Sex, Slut, Power, Love

By Priscila Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez @priscadorcas | Photo by Jessica Rodriguez

I was 23 years old when I met the person I thought was the love of my life. I was a kid, who had been force fed this romanticized notion of marriage and love, that had everything to do with a feeling and nothing to do with actual compatibility. I think feelings and intuitions are important and a valid contribution to decision-making. But the layered response to marriage that girls from my class and culture are told to have toward men made me particularly susceptible to being too quick to devote my entire life to a man based on the assumption that otherwise, I would die alone.

Due to un millon de razones, by the time I was 28 I was getting a divorce and jumping into the online/app dating scene without any sort of real experience on casual dating and casual sex. Due to my marriage at such a young age, and divorce at a young age, I found myself lost in the dating world. I did not know how to handle dating, let alone know myself well enough to know what I wanted. I jumped deep into a stream of thought that mirrored sexual liberation but I was also straddling a thin line of coping with my newly found independence and body, but emotionally I was a shadow of myself because so much of me had been invested in another person.

So in 2014, I became a slut. I say this with the positive connotations that the word should have, reclaiming it from that dark pit that we have put that word in because I knew what I was doing. I was having tons of casual sex. Additionally, I was very much consenting to become this person: this was for me. I was tired of being told that having casual sex was bad. I was tired of being shamed for having sexual desires, and I was not ready to dive right back into something serious, despite my subconscious that constantly tried to anchor onto someone. I would meet people, who I enjoyed but did not know how to casually enjoy them. I did not know how to date casually, so I found myself trying to anchor myself to people who were not meant for me, nor was I meant for them.

In 2014, I needed to be a slut, because, in 2014, I was left a shell of the version I used to be, I was left to pick up the pieces that divorce left me with, and I had to rebuild and I wanted a sexually-liberated-me to be part of my new composition. I was too grown, too brown, and had cried too many tears for one man to give anyone that power. Having casual sex allowed me to stop emotionally attaching love to sex, and I needed that. I needed to know that love was deeper and much more significant than sex. While sex is a wonderful feeling that cannot be described nor replaced, sex meant power. Sex is powerful, and love is disarming. I was ready for the power; I was not ready to be disarmed any time soon. While being sexual, embodying sexy, and having sex - I felt unstoppable because I got to dictate how that looked and felt for me. I got to tell people, this is me being sexy, so accept it. I got to make demands of partners, and if they did not meet my expectations, I got to leave. Sex was/is liberating, and I got to know this type of liberation only through becoming a slut.

I was 23 years of when I met the person I thought was my soulmate. I was a kid, without any idea of what love was, but I threw myself head first and fell plunging into an abyss of depression five years later. I lost myself in my marriage, and when I finally got to be by myself I got to discover myself and become the person I needed to become.  But in order to do that, I became a slut because I needed to heal emotionally before I could connect with someone like I had with my ex-husband.  

I think we need to begin to accept that healing looks differently for people, and sometimes you become a slut to find yourself and we cannot vilify women for seeking and wanting to have sex. My strongest and baddest version of myself came out when I allowed myself to have orgasms without love. My strongest and baddest version of myself came out when I did not worry about whether my partners were enjoying themselves but focused solely on my enjoyment. My strongest and baddest version of myself came out when I finally realized being “selfish,” as someone who was coming from a cultura where women break their backs for husband and children, was okay. Meaning that I could worry about my goals and dreams, that I could have goals and dreams of my own, that I could enjoy things because I wanted to enjoy them. My strongest and baddest version of myself came out when I became a slut and I have never looked back.

Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez is a chonga Mujerista from Managua, Nicaragua currently living in Miami, FL. She recently graduated with her Masters from Vanderbilt University, and is looking to take some much needed time off to refresh. She is also the founder of Latina Rebels, a blogger for HuffPo Latino Voices, and a columnist/editor at Chica Magazine. Her interests are within biopolitics as it relates to Latina embodiment, specifically concerning models of conquerable flesh around narratives of naturalization for women of color. Thus her work is around reclaiming and upholding embodied resistance, particularly within chonga and chola subcultures. Que viva la mujer!