I was doing some research a few weeks ago and came across an article about sexual awakenings. Specifically, when most people experience their first one. According to the data: adolescence.
I sat with that for a while.
My adolescence did not feel like an awakening. It felt out of my control. And given the messaging I was receiving around sex, it seemed like something I shouldn’t open up to experiencing.
The feelings were real. Hormones are real. If I were being generous, I’d say our bodies were coming online and we were shifting into sexual beings.
Awakening implies something more conscious. A turning toward, a recognition. What I remember is being introduced to sex-ed, being told it was okay to have sex to have a baby, to never have sex until I was married and literally nothing about sex being pleasurable. Let alone an explanation to all the pleasurable feeling coming out of nowhere.
Girls were introduced to sex in adolescence. Most of us were not awakened to it.
The distinction matters. An introduction means someone hands you a thing and says: here, this exists, navigate accordingly. An awakening means you actually understand what you’re holding. And more than that, you understand that it’s yours.
An awakening means you have agency. Most adolescents are still operating inside someone else’s rules.
For most women, if the awakening comes at all, it arrives much later. After years of performing desire more than feeling it. After enough distance from everything she was handed to start asking what, if anything, was actually hers.
A number of years ago I was asked to speak to a group of women about sex. It sounded straightforward. It wasn’t. If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that there is no single conversation about sex. Every woman walks in with her own conditioning, her own history, her own relationship to her body.
Including, perhaps especially the topic I chose; a pleasure practice. Masturbation.
Most women have learned about their own bodies by way of someone else’s hands.
Women’s pleasure — how to feel it, whether they’re allowed to feel it, what it means that they feel it — arrived to them filtered through someone else’s wants and expectations. Through conditioning that made very clear, early and often, that her body’s primary job was to be useful. To others. To function. To perform.
Not to feel. Not for herself. Not as its own source of information.
And I believe, from this very conditioning, girls have learned not to feel safe in their bodies, not to know their bodies, not able to embody what they are experiencing and most crucially, feel into their desires.
We were taught from the very beginning to look outside ourselves to feel good. To hand our pleasure over and call it normal.
When you don’t know how to access your own body, you find something that does it for you
Which is why it’s no wonder most women are reaching for alcohol. It’s the one socially acceptable place she’s allowed to stop performing. Nobody questions it. And for a while, it works. It manufactures the exhale, the loosening, the brief sensation of being present in a body she was never given permission to fully inhabit.
Then she arrives in her forties and fifties, estrogen making its quiet exit, and the questions she’s been successfully outsourcing start surfacing anyway.
Whose life am I living? What do I actually want? Why doesn’t this work the way it used to?
This is her awakening.
You may have heard of it. Someone branded it as a crisis.
But a crisis implies something has gone wrong. This is something going right.
There’s a difference between a sexual awakening and what most of us experienced in adolescence. What happened then was an introduction.
The awakening is what happens when you realize most of what you were handed was never actually yours.
It’s desire coming back online on your own terms. It’s appetite returning. Not just for sex but for your life. For what you want, what you feel, what you’re no longer willing to numb.
For a lot of women, the thing standing between her and that appetite is what she’s been using to manufacture it.
Removing alcohol forces you to confront and feel all of it. You are suddenly exposed to the version of you underneath the drinking — the one who has wants and edges and a body full of information she’s been trying to quiet. The one who’s been there since adolescence, waiting.
A sober awakening is the same house. You just enter through a different door.
Sobriety is about stopping. A sober awakening is about what you find when you do.
The awakening is meeting her again.
And realizing the answers were never in the glass.
They were in you. They’ve always been in you.
You just weren’t taught to look there.
