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This book is so damn amazing, it’s been a couple months since I read it but going back through to answer this question I was reminded of all of the gold inside each and every page, which makes choosing a particular chapter really really difficult. I settled on chapter 15 sister teacher. This chapter stands out for me because Betty talks so much about her realization that every single orgasm creates a ripple of conscious change. And that she learned by doing, not sitting or reading which really excites me for learning and experiencing and helping when holding my own circles someday. In this chapter she talks about her challenges to starting circles, overcoming her fears and also the divine channeling she felt during that process. So beautiful and so sacred.
The chapter 19 ‘Bodysex Designs’ is the one where Betty describes how she established Bodysex as a brand and a business. We learn the history and context in which Betty has started workshops, what we are all today part of. That is amazing for me. How she opens her account, starts to learn what an invoice is. How she makes her fist business flyer and how she starts selling her first book Liberating Masturbation. Funny she has transformed her bedroom in the office, I like it was full of sexual energy, which is for sure helping creativity and business. I am on a similar way now, starting my new carrier chapter as bodysex facilitator. Funny enough I am going through exactly the same steps: opening my own company, learning how to make an invoice, thinking on the name of my company and registering it – so close to me…and for me its important, as I would like to tell this/her story further to the women which will be coming to my workshops. And tell them who Betty was, how she started the workshops, how the Bodysex name was created. This way we will keep Betty alive in our actions, minds and hearts, giving full gratitude for the work she has done for all of us women.
There are two stories with Betty’s mom that touch my heart. First, when Betty asks her mom if she’s masturbating and taking care of herself. I think this highlights the honest and vulnerable conversations mothers and daughters want to have but they remain stuck in the mother-daughter/parent-child dynamic and rarely relate to each other as women; it’s my experience and one that my friends also discuss.
Second, when Betty is at her mom’s bedside and gives her permission to go. Wow, such an honorable way to be loved and supported. This story reminds me that, as women, there are parts of us that no longer serve us and we want to shed but it’s hard to let go of the old way of being. sometimes another person gives you permission to release outdated approaches and other times it’s you giving yourself permission to let go of the old and expand into something new. If we’re in this life or transitioning over, fundamental change can be scary and requires courage.
As a hospice nurse I have to pick Chapter 26: Heart of my Heart. I love that Betty had open discussions with Bessie about death. She even references Elisabeth Kubler- Ross who is best known for the five stages of grief. Like sex, death is very intimate. The body goes through profound changes that can be overwhelming. Betty did an amazing job taking care of her mother and giving her life a peaceful, loving ending. It was heartbreaking to read about the death of Betty’s brother, Rowan. This chapter did a great job of showing a different side of Betty.
Because I have gone through menopause myself, I like chapter 27. I can so much relate to the easy naturally transition she had noticing the new sensations as “my mini heat orgasms” and also her seeking out adventures and then wondering whether she had “finally become a romantic realist?”
The book as a whole is packed full of wisdom, vulnerability, tears, joy and sexual power. There are many chapters that stuck out to me. I’ll choose chapter 9 for this purpose of how visceral Betty’s description or paintings were. In reference to the great anger I have felt towards the masculine/ my father, and the pain that I have worked with in healing that anger. Its makes me emotional, because I’ve never read or heard anyone be able to describe or capture in art the feelings I had in my anger. Chp 9: My Masturbation Crusade”page 99…” The Revenge….image showed an angry woman about to bite off a man’s penis”
I’ve felt that desire so deeply, and as I go on my own Masturbation Crusade I feel like that anger that emptiness I’ve felt is being healed and transformed.
Chapter 5: Beyond Serial Monogamy is one of my favorite. She tackles the whole problem of nuclear family and the authoritarian regime of exclusive heterosexuality. I love it! She challenged everything from that model.
I’m again listening to this on Audible because it’s very hard to find. Listening to it is a little different from reading it because things are just organized differently, like there’s no chapter titles for instance.
What I imagine doing is going back to the work as a whole and using the tales from Betty’s life to inform my own. I’m already doing this but the first time listening to it is to get the baseline, then I’d like to go back and relisten. Something I’m also grateful for is the repetition between stories and hearing them both in this book as well as the training videos in this course as well as in sex for one. Each time I hear a story I’m familiar with I feel like it’s sloughing off the miseducation I was taught from my culture. Betty’s life is one of myth and legend, like true teaching stories for the people.
It isn’t a particular chapter that I will go back to over and over again it is more like several paragraphs and the fotos and drawing . How each chapter has a photo or draining at the end of it. The body sex flyer after page 230, is stunning and her drawings , man on top etc. are erotic and so beautiful I find my self enjoying the lines and shading and I love looking at her art. I also love how it chronicles her life. So awesome that so much of her life was documented. I can see myself viewing theses images over and over again because they bring me so much joy.
And pg. 157 in chapter 14 where Betty describes partner assisted masturbation. Not only is it erotic and is part of one of my fantasies, it is wonderful to read about two women pleasuring each other. I really expanded my understanding of sex.
I loved the chapter Mother’s Day Wankers. Having a circle of men seemed like so much more energy than with women. I laughed and enjoyed her way of communicating with the men and difficulty in getting them to be involved in genital show and tell because they all claimed they knew what a penis looked like because it was in plain sight. Women are so delightfully curious during this, so that is a big difference for me. When it came to genital massage, the men finally got to relax enough with their blindfolds on and ended up coming all over the place. That made me laugh out loud. I could only imagine the room. At the end of this circle it was so beautiful that the straight and gay men got to interact and respect each other for just being human with no labels. .
Chapter 10 really stuck out for me because of the conversation between sexual labels and all of the back fighting that was taking place further separating women by the gay women and straight women split. I also believe that labels do more harm than good; that we can just be sexual beings. Sure we can have preferences, way that we usually “lean.” But if someone defines themselves as purely lesbian, what when they encounter a man that is more effeminate in his presentation that they find themselves attracted to and want to sexually explore with him. Does that mean that because he has a penis that she is abandoning her call to label herself as lesbian? Maybe out of guilt she wouldn’t explore that direction. Or if she saw herself as simply sexual, going with listening to her vulva and the sexual experiences she wants to have, it doesn’t matter what genitals the person has, she just wants to explore and experience with them and not wake up the next day with an existential crisis. This happened for me until I released the label – thinking I needed to justify that “I’m straight, I just like to play with girls sometimes but I don’t date girls.” A friend of mine told me what this label is, something like heteroflexbile hetero romantic or something like that. But I just see myself as sexual. Sometimes I play with boys, sometimes girls, sometimes myself, sometimes both, it doesn’t matter to me.
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