Sarah Pondered

Sarah could not track what might be a healthy sexual way of expressing herself when she came face-to-face with people outside of her intimate relationship with her husband.  She swung from feeling sound to slutty--confident to insecure.  She wondered how she could show her curves and not feel wanton when others watched her move?  If her  bosom moved when she moved, was this flaunting?  She wondered, “Must I sling and bind my breasts still and pad the nipples shapeless, to be accepted without stares or ostracism when I feel and am a sexual being?” 

Her isolated living in a conservative, patriarchal community was clearly a confusing place to live for Sarah as she reflected upon her maturing womanhood while exploring her sexuality.  A neighbour woman, who had lived there for some decades before her, had warned that being physically “conservative” in dress would garner more respect among the men and not throw her to their ghoulish preying—that if she clothed her breasts and nipples too loosely to their eyes, she could expect roughness and abuse to follow.

Sarah was a beautiful, sexually aware woman—full of energy and enthusiasm for life.   Relationships meant everything to Sarah, and she met people, animals, and Nature full-on, ripe to learn and engage with everyone who was wanting to be a loving and kind person in return.  She understood in her heart that we were all “one” and in the Rostapherian mindset, shared “one love.”

Sarah wondered if everyone, or at least every “community”  had  its own definition of sexual acceptance.  As she tracked this response  Sarah concluded that she did not know how to deal with the results. Her obese neighbour’s breasts hung at her elbows--nipples and tummy bursting beyond the confines of the already over sized frumpy, often food-stained cotton jersey tank top with bra straps and flesh bursting forth from all edges of what seemed inadequate to cover her upper body.  Sarah’s husband, Don, said that it was accepted because she was fat, and that no one was titillated anyway.  She wondered--she is a woman is she not?  Those are  breasts. She has a loving husband, and must have her own definition of her own sexuality.  Why would Jennie be exempt from the same standards as she?

Sarah did not allow herself to limit her relationship with people by judging them superficially, but chose to look deeply into the heart and soul of each and every person.  More than a few people had called her “Bohemian” in her ways for her capacity to engage in such open, loving ways.  Sarah lived with her heart on her sleeve and took the brunt of this when misunderstood time and time again.

She followed every woman she saw with a tuned sexual-awareness radar—and pondered how they might establish their own private “place”  in the world of sexual ease.  For what Sarah was experiencing was most definitely a dis-ease.  Women who dressed and walked with ease and abandon caught her gaze the longest.  For she wished to  be of that group---a group that represented to her a freedom that she felt was missing within herself, and longed for.

Fiona danced the Highland Fling with  beauty and poise that evening in Edinburgh when the conference day ended and it was time to kick back and party. Her bosom caught all their gaze—men and women  both.  How could it not? Her dress and movement revealed it all to them. She slept with John that night, calming his scattered sarcasm and quieting him as only sex can do--Sarah knew full well the outcome of satisfying sexual intercourse.  Fiona and John missed that next morning’s lectures and were noticeably missed by Sarah, and no doubt others in the group as well.

And when she flirted that night with Sarah’s husband, Sarah watched and wondered if Fiona’s abandon had loosened her husband’s morals as well.  Sleep took some time coming that night.

Don, she had noticed for some time, had eyes for women who moved with ease—women who flirted with their bodies clothed in suggestive fashions. Simple. Revealing breast and thigh and pelvis.  When strong and lean, the forms drew closer inspection.  Not the hard muscle of gyms with weights and repetitive workout, but the long, leanness from healthy living—good food, enough sleep, perhaps yoga or long walks.  It was the balance that seemed to catch his eyes—and cause him to linger.  Sarah thought about the waitress at the brew-pub whose close-fitting dark skirt, just below her knees, and the close-fitting top, revealed just enough lean  breast and pelvis, and long, lean legs.  Her walk was as if on air.  He liked dining there—and spoke easily of her to Sarah.   But in time, she grew to resent his comments and felt humiliated by what she thought of her own broguish attire and aging body.

She could not help but compare.  For she was the one he had eyes for at one time—and now, she had become his confident in his sexual attraction to this younger sexy woman.  She knew intellectually that it was healthy for a man and a woman to be attracted sexually to others—even while married.  What she did not know in her heart, was to what extent his continual gazes and enthusiastic conversation with this waitress and then with her, would ultimately bare upon their own intimate relationship and her own sense of sexual self love and respect.

At what point would this external admiration of other women’s sexual presence turn against and perhaps loosen and ultimately harm the bond  between  the two committed in love?  She truly did not know this answer.  Yet she knew that inside she wished he could continue to silently admire other women, and continue to speak his loving, endearing, desires for her, to her, with that awe and delight they used to share together.  Was this not possible, she pondered?  Must she become a confident now,  for her husband as if somehow their day-to-day ease and familiarity over road what she held sacred and delightful still in her own heart and body after years of marriage and their own sexual intercourse?

Sarah and her husband were soul mates.  Best friends, and had a developing, ongoing sexual relationship that was neither over-the-top nor failing, but  a physical expression that sustained their connection and kept them committed to one another.  She had always, even in her first marriage, enjoyed and delighted in sex with her husband.  And stayed true to him, even up until leaving the marriage.  Sex was something Sarah found not only fascinating, but exciting, and a part of her total health—both physically and mentally.  She could not imagine life without being able to express herself sexually through masturbating and copulation with the man she loved.

In a time when sex is flagrantly exposed in tabloids, TV, & movies there is everything available for the viewer.  Sarah sensed that she wanted to feel more freedom about herself—to feel the ease in movement and dress. To not wonder about how she moved throughout society.  She was at ease and peace when at home—on the land, in her gardens—but she inevitably wondered if she must drape her breasts with cloth to cover nipples and excess movement when she went to the post office, to town or on visits to friends. She deeply  pondered why this mattered to her—why it should matter to others—particularly when society exploits everything sexual. Judy’s breasts are so flat, Claudia’s nipples do not seem to stiffen—Susie is too fat for others to care.   Erect nipples are suggestive, she has experienced, only too clearly.  A come-on. A taunting—a tease. “Put out,” is the word.  And with this experience throughout her life now, she has covered herself and hidden her freedom to express her sexuality.

Jacob once told her that a woman dressing flauntingly deserves to be raped. Harsh she thought—whaco! And he was her homeopath.  How could he help her integrate how she felt about her own body with thoughts so repressive and patriarcally limiting?  He believed hugging is  bad—with clients.

Sarah felt ashamed in her youth when her nipples showed through cotton T shirts, but she felt the need for her breasts to be free if she wanted them to be—and not  be restrained  by a bra or the “world.”

 

In her hometown in 1970, she stopped wearing a bra one morning.  It happened one early morning dressing hurriedly after a morning swim before high school class when she quite simply forgot to put it on.  She found the absence, a personal freedom, a feeling of self-expression, well beyond anything what she thought possible.  Within the week, she endured a physical assault upon her breasts by a boy who, when she was in grade school, used to hide in the bushes and punch her in the gut when she traveled to visit friends after school.  This did not deter her from her path—but she would hope each time, in vain, that Charlie was elsewhere. She wondered if perhaps these assaults on her in her younger years toughened her to those yet to come.

Charlie was sitting in the backseat of the car when the guys on the basketball team pulled up next to her as she left the pool that morning on her way to school, asking if she would like a ride.  Sarah accepted, quite unaware of their motives   when she jumped into the back seat and was immediately man- handled by Charlie as he struck at her breasts as she fought and hollered for him to stop.  Charlie was a runner-- an athlete, and impossibly strong and tenacious.  Sarah bore the brunt of his attack yet again and again.

An only girl, Sarah sought out other childhood female playmates. Her desire to be with them obviously eclipsed the fear she had of Charlie and his  brutish ways in those early days.  Years later, did it help to hear the murmurings of  Charlie’s mom’s struggles? The trouble their youngest had? She knew his dad, Dr. Jordan, saw patients at the town clinic.  He helped heal people—yet his household was ill and his son raging out at her physically, sexually. 

Was this about sexuality?  Sarah’s?  Charlie grabbing her breasts because she no longer wore a bra?   Because she was acting wanton?  Beating her up because she was young, a girl, vulnerable?  Was expressing one’s own sexual preference for dress, weight, movement, a message to some that OK’d abuse?  To others, confidence?  And to some, an abandonment of their boundaries and moral responsibilities?

Kat

22 July 2007  ©