I was told women were emotional, worse at leading, couldn’t make hard decisions. I was expected to go to college to find a husband (better than our friends, whose 22yo daughter was still at home cause she wasn’t allowed to be outside the physical headship of a man) 2/
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I had to be told I had a vagina, and only was told because I was going to start bleeding soon. I wasn’t told what sex was. I was forbidden from holding hands with a crush at age 16 (which I obeyed). I was expected to have my first kiss at the wedding altar. 3/
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Sex with your husband was considered to be your duty. If a husband cheated this was bad, but also a side eye was given to the wife - did she uphold her side of the sex bargain? My mom told me she had sex *every day* for *decades* because of duty, not pleasure. 4/
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I internalized this so much that it took me years to start processing that I could have actual sexual desire that contradicted the man i was with; once I banged a guy where the penetration really hurt, and I hid that anything was wrong at all because sex wasn’t ‘for me.’ 5/
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I started secretly masturbating at age 14 and felt real guilty. I tried to research how much of a sin it was, to figure out how to handle my urges without committing lust. Every single resource I found was for boys; I couldn’t find a single thing about female masturbation. 6/
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I’m going into a lot of detail here (and skipping a lot too), but I’m trying to drive a point home that there does exist a type of traditional sex/gender culture that is pretty hard to exist inside of, that hurts people, shrinks their world, injects shame. 7/
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I carry it in my bones, it’s a heavy part of my history, and it’s strange and wonderful to have escaped, to be outside in a world that lets me have a wide variety of expression. My past feels like some dark, hidden dream that those around me have never dreamed themselves. 8/
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And I know a lot of current trad sexuality discourse is getting at a real thing, is trying to point out problems that exist in this weird progressive sex freedom, trying to protect ways people are hurt by this new approach.
But... do they know how dark the dream can get? 9/
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To be clear, a lot of neo-trad-discourse ppl wouldn’t condone most of my upbringing. My old trad life was an extreme version, the values mandatory and heavy and cruel. But my old trad life had a lot of justifications, and it makes me nervous to see similar justifications now. 10/
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