They're talking about pleasure at the University of Guelph - sexual pleasure.
That is the subject of the 38th Annual Guelph Sexuality Conference, on now at the University of Guelph. Thursday’s opening morning sessions highlighted the broad diversity of what pleasure means, how it is experienced and why it is suppressed.
Ruth Neustifter and Robin Milhausen, both in the University of Guelph’s department of family and applied nutrition, organized this year’s edition of a conference that continues to expand, attracting professionals in the areas of therapy and education.
Continuing Friday, the conference, Neustifter said, will explore sex, gender, culture, and relationships, and the intersection of them. In the 38 years that the conference has been held, the subject of pleasure was not a theme.
“That seemed like quite an omission,” she said. “There is such a political component to pleasure – whether you’re looking at trying to get more pleasure, realizing who is prioritized with a pleasure focus, or even about the absence of pleasure, and the opposite of that, which is pain. All of those things can be explored in a way that is very applied, very political, and in a way that is very theoretical.”
Many of the roughly 150 attending are public health nurses, therapists and councillors, sex educators, and public school educators.
“So it is a great number of professionals who in some way are working with people across the life span, and recognizing the vital importance of sex and relationships in their work,” she said.
Francisco Ramirez, known for his international sex and reproductive health work with the United Nations, and for his entertaining MTV segments that openly discuss sex, was a keynote presenter Thursday morning.
At the heart of his message was a call to compassion and listening. Sexuality is experienced in a myriad of ways, and how individuals express sexual desire and pleasure, and the contexts in which their attitudes and expressions are shaped, are very diverse and personal, he said.
Listening without judging, being willing to remain open and to see each person as unique, is key to understanding them and helping them, he indicated.
“We open ourselves up so others can open up and talk about their sex lives,” Ramirez said. “It’s a normalizing experience.”
Asked what has surprised him the most about hearing others open up about their sexual desires and pleasures, he answered that it is seeing the emotion behind the stories.
“It is seeing how many people break down crying, because they had never told anyone these things before,” he said, adding that it is common for people to hold on to the secrets and truths about their sexuality, and to discuss it with no one.
Holding it in is an act of shame, but professionals must adhere to the attitude that those stories are not shameful – that they come from life experiences that are often rooted in cultural attitudes, stereotypes, early lessons about sex, and in experiences of violence.
“When people talk to us about their sexual life, they have been told that it is wrong” Ramirez said, adding that it is a revolutionary act to help someone see that it is not wrong.
He encouraged the professionals in his audience to “shift your landscape” and not always be bound by unwritten rules and social conventions. Educators should freely go “beyond your bounds” and to “open your doors” to broader social interactions that lead to broader understanding.
“See pleasure as subjective,” he said. “Everyone has a difference perspective on pleasure. What is sexual pleasure to you? If I was to open up everyone’s brains, I would see very different things.”
Dalya Israel and Jordan Pirkell of the WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre facilitated a morning session entitled “Pleasure and Sexuality in a Rape Culture.”
The two women explained that rape culture is “a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent.”
In such a culture a complex set of beliefs encourage male sexual aggression and support violence against women, and women perceive an ongoing threat of violence ranging from sexual remarks to sexual touching, and to rape. One of every three women in Canada experience sexualized violence in their lives.
Pickell said the influences of this rape culture negativity impact one’s sexual identity, making it very difficult to actually connect with your own body, your own sexual desires and pleasures. Women don’t often get to talk about these realities.
Israel said talking about pleasure can lead to “crazy tension” in groups and communities, and is “like pulling teeth.” And a big part of the problem is the idea that pleasure exists in a vacuum, in isolation from what goes on around us.
But there are so many contexts in which pleasure is situated, and understanding the great many conditions and experiences that influence the understanding of, and experience of pleasure, is crucial. Pain, survival, blame, grief, recovery, popular culture, safety, colonization, love - all are part of the pleasure equation.
“What does pleasure look like in a culture where violence is inherently sexy?” Israel asked. Answering that question can be overwhelming.
