I still remember it very clearly, though. Josh and I were at a rowdy party and were both quite high on endorphins (the best natural intoxicant). We were standing up, near the edge of a room. He kissed me. I yielded to the kiss, or tried to… but he didn’t follow me. It was the strangest thing! I had this very clear idea of how kisses between men and women were supposed to go; the woman submits, the man asserts dominance. But he didn’t do that. When I displayed all the body language of someone putting herself down, he waited for me to come back up. He took everything of myself that I was trying to offer him, and he gave it back to me–not as a rejection but as a way of telling me not to reject myself. And I dared to straighten my spine and bring myself up to meet him as an equal, and then the world kind of spun off into the distance. I forgot we were at a party. I forgot we were surrounded by people. I forgot everything. It was just the two of us, celebrating the wonder of each other, two consenting adults sharing joy; no yielding, no dominance, no head games, no cultural bullshit. Utterly transcendent.
When I say it changed my life, it’s not just because it led to me falling in love with Josh and eventually joining my life with his. It’s because it led me to question everything I thought I knew about love and sex between men and women. It was as though I’d spent years on my knees and one day someone peered down at me with a friendly smile and said, “What on earth are you doing down there?” He didn’t scorn me or cajole me or pull me to my feet. He just made standing up feel like an option, where it hadn’t before. He made it feel safe. And when I stood, trembling, he was purely delighted to share uprightness with me. He didn’t just see me as equal to him; he showed me how to see myself as equal to him.
That is what a feminist kisses like.
– Rose Fox
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