THE PILLOW BLOG

 

Cookie Consent
Beate Absalon Beate Absalon

Cookie Consent

Guys! We’re all working hard to foster a culture of consent by reminding each other—in workshops and beyond—that we don’t take physical affection for granted; that we don’t simply assume what the other person wants; that we respect personal boundaries and support one another in self-determinedly figuring out, through collaborative processes, what naughty things we’d like to get up to together; that we can truly let ourselves go, above all, when we create safe spaces of trust; that a “no” isn’t a drama but a valuable guide for navigating the love zone, and so on and so forth. This is all a massive undertaking—indeed, a humanistic educational project, if you will—because there’s much more at stake here than merely securing legal, contract-like protections when becoming intimate with one another to shield oneself from accusations of sexual assault. Rather, this is about deconstructing paternalistic structures and forging new relationships with oneself and the world! It’s about learning to respect ourselves, to respect others…

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Sex /vs./&/?/ Violence. An Attempt at Conceptual Delimitation Through Distinction
Beate Absalon Beate Absalon

Sex /vs./&/?/ Violence. An Attempt at Conceptual Delimitation Through Distinction

“What is sex?” we asked during a discussion session at Xplore. Anna Natt and Matís invited us to break down this impossible question into more specific parts: “How do you use the word ‘sex’?”, “How do you have sex?”, and “How do you know you’ve had sex?” One participant explained that he was attending this discussion group because he thought it was a good idea to hear, at a sex-positive event, what “sex” actually means to the participants here. Community = shared language. Makes sense. But after the first round, it becomes clear that “sex” means something different to everyone. And yet it would be too easy to stop at private language and pseudo-enlightened platitudes like “Everyone sees it differently, everyone is right, no one is right. Namaste.” Surely we can find good arguments for common ground to agree on convincing definitions. The answers to the questions vary between references to specific…

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