Call Me They

A Galaxy of Gender: On Being GenderFull, Style as Expression and Activism, and Asking How To Be Better To Yourself

Talk highlights: the political event that thrust AC into the activism spotlight, sustainability in how we show up online and in the work we do, how gender isn’t flat and why we’re orbiting together, what to do when we mess up someone’s pronouns or gender, what it means be gender euphoric, the way femmephobia shows up for so many of us, and investigating the ways we love.

Rafaella and Dalychia

Opening to Pleasure, Opening to Pain: How Boundaries, Self-Love Rituals, and Expanding Our Understanding of Pleasure are Tools of Resistance

Talk highlights: Dalychia & Rafaella’s year of orgasmic living, non-sexual orgasmic cycles in our life, boundaries and resentment, magic and how self-touch can bring us closer to our wisdom and authentic selves, the accessibility of self-care, disrupting cycles of abuse and harm in communities, communal trauma, creating a life-long pleasure timeline.

Trauma Aware Care,
Trauma Counsellor

Belonging, Safety, and Boundaries: Understanding the Importance of Safety and Belonging in Connecting With and Increasing Our Access to Healing and Pleasur

Talk highlights: turning towards our coping mechanisms and the ways we’ve survived with compassion, finding yes and no in our bodies, self-forgiveness for survivors, rejecting the monster narrative around abuse and sexual violence, healing as a collective responsibility, and pleasure as the glue that holds it all together

Disability After Dark

Sexual Agency and Expression: The Power of Working with Professionals to Get Your Sexual Needs Met and What Accessible Sex Could Look Like

Talk highlights: agency and how unique it is, unpacking the stories we have about working with professionals, how Andrew came out to his mom, what would happen if we centered and PAID disabled folks for their wisdom and experiences, performing different versions of ourselves to get needs met, the emotional realities of disability, internalized ableism, and prioritizing our pleasure as an act of agency.

Therapist, Polyamory Expert

Polyamorous Parenting, Exploring Consent in Relationships, and Making Mental Health More Accessible (Plus, Orgasmic Ellipticals)

Talk highlights: validating feelings for kids and adults, planning so people can opt-in to conversations and invitations, becoming trauma-informed in our intimate relationships, allowing for mistakes in community, break-ups and grief when we’re parenting kids, and what the kids of polyamorous parents complain about.

Dana Sturtevant & Hilary Kinavey

Pleasure is a Part of Normal Eating: Standing Our Ground, Orienting Towards Pleasure, and Coming Home to Our Bodies Inside of Diet Culture

Talk highlights: the ways we may be policing our pleasure without realizing it, how our relationship to food impacts and informs our relationship to sex, how developing body trust means healing our relationship with scarcity and pleasure, permission to ask for what you want, what it means to feel satisfied, the importance of C-level work (versus A+ work) and rejecting perfection, letting ourselves be seen in the messiness, and why we can’t do this work without community.

SexEd in Color

Reclaiming Sexy: Making Sexy Work For You Inside of Chronic Pain, Big Emotions, and Rejection (Plus, Community Only Words

Talk highlights: learning about intimacy from pop culture, changing our relationship with sexy and how emotions like anger can be part of what it means to be sexy, the importance of uplifting survivors, chronic pain and a new way to look at boundaries, deciding whether to stick with something or abandon it, reframing rejection and challenging our stories of self-worth, and why Cameron sees “intersectional” as a community-only word.  

Eating Disorder Specialist, Therapist

Becoming Fluent in the Language of Our Satisfaction: How Eating Disorders are a Wise Response to a Disordered Culture, Why Rebellion is a Move Towards Freedom, and Fuck You Frie

Talk highlights: why our bodies are not problems to be solved, the healthy impulse inside our coping mechanisms, how we can make changes without rejecting the importance of where we are now, the ways we block nourishment, shifting our understanding of eating disorder recovery, and navigating relationships when our loved ones aren’t on the same path. (Come bask in Carmen’s compassion!)

Co-Authors, "Burnout"

Pleasure As the Ultimate Fuck You: Addressing Overwhelm, Stress, and Burnout in a Game That’s Rigge

Talk highlights: emotional & invisible labor, teaching the body how to complete the stress response cycle and unlearn feelings of helplessness, scientifically proven methods of processing stress, finding meaning beyond ourselves as a source of survival, and redefining wellness. (Plus, Disney songs!)

Prof of Psychology and Sexuality Studies

Tackling the Taboo: Why the Moral Panic Around Sex Education, Porn, Sex Work, and Sex Addiction Cuts Us Off From Pleasure and Sexual Expressio

Talk highlights: how Eric uses humor to talk about sensitive topics, the ways we confuse $exual health with morality, Christian ethics and how they’ve infused so much of what we believe about bodies and pleasure, how there’s no manual for pleasure – it’s all about communication and curiosity, destigmatizing $ex work and STIs, confronting masculinity and toxic gender roles, and opening ourselves up to the countless paths to pleasure.

Nalgona Positivity Pride
 

White Pleasure and Moralizing Food: Ethically Engaging in Self-Care, Why Superfoods are Destroying Indigenous Communities, and the Importance of Setting Boundaries with Famil

Talk highlights: the realities that pleasure and rest are hard, how colonial gender and religious practices robbed women of their sexuality, how difficult it is to experience pleasure when you continuously experience disparity and oppression, the origins of “you are what you eat”, the silence around eating disorders especially in immigrant families, and creating sanctuary with self-dates.

Writer, Artist, Sanctuary Creator

Creating Sanctuary to Unearth Our Desires, Find Pleasure Inside the Mess, and Trust Our Unhealed Truth

Talk highlights: being tender about the ways we survive, the unknown as a source of connection, gaslighting our own experiences and truths, why Isabel doesn’t want to be healed inside of broken systems, the performance of desire, choosing not to abandon ourselves, the power of imagination, and finding pleasure inside of chronic pain.

Author, Consent Expert, Cultural Critic

Screw Empowerment, We Want Power: Why Trusting Victims, Teaching Pleasure in Schools, and Centering Survivors Would Topple the System

Talk highlights: how we all have a right to expect that intimacy is good for us and on our terms, what really happens when we leave pleasure and consent out of the conversation, why Jaclyn can’t stop saying horseshit, what faux-powerment is and how we can stop supporting it, what we never talk about when we talk about sexual assault survivors, and how rape culture harms men and boys and keeps them from their pleasure, too.

Fat Activist, "Landwhale" Author

Pleasure is a Forbidden Fruit: How Fatphobia Affects Every One of Us, Why Dumplin’ is Magic, and the Importance of Healing Thru Relationship

Talk highlights: the importance of representation and nuance in pop culture, why it’s not just on Jes to heal her relationship with her body, the gradual and often painful process of figuring out who we are, being mindful of who we unpack our privilege with and why it matters, speaking our shame and feeling into those icky places shame lives, and the role that Jes realized play wasn’t playing in her life and why silliness in sex is so fun. 

"Trauma Stewardship" & "Age of Overwhelm"

Less of What Erodes Us and More of What Sustains Us: Creating Exquisite Capacity for Presence to Reduce Harm and Increase Our Access to Pleasur

Talk highlights: the continuum of overwhelm, how we can have a relationship with overwhelm instead of resisting and fighting it, balancing the ways numbness can be crucial to survival and how numbness contributes to harm, allowing time for feelings and the power of slowing down, developing a gratitude practice that’s not about gaslighting ourselves or denying our realities but instead about increasing our capacity, and how we can feel unworthy or guilty AND still make choices that help nourish us and sustain us.

Disability Justice, "Care Work" Author

Dreaming New Futures of Healing and Pleasure: On Care Webs, Disability Justice, Survivorhood, and Slowing Down to Figure Shit Ou

Talk highlights: how fraught the concept of “healed” can be in our ableist world, the ways we pathologize survivorhood and some of the ways Leah has survived, the creativity and genius of disability care economies, queering and disabling sex to give us all more access and pleasure, dreaming ourselves to new futures, how our ancestors literally bent reality to dream us up (especially for those who are disabled queer POC), and the beautiful possibility of crazy.

Sexuality Expert, Coach

Journey into Wildness: Explore Your Conscious and Unconscious Domestication, Liberate Your Inner Wildness, and Find Permission in Communal Erotic Witnessin

Talk highlights: wildness as unrestrained access to erotic expression and deeper pleasure, the erotic as a path to personal and collective liberation, embracing the messiness of the body and our emotions, the power of witnessing each other in our stories, unearthing sexual narratives through mythology and archetypes, and why it’s not what you’re doing but how you’re being that matters.

Professor, Psychologist, Desire Researcher

Better Sex Thru Mindfulness: Exploring Libido, Desire, and Presence to Maximize Pleasure and Connection (Plus, Asexuality Versus Low Libido!

Talk highlights: the erasure and invalidation of asexuality, low desire and the silence surrounding people’s shame, what’s possible on the other side of uncomfortable conversations, exploring the mindfulness of touch, rejecting goals and exploring presence in the bedroom, the power of group mindfulness, and why sexuality is not universal.

Fierce Passions, Erotic Expert

Erotic, Sensual, Sexual: Expanding Our Container for Bliss, Healing, Joy, and Grief Through Ritual and Erotic Breathwor

Talk highlights: healing our erotic wounds and opening to pleasure as a path to self-love, why healing is not about becoming someone who didn’t experience trauma, expanding our capacity for joy and grief, moving deeper within the body rather than outside the body on our journey to bliss, the power of ritual to move us through life stages, the divinity of our bodies and why the system is intentionally designed to deny our pleasure, plus a guided erotic breath practice.

Worthiness Coach, Host of Needy Podcast

Tending Our Garden: Asking for Help, Surrendering to Messiness, and Teaching Ourselves We Matter in Big and Small Way

Talk highlights: how we can teach ourselves we matter through tiny actions, when we tend our boundaries we can bring the fullest expression of ourselves, why we are allowed to have needs and to be needy, what it really means when we try to micromanage everything around us, the ableism in refusing support and help, building our capacity for messiness, saying no to restriction, and why imperfection actually deepens intimacy and connection.

Creator, Sex Positive Families

The Skills of Being Human: Building Our Awareness of Pleasure, Emotions, Boundaries, Safety, and How We Relate to Those We Lov

Talk highlights: pleasure as the foundation for safety and empathy, becoming a sex positive parent if you weren’t raised that way, talking to kids about the tough and confusion stuff, developing our own emotional competence as adults, and the importance of modeling our vulnerability and uncertainty.

Ancestral Healing, Sexological Bodywork

Ancestral Healing and Erotic Wellness: Sipping from the Well of Erotic Nourishment, Connecting with Our Lineage and Legacy, and Rejecting the Tyranny of Embodimen

Talk highlights: how healing our relationship with pleasure now impacts future generations, why belonging is a way to help prevent harm, practicing living in a shame-free body, the tyranny of embodiment and what happens when other people tell us (especially folks who are trans and non-binary) how to be in our body, being gender blessed, fleeting pleasure versus nourishing pleasure, and asking what do I want to let in? 

Charlotte Mia Rose & Chris Maxwell Rose

Liberation and Erotic Power: Expanding Our Access to Pleasure and Connection through Reverence, Devotion, Touch, and Massag

Talk highlights: the erotic as a source of personal and collective power, finding our sense of aliveness, mapping our unique constellation of pleasure, acknowledging that our desires may be bigger than our lives can hold, why systems of oppression seek to control our sexuality, redistributing sexual power, collective joy as healing, self and partnered touch as a resource for nourishment and connection, plus a self-massage demo.

Therapist, Fat Activist

You Deserve Pleasure, You Are Worthy of Joy: The Complexity of Families, Queering of Fat Bodies, and How Liberation is Connected to Our Pleasure Practic

Talk highlights: the ways our intuitive sense of our bodies gets disrupted, disobedience in our families and rebellion, how our bodies are heirlooms and why they’re evidence of how those who came before us survived, what body image abuse looks like in our intimate relationships and how culturally supported that kind of abuse is, how capitalism and Christian colonialism have ruptured our sense of inherent worth & centering the most marginalized in our pleasure practices.

Author, "Rage Becomes Her"

Rage Becomes Her: The Real Risk of Expressing Our Anger, How We Deny Women’s Pleasure and Pain, and Why Anger is the Emotion of Fairness and Justic

Talk highlights: the ways anger is policed starting from infancy, why denying an emotion is to deny the wisdom it offers, anger as the emotion of injustice and accountability as well as connection and liberation, sexualization as one of the few paths to acceptance and power for women and girls, exploring our lineage of anger, developing anger competence, plus why self-help often contributes to oppression.

Therapist, Polyamory Expert

Polyamorous Parenting, Exploring Consent in Relationships, and Making Mental Health More Accessible (Plus, Orgasmic Ellipticals

Talk highlights: validating feelings for kids and adults, planning so people can opt-in to conversations and invitations, becoming trauma-informed in our intimate relationships, allowing for mistakes in community, break-ups and grief when we’re parenting kids, and what the kids of polyamorous parents complain about.

Pelvic Health Physical Therapist

To Clench or Not To Clench: Pelvic Floor Health, Why Pelvic Floors Are Crucial for ALL Genitals, The Disparity of Medical Research, and Why The Enemy of Pleasure is Expectation

Talk highlights: the mystery of our pelvic floor and how much it impacts our overall wellbeing, pain during intercourse and expanding our ideas of what counts as sex, the impact of race and gender on pelvic health research and treatment, implicit bias in health care, how pleasure contributes to liberation especially for marginalized folks, how sexual development is as important as financial and psychological health, and why orgasms are not the definition of good sex. 

Educator, Owner of Spectrum Boutique

Pleasure is Our Why: Mental Health and Pleasure, Toys For the Win, and Creating Accessible Pleasure Products For Us All

Talk highlights: loving what’s taboo, the shame and silence around STIs and mental health, the ways we gaslight ourselves in relationship, the coercion that is at the heart of so many questions we get as sex educators, the power of toys for maximizing pleasure, the awesome videos Zoe makes to help reduce stigma and increase curiosity around sex, and removing gender from toys.