“There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language. There are dirty names for every female part of her body and for every way of touching her. Fucking her is the dirtiest, though it may not be as dirty as she herself is. Her genitals are dirty in the literal meaning: stink and blood and urine and mucous and slime. Her genitals are also dirty in the metaphoric sense: She is reviled as filthy, obscene, in religion, pornography, philosophy, and in most literature and art and psychology.” ― Andrea Dworkin
For generations our bodies and desires have been constructed as filthy and obscene through religion, law, medicine, empire and the market. We do not all inherit the same rules, nor are we punished in the same ways. Some bodies are hypersexualised, some desexualised, some fetishised, some forgotten altogether. Shame is not distributed equally, but it still finds its way into all of our lives.
Patriarchy doesn't only shape what happens to our bodies. It shapes what we believe we are allowed to want, enjoy and ask for. It enters our bedrooms, our relationships and our most intimate understandings of ourselves.
What does it mean to want, feel and be touched when we have been taught to distrust our own wanting? And how do we tell the difference between desire that is ours and desire that was handed to us?
Join us for an evening of honest, unhurried conversation about desire, shame and the bodies we live in.We will explore the politics of pleasure and consider what becomes possible when we refuse the shame that has been attached to female desire and begin to imagine pleasure on our own terms.