NSEC Workshop Title: Body Neutrality : A Workshop on the Connections Between Body Image & Sexual Health
NSEC Workshop Description: This workshop will explore how a socially constructed concept of an ‘ideal’ body impacts our work toward improving sexual health. Gain concrete tools to help you teach about body image and join the cultural shift towards creating a set of rules for individual bodies to be healthy, comfortable, and loved.
How many times have you attended the National Sex Ed Conference?
This will be my second time attending the conference.
What about your workshop are you most excited about?
I’m most excited about bringing the healing practice of body positivity to educators and the people they serve. Body shame affects us all and I look forward to examining it through an intersectional lens with folks that attend my workshop.I love sharing resources and hope participants bring some too.
Sex educators and the other professionals who present at the National Sex Ed Conference often do so many different things. Tell us a bit about your work life.
I’ve been working at Planned Parenthood of Central Western New York for seven years. Highlights for me besides my body positive and fat activism work in sexual health is providing sexuality education to people with disabilities, pregnancy options workshops for professionals and sex ed busking (I’m a musicians who has done street performance before so I thought why not just bring sex ed to the streets?). I am the training and curriculum specialist for the volunteers at Connect & Breathe, an after abortion nonjudgmental talkline. As a certified yoga teacher I have been so incredibly lucky to create safe, accessible yoga spaces to celebrate bodies of all sizes and abilities.
Tell us something about where you learned what you know, professionally?
I received my BA in sociology with a concentration in gender studies and minor in anthropology from Ithaca College. My mentor Rebecca Plante not only was an excellent professor that inspired me to choose a concentration in gender studies but introduced me to the field of sexuality education. I’m forever grateful for being able to attend NATISHE, North Atlantic Training Institute for Sexual Health Educators where I learned the ropes of sex ed and found my first community of colleagues.
