I want to live in a community with men and women, with children, animals and plants so that I am not continually forced to hide my actual being from the others. Perception and contact are forces of life that are as elementary as breathing. If these are possible, then I love being a woman, because I can then be a woman to my full extent. My fulfillment as a woman has always taken place within community. This almost biological longing still lives in my cells.
Under present societal conditions, I am forced to confine this longing for contact, continuity and faithfulness to contexts that are far too small. To make it possible for love and Eros to unfold in a way that corresponds to my actual femininity, community is needed: a larger love-community based on trust. The new human peace culture depends on our ability to build functioning communities. It is strange that humans can live at all without community. In the patriarchal culture, humans have been separated from their natural universal tribal context. Communities that do form nowadays always fail because of the issue of love. They always fail because of the unresolved issues of competition and jealousy.
In the early cultures, we were all connected with Mother Earth and our life was in her service. This state of being connected with Creation, we called love. Together we formed one big interconnected family. All love relationships were in connection with the greater whole. Private love relationships did not exist. And this is where I come to the essential point of my being a woman, the point that has been oppressed and denied the most: my sexuality.
I am a woman. And as I am a woman, I am a sexual being. And I love being a sexual being. A woman who makes this statement today in the 21st century needs revolutionary courage, which so far is only rudimentarily present in only a few women, even though we seem to live in the age of so-called sexual liberation. This statement means:
Letting go of shame.
Letting go of the fear of violence.
Letting go of the fear of suppression and punishment.
Letting go of false morals.
Letting go of the fear of the envy of rivals.
Letting go of the norms of the beauty industry.
Letting go of the religions of the patriarchal culture.
Letting go of the old picture of love.
Letting go of powerlessness towards men.
Letting go of sexual comparison and pressure to perform.
There is hardly anything that women don’t have to let go of in order to freely claim this statement with no secret guilt feelings. A historical fear of sexuality has been lying in the cells of the female since the development of patriarchy. The intensity of this fear increases immediately when the woman does not bind her “yes” to sexuality to only one man. Violence, demolition and destruction of all elements of the female, and sexual atrocities of a history that went wrong between men and women lie today as a sediment of fear in the cells of the woman as soon as she approaches the issue of sexuality. But the cruelty, and the fear of cruelty, are not part of sexuality itself, but rather a result of a sexuality that has been misdirected and suppressed for thousands of years.
This was a taste of Sabine Lichtenfels’s “Lilith’s Worlds: I Love Being a Woman”
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