TW: mentions of SA, dissociation

Growing up in a conservative household, I was constantly told to cover up because of men’s “wandering eyes”. I was taught that if I were to be sexually assaulted, it would have been my fault, instead of the person who sexually assaulted me. Out of fear, I obliged, wearing modest clothes throughout my childhood, convinced that I could never be safe. My mother also told me to speak properly, to never talk back to elders or men, and to hold my tounge if I was uncomfortable. In Throwing Like a Girl, Iris Marion Young describes how women move with “inhibited intentionality”, we know we can act, but we feel like we shouldn’t. That was my childhood: constantly silencing and covering myself to make myself more palatable for men. These habits became ingrained in me, because for so long, they were all I knew to do.

When I entered my first relationship, I realized how much of this conditioning carried over. I felt like I always had to give emotional labor without ever receiving it back. I shaved every inch of my body just to feel desirable. I made myself so small just to make space for my partner. Even in moments of intimacy, I felt too afraid to say “no” worried about being an inconvenience.

Pornography only reinforced these behaviors. Both my partner and I were exposed to it young, and I never liked it. I always noticed how it scripted women into performances of pain disguised as pleasure. Phenomenology asks us to focus on lived bodily experience, yet in sex, I was never really present. I was constantly dissociating or trying to perform the sex I was having with this person, rather than simply experiencing it. I would fake moans, faces, and enjoyment, while inside, I felt completely detached.

In both my daily life and my intimate life, my body became something for others to manage, watch, and enjoy, rather than something I lived through freely.

Lately, I have been trying to unlearn all of this. It’s hard to unlearn things that have been reinforced in your mind for as long as you’ve known, but I’m slowly reclaiming my body as my own, something I live through, not something to be managed or consumed by others.

If you can relate to any part of this, let this be a beacon of hope that you are not alone, and that living freely in your own body is an act of resistance itself.