What do you see as the relationship between personal power, pleasure, and healing?

"She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love." - Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

For the past 14 years, much of my professional life has been dedicated to taking care of child and adolescent victims of sexual abuse, as well as teaching about trauma, sexual anatomy, and sexually transmitted infections. My favorite moments in my work are getting to talk to teens about the wholeness of their bodies, hopefully dispelling at least a modicum of the shame, guilt, and fear that so often comes after a sexual assault. In 2019, my path took a slightly surprising turn. In November of that year, the artist T.I. made the news for taking his 18-year-old daughter to get a "virginity check." My social media feeds became full of justified moral outrage, and friends who know what I do for a living asked for my commentary. In response, I wrote a post about anatomy, sexual assault, and virginity as a social construct. To my awe, the post went viral.

What happened next brought me to my knees. Women from all over the world began to write to me in response. Many of these women, some already in their senior years, disclosed their sexual abuse histories for the first time. Some confided in me regarding how their religious upbringing had restricted their ability to find joy in sex. Others asked me for help in protecting the children in their lives, and still others wrote about their own anatomy and their shame about any "abnormalities." What I had known academically and clinically, that the problem of the lack of knowledge, understanding, and compassion regarding sexuality was vast and debilitating, became felt in my own psyche through these stories. It was then that I decided that somehow, I needed to make this knowledge more accessible to others outside of the walls of my institution.

I started my journey to certification in April 2021, after some soul searching about how I needed to proceed. To be honest, I was not entirely certain what I was going to do with it other than enhance what I was already doing, but instinct told me to move forward to see what would unfold. In my first meeting with my supervisor, she pointed out to me that I knew a great deal about the darker sides of sexuality and that perhaps I should concentrate a bit on pleasure. I took that to heart. As a nerd, looking at pleasure from a scientific perspective was tantalizing. I still had no idea how delving into it would be helpful in the world in which I lived, but I was ready for something a bit more succulent and delightful than all of the darkness.

I am glad I listened to my supervisor. Little did I realize how diving head first into the pool of pleasure was the channel out of the depths of darkness. Feeling it in my own body, I began to see that owning pleasure and desire is courageous and deeply sacred. This inquiry led me to ask myself what had kept me chained away from my own ecstasy, binding me to the stories of shouldn't and can't because nice girls don't. As I spiraled further down the staircase of my own unknowing, through memories of childhood traumas, societal messages, microaggressions, and compassion fatigue, I realized that the words of Audre Lorde were true, that power and the erotic were one and the same, and that I deserved both.

And so does everyone else. My vision had finally become clear. A disembodied and wounded being can only fully heal by feeling, and what better way of feeling your way back into your body than through enjoying it? Our body's pleasure is our birthright. My goal as a sexuality educator is to spread this message as a way of healing and reigniting our inner flames. We should not have to live our lives in the shadows of our past wounds, whether it is sexual trauma or other experiences that trap us behind stone walls. I not only want to teach the basic science; I also want to help reopen shielded hearts, and at the end of that opening, to be able to fully understand the words of Pablo Neruda, "I want to do with you what springtime does to cherry trees."