Chapter 33
For the Woman in the Bunk Next to Me, Part Two
She says, all coy, there’s something about me—something she can’t name. Maybe you’d call it sex appeal. How I move through the dorm, how I sit at meals, how I listen. “It’s like you aren’t waiting on anyone,” she says. “They’re waiting on you.” I laugh because I thought I was undercover: federal-issue granny panties, East L.A. khakis, no hair product, no makeup. And still the light shines through. Part of her question, I suspect, is how a woman nearly twice her age could carry something she learned to associate with the young and the pretty. I know I’m beautiful, but I don’t put my beauty in the storefront.
I’ve seen what happens when people walk in dazzled and find there’s nothing behind it. I keep my valuables in the back room, the one you have to get buzzed into. Years ago I made a choice. I had watched the flicker of surface beauty—the bulbs dim, the bulbs get replaced—and decided I wanted something that didn’t burn out. Then I met women who felt like that to me: steady as a river. When I asked how, they taught me to plug into a quieter power already inside me. They called it “orgasm,” but not the fireworks kind—more like a saturating warmth. They drenched me in it until I could feel the source for myself. Beauty as a by-product of bliss, not the other way around.
Not dressing up, but unblocking what’s already shining. That’s what real sex appeal is: Surrender to the radiance that wants to move through you. You know the woman who descends the stairs and turns every head, women and men. The minds turn, too. For some, there’s simple appreciation: Look at her. For others, reflex: judge, diminish, own, outshine. Our response to another woman’s light tells the truth about our own. And here’s the heartbreak—our culture is taught there are only three options when faced with radiance: Consume it, control it, or destroy it. “Fuck, kill, or marry.” All three snuff the very light we’re starving for. You can list the high-risk jobs—power lines, rooftops, mines—but I laugh because I believe a woman’s work of illumination is just as dangerous.
If she won’t dim on command, the world will try character assassination. If that doesn’t work, it will demand she police herself until she forgets her appetite. If that fails, there are always shackles. How many women end up in places like MDC because she didn’t die on cue? Here they make us play dead under fluorescent lights. I want to tell the guards they’d have more fun letting us live, but humor is the dialect of the sexual and this place doesn’t speak it. She tells me the stories every woman wishes to tell—the lover who finished when your mouths met and blamed you while never thinking to satisfy you; the trainer you finally slept with because you were tired of humping pillows; the games you play to keep some semblance of control.
I hear the bravado and the ache. And I want to say, with love: That’s the “best of” a bad playlist. We keep being placed under a ceiling so low we have to stoop to fit, and then we’re told to call it empowerment. Control is not rapture. Transaction is not nourishment. Revenge is not intimacy. There is more. Infinitely more. Not just gasps and spikes and the chase for peak moments, but an underlying country—call it a hidden realm where the weather is always ecstatic, and our bodies are made to take flight into it. The promised land is not a metaphor; it has a zip code inside your skin. Milk and honey are not souvenirs; they’re how your rivers run when no one dams them.
But they have been dammed—rerouted to power someone else’s project: production, property, reputation. We end up thirsty in a house built over a spring. So we gnaw the box and read the label—GREAT SEX—and tell ourselves we’ve eaten. We haven’t. We’ve forgotten the low groan, the mindless shudder, the devotion that rises when you are truly fed. We settle for head games because our bodies don’t feel safe enough to let go. We think we can perform our way into ecstasy and control our way into abandon, which is like swapping shackles and calling it freedom. “Who?” she asks. “Who could take me there?” It’s a fair question. Who can stand in the heat of your force and not flinch?
Who can say, “More,” without their own fear pulling you back? Who can unbridle even your fears and mean it when they say, “Run free. I’m not going anywhere”? Here’s where I start the initiation—gently, because this is tender ground. It’s not about sex at first; it’s about power. Not power-over, not power-as-status, but the responsible electricity of being fully alive. When you turn up your arousal, you move people. That comes with responsibility. You don’t hype it; you steward it. Your job isn’t to perform. Your job is to relax and receive so completely that your wealth spills over. The world doesn’t need more performance. The world needs women whose presence wakes everything up. Men have their path—earning, proving, offering.
That makes sense for them. They’re working their way to something. But we are the destination. We keep forgetting and clocking in to their job, scrubbing floors in our queen’s robes, trying to earn access to what is already ours. We chase after men down the same road they’re traveling to reach us, and then wonder why the gardens we left untended at home are dry. There is one instruction, so simple we skip it: Relax. Really relax. Loosen the clench you’ve been holding since you were told, directly or between lines, that your desire is dangerous, silly, too much. What you fear will escape if you let go is precisely what the world needs you to spill. That inner wealth—rapture, tenderness, appetite, generosity— has never been touched by anyone’s hands.
It does not need to be earned. It does not need to be explained. It wants out. This is not a summons to recklessness. It’s an invitation to sovereignty. Your radiance is not for sale, not for ransom, not for proof. It’s for lighting rooms where shame has kept women small; for flooding the fields that have gone fallow; for nourishing those who have forgotten they, too, are made of honey. When you free what lives within you, you don’t just free yourself. You loosen the locks on the whole world.