MOMENTUM

Jul 262010
 

It was a beautiful evening in June when we walked NYC’s High Line with Figleaf of Real Adult Sex discussing our ideas for a new sexuality conference.  Diva and I had been mulling it  over ourselves for a while, motivated and inspired by Amber Rhea’s Sex 2.0 and the Sex in America panel at NYC’s Open Center.  We knew we were close but had not quite nailed down what our concept would be and how to combine these two amazing events.  When Figleaf suggested what was missing was relationships, all the pieces came together.  After all sexuality and feminism don’t exist in a vacuum but amid a myriad of relationships.  And so, Tied Up Events is  now happy to announce MOMENTUM: Making Waves in Sexuality, Feminism and Relationships Through New Media, a conference taking place on April 1st to April 3rd, 2011 in Washington, DC.

MOMENTUM explores how the phenomenal growth of online communication has given rise to an amazing amount of sharing, learning and experimenting with different expressions of sexuality, relationships and feminism. MOMENTUM provides a safe place to listen, discuss and learn about the ways the web has impacted our sexuality without the fear of reprisal or shaming. It is a space for acceptance and appreciation of diversity, including for those in the LGBTQ, sex-work, BDSM and non-monogamous communities.

During MOMENTUM we will discuss ways to bridge the baffling dichotomies our culture creates around sexuality. While on one hand we have unprecedented sexual freedom, on the other we continue to police sexuality with a frightening vigor. Abortion laws, restrictions on gay marriage, abstinence programs, medicalization of sex, fear of pornography and prosecutions for teenage sexting are examples of one side of the spectrum. The discomfort that strives to make us keep our sexuality hidden conflicts with the use of sex — especially the female body — to sell everything from food to cars to “performance enhancing” products.

Each participant will leave the conference with new perspectives, new connections, and a plan to carry the MOMENTUM forward into 2011 and beyond.

We’re now calling for presenters to submit their ideas for sessions at MOMENTUM.  Please explore the official site, MomentumCon.com, where you’ll find all you need to know, including how to submit a proposal for a session, how to register to attend, and how to take advantage of early bird pricing.

Fascinations has generously agreed to be the primary corporate sponsor of MOMENTUM and we want to thank them very much for their support of this event.

If you think the site absolutely rocks as much as we do, that’s only because of the help, guidance and technical know-how of Dangerous Lilly and the website design skills of AAG.  We’re indebted to you both.*

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*Aw shucks! –aag

 AAG Entries  2 Responses »

Extra Value Swim Lessons

Jul 262010
 

During the last ten minutes of the final day of swim lessons the manager turned on all the pool’s assorted water toys and let the children run free, a combined celebration and break from the ceaseless toil of never-ending bobs, floats and dives.

My son raced away from his instructor and spent the time at a row of some half-dozen jets designed to shoot water head-high to the grade-school set. At first he was content merely to run through them, but once an instructor showed him how, by blocking one of the jets with his foot, he could make the rest rush ultra-high, he did nothing else. If one blocked jet created a four-foot tower, he pondered, how high would three blocked jets go? He enlisted a friend when the span of his own feet fell short and the two created a geyser that loomed as high as a dinosaur and no doubt just as thrilling.

He was, in short, in heaven.

In contrast, his sister hardly budged from the side of her teacher, a seventeen-year-old slaving in the pool before commencing her senior year come September. My child idolizes her; she chatters incessantly about her hair and assortment of swimsuits when we’re not at the pool and hurries to sit next to her as soon as we are. This young woman wobbles on the very precipice of adulthood, one moment speaking to me clinically about my child’s progress, the next tugging on the top of her suit and flipping her hair as another swim instructor, a young man, saunters by.

These two teach next to each other in the pool, and while lessons themselves are carried out with the nothing but professionalism, the few moments between lessons allow for a just an inch of hijinx. Then the two surreptitiously splash at each other and whisper quietly. There is much gazing into eyes.

It is very sweet.

I watch, all but invisible due to age, from beneath a huge umbrella. I watch because I can so clearly remember being seventeen and enveloped in love and lust. I watch because I can’t remember being so effortlessly beautiful — though photographic evidence says I was.

And I watch because my child watches. She grins right along with her teacher as they splash the boy, and if he splashes back she gets wet too. “Do it this way,” the teacher demonstrated during the one class I spent with them in the water, and I watched my little girl’s eyes shine as she got a response from the young man. She beamed and laughed and I could so clearly picture her assuming the teacher’s place in just a decade.

“It’s a class in swimming and flirting all at once!” I said to the teacher, and she agreed that it certainly seemed so.

Two classes for the price of one? I’m happy with that bargain.

 AAG Entries, family  7 Responses »

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