Strolling along a pristine southern California shoreline, my
brown skin and voluptuous curves lovingly draped in an orange and white,
polka-dot bikini, a friend walked along beside me. Offering an earful of what she had been gleaning from
Sherry Arkov’s book, “Why Men Love Bitches: From Doormat to Dreamgirl – A
Woman’s Guide to Holding Her Own in Relationships,” she is now passionately
determined to employ Arkov’s suggestions in order to land herself the long-term
commitment she has been looking for.
“I am over it, Cara,” she emphatically stated, as I noticed
the gaze of the surfers we walked by following the line of her narrow,
Brazilian bum. “My way hasn’t been
working. I lovingly offer myself,
and within a few, short months he bails - like clockwork. So, I am not going to give the next guy
sex – not after the first date, or the second date, or even the third." "If you really want a relationship, then
you should try it too,” she encouraged.
Meanwhile, I felt waves of resistance unfurl and crash within my
gut.
“Men are warriors,” she said, mirroring sentiments I have been
writing and speaking upon for years now.
“They need to chase and hunt,” she went on, as I observed in the
reflection of her Aviator sunglasses surfers running headlong into the break,
their boards held aloft. “If it’s
too easy of a catch for them, then they quickly lose interest. If we make it a game - of playing cat
and mouse, hide and seek and hard to get - then we will win in this match of
love.” Exhaling heavily on a deep
breath, I felt my internal body temperature rising with every point she
iterated. “What do you think?” she
sweetly asked.
“That’s just not the world I am actively co-creating,” I
replied. “The new consciousness is
based in LOVE. Things are not
withheld as an attempt to manipulate an outcome. Rather, all that is wanted and desired is lovingly offered
in the full trust that it will bee returned. Perhaps just not from the reflection we are hoping -
and this is where letting go of expectations comes in.” She listened politely to my plea, but I understood that my passion was falling on deaf ears.
Without books on the New York Times best-seller list, guest spots on
Oprah, an abundance of material resources and money in the bank, my hard-earned
wisdom, accrued through a lifetime of experience, travels and education, is
valued as null and void.
Soon after, I noticed that another soul sister had posted to
her Facebook feed a blogpost from feminist.com that addressed this same
topic. Apparently, our collective
consciousness had been pierced.
This piece’s angle was that, when we as women play “hard to get,” we are
sending mixed signals - of “no” means “yes” – that unfortunately only serve to
subliminally reinforce rape culture.
In further reflection, I realized that it is time for this gravely
mistaken notion of ‘woman as object to bee hunted and then paraded as trophy’
to bee laid to rest and transformed into a life-affirming story in which
fertility – of body, mind, heart, soul and spirit - is heralded as the standard of
feminine beauty; a full return to our natural Nubian state.
However, the responsibility for this shift lay not on the
shoulders of our men but, rather, in the cellular re-patterning of us
women. It is up to us to transmute
all that has come before into a peaceful, harmonious whole by listening to our
hearts, unlearning all of the cultural conditioning that coaxes us into
believing that who we are – with our graying hair, cellulite thighs, protruding
bellies, sagging breasts, voluptuous curves and wrinkling skin – is anything
less than perfection. It is up to us
to re-claim our power and to demonstrate with our actions that beeyond this
mere flesh and bones are vibrant Souls capable of giving birth to new life, new
languages, new forms, new structures – a new way of beeing in a sweet and
loving world.
It is up to us, women, to grab hands as sisters – no longer
pithy competitors scratching for the scraps of a poor, economic worth based on
our exterior – and to declare that all of the clothes and the shoes, the jewels
and the mansions, the attention and the money, are merely empty shells without
a just and sustainable present that takes into account the future of the next
seven generations on our shared home, planet Earth. We are the
future and the time is now. Join
US!
