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.