Sex, Power and Mental Health: Uncovering the “Dirty-Girl Effect” (Part 1)
A few years ago, I had Sunday brunch with some powerhouse women. These are the kind of women that raise millions of dollars for their nonprofit organizations, the kind that make an impact on thousands of people in a single year, the kind of women that entire cities follow and recognize as leaders. And so, you can imagine my surprise when, during an intimate conversation with these influencers, I learned that many of them had never experienced an orgasm. The only sex position a lot of them were comfortable with was missionary. And after years of marriage, most of them were still uncomfortable initiating sex with their husbands (or partners). That both fascinated and concerned me. How could these women, who are so empowered in the streets be so disempowered in their own sheets?
Introducing the Dirty-Girl Effect
Through conducting dozens of interviews (formal and casual) with high-powered women, reading countless articles and books and reflecting on my own experiences, I learned a lot. And those lessons can be summed up as what I am calling the “dirty-girl effect.”
So what is this effect and why is it worth sharing with an audience of ambitious women looking to fulfill their “impossible” dreams? Why should we care about the sex lives of badass women doing extraordinary things in the world? It boils down to this: power and mental health. Women are often made to feel dirty when pursuing power in any context. When we have ambition and drive, we are labeled as “dirty” and “bad,” and when we express our sexual desires and interests, we are seen as “dirty” and “bad.” This is in part because power has, historically, been constructed as something belonging to men. And the way that we maintain that legacy is by shaming women for pursuing it — hence, Donald Trump addressing his 2016 presidential opponent, Hillary Clinton, as a “nasty woman” and our society creating “dirty girls.”
Dirty Girls…Literally
For many of us, it starts young. About a decade ago, I had a conversation with a woman who is an established author and writer. Her work was turned into a film and presented at the Cannes festival in France when we were too young and green to fully understand what that meant. One day, we were on the phone talking about raising children. We wondered about how we’d talk to our boys and girls about sex when no one really talked to us about it. And she shared a story with me. She said, “I vividly remember my mom changing me as a toddler. When she ran the wipe across my clitoris, I said to her, ‘That feels good. Do it again.’ She looked at me with disgust. And she dropped me.” We both laughed, in part because it was funny imagining the mortified look on her mom’s face, but also because of the awkwardness and maybe even sadness of it all. I think so many of us can identify with the mom and the compromising situation she must’ve found herself in. But what about the toddler, the child, that was dropped and made to feel dirty for expressing that a cool wipe across her private parts felt good. She was sexualized before she was even old enough to understand what sex was and penalized— dropped— for her body’s natural reaction. But this isn’t an isolated incident.
“Dirtying” is a common practice. In her book PHD (Po Ho on Dope) to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life, Dr. Elaine Richardson says this about her entrance into the world: “Mama said she shoulda known I was gon’ be fast the way I was trying to pop out on the way to the hospital in Mr. Dejarnette’s car on a warm day in May.” In Richardson’s case, the label “fast” is retroactive, going back to a time before she was born. She is imagined as hypersexualized while still in the womb. In June 2017, the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality released a groundbreaking study called “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” in which the authors reported that between the ages of 5-14, Black girls are seen as “less innocent and more adult-like than their white peers.” This perception is called “adultification.” In the followup study, “Listening to Black Women and Girls: Lived Experiences of Adultification Bias,” authors dove deeper into discussions about Black women being portrayed as promiscuous and about how that understanding of Black women maps onto Black girls. Findings from focus groups that asked adults basic questions about their perceptions of black (and white) girls between the ages of 0-19 revealed that “adults assumed that Black girls are sexually active at an early age and that they are generally less innocent than their white peers.” In other words, Black girls are often seen as “less pure” than white girls. They are seen as dirty.
The Property of Men
As if this isn’t enough, other forms of dirtying include rape and molestation. Historically, rape has been viewed not as a crime against the person being assaulted, within this context we are referring to women. It has been viewed as a crime against the men connected to survivors. According to one source, “For much of recorded history women were the property of men, with their value as property measured largely by their sexual ‘purity.’...A raped woman or girl was less valuable as property, and penalties for rape often involved fines or other compensation paid to her husband or father.” Within a male dominated society, traditionally, a woman’s value has been determined, in part by whether or not her virtue was “intact.” Never mind that she had been violated, assaulted, disrespected, abused and traumatized. The real question is this: Is she clean? Or has one man dirtied another man’s “property,” and by extension, lowered her value in his eyes and in the sight of society?
Freedom Ain’t Free
We haven’t even arrived at a discussion about consent yet. Up until now, this entire post has been about all the ways in which the world projects, imposes and reconstructs the images of girls and women just because they live and breathe. It has been about the perception of and entitlement to women’s bodies. It has been about the sexualization of women and girls— Black women and girls, in particular— and male ownership over the female body in general. But what about sexual empowerment and freedom for women? What happens when we set out to take control over our sex lives and/or co-create our sexual experiences? Well, now, that is a whole different kind of dirtying.
If you are lucky enough to avoid or survive the above mentioned, there is yet another hurdle to jump over once you make it to the bedroom. It’s called slut shaming. Here is what Equality Archive tells us: “slut originates from Old English, and it means a ‘messy, dirty, or untidy’ woman or girl. In contemporary culture, the slur reinforces the social characterization of the ideal woman as demure virgins until marriage (and patriarchal possession).” It’s not surprising that the term “slut” is one more way to connect women, sex, and dirtiness. What may be surprising for many is this: “Slut shaming demeans women because it suggests sexually empowered women deserve negative judgment and social marginalization. It denies women’s choice and women’s autonomy.” Labeling someone a slut, in the popular imagination, has always been about checking promiscuity. We justify slut shaming by rationalizing that society is stopping the spread of disease, the birth of “bastard children,” the burden of single motherhood, and the breakdown of nuclear families by blackballing “immoral” women through categorizing them as sluts. (Men, on the other hand, are free from this kind of social scarring. In fact, they are encouraged to “sow their oats” before they finally settle down. But I digress. This post is not about double standards, hypocrisy and sexism — not directly, anyway.)
And yet shaming is not about promiscuity, the grown woman’s version of being fast, at all. Being a slut is about a woman being too comfortable with her own sexuality. Slut shaming is as much about punishing a woman for seeking and taking control of her sexual experience within the confines of her monogamous relationship or marriage as much as it is about punishing a woman for being raped. It’s what people do when a woman has the audacity to own her sex life and her body. It’s what people (men in particular) do when they do not have control over our bodies. It’s this ownership (or lack of) that makes her dirty.
Sex Is about Power
Dirtying is a process that happens to women and girls from infancy to adulthood. It’s a process that plays out through both consensual and non consensual sex. It doesn’t matter if a woman is having sex outside of wedlock or within it. Your virginity will not protect you, especially if you are a Black girl or woman because dirtying at the core is not about purity. It’s about power.
While there is debate around the actual source of this quote, Oscar Wilde is often attributed to saying these words: “Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power." I’m particularly interested in making sense of the second part of this message because many of us— women in particular— have been socialized to believe that sex is about love and connection. But is that a naive and/or limited understanding? Consider these two sentences from the HuffPost: “It is interesting that one of the most common verbal expressions of aggression in the English language, ‘Screw you!’ -- and its more colorful alternative--allude to sex. What's more, the word ‘fuck’ is believed to originate from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to strike.’” According to this post, baked into our language is the intertwining of sex and power. To echo Wilde, sex is about power. It’s about position— who’s on top and who’s on bottom. It’s about giving and receiving, proposals and rejections. It’s about managing risks and dangers. It’s about “location, location, location.” It’s about submission and dominance. It’s about control over one’s self and influence over another.
An intimate conversation between Celie (Whoopie Goldberg) and Shug Avery (Margaret Avery) about sex in the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.
Whether we are passive players or ambitious ones, make no mistake, sex is a game of power, one that many women arrive at ill-suited to play, in part, because by the time we make it to the table, our sense of self is too worn down from a long process of dirtying. Society, life and circumstances have dropped us off, broken, at bedroom thresholds. And like the broken, we surrender our bodies and wills over to those who have more power than us, with no demands and very little questions. If we are to be completely honest with ourselves, many of us are not that much different from Alice Walker’s Ms. Celie in The Color Purple. Consider this conversation between her and Shug Avery:
Celie: He just climb on top of me and do his business.
Shug: 'Do his business'? You sound like he going to the toilet on you.
Celie: That's what it feel like.
A lot of us have this story. But some women are reading this and shrugging their shoulders saying, “Couldn’t be me.” And yet, we dive a little deeper into your story just to discover that you’re right, it isn’t you. You are the one doing all the work, all the pleasing. You’re the sex kitten, the vixen, the legend, the freak. And yet, everyone else’s satisfaction comes at your expense. Your orgasm is because of you. Your pleasure is all about your effort. All the power is yours. That’s true. And so is all the labor. Your life inside of the bedroom is just like your life outside of it. Either way, ladies, we have a problem.
Wounded
Even those who are the most liberated among us women often find that our sexuality is bound by feelings of fear, inadequacy and guilt. In her book, Sexual Ecstasy: The Art of Orgasm, Margot Anand writes, “Beneath a surface layer of liberated attitudes, women still carry a deep wound around their sexuality…Beliefs such as ‘I can’t ask for what I want because I don’t deserve it,’ or ‘I shouldn’t feel pleasure,’ or ‘It’s the man’s role to give me pleasure, and I must settle for what he gives me,’ and fears such as ‘If I really let go into my orgasmic energy, he’ll think I’m too much.’” Women have been conditioned to feel dirty or be seen as dirty and unworthy of pleasure because we are not valued outside of being in service of men. This very private thing has real-life public implications. These feelings creep up in the way we negotiate deals. It affects our ability to dream big and to pursue those dreams. It impacts our relationship with comfort and ease, consigning us to a life of labor on behalf of everyone else, and makes us feel guilty for wanting to enjoy the fruits of our work. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Beyond Orgasms
Consider this point made in a Willingness blog post: “Being sexually confident, feeling desired, loved and attractive can empower your self-esteem and self-reliance to deal with personal and social demands.” Sexual empowerment is a down payment on our overall sense of self. It has an impact on how we manage ourselves and juggle the demands of the world. In her often cited paper, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Black, feminist poet Audre Lorde tells us this: “Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to the fullness.” For Lorde, our sexual experience has something to teach us about daily pursuits. It is a powerful resource that can become a measure of what joy feels like. And once we lean into it and “begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up…being satisfied with suffering.” A healthy sex life is about so much more than having an orgasm and connecting with another person. It’s about experiencing our innate power, the power within us, up close and in person, calling it forth and wielding it in other aspects of our lives. It’s about getting comfortable with a life of pleasure. And for caregivers and game changers, embracing such a life can feel, well, dirty.
Audre Lorde
Lorde tells us this about herself: “In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness…such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.” For her, the erotic and mental health are interconnected. And Planned Parenthood of Delaware agrees. In a post titled “Sex & Mental Health Share the Same Bed” we are told this: “During sex, the brain releases natural chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin – neurotransmitters that enhance feelings of happiness and relaxation as well as curb stress hormone levels.” It goes on to tell readers, “The role of touch is so powerful that those who are ‘touch-deprived,’ as many were during the pandemic, are more likely to experience higher levels of stress or depression.” I’m sure there are therapists that will argue that healthy sex is not a cure for depression, but its impact on mental health — even if it only offers slight benefits — may be undeniable.
This brings me back to the main point of our post. Across industries, throughout history, and between the sexes, experts and thought leaders have established that sex is power. They’ve established that sex has an impact on people’s mental health. And they’ve established that women are often denied access to this power — even when it lies within our own bodies. This is, in part, because of the dirtying process. And because that process can be so thorough and complete, many of us internalize it, fully giving in to its programming without being aware of it. In fact, some of us become the slut shamers, policing women’s sexual practices, calling little girls fast and questioning whether or not another woman was “clean” enough to actual be a rape victim. Disillusioned by the whole process, many of us accept our powerlessness in the sheets, and pour all of that ambition towards making a difference in the streets just to discover that the dirty-girl effect is just as pervasive in public as it is in private. And so, before we start exploring ways to address this, we have to unpack and discuss the other side of the issue: the dirtying of ambition. That’s the subject of next week’s blog post, or part two of this three-part series. But, again, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Here’s this week’s takeaway. When we play small in the bedroom, with ourselves or with someone else, we miss an opportunity to explore our relationship with power. The next time you’re in a sexual encounter — be it physically, mentally — pay attention to yourself. What makes you shrink? What makes you feel empowered? What makes you feel dirty? Do so without judgment. Reflect on those feelings. Ask yourself, for example, why can’t I look my partner in the eye during the act? Or, why am I only comfortable in this position? Why am I still getting undressed with the lights off? The answers, you may discover, are about so much more than sex. They may be about self-worth, confidence, and your own relationship with power. Ask yourself, how do these private experiences play out in the way I move in public. You just might discover something life changing.
Stay Connected
If you like this blog post, share it on your social media or follow us on ours. If you want want to know more about Infamous Mothers, our products and services, and Infamous Mothers University (IMU), visit us at www.infamousmothers.com. If you want to know more about this blogger, read below.
About the Blogger
Dr. Sagashus Levingston is an author, entrepreneur and PhD holder. She has two fur babies, Maya and Gracie, six children (three boys and three girls), and they all (including her partner) live in Madison, WI. She loves all things business, is committed to reminding moms of their power, and is dedicated to playing her part in closing the wealth gap for people of color and women. She believes that mothering is a practice, like yoga, and she fights daily to manage her chocolate intake. The struggle is real, y’all…and sometimes it’s beautiful.
Follow her on Instagram and Facebook @drsagashus