"Loss of Innocence" Responses

“I never felt any great loss of innocence, only great rushes of the kind of power that comes with self-knowledge and shared intimacy.”
“Loss of innocence.” This is what most people think happens to a young girl when she first loses her virginity. I know that this was something I felt, and I personally had wanted to keep proving, to everyone who put me down, that I was no longer a little innocent girl. I feel like sex is something that was thought of as risky and disgusting as a teenager. My parents, peers and certain media made it feel that way. But it isn’t, and the author does such a great job attending to this idea in her essay.

“I had mastered the art of transforming myself into what I thought each man would fall in love with. Not at all in control of each affair, but very much in control of the mask I put on for each man, I tried on a dozen personas, played out a dozen roles, decided not to be a dozen people.”
I found this to be quote very interesting. As an actress and performer, I have learned to come out of my self and become a different character. I’ve always considered the act of taking on a different persona to be that of a performer, but Rebecca Walker use this action to discover her sexuality, preferences and about her self. At first I found that kind of odd because I thought why would someone want to change who they are in their own life, but then I reconsidered and realized that that is her own way to find out things about herself and that she wasn’t truly changing who she was.

“Pried away from our parents and other authority figures, we look for answers about ourselves and how the world relates to us. We search for proper boundaries and create our very own slippery moral codes. We can begin to take control of this process and show responsibility only if we are encouraged to own our right to have a safe and self-created sexuality.”
I have always believed in hands on learning. If I child is only ever to be handed the answers and told everything, than how can the child learn to think on their own, to form their own ideas and find their own answer. Young adults need to be let to figure out who they are without their parents and peers defining that for them. If sex is consistently thought of as a taboo, it can never truly be special, or safe.

“We deserve to have our self-esteem nurtured and our personal agency encouraged.”
How is it possible to build up your self-esteem if everybody is always judging you? A girl who wants to explore who she is and her sexuality is typically considered a whore or a slut. So then any girl who is curious about sexuality or sex feels the needs to hide her thoughts and push away her curiosity so she won’t be called names. Girls need to feel free to explore and not be judged for curiosity and self-exploration.

Response on relation of essay to Fledgling:
As I have been reading Fledging, I have often found myself feeling awkward or disturbed. Reading about a girl who looks like she is 10 years old have sex with a man in his twenties wasn’t so easy to stomach, even though we later find out, she is actual 53 years old. On the other hand, I wasn’t disturbed at all when I read Rebecca Walker’s essay where she tells how she first had sex at age 11 with an older boy. Why am I having such different reactions when both the story and the essay talk of young girls engaging in sexual activity? I think that maybe I felt better knowing that the narrator of the essay was having sex as means of self and sexual exploration. And that the rest of the essay discusses how girls and young women need to be able to explore themselves and their bodies without any inhibitions from parents or peer, without anyone judging them. But then again, one can consider that Shori is doing the exact same thing. She is having to relearn how her body works and is basically exploring all of her new feeling and bodily cravings. Reading Rebecca Walkers’ essay left me empowered as a young woman who had to grow up feeling guilty about sexual curiosity and the act of engaging in sex. Though the idea of young girls having sex or wanting to explore sexuality threw me off at first, I realized that girls and women of all ages should feel that they have that right to do so safely and without judgment.