via Sex With Emily on Sirius XM
With the Black Lives Matter movement sweeping across the country and around the globe, there has been a lot of information floating around on how to get involved and make a difference. One way to get involved by advocating for and patronizing black-owned businesses.
We here at SWE want to lend our support to black sex educators and coaches, as well as black-owned sex and intimacy shops.
You may not know this, but the sex education space has been dominated by white sexologists. This imbalance is nothing new, as evidenced by this article from five years ago. So many incredible sex coaches and educators are being overlooked because of implicit racial bias. Take a look at this eloquent explanation from the Women of Color Sexual Health Network’s (WOCSHN) response to the editors of a book called Secrets of the Sex Masters, which was comprised of all white authors:
Yes, for many of us, our bodies of Color do experience sex and pleasure differently. Our bodies are not solely genes and biology, but also the histories written on them and the myriad ways we have to navigate the world differently than White people, particularly for those of us who are racially Black and marked immediately as “Other.”
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Some of us never even get the opportunity to really experience sex or sexual pleasure because we do not live long enough. Some of us carry shame about our bodies just by virtue of their color or the racialized traits they carry, which impacts how much pleasure we think we are even worthy of. That’s why any conversation about sexuality is also about race.
Black and BIPOC sex coaches, educators and therapists have a part to play in a global conversation about sex. As aptly stated by the WOCSHN,
“POC can speak to every issue in the spectrum of sexuality and beyond. The beauty of what many of us POC do is that we weave all these stories together and acknowledge they are actually inseparable.”
We wanted to take this time to point out some amazing resources that you should be aware of in the sex ed and intimacy space. Click on the links below and explore!
BLACK-OWNED SEX AND INTIMACY SHOPS