WholeSomeBodies Teaches Joyful Sexuality
By Meg Kuhner

In 2000, a small workgroup of women began to meet in living rooms and outdoors at Montpelier’s Hubbard Park to begin the newly formed Vermont Sexual Violence Prevention Task Force. We were sexual violence prevention practitioners, health educators, and anti-violence advocates and challenged ourselves simply to define healthy sexuality: what was it exactly?

That work blossomed into critical steps toward transforming the usual ‘sex education,’ so often based in fear and embarrassment and secrets, into a positive, and indeed joyful, way to understand human sexual development. We named the project, which developed into a published curriculum in 2004, Joyful Sexuality; the program continues to evolve today, including a name change to WholeSomeBodies in 2009.

Positive Passions

As the group met on a monthly basis, our definition of sexuality grew broader and deeper until we were discussing not only sexuality, but its close relations: sensuality, eroticism and even spirituality. Delving into the work, we became committed to experiencing joy and sensuality within our own meetings, as a way to validate for ourselves the meaning we were so passionate about being able to express to others.

We shared poetry, song, the latest ideas and definitions on the subject. We created wild finger-paintings, ate warm homemade muffins and traded personal stories of joy both from our childhood experiences and from the latest moments of deliciosity!  We were serious about finding joy and connecting that joy to the experience of healthy sexuality.

Out of this work grew the Task Force philosophy, training workshops and manual. We became excited about sharing our mission:

…to shift the cultural norm toward joyful and healthy sexuality by creating opportunities for individuals and communities to explore, reclaim, and discover a deeper and more expansive understanding of how sexuality informs our humanity.

Sex and Wholeness

Importantly, the group believed this sense of joyful and healthy sexuality was a critical step toward ending sexual violence. We worked with those who taught children and teens and those who worked with women who have been traumatized by sexual abuse. We sought to introduce new values, new thinking processes, and new relationship skills, ones incompatible with violence. The WholeSomeBodies approach fosters a positive, holistic approach to sexuality and sensuality and is intended to infuse future generations with more expanded and positive ideas about themselves as sensing, sexual beings.

WholeSomeBodies is a philosophy, an approach and an attitude. Its philosophy reclaims one’s sense of sexuality from a culture that separates our sexual selves from the rest of our wholeness. We are each intellectual, spiritual, social, physical, expressive, and sexual beings. As Riane Eisler puts it in Sacred Pleasure, drawing on the work of poet Audre Lourde: “[W]hen we begin to live from within, outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible for ourselves in the deepest way.”

This approach to prevention of sexual violence is a natural extension of the advocacy work women have been doing for years. For as long as we have been fighting sexual violence with definitions, disheartening statistics, and rape deterrence, we have intuitively strived for ways to bring in the positive; to balance the scales so that people come away with a sense of empowerment as well as important information. WholeSomeBodies accepts as true that people will be less likely to use sex or sexuality as a weapon against others, in a world that respects one’s sexuality as part of one’s humanity.

We begin to build this respect as early as possible and have shifted our focus of child sexual abuse prevention from children to their parents and caregivers; we encourage their using correct language for all body parts, talking regularly and naturally about sexuality, and building foundations that will allow children to feel comfortable and confident in their bodies. Such healthy communication can break the dangerous practices of silence and secrecy so necessary to sexual assault. Children will feel more comfortable asking for help. Our work with perpetrators has shown us that they choose to stay clear of children who CAN and DO talk openly about healthy sexuality to the adults in their lives.

Rooting Out Sexualized Violence

More than a decade has passed since that initial groundbreaking work. Many Joyful Sexuality and WholeSomeBodies workshops have been given across the country. Participants have included women’s advocates and trainers, college-level health classes, mixed groups with boys and men, and even groups of survivors of sexual violence. We acknowledge survivors may be present among any given group when convening a workshop and we encourage everyone’s increased sensitivity to this fact. One of our goals is to help everyone present to feel safe. The workshop, including its curriculum and activities, has won national recognition from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) for its focus on health promotion. It will be highlighted this year by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. We believe our work addresses the root causes of sexualized violence in our society.

Prevention Specialist Bethany Pombar now heads the state-wide effort and says, “We can break the silence around sexuality and give people tools for how to act, how they can experience their sexuality in deep and meaningful ways, how their sexuality relates to their experience of the world and decisions they make, and how they can set and respect boundaries and a diversity of sexual expressions.”

Those who have participated in the workshop have given positive evaluations of their own experience in the workshop, applying it to their life experience. “These exercises really helped me to understand some abstract stuff on a gut level, which makes it so much more relevant than ‘book knowledge,’” said one Sexual and Domestic Violence Advocate. Another woman who worked on developing the curriculum later commented, “As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, using the joyful sexuality approach has been a very important step in my healing. It has helped me to reconnect to a part of myself that was lost or never discovered during my childhood. It has reminded me that sex and sensual pleasure can be healthy and positive parts of my life.”

Still Evolving

Today, this ongoing workgroup is reevaluating its training materials. From the beginning, we understood that not everyone would be comfortable with the original name, but the experiences of the early group, still glows within its long history. We are incorporating all we have learned about primary prevention and health promotion. We still hold dear the founding principle of joy and infuse time to share our experiences into each working meeting.

WholeSomeBodies, now enlarged and including an even more diverse group of women and men, is still talking and working to incorporate more applicable skills-based learning, to remain current in the field of prevention. In this continuous effort, the group has put such topics as gender construction, media awareness, sexual harassment, body image, and bystander tools for youth and adults on its agenda for 2012.

The working group still offers this vision:    

We envision a culture where adults will feel free to invite wonder back into their lives and teach their children the fullness of human sexuality; where connectedness and sensual delight move freely within individuals and throughout their lives; where adults and children are whole and sexually healthy.

You can learn more about WholeSomeBodies by visiting the publications section at the website of The Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence: www.vtnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/WSB-manual-09.pdf

To learn about programs in your area, phone or email Prevention Specialist Bethany Pombar at The Vermont Network (Bethany@vtnetwork.org or 802-223-1302)

Meg Kuhner is an educator and currently co-director of Circle, formerly Battered Women’s Services in Barre.