Guest post: Religion and the sex lives of women

This guest post has been written anonymously.

Last Friday I stayed at a male friend’s house. I’ve done this a few times before but this time, after one too many glasses of wine, we made some ill-advised decisions which led to me spending Saturday lunchtime in an NHS sexual health walk-in clinic, due to what I like to think of as a “communication break down”, but what other people may choose to call plain stupidity. They’re probably right.

Sexual health clinics are not places I frequent and I felt judged just because I was there. I convinced myself the friendly, helpful receptionist was secretly attaching a hundred and one labels to me as she read through the form I filled in in the waiting area – I know this is illogical, but it did not feel that way at the time.

When I got into the nurse’s room I sat opposite her and my eyes were quickly drawn to the cross necklace around her neck. People wearing crosses is not usually something I take offence at, it’s an acceptable way to express your faith – but was this really the place to be wearing it? The Bible’s stance on any sort of sexual relations outside of marriage is not one you need to read deep into to discover – you don’t do it. I felt vulnerable and judged enough as it was without my nurse making it very obvious her strong beliefs (as those held by Christians, or people of any faith for that matter, usually are) did not agree with my actions. However, this probably would not have been a big deal – certainly not one big enough to warrant a blog/rant on it, had it not been for what she said during the session.

As is the way with sexual health clinics, you don’t just get the treatment you need and get to leave within 5 minutes – they usually want a run-through of your sexual history. The first thing that offended me was the comment she made after I told her I’d previously had a relationship with another female. I told the nurse that I knew her sexual history and trusted that I’d been told the truth as we’d always been very honest with each other. I was told I should ask again and tell her to be completely honest with me this time. The implication being that she was either promiscuous, lying or both.

As if her prejudiced comments about my sexuality weren’t enough, she insisted on referring to the man I spent the night with as my “boyfriend”. I told her he wasn’t – I didn’t have a boyfriend – to which she replied “well you do now”. I was shocked. Clearly she felt sex should be confined to relationships; a view shared by many. But was it appropriate for her to try and push this view on me in such a patronising manner? I don’t think so. I strongly hold the belief that other people’s sex lives are their business. I resist judging people based on their personal lives generally and if I do find myself doing so, I certainly wouldn’t belittle them for their decisions. It is simply not my place. How lovely it’d be to live in a world where other people – especially those in positions of trust, as this nurse was – extended me the same courtesy.

I left the clinic feeling about 2 feet tall. However, I considered myself relatively fortunate after reading this. A 29 year old woman was refused the morning after pill because the chemist she was served by had religious objections. When I first heard about it I figured the woman was living in America’s Bible Belt, where women being refused contraception or an abortion due to their doctor’s beliefs is not unheard of. But no, this was in a Boots store in Hartlepool.

Why, in 2011 in the Western World, are women still having other people’s so-called moral values thrust into their sex lives? The fact that it is acceptable to judge, and even to prevent a woman from taking responsibility for the actions of herself and who she has slept with – and then to be able to use religion as an excuse for doing this – is an example of how far we have to go in securing full reproductive freedom for women even in the West. I hope that Boots and the General Pharmaceutical Council reviews their policies. Why should someone’s “ethics” come before another person’s well-being? I also hope that next time (if there is a next time) I go to an NHS walk-in clinic I get a nurse who does his or her job without making me feel like I should be ashamed of decisions that are my business.

The learning curve

A while ago I wrote about ‘trying something new‘. A lot of people were very dismissive of my attempt at broadening my horizons, to my disappointment. Though to my surprise, I had a few private messages from the most unexpected people, telling me that they’d tried having Reiki and it had worked for them. I heard from someone who was a Reiki Master who is someone I’ve known as an acquaintance for years, and I didn’t have a clue he’d even looked into Reiki. He told me he started learning it because he had ME and was desperate to get better. He does it every day and since he started he noticed a marked improvement in his health very quickly – he no longer has ME, he no longer gets ill as much as he used to. I found this and other stories very encouraging.

Even after this, I was unsure if it would work. I thought perhaps that I personally wouldn’t be able to do it. That ‘healing’ is something other people can do (though I have been told by a couple of people that I am an ideal person for healing) – not something for me! As I said in my first post about this, to me, the opportunity to learn how to give Reiki was basically something I couldn’t miss, and something I couldn’t really lose on. The money, effort, and time involved is minimal and I always said I could easily write it off as a bad judgement if nothing happened at all. But I’ve found it really, really interesting and a positive experience thus far.

The first level of Reiki which I’m doing is mainly about treating yourself than treating others – because you have to balance yourself out before you work on others, which makes sense. So I’ve been attempting self-healing and I think it has been working, but in more subtle ways than ‘fixing’ myself physically. I gave up coffee (replaced with herbal teas) before starting to learn Reiki and that might have something to do with it, but I find myself being much more calm and relaxed about things. I am an incredibly emotional person, but I’ve found I’m not having so many mood swings. I hit my car on a skip (first accident since I passed my test!) a few days ago – but whereas normally I would be panicky and cry and get upset and not get over it for a day or so – I found myself looking at it in a different way. I was shocked, of course, but I got over it very quickly instead of instantly being angry and upset, and not letting it go. I’d almost forgotten about it until I saw the damage on my car again.

I’ve been feeling better since I started doing it (in an emotional way) but I wasn’t sure if this was just me imagining it. We did a little bit on treating others the other night, and we learned how to ‘scan’ others – where you pick up on excessive energy in the chakras, or the energy levels are fluctuating/inconsistent with the rest of the body. My Reiki Master scanned me and the woman I am learning with, and without telling us what he found, we both scanned each other. When we reported back what we’d felt, we had all felt the same thing on the same person. We didn’t do any healing then, but he encouraged us to experiment with doing healing and scanning other people – the more you do it, the better you get.

I decided to try and do some work on my sister and my mum, because I thought I could try it on them – but again, I wasn’t sure I could do it. My sister suffers from terrible migraines, and nobody knows why. She has cut out certain foods, tried different painkillers, seen several doctors, and nothing works. I spent about 45 minutes working on her. I scanned her and found out that she had a lot of energy around her head, and around the tops of her legs (which align with the root chakra) – when I worked on these areas in particular, she distinctly felt like I was doing something. “You’re moving your hands aren’t you!?” she said, when I had my hands gently placed on her head. I wasn’t moving my hands at all, but she said it felt “waves” like I was moving my hands – I could feel a lot of energy moving around too, and my hands started burning hot. At one point, my face/head felt so hot that I was almost sweating, and I felt a bit faint. At the end of the session I was totally wiped out, and she reported that her headache was a lot less painful, and she was so relaxed and tired that she fell asleep for a while.

My mum has loads of problems with her feet – small knocks confounded by arthritis and underlying problems that have been going on for years. She is rarely out of pain, especially when walking on them. I decided I would do her whole body but try to focus on her feet. She wasn’t really relaxed, I felt, and she didn’t feel anything through the majority of the session, except pain in her foot. A difficult client! When I was going down her worst leg, she started flinching and said she felt like the pain was going down her leg into her foot, and the pain was excruciating – moreso than usual – and she felt a sensation she had never experienced before. I quickly started concentrating on her feet, and she said my hands were really hot. While I was doing it, she reported pain, but afterwards, she said that her foot felt fine, and that she wasn’t in any pain at all. This morning, she said she slept quite well, and that her foot wasn’t as bad as it normally is. I’m going to try and monitor this in terms of pain etc, and experiment with it – see what works best for the pain.

It sounds crazy. It’s hard to believe, and I almost don’t want to believe it myself… But I am really happy that it seems to be working. I went into it very doubtful, but I don’t believe in writing something off before experiencing it. I have noticed, the more I try to force it, the less stuff happens – so I think my main focus as I keep learning and perhaps progress to treating other people (my dad is already in the queue!) is to just relax and let it happen. I probably won’t write about this again unless something significant happens, because I am doing it all the time and if I wrote about it every time things happened, my blog would be very boring. I know some people were intrigued about my progress, so I hope that this is useful or interesting to someone.

#Fem11 Pt 2: Challenging Sex Object Culture

This seminar was really popular, and held by the activist group OBJECT, which opposes the sex object culture. That is, the objectification of women – through lapdancing clubs, sexist advertising, and the media in general. What is objectification? The following words and phrases explain how women are objectified/the characteristics of objectification:

• Instrumentalism (eg, only to provide sexual gratification)
• Denial of autonomy
• Inertness
• Fungibility (that women are interchangeable)
• Violability
• Ownership
• Denial of subjectivity (dismissive of feelings, perspective)
• Reduction to a body
• Reduction to appearance (as discussed at the Endangered Bodies seminar)
• Silencing

The group have already worked on several campaigns including staging a protest against lapdancing clubs, and this hilarious anti-lad’s mags stunt in Tesco (best to watch from 1min30 as the beginning is the preparation):

The group, along with the Fawcett Society were also heavily involved in the campaign for the reclassification of lapdancing venues as “sexual entertainment venues”. This meant stricter regulation on who could and who couldn’t open lapdancing clubs – they were previously classified in the same group as coffee shops. Their latest campaign is ‘Stop Press Porn’ and aims to stop porn from being so easily accessible in supermarkets etc. In this video, which was also shown in the seminar, the spokeswoman for Object argues about lad’s mags with a former editor of one:

While I generally agree with their point about porn and about objectification, and I quite like the way they have tackled some issues (the pyjama Tesco protest is hilarious and creative) there’s something I can’t really put my finger on that I’m not sure about. Sorry, that’s a really useless analysis of something that was very interesting and very prevalent in society. Reducing women to objects is restrictive and harmful but I think that this comes across wrongly as prudish, and that perhaps some of the language used is inaccessible and hard to follow. When we say objectification, what we mean is the general societal idea that women are to be looked at, to be touched, and admired, and they should be passive and inert. Of course, this strips women of their autonomy and ability to make decisions, it is part of a wider culture that says it is ok to rape, and that it’s ok to do whatever you want to a woman as long as you get your rocks off. So you see, it’s not a good thing at all.

I don’t really have much to add to this really, other than to raise the point that this is an issue, and very harmful to women (and men in some circumstances – the best example I can give is that teenage boys don’t really learn how relationships work, how to respect their female peers – because in porn and in lads magazines, the sex is on tap and freely available). I realise that there is an argument that most people realise films are not realistic but I dismiss this entirely because a) this is probably most people’s first introduction to sex when they are at an impressionable age b) sex, and the reality of it, is rarely discussed in mainstream education and media. My sex education film was one video of a man and woman rigidly laying side by side holding hands, then having awkward, technical sex (man on top of course) – and then it cut to a cartoon image of the mechanics of sex. So who is going to make feminist porn or sex education videos purely for the purpose of adding it to the school curriculum to show boys/young men how sex really works? Who is going to sit down and explain to a bunch of teenaged boys that women come in all different sizes and shapes, that pornstar bodies are not the norm? Exactly. We are setting them up for disappointment and encouraging misogynistic attitudes.

#Fem11 Pt 1: Endangered Bodies

Yesterday I went to my first feminist conference, Fem 11 (organised by UK Feminista / Kat Banyard) and this is the first of a couple of posts about it. I’m separating them out because they tackle different issues.

The first seminar of the day, I actually wanted to go into the End Violence Against Women discussion, but I was late, and that was full so I went downstairs and dived into the nearest room. When I saw it was the ditching dieting/bodies related one (run by Endangered Species), I was a bit disappointed because it was probably the one I was interested in the least. How wrong I was!

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t really listen much to the opening statements but more to the views of the people who were in the audience. The women organising the event spoke a little about the dieting industry – worth billions – and how the culture of dieting is totally damaging. They explained that the BMI system of ‘measuring obesity’ is flawed, that individual bodies need different amounts to sustain themselves. Under the BMI system, Brad Pitt and George Clooney would be classed as obese – yet they are seen as the most desirable men in the world! They then asked people to think about some questions, among these lines:

• What does a diet mean to you?
• What did you think would happen when you started dieting?
• Can you remember a carefree time of eating?
• Do you think you will feel at peace with your body?

There was another question, and they were probably better worded than that but that sets the scene well enough. Obviously, I am well aware that other women are conscious about their bodies, but “other women” has always been an abstract concept to me. It has always been an unreachable, unimaginable group of ‘other women’, so I’ve always felt like secretly it is just me that suffers from body confidence issues. But it’s hard to remain that way when there are hundreds of women – and men – in a room together, nodding in sad agreement, each with their own startingly similar story.

It started out quite general, but as the discussion went on, people started mentioning things that I had honest-to-God thought were just problems with me as an individual. There are a few people who ‘stood out’ to me, but actually I wish I could tell you everything that was said by the audience because it was all so heartbreakingly true.

One woman talked about her dieting cycle: She had been dieting for most of her life, and she’d tried every diet going. Basically, dieting and losing weight became and obsession that took over her life.
One lady in the audience said she had just arrived in the UK, and that she has never felt so much pressure to look a certain way in her life! She said that she felt sorry for women in the western world because they can’t escape the pressure.
A woman of 43 said that she’d been dieting since she was 19, and that she assumed that when she hit her forties she would feel at peace with her body. She admitted she wasn’t sure she ever actually would.
At one point, school teacher and councillor, Rania Khan, said she knew a pupil who was saving up for surgery. The girl was 14.
A young woman, in response to the “What did you think would happen when you started dieting?” (may have been “what did you want to happen”) question, said: I wanted people to leave me the hell alone. She spoke about how other people assume they have the right to talk to you about your body, and tell you what you’re doing wrong.

A couple of people said something so relevant to me I almost cried. One woman said that she grew up in a house where her mother hated her body, and her sister hated her body, and she had never felt anything but hatred for the way she looked, because she didn’t know any different. This is exactly the situation I’m in. I have never known anything but hatred for myself. I have always been aware of food and what it does to my appearance/body, ever since I can remember. I remember being put on small diets when I was young. I remember my mum struggling to lose weight; I remember my sister struggling with an eating disorder. I remember counting calories, weighing food out, feeling guilty every time I ate. I still do. The over-consciousness of food has made me not really appreciate it as much. Every time I eat, it feels like a reminder of how bad a person I am for not being thin; of how greedy I am because I can’t not eat for days; how little will-power I have. I have a bad relationship with food, a really bad one. But I don’t know how to break the cycle because it is so ingrained in everything I do.

One girl said that she tried hard to intellectualise it, but she struggled to really take to heart that everyone is beautiful regardless of their size or their shape. A slim woman stood up and said: I have a fast metabolism and I’ve always been thin, but people even say to me “What are you going to do when you have a baby? What will you do when you inevitably put weight on?”… So even thinner women suffer from body fascism and negative assumptions.

The key thing here is that weight-consciousness is literally inescapable for women. It’s only when you really think about it that you realise it is such a massive issue. If you lose weight, as another woman pointed out, people compliment you – “You look lovely! Have you lost weight?” – being thinner makes you more beautiful. You question if you looked bad before, because suddenly dropping a few pounds makes you more desirable.

I probably have more to say on the subject but I needed to write about something that is a big part of my life, and say thank you to all the women in that seminar. Thank you, for making me feel that I’m not alone. Thank you for your brutal honesty. I didn’t contribute myself but I sat on the sidelines close to tears for most of it. Your words resonated with me and I just hope that some day we will live in a society that judges people on personality, not weight. To end with the (probably misquoted) words of a 14 year old girl in the seminar: “I try to tell my friends that they are beautiful, because they are. I try to tell them that they shouldn’t worry, because I don’t judge them on their weight. I judge them by how nice a person they are.”

On Smashing Gender

A few days ago there was a hashtag on Twitter, the #feministwishlist one – someone told me that they’d seen a tweet by a woman (feminist) tagged with this saying something about keeping genders as they are. They then asked me whether or not I agreed with this. An annoyingly short conversation ensued, but I thought it was an interesting point.

Should the concept of gender be banished? Erm, yes! I am amazed that someone who calls themselves a feminist says that they want to keep it as it is. According to Wikipedia, Gender is “a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them.” Gender roles are roles whereby men do things like fix cars and women stay at home with the children. This follows on directly from the ‘attributes’ given to both genders – men are logically-minded and practical; women are good at cooking and child-rearing (empathetic, kind). And so it goes.

The person who brought up the topic suspected that the woman’s desire to keep gender was due to wanting to retain a sense of womanhood or femininity. To retain the right to be identified as a woman. To put it kindly, I reject this notion, because it buys into the idea that gender is binary – that you are either male or female and there is nothing in between. Firstly, if a girl likes wearing trousers and playing with train sets, does this make her male? Of course not. Secondly, this entirely ignores a whole section of society that actively don’t subscribe to this – trans men and women. Thirdly, the non-existence of gender does not take away from you the fact that you are, biologically, still a woman. I simply don’t see a case for discouraging diversion from the traditional binary view of gender – somebody else’s right to be in between male and female doesn’t impinge on your right to be a female, or change the fact that you’re a woman. Gender assumptions and roles are harmful to both men and women (I’d be here all day writing a list of examples) and I don’t really think it should have a place in society.

As a general note, I have some serious problems with labelling people in society, and I have problems with ongoing attempts to utterly simplify ourselves and our experiences. I absolutely believe that people are flexible when it comes to morals, sexuality and identity. I don’t think everyone fits into gay, straight or bisexual classifications, I don’t think anyone can say that their morals are absolute, and I don’t think everyone is either male or female. We are complicated creatures and we should be embracing that, not segregating people using ever-narrowing arbitrary definitions.