“IF YOU’RE INTERESTED IN FISTING, WE’RE HERE FOR YOU”

By Clementine Mills

My sex ed. classes consisted of a Catholic Priest popping on a daggy 90’s video that preached the horrors of pregnancy and masturbation as he patrolled the room to ensure that no one was laughing.

Needless to say, my prudish schooling left much to be desired in the way of sexual empowerment. Luckily for me my high school in New Zealand was right down the road from a Family Planning clinic. Handy! I’d pootle down there in my free periods with my various concerns about all of the things and the remarkably patient nurses would answer my endless questions about everything from HIV to pre-cum with unflinching detail.

They were the first people to ask me the pivotal question: “Do you have sex with boys or girls or both?” They gave me my first prescription for the pill and they practically showered me with condoms as soon as I got within a 10m radius of the frosted glass door.

In hindsight they probably thought I was a little nymphomaniac, given the frequency of my visits, but really I was just terrified of my own body and the expectations that society hung heavy on its still developing bones.

I was very lucky to have had access to those kind women. Many girls weren’t so lucky. So many women have a stunted view of their own sexuality well beyond their schoolgirl years and are still grappling with the ever-churning maelstrom of queries about sex and the female body.

Enter: the Internet. We’re in an exhilarating position now where the answer to almost any question is just a Google search away.

Granted, you have to be selective with your trusted sources (as any seasoned hypochondriac would have discovered the hard way – never Google symptoms to anything ever! Over the years I’ve diagnosed myself with just about everything from prostate cancer to post-natal depression) and as long as you can blinker yourself to the copious amounts of vacuous nonsense that is also floating around there in the technological ether, the ol’ inter-web is an excellent vehicle for enlightenment.

I sat down with Viv and Michelle from iloveclaude.com, a pioneering sexual health project for women from ACON, to discuss sex positivity, LGBTQI friendly health practices and local queer art.

Your website is beautiful. And refreshingly frank, I love it. I understand that Claude is a project for all women but notice that there are several nods to queer culture – is this aimed at the LGBTQI community in particular ?

M: Yes, while Claude is primarily targeted at Lesbians and Same-sex attracted women, the idea behind Claude is much broader than that.

V: The idea behind it is: there’s identity and then there’s sexual practises; so if you focus on identity you will leave someone out and it’s always changing, right? So we focus on sexual practices like fisting or blood-play –

M: She always says that one first.

V: Fisting!

M: All the time.

V: I know, it’s weird that it just pops into my head like it’s all I think about every day! No, so that’s why we focus on practises, we’re not the identity police, we can just say: “If you’re interested in fisting, we’re here for you”

That’s a tagline right there.

V: Yeah! And that came specifically out of research from the BDSM and swingers scenes around Sydney which showed that there are actually lots of people who identify as women, playing with or having sex with other women but who did not necessarily identify as lesbian, bisexual or queer and no one was talking to these women about sexual health.

M: A lot of those practices in the kink scene come with a higher risk of transmission of STIs or Blood Borne Viruses.

V: It’s about sitting down with people from the community and going: “Ok what’s going on? What do people need?” We don’t storm in and go “Here’s information on Chlamydia, stop touching each other!” No, we say “That sounds fantastic! Here’s information on how to enjoy yourself and avoid STIs.” But the main thing about the way we approach sexual health for this group is self-empowerment…encouraging confidence and the ability to be assertive about what you want – that’s sexual health as well as learning about consent, safe relationships –

M: We encourage communication and being able to negotiate what you want in a relationship. Knowledge is power. The more that you know about your body, the kind of sex that you want, who you’re having it with and how to keep yourself safe, the more empowered you are to make better choices. So that’s our role: providing the information in a way that is non-threatening, interactive, kind of sexy and fun and that pushes the boundaries a little bit.

The website talks a lot about Sex Positivity. Those are two words you don’t often see together – could you please explain that a little bit?

V: Sex positivity, you need to remember, comes up in opposition to acknowledging the fact that our culture tends to be kind of sex negative. There’s lots of examples, like slut-shaming, the law around female versus male nipples, the history of age of consent laws being different around homo versus hetero sex. For me sex positivity is about first of all acknowledging the diversity of sex, of gender, of sexuality, of identity and of practice and of not attaching a morality to practices. So practices should be ethical meaning that they should be involving two consenting adults; everything else is an expression of your desire. That’s why we do a lot of sex positive, celebratory art. It’s about creating a space and a culture where women can talk about their desire, their sex, their practices without shame.

So to follow on from that – how do you feel about the way the female body and female sexuality are portrayed in mainstream media? What do we see too much of? What do we not see enough of?

V: I don’t think we see enough diversity, still. I think obviously if we compare now with twenty years ago it’s better but it’s a really slow ascension, and  that’s around really basic stuff like racial diversity and body size. Ideas of conventional beauty are quite narrow, like I want to see some more fat bodies, I want to see a body like mine on TV, I want to see a body like my lover’s on TV. There’s also not a lot of representation about sex and sexuality being something that is this project you can engage with and work on and play with, it’s still this very simple narrative of “It’s natural, it just happens, you have a body and it wants certain things” when actually, what we know from our community is that sex is this wonderful thing that we keep figuring out and learning from each other.

M: Something else we offer to the community is a series of workshops that cover a range of sex and kink topics. Some of these we do in partnership with industry experts and some with community peer leaders. Often at these types of events we hear women talking about the ideas they have about their bodies and the diversity in the answers is kind of startling, from women who are extremely confident and know exactly what they enjoy and want to women who have difficulty relating to their own body in a positive and sexual way. Messaging around sex has traditionally been focused on reproduction. That’s concerning. That’s the stuff that we’re addressing by saying: know yourself, know your body and be confident. The only way to have the sex that you want to have is to communicate.

V: There’s just this shame around the body and the vagina, and this is with adults as well when we’ve done workshops on – yes, I’m talking about fisting again – when you look at the data we collected from fisting workshops, one of the main things people kept saying they did not know and were really happy to learn was anatomy. If you do a google image search for vulva anatomy, everything is around reproduction, and they kind of point out the clit and the vagina and labia but…showing you that this is labia doesn’t say “maybe give it a touch, you know, you can pull on them, lick them, this is going to feel good around here because the clitoral legs are around there and –

M: Because the clit is an iceberg! Ok, write that down!

Amazing! Ok, Interview aside, this has been so informative. I’m starting to realise how little I know about some things!

V: We learnt a new part of the vagina two days ago and we work in sexual health

M: Fourchette

V: F-o-u-r-c-h-e-t-t-e

Oh I see, it’s French, like most sexy things.

M: The more that you’re attached to your vagina and the more that you know about it, the more likely you are to look after it, the more likely you are to get regular pap smears or talk to you doctor frankly –

V: If you don’t have shame about your sex practices you will get better healthcare because you will be open and honest about it.

M: On the website you can find a list of LGBTQI friendly and kink friendly practices. Also we talk about what happens at a sexual health test so, especially for young people, we give a run down on it.

You guys are like the cool older sisters that give you all the sex advice you actually need that you just never got.

M: Oh yeah!

V:  Well, we try, thank you! Also, on the website you can order play packs, they get shipped to you for free, anonymously to any woman in NSW.

M: it’s for people who identify as women

V: Including trans and gender queer

M: In some of the workshops as well we talk about indirect communication, you know – leave the condoms on the bed and if you bring someone home, they already see that the condoms are on the bed, so indirectly you’re communicating that “I’m not going to fuck you unless you have a condom on.”

V: And there’s sexy ways of asking someone to put on a glove, there’s sexy ways to put on a glove. These are things to add to your sex to make it awesome.

If your hot little hands haven’t clicked the link already, you can meet Claude at www.iloveclaude.com and follow her on Facebook and Instagram to keep up to date with upcoming workshops and stunning work from local artists.