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Masturbation is the New Meditation | Keeley Olivia | TEDxLeamingtonSpa


[Applause]
it was the fourth consecutive Sunday
that I’d been sat in this particular
coffee shop with my laptop writing and
today was a special day because before
now I hadn’t known if I was writing
purely for my own catharsis but today I
knew my words would be shared with
others freely on the internet the whole
world and that thing that I’d been
writing well of course it was my
masturbation memoir I was both mortified
and thrilled thrilled because finally I
was living my version of anarchy in the
UK circa 2017 something I had long
dreamt of since childhood
growing up the daughter of two young
punks in the 90s and I was mortified
because I had just spent nearly a decade
of my life as a professional scientist
and research academic and now I was
going public with my masturbation memoir
what were people gonna think I was
writing this memoir because I had been
on this epic journey of personal
discovery in sexual awakening over the
past five years working by day as a
medical statistician and by night doing
my real work as a transformational and
loved sex and relationship coach what I
had learned blew my mind my body it was
capable of producing these life-changing
orgasms things I had previously believed
with a stuff of legend reserved only for
beans not quite of this world I had to
tell womankind what I had learned
oh how delighted they would be female
orgasm was a myth no more and the direct
pathway to it about to be revealed
I was going to tell the whole story of
ordinary female sexuality including the
unglamorous and uncouth along with it
the possibility for what lay beyond for
the first time in modern history women
were going to have a guy to get
their very own magical vaginas if this
is what they so wished I had conducted
upon myself a great masturbation
experiment over the course of one year I
had masturbated for an hour a day five
times a week now this might not sound
like very much some members of the
audience but for me it was revelatory
the world I grew up in said that
masturbation for teenage lads was the
norm any opportunity into a stop trying
his best not to get caught by his mom
but for teenage girls it was a different
story
it was more hidden and less spoken about
even though I remember my body feeling
like a walking hormonal catastrophe
causing my every waking thought to be
about sex yes I wanted to masturbate I
just didn’t really know how consider
this a woman’s sexual anatomy is
comprised of the vulva on the outside
home to the clitoris and the vagina on
the inside home to the hotly debated
g-spot and the cervix the old Latin term
for external female genitals is pudendal
and it translates literally as shame
limb this is the legacy we’re dealing
with the clitoris is the only organ ever
to evolve for the sole purpose of orgasm
and pleasure it has 8,000 nerve endings
twice that of the human penis and guess
what
every female mammal has a clitoris who
knew that female mammals could be
intersex for more than just procreation
now back to masturbation teenage girls
have flicking the bean the colloquial
term for rubbing one’s clitoris but what
about all that inside goodness how does
a woman come to know the landscape of
her own vagina the answer is simple she
needs a sex toy she needs a dildo now in
the UK too
by a sex toy from a shop on the high
street you have to be 18 years old but
it’s 16 you can have consensual sex with
other adults so what does this show us
well it shows us that many young women
are entering into sexual experiences
with others having never fully had the
opportunity to know their own bodies or
they are putting things up their vaginas
that weren’t designed to go up there and
yes this actually happens true stories
from the frontlines of war Manatee but
nobody talks about that do they female
sexual urges are real and by pretending
they don’t exist we are robbing women of
the opportunity to truly know love
safety and belonging within their own
bodies when we consider this context of
masturbation things like the gender
orgasm gap seem obvious of course men
would be having more orgasms in
heterosexual relationships than women
when they have had so much of a head
start
porn intended I first learnt to orgasm
when I was 20 by squeezing the muscles
in my vulva really tightly and watching
porn this created a short contracted
orgasm in my clitoris later when I
decided I couldn’t be both a
self-respecting woman and watch porn I
bought myself a vibrator and now found
that the only way I could orgasm was
through thinking about the porn I had
seen this made me feel really sad I knew
my body was capable of magic yet my
sexuality fell constricted and trapped
learning to experience orgasm while
being present in my body and not going
off in my mind was hard but I did it by
using my breath and placing my focused
awareness on the pleasurable sensations
in my genitals and allowing the natural
sound and movement of my body I could
experience my sexuality in a deeply
relaxed and surrendered way this was
very different than the tense
contraction I had previously known
self-pleasure became a way to lovingly
connect
my body and orgasm for the first time
felt soulful and nourishing masturbation
became my new meditation and I was one
step closer to knowing the magic my body
was capable of next I went in search of
my g-spot and proof like magic I found
it it wasn’t like I never tried before I
just didn’t have the right instruction
or conviction that it even existed truth
was I’d always been a bit scared of the
inside of my vagina something
exacerbated by having genital warts at
19 and living in fear that they would
one day return when I experienced my
first g-spot orgasm that day I learned
something spectacular that my vagina was
not broken or ugly or smelly or
disgusting or Megan or any of the other
disempowering notions I had internalized
about my vagina she was in fact this
treasure trove of grandeur and finesse
with so many gifts and blessings to give
my vagina and I were becoming intimate
friends and this fault really good the
next expedition was north to my cervix I
had heard of women who had experienced
these deeply spiritual orgasms from
their cervix and quite frankly if that
was on the menu
I wanted my taste it took me about five
months of consistent diligent cervical
stimulation before I even began to feel
pleasure there but when I did I can
assure you it was well worth it
the day I experienced my first cervical
orgasm was the day I was so fed up with
trying that I exclaimed to my cervix if
it didn’t happen today I would accept my
fate and move on with my life
something in that letting go of control
allowed my body and psyche to move me
into the most profound state of
transcendence that I had ever known
about 40 minutes into myself pleasure
practice something remarkable to
a supernova happened in my vagina and I
am quite sure that in that moment my
vagina was the brightest shining object
in all of our galaxy the eruption began
from deep within my soul and pleasure
previously unknown to me cascaded from
the center of my beam and rippled out to
the tips of my body which should merge
with the corners of the ever expanding
universe I became all of time and space
all of time and space
eternal benevolent blackness enveloped
me into connecting me to everything all
at once
pure present consciousness not a thought
or worry existed it seemed to last
forever me floating between worlds it’s
traveling through space on this giant
marshmallow of cosmic angelic pleasure
and then this raucous cackle penetrated
my awareness from somewhere in the
distance and I realized it traversed out
of my own mouth and emanated from the
most ancient part of my womb and I was
back in the room and tears were
streaming down my face tears of joy
tears of gratitude tears of enchantment
and Wonder and awe I had danced with
grace through my vagina through my
cervix the actual gateway which opens
when every human life is ready to enter
the physical from the mystical in the
days and weeks preceding this monumental
event a sparkle and ruddiness came
through me that I had not felt in years
I was three years old again stood
outside in the garden not a care in the
world wearing nothing but my wellies and
eating mud wild free abandon she was
back I was back from the slumber I had
been in for decades and no it was not
true love’s kiss which sure won’t mean
it was my magical or
Kosmic vagina from this place the
inconsequential futilities of life fall
away what mattered what might had truly
to me this was the only place I could
bear to live from it became absurd to
engage in a world which said that my
inherent value and worth beauty and
intelligence was determined by some
external factor did they not know what
my vagina was capable of clearly not and
it became my mission to educate the
world and now it’s 3:00 in the morning
and I’m staring into the blackness of my
bedroom and my breath is shallow and my
body’s cold but it’s hot as well and
there’s this immense pang of panic
crawling itself under my ribs and I put
my hand on my chest and I breathe and I
say it’s okay mama bear it’s gonna be
okay and I wonder how I managed to
arrange my entire life so the interest
over one week’s time I’m gonna be stood
on this very public stage time the story
about my magical orgasmic vagina hoping
beyond all hope that somebody somewhere
understands that this is about so much
more than one woman’s orgasm but even if
it was about one woman’s orgasm that
would still be an idea with spreading
and every time I ask myself Keeley are
you really gonna do this I think about
that display I saw in the shop window
just two weeks ago when I was out
shopping for this very outfit with the
statue of this guy stood nude on the
high street in all of his nonchalant
glory and grace exceeding so much
confidence in ease that he’s about to
and when I see him I get excited not
because of him but because of what I
might see when I look to the other side
of the window will I see a statue of a
woman in a similar pose with a vulva
ball for the whole of the high street to
see and not just the usual fused skin
and when my eyes meet her my heart sinks
because they’re reflected back to me is
every woman that I’ve ever known
taught to cover up hiding who she is
some part of her not quite welcome and
I’m stood there looking at this image
which is what it looks like from the
outside and I know deep within my bones
that something about this isn’t right
and I know that I don’t have all the
answers but maybe I have one maybe I
have a starting point from which we can
begin to Reena vacate this ship and the
next time I ask myself Keeley are you
my resounding response is Keeley how
could you not how could I not proclaim
to the world what I know to be true
which is that of woman’s vast orgasmic
variety both exists and matters and that
her pursuit of it can be not only a
portal to profound self love and self
acceptance but it can also be a
potential doorway to divinity within her
very own body this to me is even more
revolutionary that when the Sex Pistols
put a safety pin in the lip of the Queen
in 1977 and it’s 40 years on and I know
which revolution I was born for and it’s
the reclamation of love of healing and
wholeness within the human body and the
human psyche which is exactly what this
thank you [Applause]
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