Strippers and Sages

Katherine Rowland, former publisher and executive director of Guernica Magazine, recently published The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution. In it, Katherine investigates everything from big pharma’s attempts to pathologize low female libido to the neoliberal underpinnings of the sexual self-help industry, arguing that women should take inequality in the bedroom as seriously as we take it in the workplace. (Amen!) It's a phenomenal book that unpacks the various social, scientific, and historical influences that have affected women’s relationship to pleasure and surveys the current landscape. Katherine holds a Masters in socio-medical sciences from Columbia University, where she was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research fellow in medical anthropology. Her writing on public health, cultural criticism, and utopias has been published in Nature, Outside, Aeon, the Guardian, Guernica, and Psychology Today, among other outlets.

Katherine is brilliant and generous, and her book is incredibly well-researched and provocative. It will make you rethink your relationship to pleasure and how it intersects with other areas of your life. Head over to Strippers and Sages for additional resources and information.  

Also, if you like talking about sex, reach out to us to be part of our upcoming Street Talks! series - real people getting real about sex. E-mail [email protected]. 

A quick teaser to you know about some of the remarkable conversations we'll be releasing over the next few weeks! Upcoming guests include activist, organizer, and queer mama Leila Raven of Decrim NY talking about abolitionism and decriminalizing sex work; author and medical anthropologist Katherine Rowland talking about her new book The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution; writer and interdisciplinary artist Ayden LeRoux talking about the aesthetics and fragility of the body and designing intimate experiences for one with the  performance group Odyssey Works; Pakistani artist Misha Japanwala talking about gender based violence, sexuality, and feminism in Pakistan and her work casting the female body into sculptural garments; and performance artist Ze Royale talking about subjectivity, spanking, neuro-porn, and fucking the system. It's a fantastic season, so stay tuned! 

In this episode, I speak with B.K. Chan about how rejection resilience enables us to live more courageous and authentic lives. In the last episode of Strippers and Sages, Jamila Reddy spoke about the importance of being in touch with and brave enough to pursue our desires. That bravery involves being willing to face rejection ourselves as well as to reject others in order to remain in our truth. Rejection resilience is an essential yet ofter overlooked part of the consent conversation, and B.K. Chan has much wisdom to offer on the topic.

B.K. Chan is an award-winning sex and emotional literacy educator in Toronto, Canada, with 20+ years of experience. Trained in Creative Facilitation, Productive Thinking, and Non-Violent Communication, BK's favourite ways to learn and teach are through stories, metaphors, diagrams, and things that make people laugh. Above all, BK is dedicated to having difficult conversations that are real, transformative, and kind. In 2014, BK was named "Service Provider of the Year" by Planned Parenthood of Toronto for her work in sexual health and was honoured in 2017 as one of 30 Chinese Canadian women of distinction in Ontario. BK is currently working on a series of tiny books and videos about feelings and justice. Her online course on Emotional Intelligence was released in 2018 and is widely available to the public. Follow her work at http://www.fluidexchange.org/. 

 Ever wondered what it's like to have sex in the Orgy Dome at Burning Man? Jamila shares about their delicious sexcapade on the playa. Enjoy!

Jamila (she/they) is a dear friend who never ceases to inspire me. In this very personal and provocative conversation, Jamila talks about re-imagining intimacy, expanding their erotic horizons through gender-fluidity, navigating fear, and finding their "inner daddy". They share their experience dancing through grief and cultivating joy in difficult times, an art they learned while serving as their father's death doula only months after their sister's sudden passing. Jamila is a trailblazer in intentional lifestyle design and has much to teach us about being in authentic relationship with ourselves and others.

A writer, self-empowerment coach, and life-enthusiast, they are on a mission to help people manifest their dreams. Jamila is the creator of Make It Happen, an online course for creative, compassionate people who want to be more powerful, purposeful, and spend more time doing what they love. Jamila's podcast, Deliberate and Doing it Afraid, features personal stories from the journey to their best life and the lessons that come from it. Jamila's work has appeared on TedX, Greatist, The Body is Not An Apology, and Shine. Learn more at jamilareddy.me.

In this rich conversation, Eli talks about how spending time in the wilderness helps adolescent boys hone their inner voice, an essential tool when it comes to resisting and reprograming the toxic messages they receive from society around sex and masculinity.  Eli shares vulnerably about his own experience as an adolescent boy (including his stint as Stifler's little brother in the film American Pie, which in my opinion makes him especially equipped to wax poetic on how culture programs young men to think about sexuality). A talented poet, Eli shares his original poetry at the end of the episode. 

Eli Marienthal is the co-director of Back to Earth and the founding faculty of W.I.L.D., a wilderness guiding, outdoor education organization that works with adolescence to develop practices of personal development and self-care through a culture of peacemaking and thanksgiving. He is trained through The Tracking Project in Corrales, New Mexico, a non-profit led by John Stokes devoted to peacemaking, nature awareness and cross cultural respect. Eli holds masters degrees from Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied international development, agriculture, and the politics of humanitarianism. Eli is also a poet, dancer, songwriter and spoken-word performer. He was a first generation Youth Speaks poet, and was the youngest member of a winning Brave New Voices National Slam Team, as well as the youngest to win the Bay Area Slam. 

Check out Eli's work with adolescents in the wilderness here: www.backtoearth.org

In this rich and expansive conversation, we talk about sound and consciousness, music and mysticism, judicious listening, psychedelic, and the sensuality of the soul. It's a highly rewarding listen that features original music with my dear friend, a Colombian musician and composer from Colombia who began playing the guitar at age 9 and has been studying the Indian Sarod for over a decade in Kolkata with Tejendra Majumdar and in the USA with Alam Khan. Her former gurus include maestro Krishna Bhatt and Sougata Roy Chowdhury. In 2009, she was nominated for a Grammy for best world music album in collaboration with the Hindustani slide guitar maestro Debashish Bhattacharya. She performs around the world and has composed music for film, theater, and commercials. She lives between New York City and Kolkata, India.

 With Appearances at the Bioneers and the IONS conferences, Jewel Love is deeply committed to leading new conversations surrounding healthy manhood and joining ancient conversations about sacred masculinity. As the founder of Black Executive Men and Urban Healers, Jewel specializes in creating prosocial male-identity brands. As a licensed psychotherapist in California, he uses a person-centered approach to help black men in corporate America find inner peace. Dubbed the Golden Rhinos, his therapeutic origination Black Executive Men has a mission to lead the charge for healthy manhood. This includes practices for optimal mental health and professionals responsible corporate leadership. Through Urban Healers, he harness men's authenticity, vulnerability, and spirituality in order to transform entire cities into oasis's of joy and connection.

This is part two of my conversation with the illustrious Eve Lady Apples Bradford. Eve discusses the Erotic Basis of Being as a philosophy and sheds historical light on how we arrived at our current state of sexual affairs. It's a conversation not to be missed.  

Eve Bradford is an educator, artist and oracular practitioner working at the intersections of art, activism and magic to create work primarily intended to call upon the true capacity of our most authentic selves in service of full-spectrum health, embodiment, expression and ecstasy.

Eve has been producing events, curating content, facilitating community ceremony, creating ritual theater and generally contributing to the evolution of west coast underground culture for the last 15 years. With Isis Indriya, she is the co-founder of Living Village Culture and The Compass at LIB. She graduated from the Gallatin Division of NYU with an independently designed BA in Art Making and Cultural Process, and from California College of the Arts with an MFA in Creative Writing. She published her book Instructions to a Young Magician (from herself).

After a series of profound life-changing events in 2017, Eve began training intensively and stepped into being both a teacher and staff member within the Mogadao Institute, an original lineage of qigong, depth sexuality, martial arts, meditation and Post-Daoist philosophy created by her mentor Zhen Dao. She is also a core player in Zhen’s SACRA Immanence Theater, a radical troupe dedicated to theater as the apotheosis of the work of Mogadao.

To learn more about her work and her incredible offerings, including her upcoming course Reclaiming Eros: Sex as Medicine, Art, Activism & Prayer, visit originalskin.org.

Eve Bradford is an educator, artist and oracular practitioner working at the intersections of art, activism and magic to create work primarily intended to call upon the true capacity of our most authentic selves in service of full-spectrum health, embodiment, expression and ecstasy.

Eve has been producing events, curating content, facilitating community ceremony, creating ritual theater and generally contributing to the evolution of west coast underground culture for the last 15 years. With Isis Indriya, she is the co-founder of Living Village Culture and The Compass at LIB. She graduated from the Gallatin Division of NYU with an independently designed BA in Art Making and Cultural Process, and from California College of the Arts with an MFA in Creative Writing. She published her book Instructions to a Young Magician (from herself).

After a series of profound life-changing events in 2017, Eve began training intensively and stepped into being both a teacher and staff member within the Mogadao Institute, an original lineage of qigong, depth sexuality, martial arts, meditation and Post-Daoist philosophy created by her mentor Zhen Dao. She is also a core player in Zhen’s SACRA Immanence Theater, a radical troupe dedicated to theater as the apotheosis of the work of Mogadao.

To learn more about her work and her incredible offerings, including her upcoming course Reclaiming Eros: Sex as Medicine, Art, Activism & Prayer, visit originalskin.org.