1/4: The Birth of YES

There is a question that has captured me about Eros. Perhaps it’s been there my whole life, waiting. I equate its birth with a lunar eclipse and a workshop for women on how to ejaculate that happened about nine years ago. I know when I write about the ejaculation workshop some sort of chemical/physical sexual response will rise within you. It does for me too. I almost want to fake the story, to write the “beginning” differently. But this is the way it is … sex is the beginning of Recreating Eros but it is just the beginning and somehow to follow the thread of the question I want to pursue we – as a culture – need to go beyond the beginning, without losing it.

I wasn’t always so sure of this … that the question of Eros I’m interested in is about more than sex.

Nine years ago when those two events happened I definitely thought a revolution in Eros was all about better sexual relationships – with ourselves and with our sexual partner(s).

One cold, snowy night in January 2000 I sat for hours on a swing under an enormous old Oak tree watching a lunar eclipse for the first time. Something in that process brought forth an inner image of something more that was possible – could I sound more vague?! It had to do with love and wholeness and growth. It was felt-sense, something I "saw" with my heart and my gut - not a logical vision. Strangely though, the vision was clear.

I had no idea what had happened, only that I felt inspired, alive and suddenly certain, at a very uncertain time in my life that I needed to pursue this felt-sense. That pursuing it was perhaps the most important thing for me to do. I had no idea what this meant, practically speaking, in my every day life of work, children to raise, laundry, dishes … a marriage that I had been trying to salvage for some years with no success.

Five months of pain and ripping apart later, and paradoxically with a new sense of erotic tension flowing through me, a friend suggested I attend a cool new workshop for women in which another woman would teach us, through instruction and live demonstration, how to find our g-spot. I signed up … nervous and apprehensive.

I emerged filled with excitement and eagerness to go home, pull out the hand mirror and practice. There was something else that emerged within me out of that session that surprised me more than what I had learned about my own body: a sort of activist voice. I say ‘sort of’ because I had never felt this kind of passionate anger in this way. It was an entirely new experience for me and I really wasn’t sure how to respond to it.

I tried to describe it to my girlfriends …

“Why don’t we know these things about our bodies? I came from a family who spoke openly and positively about sex and our body, which is pretty unusual, and I still didn’t know this stuff about the anatomy of my vagina. Hell, when I told my gynecologist about the workshop, he didn’t seem to know about the g-spot either! Why does speaking about our clitoral organ feel like either dirty porn or a cold, clinical analysis? Something’s wrong here!”

Friends invited more friends into the discussion. Soon I was hosting workshops which we called Reclaiming Venus. In my living room, art centers, holistic health centers, and remote country church parlors I was talking to women about their relationship with their sexuality … their vagina, their sexual feelings and beliefs, the seasonal fluctuations of hormones that run through them. Reclaiming Venus became a call for recrafting YES: Your Erotic Story.

After hundreds of YES conversations with women through workshops, a Reclaiming Venus website and a local radio show, I was sure I'd tapped into the expression of the passion stirring in me and found the way to express it.

"I wanted a perfect ending. But now I've learned the hard way that Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next."

~ Gilda Radner