Our Female Bodies and Sexual Exploitation
The following is a transcript of a class led by M— and T— at an RC Contemporary Women’s Issues Workshop:
OUR FEMALE BODIES
M—: Every human starts life in a female body. We all were vulnerable and wholly dependent on our mothers. We relied on her female body. We needed her womb to be a safe and nurturing place in which to develop; we needed there to be enough food. Some of us felt connected and safe as we grew in our mother’s body. Others of us had significant struggles. Distress recordings from our early struggles necessarily include impressions of and feelings about our mother’s female body.
As humans we expect and need closeness, connection, aware attention, and food from the beginning of our lives. However, most of us lost our connections with our mothers and the other humans around us. The people around us were doing the best they could but were not in shape [in a condition] to meet our needs. We need to discharge for many hours on the early loss of connection and the resulting recordings of desperation, longing, and isolation. We can also discharge on how these recordings may have become attached to our mother’s female body.
Because of the above recordings, people may become preoccupied with the female body and act out that distress. Some of us feel “positively” preoccupied (fascinated), some of us feel revolted, and some of us feel both—whether the feelings are about someone else’s body or our own. In this society the distresses can be like “the air we breathe.”
(Mini-session on female bodies)
As females, we internalize the sexist message that it is normal for our bodies to be objectified and exploited. Men, because of their oppressor role in sexism, are trained to act out the patterns of objectifying and exploiting female bodies.
T—: Our mother’s female body had already experienced decades of sexual exploitation, built on thousands of years of sexism and male domination. The oppression of females can feel embedded in our cells.
OBJECTIFICATION
We are born. We come out into the world. We are separated from the female body we had been living in. As soon as it is known that we are female or male, lots of things start happening. There are expectations about who we are and who we will be. We are typically objectified as females instead of being seen as powerful, thinking, and respected human beings.
Objectification becomes sexualized. Sexual exploitation happens to every female. There is no place where it doesn’t happen. It has nothing to do with what we did or did not do. It is not personal. We did not invite it. Sometimes it happens when we are being ourselves, being alive, showing our minds. It also happens when we are trying to be invisible or small. The hurt comes down on us no matter what we do. It starts early and is continuous. It is systemic and systematic. Sexual exploitation happens to every female everywhere; none of us escape it.
And all of us, whether we are born female or male, are targeted with male domination. Males are conditioned to have dominating patterns that dominate adult women and young girls as well as younger males and males from other oppressed groups.
As we work on our early sexual memories, we can remember to look at where they are connected to being female, including how we were objectified and exploited because we were born female.
M—: We need to work on our whole history of sexual objectification and exploitation, including in our teenage and young adult years. We do this for ourselves but also to build attention and space for teenage and young adult females to show and work on what their lives are actually like in this area.
It is important that men work on the feelings that come up for them around teenage girls and young adult women, including from having been separated from females as teenagers and young adults. Until men do this work, it is generally hard for them to stay close to teenage girls or young adult women without acting out the distress.
Males are systematically disconnected from human connection and then offered sex as the only way to be close and connected. None of this is men’s fault. It is not their personal failing. And it doesn’t mean that females never exploit someone sexually or that males are never exploited sexually themselves. As with all distresses, both ends of the pattern are recorded, and we can act out either end.
(Mini-session on our teenage and young adult years)
It is never useful to blame anyone for whatever role they were hurt into acting out. As females, we’re often caught in the victim role from having been sexually exploited and lacking the resource to recover from it. To heal, we have to challenge the entire oppressive system. We have to take a powerful stance. It doesn’t make sense to target and blame individuals who act out the distresses. Instead we need to end the system that hurts, exploits, and oppresses everyone. We can do this together.
THE SEX INDUSTRIES
The sex industries influence our relationships and all of society. These industries, particularly prostitution, have been around since the beginning of class societies and have grown exponentially with the explosion of the Internet. They are not only bigger in terms of how many people are directly engaged with them but also in how they have infiltrated almost all aspects of society. Every time we have contact with them, things get recorded in our minds that affect how we see people, particularly women. We need opportunities to discharge the recordings. We can look at how they have affected us, from when we were very young up to the current period. We can look at how much they are in all of our lives and all of our heads. We need to do this work for ourselves, for everyone we have contact with, and for everyone we bring into Co-Counseling. The younger new Co-Counselors are, the more their lives have been affected by the sex industries.
They are called the sex industries, but they are not actually about sex. Sex is a human activity that is fun and interesting. It is about connecting and being close to another person. A sexual relationship can be flexible and change over time as we think and figure out new things. Sex is not about dominating and exploiting another person to fill frozen longings or to numb early feelings of loneliness and desperation.
As we recover from hurts from the sex industries, we need to remember that we cannot blame, judge, criticize, or be hard on any person, including ourselves, for having been a consumer of these industries or exploited by them. We are all oppressed and are doing the best we can under harsh circumstances. We can stand against and challenge the exploitation and oppression and build the resource to work on the early distresses that leave us vulnerable to the sex industries.
(Mini-session on pornography, beginning with our earliest memory of hearing about or seeing it)
T—: My personal commitment to working on these issues came as I realized they weren’t just about me individually; they had everything to do with my people. Our country has been colonized for centuries, with racism and classism driving the colonization. We have also been run over militarily. Sexual exploitation connected to war, violence, and the military has happened to everyone, in particular the females. To be free, we need to eliminate the sex industries and their impact on every person in our society.
Around the world, sex trafficking, prostitution, and pornography are massive industries connected to military installations, particularly of the U.S. military. Anywhere there’s a U.S. military installation you will find prostitution and other sex industries. And it’s not coincidental that the military is closely connected to the sex industries.
Men are made to give up on themselves and be isolated. They are expected to be expendable, put themselves in the line of fire, and do the things that are demanded of them. They are made to be completely disconnected from themselves and other humans then set up to get connection only through sex. Often the only way they can get sex is by buying it. That’s obviously not about a real human connection. The sex industries are not good for anybody. And they’re designed to hook [addict] people and bring them back repeatedly. For them to make money, people have to be restimulated into continually coming back.
(Mini-session on prostitution and any relationship we have with it)
M—: As mentioned, we can trace how the explosion of the sex industries is related to the military. We can also trace how it is related to industries engaged in extractive practices—for example, the extraction of oil from tar sands. Where these industries are located, corporations dominate the land, and men who work in them are offered opportunities to exploit and dominate women—to numb themselves to the exploitative work they are engaged in.
At the 2013 World Conference of the RC Communities, we revised the Guideline for the certification of RC teachers to include the expectation that certified teachers “oppose both the existence and the use of pornography” as well as “work to free themselves from any distresses connected with pornography, along with other rigid and repetitive sexual behaviors.” At the 2017 World Conference, we revised the Guideline further to include the expectation that certified teachers “not defend the use of pornography, prostitution, or other sex industries” as well as have “counseled enough on the sexual distresses that society has installed on them (as on all of us) to not engage in sexual contact for money or other forms of compensation or otherwise collude with the exploitation of anyone who is compelled or driven to offer such contact by violence, threat, force, economic conditions, or oppression.”
Anyone who is certified to teach, anyone who wants to become certified, and any Reference Person needs to be thinking about this Guideline. We all need to be discharging about it to come to our own thinking. What does it mean, as an RC teacher, not to defend the use of pornography, prostitution, or the sex industries? We are asking teachers not to defend the industries. This does not mean they cannot defend the people who have been exploited by these industries. People who have been exploited by them have been heavily targeted and often blamed in religious and moralistic ways. As RCers we know not to blame anyone for the ways they have been hurt. We stand in close connection with them and in opposition to their oppression and exploitation.
As RC teachers we reach for our best thinking and for rational policies and perspectives on the world and our relationships. We try to set policies that guide us toward rational relationships, including not exploiting people. Also, when any group is targeted and exploited, it makes room for all people to be targeted and exploited.
As Co-Counselors and Co-Counseling teachers, we seek to build thoughtful close relationships with many different people and to keep thinking flexibly as we get closer. We cannot do this well when we are trying to escape our early feelings—for example, by exploiting someone. Sexual exploitation is not the only way people exploit other people, but it and the sex industries are exploding in their effect on the world. We need to get smarter about how this affects all of us and how we can challenge it. And we need to discharge to do this.
T—: A key issue for women worldwide is sexual violence and sexual exploitation. We can each decide how we will take them on [confront and do something about them]. It is about getting our minds back, and doing it with a group of people who are doing it along with us.
(Present Time 203, April 2021)