Podcast: Play in new window | Download
First up, I am so excited to announce the Explore More Summit: Bodies Edition. It kicks off December 4th and it’s totally free. We’ll spend 5 days going super deep into body politics, self acceptance, fat activism, diet culture, weight stigma, and shedding body shame so we can center our pleasure.
To see the line-up and to enroll, pop over to exploremoresummit.com.
This week we are talking about technology, innovation, and sex education. Andrea Barrica is here, the founder of O.School. She has long been in the tech industry, working with the titans in Silicone Valley, and it’s clear that the internet is not designed for sex education or for safety.
Andrea is on a mission to change that. She wants people to have a harassment-free, trauma-informed place to access sex education that is real, powerful, and available anywhere in the world.
We talk about all the ways technology is currently failing us, what’s next for sex education, and how we can design better solutions that center the most marginalized. This episode will totally scratch your geek side, so dive in!
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Andrea and I talk about:
- The launch of O.School, which Andrea has been working on forever. It’s streaming, live sex education that you can watch from your computer or phone, anywhere in the world.
- Andrea’s sex education growing up, why she would have been better without any sex ed, and how she REALLY learned about sex.
- Why it was scary for Andrea to explore her queer identity and what happened when she finally started seeking sex education as an adult.
- Cosmo and porn for sex ed. Why is the internet such a terrible place to get sex education and why is it so difficult to find good information?
- Where most of our technology actually comes from – streaming video and live chat, for example.
- Andrea talks to CEO and creators in the tech space, and she sees that we’re on the cusp of a huge change. What’s next for sex education and tech?
- Harassment online and how we can try and control for it with better planning and moderating. Because harassment should not be inevitable in online spaces.
- The epidemic of loneliness and toxic masculinity that is the internet, and what Andrea and I are both trying to spread instead.
- We all come into our sexuality with things we need to unlearn because we’re all swimming in this sex negative soup.
- Pleasure as resistance – what it means to Andrea. Some of her inspiration comes from Afrosexology! WOOT!
- Tech leaders & folks in Silicone Valley believe sexism and patriarchy are over, so they aren’t interested in investing time, money, or innovation to these spaces. Which means we need to do it ourselves, which is where O.School comes in.
- Shame and why it’s so rampant – a lot starts from our refusal to offer young people and youth access to information about their bodies and sexuality and only grows as adults.
- Why centering the most marginalized can solve so much of the design issues we experience in this world. Most of the information we have culturally about sex are based on decades-old studies of 18 year old white cis able-bodied men. No wonder we all feel so broken.
About Andrea Barrica:
Andrea Barrica is CEO/co-founder of O.school, an online shame-free platform for pleasure education, powered by live-streaming and chat to help people unlearn shame, process trauma, and learn about sex and pleasure. Previously, Andrea co-founded YC-backed accounting and tax platform, inDinero.com, where she led sales and operations. She also served as a venture partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at 500 Startups, one of the world’s most active, global seed funds.
Stay in touch with Andrea on LinkedIn and follow along on Twitter at @abarrica and @OschoolLive.
Listen and subscribe to Sex Gets Real
- Listen and subscribe on iTunes
- Check us out on Stitcher
- Don’t forget about I Heart Radio’s Spreaker
- Pop over to Google Play
- Use the player at the top of this page.
- Now available on Spotify. Search for “sex gets real”.
- Find the Sex Gets Real channel on IHeartRadio.
Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!
Hey, lovely listeners. Dawn Serra here. We have a really fun, interesting, geeky episode this week that I’m very excited to bring you. Before we dive into that, I am super excited to announce that my annual summit, Explore More, is actually having its first breakout edition, which means instead of the big 10-day, 30 talk summit that I do every spring which is still happening this coming spring – I’m doing a smaller 5-day summit that’s all about body politics, self-acceptance, fat activism, diet culture, weight stigma, and shedding body shame. It is amazing. I’ve recorded all of the talks. They are so fucking powerful. There is something for everyone in there, whether you are brand new to body positivity and you’re starting to question diets and this fatphobia we have, or you’re really deep into activism. There is something for everyone. The best part is it’s totally free and happens online. I would love to see you there. You can go to exploremoresummit.com to see the incredible lineup. Of course, when you register, not only do you get access to our explore more community where we do all kinds of really deep conversations, but you also get free workbooks throughout the five days of the summit that are full, and I mean full, of journal prompts and self-reflective exercises, all kinds of amazing stuff that’s going to help you really start working through body shame and the stories you tell yourself about your body, and ways that you can center pleasure without having to change a thing about the way that you look.
Dawn Serra: So on to this week’s episode, it is all about technology. The person that I’m chatting with is Andrea Barrica, and she is the CEO and co founder of O.School, which is an online shame free platform for pleasure education, powered by livestreaming and chat to help people unlearn shame, process trauma, and learn about sex and pleasure. Previously, Andrea co-founded YC back accounting and tax platform inDiner.com, where she led sales and operations. She served as a venture partner and entrepreneur in residence at 500 Startups, which is one of the world’s most active global seed funds. So Andrea has deep ties to Silicon Valley and to tech, and she’s decided to move into the sex education space.
We have this amazing chat about creating harassment-free spaces, and trauma-informed spaces, how to design software that centers the most marginalized. It is super amazing and super geeky. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed speaking with Andrea. So here we go.
Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Andrea. I am ridiculously excited to, not only talk to you, but talk to you on O.school’s launch day.
Andrea Barrica: Very exciting.
Dawn Serra: I imagine you have your hands full with all of these things you’ve been planning. I’d love it if we could start if you could tell everyone a little bit about O.school because that’s launching today and this episode is going to go out two days post – launch. So I’d love for you to start by telling everyone what you’ve created.
Andrea Barrica: I would love to, Dawn. Thank you so much for having me. It is a really special day and it’s extra special that I get to chat with you. I’m a big fan of yours as well. So O.school is a shame free place to watch sex and pleasure education through live streaming and moderated chat. So our goal is that anyone in the world with a smartphone can access the most amazing educators talking about sex, on learning shame, discovering pleasure after trauma – all online and able to access no matter where you’re from or where you live or what access you have to things in your home – just in your hometown. Because we know that so many people didn’t get access to education, and that this should be accessible everywhere.
Dawn Serra: Okay, so it begs the question, what kind of sex-ed did you get when you were growing up?
Andrea Barrica: I didn’t receive any sex-ed, and frankly, the sex-ed that I received, I would have been better off without any sex-ed, actually. So I grew up Filipino Catholic. My parents were immigrants from the Philippines. If you don’t know the Philippines is a very Catholic country and my parents came with very traditional ideas about sex, especially purity and virginity. I was told very… What I came to understand growing up in my household was that men were out to get sex, and I was supposed to, at all counts, avoid it and protect my virginity. That people would always try to get it from me. So I was really fed these ideas. I received Catholic abstinence-only education for the first couple years of school and then I went to a California public high school and there I received a very fear-based “Don’t get pregnant, don’t get these STI.” These are very scary things. So I was brought up in my sex education with a lot of fear and a lot of shame.
Dawn Serra: When did you start finding out that sex was something other than those fear-based messages? Because I’m always fascinated when people start getting to that place of like, “Maybe I haven’t been given the stuff that I need.” Or “Maybe I don’t know the whole story.” What was that journey like for you?
Andrea Barrica: It was a long journey. I think that, for me, it came much later in life. I was in my early 20s before I ever looked at my own genitals. Even before that, I was really struggling with my sexuality. It was really scary for me to be queer and to really even explore that side of me because it was not welcome in my culture at all. So, what I ended up doing was I was like, “Oh, okay.” I was convinced that I would be a dork and I studied a lot. I actually just turned off my sexuality. So my first response was to say, “I just don’t have one” and “This is not something that I’m going to participate in at all.” I ended up meeting someone I really loved and fell in love with, and we ended up getting married really young.
So I reacted by, again, going the mainstream route, trying to please people in my life. Then I got to the point where… A couple books changed things for me. I read Ethical Slut, which was a huge, – again, early in my life was something like, “Whoa.” There are totally different ways of thinking about sexuality. I also started to come into my own independence as an entrepreneur. I started my first tech company when I was 20. Yes, that’s correct. I started my first company before I looked at my own genitals. It was hard and it was during this time that I co-founded an accounting software at 20. I was a professional and I was working a lot, and it was kind of this hidden buried thing in me. When it unleashed it, I couldn’t go back. It was something that my journey to find pleasure was something that came later for me.
Andrea Barrica: I had a lot of shame around not knowing sooner that I had to get over. Because there is that shame of, “Oh my gosh.” I was really blessed that I had a partner that did care about my pleasure. So, it wasn’t like I wasn’t having pleasure – having sex that felt pleasurable. But I wasn’t willing to think about it, talk about it, explore it. It was just very scary. It was a very scary part of my life. Then when that broke down, it was like, “What else can we try?” And all the things, “Let’s try all the things.” It was while I was in this tech world that I started to be obsessed with this question of, “Why isn’t this more widely available? Why didn’t the internet get me this information sooner?” Because there’s Cosmo and then there’s porn. There’s all these things that you would expect that the information in a digital age would have delivered. I was in a tech company and I was going to live in-person classes to get education or go to local good vibrations and asking questions. These were the ways that I actually learned about things because I couldn’t talk about it at home or with friends or really anyone.
Dawn Serra: Cosmo oh blessed, blessed it. It informed so much of my early teen years. I considered it my Bible in middle school. My friends and I would pour over it and try to imagine what it would be like when we finally got to the place that we got to have sex with the wild positions that Cosmo would it was put out. I know like distinctly that I always felt like, “Well, the only way I can ever have the types of sex that I’m reading about in Cosmo is to lose weight and not be in a fat body.” So it felt like this thing that I would have to change myself in order to achieve and have the kind of sex that I had been idealizing and idolizing for years and years and years. Then, of course, porn comes along and helps to fill in some of those gaps in a worst way. So yeah, I totally agree with you just this.
We kind of have this mishmash of places where we start getting all this information about how sex is actually happening and maybe “supposed to be”. But then there’s so many people who don’t even realize there’s sex educators out in the world, and that there’s books out in the world that can help you with all of these things, because it just never gets talked about. Access is– I mean, you have to actively look for it, to try and find it. I know that’s one of the things that you love geeking out about is like, “Where do we get all these ideas about sex?” “Why is it so freaking hard for people to find, not only great sex education, but also ethical pornorgraphy and all of these things?” “What have you found being in these tech spaces around…” The internet can literally do almost anything at this point. We’ve got robots for Christ’s sake. But it’s so hard to find good, quality information about sex without digging.
Andrea Barrica: Oh, thanks for sharing that, Dawn. I definitely experienced a lot of the same experiences. That’s why it’s amazing to me that it’s 2017 and it is still a radical idea, when I posit that a fully clothed person talking about sex on the internet does not constitute pornography, or does not constitute adult content in a way that should be censored. It is amazing to me. It’s pervasive, it’s pervasive. It’s pervasive that it’s not against the law at all. But platforms have a lot of power in this way. There’s two main ways.
One is that you talk to most sex tech companies or most people doing sex education, it’s very difficult to get an ad approved on Facebook, if you didn’t know that.
Dawn Serra: It’s impossible for me.
Andrea Barrica: Impossible, and also payment, right? I’m sure you’ve experienced this too. There is this sense that this belongs in a different area of the internet. From a tech angle, it’s even more interesting because most of the technology that people know about and use today was driven and innovated on through the adult industry, but it is treated like its own separate sect of the internet that you can’t really blend with the mainstream. It is propagated by systems. What I usually tell people is the reason we can’t have nice things is because of Visa MasterCard, which is one of the big problems. This is where you can be blacklisted for being against various legal terms of use, whether or not it’s illegal in various states. This is based on very vague obscenity laws. So that’s one side of things.
The other is that very few people who have been funded and who have founded technology platforms really have the value system and the lived experiences to fight for these issues. If their investors have a problem with it, if the payment processors have a problem with it, and that’s why we need more champions to make sure that this content on the internet has a place. That’s what I’m really excited to be able to do. I’ve been working, again, I’ve been in tech for seven years and it’s amazing to me – there’s so much challenges, there’s so many challenges with fundraising. The one that’s just alarming to me is this is an industry that we both know is huge. By 2025, there will be 100 billion dollars of sexual wellness products being sold. And the only thing we can count on investors to do is to be greedy. Yet, this is one area of business and of the world of sexual wellness that hasn’t been innovated and we’re left with this message, which is that, “We’re not going to provide great sex positive education online. We’re also not going to have any in schools. We’re also going to restrict all the ways that sex educators like you, and so many of the other amazing sex educators in the country, are doing. We’re just going to create these avenues.” That’s why we don’t have any nice things on the internet.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Yeah, it’s so frustrating because there’s so many people, myself included, doing so many really radical things that don’t involve– No. You and I are both super pro-porn. So I don’t think this is the worst thing in the world either. But, for all of us who are doing work in this space where we’re not doing explicit pornographic, sexual content, to not be able to do Facebook ads or promoted tweets. Patreon is considering banning all sexual content on its site, and there’s so many people that I know: Andre Shakti who’s been on the show, and Sinclair Sexsmith, and myself who – one of the ways that we actually can connect with people and exchange money and goods and relationships is through sites like Patreon. So if they were to ban all “adult” content, it just makes it that much harder for us to get our voices out. It’s so endlessly frustrating and disappointing.
Tristan Taormino and I were talking one day about how we should just create our own bank so that we can help fund people who are doing work in this space without them having to have all the shit-tastic crap they go through with other banks, because it’s just so sex negative.
Andrea Barrica: We also had an idea for this. We wanted to call it Bitchcoin.
Dawn Serra: Yes! Oh my god, I’m so into that.
Andrea Barrica: We definitely recognize that. The good news is that I believe now is the right time to change this. Again, I come from the other sexy industry, which is accounting and finance – that was my first company. So that’s helped me really be able to understand and talk to the founders of these companies and ask them to their face, “Why don’t you support this?” Typically, it’s around fear. It’s around stigma. But what I tell them is that things are changing. Millennials are twice as likely to identify as LGBTQ. In 2009, single women outnumber numbered married women for the first time in history. We are at a massive cultural shift right now. What I’m excited to see are these institutions have to grapple with that – that there should be an area between Planned Parenthood and Pornhub. There should be, and I’m agreeing with you. I think porn is amazing. I think that there needs to be more of it made by totally different communities as well. Also, expecting people to learn about sex through porn is like expecting to learn how to drive through Fast and Furious movies, right? It just leads to a lot of the things that many sex educators are dealing within their communities.
Dawn Serra: So one of the things that I know you’ve talked about as you moved into this space is, it’s inevitable that when we’re talking about sex, if we’re marginalized in any way, if we’re a woman, if we’re queer, if we’re trans, if we’re fat, if we’re black, if we’re indigenous – whatever it is, and you talk about sex on the internet, harassment is a guarantee. I actually have a weekly Twitter chat and yesterday, I had my weekly Twitter chat and we were talking about genitals. I had to actually put out a tweet that said, “Just because we’re talking about genitals doesn’t mean we want to see yours. So no unsolicited genital pics.” Because I knew, inevitably, that talking about genitals, there were going to be someone who felt like this was an invitation to send dick pics to everyone in the feed.
So I’m wondering how have you grappled with that space around talking about sex and social media that can be very unsafe and really horrifying for a lot of us, and yet, we have to persist because it’s the only place where we can. What kind of thinking or innovating or questions, even, have come up for you when you think about that?
Andrea Barrica: It’s such an important problem. I would say it’s a core and central problem to what we’re trying to do with O.school. People are starting to realize that the internet is a place, just like the sidewalk is a place, right? We are lucky – some of us are lucky, not all of us are lucky, to live in spaces where we can walk on the sidewalk and no one’s going to harass us, right? Of course, this is a thing. But when you go into online spaces, it’s almost expected that you will be harassed in certain spaces because of who you are and the things that you choose to talk about. We have a problem with that at O.school. So that’s why we’re launching with human moderators from day one, which is really different than how a lot of internet communities treat this, which is, the community can moderate themselves and justice will prevail if you let the communities moderate themselves. We know that does not work. We know that that is not the answer here.
So we have outlined collaborative community guidelines and that was an evolving living document that we are going to use internally. But I think people who choose to be on the internet and have a voice – they deserve to join platforms that understand that there has to be something done about this pervasive harassment. Like you said, I’ve seen pleasure professionals O.school try to do what they do on other platforms and be almost instantaneously harassed. The saddest part about it for me is that they are so used to it. This is like part of the job description like if you want to talk about sex on the internet, then you better get a thick skin. I think that is sad and absolutely unacceptable, especially if you are building in this world – what are we going to do about creating places where women and people of color and queer people and indigenous people, all these people, can feel safe? A good example of this is – are you familiar with Reddit?
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Andrea Barrica: Reddit, right? It’s a darling of the tech world. It’s the seventh most visited website in the world, the fourth most visited website in America. They are still over 70% white and male. Last time, I looked at the numbers. What that tells me is that the internet’s not serving a lot of people. We need to do better, we need to do better. We are a small, tiny startup trying to do what we can and start a movement. But this is a huge problem for us. And I would say it’s a bigger problem – streaming to devices all over the world is a hard problem. But I think even more core to our mission is how do we scale that and build that without it becoming a cesspool of abuse and harassment?
Dawn Serra: Yeah, I don’t know. My hope, I don’t know, maybe it’s naively optimistic of me, but my hope is that as people have better access to be having conversations that dismantle the rampant misogyny, sexism, patriarchy, all the other things, isms – as people have more access to have these conversations and grappled with these questions and explore their pleasure and have the information they need, that harassment would go down. But I don’t know. I guess it’s just going to have to be part of the great big experiment that is the internet.
Andrea Barrica: Absolutely. I share the same dream as you. Also I think that what you and I are trying to do in the world, which is: spread pleasure, help people really get in touch with what really gives them joy and purpose and all of that, is essential to this. Because I think there’s an epidemic of loneliness and toxic masculinity on the internet. We don’t talk about how many of these behaviors, I think, we are showcasing just a real need for people to talk about their feelings and to have outlets.
It’s interesting. So my little brother is a huge internet user and calls himself a denizen – real citizen of the internet. What he explains to me is that most of the people who do this are really looking for validation from their own communities. It’s very interesting that this has become their– I am a big believer in empathy. I’m a big believer in understanding. What could possibly cause people to want to go on the internet and be assholes all the time? It sounds really exhausting to do. What I’m learning is that, it’s so confusing to us, is that we have love in our lives and a lot of people, they don’t. so they go to the internet to really create– It’s really the reactions of other people that they’re looking for. I’m like, “Wow, what a sad way to really express wanting love and wanting all the things.” that funnily, the work that you and I are doing are being barred from the internet. So I do believe we’re part of the medicine and the solution for it.
Dawn Serra: It’s interesting as you talk about that, because one of the things that I’m constantly talking about on the show and in the work that I do is that in order for us to actually build meaningful connections with others – be it sexual or platonic, whatever it is. We have to learn resilience for awkwardness, for uncertainty, for having feelings that are maybe really uncomfortable in ourselves or even sitting with feelings from others. There’s this feeling of when you go online, there can be these powerful connections that we create. And it can also be a place for us to feel really sad and lonely and to express our frustrations. I know you’ve also done so much work in the business space and one of the things you’ve told people in the past around building business and finding success is the importance of making mistakes. For me, that’s such a critical part of cultivating meaningful relationships with other human beings and also for finding our way to what sex means for us on our own terms.
You have to mess up. You have to try things and get it wrong, and then learn from that and grow from it. I think so much of the sex-ed that we get and so much of the messages we get around relationships, right now, at least in mainstream, there’s zero modeling of the mistakes and the discomfort and the uncertainty. I don’t know, it’s like, we need more spaces where we can all be practicing that.
Andrea Barrica: Wow, that’s really insightful, Dawn. I definitely agree with you. I really think that ‘s important, especially for the communities that you and I get to be in, which are really privileged communities having been sexually liberated – we are one of the few people in the world. I really believe that. I mean, business stuff aside, there are more oppressed people in the world than sexually liberated people in the world. I’ve seen that. This is what I’ve experienced. I think what’s important to the work that we do and why, like you said, creating spaces to make mistakes is so important is that all of us come to our sexuality with a certain amount of things we need to unlearn. All of us do. One of the things that I say that sometimes can be construed as controversial, but wokeness is a privilege. If you didn’t grow up in a progressive place, and if you didn’t get a higher education degree, it’s going to be really– It would be very, I would say, difficult to learn how to use the most inclusive language. I would say it’s a privilege.
So part of us creating these spaces is not only is it to prevent abuse and harassment, but to call in all the people who don’t really know a lot about how to be inclusive to all the different identities and the different communities, but who we can pull in and help them work through their own issues and then grow the ally community. Because I think that’s a challenge with some people when we are carrying around a lot of pain that we want to come to issues with a level of, “If they use this language, then they obviously don’t care about me or they don’t share my values.” What I’ve experienced is that there’s many, many people – that they’re also ashamed that they don’t know how to use the right language. They don’t know how to be with people with different identities.
Andrea Barrica: I experienced this myself early – a few months before I started O.school. I fell in love with a trans person. I have a Berkeley degree. I’ve been in progressive circles for a long time and I was amazed at how much I needed to learn to be able to love someone with an identity that was different than being a cis person, having to just sit in that. To think that suddenly now that I do have a certain amount of education, it’s always still evolving and growing that I have had. I want to create spaces where it’s okay not to know the right word. It’s okay. And it’s okay to still want to talk about sex, even if you’re not an expert at it. Because it can be really different, not only for people who don’t have education, but just generational differences. I definitely have met people who don’t react to the word queer the way that I feel about the word queer. And that’s okay. There needs to be spaces where that’s okay to talk about too.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, one of the things that… Something that really shook me earlier this year was I was having a conversation with Betty Martin. She’s an amazing educator who’s dedicated her multiple decade career to doing hands-on sexual work with folks. One of the things she said to me is, “I don’t care if you know the names of your body parts and your anatomy, because you don’t need to know the names to tell me what feels good and where it feels good when you can show me or when you can point me in the right direction. If you can put your hand on yourself and say, ‘This is my favorite spot to be touched.’ You don’t need to know the name of it. What’s more important is knowing that about yourself and not necessarily the language that everybody’s telling you you need to have.”
She was kind of saying it’s more important that you know stroking your clitoris and this way is what brings you personal pleasure over being able to say the word clitoris and not knowing how you like it to be touched. That just made such an impact on me of – I think sometimes, you’re so right, that we’re so focused on language and teaching anatomy, and checking those boxes, but are we leaving space in all these conversations for people to even be curious about themselves. Maybe I don’t have the word for the thing my body is doing. But if I know this consistently feels amazing, at a minimum, can I just give myself permission to enjoy that and maybe share it with someone? I think that’s such an interesting conversation. I love that you say being woke is a privilege.
Dawn Serra: Feminista Jones who’s one of my, one of my heroes, says, “None of us are born woke. We have to constantly do the work and we have to choose…” And not everybody has the privilege to be able to put the time and the energy into that activist mindset, basically. So I love this concept that you’re talking about of it being a constant journey, because I think that leaves so much more room for all of us to be at different points on it, right? It’s not like you either know or you don’t. It’s, “I’m learning every day.” So you can start, too, and we’ll just be at different points on the same journey.
Andrea Barrica: Absolutely. And that’s a really powerful story and something that I think a lot of people can relate to in that – not everyone wants to nerd out about sex like you. Not everybody does. I see that and I see that and people trying to engage and trying to have more pleasure in their lives. I’m really excited about the opportunity for O.school to create those spaces, because we at O.school don’t create any content. We are bringing nothing new to this to this industry in terms of education or concepts. It’s all there. It’s all out there. There are people in their communities doing this amazing work. What they don’t have is a platform that supports this type of content and centers it, which is a really big problem. That’s what I think our job at O.school is – to build a technology so that people can find what they need and create that destination that’s trusted and safe. That’s where I see our job but I think, from what we just listened to that story, it’s like, “Wow, I want to learn from that person.” Right? There’s all these people that’s like, “Why don’t more people know about this?”
Dawn Serra: Yeah, I totally agree. That’s one of the reasons why I love doing my summit every year is because I feel like it’s an opportunity to, “Let’s share more stories from more people who have these amazing experiences. Maybe you haven’t heard of some of them before. So let’s make space for having these amazing people tell stories and rock our worlds and open our minds.” That is so my geek space. I just like, “Oh, I wish I could listen to it every day.”
So I’m wondering, you have said in the past, that pleasure is resistance or pleasure as resistance. I’m wondering, what does that mean for you when you think about pleasure as resistance?
Andrea Barrica: Two things come to mind. One is – one of my favorite pleasure professionals on O.school is two people called Dalychia and Rafaella.
Dawn Serra: Oh my gosh, they were just on last week.
Andrea Barrica: Oh my gosh, that’s so funny. I’m totally going to listen to that episode. They’re amazing. They’re medicine. There’s some of my inspiration to build O.school. They always talk about how can you have political agency, economic agency, professional agency, all the agencies if you don’t have agency over your own body? That’s a huge one for me that comes to mind is that – we talked a lot about the wage gap. I work in the professional tech in the tech business world, and there’s a lot of discussion about that. Not a lot of discussion about sexuality at all.
I remember early in my career, I was starting to find my sexuality. I became very powerful at work. I was more decisive. I was able to advocate for myself and others much better. I had more confidence. It was just a total change. Everyone was asking me, “What’s your secret? What’s going on with you?” And I remember feeling like, “I know what it is, but I can’t talk about it.” So I’d make it up like “Oh, it’s a green juice that I got.” or “I’m eating those sprouted seeds.” You just make something up. You can’t say, “I’m having the best sex of my life.” or “I’m really starting to figure out what my body can do.” It’s an amazing thing that we don’t talk about bodily agency as being a really huge part of all the other powerful things we want to be able to do in our lives. So I think that’s a huge part of it that we’ve cut the body off of us a little bit when we talk about power and sexuality and pleasure. It’s one of the most basic ways that we can exercise our power.
Andrea Barrica: Secondly, with everything going on in the country right now – pick the sexual harassment problem of the week, sadly. It’s a wild time to be alive, where it’s a weekly reminder of just how much work we have to do as a society. There’s this overwhelming feeling I get sometimes, which is that what can we really– It sometimes feels like we can’t expect more than just not being harassed or abused or violated. It’s like we’re playing defense, often against, the oppression and the powers that be. I think part of pleasure is resistance is that, “No, no, no. It is way more than just the freedom of being free from harassment or abuse or violence or consent being constantly violated. We want to pursue pleasure.” For me, it’s an offense move against everything that’s happening.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. So much of what’s out there is about hiding or denying or downplaying pleasure, specifically, for people in marginalized bodies. I think you’re so right that when we can start saying, “This is my body and these are my edges, and this is what I want.” There’s so much power and in acknowledging you deserve to want those things, you deserve to say you want those things. That’s a really hard thing for so many of us to do, especially when we’ve been socialized in various specific ways that tell us we shouldn’t speak up and we should follow and not listen. I think there’s this assumption in the world that because we’ve had shows like Sex in the City and we’ve had this third wave feminism. There’s this assumption that the socialization and patriarchy doesn’t really exist as much anymore, at least in pop culture and media, and it absolutely does. It’s just become so much more hidden and so much more invisible. I think that’s why people are feeling so shocked by all of these – basically at this point, daily, things that are coming out around sexual harassment from people that we’ve long considered idols and heroes, and artists and realizing that literally everyone is problematic in some point because the world is problematic.
We are built on a culture of problems and shame. It’s a fascinating time, you’re right, to be having these conversations. I feel like you could either be the kind of person that feels overwhelmed and helpless, or feel like, “Okay, this is now the time to actually really start fighting because more and more people are talking about this.”
Andrea Barrica: Absolutely, absolutely. It’s amazing to me, too, the timing tha– We have someone who could not be like a bigger worry in terms of the future of teaching sexual respect in this country and office. I started school before the election, Dawn, so I could not have imagined that this would be the world that O.school will be launching in. And it scares me – it scares me, but it also excites me because it means that– Especially the kind of audiences that love O.school. I went to Claremont McKenna last week. O.school hosted a sex week there. And, close to half the campus came to sex week. The same time that I’m going into – some of the investors that I meet in Silicon Valley try to convince me that what we are doing at O.school is not solving a problem. So the things that you’re saying – I’ve been told by very powerful people who’ve invented some of the best technologies that we all use today, I’ve talked to them and they say things like, “Well, these young people they have YouTube. They can get this information.”
Like you said, there’s this incorrect assumption that young people must be all sexually liberated because the internet is here, we have open relationships column The New York Times and 50 Shades of Grey outsold Harry Potter in some markets, whatever. There’s this assumption, yet what they don’t see is what I just saw at Claremont McKenna with 700 students, where they are dying. They’re starving for great information and for helpful information about sex and pleasure, and not just the mechanics of it. There’s a sense of like, Oh, well, if they’re healthy, what’s the big problem?” Of course, it’s mostly cis white men who say these things to me. It’s like, “Oh, I just put it in and it works. What’s the problem?” I feel like that a lot. It dawns on me like, “Oh my gosh. This is this insidious problem with shame.” And I think there is a problem in that the next generation wants so much more education around this. I think it also relates to this strange problem we have in society of treating children or treating youth like they shouldn’t learn anything. Even 18 year old legal ages – why give them access to this and I believe that the right time to talk to someone about sex is when they ask, at whatever age, at whatever ask. There is nothing that’s off limits in terms of what should be discussed. Yet it’s this insidious problem of shame that creates all this darkness, all of the silence. And that’s why we have the world we have.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Oh my god, there’s so much about that that I love. Shame, I think is the underlying issue with so many of the questions that I get here on the show. I think there’s kind of this weird relationship we have with shame, where so many of us feel like, “Well, no. I’m not ashamed that I’m sexual. I’m not ashamed that I hook up. I’m not ashamed of my genitals or how I orgasm.” But then these questions come in around, “How do I tell so and so that I’ve been faking my orgasms?” “How do I deal with a partner who’s super into porn?” “How do I X, Y, Z because my labia…”
What’s underneath that is that shame and that fear of either not being good enough or of doing the wrong thing or of damaging or losing a relationship that you care about. But not realizing that there’s so many other opportunities available for either relationships themselves or even just for attacking these problems that we have a very, very personal level. There’s multiple solutions to every problem. But because information – good information is so hard to come by when it comes to relationships and sex, it feels very polarizing. It’s either “I’m going to do it right or everything falls apart.” Or “They’re either going to like it or they’re going to hate it.” It’s this space where because of shame, we tend to think of these very black and white terms and to have spaces where we can start softening that a little bit of like, “It’s okay if you’re in shame, and here’s some other ways to think about this.” I feel like that creates so much less hurt and that’s so much better for connection, which is what we all really need.
Andrea Barrica: We all really need connection. Absolutely, absolutely. I’m really positive about this future. I get 18 year old cis men walking up to me being like, “How can I unlearn this toxic masculinity I know is around me?” And it brings me to tears, it does. I have hope. I have met the next generation and they’re listening. They care and they don’t want to grow up in the same world that we’re living in right now. They want a new world. So I’m really quite optimistic about the future and that we will create it. I don’t believe in 5 to 10 years, it’s going to be how it is now. I believe that there will be spaces and that there’s going to be a massive dialogue happening about this radical notion that people want connection, sex is good for you, and there’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of with how little or how much sex you want to have, and no matter what type of sex you want to have.
Dawn Serra: So one of the things you’ve talked about – you have this great talk at lesbianswhotech that I saw, and it’s in some of the articles I’ve read about O.school, but this focus on making sure that we’re not only making room for talking about pleasure and reducing shame, but also that we’re being very trauma aware. I’m a survivor and I know that so many of the people who listen are as well have a variety of traumas. I’m wondering, what does it look like to think about an online sexuality space where you’re being trauma informed?
Andrea Barrica: Yeah, it is absolutely our experience that the barrier to pleasure is often something that’s happened to us, right? So that can be trauma that comes from growing up in a home that has very shameful messages, which is what I experienced growing up in a Filipino Catholic home all the way to being the survivors of sexual assault or other things. So we define being trauma-informed in a very wider array of things, because so many things that we live in our society cause trauma around sexuality. Whether it has to do with our bodies, whether it has to do with our families, or whether it has to do with things that have really made us feel powerless or violated our consent.
So as a community, that means a few things for us. It means that we definitely grew our community, looking for people who could speak to this through lived experience – that was a massive part of how we formed the first community. It also meant how we wrote our community guidelines and how we really are trying to build consent into the software – like how are we going to teach consent to the world if we don’t build it into our software as much as we can? right. That’s one of the more integrated ways that we think about being trauma- informed.
Dawn Serra: It’s really interesting because I think often – I think oftentimes when it comes to books about sex, programs about sex, sex education in so many spaces – the marginalized voices are these asterisk that gets thought about after. So I want to create this workshop that’s about orgasms. Then afterwards someone says, “Well, what about asexual folks?” So there’s this little one liner that you just throw in so you can check that box. Or “What about trans bodies?” And you just throw in a little one thing.
I think often trauma is approached that way, too, like, “I want to teach this thing or write a book about this thing.” Then afterwards, like, “Oh, yeah, folks with trauma. I’ll just put in this little shout out box this little appendix for trauma folks.” So, I think it’s so important for all of us who are having these conversations, whether it’s as a professional who’s teaching classes online or in-person or writing books, and even just in our personal lives; if we can start approaching these conversations thinking about the most marginalized and the potential for trauma in the conversation before we initiate, it comes out so much more powerful. So I love that that’s been something you’ve built in from the very beginning of, “We’re going to think about this from the ground up about harassment, about trauma, about shame, and then try and address from there.” Because I think where we get it wrong, so often, is we don’t think about it until someone brings it up because they’ve been harmed. And we’re like, “Oh, yeah, well, I’ll just throw in this little thing and hope that’s good enough.”
Andrea Barrica: Thank you, Dawn. I agree. What’s important about all of this, too, is that you will reach larger communities if you focus on trauma, on shame. There are more traumatized and ashamed people in there are sexually liberated people because of the society we live in. That is just the reality. People who think that, “Oh, if only women had enough erotic products”, or “If only queer people had this or that.” They make this it seem like – that pleasure should be always erotic, very titillating, very arousing thing. But I find that the barrier in my conversations with people in these communities is that the biggest barriers to pleasure are not just access to these things, that’s part of it. I believe that. But it’s also, we need to acknowledge that we live in a society where – what are the stats these days? One in four people or one in three people will somehow experience sexual assault. You have all of these statistics and it gets even worse if you go into communities of color and other marginalized communities.
So I think there’s this misconception that, “Oh, if you reach this community, that’s somehow niche.” And that’s bullshit. That’s absolutely not true if you look at all of the issues that communities face. Not just from a business case, I just think it’s misinformed to think that when you build for communities and you ignore these things that you’re actually missing out on most people. You’re missing the problem altogether.
Dawn Serra: That’s how we got here in the first place, right? I mean, so much of the “sex research” that everything that we know, in a pop culture or on a media level, are built on studies that were conducted on 18 year old, cis men who were able-bodied and white. So if everything we know about arousal is based on an 18 year old white cis dude from the 40s and if everything we know about sexual attraction is based on these studies that focused on dudes – no wonder all of us feel like something’s not right or we’re broken.
So all of the articles and all of the TV shows are talking about all the ways to fix ourselves. When we approach it from like, “Well, how could we maybe talk about sex in a way that is inclusive of indigenous, trans, intersex older bodies?” Well, guess what, a lot of the stuff that works for those folks is going to work for everyone else. So we’re all winning in that situation. It’s so baffling and angering to me that so much of the information we have is based on such a tiny subset of the world and yet that’s what’s taught as what we should all be aspiring to.
Andrea Barrica: Absolutely. Again, this idea that for something to be sexy, you can’t talk about these issues. We made a very conscious decision not to put certain tags on things that are LGBTQ or asexual or – because it should be integrated in the site in general, right? You should learn about kink through all of these different lenses. You should learn about Tantra in all of these different lenses. The more that we just start normalizing that– I mean, everyone’s kinky. I’ve talked to therapists, I’ve talked to people who’ve worked with some of the most powerful people in the world. And everybody has these issues, but it’s almost like we’re so preoccupied with pretending like, “No, no. Everything’s fine. This is how things work.” And that’s just not true. This is not really what is real, what is true.
I’m really excited to bring the powers of a great empathy-driven, sex positive, inclusive sex education to the world. This is one of our main messages that you can’t just watch a recorded video about body shame and know like, “Oh, yeah, great. All good.” This is a process of constant healing. Even me, even the people who are a sex educators that we work with or ex-sex workers – all the people that are working with us. It’s all a constant process and that’s what I think is also a misconception that, “Oh yeah, why don’t you just go to a doctor and get that fixed?” Or it’s like a one time thing like, “Oh, that’s a weird thing that you have. Go fix it.” But if you’ve been fed harmful messages for a decade, it is a lifelong process to unlearn it.
Dawn Serra: Yep. It’s lifelong and it’s daily. Because every single day when we wake up, there’s another joke about small dicks or there’s another how-to article about the things that you’re doing that aren’t right, or some way you need to change your body in order to be sexy. I mean, literally every day when we wake up, we’re bombarded with these very subtle messages that reinforce all the ways that we’re not good enough or we’re broken or we’re not exciting enough or we’re not sexual enough. So this waking up, and education, and unlearning, and rewriting… We have to choose to do it every single day. And sometimes we’re tired. Sometimes you’re like, “I’m going to ignore the world for a little while.” But then you come back to it and you learn again, and you have new conversations.
So anytime we have an opportunity for these spaces, whether it’s podcasts or O.school, or wherever else people are teaching to have the ongoing dialogue so that we can all get re-fed and re-nourished and keep doing the rewriting, I think, is a win. Because it doesn’t stop. It’s not one and done, which I think is another place where people feel like, Well, if I take this one class, then I’m going to be – I’m going to know all the things about blow jobs.” That’s not how it works because every single person that you’re going to give a blowjob to is different. So we have to always be learning.
Andrea Barrica: Everything is shifting to gender and people – all of the things about identities that are coming out and how people express themselves. It’s a beautiful thing, but it also makes me feel like we have so much work to do to be prepared for all of this. All of this new openness and flexibility that makes me excited about being a human for the next however many years I’m going to be alive. I’m so grateful to be part of a community with you and other people who are beacons of permission for people to start talking about it because it’s so not happening on major platforms.
Dawn Serra: Well, I would love it if you would share with everyone how they can find you online, learn all about O.school and follow along with your amazing launch and journey.
Andrea Barrica: I would love to. So today, you just have to go to O.school. We will be streaming at 4pm. I will be streaming first and then there will be three more streams after me. Starting today every day from 4pm to 9pm Pacific, We will be streaming on the hour. I’m really looking forward to meeting some of you in the chat there.
Dawn Serra: Everybody who’s listening – I, of course, will have links at dawnserra.com. Please go check out O.school – live streams every night. So there’s so many delicious things for you to learn and roll around in. Please go geek out with Andrea and all of the other educators there. If you have any questions or comments, you can leave that to me on the contact form. I love hearing from you so send those over. Andrea, I want to thank you so much for coming on and talking to me about O.school and all of your big, huge plans for world domination. I love it.
Andrea Barrica: Thank you so much, Dawn. it was a pleasure. Again, I’m a huge fan of the work you do. Thank you.
Dawn Serra: You’re so welcome. To everybody who listened, thanks for tuning in. I, of course, will talk to you next week. Bye.