The classic “Last Supper” poster for the 2007 Folsom Street Fair
If I had to boil down the reasons that we started Godless Perverts, they could probably all be summed up thus: religion can really fuck up your sex life. That might sound glib, but it’s deadly serious. For most of us, sex and religion are tangled up with each other from the very beginning. Many people, in order to just speak their orientation or gender for the first time, have to first figure out a way to silence the voices of the priests, clerics, and deities who told them that their very existence was a sin.
Recovering From Religion, an organization that provides support for people who have just left their religion or are thinking about it, is offering a six-week online workshop for people facing these very challenges. It starts next Monday, July 14, and is appropriately priced at $69.
Here’s what they have to say:
Recovering Your Sexuality
Many of us who grew up in conservative religious traditions reach adulthood with a lot of guilt, confusion, and just plain missing information about sexuality. We feel disconnected from our bodies, uncertain about what’s normal and healthy, and afraid to explore who we are and what we want sexually. Recovering From Religion is very excited to announce an online class for adults looking to develop a healthy relationship with their own sexuality. After years of being told that sex was wrong, dangerous, sinful, or only to be enjoyed in narrow circumstances, our goal is to empower you to move past those roadblocks to discover what truly works best for you! We will discuss issues like guilt, pleasure, and ethics; learn about sexual anatomy, arousal, and sexual response cycles; and provide concrete exercises and actions to begin the road of healing the damage that repression and guilt can do.
This six week course is open to anybody whose relationship to their sexuality has been negatively affected by religious teachings in their past, regardless of what that religion was and what their current religious position is. Some participants in the course will have no or very little sexual experience; some will have years of sexual experiences that were plagued by guilt and shame. This class is uniquely designed to be a welcoming and supportive environment for everybody, regardless of their current relationship with religion and sexuality.
The online six-week workshop begins MONDAY JULY 14TH 2014 and will cover the following content:
- Week 1: Body awareness, mindfulness, circles of sexuality
- Week 2: Pleasure, guilt, sexual anatomy and physiology
- Week 3: The sexual response cycle, varieties of sexual response, desire and drive
- Week 4: Orgasm, masturbation, overcoming barriers to sexual enjoyment
- Week 5: Fantasy, imagination, ethics, consent
- Week 6: Celebrating yourself, connecting with other people sexually
There’s more info at the site, including background info on Virginia Brown, who’s leading the workshop. If any of you wind up participating in this, we’d love to hear any feedback on what you thought about it, one way or the other.
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