Pleasure is a right not a privilege
Emma-Louise Boynton discusses her experience with body image and her path to pleasure.
By Emma-Louise Boynton
Before I went to sex therapy, I thought my issues around intimacy – I couldn’t orgasm and seldom enjoyed sex – were things I could sweep under the rug and ignore. Growing up I had only ever seen my body through the prism of self-punishment, as something I needed to discipline and shrink, rather than enjoy. Like so many other young women and girls, I’d had an eating disorder from age 12, which affected the way I connected to my body in a myriad of ways thereafter, not least in my ability to enjoy sex. But I didn’t understand that until, at twenty-eight years old, a sex therapist told me that for as long as I was at war with my body, I’d struggle to enjoy intimate pleasure.
It proved to be the catalyst that transformed my life indefinitely, awakening me to the fact that our connection to sex is never just about what happens in the bedroom – it is about everything that happens outside of the bedroom, and then comes into sharp focus, as though placed under a magnifying glass, in the context of intimacy. Body image issues, our experience of gender and the power dynamics that come with that, shame, guilt, the complexity of our desires, trauma – all of it tends to show up in some way when it comes to our connection to, and experience of, sex. It follows then that when we begin to tackle whatever issue is showing up for us in connection to intimacy, there is a ripple effect that extends well beyond our experience of orgasm.
For me, sex therapy proved transformative because it opened up a conversation around my relationship to sex, and thus to my body, that I had never had previously. And it was through these conversations that I felt the shame I’d long carried in connection to both begin, at last, to ebb away. (Often the thought of healing some fundamental part of ourselves feels daunting, especially if it’s in an area of our lives we typically avoid talking about. But I firmly believe that open conversation is the first step toward tackling even the most seemingly insurmountable hangup we may have.) In the end, sex therapy didn’t just bring back my orgasm, however joyful that indubitably was, it helped me overcome a 17-year battle with bulimia by teaching me of the value and importance of taking care of my own body, of swapping self-punishment for pleasure.
I became convinced then that every woman must have access to the insights and learnings I’d had in the sex therapy room, sure that they could prove just as revolutionary for others as they had for me. So, I did what I knew best and started to convene live events, at which I’d gather roomfuls of women to sit shoulder-to-shoulder, to talk about the very thing we’d been taught was taboo. During one interview, my guest told the room that in building confidence in the bedroom, we build confidence in the boardroom and something clicked.
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