Power: Who Does Your Sexuality Belong To?
I felt so powerful that day I had sex with two different guys.
Two dorm rooms on the Upper West Side. Two twin mattresses. One jean skirt. One and a half city blocks. An hour in between.
Neither guy knew about the other, but I knew.
There was no penetration during the initial hook-up, only oral. I figured that way I was less likely to be found out. But that encounter didn’t really have anything to do with the first guy anyway. It was all really about the second guy: a sometimes-ex, sometimes-boyfriend. That particular day, he was an ex on his way back to boyfriend, or at least that was my hope.
I wanted to walk up the flight of sticky frat house stairs to his second-floor dorm room wielding power and authority over him. I needed that.
He had always been more in control of our relationship than I was. He kept me around or tossed me aside on his whims, never mine. I was always acting in response to him.
This night was about my power.
I could fuck one guy and then fuck him. I could turn him into sloppy seconds without him even knowing. I could make him act in response to me.
Having sex with someone else just before him made me feel powerful.
Or so I thought.
The Power I Thought I Had
Here’s the problem: the power that night was still his. He still ran the show, dictating my actions, my emotions, and the entirety of my focus.
My power was still dependent on his response to me. It existed in relation to him and was still in service of him.
So, What Is Sexual Power & Agency?
Sexual agency is an expression of personal power. It begins with recognising that our sexuality belongs to us, not to our partner, society, religion, or cultural expectations. It is ours to define, communicate, and embody.
It begs the question: Can I choose?
The power of sexual agency is active. It’s participatory. It’s not simply possessing something that is already ours; it’s claiming it and putting it into motion.
It is choosing to take ownership of something inherent within us and deciding how we want to engage with it, how we want to express it, experience it, consume it, or be consumed by it.
It’s not power over. It’s not power for.
It’s power of.
Real power is not performative. It’s not trying too hard to achieve an outcome. It’s not self-monitoring, hypervigilant, or outcome-driven. It’s not loud. It’s not grasping for something. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s not oriented around anyone else.
It’s an ease. A settledness within yourself.
It’s one of those “you know it when you see it” or “you know it when you feel it” sorts of things. Which, I’m aware, is wildly unhelpful to the person sitting there thinking, How the fuck do I know if I have power within my own sexual agency?
First, if you’re unsure, you’re not alone. This is common. You haven’t failed at something. You’ve simply been a woman living in a world that has spent a very long time teaching women to experience their sexuality in relation to someone else.
Second, power isn’t fixed. Sexual agency isn’t something you either possess or you don’t. It can be cultivated, practised, and reclaimed.
So, how do you know when it’s yours?
The Stories “We” Tell About Sexually Powerful Women
We have been telling stories about sexually powerful women for thousands of years.
Helen’s beauty launched a thousand ships and sent men to war.¹ Cleopatra captivated Antony as he risked his power, reputation, and the entire empire.² Delilah seduced Samson into revealing the secret of his supernatural strength, then stripped him of it.³ Salome danced for a king and pleased him so completely that he promised her whatever she asked, so she asked for a man’s head.⁴
Female sexual power has overwhelmingly been measured by its effect on men: what they will abandon, betray, destroy, sacrifice, or become in pursuit of a woman.
Men have long written stories about the danger of female sexual power, conveniently casting themselves as its victims. Even when women are depicted as sexually powerful, their power becomes a threat, and the man still gets to be the hero for resisting it.
Odysseus had to tie himself to the mast of his ship to resist the Sirens’ song. He rendered himself helpless to their seductive pull, which would lure him away from his journey.⁵ (A convenient narrative, I think.)
Female sexuality is powerful, and the idea that men can feel overwhelmed by its pull is not entirely irrational. But feeling powerless is not the same as being powerless. Desire does not erase agency or accountability. We see the danger of confusing the two whenever violations of consent are excused with some version of I just couldn’t stop myself.
And even in these stories that seem to centre a womn’s sexual power, her power is still measured by what it makes a man do.
These aren’t stories of female power at all, though it’s easy to mistake them for such. I certainly did. That night in college, I measured my own power the same way: by its effect on a man.
Helen may have appeared powerful, but the men who fought over her remained the measure of her power.
When In Doubt - Return to Audre Lorde
You have to search a little harder, but there is a growing body of literature that locates women’s sexuality within women themselves, rather than measuring it through male beahviour.
In Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978),⁶ she positions power within women themselves. She describes the erotic as an internal source of knowledge, feeling, creativity, and power. A power women have been taught to distrust and suppress. She distinguishes this genuine erotic power from the superficial version of female sexuality that exists for someone else’s consumption.
She argues that the erotic isn’t powerful because of what it does to someone else. The erotic is a source of power within ourselves.
In 1976, Shere Hite published The Hite Report, which focused on how women defined their sexuality through their own experiences rather than through men’s expectations of female sexuality.⁷
Her approach was radical in its simplicity: instead of beginning with what women were supposed to find pleasurable, Hite asked women what they actually did, wanted, felt, and experienced. Her work brought masturbation, clitoral stimulation, and women’s own descriptions of orgasm to the forefront, challenging sexual models that centred penetration and male sexual performance.
And remember Our Bodies, Ourselves? The content of this book began to develop in the late 1960s with a group of women sharing their experiences and frustrations about how little they knew about their own bodies. In 1970, it was published as Women and Their Bodies. A year later, the title was deliberately changed to Our Bodies, Ourselves. To some, it seemed like a small linguistic shift, but it was exceptionally meaningful. The new title shifted ownership of women’s bodies from the “other” to women themselves, from object to owner.⁸
What Does This Mean for Us?
They say, “know better, do better.” Now that we have a slightly more expansive understanding of female sexual power, one centred on the woman herself, rather than on what her sexuality can make someone else do, we have more information.
And with more information, we get to become curious.
Do we feel connected to our sexual power? Do we feel like we have any power at all? Where do we locate it? In ourselves, or in the responses of others? If our sexual power belonged entirely to us, what might we want to do with it? What might it allow us to experience? Who might it allow us to become?
These questions open up our understanding of ourselves, our intimate relationships, our sexuality, and, ultimately, the realities of our lives.
Back to 113th Street
I still returned to that 113th Street dorm room many more evenings. There were at least a few more break-ups, a few more reunions, and a few more moments when I tried on this version of power.
It wasn’t until I ended that relationship completely, aided by the forced physical separation of graduation and moves to different parts of the country, that I was able to see my sexual power within that relationship more clearly. Time, maturity, education, experience, curiosity, healthy relationships, growth, and good old-fashioned luck have illuminated the lessons since.
I came to understand power differently after that relationship. I got clear that my power was mine. How my behaviour could influence the behaviour of another person, men in particular, wasn’t power. It was a chain reaction. What was mine was something internal: for me, about me, of me.
My power diminished whenever I measured it by what I could make another person do. Whenever I got sidetracked, wielding my sexuality in an effort to get a boy to like me, I felt less and less powerful. It was in focusing on someone else’s behaviour that I relinquished my own.
It grew stronger when I measured it by what I was able to know, choose, experience, express, and become. And perhaps surprisingly, the more I’ve learned to harness my sexual power, the more it has enriched my sexual relationships. But that is a consequence of my power, not the measure of it.
My power is still mine. Who owns yours?
1. Helen of Troy appears in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; the famous phrase “the face that launched a thousand ships” comes from Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1592).
2. William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1606–07).
3. Judges 16:4–22.
4. Mark 6:17–29 and Matthew 14:3–11; the biblical texts do not name Herodias’s daughter Salome. The identification comes from Josephus and is later developed in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.
5. Homer, The Odyssey, Book 12. Odysseus has his crew bind him to the mast so he can hear the Sirens’ song without succumbing to their lure, while his crew block their own ears with beeswax.
6. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), later collected in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984). Lorde describes the erotic as a source of power and knowledge rooted within women and argues that patriarchal culture has encouraged its superficial expression while suppressing its deeper power.
7. Shere Hite, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality (1976). Hite distributed approximately 100,000 questionnaires and based the original report on responses from roughly 3,000 women, using open-ended questions that allowed women to describe their sexual experiences in their own words.
8. Our Bodies Ourselves began in 1969 when a group of women met at a women’s liberation conference in Boston and began sharing their experiences with medicine and their lack of knowledge about their own bodies. They published Women and Their Bodies through the New England Free Press in 1970, changing the title to Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1971 specifically to emphasise women taking full ownership of their bodies.
***This essay is part of a series exploring the Five Elements of Female Sexuality. If you enjoyed it, please refer to my last article about Permission. Performance will be coming next.
The Five Elements are:
Permission; Permission is the foundation of our sexual agency. Women have never been given permission, not only to experience desire, but to embrace it as legitimate, valuable, healthy, and worthy of pursuit. Permission invites us to reclaim what has always been ours: the right to desire. Question: Am I allowed to want?
Power: Sexual agency is an expression of personal power. Power means recognising that our sexuality belongs to us, not to our partner, society, religion, or cultural expectations. It is ours to define, communicate, and embody. Question: Can I choose?
Performance: How much of our sexuality is authentically ours, and how much is something we’ve learned to perform? Performance invites us to distinguish between the sexual responses, behaviours, and personas we’ve adopted to meet external expectations and the sexuality that genuinely reflects who we are. Question: Who am I doing this for?
Pleasure: Pleasure is more than orgasm. It is our relationship with our bodies, our capacity to receive, and our ability to experience sexuality as something that nourishes us. Pleasure asks whether we have created the safety, connection, and embodiment needed to fully experience our own desire. Question: What feels good?
Play: Play reconnects us with our innate nature. It is the freedom to explore, experiment, imagine, and express ourselves without fear. Like all mammals, we are wired for play. In sexuality, play creates the safety for curiosity, risk-taking, spontaneity, and joy to flourish. Question: What becomes possible?
