It starts and ends with our bodies.  What’s “it”? Everything. Life. We will never know anything outside of our bodies yet we have been taught to fight against them, to numb pain, and look for the fountain of youth.  It’s hard to think of another thing we have tried to push so far outside of our bodies than sexuality.  In reading up on this topic and exploring cultural dialogue, it is almost impossible to consider sexuality without sex, but what I’m advocating for is that yes, sex is part of if, but not the whole and not a starting place either.  So often it is sex that makes us consider sexuality, but what if it was reversed?  What if we thought about sexuality outside of sex?

Rewind to junior high.  Boys' voices start cracking, girls breasts start developing, and hair grows in places one only sees in text books or the dictionary.  It has become a stage of life in Western culture labeled as “awkward,” “ugly,” “annoying,” “difficult,” and my personal fave, “survival of the fittest.” It is an incredibly random person that I meet that enthusiastically says, “I loved junior high!” In this developmental phase many kids’ parents are caught off guard: “It happened so fast.”  “She’s still my little girl.”  When I got my period, my dad and I had a totally awkward conversation and he told me 15 years later he, being the father of 3 boys and 1 girl (me), decided that my mom would just “take care of it.” And so it begins, this weird separation that can lead to suppression, exploration, or exploitation.

I love the idea of Bar/Bat Mitzvahs – coming of age, rites of passage.  Too often shopping trips, manis/pedis, or expensive parties become the symbol of adulthood for tweens.  The Bar/Bat Mitzvahs ceremonies (not necessarily the parties, some of which are lavish as well) still carry deep tradition and are steeped in symbolic rituals.  Families come together in community to celebrate the arrival of adulthood.  The Christian tradition doesn’t have anything like this across the board.  Lutherans have confirmation.  Catholics have first communion, but for the most part Protestant churches graduate you from junior high to high school youth group and that is that.  Rituals, symbols, and traditions are instituted in families and not in the church or communities anymore.   These are ways of sharing ancient wisdom and knowledge that only communities have, so a lot of young people are left with a couple conversations and then up to their own vices to “learn.”  One of my favorite books is Anita Diamant’s Red Tent, which is fiction, but the idea of women gathering together, sharing wisdom, and learning about their bodies is a rich and beautiful thing.

The traditions I was taught as I “came of age” were the “birds and the bees talk” with my mom, tampons or pads, douche or don’t.  It shouldn’t smell.  No one should realize it’s happening, except maybe your close girlfriends.  You should be able to do everything even on your period, except if you wear pads – then you’re doomed especially in bathing suit weather.  So we shove it up, stuff it up, clean it up, take Advil or Mydol or a pill that makes us not even get our period and the denial begins.  Our periods are not celebrated as part of our femininity.  I understand this is a weird conversation – “It’s a curse.”  “It’s all Eve’s fault.” “It’s my time of the month.”  (And men quickly learn to never bring that up in an argument for fear of losing their heads.)

But I truly believe in a God that can redeem anything and anyone.  I believe this denial of our cycles and belief in white absorbent cotton has led to lack of knowledge about our bodies and our sexuality as women.  After all, most women only look “down there” when there’s a problem, but it’s a part of our body.  Most men do not have issues with this because they can see and feel what’s going on.  Women fight against it or at least are taught to.

So we have to reintroduce ourselves to our bodies and to our cycles.  Books like Taking Charge of Your Fertility and Our Bodies, Ourselves are great educational tools and journeys every woman should know about, not just when they are trying to conceive.  We should learn more about women of the past and not just where the tampon aisle is at Target.  Yes, I wish it wasn’t like this either, but we have to move beyond that. We need to realize that our bodies are good – Jesus came to us in one.  That this flesh we try to flee is all we have to experience life and God for that matter.  So it may not seem like this is about sexuality at all, but it truly is.  Our bodies need to be understood and explored.  It is a temple and worthy of taking some time to get to know.