A majority of women I know swear by making love in the dark. ‘It’s romantic’ they coo when I ask them the point of that. Here’s what I KNOW, most of us are ashamed of our body. Nudity is a concept we haven’t been taught to handle well. Seeing ourselves naked freaks us out, and knowing that someone else is watching us naked, desiring our body for itself, brings to life our worst fears. This is the gaze our parents warned us against, this is what Church lessons have told us to avoid. So off goes the light, plunging everything, from ourselves, to that desirous gaze, to our insecurities, into comforting darkness.
The truth is that the darkness serves as a warm invitation to what Susan Bremer calls our ‘Shadow” side. “Every woman wants to take a trip to their wild side” she explains, “We all yearn to seduce. But we’ve been told over and over again that to rejoice in our body is immoral, yet the wish to feel powerful in our sensuality, to express our sexuality remains.” Susan, a proud ‘Gentleman club’ dancer considers her sexual prowess to be her way of establishing her role in a world hounded by men. “When I’m at work,” she says “I’m surrounded by men in coats and ties — bosses and underlings, jocks and nerds. All of them are the kinds of men who made me feel small. But now I can reduce the top dog to a lapdog by staring at him, opening my top, and smiling”.
This sense of power probably needs some delving into. As women all of us suffer from our own insecurities. It’s a cliché by now but we all know that the world belongs to the testosterone thugs. They keep us down everywhere, be it in our boardroom or our bedroom. And slowly we grow used to being kept down, such that we soon we are conditioned to not reversing the situation at all.
A positive sex-image, whether you use it or not, can miraculously alter all this. Your sexual achievements in the bedroom can give you the kind of omnipotent confidence which oozes out from your personal to public sphere. For any woman with low self-esteem, the act of embracing your sexuality serves as a miracle tool for believing that she can have that effect on other people, in a non-sexual environment too.
