Natty Love and U of G’s Cultural Diversity Office hosted a workshop for Black History Month on exploring Black joy and sexual pleasure
When it comes to sex education, we usually hear about the risks that come with being sexually active, such as STDs, accidental pregnancies, and the like, but rarely are we taught how to enjoy sex.
This is where sex educator, pleasure consultant, and pleasure activist Natty Love comes in. With eight years of experience in sexual health education, she regularly hosts workshops that focus on consent, sexual autonomy, pleasure, and eroticism. As a Black, queer, Caribbean woman, Love focuses her education on Black women and femmes and how they can prioritize their pleasure.
“When I started having partnered sex, it wasn’t what I was expecting. It was clear that it [was] not really about me, that [I was] just kind of there for someone else,” Love told The Ontarion. “I might as well [have been] a mannequin or some type of prop.”
This was unacceptable, said Love. However, it was only after experiencing “a form of touch that was transformative” that she began having conversations about the issue.
“I was like ‘wow, this should always be like this,’ and I made sure it was always like that moving forward. But it’s the conversations that I was having with people about it, particularly people who identify as women and femmes … and seeing that there’s so much similarity in the sense that ‘I’m not feeling pleasure’ or not even having the language and knowledge to be able to speak up about it.”
It was these experiences that motivated Love to provide safe spaces for people like her to discuss how to center their own pleasure.
On Feb. 9, Love hosted a virtual workshop on this subject with the Cultural Diversity Office (CDO) at the University of Guelph. It focused on the liberation of sexual pleasure through a trauma-informed, African, Caribbean, and Black lens. The event was organized as part of the Cultivating Black Joy theme for Black History Month.
“We wanted to explore joy in all its forms, including sexual pleasure,” said CDO Coordinator Alexis Charles about the event. “Conversations about pleasure and joy often don’t center Black women and femmes. There are a number of historical and societal reasons for this—but essentially, it is reinforced that either we aren’t worthy of joy or pleasure or that it should be put ‘on hold’ while we care for others.”
Love explained that oftentimes when there are barriers or blockages in personal pleasure, it is a result of trauma. So for this workshop, she focused on teaching participants to identify how trauma shows itself in the body and helping them move forward on their journey towards healing and pleasure.
While Love states that every person is built for pleasure, being told constantly and in a variety of ways that you are “unworthy” of it makes you start to believe it. This is the reasoning for Love’s focus on pleasure and trauma through a Black lens.
“[Regarding] the experiences of my ancestors who were enslaved … We were at one point in history considered property—cattle—so what did anyone care about us receiving pleasure?” said Love.
“There’s a principle from out of West Africa called ‘sankofa’ and it basically means ‘go back and get it,’ and [it means] in order for us to move forward, sometimes you need to look back.”
As such, Love also discusses using pleasure as a coping mechanism to help you contend with difficult experiences in your past.
Essentially, building up confidence and agency in your own pleasure is an important way to practice self-care alongside other methods.
During the workshop, Love taught participants how to practice sexual self-care through a number of activities, such as mindmapping exercises where you identify the factors that are holding you back from “living your best sexual life” and make a plan for letting them go. Another option is creating a joy jar where you can write out various sexual desires on paper and then, on days where you’re feeling in need of a pick-me-up, pull a random piece of paper out of the jar.
10 participants had the opportunity to try out these activities during the workshop, and if you’re interested, Natty encourages you to try them at home too to help you on your journey towards sexual fulfillment.
At the University of Guelph, the CDO offers the CORE Mentorship Program, a weekly discussion series with the Guelph Black Students’ Association, and Black History Month programming which can be found on gryphlife.uoguelph.ca/events.
A version of this article appeared in print in The Ontarion issue 192.3 on Feb. 24, 2022.
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