Female Sexual Dysfunction, Spirituality, and Culture

In this episode, we'll explore the influence of religion and spirituality on female sexuality. Plus, we'll debunk some myths along the way using modern science!

Resources:
On the Origins of Sexual Inequality by Peggy Reeves Sanday
Why Is Sex Fun?: The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Jared Diamond
Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body by Riane Eisler

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#myths #sex #female

Transcript

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Welcome to the Why Didn't I Know Podcast, episode 23. I'm your host, Dr. Jenny Martin, and this episode is entitled Female Sexual Dysfunction, Spirituality and Culture. So we're talking today about female sexual dysfunction in the context of larger society, in the context of religious influences, spiritual influences. And so to begin our discussion, let's talk about some of the current data that we have on this topic. Just look at the kinds of issues women today are dealing with. There has been some research that shows 66% of all women have sexual concerns, including lack of desire, lack of pleasure during sexual contact, pain with penetration, problems with feeling aroused, and problems with climax, andor complete lack of orgasm. And when you have that many women en masse in society having the same type of issue, you need to be able to look at it not just from an individual woman's personal history and what got her to where she is today in her life, but to be able to look at the cultural story that our societies today hold around female sexuality. So when we look at the statistics of women struggling with sexual issues, it's really important not to just look at the individual woman and whether, for example, she's had sexual trauma. Certainly, that's going to factor into how she experiences herself and her sexuality today, but it's so important and often overlooked to take a bigger view of this topic and look at how female sexuality is framed in modern society. And a way to start on that investigation, on that exploration, is look at how language is used. Because language filters our perceptions. The function of language is to define, provide meaning, and once we assign meaning to a certain experience or body part or you name it, it is going to give us access to a certain perception of it and dictate our experience. Language influences our beliefs. This is beliefs beyond just our personal history, but beliefs that we hold as a global society today. And words such as grow a pear, get some balls, be ballsy, man up, are all phrases that are associated with being strong, being powerful. And they're all associated with male sexuality and a male body. And then we have phrases to do with female sexuality, such as don't be a pussy, don't be a bitch, whore, cunt. Those phrases, those words are either associated with weakness, lack of power, or disgust. The worst thing that you can call someone is a cunt, and it directly relates to part of a female anatomy. So if we look at the words such as bitch, whore, and cunt, and look at the original meaning of those words, it is vastly different. For example, bitch was associated with a goddess in ancient Greece who usually appeared in the company of dogs. Dogs were very sacred to her. That's why the word bitch was associated with this goddess. And this was not a term of disgust or powerlessness, quite the opposite. The word whore originally meant a priestess, a highly educated woman who was well respected in society, who partook in a sacred ritual, a sacred rite in the temple to initiate men into higher states of consciousness through sexuality. There's a long history of women initiating men to spiritual awakening through sexuality, and there was training, training, and initiation they went through in order to work with the energy of transformation through sacred sexuality and then bring this to the men that wanted that type of transformation. So these women were connecting directly with the goddess, and they were trained to provide that type of spiritual illumination. This was when sexuality and spirituality were linked, which, from what we understand, for thousands of years, sexuality was the ultimate way to access a spiritual awakening, a kundalini experience. And this was the domain of women in society to bring this awakening to society, women that went through initiation and training to be able to hold this high frequency in their body and bring this to the person that they were bestowing this on. And it was only stopped when traditional religion wanted to squash the feminine and to make religion about patriarchy. That's when we lost the feminine. Mary Magdalene is a holder of this high sacred knowledge and brought this to Jesus. But the goddess, in and of itself, is not just one goddess. She shows up at different times and at different locations, different geographical regions on the planet, but it's the same energy when we're talking about Isis or Inana or Aphrodite or Venus or Magdalene. It's that same powerful, powerful energy that has been largely erased in modern society. The word Kunt was originally associated with the goddess image as well in Sanskrit. In canonite priestesses were known as K-H-U-N-T. There's an Oriental goddess named C-U-N-T-I. So there's also a Greek goddess with this root name as well. So there's this long history of honoring the feminine, the power of female sexuality, and these words that today are seen as insults and associated with disgust or weakness were actually the opposite. And I've mentioned Sheila Nagigs. The Sheila gig is the symbol for this podcast. The artwork for this podcast is actually an image of a Sheila Nagig. The Sheila Nagig image of the divine feminine was all throughout Europe, primarily in Ireland, my country, my birth country, throughout the 12th, 13th, 14th century. And they were on Christian churches. And again, the same idea is that it was about the power of female sexuality to provide protection, to provide spiritual power. And they were pictured, they were stone carvings over the entrances of churches, castles, and so forth. And the key elements of a Shila Nagig are the big eyes, and then she's proudly displaying her genitals. You see her legs spread apart and her genitals on display on these carvings. And some people have suggested that, oh, well, this is just a fertility symbol. Well, first of all, that's kind of odd to have a sexual fertility symbol actually carved on Christian churches. But when we look at some of the scholarship on that, there's a wonderful book from an Irish female scholar that talks about this. What we realize is this is not just a symbol of fertility. Many of these Shilina gigs actually have breasts that are sagging to demonstrate the idea that this is not a younger feminine image. This is more of a crone, a woman that has past menopause. And so what this is telling you is the power of the female sexuality is not associated with only the power of birthing new offspring. It's the power of her sexuality in general. When we look at the divine design of the female body, of female sexuality, what we see is a powerful role of her sexuality that is way beyond fertility. So there's a wonderful book called Why Sex is Fun. And in that book, what is talked about is how unique human female sexuality is compared to the whole entire animal kingdom, and also compared to human-male sexuality. So in general, sexuality is tied to the ability to reproduce. Most wild animals remain fertile until they die, or close to that time, also applies to adult males. They remain fertile until they die. Menopause is unique to adult women. What does that mean? It means that our sexuality was not just intended for a reproductive purpose. And the fact that women can enjoy sexuality sometimes even more after menopause tells us that the evolutionary role is not just for offspring, it is not just to propagate the human race. I would suggest to you that the role of female sexuality is to give us access to a higher state of consciousness. And temple priestesses carried this knowledge at one time. And I do believe Mary Magdalene carried this to Jesus. When she anointed him, the anointing of Jesus, which we are told in the Bible, was perfume that she poured on him. There has been scholarship. This is The Woman with the Alabaster Jar by Margaret Starbird, that book, which provides a beautiful explanation, scholarly explanation, why that anointing was Mary Magdalene, and it wasn't ointment she was pouring on him. It was a sacred sexual ritual to raise his consciousness, to give him access to this unseen realm, to help bring him into the state, the resurrected state, so that he could be able to walk between the worlds as he did. It is about the submission of the female. It's often associated with violent submission of the female. And that is not at all the imagery that we have from ancient times. Pornography is not new, but what is new is the pairing of submission and violence towards the female that is new. And Renee Eisler in her book, Sacred Pleasure, really discusses that in a really profound way: how this imagery, these associations of the words that I've just mentioned, bitch, cunt, whore, all go together to provide a view of female sexuality as disempowering for women. So it's not surprising that unconsciously, I'm not saying that women think this through and intellectually decide to disconnect from their sexuality because they find the representation of female sexuality quite a disconnect from a deeper knowing that they have. To quote her, she has said, from my professional perspective, the disconnection of sex and spirit is the greatest contributor to low sexual desire and lack of pleasure, sexual pleasure for women in modern society. And so she described that when women were coming to her sex therapy practice, they would just explain that something was missing for them. Something was missing that made them feel sexually incomplete. They couldn't put their finger on it, they didn't know, but down deep they knew that something was missing. And she came to define this as the spiritual disconnection we have in today's society. Because this ancient wisdom, this ancient pairing of sex and sacredness and sex and spirituality, we may never have been told about this in modern society. We may have never been introduced to that concept. But somehow, down deep in our DNA, in our inner knowing, we remember this and we feel disconnected when we only see images of violence, images of forced domination and submission around female sexuality in modern internet images and websites. It doesn't follow with something that we know inside. So part of reclaiming access to our sexuality, to the power of sexuality, is reclaiming some of the original ideas of what it meant to be female, which are quite the opposite of the patriarchal type of religion that gives us a different view of female sexuality. For example, in many of religions around the world today, even spiritual traditions, the man is seen as having more spiritual access than the woman. The woman is seen as a support role to the man and him being the spiritual leader. And there's this idea that women were the helper. So even if you go to Eastern traditions, the guru is most likely male. In fact, I can't think of a religion that's in modern society, not ancient society, that there is an icon that is female first and foremost. It's pretty much all the male is number one. There will be female representation too, but it's as an in a helping role, in a role that's to support that. And even today we have man and then we have W O man. So this idea that women were an afterthought. But if you look at actually the divine design of us, and you strip away any of these dogmas and belief systems that have been passed on to us, and you just look at the biology of this whole thing, what you realize is that in the womb, the divine design of the human being is by default female. We all start out female, and we will keep developing as a female embryo unless there is the addition of male hormones. With the addition of male hormones in utero, then the genital tract of a male develops. So there is this divine design of the female being primary. Now, is this to say that one gender is more important than the other? Not at all. But we need to understand that there's been so much information that has been fed to us about us being secondary, the weaker sex, and all of that. And it's just not the way things are in reality. It's not just, it's just not the way that the divine design of the human female is. So we look at this in utero and we consider the fact that a female baby has XX chromosomed, a male baby has XY. What's interesting to note is that the X chromosome. Is five times larger than the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome, which you only get if you're male, is actually not only smaller in size than the X chromosome, it's one of the smallest chromosomes in the human genome. Now, I'm not saying this to suggest that one gender is inferior to the other, but I'm just saying this because I think it's intriguing that the narrative that has been spun in so many religions and so many spiritual traditions is that God created women, the weaker sex, as an afterthought. And that's just not what human biology, which was if you're if you believe in the divine, human biology was created by the divine. And it doesn't show this secondary role of women at all. The other aspect of this is that the X chromosome contains about 1,000 genes, which is many times more than the genes of a Y chromosome. The Y chromosome, the male chromosome, it contains about 50 to 60 genes compared to about a thousand for the female. So what this paints is a picture that is quite different than the religious picture. We're given a view of women as not as powerful, as not as much in the forefront of the divine design of humanity. And it breaks down this whole notion that we were created somewhat as an afterthought. So what is important here is to realize that at one time we had a very different view of female sexuality. And I believe that the modern day issues of women having low sexual desire, no sexual desire, lack of ability to climax, lack of sexual pleasure, sure, those are complicated issues and they have a lot of aspects to them. But what usually is not talked about is the role that culture plays in our personal experience of our sexuality. If we go back thousands of years, I would suggest to you that women didn't struggle with pleasure like they do today, didn't struggle with desire like is so common today, because the view of what we were as women, of how powerful our bodies are, how powerful and good and sacred our sexuality is, that was once known. So for thousands of years, women were worshipped and there was a reverence about a woman's body. And it was known that through her body, these psychedelic, mystical, powerful realms of divine realms could be, she could connect to that through sexual pleasure and bring her partner to that state of consciousness through sexual pleasure. And we just don't have that type of association today in our modern imagery, in our discussions about sexuality. It's quite the opposite. And interestingly enough, an anthropologist, her name is Peggy Sande. She's retired now, but she was at the University of Pennsylvania, and she wrote a book decades ago about the link between sexual violence and how a culture views female sexuality. She suggests that sexual violence is not inherent to humanity. Humanity is not wired for this type of activity to happen. It's not hardwired into us. What influences rape and assault and all of that type of behavior is the cultural narrative around women, around sexuality. And she provides an explanation for her view by showing examples of cultures that held women's sexuality and women's bodies in a sacred light and revered them and worshiped them in a very pure holy way, not in a way of dominating and looking down upon her as a sexual being. And how that narrative was spun in the culture, also having to do with the creation myth of the culture, how humanity came to being. Whatever the culture held, their original story of women and men and how they came to be as humans really set us up for how we then internalize our sexuality being female in society. And so she discusses examples of cultures in the past that have almost no instances of sexual violence. And she correlates that with a reverence, a sacredness of how sexuality was held, the original creation myth of that culture. And she compares that with cultures that rape was prevalent and sexual violence was commonplace, and how usually the creation myth of that culture was women were the downfall of humanity. Woman's sexuality was somehow dark and evil, and it tempted men and brought the downfall of humanity. And there was a need to dominate women because of that. So it's really interesting to know that these kinds of myths that were propagated through different cultures really translated to the accepted behavior that people exhibited around sexuality. And that I find quite hopeful because it shows that the major problem we have around sexual violence today, it's not some problematic way that humans are hardwired to inflict this type of behavior on another person, but it is much more about how society views the role of women, how society views female sexuality, and when we take back, reclaim the pairing of sexuality and sacredness, and the role of women beyond just reproduction, then this provides the basis for a new narrative where those types of violent behaviors are no longer commonplace at all. So there's a lot there to unpack. I'm not going to really go into the rape-free cultures right now, but if you're interested in that exploration about cultures where there was virtually no sexual violence, and it proves that men are not prone to rape. And all of these rape-free cultures honored the sacred feminine. If that topic is of interest to you, I will link her book in the description below. That's all I have for you today. Thank you so much for joining me. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share this with someone who could benefit. And please write a review if you're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, so more people can find this podcast. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.