“Rebellion is as much of a cage as obedience is” – Glennon Doyle

When I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, even twenty, I decided that I was going to make the perfect decision about sex. I would not have it, unless I was fully (financially and emotionally) capable of having a baby. It was the only way I would do it. I even scolded, loudly mind you, my best friend in the cafeteria of our high school about having sex at fourteen. “Are you ready to have a baby?” I asked, angry and louder than she expected. She was so hurt, her body folded into itself with shame. Until I saw her body, I didn’t snap out of my anger. 

You see, I was not going to be that girl. The girl they called a hoe, a slut, a tramp, a teen mother. I would be the responsible, perfect girl. The one who would only have sex, if she was in love and when she knew she could handle the consequences. I was certain that this way of living was correct and feminist as fuck because I was taking control of my body. No one, not the media, not my friends, and certainly not boys, no one would convince me to have sex for pleasure. You read that too, right? 

I was a free woman because sex was off the table. I was rebellious in the best ways. When all my friends, even my christian, Seventh Day Adventist friends, were having sex in high school, I remained virginal. Here I was a fifteen year old who had figured it out. I stopped going to church and I was not having sex.You see where I’m going with this?

I believed resisting my pleasure was actually resisting christianity and society’s expectations of women and high school girls to be exact–hello white christian missionaries who converted my ancestors!

But “rebellion is as much a cage as obedience is” and I sat in this cage till I was twenty-one because now I was too old to just “do it” or “give it away”. Without knowing I had subscribed to this gargantuan belief that my virginity was somehow worth more because I am a woman. 

The problem is I still believed this virtue, even though I thought by rebelling against it that I was truly resisting the idea that women are sluts if they have sex for enjoyment. 

I want to say I am fully free of this belief. I want to tell you how far I have come in my resistance of sex as pleasure and only pleasure. But at forty-two, I have a complicated relationship with sex. A bi-sexual who has never had sex with a woman because she was scared that she was not gay enough. A woman who has had two sexual partners and at times is embarrassed by the lack of experience. A woman who values sex and the importance of pleasure in the human experience. The same pleasure that was robbed from her when she was sexually abused as a child, as a good perfect girl who was scared by accidental pregnancy instead of educated about birth control, as a girl who was convinced by media that one can only experience sexual pleasure when in love, I now counter all these beliefs and declare:

Sex is pleasure. Stop resisting pleasure woman.

With that said, I ask our readers to dive into all the things that you resist because you are not perfect. Let’s together burn these cages that we put ourselves into in the name of rebellion and instead hold hands and stand up as we are: beautifully complex women who may be privileged and still fight against patriarchy,  who may be  exhausted and still set boundaries, who may not feel good enough and still take care of their children’s every need. 

Resist Woman is about shattering the black and whiteness of our identities and leaning the fuck into the gorgeous gray.

 This issue is dedicated to my dear friend “Adubs” who reminds me every day in every conversation that pleasure for the sake of pleasure is worth it, enough, and something worth seeking.