Workshop on Sexuality. Part I
Sexuality within a committed relationship works differently than casual hook-up sexuality. This distinction can help you address relationship issues and avoid frustration if you expect that, after a trip to IKEA with your spouse, things in bed should be just as passionate as they are with a mysterious guy you picked up at a jazz bar. Similarly, teenage sexuality works differently than adult sexuality. This distinction helps you adapt your sex education knowledge to this new phase of life and avoid stress when you expect body parts to become erect and lubricated just as easily as they did in your teenage years.
At first glance, both distinctions seem self-evident. Of course, heterosexuality works differently from queersexuality. But the more I observe and reflect, the more I notice how rarely people actually speak of“sexualities”—in the plural. Most often, universal statements are made that lump together different sexualities with their very distinct characteristics. What leads many to sex or couples therapy is that adults orient themselves toward the definitions of sex from their youth, because those are the universally accepted criteria for “normal” sex—a seemingly inexhaustible supply of physical energy and arousing hormones, spontaneous trysts with no strings attached, taut skin,... —and convince themselves that something is wrong with them when their bodies can no longer keep up with these standards. And for those who set the sexual behavior of fresh infatuation and adventurous impulsiveness as the gold standard, the settling into calm and routine in long-term relationships appears as a deficiency and a problem.
It therefore makes sense to take stock and understand what kind of sexuality you are currently experiencing, to view it as equal to others, and to get to know its unique characteristics, challenges, and promises. Then you can shape and enjoy your love life in a way that is appropriate to your specific circumstances.
The same applies to the kind of sexuality encountered in workshops, which is distinct from and different from other forms of sexuality. However, I haven’t come across this phrased this way anywhere else: that there is such a thing as “workshop sexuality.”
Time to catch up.
What makes the "Sexuality" workshop unique?
Taking the workshop format seriously means understanding that sex-positive workshops are not simply neutral containers in which sexual topics are discussed. Just as every form inevitably influences the content, the “workshop” format shapes the content of “sex.” One could go even further and propose the following thesis: Sex in workshops becomes“workshopified” itself.
Workshops are educational spaces where knowledge and techniques are tested through trial and error and experienced firsthand. It is not, therefore, about one-sided indoctrination, but rather about entering and inhabiting open-ended spaces for experimentation and experience. Participants reflect on what happens during the course and take away different things from it. However, what is taken away cannot be directly transferred to sexual contexts outside the workshop. Perhaps one tries things with one’s partner that were exciting in the workshop, only to be surprised that they don’t work nearly as well as they did in the workshop.
According to a definition on Wikipedia, a “workshop [...] is an event in which a small group works intensively on a topic—usually practice-oriented—over a limited, compact period of time.” A workshop is structured. It follows a program and is divided into different program items or modules. Above all, however: a workshop ends. And it does so after just a few hours or days. This limited duration enables precisely what is one of the greatest potentials of workshops: Here, you can take risks! Here, you can do things completely differently! Here, for example, I can try out how it feels when others address me with “they/them.” Here, I can slip into role-plays with strangers with whom I have nothing to lose, even if it gets awkward, because we’ll never see each other again afterward. It’s about pushing boundaries, leaving familiar paths within a controlled framework. But when workshop content is carried over into long-term relationships or other settings, it automatically changes. Different stakes are at play. The new pronoun might unsettle the partner, or the role-playing might bring unconscious relationship dynamics to the surface that need to be processed in a completely different way afterward. But there’s no longer a facilitator or a group to keep up with and support that process.
This does not mean that attempts to apply workshop experiences to other areas of life should be avoided—quite the contrary. Workshop participants simply need to be better prepared for—or attuned to—the fact that the specific characteristics of each sphere must be taken into account. For example, workshop sexuality thrives on both collective endeavors and cooperative peer support among very specific people, while also being oriented toward neoliberal individualism.
The word itself suggests that a workshop is about work. It is a workshop where people tinker and get things done. In workshops, sex thus becomes something that can be worked on, repaired, and refined. This, too, holds immense potential, as it upends prevailing notions that sex should simply happen on its own, since it is primarily something “natural” that follows an inner drive. Workshops are thus part of an emancipatory project: we are not merely at the mercy of things; we can proactively shape them! This makes workshops a wonderful gem, but one that can just as easily turn out to be a stumbling block. For this empowerment-oriented approach could, for example, overlook all those equally valuable sexual experiences in which sex does something to you rather than you doing it. Experiences of surrender, of being swept away as if by a giant wave, who knows where. The approaches of skill, mastery, and improvement that dominate workshops don’t come close to these aspects—they might even hinder them. This goes hand in hand with a methodological individualism that workshops pursue. Within them, well-adjusted subjects act who have access to themselves and their experiences through various self-techniques: sharing rounds, processing, tuning in, exchanging, reflecting, making things transparent. By communicating desires, boundaries, and needs as clearly as possible. With this understanding of the subject, workshops turn sex into an optimistic project. An interesting school of queer theory, however, points out the shortcomings and dangers of such attempts at a “salvation-oriented reinvention of sex,” in which “a hidden consensus prevails that sexuality is, in its essence, less unsettling, less socially exhausting, less violent, and more respectful of ‘personality’ than it has been so far.” This quote comes from the theorist Leo Bersani, who coined the term “self-shattering” through sex, according to which the self, during sex as in other intoxicating experiences, dissolves in a sense. Workshop sexuality, on the other hand, only works with an intact self and ends where depersonalizing intimacy begins. After all, there has to be someone there who can confidently apply what is learned in workshops. But if you forget and lose yourself (which—depending on the situation—can be a creepy, yet also wonderfully exquisite and soothing experience), then you can no longer say where you currently are on the Wheel of Consent; whether you are now serving, taking, allowing, or receiving is then of absolutely no consequence.
This leads to the next distinctive feature of workshops, which are characterized by the fact that they are facilitated or led in an educational manner—and are thus also limited. Since workshops are not only more well-behaved but also safer spaces, they are primarily concerned with integrating sex with responsibility and consensual action. Workshop sexuality comes with its own norms, regulations, and rules.
You'll soon be able to read all about what this is and what it entails in Part II...
