The Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) Womyn’s Centre held a sex positivity and consent workshop on campus Jan. 27 titled “Confidence, Consent and Communication: How Sex-Positivity Makes for Hotter Sex.”
The workshop focused on discussions around sex positivity, which includes respecting different sexual preferences people have and the importance of communication between partners.
“The workshop was designed to be interactive and to get folks thinking about creating safer spaces around them and challenging stereotypes that we carry within ourselves,” said Kandace Price, workshop facilitator from Ottawa sex store Venus Envy, who helped organize the event. “It went really well. There was a lot of participation and people were able to feel vulnerable in this space, which I think is super important for learning. . . It helps folks to better retain it and better apply it to their own lives.”
Debbie Owusu-Akyeeah, program co-ordinator for the CUSA Womyn’s Centre, said consent is essential.
“Consent means safety to me,” she said. “I think the most important thing about sex is that the folks involved are safe.”
She also said having Price, who is a former programming co-ordinator for the Womyn’s Centre, is exciting.
“It means we have someone who is familiar with the space and knows her stuff teaching students, or engaging in the conversation with students, in a manner that I couldn’t do myself. It means a lot to us,” she said.
Akosua Peprah, a third-year neuroscience student, said she learned a lot from the workshop.
“You would think consent would almost be implied and be [a part of] the unspoken rules among people and who are intimate with them, but to realize there still needs to be work done is interesting,” she said. “To me, sex positivity is being able to accept the diversity that surrounds sex, not just for what your things are, but for other people. [It is about] realizing that everybody is different and that’s okay.”
Price, who has been working for Venus Envy for about five years, said consent is not just applicable to relationships.
“I think that consent is one of those topics that are far reaching and probably factor into our lives in ways that we don’t even realize,” she said.
“Consent can include even to being on this land, which is unceded Algonquin territory . . . and that discussion alone really interests me. [Living] in a world that is focused around or conscious about consent I think is going to be a better world to live in.”
This is the first workshop the CUSA Womyn’s Centre has held this year, but it plans to hold two or three more, according to Owusu-Akyeeah.
