Changing the world
or, finding our way back to it.
Note: This post has an audio track with voiceover/music, have a listen if you’re able. I’ve been really enjoying the opportunity to dig up old music tracks and give voice to these personal reflections.
In my senior high school yearbook, I was voted most likely to change the world. That shit can either bless your journey or screw you up.
I genuinely wonder what led my classmates to this vote. Sure I got good grades, did some volunteer work voluntarily, and cared about things when many high schoolers pride themselves on cool passivity. Maybe I was louder than I remember, shortest in the class but standing on my soapbox about vegetarianism and the rainforest? But I was such a rule-abider, extremely conflict avoidant and always wanting to do things by the book. And the thing we all learn as we get older is that the rule-abiders are not likely to be world-changers.
A few years ago I reconnected with a high school friend who had become a lawyer; we were having ongoing conversations about reproductive rights and legal defense strategies. A few hangs in, she reminded me that in English class we did a mock debate in which the issue was abortion. I have no memory of this. And because of her Catholic upbringing, she said she automatically took the anti-abortion side, or pro-life as they call it, and I apparently took the side of the pro-abortion, and in some teenage framework I argued the case for body autonomy and choice. She told me this moment made a huge impression on her: it led her to reconsider the ideas imparted by her family’s faith in exchange for her own more fully-formed values. When she told me all this I was stunned. My family was progressive but my parents didn’t talk about sex, except maybe a side-comment to remind us that it was a bad idea. Where had this fully-formed argument of mine come from?
As a teen, I found the entire realm of sex uncomfortable. I was scared of having it, scared of waiting too long to have it. Allured by it, ashamed of being allured by it, mildly judgy of the kids who had it. Confused about whether it was okay to explore my own body, confused about when and where and how sex was actually something to be celebrated. It was so confusing: how could something be so desired, considered the end goal of hooking up aka “Home Base” and also so scandalous, sinful, hidden and off-limits? I could tell it was a powerful thing, but this was pre-internet and I also wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies, so my exposure to sex as anything more than pg-13 carnal was quite limited. I still can’t watch a makeout scene in a movie without hearing my dad’s voice hollering “mush alert!” from the other side of the couch, which I realized later was almost certainly a tactic to deal with his own discomfort. I knew hiding couldn’t only be about trying to protect me, but it felt like something I wasn’t supposed to understand quite yet.
About a year ago, another person from my past — the mother of my childhood best friend, who I used to call my “second mom” — told me her lifelong political issue is, and always will be, abortion. This stunned me too: I had no idea (or at least no memory of it) but it must’ve imprinted on me directly or indirectly. I do have a sharp memory of a certain conversation where she leaned in with such seriousness that it read like anger: “You can ALWAYS say no. You never have to do something your body tells you is not right. Even if you’re walking down the aisle, it’s never too late to say no.”
Consent! Agency! This is what I needed to hear, growing up around a certain surf-bro, beer-drinking high school scene where it didn’t always feel clear who was in charge of what ground rules. I knew my family was trying to keep me safe, but sometimes they did it by hiding their hand instead of spreading out the cards on the table. At the same time that I was learning how to be sexy, in my ass-tight stovepipe jeans and baby tees, I was also terrified of being shamed for doing it wrong or going too far. And so, to keep myself safe in the “good girl” zone I decided early on that sex in high school probably wasn’t for me. I had grown up more or less in a protestant church, but the summer I turned 15 I went to a sleepaway Christian camp with a rock band that played during worship services, and was smitten for the first time by the mystery and promise of a godly and spiritual life, nodding reverently to the sacrifices I was told it required. I came home from camp baptized and wearing a promise ring to symbolize saving myself for marriage (decision made! all set), and my parents were surprised and a little concerned. The ring only lasted a few months, but over the years that followed I found healthy relationships with good guys, ones that respected my boundaries and let me grow at my own pace. I must’ve held that value of abortion rights clumsily but firmly alongside the rest.
Right now, a phrase like “change the world” feels earnest and hopeful in an old-fashioned way: like talking about early-days climate concerns, or building schools and distributing water filters. The change that’s needed today feels more like a hail-mary, and most days I can’t quite wrap my arms around it. Gender equity was a thing then, but in the 90s third-wave feminism’s slow steady build of riot grrl / girl power hadn’t yet cracked open the rawness that followed, the surfacing and mainlining stories of violence and injustice, sexual exploitation and workplace mess. I was aware of the problems of patriarchy, things that didn’t feel right and didn’t seem fair. In college I once walked into an intro to computer science class to find a sea of male heads, and walked right back out. I didn’t know if I was correct to feel like something was off, or I was just encountering the way the world worked and needed to figure out where I belonged? It would take years for me to get clear on what I believed was out of whack, what could be done about it.
My own fundamental fears around sex were pretty simple. Getting pregnant, getting hurt or abused, getting an STD (the STD marketing of the 90s, wow! Not to downplay the very real impact they can have, but dear lord it made it seem if you had sex once, more than likely your skin would fall off and you’d never walk again). Getting shamed by my peers for having sex too soon, or too often, or shamed by my partner for doing something wrong in bed. It was not a freeing experience. Throughout my 20s, I failed to understand what my body wanted or to have much fun with it. Whether in a relationship or after a few dates, I found a way to get twisted in knots, just about every time.
I grew from it, sure. But I wish I knew sooner that in a world of structure and obligation, sex could be freeing. There are so few spaces where we are invited to turn off our logical brains and play. There’s creativity in how bodies move and dance and respond. It can be a deeply connected act, and these days moments of real connection can be hard to come by. It can be meaningful, exciting and unpredictable, spiritual. But if fear and shame rules the narrative, sex as a healthy and integral aspect of human existence becomes lost. So why is it still all tied up in knots, I wondered, and especially for women? What is the big deal? Who’s invested in keeping us scared, keeping us in limbo between wanting sex and being ashamed of it and being afraid to get hurt by it?
I found many ways to answer that question, and many ways to get free. Friends of mine became tantra teachers and sex therapists. Others went poly and found play parties. Still others did therapy, found their groove, carried on with their life. Everyone’s path is different. Mine was my own. I continued to be in relationships, but that job with the anti sex trafficking organization sure didn’t help with my feelings of safety and freedom. How many stories can one psyche hold, how many basements and cuffs — and not the playful kind…! (Sung to the tune of “part of your world” - yikes.) But I found my way — a story for another day — and found my body’s likes and dislikes, found ways to listen to a partner’s body and be in flow, and found those psychedelic moments of sex that to me are like being inside an oil painting while it creates itself.
The bigger idea, the real dimensional part that back then some part of me knew I wasn’t supposed to understand yet, was that this aspect of life isn’t just about pleasure, or bodies, or connection.
In the traditional seven-chakra system, the root chakra is the first. Located at the base of the spine, it’s all about connecting to the physical world, grounding down and feeling safe. The root chakra holds raw life force energy. The second chakra or sacral is all about moving that energy into creative expression and intimate connection. So once you feel safe, you can create, and sexual expression is one of many modes of creation — artistic, embodied, even making new life (if you can and choose to). By the way, I agree with the antis that this is a miracle. I just disagree that it’s meant to be carried out every time, that god’s will looks only one way. I think of god’s will moving through a person in every decision, every step they make.
Scare tactics of controlling someone’s sexuality — tricking people into thinking these qualities are not inherent but can be granted or taken away, condemned or condoned — get in the way of how free a person feels to connect and express, of how safe or unsafe they feel in doing so, and can change whether creative energy can flow. Again, this journey is personal: everyone’s needs are different, everyone’s history is unique. Maybe that’s why it feels like a final frontier of empathy, a test of the human race on whether we can let each other be in this way. Actually, maybe it’s test #2 after test #1 — whether we can come together to turn climate catastrophe around. Either way, if we allow culture, society, politicians to shut down this dimension of our lives we risk stymying our most creative, connected and powerful selves. Societies that want to control and suppress are often invested in shutting down pathways to new thinking and other intelligences. See: psychedelics movement and theories of government suppression there.
Of course I’m not saying that sex is all we need to be free: tactical political change-making strategies are not directly emerging from the hottest bedrooms. And not everyone is looking for, or open to sex in the same way. I’m talking about making sure we are not blocked from more subtle levels of knowing and being which might help us become more fully expressed, reclaiming our bodies and our personal power, knowing how to tap into these energetics and unlock creative ideas and visions, whether in meditation or sex or some other embodied activity.
These are not new ideas. They are ancient in practices like Tantra. Over history civilizations fall away then come back to the sensual aspects of life. Recently I saw aspects of ancient tantric wisdom repackaged as “the O method” (standing for orgasmic manifestation, not to be confused with O Meditation), a recent tiktok trend, in which you hold an intention as sexual energy builds and shout your big dream out loud at the moment of climax. This feels a bit… disruptive to the moment, if it’s with another person, but I like the exploration.
Here we see again that progress is not linear: we are muddling our way back to the sexual freedoms our tantric predecessors discovered and enjoyed thousands of years ago. Bumping up against resurgences of puritanicalism despite our parents’ generation’s sexual revolution. Fighting for access to reproductive health despite having safe modern technologies widely available. All of these layers are reasons I work day to day on the issue of body freedom, in the form of abortion access, to spread useful information and help people feel less scared and more liberated in these intimate, thrilling, transcendent and mysterious and sometimes painful and confusing and also fundamentally essential moments of life. To get at least one road block out of the way. Life has enough human-made challenges as it is, would you agree?
Sometimes changing the world means not inventing something new but initiating a return, back to a way something used to be done before the practice or idea was lost. Lost out of fear, out a need to control, out of a desire to stay safe in a chaotic and unpredictable world. But in moments of safety, maybe unpredictability is just the practice we need. Maybe creative flow is just the thing to get us out of this mess. And of course, changing the world doesn’t happen at the hands of a single person. It’s something we do together.
A final note: The root chakra (and also its corresponding color red) map to sound, in the form of a low slow vibration between 228Hz and 456Hz. I like to put on this hang drum root chakra track in the background when I’m starting my day.
Backing/music track: “See You Shining,” a jam from my time with the Buckminster Fuller Design Science Studio in 2020. I recently added it to my modest archive of works in progress at amybatara.com.
