At BC Culture Days, Sex Is Revolution

Every generation rediscovers sex, a phenomenon as old as the stuff itself. But it’s a little new to see kink on offer at BC Culture Days, an annual, provincewide event series that starts today and runs until Oct. 25. The 11-year-old series, although not super staid, isn’t something that culture lovers might immediately associate with sex.

Artivism: Sex + The Unheard, extends beyond BC Culture Days itself, with two months of programming that encompasses comedy, food, poetry, music and workshops, all offered with a kinky perspective. The festivities start this weekend with a cabaret event featuring singer Missy D, comedian Andrea Jin and Virago Nation burlesque.

Curator Coral Santana, an Afro-Latinx activist, artist and UBC student, will host the live-streamed opening ceremonies. Conversations, performances, even a cooking demonstration are on offer. In addition to BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ community representation, the festival is committed to highlighting artists with disabilities.

“If you told me a few years ago that I’d be organizing a festival about sex, I would have said you’re nuts,” said Santana.

But, as she’s quick to note, sex is a fundamental human experience, something to be joyfully celebrated without shame or prejudice. It’s also something that she believes everybody should have access to — unfettered, unashamed and enthusiastically consensual.

In the leadup to opening weekend, Santana is rushed off her feet with lots of last-minute details. Acknowledging there are many different levels of comfort and ease with sex, she admits she too is still learning about the nuances of the subject. “I’m just a very curious person.”

The Unheard part of her event’s title refers to minority voices who’ve largely been left out of the kink world, except as fetish objects. (Think photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s nudes of Black men as emblematic of this idea.)

“Kink is very white for the most part,” said Santana. Because of this, it was important for her to provide a place where people of colour “could go from being an ornament to being super invested. Minorities are not allowed to be disruptive in this way,” she explains.

The idea of empowerment through kink, whether it’s reclaiming your body through art, engaging and sharing experience or simply opening up the conversation about ideas and realities that haven’t been fully explored, will take place in different ways.

The events series approaches the idea of sexuality from a variety of angles. Even the advent of going online, as opposed to in the flesh, is viewed by Santana as a positive development, revealing, as it does, the issue of accessibility that differently-abled people have long been subject to.

While the intent is serious, fun is also on the menu. Indulgence: In Search of the Perfect Aphrodisiac Recipe, a cooking demonstration of aphrodisiac cuisine led by Marla Renee Stewart, invites folk to unleash their appetites in every sense of the word.

While things like a cooking demonstration might on the surface look lighthearted, the programming is meant to create a space where more expansive and inclusive discussions can take place.

This is particularly critical when expressions of desire and sexuality can quickly devolve into pearl-clutching arguments about moral decline in popular culture.

The tempest that surrounded the release of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s ode to lubricous pleasure is a case in point. When the song dropped it attracted a fever of attention from largely right-wing pundits. Santana laughs about the reaction. “Have you listened to music lately?”

It wasn’t just the fact that the song featured women celebrating their bodies, but that a dark-skinned woman like Megan Thee Stallion was happily participating. This kind of colourism is confounding to Santana: “Bigotry is part of the human psyche, but we need to develop and grow out of it.”

Her frustration with the taboo aspects around sex extends to the misinformation and misogyny that any frank and honest discussion about female desire and female bodies attracts.

Others like Dr. Jen Gunter have pointed out that the shame around female bodies gives rise to any number of other problems.

In a column in the New York Times, Gunter wrote: “I know the cruelty and damaging messages these women receive from various sources — men, mothers, friends, magazines and social media — all because of a system built and maintained (often by those without vaginas) that revolves around the culture of the problematic, shameful and, yes, wet vagina.”

It’s a subject that writer Laurie Penny also explored in depth in an article entitled "The Horizon of Desire": “The reason that the notion of real, continuous, enthusiastic sexual consent is so outrageous is that the concept of female sexual agency — let alone active desire — is still a fearful one. Our culture still has very little room for the idea that women and queer people, given the chance, want and enjoy sex just as much as men do.”

Asked what her ultimate hope is for the events in Artivism: Sex + The Unheard to provide to people, Santana’s answer is as simple as it is revolutionary: “To open up the conversation. Sex is an integral part of the human experience and we need to have as many voices as possible. If sex is a book, we’re still in the table of contents.”

So crack that book.