Feministing recently shared a girl’s precocious opinion via you tube, with the headline: “Thirteen year old badass on slut shaming.” Composed of diligent research, and quoting the founders of the “Slut Walk,” a protest that arose out of equating the enjoyment of sex with sexual assault, the girl’s descriptive diatribe rails against a culture that marginalizes sexually expressive women by naming them “sluts.” Most women would agree that slut-shaming is a debasing practice that happens amongst unenlightened men, women seeking male approval, certain conservative talk show hosts, and now middle schoolers. So why did I find myself responding, “This girl needs to spend more time running naked through the forest”?*

     Whether a pejorative of promiscuity, or a claiming of errant sexuality, the ‘slut’ is an intellectual concept. At the mental level, ‘slut’ belongs to society; in the forest ‘slut’ doesn’t exist. Intellectually, ‘slut’ is an identity; in nature, there is neither the possibility of another being shaming a woman for her sexuality, nor is there the possibility of sexual expression being rewarded. In nature, sex is not an identity. In the mind, sex is a set of characteristics shared and commented on by the collective; in the wild, sex happens. Everywhere. Loudly. Which makes me wonder: if intense body sensations should happen in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does orgasm really exist?  Yes, sluts, Orgasm Is.

     But here I am using symbols to point toward something that can only be experienced. Whether through thirteen-year old girls, or the trees they climb, the feral comes on its own terms. [Pun intended. Yes, Virginia, thirteen-year old girls experience embodied ecstatic bliss.]

     Wild sexuality – the kind that happens when the rain falls upon the tongue, or the fingers find anchor in rock, or the vulva slides over moss – is sensate. No amount of you tube declarations can touch touch. And her sisters: sight, smell, speech, listening. And her great grandmother, climax. While promiscuity is relative to the tribe’s morals, in the wilderness a woman’s sexuality is unbridled by neither expectation nor history. Here, thirteen-year olds (and their mothers and their mother’s mothers, and all who have neglected their wild nature) can locate an authentic sexuality that is before comment, before relationship, before knowing. Enchanted with our true nature, we mammals please our selves. We are each a pleasure-seeking organism who moves toward joy. We learn that ‘self’ is not simply an idea; self is as erotic as river, flower, boulder, glacier, lake. With the erotic embodied, we have a chance to share our sexual joy-making with our tribe. We might even turn off the computer for that.

*Thirty some years of being with the same guy has taught me that when I want to give advice to someone else, I actually intend it for myself.

Sonya Lea writes about the loss of identity through cancer, brain injury, travel, art, food, sex, wilderness and family, and the journey to discover what lies beyond who we think we are at http://wonderingwhoyouare.tumblr.com/