not good enough, not beautiful enough, or not pleasing enough to others, are stilled, and a great sense of a larger set of connections—even a sense of what I will call, for lack of a better term, a Universal or Divine Feminine—can be accessed.
Major creative insights, and powerful work, can emerge after an experience of transcendence of this kind. I do believe that when women learn to identify and cultivate an awareness of “the Goddess,” defined in this way, their behavior toward themselves, and their life experiences, change for the better—because self-destructiveness, shame, and tolerance of poor treatment cannot live in harmony with this set of feelings.
But I would argue, less literally, that “the Goddess”—a gendered sense of self that is shining, without damage, without anxiety or fear—inheres in every woman, and that women tend intuitively to know when they have glimpsed it or touched upon it. When women realize the spark of “the Goddess” in themselves, healthier, more self-respecting, and other sexual behavior follows. The vagina serves, physiologically, to activate this matrix of chemicals that feel, to the female brain, like “the Goddess”—that is, like an awareness of one’s own great dignity, and of great self-love as a woman, as a radiant part of the universal feminine.
The vagina may be a “hole,” but it is, properly understood, a Goddess-shaped one.
1
Meet Your Incredible Pelvic Nerve
The poetic, the scientific, the erotic—why should the imagination care which master it served?
—Ian McEwan, “Solar”
S pring 2009 was beautiful. I was emotionally and sexually happy, intellectually excited, and newly in love. But it was a spring in which I also, slowly, started to realize that something was becoming terribly wrong with me.
I was forty-six. I was in a relationship with a man who was extremely well suited to me in various ways. For two years, he had given me great emotional and physical happiness. I have never had difficulty with sexual responsiveness, and all had been well in that regard. But almost imperceptibly, I began to notice a change.
I had always been able to have clitoral orgasms; and in my thirties, I had also learned to have what would probably be called “blended” or clitoral/vaginal orgasms, which added what seemed to be another psychological dimension to the experience. I had always experienced a postcoital rush of good emotional and physical feelings. After lovemaking, as I grew older, usually, after orgasm, I would see colors as if they were brighter; and the details of the beauty of the natural world would seem sharper and more compelling. I would feel the connections between things more distinctly for a few hours afterward; my mood would lift, and I would become chattier and more energized.
But gradually, I became aware that this was changing. I was slowly but steadily losing sensation inside my body. That was not the worst of it. To my astonishment and dismay, while my clitoral orgasms were as strong and pleasurable as ever, something very different than usual was happening, after sex, to my mind.
I realized one day, as I gazed out on the treetops outside the bedroom of our little cottage upstate, that the usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive, was no longer following the physical pleasure I had certainly experienced. I started to notice that sex was increasingly just about that physical pleasure. It still felt really good, but I increasingly did not experience sex as being incredibly emotionally meaningful. I wanted it physically—it was a hunger and a repletion—but I no longer experienced it in a poetic dimension; I no longer felt it as being vitally connected to everything else in my life. I had lost the rush of seeing the connections between things; instead, things seemed discrete and unrelated to me in a way that
Major creative insights, and powerful work, can emerge after an experience of transcendence of this kind. I do believe that when women learn to identify and cultivate an awareness of “the Goddess,” defined in this way, their behavior toward themselves, and their life experiences, change for the better—because self-destructiveness, shame, and tolerance of poor treatment cannot live in harmony with this set of feelings.
But I would argue, less literally, that “the Goddess”—a gendered sense of self that is shining, without damage, without anxiety or fear—inheres in every woman, and that women tend intuitively to know when they have glimpsed it or touched upon it. When women realize the spark of “the Goddess” in themselves, healthier, more self-respecting, and other sexual behavior follows. The vagina serves, physiologically, to activate this matrix of chemicals that feel, to the female brain, like “the Goddess”—that is, like an awareness of one’s own great dignity, and of great self-love as a woman, as a radiant part of the universal feminine.
The vagina may be a “hole,” but it is, properly understood, a Goddess-shaped one.
1
Meet Your Incredible Pelvic Nerve
The poetic, the scientific, the erotic—why should the imagination care which master it served?
—Ian McEwan, “Solar”
S pring 2009 was beautiful. I was emotionally and sexually happy, intellectually excited, and newly in love. But it was a spring in which I also, slowly, started to realize that something was becoming terribly wrong with me.
I was forty-six. I was in a relationship with a man who was extremely well suited to me in various ways. For two years, he had given me great emotional and physical happiness. I have never had difficulty with sexual responsiveness, and all had been well in that regard. But almost imperceptibly, I began to notice a change.
I had always been able to have clitoral orgasms; and in my thirties, I had also learned to have what would probably be called “blended” or clitoral/vaginal orgasms, which added what seemed to be another psychological dimension to the experience. I had always experienced a postcoital rush of good emotional and physical feelings. After lovemaking, as I grew older, usually, after orgasm, I would see colors as if they were brighter; and the details of the beauty of the natural world would seem sharper and more compelling. I would feel the connections between things more distinctly for a few hours afterward; my mood would lift, and I would become chattier and more energized.
But gradually, I became aware that this was changing. I was slowly but steadily losing sensation inside my body. That was not the worst of it. To my astonishment and dismay, while my clitoral orgasms were as strong and pleasurable as ever, something very different than usual was happening, after sex, to my mind.
I realized one day, as I gazed out on the treetops outside the bedroom of our little cottage upstate, that the usual postcoital rush of a sense of vitality infusing the world, of delight with myself and with all around me, and of creative energy rushing through everything alive, was no longer following the physical pleasure I had certainly experienced. I started to notice that sex was increasingly just about that physical pleasure. It still felt really good, but I increasingly did not experience sex as being incredibly emotionally meaningful. I wanted it physically—it was a hunger and a repletion—but I no longer experienced it in a poetic dimension; I no longer felt it as being vitally connected to everything else in my life. I had lost the rush of seeing the connections between things; instead, things seemed discrete and unrelated to me in a way that
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