Last month, I kicked off the December holidays with a trip to IDS for a workshop on Pleasure and Women’s Empowerment. From the get-go, I knew it was going to be a fun meeting. We started off with dinner and a conversation (as so many sexually pleasurable things do), where we got a chance to meet all of the different participants who’d come from around the world. We got into some serious conversations pretty quickly… “Do you want sexual pleasure all of the time?”, “Is BDSM an internalization of social norms?”… let’s just say I knew it wasn’t going to be a boring workshop.
Over the course of the three days, we heard many perspectives on sexuality, pleasure, empowerment, women, gender, and more. And yet, even with diverse participants coming from different areas of work, backgrounds, countries, and professions, we still found an impressive amount of common ground.
Here are some of the biggest points for me: