"I had a feeling that Pandora's box contained the mysteries of woman's sensuality, so different from a man's and for which man's language was so inadequate. The language of sex had yet to be invented. The language of the senses was yet îo be explored."

 -- 

Anaïs Nin, 

The Delta Of Venus

I grew up in a pretty liberal household - as liberal as you could say having your mum own a sex toy and lingerie shop, in a rural back corner of Northern Ireland. There was a time when I walked around in a pair of thigh-high PVC heels, to give her a seller's-appraisal at the age of 16 (with our love for Pretty Woman, we came to the agreement that no thigh high is too high). I would get the perks of last stock, I'd flick through sex toy catalogues that would arrive in the post as casually as if they were from Next or Argos. She once read out her online descriptions for new toys over the phone, when I was in Tesco in the egg aisle, loving her even more for her casual dropping of "clitoral stimulation" while I was browsing the free range. She embraced all the speed-bumps of awkward adolescence with finesse and I'll never forget her explaining to me what a dildo was when I read out the link on a pop-up over my shoulder. As a young teenager browsing the internet in the days before Adblock, she remained unfazed. I was curious and she was honest, and there came a bond of having a mother-daughter relationship built on unabashed openness.  Her gutsy enjoy-it-all attitude was the beginning of my embrace for the sex-positive.

But I hit a roadblock in my early 20s. I became increasingly aware that I was living in a sex-negative society, one which brainwashes young girls through images of women as sex objects, leading to a divorce from our own sexual agency because of the embodied belief that female pleasure is secondary to a man's. Archaic gender roles still play a part in giving precedence to male pleasure over female sexuality. 

It was my final year of uni in 2015 when I wrote my dissertation on female sexuality and the hyper-sexuality of women on social media. I was intrigued by what women had to say about the pornification of culture. But what was a pretty standard run through of feminist academia has since sat inside of me, bitter and heavy like a coin, for the past two years. Isn't critiquing the sexual expressions of women a subversive kind of sexism, a calling out to the patriarchy that it's alive and thriving, by giving women yet another rod with which to beat their own backs? A vast majority of these female writers would regale an internalised misogyny (one where women can't express their sexual pleasure or gratification for themselves, because the male gaze is seemingly too dominant a social structure that the female gaze is buried deep and invisibly beneath it...) and so they would lambast and write and derail all under the guise of feminist liberation. I've returned to the same writings and found it suffocating, like a trussed up telling off of what women can or can't, shouldn't or should. I was annoyed with myself to have been pulled into the fold of shaming without realising it was shaming. 

My research came from a place of trying to find resolution for a deep-seated anger and exhaustion at feelings of female guilt. It was a frustration that was fuelled by shops now selling padded pants along with padded bras, perfectly geared to fill the gaps drilled by the never-ending barrage of advertising that says we're never quite enough; by a capitalist market that manoeuvres our insecurities around the chess board of commercialism; by all the young girls who are contorting their flesh into the lumps and bumps of puberty before its time; by a woman posting nudes online and gaining followers, but in her condemnation of politics, white supremacy or sexist bigotry, she loses followers; by all the times I've been told I haven't made the right choice in birth control or that I'll "regret" the ink on my skin; and by men who spout comments about a woman's appearance as casually as if remarking on the weather.

But the guilt has been misdirected and misunderstood, lead astray down a path of blaming, where "sexualised youth" are discredited as a result of adult female sexuality and the accessibility of sexualised imagery. The real problem is in blame, assumption and the insistence that a woman's sexuality is to be in a state of passiveness. You only need look at the tired old rhetoric around porn to see that it's a relatively new concept that sexual material could be a pleasurable experience for both sexes - both as an actor and a voyeur - whereby ethical porn companies can and do exist...

"I am done living in a world where women are lied to about their bodies; where women are objects of sexual desire but not subjects of sexual pleasure; where sex is used as a weapon against women; and where women believe their bodies are broken, simply because their bodies are not male. And I am done living in a world where women are trained from birth to treat their bodies as the enemy." 

--Emily Nagoski, Come As You Are

The White Page

There are few things as liberating as the blankness of a white page - or in this case, a text box - and there's little else as dreadful as the thought of spoiling it.

I used to have a blog. At the credulous age of 15 years old. It was 2008. I had things to say and a passion to voice them, armed with a growing repertoire of words I could spell but never pronounce. Therein lied the beauty of writing and flexing literary muscle without the embarrassment of pronunciation. The woes of spoken-word dyslexia.

I faithfully logged my life until I was 19. I thank those blogging years as giving me a head-start into the world of journalism; it gave me a foot up when no one would pass the stool. It let me extend myself into a sphere of writing that was teasingly uncensored and needed no permission. I've learned a lot since then, but in the pursuits of professional writing, I've lost the desire to write for me.

I read a book recently called Letters To A Young Writer. I picked it up in a bookshop after ambling from shelf to shelf, swapping tome for tome, squatted in front of particularly tasty rows, browsing until I felt the spines crease.

"You can't not write," Colum McCann spells out. "And be a writer." The words slapped me in the face. Outside of the shackles of freelance projects, where I'm yanking on the proverbial heels of words to pull them into being, rushed by the loom of a deadline, the fun of writing has been quashed.

Here's to blogging - long may it reign!