Last week while ranting to my meditation group about the bland reality that is incessant online meeting, my external fervor reached fever pitch. In that moment, I proposed “an orgasm a meeting”. Referring to and building on an earlier Sex in My City blog post, I’m not backing down from Wednesday’s moment of brilliance.
I here by advocate weaving in orgasmic pleasure to your meeting-ed-up virtual life. Let’s see what kind of magic masturbation lends our pithy, stale, two-dimensional work worlds.
While Celeste Headlee (whom I discovered while listening to Scene On Radio - highly recommend starting with season two Seeing White) says our brains aren’t wired to multi-task, an orgasm a meeting might just bring the playful, irreverent twist to our days that we’re seeking seven months into a pandemic.
In her brilliant book We Need To Talk, Headlee spends several chapters discussing the impact technology is having on our creative, professional, and personal lives. Her passion is teaching others how to exchange words and moments that have gravity. While Celeste doesn’t discuss conversational skills specifically related to physical connection, sexuality and pleasure, she’s an indefatigable defender of all the parts of ourselves and our shared lives that lend to greater intimacy. Written and published three to four years ago, I found my brain doing the Covid translation, asking how to take Celeste’s astute data and apply it to our 2020 reality.
It helped to devour Zadie Smith’s Intimations, just out this month, simultaneously. Smith high-dives into our socially distanced, isolated lives. She talks about lockdown as masterfully as she does the Uprising and George Floyd. Early on, I recognized both authors spend ample time ‘feeling uncomfortable’. By staying present with the sensation, especially related to finding one’s voice, desire, class, race, and gender, the angles of both womxn are bent wider.
Ultimately, that’s what I’m inviting us all to do with this post. An Orgasm a Meeting is another opportunity to increase intimacy in our lives. Brighten our dimmed screens. May these physical ‘conversations’ we engage in with our own bodies while we’re ‘on the clock’, lead us to more loudly spoken connective truths, collective liberation, and pleasure filled freedoms than we knew before 2020.