Academy 6 - Desire 3 - Embracing your femininity

Embracing your femininity

This is the title of the letter, but in a big way, it’s also what the entire course is about. Finding out who you are, exploring and then embracing your femininity.

As you know, the Academy promotes a positive view of sissification. Even though stereotypes around sissies can be degrading and demeaning, the sissy never is. Even if your tastes run into extreme humiliation or physical punishment, you are still a beautiful, glorious human being with worth and value.

Later on in the Module, I’ll write to you about dealing with and overcoming the feelings of shame that can arise from accepting these parts of yourself but in this letter, I went to dive into how your feminine side can be a source of strength and pride.

Gender Roles

There’s a snippet of a speech by David Foster Wallace that sticks with me,

‘There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning girls. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”’

Society categorizes certain acts, behaviours, and things as belonging to one gender or the other. This has a historical basis if you’re a hunter gather or subsistence farmer pregnancy can be a major impediment to your day-to-day activities. Throw in birth complications, no medical knowledge, and high child mortality and in the earlier days of humanity, it made sense for women to be assigned less physically demanding tasks.

In much the same way that the fish couldn’t see the water, gender roles that made sense thousands of years ago became accepted and embedded until they were just assumed to be the way of things.

Feminism is the name of the political movement that aims for equality of the sexes by improving the lot of women in the world and it has been a key factor in women being able to own property, vote, sign contracts, control their reproductive rights and on and on.

As you may be aware, it has become more and more acceptable for women to take on traditionally male roles, have traditionally male hobbies and exist in traditionally male spaces. If a woman wants to squat 400lbs, nowadays most people will just look on enviously with only a few muttering about how it’s not ladylike.

However, progress on the reverse is still lacking, men who want to act in a more traditionally feminine manner are not looked on kindly by the bulk of society. My feelings are that this is because power is still mostly a male domain, and men acting girly threaten this (if a women achieves political office, it’s usually because she acts in a similar fashion to how male holders of the office have done).

This is changing, but very slowly and the messages society sends about men acting or liking femininity is an obvious source of problems for sissies, and feminists were the first to point out that societally ordained gender roles were just as damaging to men as they are to women.

Sexuality

Sexuality is so important, your sexuality is unique and something that belongs only to you. Even though our culture heavily sexualises females it is important to carry a heartfelt empathy and understanding of when this is more or less appropriate. In order to really be able to embrace femininity and feminine sexuality it is important to acknowledge the reality and sometimes not-so-pretty history of these topics in our world.

Here at the Academy, we do not think one extreme of objectification of women should be replaced by another extreme that women should try to dress down, avoid decoration, jewellery, fancy clothes or even sexy or erotic clothes.

We think that what is the most important is that each person can feel comfortable to wear things and present themselves to the world that are aligned with their inner view of how they want to present themselves.

While it is not respectful to go around naked in front of people who have not asked for it, likewise such code of respect applies to sexual and erotic clothing as well. Yet there is also a place and time where it is all okay. The danger is always to sway from an extreme where nothing is forbidden to one where shame and secrecy are allowed to flourish.

You and all women on the planet should be allowed to present yourself exactly as feminine as your choice of doing so is. Wear heels, lipstick and makeup because you want to, or because of how you look in them or how they make you feel. And likewise, don’t wear them because you don’t want to (when you go camping it might be wise to leave some jewellery at home!). Situation matters, feelings matter, YOU matter.

We want a world where opportunity comes equally to everyone without dogma. This should apply not just to women but to men as well. It is not healthy to deny alpha males permission to show their masculinity in the same way that it isn’t healthy to deny sissies permission to show their femininity, because then it tends to just come out in other, less healthy ways.

Instead, we need to find ways in which everyone can express and feel comfortable with their differences on the gender spectrum in a warm and wholehearted way.

Homework

Watch this short but powerful speech and these two speeches as well.

Every day for the next week, read something about strong, iconic women. This can be as simple as a Wikipedia article but you should read it and pay attention. Avoid women who inherited their role (e.g. Queens) and as you read try and understand a little of what that woman had to go through to achieve what she did.

Examples would include Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, Hedy Lamarr, Harriet Tubman and Hypatia, but you can only use two of these, find the rest on your own! Try and find points of connection between you and them, once you start to find things you have in common with strong women it becomes easier to accept femininity as a source of strength.