Andrea Barrica – The Establishment

A #MeToo Movement In Real Time

Andrea Barrica — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 16:04:35 +0000

In order to move forward, we need multidimensional spaces where we can have these discussions openly, safely, and communally.

As disturbing as the past year has been, it’s been inspiring to see so many survivors of assault come forward, and to watch the #MeToo movement make international headlines. But what struck me in post after post was that the stories were largely retrospective. Few who came forward felt they could do so at the time of the incident.

It doesn’t have to be that way. If we can demystify the process — from reporting, to rights, to recovery — we can help survivors come forward earlier, and make #MeToo a movement in real time.

The statistics are not new, but bear repeating: Fewer than a third of rape and sexual assault cases are reported to the police, and those numbers plummet when the assailant is a friend or acquaintance. Fewer than 10% of all assaults see any prosecution at all.

Our legal system, campus security, human resource departments, and news media have filled assault reporting with landmines for the few who do come forward. A survivor is faced with reliving the trauma, questions about their character and motivation, and institutional sympathy for the assaulter. We don’t talk about the process openly, which only generates more fear and uncertainty, and dissuades even more of us from reporting.

Last November, I launched O.school, a trauma-informed sex and pleasure education platform, featuring free, live-streamed conversations with “pleasure professionals” — or PPs — who deal with issues of sex and sexuality. Our streams range from “How to Purchase a Sex Toy” to “Recognizing Emotional Abuse” to “Understanding Consent.” The streams are interactive, meaning viewers can chat anonymously with the PP or other participants, and each stream has active moderators to prevent harassment and trolling.

While we have always focused on pleasure education, the format has turned out to be particularly conducive to dealing with issues, like assault, that are shrouded in shame and secrecy. In stream after stream, I’ve watched as participants — sometimes for the first time — spoke freely about their own consent violations, abuse, and harassment. As importantly, I’ve watched as they’ve shared critical information about reporting and recovery.

Cavanaugh Quick, a victim advocate at the Crime Victim and Sexual Violence Center in Albany, New York, regularly accompanies survivors during the reporting process. At O.school, Cav leads a stream on forensic rape examination kits. In their stream, Cav unboxes the kit, and walks viewers through the process of reporting assault — from the contents of the kit and the location of the exam to the types of questions asked to the length of time it takes and the rights you retain.

We’ve been taught to fear the process, but watching Cav cheerfully walk through it, that process loses some of its power to intimidate. Watching Cav’s first streams, and their interactions with those in the chat, were revolutionary for me, and I saw how demystifying the process could quickly lead to increased reporting.

Of course, the hurdles to reporting aren’t limited to the process. Survivors face guilt and shame from the assault, and a fear of stigmatization from coming forward. That’s why sharing information about our complex emotional and physiological reactions to assault, or providing someone who can answer questions about their own experience with sex after trauma, can be life-changing.

We’ve been culturally trained to be silent in the face of these experiences, to only accept prescribed narratives about what does or doesn’t constitute trauma or assault. But just as everyone’s experience is different, everyone’s reaction to is also different. In order to move forward — whether that means reporting, recovering, or both — we need multidimensional spaces where we can have these discussions openly, safely, and communally. At O.school, we’ve devoted an entire channel to “Sex After,” where survivors can engage with issues surrounding assault and trauma.

While I’m heartened to see greater awareness of sexual assault finally capturing the attention of the media, many of us are already far too aware. Let’s focus on raising awareness of assault, certainly, but also on the tools there are to report it, the resources for those processing it, and the communities that can help us recover from it.

How Can We Teach Consent If We Don’t Teach About Pleasure?

Andrea Barrica — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 23:32:21 +0000

Let 2018 be the year we demand more than freedom from sexual harassment and abuse. This year, it’s time we demand pleasure.

fter giving a talk about pleasure anatomy to a group of Ivy League students, complete with 3-D models of a clitoris, a tall, soft-spoken sophomore student came up to me with tears in her eyes. “This is the first time I’ve ever learned about the clitoris or anything about female pleasure,” she whispered, “I’ve had sex many times, and I have a boyfriend, but I’ve never enjoyed sex or had an orgasm. What’s wrong with me?”

As a sex educator, I’ve heard this story hundreds of times. It used to be my story, too.

The thing about bad, one-sided sex is that you can be sexually active for years and not realize how bad or one-sided it is — that you’re missing out on a wide array of joy and pleasure. I grew up in a conservative, religious family, and not once did anyone ever tell me that sex… should feel good. I was taught that men would try to get sex from me, and that my job was to say “no” and protect my virginity.

Not only did I never learn about pleasure, no one ever mentioned consent. All sexual acts were equally sinful, so it didn’t matter if a boy went too far on a date with me — why was I letting him touch me at all? This internal shame about sex made it easier for people to coerce me to do sexual things and made me complacent about unfulfilling, ho-hum, or just plain terrible sex… until I learned about pleasure through exploration, actively working through my shame, and extraordinary lovers who supported me. Finally, I learned what a true “yes” felt like.

Not only did I never learn about pleasure, no one ever mentioned consent.
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And while recent accounts about Aziz Ansari and the greater #MeToo movement have started a long overdue and deeply necessary conversationabout harassment, coercion, abuse, and our culture around sex, it lacks a critical element: any meaningful discussion of pleasure.

But without discussing pleasure, how can we talk about consent?

Overwhelmingly, our media’s reflection of female pleasure is, at-best, one-dimensional. When women’s pleasure is shown, whether in porn or a Hollywood movie, it’s often reduced to a quick, performative expression, an overwrought moan, perhaps, that serves as applause for the man. This not only alienates and guilts women who don’t climax, but such stereotypical representations flatten the complexities of pleasure, and prevents us from discussing its absence. As a result of our media and educational system failings, real conversations about sexual pleasure rarely happen at home or in school either, and discussions of how to achieve it is still, sadly, taboo in many relationships.

Straight women who date straight men tell me about the script: making out, oral sex on the penis, then penetrative fucking. When the penis ejaculates, sex is over. When I slept with straight men, this was my experience too, and my partners never seemed that concerned about my pleasure, or lack thereof.

Statistics show that I wasn’t alone.

Women don’t just face a wage gap at work; they also face what’s being called an “orgasm gap” in the bedroom. According to a recent Kinsey study, straight women have fewer orgasms than any other group*. While 95% of heterosexual men have an orgasm every time they have sex, and 86% of lesbians, only 65% of women sleeping with men do.

So, for women, sleeping with a straight man lowers the chance of having an orgasm by 20%.

Due to my struggle with sexual shame and lack of education, I have spent the better part of my twenties disturbed by and grappling with the lack of sex education in the United States, especially as sex ed in schools has plummeted over the last 20 years.

As a result of conservative efforts, fewer than 50% of schools in the United States now teach any sex ed at all — and of those, more than 75% focused on abstinence-until-marriage. Back in 1995, over 80% of students learned about birth control in schools. The Trump administration has slashed $200 million from the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program started in 2010 that has been thought to be the key driver of a plummet in teen pregnancy in the past few years.

I was so disturbed, in fact, that I founded a live-streaming company for sex and pleasure education called O.school. Over the past year, we have given sex and pleasure education workshops in 15 universities from progressive places like Los Angeles to rural colleges in Kansas to huge schools like Arizona State University. We’ve spoken to thousands of students about the issues they have around sexuality and pleasure.

On our college tour, I was honored to hear personal, at times devastating, stories from the students I met at these workshops. Auditoriums full of underclassmen would crowd around the sex educators and me to share — often for the first time in their lives — the shame they carried around sex, all the things they wanted to learn but didn’t know who they could ask, and how it was life-changing just to witness women standing up and talking about pleasure, not only STIs, contraception, or abstinence — but pleasure.

#Squad

During anonymous Q&A sessions, we fielded queries that ranged from the most basic anatomy questions (Where does pee come out? Does masturbation really lead to erectile dysfunction?) to communication questions (How do I tell my partner what to do without hurting their feelings?) to questions about kink (Why do I like pain? Does that make me a freak?). We heard story after story about sexual assault, LGBTQ shaming, body shaming, consent violations, and lots of bad, one-sided sex.

One student from UCLA shared that her boyfriend regularly shamed her for asking him to wear a condom. A student in Arizona couldn’t get her boyfriend to cut his nails before fingering her despite it causing her incredible pain. The stories have rolled in from students, teachers, and retirees alike, about women who struggle to experience pleasure with their boyfriends and husbands, about men who never bother to ask what their wives and girlfriends want.

2017 was a raging garbage fire of what happens when society has combined misogyny, power, and a lack of sex or consent education. Because of the #MeToo movement, sexual assault and harassment are receiving media coverage more than ever before. But 2018 is a year we demand more than freedom from sexual harassment and abuse. This year, it’s time we demand pleasure.

Why is pleasure important? Because asking for what we want and saying no to what we don’t want is a direct rebellion against the patriarchy. Because how do we teach anyone about giving their enthusiastic “yes” if they don’t understand pleasure? Because men expect pleasure every single time they are sexually intimate, and women should, too. Most of all? Pleasure is a powerful form of self-care, wellness, and has been proven to be a key driver of happiness.

How should you or your friends figure out if your sex is one-sided? Thirty years ago, author and activist Alison Bechdel introduced a three-pronged testto determine whether a movie was worth watching. Did it feature more than one woman? Did they talk to each other? About something other than a man?

Given the orgasm gap, we thought we’d formulate our own version with criteria aimed at helping you determine if it’s worth sleeping with your Tinder date, FWB, boyfriend, or, really, any man:

Do I feel safe saying no?
Is my pleasure as important as his?
Does the sex end when he does?

For many people, answers to these questions are often disappointing. What can we do about it? Taking your pleasure into your own hands (yes, I mean that literally) is step number one.** Masturbate to get to know yourself and figure out what feels good for you.

I want you to get off, but more than anything, I want to hear your stories, so we can complicate and elevate our collective understanding of pleasure. I’ve worked to build a platform for people of all genders, bodies, and sexualities to talk about and learn about pleasure. Once you’ve gotten off, we want you to join our community. That’s why we’ve launched live streams on learning about orgasm, consent, pleasure anatomy, buying sex toys, and asking for what you want in bed. We also address sex and pleasure after trauma, overcoming religious shame, pleasure and disability, and more.

Right now, a collective “fuck no!” is resounding across the world. When we fuck ourselves just right, we gain the energy and the knowledge to finally say, “fuck, yes!”

**The study was unfortunately very binary and did not study other groups, such as gender-non-conforming or trans individuals. We hope this changes in the future to reflect the multitude of identities and experiences.