Sex is a human right & a human imperative. Sexual justice is the Experience of the Freedom and Power of Speaking Sex. Speaking Sex Means not speaking in metaphors. Speak Sex is a conversation of liberation. Feel the Transformative Language of Consent, of Intentional Intimacy. I call it Speak Sex to emphasize how we devalue & disrespect our nature & over-value our mental faculties. It’s in this Re-evaluation that seismic social change can happen.
I am Eve Eurydice. I know about the power of words. I was born on the island of Lesbos, and by virtue of my toponym & my DNA, I was born aware of all things sexual. I’ve spent my life studying sex, expressing it, writing about it, & celebrating it, & I am here to tell you that the next sexual revolution is coming & it will overthrow our bondage to an antiquated social system that hasn’t been updated to our millennium. A social moral system, a vast, elaborate, whirring contraption that delivered culture and commerce at spectacular speeds, with astonishing efficiency, and which is now dead.
Being born Lesbian made me keenly aware of preassigned sexual names & moral values since infancy. I’ve written 3 books on female sexuality; I was a staff writer on sex at Spin Magazine & also wrote the Sex Files column. I have been on talk shows & TV shows speaking as a sex expert. I’ve worked as a multimedia artist on the theme of female sexuality, female objectification, & the dichotomy between our bodies & minds, our hormones & souls, & how we bridge the divide. I’ve spent my life honing words. I know that language limits & distorts & at best approximates & is most easily misunderstood by the listener, by the dominant fads & groups, and by power.
The MeToo movement led me to re-evaluate my views on sexuality & sexual liberation. MeToo taught us that if we raise our voice, others will too. We will find each other, we will know we are not the exceptions, we will not feel outnumbered, we will be discernible to each other.
First, I realized that in order to function in our society we women adopt the male gaze and the male first person ‘I’. We have no alternative consciousness. We speak in a male ‘I’ as if we are men—because that’s the only language available to us. For example: I realized how often I objectify myself during sex. I look at my own body, the female eroticized body more than the body of my male partner to get off. My sexual mind is male. That is a shock for a lifelong feminist & bisexual like myself. We depoliticized sex and recolonized the female body in the process. Tools of the master...
Second, I realized that for most people it’s easier to have sex than to talk about it. That deeply shocked me.
At the other end of this consciousness change, my third realization was that we had to demonetize sex, to understand what I call provider sex & how we can choose to live without it.
So, I set about to organize a language devoted to sex. An authentic vocabulary for us to use that is not weighed down by the meaning-making priorities of the patriarchy. I used my podcast Speak Sex as my field research in order to develop a detailed program that can guide us to retrain our brain patterns in a conscious way.
I heard the phrase “patriarchy” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. The word Sex made guests or listeners embarrassed. I realized that was part of the point: The S-exorcism. So long as we value the mind (assumed to be culture & male) more than the sex (assumed to be nature & female), we remain divided, unbalanced, incomplete. Society can’t evolve until we bring sex into the discourse, value the body equally with the mind, and revalidate the procreative imperative.
My notion of coming up with a language for articulating sex coincided with the movement of women who began to speak up about sexual harassment at work and of coachers who taught each other new ways to speak honestly of domestic and romantic partnerships. I realized that it’s only in silence that date rape, sexual assault, sexual misread, & misunderstanding can happen. If we don’t Speak Sex BEFORE sex, if we insist on being shy, self-conscious, drunk, high, or afraid of rejection- desperate for others to love us & want us unconditionally and indiscriminately, if we are anxious for others to be overwhelmed by our charms & lose control over us & be in our control- if that’s how we like to get intimate, we perpetuate Rape Culture & Patriarchy.
We are in a moment so big we don’t have words for it. We are setting the new patterns & lifestyles of this millennium towards the next sexual revolution.