Sexuality, Sex and health

Great sex, it's no secret
It's all about changing our ideas about sexuality and starting to feel empowered.
BY Donna Duggan | Jun 04, 2008
Sexuality is simply the way you experience and express yourself as a sexual being.

According to Jacqueline Hellyer, for centuries many women have been struggling with their sexuality: “We’ve had the Madonna/whore mentality for so long – where you should be one or the other – that it’s really left women feeling confused.”

To get a better understanding of Hellyer’s work, I attend her “Luscious Woman” full-day, women-only workshop. The event offers the opportunity to “unleash the awesome power of your female sexuality”, which sounds new age and confronting, but I’m willing to keep an open mind.

At 8.30am I line up for registration with the other women who have chosen to part with $400 for the workshop. I’m surprised by how gorgeous they are. Surely they have nothing to unleash?

The 14 women range in age from mid-20s to mid-50s.

“Helping people get in touch with their sexuality and seeing it in a really positive way is my main focus,” Hellyer says, as she eases us into the day. “Many of the sexual problems that women in modern society have stem from the fact that we have a very narrow view of what sex is all about, and it’s not a particularly good view.

“Sex is an intrinsic part of our being. It’s as natural as eating food. However, society tries to compartmentalise the experience, to judge it as good or bad. It’s left a lot of people confused. No one really knows what they should or shouldn’t be doing.

Additionally, there’s not a lot of good information out there about how to optimise your sexual experience. My goal is to give people that information so they can experience sex as something that is life-enhancing and very, very enjoyable.”

Our first topic is a history lesson. “Prior to the patrilineal civilisation we live in today,” Hellyer says, “women were more empowered and free in how they expressed themselves sexually. When man set out to conquer the world and establish a more male-dominated religion, things changed. It’s now up to us to swing the pendulum back a bit and reclaim that sense of empowerment we once felt about our bodies and our sexuality.”

Next, we move on to biology, real biology. We see diagrams of how female arousal mechanically works and how large the clitoris actually is. Through illustrations we see that penis size really doesn’t matter; it’s how a man uses it.

WHAT’S “NORMAL”?

“The challenge for me is the way sex is viewed by society,” Hellyer says. “Because of that view, people may avoid my type of work because they expect it to be about sex toys and Tantric sex techniques. Or they think they couldn’t possibly do something like that because they don’t feel good about sex or because it’s too confronting.”

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