There is a line from an essay that continues to haunt me:

"During this time, women showed up at my workshops and broke down in tears as they began to talk about being sexually abused. Each time, I would ask them to leave, with the explanation that my groups were about exploring pleasure, not sexual abuse. They needed a therapist and then come back for a Bodysex Workshop later on" (p. 29)

The Feminist Porn Book is a book near and dear to me, but I take serious issue with this remark by trailblazer, Betty Dodson.

When I read this, I felt hurt. It confirmed some underlying fears that I have had in the past about attending workshops. I, someone who has immersed themselves in sex-positive feminism, could, and probably would have been, thrown out of a Betty Dodson workshop.

As a survivor, who has worked with survivors, I do somewhat understand her impulse to remove folks who are having a negative reaction in some way or another, but only to a certain extent. It's important to get the person away from whatever has triggered them, from the pressures of being stared at, so that you can respond to them individually, without causing a chain reaction with the others.

I know this because I've done this before.

But this doesn't seem like it was Dodson's intent. In the reasoning within the essay,  danger and pleasure are separate entities and her focus is on one and not the ways in which they interact. This ideology, however, furthers the assumption that sex-positivity diminishes the experiences of sexual assault and marginalizes survivors. Like me.

Survivors face a double bind in feminism at large. On the one hand, we are used as personifications of sexual abuse---we are to stay in our survivor position without regard to our actual sexual selves to make a political point. On the other, if we are kinky we can feel silenced often so that no one unjustly conflates our experience of trauma with our kinky dispositions. We should "transcend" our past.

There is not a lot of room for real talk about sexuality after surviving assault. Which is unfortunate, because at least for me, my experiences have effected my relationship with my body, with my own senses of pleasure, and my relationships. This is not to suggest that it is the end-all be-all of my sexual self but it is an important facet of my sexuality.

My body remembers things that I sometimes do not. This means that sometimes pressures and textures trigger me and I do not know why. I do different exercises, namely chakra meditation, to check in with my body but it is easy for me to understand how a workshop setting could trigger me and its easy for me to understand why these issues would come up in a orgasm workshop. It is not, however, easy for me to understand how a trained sex educator would not know a compassionate way to deal with a situation other than to kick a survivor out under the assumption that they can afford psychiatric care.

What mechanisms do we have in place to offer support in these cases? What can we do to make the workshop setting accessible and safe and free of shame for survivors?