ALUNA TEMPLE MAGAZINE Edition No3 'INITIATIONS' | Page 38

‘THE VULNERABILITY OF PENETRATION’ with JAMIE CATTO ? Musician, Producer, Director ? Film maker, Writer, Activist [email protected] www.jamiecatto.com/ It stands to reason that in love-making, on the surface at least, it is the woman, ‘the penetrated one’, who holds the vulnerability. After all, having a man push himself into your most sacred and sensitive opening is about the most surrendered and yielding experience one can imagine. So it’s understandable that while women are in the ‘receiving’ role sexually, and are also usually less physically strong than their male partners, the vulnerability is held by the women. I’d like to connect with you deeper in this vulnerability and share something I haven’t spoken about before. It is extremely vulnerable for us men to be the ‘penetrator’ too. As much as we work on raising our sensitivities and empathy to women, unless we enjoy our own anal penetration, we don’t know what it’s like to be ‘pushed into’. Today, the social climate around men’s sexuality includes a lot of past trauma from abusive and violent sex or just insensitive or immature men of previous generations who had no clue what they were doing to their women. Today’s women bear the scars of past, male-dominated, unfeeling sexual experiences and it has only been very recently that the law and society’s moral compass has even acknowledged a woman’s right so say “No” even in the middle of sex and even if she’s married to the man she’s having sex with. Unbelievably, still, in most countries there is no law against a man raping his wife. She has no legal right to refuse him and no legal protection if he rapes her. Even in USA and UK the law has only been passed to protect married women in the last 50 years or so, and across Asia and Africa they think I’m crazy to even bring the subject up. So the idea that men could be the vulnerable ones in love-making may sound puzzling at first. But I want to express that as a man, carrying the burden of women’s often negative expectations and the ever-felt sexual wounds of all mistreated women of the past, creates a very unique and sensitive vulnerability of its own – for the men. Photo © Sacred Seed Perhaps it could be likened to German grandchildren of the Nazis who themselves played no part in the abuses of WW2 but in the post war decades couldn’t help being tarred by the same brush and unjustly carrying some of the guilt and rejection. 38