Sexuality Happens

Holy Guacamole has life been crazy lately!

My partner Q and I moved back to Colorado, a few months earlier than originally planned due to Q’s new job, and it is fucking fantabulous…at least the six days I was able to spend there before I headed out of Providence, RI to speak at the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health (on Ethical Pornography), and now at Brown University (On Body Positivity and Autonomy as Sexual Freedom and then with Megan Andelloux on Being a Sex Educator in the Real World). I’m then back in Denver for about 48 hours, if that, before I head out to Portland to teach at KinkFest (Safer Sex for Kinksters, Poly and Kink, and Communication in a Kink Context). Then thank the mooses, I’m back for about 10 days before heading to Washington, DC to speak at Momentum (on Intersections of Identities and on 3 panels about ethics and blogging, feminism in the adult industry and public vs privacy in blogging) and Sugar (Sex positions for EVERYONE!). Phew.  Then it’s back to AZ twice in April for a class and Phoenix Pride, and then to San Diego for AASECT. Finally, I get to chill a bit in May, really get to re-settle into Colorado, work a little more on planning the wedding, etc.

In the midst of all this, I also had to help my mother put down our family cat of eleven years, the wonderful and caring Anastasia, who was a rescue cat from a dementia patient who was abusing her back in 2000. It was incredibly tough, especially with all of the emotions running high still from the move, some of the body pain I’m dealing with, and then traipsing across the country…

Anyways, I’ll try to be better about putting more posts up here, and you can also check out thoughts, Q and A, upcoming workshops and more on ShannaKatz.com.

-Essin’ Em

I just got back from Las Vegas on Sunday night, very late. I’d been gone for five very long days.

When I got home, Q had left that morning. Because she’s awesome, she’s facilitating this amazing social justice leadership retreat up in Prescott all week, and won’t be back until Saturday night. The apartment felt so empty without her, the cats all crowding around me for attention that they hadn’t gotten all day, demanding pets and love. All I wanted was to curl up in bed with her arms around me, having been apart almost a week already.

I travel a fair amount, but with my disability and relationship, I try to keep it down to less than a week a month. When it’s longer, I try to come home in the middle for at least a night so that we can regroup and reconnect. This almost two week period is the longest amount of time that we haven’t slept together in almost a year and a half, and shockingly to me, it’s harder than I thought. I was such an independent person for so long, rarely spending the night or letting others spend the night, that it seems odd to me that just a few days apart from my partner makes me feel weird and lonely. But if I’m honest with myself, which I try to be, it does. It bothers me. I feel lonely in bed without her pressed up against me, or her heavy breathing in my ear.

I never expected to be in a mostly monogamous, long term relationship. When I pictured my future, it was never a part of it. Now, I’m incredibly happy to be in one now, with such an amazing person, but it certainly goes to show how much you never know, and how different the future may be than what you expect it to be.

7 Days down and 4.5 more to go until I have someone to hug and cuddle with, someone else to cook for, someone to laugh at my jokes and swat my butt while I’m cooking. I never thought I would miss that, because I never had it to begin with…but now that Q is such a huge part of my life, the space that is there when she is gone is so much more noticable than I ever would have thought.

-Essin’ Em

Essin' Em at the AVNs

Check me out at the AVN awards, wearing a sassy blue dress (my first ever One-Strap Dress), and the awesome 3-D glasses for the 3-D segment of the awards. Yep, I’m that cool.

Like last year, lots of queer and sex positive movies were nominated for the awards, including CrashPadSeries.com for best alternative website, Courtney Trouble’s Seven Minutes in Heaven for Pro-Am, Dangerous Curves for best niche movie (starring April Flores, directed by Carlos Batts), Good Releasing for best company, Jamye Waxman’s Sex Positions for Couples, etc. None of them won, sadly (although Good Vibrations and Babeland did win the two categories that Fascinations was nominated for…if we had to lose, what great companies to lose to!). JeJoue won both best small toy company and best toy for women with the JeJoue G-Ki.

Also, I got an Njoy Eleven. Get ready for my entire life to change. Well, I mean, at least the sexual part and art collector part of it. I also now have a La Palma harness from Spareparts to try, which I am super excited about, and a sample of one of Buck Angel’s new AWESOME glass toys! I can’t wait for his whole line to come out.

Smitten Kitten threw a fabulous party on Thursday night, and I am incredibly grateful to them. In this field, it can be extremely hard to be a sex positive person, particularly since many of us are the only people in the industry in our area. We are often alone in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Wisconsin, LA, or wherever it is we happen to be. Outside of San Francisco and New York, there are not many groupings of sex educators, sex positive toy store owners, etc. However, attending this party was like coming home, meeting all sorts of other awesome people in the field, sharing triumphs and tribulations, asking questions that related to our own ethical views of certain toy lines, talking about the latest this, and the most interesting that. My hat goes off to Smitten Kitten for organizing such a great event (and with such delicious vegetarian and organic food/drink options to boot!) and helping to connect sex positive people in the adult/sex industry in a way that rarely has happened before. Plus, their crew is awesome.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m straddling the mainstream world and the sex positive world, and I don’t quite fit either. Where I work is sex positive, but we also have 16 stores and a website, so we do things very differently than a small company with just one or two stores. On my own, I am as sex positive as I can possibly be, but when I’m seen as part of Fascinations, I feel like I’m sometimes shunned from the sex positive community for having chosen to work with a more mainstream company, and that the literally dozens of free classes we offer, sex educators we employe, products we choose to carry (and not carry) don’t even matter, because it’s not my own store, or a well know store in the sex positive world. It’s tough. I felt that same way working for HotMoviesForHer, because at the time, few people were ok with the fact that many women DO like porn, and like more than just super touchy feely couples porn at that. I’m always feeling a little like a black sheep…but at least black is my favorite color, and I think sheep are cute. I do look forward to moving back to Colorado for many reasons, and one is being closer to other sex positive people in the adult industry, and the folks at the Denver SK are awesome.

That’s it for now…I’ll try to get back to posting more regularly from now on.

-Essin’ Em

It’s that time of year again, where I’m heading to Las Vegas for the AEE/ANE shows and the AVN awards (think “Oscars of Porn”).

This year, it’s a little tough. I’m heading to Vegas today through Sunday afternoon. Q heads up to this awesome social justice-y leadership program she’s helping to facilitate on Sunday morning…and will be gone for a full week. Then once Q gets back, we have a week together before I’m off to do classes and house hunting in Denver, and then I get back the day before Q heads to Minneapolis for Creating Change.  Usually I’m so good about planning my travel, and keeping it to less than a week per month, but these four weeks, both of us are travelling twice. I mean, I guess it is kind of good that we alternate, so that we don’t have to find a cat sitter…but on the other hand, that’s the most time apart that we’ve spent in a while, which is tough.

But here’s to Vegas, queer porn stars, sex educators, new sex toys, sex positive people, networking, seeing old friends, making new ones, and having a great time!

-Essin’ Em

Last week, I went with Q to visit her family in New York.

I’m nervous around her family. Why? Because I want them to like me so much. I want to fit in. I want to be the perfect daughter in law. I want everything to be so perfect, so right…

Because my family is so dysfunctional. My mother and sister apparently had a conversation about how my mother didn’t want to call me or email me to wish me happy birthday on my birthday. And then my aunt called this week, trying to convince me to convince my mother to sell her house and get baratric surgery, and yada yada…although she neglected to tell me that her partner was having another round of surgery for her breast cancer. Yeah. That’s how my family works. There are only a few of us (5? 6?) left in the US, but we’re all crazy. And so I wanted so bad to fit in with Q’s family.

They were so warm and welcoming. They had holiday gifts for me and even threw a little birthday/holiday dinner. Her mother made these AMAZING stuffed mushrooms and artichokes (I’d never had stuffed mushrooms before — they are so freaking tasty), and her Nana took us to lunch one day, and her aunts were so sweet. It was like having the holiday experiences that I’d always wanted to have, and that my family never had.

Family is what you make of it. You are born into a family, and while they are always your family in some ways, your family is chosen. My friends are my chosen family and Q and my kitties are my family, and now, hopefully, I’ll be gaining another type of family.

-Essin’ Em

I know 25 isn’t supposed to be a big deal…but I’m sorry, turning a quarter of a century seems like a bigger deal to me than some arbitrary drinking age, or hitting the thirties. I mean, it sounds pretty epic, just saying. Plus! I can finally rent a car without having to pay the extra under age driver fee, and hopefully my insurance will go down next time around. Seems like a pretty good year to me.

I’m off to New York tonight, so I’ll be a busy be all weekend. Thanks in advance for any birthday wishes you may have…and if you happen to be feining to buy me something…for my birthday or channukah or just because, here are some wishlists:
My Amazon Wishlist

My JT’s Stockroom Wishlist

My Extreme Restraints Wishlist

However, just having you be loyal readers and wonderful people in the world is a huge gift to me, and I thank you for it.

Happy Birthday to me!

-Essin’ Em

I am currently in Vegas for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality annual conference.

It’s always so interesting to me when I come to these things how “different” I am. I mean, there are very few people here with tattoos, most are sex therapists, marriage/family therapists, or college professors (now, I’d LOVE to teach at a college, but I’m not there yet). Very few people here teach direct to adults or college students outside of a classroom setting. Very few people teach directly about pleasure and how to improve sexual skills. Very people people know much about kink play and/or how to talk about it.

Now, this is not to say that other forms of sex education aren’t important. The more types of sex ed and ways to reach people about learning about sexuality, the better. However, at these events, the reactions I get when people find out what I do makes me feel more alienated” and that I’m not “enough,” not a “real sex educator. I don’t know how Charlie Glickman does it.

Add to that the technology aspect. I was told my live tweeting of the presentations (and my reactions to said presentations) made people uncomfortable, that people thought I was breaking the confidentiality (don’t share participants names/identify info) agreement. Why people assumed I was doing that (versus no one else in the room), I have no idea. I’ve tweeted at Sex 2.0 2009, Sex 2.0 2010, AASECT 2010, all with no issues. But here, it makes me even more an outsider, someone who doesn’t fit in the community. I ended up feeling incredibly attacked the way that it was framed, and wound up spending the latter half of the last day in tears, missing the last plenary as I tried to collect myself.

What makes someone a good sex educator? What makes someone a “real” sex educator? What makes someone a sex professional? And who is anyone to make that distinction.

I love my work. I love changing people’s lives. I love watching people’s eyes light up during my classes, seeing break-throughs during my sex coaching, and getting emails of thanks, or those seeking advice. I will not apologize for the type of work I do, or the fact that I use technology to reach out to even more people. However, maybe this is a sign that I don’t belong in these associations or societies, if I am made to feel less than simply because of the technology provided to me that I choose to use, or because of the type of education I choose to provide.

I am a sex educator, almost every moment of every day. However, here in Sin City, as I sit outside trying to collect myself, I feel small. I feel like an outcast. I feel like a black sheep. It’s grad school all over again. And I don’t know if it is healthy for me to continue to place myself in such situations.

-Essin’ Em

This picture is from last weekend’s RACK Room party. I went with my moose Evey…she as a good conscience, me as a bad conscience. I’m sure you can imaging the devilish and angelic outfits that we each rocked out in. There will hopefully be a picture of the two of us at some point, once I can find out who was taking those pictures.

But for now, enjoy my horns…and not much else!

Happy Half Nekkid Thursday!

-Essin’ Em

I’m home, I’m alive, I had fun in Colorado and absotively posolutely cannot wait to move back to the Denver area next spring with Q. If you hear for any social justice oriented, non-profit and/or higher ed jobs in the area that would fit someone with a Master’s of Social Work and experience in all of the above, please let me know.

In other news, I can totally feel myself getting sick. So with that, I’m going to guzzle some off brand Emergen-C, drink a boat load or two of tea, and crawl into bed with a box of tissues. Wish my moose was here to make me some yummy soup…luckily, I at least have Q who made me truffle mac and cheese with capers.

More posts (particularly more interesting ones) to come!

-Essin’ Em

As I’m getting to see my favorite Moose tomorrow, also known as Evey, I thought I’d post a picture of the two of us, just to give you some ideas of what craziness is going to go down tomorrow night at the RACK Room’s Skull FuK (Fetish und Kink) party. Evey is going as an angel, and I a devil, as good conscious and bad conscious. 

Happy Half Nekkid Thursday all!

-Essin’ Em