Articles

We've had several media outlets cover Bodysex but yesterday's piece in Harper's Bazaar is the best one yet. 

The images are perfection especially the vulva diagram with the clitoris front and center.  When fashion magazines are publishing this sort of sex ed content, expressly for women, it makes you tingle.  We are at a tipping point and this new wave of feminism is a fucking tsunami.

This is my favorite passage because it speaks to our orgasm expectations.  Thank you, Suzannah, for putting yourself out there and getting it right:

"I’d gone into the Bodysex workshop aiming to experience the biggest, best orgasm possible. But finally, I saw that liberation was not in the orgasm itself. It was in the defiance that it represented. In Betty’s time, when vibrators were just starting to be marketed as vibrators rather than “massagers,” it was radical for a woman to masturbate. For some women today, it may still feel radical. But what’s radical for me is masturbating in my own way.

The sexual revolution that Betty helped usher in made it more acceptable for women to be sexual, but it also created some expectations for how an orgasm should feel: long, loud, sensuous and emotional. You don’t often hear about men striving for better orgasms. Yet there’s a whole market of toys, books, classes and even vaginal injections marketed to women for this purpose. Society has been teaching us that our orgasms, like the rest of our bodies, aren’t good enough.

It was in falling short of this expectation that I found liberation. That was my defiance. I didn’t have to discover a new kind of orgasm; I had to free myself from the ideals that made me feel I should always be aiming for better orgasms.

I walked out of the workshop feeling, for the first time, that my orgasms were already sufficient—and that I didn’t need them to feel liberated, anyway. Betty Dodson is right that women shouldn’t rely on men to feel sexually adequate. But we shouldn’t rely on vibrators either. Liberation, after all, isn’t about having a mind-blowing sexual experience. It’s about unapologetically owning whatever experience you have."

So happy that Betty is being honored for Bodysex and this ground breaking work.