My job, My sex life

I remember being in second grade and preparing to receive first penance....in Catholicism, it's where you make your first confession to a priest and he talks to god and you're forgiven for your sins. So a little girl gets down on her knees in a little room, tells an old man in a dress that she doesn't always listen to her parents, and sometimes fights with her sister. She's then set out of the tiny room to kneel again, this time to repeat the same prayer to an eternal virgin (.....hail mary, full of grace.....) as she asks for forgiveness and questions her worth as a big sister, and daughter. What the fuck??

So here I am, a Catholic in Recovery, feeling like it's time for confession....old habits do die hard. I'm starting this blog because I need another outlet for exploring gender roles, feminism, and healthy sexuality. But! I'm also starting it because a good friend of mine recently started a blog. After reading hers, I was sent on a whirlwind of blog-reading. I can't stop! I want to know more about what people are thinking and what about their lives stands out in such a way that they want to post it and share with essentially anyone. Especially women, lesbian sex-positive women. I started searching and found blogs that review sex toys, discuss safer sex practices, and advertise positive body-image classes. I want to find a way to be a part of that.

It blows my mind what an impact sex has on my life. Sex and it's intersection with violence I suppose is more like it. Sex and force and the questions that can linger, the confusion that victims are left with. My life is largely compiled of grey area, yet my field of work requires boundaries to be clear. I would even say my boundaries are rigid in some aspects of my life, while non existent in others.

I've been preoccupied with sex lately and the role it has in my life. I've been grappling with how to separate all of the pain and dysfunction of my profession with the fantasies and dirty talk that my actual sex life is composed of. (A sex life that currently consists of hundreds of miles of distance, and a telephone.) I hope that I'm phrasing this correctly....I'm having a hard time feeling good about being a sex-positive feminist after listening to experiences of hurt and violence day in and day out. While there must be and clearly is a real distinction between people that hurt other people to feel powerful, and consensual adults who engage in healthy sexual activity, I find myself struggling to find it in all of the grey. (Is my job impacting my positive sexual identity?)

A few weeks ago, I was called out to a hospital around 11 pm to sit with a sexual assault victim.....I got into my car and screamed, "I'm so fucking sick of people being raped!!" at the top of my lungs. I was too angry to cry. I'm so angry. I'm so angry that people hurt other people. I'm so angry that women can take precautions; carry pepper spray, weapons, call friends, walk in groups, carry cell phones, start revolutions, and STILL many of them, myself included, have to live with the fear that our bodies are considered public property! I can take all of the precautions in the world, but that doesn't guarantee that I am safe.

I've never been a victim blamer...."she shouldn't have gone there alone at night..." "she shouldn't have been drinking....wearing that...etc etc...." But I think that somewhere inside I thought that I was immune. Deep down, in some fucked up space; victims are losers, and perpetrators are winners. Victims are blamed, and perps excused. I used to think it could never really happen to me. I've been with the agency I'm at for just over a year. It has taken that amount of time, at least twenty trips to emergency rooms with women and children who have been sexually assaulted, dozens of police interviews, and a handful of court hearings for me to fucking get it. It can happen to anyone. Intellectually, this is something that I have always known, but emotionally, it's finally starting to sink in. I am every one of those women whose hands I have held. I am them, and they are me. How humbling and simultaneously horrifying to realize that I am every woman, and that "she" is me.

I'm both moved spiritually and enraged beyond belief. I am more at peace, yet increasingly more unsettled than ever.

She. is. me.