As a right of passage in my middle to upper class Western culture childhood, I was placed in ballet class at a very early age.  I learned first position, pirouettes, and how to point my toes.  I found friends and was quickly inducted into the wiles of feminine competition and cliques.  I looked up to the older girls in their glistening pointe shoes and see-through wraps that showed off their board-like muscular physique and their perfect turn-out.  With not a hair misplaced, the Sugar Plum Fairy would twirl across the stage and for just a moment, to a six-year-old, I thought of her as a real life doll - my jewelry box come to life.  

I walked away from dance for a while, but upon entering the awkward junior high years, I went back to my place of belonging, baby fat and all.  The memories of my six-year-old self becoming that twirling Barbie were dashed when my instructor told me I was going on pointe because I was old enough, but that I needed to lose weight.  Instead of losing weight, I turned to the ever-comforting solace of potatoes fried in various forms.  Eventually I left the dancing world to pursue soccer, track and field, and cheerleading, but I start the confession here because this coupled with my conservative Christian schooling shaped the realities of my body and my own sexuality.  It starts with your body. Whether you were young and rubbed up against something or saw something and curiously inquired, “Mommy, what’s that?”  These are the first moldings of a cultural mindset of sexuality.

For me, it was denial and miseducation, especially of my own body.  My hips have become the metaphor of my life and through said experiences I wasn’t sure what these “hips” were.  In ballet, the tighter the better; in gymnastics and cheerleading it was the same: “Pinch a penny;” and in the church it was just keep pinching everything.  This was reinforced through poor body education in the communities I personally was raised in and by the cultural activities I partook in.  Dress codes of long skirts and notions that boys and girls should exist without any kind of hormonal drives greatly helped as well.  My hips were being silenced, but oh how they were screaming inside.  

The little ballerina grew into the good Christian girl who was class president, honor society member, and homecoming princess.  I was captain of the cheer squad and soccer team all the while abiding by the dress code and school rules of don’t move your hips in cheer routines.  School dances were completely outlawed.  Meanwhile, understanding that across town there were the public schools and there were girls there that were definitely using their hips – snug bell bottom jeans and shirts that showed off your abs, and they had the school dances where you could “get jiggy with it.”

The point is, both of these extreme scenarios are misguided representations of sexuality for young women and of how we use our hips.  Going back to the abstinence pledges (see previous blog), I’m reading Lauren Winner’s Real Sex right now and in it she says,
“In 2001, a study of 6,800 students showed that virgins who took the pledge were likely to abstain from sex for eighteen months longer than those who did not take the pledge.  This was touted as good news by abstinence advocates, but actually it is troubling – it means simply that a lot of abstinence pledgers are having sex at nineteen instead of eighteen.”  She goes on, “The study, which was conducted by sociologists at Columbia and Yale, also showed that students who broke the pledge were less likely that their non-pledging peers to use birth control – presumably in part because the sue of birth control implies that one thought about sex beforehand; one planned for it; but the culture among Christian singles dictates that the sin is somehow less grave if one got swept up in the heat of the moment.” (page 17)  

The heat of the moment, the pledges, the boyfriends, the lack-of-boyfriend, it’s overwhelming… so what do we do? Our hips are talking, but no one is listening.  We are taught to deny we have hips at all, while other cultures fully embrace theirs.  Diets, fashion, TV still stylishly scream at us “lose weight to feel great.”  This is not about getting healthy, (which I am an advocate of) it’s about what we’re being taught from an early age – suck it in, pinch a penny.  (If you grew up in a household that avoided these messages, please pray for those of us who weren’t so lucky, there are a couple of us).  As I continued on with my good Christian girl routine, I needed the boyfriend to complete the picture.  That’s when I desperately needed an education and oh how I got it, but it was with a boy in his car or while our parents were gone or fill in the blank, we found places and time because we were 16.  Parents still think, “Oh that could never by my kid,” but as I recently confessed to my Bible teaching, Jesus loving mother, who is a great mom, what her youth group attending, church leader’s daughter was really doing, she couldn’t believe it.  Denial. No safe space – not in our communities, or in our bodies.

In the past two years I’ve taken up yoga and belly dancing and now my hips can sing.  Other cultures have been in tune for such a long time but we drowned them out.  I’m in classes with women of all shapes, sizes and ethnicities who have stories and beautiful hips that we’re all learning to use in our own way.  There’s no competition because at first we all felt awkward and goofy. “I’m sorry let your butt jiggle how?” No way!  But then class by class you laugh and do it more and the freedom that comes with that is truly breathtaking.

I wish I had been given Toni Weschler’s Cycle Savvy for Teens and learned how to chart my cycles, about ovulation and hormones and learned about my body in a real way.  Instead I went on birth control in high school and college because I was sent home due to my periods being terrible from ovarian cysts.  I wish my hips could have talked more with other women and not been made to hide because I will never know if that would’ve given me more courage to say no or to not go to his empty house or invite him to mine.  I wish I was taught to love my body and not hate my flesh earlier so that I didn’t look down at my purity ring after the “break-up” wondering what I did in the name of love.

So I am confessing.  I am confessing that my hips hurt so badly now that I have a sexual pain disorder (next blog).  I am confessing that I did things I was worried to tell my future husband about because I thought he would look at me as tainted, dirty, and gross, but he didn’t because he loved me as did others that I told. But I didn’t love myself for a long time because I was never invited into a conversation about sexuality and that it doesn’t mean sex – it means that it is part of who we are with or without a companion.  It’s our hips, our hormones, our hearts – it’s part of our identity.  So I confess, I might not have a doctorate, but I was a “bleeding woman” and Jesus found me sitting in the crowd, shamed, overwhelmed, yes redeemed and healed, but he said now you have to go tell your story.