Let’s talk about sex, maybe?

In conversation with -

Emma Flemming.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a ginormous sense of shame around talking about sex. Yes, we all know the birds and the bees can be #awks. But even amongst my closest friends, with whom I entrust my darkest of secrets, the idea of talking about (and I cringe as I write this word) pleasure gives me cold sweats. So, I have a large sense of awe for people who do speak out about it, because it’s a mahoosively important topic.

Last week, I had the utter delight of catching up with one such gal; self-love advocate, Vush ambassador, and all-round wonder woman, Emma Fleming. We had a whole lotta lols, but Emma also shared some really eye-opening thoughts about why starting a conversation and breaking the stigma around female pleasure is so vitally important, and the platform she’s launched to do just that.

Read on for some seriously good vibrations.

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Meg: Right, I’m going straight in. Sex, it’s a big topic. Have you always felt comfortable talking about it?

Emma: Definitely not. And to an extent, I’m still not. I just overcompensate massively and post pictures with dildos to mask the fact that I’m cripplingly insecure and afraid of the topic. It’s sort of a fake it ‘til you make it situation. (Both of us laugh).

No, more seriously, I definitely had experiences at school that completely shaped my narrative of what sex means and what your position within sex - wrong choice of words – (we both laugh again) should be. I think going to a boarding school, although I didn’t board, everything was so hyper-sexualised, and everyone was in everybody’s business…Any sexual escapades were a public thing. And I remember so well being the first person in my year to go to “second base”. I’d been going out with this boy for a few months and people [girls in the year above] were saying, “when are you actually going to go to 2nd base?”. It was like it was expected of me.

And I remember so well it actually happening, and it was so terrible, of course it was, neither of us knew what we were doing. It wasn’t sexual in the slightest, the whole thing was bizarre. And yet, the next day at school people were like “Emma Fleming, have you heard about her? Slut, slut slut.” A girl literally ran up to me and was like, “I just didn’t think you were that type of girl”. And it was just the complete disparity between a kind of hilariously awful non-sexual experience and what that meant about you and who you were. And that was me being introduced to sex as ‘it’s not for you it’s for everyone else’, which was really weird.

From that for years, I never thought it was for me. I just thought it was kind of something that you did and if you enjoyed it that was a bonus. And then I had an orgasm by myself and I was like oh my god, this happens to a boy every time he has sex? No wonder they enjoy it so much. And if I can do it by myself, why isn’t it happening when I’m having sex? So this is a conversation I’ve been having in my head for years, slowly unwinding it and trying to figure out what it means.  

Meg: And now, you work with Vush. How did that come about?

Emma: Vush got in contact with me, and at first in my head, I was like ‘fuck no’, what will my employer think? And all those sorts of conversations. You should be taken seriously no matter what career you’re in or whatever you talk about, but still, when they said “this is our platform, this is what we sell we’d love for you to talk about it, here’s our entire range of vibrators, post about it on your feed”, I was like, am I really going to do this? Deep breath, okay. And the first post I did, I did it by myself and I knew my Mum would see it, because I was in Scotland in lockdown at the time [with her]. I just tried to not bring it up and be casual about it. And then for the second post, I was like Mum can you take my picture? 

Emma & ‘the majesty’

Photographer: Emma’s Mum.

Meg: I was actually wondering who took that photo (laughs). That’s amazing.

Emma: My Mum, yep. She just had this slightly perplexed face and was like, “good grief”. (we both laugh)

Meg: You covered some of your early experiences before, did pleasure (specifically female pleasure) ever play a part in those first conversations you were having around sex?  

Emma: No, no. I remember very clearly when I was in year 6 (so I must’ve been around 11) when we had our first sex education class. And I remember so vividly a cartoon of a man and a woman running around a bedroom with a feather. I guess that was trying to emulate being turned on or foreplay or something, which is just hideous. (she laughs) But no. And still to this day, I feel like a lot of how sex is presented for women is like ‘just don’t get pregnant’, ‘make sure you pee after sex’, ‘don’t have sex with too many people or you’re a slut’. All of the fear and none of the fun. When has the conversation ever been positive and not just entirely terrifying?

Meg: So why do you think it’s so important to normalise female pleasure?

Emma: I think sometimes we [the Western world] look at other societies and cultures and think we’re so fucking progressive…but I think we’ve just fooled ourselves into thinking it’s a level playing field because it’s not so overtly unjust; which actually means, all the real subtleties and nuances around pleasure get hidden, when they’re very much a part of it.

For example, I did a poll on my Instagram, loads of different questions [on this topic]. And 70% of the women that responded (and there was about 500 of them) said they regularly fake orgasms. It’s so normalised – to the extent that it’s a thing that’s joked about really openly. How many times have you see a meme that’s like ‘imagine if you could only get pregnant if you had an orgasm, there’d be 10 people on the earth’. It’s just part of our rhetoric that sex isn’t good for women. It’s always ‘ha ha’, but never - ‘let’s fix it’.

And I think we’re also not having these sorts of conversations with men, it’s not a dialogue…It’s just this polarising conversation where guys find it an affront if you don’t cum. I’ve even said to new partners in the past, ‘oh I find it quite difficult’, and the immediate response is, ‘you’ve just never been with the right guy’ or ‘I’ve never had any complaints’ (we both roll our eyes) and you think, bloody hell are we really still in that time of ‘macho man is here to make all the girls cum’? They’ve all faked it I promise you. (we both laugh). Rather than having a conversation like, ‘cool we can just find what works for you’…Just levelling, rather than all this bullshit surrounding a topic because we’re all so afraid to admit it’s awkward and not easy for everyone.

What a lot of women said to me (after the poll questions) was that they’re in a bit of a trap because they feel like they’ve faked it for so long, how can they suddenly say they’ve been lying? And is it lying? That feels a bit loaded. But what do you say? How do you tell them what they’ve been doing (which they think works) for however long actually doesn’t work? So yeah, people can feel trapped and don’t know how to approach the conversation because it’s easier to just carry on.

Meg: Is this why you wanted to launch your Instagram platform @that.typeofgirl, to open up a conversation? I’m guessing it was also to do with your experiences at school.

Emma: Yeah, I was labelled a slut throughout school and it was completely bizarre, I hadn’t really done many things with boys. I guess it was just kissing and pissing off the wrong people. But, yeah, from that I think knowing that you’re sort of dammed if you do dammed if you don’t, I was just like fuck it! When I started posting about it, and people kept messaging me about it, I wanted to set up a mini platform where people could just talk about it openly because I think so many women want to.

So many were messaging me saying “I wish I could talk like this with my friends”, or “I wish I could’ve talked about this at Uni, but I didn’t know how to bring up the topic”. It’s a conversation people want to have.

I think, also, a lot of women don’t have a big friendship group, or might not have a sister, or aunt, or a mum they can talk to about it and there isn’t that much out there that is helpful. I’m really lucky with the people I can talk to, but not everyone has that. So I think it’s so important that it’s normalised and normalised with guys as well. For a while a few guys were messaging me and saying “can you let us into the platform as well, because we want to hear this, we don’t want to invade any privacy but we want to learn”. So I was sort of toying with the idea, but for now I just want it to be a safe space where people can bounce ideas off each other and chat and no one can take advantage of it.

Meg: It’s really interesting that guys are being receptive to it and want to know more about it. That’s really encouraging. But I think keeping it that safe space at the minute, especially for womxn is so important. Because like you say, a lot of people, even if they do have close friends, aren’t able to have those conversations because they just don’t feel comfortable doing it. So having a space where they can post anonymously or talk to you as someone that doesn’t necessarily know them personally, that must really help people open up.  

Emma: Yeah, exactly. And then on the complete flip side, guys are just sort of also pigeon-holed into being these uber sexual people. And a lot of my guy friends aren’t. The whole conversation is so damaging at the moment, because girls pleasure isn’t a thing, and for guys they’re [seen as] sex crazed maniacs. And actually a lot of guys struggle. I’ve had a lot of guys message me saying they’re so anxious about sex but they also feel like they can’t talk to people about it, because of the whole ‘man up’ mentality.

Meg: I feel like there’s a real space, possibly not for you and I to tackle, but for someone to create a platform like you’re kind of creating, but for men. Because men’s mental health is obviously a conversation that is opening up a lot which is great, but sex must play a huge role in that and whereas with women the dialogue is very much starting to open up a lot more, it doesn’t feel like it is so much with men.

 Emma: No, it doesn’t does it?

Meg: Hopefully that’ll change, because it’ll be better for everyone - especially coming out of the last 12 months or so. I was going to ask, actually, lockdown has obviously been a wild ride. It seems like you’ve been talking about it [sex/pleasure] a lot more since the Panny D. We’ve obviously spent a lot more time with ourselves over the last however many months it’s been, do you think it’s changed your relationship with yourself, or your body, etc. Maybe you’ve had more time for self-lovin’ (we both laugh).

Emma: I’m not going to lie, obviously getting sent 4 or 5 vibrators, I was like I don’t know what to do with myself. (we both laugh again). But no, I guess I’ve sort of embraced pleasure for quite a few years, but now it’s just a lot more public. It’s weird, before it seemed a lot more sexual because the whole thing was so private. But now that I’m talking about it publicly, I just feel so unashamed talking about it. For me it’s now so normal. So yeah, it’s become a lot less sexual, it’s become work.

I guess it’s watching programs like sex education as well. The Mum doesn’t talk about it in a really sexual way, it’s biological, it’s literally your anatomy and there’s no other topic relating to your body that is seen so shamefully. It’s just factual.

Meg: Sex education is such a good reference point. It’s so popular and obviously shows how much more acceptable it’s becoming to talk about. The next question I had links to that in a small way - are there any other womxn or platforms you follow that you’d recommend checking out?

Emma: Venus Libido is really good, she’s all for talking about sex toys and sex. [Venus Libido is a sex educator and talented artist/ illustrator].

And, Lalalaletmeexplain. I think she’s actually got some sort of qualification, I’m not sure what it’s in. But she was the first person, I looked on her Instagram, who showed a diagram of a clitoris and I was like OMG that’s what it looks like! The whole shape, I’d never seen it before in my life, it was so educational. She posts loads of things that are really good. [Lalaletmeexplain is a qualified social worker and author].

Meg: I have one last question for you. Have you got any kind of tips in overcoming the stigma around female pleasure or starting the journey of talking about or even just thinking about it?

Emma: Oh God, okay. So, I know not everyone can have an orgasm so I don’t want it to be seen as ‘this is the goal, this is what we’ve been denied, so this has to happen’, because some people aren’t very sexual. So I don’t want there to be that as a pressure. But I just think that we owe it to ourselves to get to know our bodies and see that you have a say in what happens. Sex isn’t something that just happens to you. You should enjoy it and however you can enjoy it there’s no shame in that. Buy a vibrator, see if you enjoy it. If you have more fun with that than you do with your partner, then you know things need to change or be adapted. Sex doesn’t need to be sexy for it to be fucking amazing. It just needs to be real (laughs) in the least lame way.

Meg: That makes a lot of sense, thank you. I feel like every one of our readers now, who hasn’t already, will be rushing out to purchase a vibrator. (we both laugh).

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After our chat, Emma also recommended the film #femalepleasure a documentary portraying the lives of five courageous, smart and self-determined women, breaking the silence imposed by their communities. It shows the universal mechanisms at work that determine the position of women until today, spanning cultures, religions and continents. There’s so much to learn on this topic about the experiences of women around the world, so I know I’ll be giving it a watch.

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If you’re after a safe space to continue talking about sex, visit Emma’s platform @that.typeofgirl .

To read Emma’s own brilliant writing, check out her blog.

And to see more of Emma’s glorious face, life and puppers, follow her Insta.