Sexual Wellness: Imagining a New Possibility for Our Healing
There’s all this talk on the internets lately about getting your sh*t together and leaving old habits (or people!) that aren’t serving us behind in 2019.
We feel that.
With a new year and new decade upon us, it’s time that we get real about living better and stepping into our greatness aka our wellness. And by wellness, we don’t mean yoga, CBD, crystals, and meditation (although these are important too). We mean your sexual wellness.
Yeah, you read that right, sexual wellness.
If this word seems new to you that’s totally cool, it’s new to us too. Let us tell you how and why we started caring about sexual wellness.
The World Health Organization defines sexual health as
““…a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being in relation to sexuality; it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or infirmity ” ”
At KIMBRITIVE, our definition of sexual health includes all of this but explicitly names a right to pleasure and other healthy parts of sexuality. But we know when we say sexual health, most people aren’t imagining these definitions. They are probably imagining something along the lines of whether or not someone has a sexually transmitted disease or how often they get tested. It’s clear that the idea of sexual health isn’t landing for most people outside of the doctor’s office.
Similarly, when people think about “wellness” they are often thinking about the choices people are making towards having a “healthy” lifestyle with the goal of being free from illness. But in reality, “wellness” has been used as a curtain to hide diet culture, fatphobia, ableism and other trash tactics to becoming a “whole, healthy and desirable person” and we are saying nah to all of that. It also promotes individualism and personal responsibility with little to no accountability or acknowledgment of the social forces and systems that shape our ability to be well. We believe that these definitions are extremely limiting and that wellness is more than freedom from illness.
Mindbodygreen, a thought-leader in the online wellness industry says that wellness incorporates mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and environmental well-being and that these pillars of wellness are interconnected. While this definition feels all-encompassing, we wish it included another important aspect of many of our lives—-sex. Like the larger conversations in the wellness industry that defines everything from finance to spirituality as important facets of wellness, we’d like to see sex and sexuality take center stage in wellness circles.
We believe a truly comprehensive view of “wellness” must include sex and sexuality.
We didn’t think that the traditional “sexual health” or “wellness” definitions served us and needed to really define what it is we want ourselves and others to obtain. Thus, we landed on sexual wellness.
We believe that sexual wellness includes:
Having a positive and affirming attitude about sex and sexuality including your relationship with your body and others.
Being knowledgeable about your options and choices for STD testing and prevention, pleasure, birth control, and pregnancy
Dismantling misogyny, transphobia, stigma, racism, ableism and fatphobia and their daily interactions with how we experience wellness
Creating systematic and community-level investments in our wellness, and taking accountability for our disproportionate access to wellness
Centering pleasure and joy for all people
At KIMBRITIVE, we pour a lot of energy into imagining a world where everyone, especially Black women and girls have unfettered access to power, resources, and support to make unapologetic decisions about their bodies, identities, and sexual and reproductive health. Black women, in particular, receive so many negative messages about their sexuality and body that say we are having too much risky sex; our bodies are doing too much and must be tamed or that the most dangerous place for a black baby is in the womb.
Furthermore, almost every sexual health statistic about Black women says that we experience higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, unintended pregnancy and sexual violence compared to other racial and ethnic groups. This frames Black women’s bodies and sexuality as the problem instead of the social forces and systems that make Black women more vulnerable to adverse sexual health outcomes. Furthermore, these realities do not create an opportunity for change and overshadow any positive aspects of Black women’s sexuality.
We want to imagine a world where none of the above exists and that Black women can see positive and affirming representations of themselves in conversations about sexual wellness. We believe that this approach to sexual wellness can foster healing, awareness, and community.
Let’s face it -- the only positive and truthful space for us to be talking about our sexuality can’t just be memes, Megan the Stallion lyrics or our group chat (although if it’s leaked, we said what we said!) We want to heal out loud, in public, together.
Our commitment to sexual wellness and supporting Black women in learning about their bodies and choices has roots in the long history of the Black Women’s Health Activism Movement, giving Black women and their communities the tools they need to overcome the fucksh*t. So together, we are claiming and speaking sexual wellness over our lives, over Black Women, calling it into our homes (and maybe our DMs).