The Past, Present and Future
We facilitated our 4th and 5th workshops on the 25th January in the lovely Palmer Studio again at Hoxton Hall. We were experimenting with structure and pace through trialling two hour-long workshops this time round. Throughout this process we have heavily reflected on the nature of facilitating conversations around sex and sex education and what makes a successful workshop. There is something uniquely special about sharing an hour with a group of strangers, and discovering new experiences, ideas and views on these conversations we’ve been having for a while now. Simultaneously there are limits to the relationships you can build when running stand-alone workshops. These topics of discussion around sex, relationships and identity are intimate, personal, often vulnerable and sensitive in nature, therefore there’s a level of trust that must be built before engaging in a lot of interactive creative exercises. These hour-long sessions do however provide a space for really powerful, thought-provoking conversations, as was made clear to us this Saturday, and showed us the real importance of carving out spaces for women and non-binary folk to come together!
We confronted the homophobia and biphobia that can be seen in some of the interviews:
Q. Yeah. What about other sorts of sexuality - like homosexuals and things like that? Gays and lesbians? How do you feel about them?
A. At first it really disgusted me. I thought, 'That's disgusting'. And then I had a friend, she's a lesbian, and she told me, and she said, 'If you don't want to talk to me anymore, that will be fine, I'll understand'. And I sat down and I thought about it and I said, 'That's stupid if you don't talk to her just because she's a lesbian. That doesn't mean to say she's going to jump on you'. So, I think it's fine, but I must say I'm not interested to try it.
Q. You're not interested at all?
A. No, no.
Q. At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic they were talking about AIDS being like mainly to do with gays. How did you react to that?
A. I thought - not lesbians - I thought if it's anything to do with ... I think it's bisexual people because they spread it around cos they're having sex with men and women.
- An extract from Catherine’s Interview
https://archives.reanimatingdata.co.uk/files/original/7c8856a115ed5c73370716a8c4ec1db15e6c668c.pdf
It was a sobering conversation to have in a room of queer, progressive, liberal individuals as we were blatantly confronted by the effects of misinformation/a lack of education in schools that can lead to these ideologies - as well as of course the Reagan and Thatcher administrations spreading anti-gay rhetoric with terms such as the ‘Gay Disease’ and Section 28 introduced in 1988 banning the promotion of homosexual content in sex education. Others’ rage was ignited by the lack of contraceptive awareness that still seems to permeate in 2025 amongst young people. Particularly in our second workshop one of the participants marked out boldly on a post-it note during our body mapping exercise ‘We Still Have to Ask!’ in response to Ruth’s interview:
A. Women don't ... they just have a laugh and a joke about them. They don't actually ask the men to put them on.
Q. They don't?
A. No.
Q. So do the men not use them?
A. No.
- An extract from Ruth’s Interview
https://archives.reanimatingdata.co.uk/files/original/a4a93d7a5bf534e465d70d8f117ff29ade8f13d7.pdf
We had an eye-opening conversation surrounding condom usage, and the irresponsibility of a lot of young people not using contraception altogether nowadays. Participants had come up against unwillingness of a partner to use one, claiming sex wouldn’t be as good, or it would ruin the sensations - rather than having an awareness of the importance of protecting against STIs and pregnancies! One participant looked at this as a dealbreaker - stating that their partners’ willingness to use a condom reflected whether or not they cared about their safety - and we think rightly so! Many participants had not received adequate contraceptive education whilst at school - it was either putting a condom on a banana or really nothing at all. Without being presented with all possible options, how can we appropriately equip and inform young people with the knowledge they need to engage in safe sex?
We also had a really interesting discussion around gendered language in relation to genital organs.
Ever heard someone say ‘don’t be such a pussy’? Or what about the opposite: ‘grow a pair’/’balls of steel’.
Where female anatomy is used to represent weakness, male anatomy is used to represent strength and courage. We encourage readers to think critically the next time they come across this kind of language in public or amongst peers and call it out! Another problematic tendency when we’re young is to give pet names to our genitals, our parents assign certain names to our genitals, which can actually be incredibly dangerous as it doesn’t provide a young person with the correct language to talk about and advocate for their own bodily autonomy should anything ever happen to them. We all had awful ones like ‘front bottom’, ‘nunny’, ‘foo-foo’. It does not protect a child to nickname their genitals. From a young age there is nothing wrong or inappropriate about using the words ‘penis’ and ‘vulva’ to talk to children for them to understand their own bodies. It made us laugh and cringe in the moment, but with deeper reflection we considered the effect this could have on a child’s safety.
We wanted to round off the workshops with a letter-writing exercise to bring in an element of the future, looking towards a brighter future of sex education, and our relationships with our sexual identities. We love the wind-down/reflective time this gives participants to chat with us and amongst each other about any topics explored in the workshop, as well as promoting individual creativity. We encouraged participants to write a letter to their future selves, with the aim of opening it in 2 hours/days/weeks even years!!! We wanted to draw an invisible thread between the women from the interviews in the 1980s, the participants in our workshop in 2025, and whoever those participants may become in the future, to span decades of sex education. It brought a lighter feel to the end of the workshops after some fairly heavy content, and brought an atmosphere of peacefulness into the space.
We put a lot of hard work into planning these workshops, and our efforts felt rewarded. Who knows what the future of Sexy Pigeons may hold!?
