A CELEBRATION OF CAT-CALLING: THE RIGHT TO CLAIM MY EXALTATION

I am going to tell you a story about cat-calling. Except…it's not really about cat-calling….it’s about Deep Feminine Power and the freedom I chose inside of the very same moments where I and my body were being ‘objectified’ by the lustful primal mating calls of men.
This is a story about surrender and allowing myself to be ravished — and transformed — as Sacred Prey. This is a story about claiming the radical, undeniable TRUTH of my own Feminine Power — a bone-deep, primal revelation made possible only by the contrast of the Dark Masculine.

I always have choice, and I will always choose to be free.

Author’s Notes:
❤ If you are susceptible to traumatic or physiological activation in the context of non-consensual encounters between men and women, this piece may be deeply activating for you.

❤ If you are highly identified  with  the narrative of feminine oppression at the hands of “the patriarchy” and identify with its entrainment of woman-as-victim, this piece may be highly distasteful for you.

❤ This is not to excuse or justify catcalling or street harassment. I am aware of the painful experiences these non-consensual primal mating rituals create for many women….and worse so, for young girls.

It was 10:30 on a Tuesday morning in a slightly industrial area of Los Angeles, the city where I live.
I was wearing my favorite edge-of-Springtime ensemble of this year:
a tight turquoise lambskin skirt, a white jacket with a slightly puffed shoulder, and smoking hot gray suede heels.

I was completely outwitted trying to find the recommended parking structure (which will surprise *no one* who knows me) and instead, found a little spot along a side-street. As I got out of my car, eyes still adjusting to the bright morning sun, I tilted my head back to orient myself to the sudden immensity of this environment. This was the most colossal construction site I have ever seen. I was not yet close enough to see anything but the immense anatomy of the buildings and the towering cranes. Like the great Titans of Greek mythology said to be the children of both Heaven and Earth, five impossibly tall cranes gracefully moved amongst one another, American flags fluttering atop their elongated throats.

The most direct way to the office was to walk along a chain linked fence spanning the entire city block, encased in black plastic. As I walked, I noticed that I began to regret my outfit…the archaic heat of shame stirring in my body, suddenly aware of the tightness of my leather skirt and my bare legs, visually emphasized by the stacked height of my heels. Pebbly construction bits made walking extra tricky; I placed my steps gingerly. I became aware that I was tensing my body and scanning the street for other pedestrians, my heart quickening as I realized there were none.

As I walked along the make-do sidewalk, I could sense the back of my body beginning to brace. I could feel the emergent physical vigilance that I have known for so much of my life. Vertebrae by vertebrae, the lock-up began….like the Transformers my 3-year old nephew adores, my body becoming not my body, but armor — and shackles.

I could feel my breath becoming more shallow, and became aware of my sudden attempt to increase the speed of my steps, shoulders raising, tailbone tucking in some sort of unconscious attempt to hide the roundness of my ass. Even my eyes, now darting in desperation, were seeking refuge away from this metal and cement cacophony of raging noise, massive machinery, and MEN.

I knew it was going to happen even before it did. First the wolf-whistles, and then the yells from high above: “What’s your hurry, baby?”, “Where you goin’ lookin’ fine like that?”
I walked a bit more briskly, looking downward to be extra certain my steps were safe.

When a female body enters this state of nervous system activation and armoring, it is literally physiologically painful. The flow of life-force so intrinsic to animating feminine expression becomes immobilized and contracted, preparing for assumed assault.

Suddenly, a new experience began to unfold for me: I became aware of
myself in this state, and could see that I had entered a trauma vortex of fear and vigilance. I saw myself — and what I saw broke my heart: back hunched over, fingertips plugging my ears, forearms and elbows creating a shield to flatten my breasts. My body was closed and armored as I awkwardly skuttled down the street like a crab, shell hardened and sharp.

I could hear myself angrily declaring to the empty space around me: “MY body is not public space” — an artifact learned long ago in a class on Women’s Studies, not even realizing that this slogan had lodged itself into my psyche.

I saw myself: puny, meek and collapsed…consumed by righteous anger….and deeply identified with my experience as a victim of this harsh and yes, non-consensual experience.

There is a very real activation in individual and collective Feminine experience when we encounter an overwhelming experience with the Masculine. Our body-consciousness ‘flashes’ between three different states of psychic, physiological and physical reality. We lose track of what is actually ours, what belongs to the collective ‘feminine pain body’, and what may be the archetypal scream of our grandmothers, and their grandmothers, their hands cut off, their bodies burned. I could feel my body flashing manically between each of these energetic lineages that were directing my physiology — and therefore, my psychological response.
(Physiology determines psychology— which is the cruel truth of why trauma begets more trauma.)

I intentionally began to deepen my breath, allowing each breath to be long, cleansing and cooling. I softened my shoulders. I lifted my eyes to the sun, feeling its warmth on my face.
I calibrated myself to this exact place and this exact moment. I reminded myself that it was Tuesday, at approximately 11:00 in the morning. I released the clenching in my jaw, my ass, my eyes. I fired the learned and conditioned “my body is not public space” mantra and began to quietly sing Bittersweet Melody by The Verve (random *and* somehow perfect) to soothe myself . It felt important to be able to hear my own voice, and feel its vibratory hum animating the central channel from my pussy, through my belly, awakening my heart, inhabiting my throat and emerging in my mouth and on my lips as song.

Despite the tormenting noise and thunderous chaos, I found myself becoming curious and realizing that I was feeling desire to be here — to BE in my body and in the TRUTH of my life….to be intimate with the reality of this moment.
I turned around, walking back towards what felt like the heartbeat of the construction site, the place where the voices of the men had come from.
I stopped and located a place along the sheath of hot black plastic, tearing its skin apart with my hands to peer inside. I watched as giant steel beams careened against the cloudless sky; the cranes, like ancient dinosaurs, lifting and placing them onto the towering spines of the embryonic buildings.

An inferno of men, of maleness, of brute strength, sweat, exhaustion and thick calloused hearts: the timeless sight of anonymous, faceless men using their bodies to BUILD. Lowly bulldozers pushing and pulling, giant claws pounding through concrete and lifting its jagged remnants. Two men jackhammering, wearing huge headphones to block out the raging staccato, the violent pulsations moving up their thick sinewy forearms to be absorbed by quivering flesh and strong bone.

I peered inside this dense, ancient citadel of men, of tools, and noise…of the very real brutality of building that occurs through and by the strong and wearied bodies of anonymous human beings we call men.

Somehow tribal: an ancient masculine code of hierarchy, musculature, men using their hands and their bodies, tools, and machines. My feminine essence has no cellular remembrance of this sort of hammering corporeal life, living inside a world of concrete and steel. It was completely foreign and yet in these moments, peering through a chain linked fence, I began to feel the remembrance:

It has been this way for thousands and thousands of years.
Women have given men life, and men have built our world.

I could feel myself opening. Ego becoming Eros. The need for justice becoming my desire for forgiveness. I could feel my heart and my pussy relaxing….opening to receive the magnitude of this symphonic chaos —
and the Soul-remembrance of my brothers, my lovers, my fathers, and
yes, my predators.

I turned away and retraced my steps back towards my appointment.
In this moment was a choice-point.
Two different timelines appeared before me.

I could carry on to the office to meet my client after having a fairly alchemical experience of compassion and life-force. Or, I could choose to surrender and be penetrated by the fullness of this moment.

I chose to surrender in devotion to myself — and devotion to the masculine.
I chose to open and take it all because I wanted to FEEL it ALL….the drunken rapture of the raging percussive throb of the jackhammers, the towering cranes and skeletal systems of the buildings, the dust and the smell, the menacing bulldozers like cockroaches, the American flags, torn at the edges, being whipped around in a sudden gust of hot city wind, the men looking down upon me, devouring me with their hunger, licking their lips as their eyes traced my body.
I want to be opened and penetrated by it ALL.

Once again, the sound of the wolf-whistle….and this time, I bend down, leaning my purse against the dusty fence. I turn to face the construction site.
I turn to face the men, high above me, desiring to penetrate me with their primal mating call.

And I let them. I unfurl. I give myself to these men.
I turn to them in the wildness of my own erotic life-force, lifting my leather skirt just enough to allow my thighs to part.
I raise my eyes to the distant men, standing high above on shafts of searing metal; my palms open to each side of my body, and then slowly, raising my hands, I place them at heart-center, in anjali mudra, bowing my head in devotion and whole-bodied appreciation.

I offer myself to these men — and through these men, I offer myself to life: the holy cock of my feminine surrender penetrating my own heart, penetrating these men, this moment, this LIFE.

I consent.
I will be your Sacred Prey.

I consent because you no longer have power over me.
I will be your Sacred Prey and in this surrender, I am set free.

I will wholly receive your desire to have me — and in doing so, you will be opened by the sacred abyss  of my surrender.

I want to be penetrated by it all and I have become powerful enough to display the fullness and the wetness of my sacred YES. I will give you all of me: my beauty, my fear, my devotion, my forgiveness, my rage, my sex, my fire, my submission, and my sorrow.

These men, my ‘predators’ are in cosmic and archetypal service to me.
They are in service to my sex, my power and my FREEDOM.

In gratitude and with my deepest honoring, I surrender.
With full consent sourced in my most exalted sovereignty, I choose to become your Sacred Prey.

You carry the keys to my deepest, darkest power.
Men: thank you for showing me the truth of who I am. This can only occur when I transmute my feminine pain into my chthonic feminine power. To give back to you, I give you all l that I am in this moment…..standing on the sidewalk in the mid-morning sun,
rapturous with chaos, skirt hiked up around my strong thighs, opened and alive in the velvet fire that is
WOMAN.

Credit:
In this context, "sacred prey" is a term I learned from Om Rupani.