Tag Archive for sexuality

Women’s Sexuality Empowerment Workshop: Free Intro Night

Women’s Sexuality Empowerment Apprenticeship: Free Intro Night

Friday, September 10, 2010
6:30-8:30 pm
Moonheart Healing Arts Center
59 West 19th Street #3A2, NYC 10011

Are you ready to own your sexuality, to reclaim it, heal it and celebrate it? If you are ready to explore and transform your sexuality, join sexuality educator Amy Jo Goddard and some of the former participants of the Women’s Sexuality Empowerment Apprenticeship program for a free introductory night. Amy Jo will help women to assess where they are currently in their own sexuality and lead them in a guided meditation and interactive discussion. There is no obligation to take the program, and you will definitely walk away with some clarity and action steps about your own sexuality.

“I know there is a deep need for safe spaces where women can study and grow their sexuality, so I’ve carefully constructed a framework where women can learn experientially and share with each other aspects of their sexual selves that have been in hiding. I want to see women be truly empowered sexually. I want to see women support each other. I want women to have the intimate relationships they dream of. I want to support women to take the risks required to become their most authentic, fulfilled sexual selves.”

For more info or to sign up, go to:

http://womenssexualityintronight.eventbrite.com/

www.amyjogoddard.com

BIO:
Amy Jo Goddard, M.A. is a sexuality educator & trainer, writer, performing artist and activist. She travels to colleges, universities, communities and conferences teaching workshops and speaking about sexuality and maintains a private sex coaching practice. She is co-author of Lesbian Sex Secrets for Men and is a contributing author of All About Sex: A Family Resource Guide on Sex and Sexuality. Her article about queer performance artists and activism was published in 2007 in the Social Justice Journal and she has been published in numerous other publications including LOFT and Bust Magazine. Amy Jo was host of cherrybomb.com‘s web stream program “Fresh Advice,” developing, researching, writing and performing over 60 episodes on women’s sexuality. A professional trainer of sexuality professionals, medical students, college students and youth for fifteen years, she has taught courses relating to sexuality at the City University of New York and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Amy Jo has taught breast and pelvic exams to medical/nursing students for 8 years and she is director/producer of the forthcoming documentary, At Your Cervix, a film that depicts this unusual work. She facilitates the Women’s Sexuality Empowerment Apprenticeship in New York City.

Sexuality, Virginity & “Purity” Series Part 7: Thou Shalt Remain a Virgin until Marriage – The importance of female virginity in the Mormon Church

This series of posts from the community is in preparation for Paradigm Shift’s next event, “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women” A Discussion with JESSICA VALENTI, Author & Feministing.com Founder/Editor on TUES, FEB. 23rd, 7pm, NYC. We want to hear your stories. View call for submissions- deadline 2/21- Click here!

by Janice Formichella

Until the age of 19 I was an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Dater Saints, most commonly known as the Mormon Church. Female virginity is a vitally important aspect of the Mormon culture, although the approach is somewhat different than other evangelical groups.

Sex education for Mormon girls can be summed up in one sentence: wait until marriage for any type of sexual activity or you will go to Hell and no Mormon boy will marry you. I was made to believe that my entire future and reputation as a Mormon depended on me saving my virginity for my future husband.

Through high school I attended a small charter school ran by devout members of the Mormon Church. As far as my parents and school leaders were concerned, there was little need for sex education outside the home. The one sex education program I ever attended was a one-night event at the home of a family friend. The parents had organized a night to host the speaker, a well-known abstinence-only educator.

The presentation was meant for teens and everyone attended with his or her parents. The presentation mostly consisted of scary stories of what can happen to you if you have sex. I remember the educator telling us that she had had a boyfriend in high school that she was crazy about. She told us about the first time they held hands and the electricity she felt. Unfortunately, she told us, that electricity soon faded and the couple started French kissing, which also ignited the same electricity, but which was also fleeting. To gain back the excitement, the couple had sex. Not only did the speaker tell us that her boyfriend broke up with her shortly after, her first experience with sex landed her with a STD.

Another thing that I remember about the presentation was the speaker’s lengthy diatribe about the ineffectiveness of condoms. She went on and on with statistics and facts about how condoms do not work and even went as far as to claim that the ineffectiveness of condoms was well known in the industry, as though condom executives are sitting in the board room laughing at all the gullible people out there unknowingly having unprotected sex.

As young Mormon women we were constantly overwhelmed with the concept that our future depended on our chastity. We were given a padded white satin hanger and a white handkerchief to save for our wedding day and were challenged to keep our chastity as pure white as the items. A poem attached to the hanger reads in part:

“So as you dress each morning,
In preparation for a new day,
Let your eyes gaze upon this hanger,
Remember to stand tall,
And with your hanger,
Hang on to “forever.”

The use of the word “forever” is significant because Mormons believe that marriages and families literally last forever, that you will literally be with your husband and children after you die, but only if you are married in the Temple, and you can only be married in the temple if you remain “morally clean.”

The responsibility of guarding virginity is almost exclusively the realm of Mormon women, although men are also required to stay abstinent until marriage. I have three younger brothers and I know for a fact that they never received hangers or hankies to remind them to not loose their way.

As you can see, female sexuality in the Mormon community is not really portrayed as dirty, but rather something that determines your entire destiny.

I had little concept of sexual activity between kissing and intercourse, and when I left the religion I quickly started engaging in risky behavior. I have a very clear understanding of how coming of age sexually would have been much healthier and even happier had I grown up with anyone willing to tell me the truth about sex.

As feminists we need to remember that we don’t exist in a vacuum. We are parents or future parents, aunts, uncles, godmothers, educators, mentors. We need to be cognitive of our own role in shaping how children come to think about sex. Not only do we need to provide the children and teenagers in our lives with accurate information, we need to make sure these young people know they have someone to turn to with questions about their sexuality. The schools play an important role in changing the culture of virginity, but even more important is the role that feminists play in the individual lives of young people as they grow up.

Sexuality, Virginity & “Purity” Series Part 6: A Literary Analysis of Twilight and its Message about Purity

This series of posts from the community is in preparation for Paradigm
Shift’s next event, “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women”
A Discussion with JESSICA VALENTI, Author & Feministing.com
Founder/Editor on TUES, FEB. 23rd, 7pm, NYC. We want to hear your
stories. View call for submissions- deadline 2/19- Click here!

by Miriam Rabinovich

– Imagine a world without the concept of virginity and “purity”- what would that look like?

It would be a world without white wedding dresses, and wedding nights without blood-stained sheets, crimson marks that prove purity only through loss. It would be a world without Eve and her daughters, women who can bring the world to its knees by seducing men on theirs; a world without Mary and the cult of female guilt that surrounds the ideal woman – a son’s mother who has never slept with his father. A world without the narrative of children’s innocence might well be a place without pedophiles. A world without “good girls” is a world without snuff films, as the myth of purity perpetuates apathy and aggression toward “loose women.” It would be a world far less invested in the policing of symbolic and embodied boundaries, a world without homophobia, honor killings, eating disorders, and clitorectomies. It would be a world without the sexual hysteria that created the fantasy of the hypersexual black predator out to hunt white virgins cowering in every corner. A world without the concept of virginity and purity is a world without hate.

But perhaps most importantly, it is a world without Edward Cullen. Yes, the un-dead, devastatingly dreamy, adolescent vampire extraordinaire of the Twilight series. Others have noted that the supernatural thriller espouses quotidian views of female purity and encourages abstinence. Bella’s blood is central to the text, it is what Edward and his pale pals sniff for and run from; every look of longing drips with its promise. It’s a story even older than 104 year old Edward, the eternal saga of female “purity,” and the masculine desire to both destroy and preserve. We know this story well and all little girls learn to cross their legs when they play. What interests me, however, is the less explored twin of female purity – male prurience. Fundamentally, what makes a woman sexually pure is her lack of contact with a penis. This is perhaps an obvious point but worth thinking of – for all of the anxiety generally attributed to men when it comes to female sexuality and women’s bodies, how much ambivalence must they have about their own sexuality when it is contact with them that makes women unclean?

Edward’s fear of his impulses is evident in the first film. He warns Bella that he might not be able to control himself around her, evinced early when Bella notices that Edward’s eyes changed color. Uncharacteristically flustered, Edward mumbles something incoherent and rapidly stumbles away from her, ashamed by his lack of control over his body, foreshadowing the constant tension between his dangerous desire for her and his love for her, as though the two can never merge.

The second film is even more apparent in its handling of male sexuality. We now have Jacob vying for Bella’s body as well, but just like Edward he forces her away, fearful of what he might do to her. Jacob is a boy transitioning into a werewolf, coming into his paternalistic legacy, clearly a parable for puberty. He too possesses little control over his bodily impulses. An older werewolf in the film who ripped into his wife’s face in a moment of passion, forever scarring her, acts as the warning of what men can do to women if they aren’t careful.

So we have two adolescent boys in physical flux and for both of them adult male sexuality means lack of physical control and (possible) violence against women. They pass on to Bella what has been taught to them and insist that she be scared of what they can do to her, of the beast that emerges when a kiss lingers a moment too long, of the loss of control when she comes a shade too close, of the danger when she dare desire as much as they. With Twilight we have not only the reinforcement of the female virginity and purity myth, but also the criminalization of male sexuality, both of which work symbiotically to perpetuate distorted views of gender and eroticism. Though much has been made of Bella’s body, critics have been more reticent about the construction of male sexuality – the arguments rarely evolve past the danger these boys pose to Bella’s sanctity. We have to move past this allegedly natural sinister male sexuality and explore the cultural investments in constructing male sexuality as dangerous, impulsive, and ultimately – in Twilight literally – disfiguring to both men and women.

The mutability of the disobedient body, its spontaneous shape-shifting and surprising fluidity, most pronounced during adolescence, seems to me to be a paradigm of the way female bodies have been constructed and described through all of their phases. It is plausible that adolescent boys on the cusp of puberty come closest to the culturally constructed descriptions of female embodiment. While this small space of flux is a site of massive potential for empathy and communal experiences, it currently functions as precisely the opposite. It becomes a time of delineating your borders, summoning your troops to the front line, and defining the male body as hard, strong, stable, and in control. And when it isn’t in control, it must be blamed on the female body that causes his defenses to crumble and rapidly consolidated into sexual aggression. So long as we refuse to create paradigms for the lack of self control that are not negative and weak, instead of say playful, productive, and transformative, men will always hold women culpable for their “weakness,” and thus project on to her the dirt he discovers in himself.

If masculine sexuality were not about possession, then female bodies would not be commodities, decreasing in value as soon as they have been opened. So long as male desire is constructed as criminal and something that – at its most intense – has the power to destroy, eroticism between men and women will always hinge on the palpable possibility of violence, and so a woman who wants is so often a woman who is asking for it.

We must defang male desire and provide adolescent boys with different constructions of masculinity, one that isn’t gnarled with skewed visions of strength and power. If we begin to deconstruct cultural criminalization of male sexuality, we will begin to unsettle the pure/impure dichotomy that has haunted the desiring female body since the time of antiquity. So long as male desire is viewed as a crouching creature always about to pounce, there will always be two types of women in the world – the one who helps him overcome himself and the one to whom he flees when the moon is full and his body howls.

Ultimately, this construction of masculinity is about reaffirming the heterosexual imperative and “traditional” values – the angel in the house will cleanse his sins after he confesses to depravity. Internal strife, inevitable sin, perpetual longing, crippling guilt, cherubic absolution – Edward’s desire for Bella is a biblical anachronism. So many of the distortions and anxieties around sexuality, female purity, and male aggression find their birth in Genesis, and loyally continue their evolution throughout the bible. A world without the concept of virginity and purity is a godless world. Amen to that.

Call for Submissions- Blog/Video/Graphic Art responses- Sexuality, Virginity & “Purity”

Call for guest blog, video, and graphic art submissions in preparation for Paradigm Shift’s next event:

“The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women”
A Discussion with JESSICA VALENTI, Author & Feministing.com Founder/Editor on TUES, FEB. 23rd, 7pm, NYC  Buy Tickets Now- click here.

Submission Deadline- Extended: 2/21- Sunday

You can answer any one of the following questions- submissions of any length welcome, including poetry and graphic art:

– How do you define virginity? Where do you think this definition came from (i.e. society, parents, friends)?

– Imagine a world without the concept of virginity and “purity”- what would that look like?

– How has the concept of virginity and “purity” effected your sex and love life?

– Did you attend abstinence-only classes? What did you think?

– Were you brought up to think of female sexuality as “dirty”? How did it effect you?

– What are some tangible ways we can change the culture of virginity?

Submit responses to blog@paradigmshiftnyc.com Please include how you would like to be credited (name, anonymous etc).  Video submissions- please submit YouTube private link.  Email subject line: Your Name- Blog post- 2/23 Event.

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