Sweet, Sleeping Pussy

Your vibrator is not the problem.

Your pussy will not be desensitized by your vibrator.

Full. Stop.

Every few months, someone with more followers and time than books will write about the most powerful part of human anatomy meeting its kryptonite: a strong vibrator. Armed with nothing more than the opinion of a man who couldn’t satisfy a woman and a MacBook Pro, they aim to convince us vulva owners that it is a battery operated pleasure tool — not capitalism’s weight on our bodies, not the disappointment of inattentive lovers, not violations of consent prying labial folds apart for someone else’s joy — that has desensitized us to the point that they can’t please us.

There isn’t a vibrator in the world that can prevent this body from being able to access pleasure. The real culprit is life under capitalism. The enemy to sensation is actually the disembodiment required for survival and the constant training to live outside of ourselves that dulls our access to the pleasure our bodies offer.

I have been vibrating the literal fuck out of my pussy for over three decades. I got my first bullet before I graduated from high school, on a quest to discover the pleasure my boyfriends seem to experience when they climbed on top of me. I had read enough Harlequin novels and listen to stories about other girls cumming from the guys I hung out with to know pleasure was possible. Faking it was never including in the limited sex lessons handed to me, so 17-year-old me thought something was wrong with my body. My vibrator became a tool of discovery, joy, and reclamation. It taught me how to use my hands, where I loved sensation and where I was already numb.

That’s right. Already numb.

I was raised and socialized female, which means I occupied a body that I had been taught not to trust. Emotions were shameful things, sensations were secretive and problematic. As soon as my breasts started to form, I was taught over and over again not to inhabit my body.

If you are in the Denver area, join me tomorrow night for an exploration of sensation and return to the pleasure that the body was designed for, from the inside.

I did not need to experience dramatic sexual harm to become disconnected from my body’s potential to experience pleasure. My culture trained numbness into parts of my body through fear, shame, chronic self-monitoring, and relentless exposure to performance-based ideals of worth. This type of desensitization can be tended to though, because as humans, we are all deeply capable of feeling. The capacity is there; the conditions for access have been interrupted.

Desensitized means we have less access to the internal cues that help us know what we want, what we do not want, and what feels alive. Capitalism teaches us to override bodily signals in service of output. It teaches us to ignore hunger, fatigue, grief, longing, and even arousal if those signals interfere with productivity or social performance. Pleasure becomes harder to locate because sensation itself has been filtered through fear, habit, and external expectation. It is easy to blame the toy or the amount of stimulation when pleasure becomes difficult, but the bigger issue is that our nervous systems have been shaped by survival.

And we can take on new shapes.

We can start to become familiar with where we are asked to leave our bodies and why. We can recognize whatever has made it safer to be numb than alive. And we can then identify and return to the places where sensation and pleasure reminds us of safety.

Sex toys are not the enemy of sensation. Don’t let these uninformed opinions disguised as education victimize your body, leaving you scared of stimulation. Find space and time to rebuild relationship with the body that has had to adapt to an economy and a culture that reward disembodiment.

The body is intelligent. It is always trying to survive, and it is always, when given enough safety, trying to come home to pleasure.

If you are in Denver or near by, join me tomorrow in person for reawakening practice that can be returned to every time you notice you are living slightly outside your body, numb. No vibrators needed, and none shamed.

Details at www.atltantra.org/colorado (the event is in Aurora).