As I mentioned in another post, I recently appeared on Girls Gone Deep. On the show, I mentioned how I masturbate to things I am afraid of to train myself to find them arousing. For example, I masturbated to the image or idea of full-swapping (having penetrative sex with another couple) hundreds of times before we actually did it, and I did the same for eating pussy. In response, co-host Vee asked an astute question that I didn’t fully respond to on the pod. She asked: “If you have to train yourself so hard to be into something, why are you doing it?”
Fear is a good thing, it shows us what we have to do.
Steven Pressfield, War of Art
I think this question goes to the heart of soul-work. It’s a deep, profound why question that goes to the heart of, why do we do anything? How do we choose what fears we overcome and which fears we listen to? Even I say, later on the podcast, “True integrity means never doing something you don’t want to do.” But how do we know what we want to do?
When it came to eating pussy, I felt a combination of fear, disgust, and desire. Fear I’d do a bad job. Some level of revulsion around the idea, but also desire. I experience this conflict all the time, around all sorts of things. For example, I really want to be fit, as fit as a supermodel, but some days, I don’t want to train. I don’t want to spend an hour on the treadmill because it’s hard. I want to be a great dancer, but I get social anxiety before every class, and often that anxiety prevents me from booking at all. With these other examples, maybe it seems obvious to do the hard thing, or overcome the fear, so why does it seem so different when it comes to sex?
I had the same fear, disgust and desire around anal play as I did around eating pussy. But masturbation helped me overcome that too. It’s a tricky one, when to listen to fear. Sometimes it’s there because it has wisdom and wants to protect us. But often, it’s just ego, attached to what’s familiar, what people will think, its identity around who you are and how that will be impacted if you do something different. How do you decide what to do?
Well first, listening is always a good idea. When we listen to whatever voices come up in our heads, we get to know them better, and we show the respect they so desperately desire. I often find that just listening to a fear makes it lessen or go away entirely. Through listening, I’ve also learned to discern types of fear and which voices carry which burdens (or stories). For example, if I feel paralyzed, this is egoistic, childish, or trauma-based fear. This means I have inner work to do, not necessarily that the fear is reasonable. If I feel calm yet cautious, that’s often fear in the form of intuition or wisdom. I observe that fear and follow it’s advice. Also listen to the desire. Is it a desire for an experience, to please someone, to grow? What is at its core? You can decide whether that aim is worthy to you.
Obviously, there are also circumstances where you feel only fear; like, for me, around the idea of diving head-first into bodies of water. That’s easy too, just don’t do it.
But what about when we are polarized–feeling both fear and desire?
I think it involves getting down to a difficult but simple equation provided to me by Crossfit Athlete Tia Toomey in her book Heart is the Strongest Muscle: “Does doing this thing support my why? Will doing this thing help me become the person I want to be?”
In the podcast, in response to Vee, I said, “I was doing it because it didn’t make sense to me,” and then I started talking about feeling disgusted by my own pussy. It may seem off topic but often disgust is a response related to shame. Disgust is a useful emotion that, in primitive days, helped us survive. Our body would feel disgust in response to something that was toxic to us and threatened our life, typically, toxic foods. But disgust evolved. It evolved to include moral disgust–we learn what behaviors threaten our social connections, which behaviors will get us shunned, and we (and others) reacted to those behaviors accordingly to punish people who violate social norms. In that way disgust is trying to protect you just like fear: it’s protecting you from being exiled.
And so we feel disgust in response to things we know society, our parents or friends will shame us for, as a way to protect us from being socially isolated from them. Indeed, social isolation is toxic to humans. This is why we should listen to what comes up when we feel disgusted, get curious about it, and see what it has to say.
What I should have said, to round out the thought around pussy disgust, is this: “How can I love women, love pleasuring them, but love all but one part of them? That disgust was inherited, not mine, there to protect me from social isolation. Basically, the disgust was cloaked-fear, saying, ‘if you do that, your people won’t like it.’ I can weigh the costs of potential social isolation against my desire (which felt honorably rooted in my desire to be the most me I can be), and I can decide to overcome the fear if I wish.” The disgust I felt was not like the disgust I feel around poor handwashing practices or someone coughing on me. Some disgust is social, learned, and although threatening in a way, we can decide if overcoming it is worth the risk posed by the threat.
Co-host Elle said on the show: “I think that a lot of things in the sexual spaces, and in this world, you have to create the desire for yourself you can’t just wait for it to find it externally or to see it and hope it sparks desire within you. I think there is a lot of self-generating it within you. If it’s what you desire, and what you are curious about, and what you want, you can be playful with it and learn to love it.”
Absolutely. It’s normal to experience fear when we are confronted with choices that challenge us and change us, but this is how we grow: through the discomfort, stretching ourselves anyway. Whether it is a sexual fear, a social fear, or something else, we can decide whether we want to overcome it. And yes, it will take training. No one ever got good at anything without training. You may have to face the fear thousands of times before you feel less fear. You may never feel less fear. But does doing the thing help you become who you want to be? If so, don’t let the fear win. If no, then maybe that thing is not what you’re being called to do.
“[Famed Broadway Actor] Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five . . . In other words, fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art
I leave you with this from a personal hero of mine, Maya Angelou. “Homo sum,” was my first tattoo. Anything another human can do, you can too. If you so desire.
“Stretch, stretch, stretch yourself.”
Honey
P.S. Read part one of the series here and part two of the series here. Muah!