Books Your Brain is Your Sexiest Organ - a SHAG Mini-Workshop - PART 2

September 22, 2022

Books Your Brain is Your Sexiest Organ - a SHAG Mini-Workshop - PART 2

Hosted by Carolyn
Watch on IG @weloveshag
YouTube @weloveshag

If you haven’t checked out part 1 of this workshop, read the transcript here!

Moving from our brains to books, SHAG’s book selection is really diverse in terms of how you can engage with them. Starting on the fiction side, we have a lot of erotica and erotic fiction. We also have a lot of creative books that are more art forward. We are a community space and art gallery, and many of the items in our boutique are made by local artisans and artists, so we carry many books that are artistic and creative. If you want to check out one of our gallery openings, check out our Events page, and if you want to read some artist studio visit interviews, check out SHAG Magazine. But back to fiction: using your imagination can really fuel your creativity and receptivity, which in turn enhances your capacity for sexual pleasure. We have a lot of people who come in here who really enjoy written erotica or audio erotica as a form of stimulation during or before play. That can be a great way to spice things up! If you and your partner are looking for a way to connect more deeply during sex and really hone in on each other’s arousal, a great option is to pick up an erotica book and share reading pages together. When listening, you can close your eyes and really get into the moment using your imagination. I think that's a really beautiful way to connect. 

I’d like to highlight one erotica option, and, again, you can read this either by yourself or with a partner. The first book I’m going to recommend from our collection is called Club 42. This is a really fun one. It is a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy book. You meet Naomi, the main character, and she gets fired from her job as a barista. From there, she stumbles into a strip club and begins dancing. Then you choose every path from there on, and it gets very steamy. There's some kink involved, there's BDSM relationships. This book is a really fun and uniquely engaging way to stimulate your mind and experience pleasure through a book.

The next couple of books I have selected are quite different, because they are not fiction, but coloring books! You can see this first one is on queer heroes. There's an educational component, and reading or coloring is a fun way to participate in and enjoy LGBTQ+ community. We also have a sex position coloring book, which is educational as a how-to, but also something sexy you can do as an activity alone or with a partner: coloring in sexy illustrations! It's getting your brain and body stimulated to think about different ways to play while also drawing. The illustrations are very fun adult graphic novel type images that can be quite complex and also have stories in them. Another coloring book we carry is called My Badge. It’s not only fun, but in terms of learning about anatomy, this can be a really great way to learn, as you're drawing and reading at the same time. Coloring can be relaxing or just a good thing to keep your hands busy while watching or listening to something else. In that way, these coloring books definitely have a dual purpose.

Besides coloring books, we have other artistic books. One example is called I Want You and this is from the creators of the animated show Bojack Horseman. It's a graphic novel, telling stories of animals, bugs, sex toys, and masturbation. It's really quirky, it's super humorist, it's erotic, and it’s ingenious. It’s a great gift for those who are more on the hipster side of things. It's pretty bizarre but very thought provoking. Then, in a totally different vein, we have a photography book called Sperm. It showcases incredible images from the gay gogo bar scene of the past from Cock bar in New York City. The images celebrate queerness and the male body in different ways. It can be a fun, discreet thing to leave out on your coffee table, because the cover does not make it clear what is inside. We truly carry a wide array of fiction, from erotic books to artful ones, but all really stimulating and very interesting to dip your toes into.

In terms of non-fiction, I want to just give a plug at the start that we actually have done a couple of workshops before on some of the books I'm about to mention and some of their main topics. I will mention those at points if you want to learn more, since we have more information already out there. But for now, we will move quickly through some of these concepts. One of the first books is called Come As You Are by Emily Nagowski. I host a workshop focusing on that book, more specifically in a pleasure-centric context, but the book covers other topics as well, and some of the ones I didn't really touch on then, I'll bring up now. One idea I’ve learned from this book, and that has also been very empowering for some of our customers, is this concept of “arousal non-concordance.” Learning about this allows you, in turn, to understand more about your identity and your body. It's basically the idea that mentally wanting something and physiologically feeling something are two very different experiences. Your physical, physiological reaction, potentially arousal, is not necessarily an honest communicator of what you're wanting, mentally or emotionally. That's why verbal consent (also sometimes called “explicit consent” or “enthusiastic consent”) is super important, because you may read signs on someone's body that actually don't match what they're wanting internally, and vice versa, and you want to be sure you’re paying attention to the most important thing, their actual decisions around consent. I'm sure you can relate there are times where maybe mentally you're really stimulated and really wanting some pleasure or play, but physically you can't quite get there. And that's, again, an illustration of the term “non-concordance” from Come As You Are. It's a very, real scientific phenomenon. So, that's a great kernel of information that can help really validate a lot of people's experiences. That's just one amazing concept in a book that is completely peppered with them!

Another book that I also mentioned in another workshop, one focused on polyamory, which you can check out on our Instagram, our YouTube, or in SHAG Magazine, is The Ethical Slut. I'm not going to go into detail because there is an entire workshop based on the ideas in that book. But, if you're interested in ethical non-monogamy or polyamory, and you want to put those concepts into practice, I recommend doing your homework before you do so. That way, you can really internalize the consensual, ethical, and enthusiastic aspect of it before just diving in. Whether that means learning the terminology or hearing about other people's lived experiences, I think it's super important and, in my opinion, the right thing to do. Books can be a really great way to get involved passively, which might be the most ethical choice before you practice on actual other human beings.

We also have some fabulous non-fictions books on Shibari, a form of Japanese rope bondage. As many of you know, we have awesome classes with our instructor, Valentine Amartey. We have been doing them for many years at the William Vale Hotel. You can book Shibari group or private lessons on our website, and most people who take the classes like to pick up one of these great books before class to get familiarized with the class content and have a reference guide for the future. Again, they’re doing their homework, and homework is hot! Before putting Shibari into practice at the class, they'll check out one of the books, read a bit more about how to tie certain knots, and then, of course, they get to learn that in-person in the class. The Shibari books range from a really artful overview, replete with gorgeous photos from the ornately decorative yet excruciatingly stringent practice that is Shibari, to more workbook style illustrated guides and how-to references.

On the subject of workbooks, we carry a number of books that fit that style, which are great for those who are interested in journal writing, self-reflection, and self-growth. We have one on learning good consent and another one called the Unfuck Your Intimacy workbook. We have an Unfuck Your Boundaries too. These great books provide a lot of prompts, which are pulled from therapists, mostly. You might be doing a body map or your sexual relationship history. These activities can be really helpful to understand yourself better, understand your relationship to intimacy, understand and define your own boundaries, and so forth. There are lots of communication templates and things like that, just for yourself or to use in your relationships.

The last type of book I want to cover are zines. We have a whole bunch of zines here. For those who don’t know, zines are essentially short for magazines. They're small, often self-published, or small print-circulation works that are made up of collages of images and text. They're typically quite thin and small, they tend to have a DIY aesthetic intentionally, and they're very accessible to both read and make. They've been around for a long time, but got really popular in the 1930s, and then got even more popular in the 70s and 80s, with particular popularity in punk rock communities and Riot Grrrl feminist movements of the early 90s. Zines are awesome. They can be a great way to foster community and disseminate information in an accessible and creative way, whether that's about relationships, sex, or anything at all. We have two here that I wanted to showcase. One is called Dating, it’s Not Relationshiping, and That's a Good Thing, which is a great title. The zine is short, just 11 pages, but it really provides hard-hitting examples that resonate, with examples of why you might want to date and take your time versus jump into a relationship. We have another one called Fat is Beautiful. This is one of our best sellers, and it's really a manifesto for fat liberation. It's helping folks to unlearn a lot of media-induced fat phobia and sizeism that we all have absorbed through our culture. Again, these are just two examples of zines that we have. We have plenty more!

Please don’t forget to check out our other workshops, hosted by me, the lovely Artemis, or Dirty Lola, all of which you can watch on our Instagram or YouTube pages, or read about at SHAG Magazine.

Article cover photo courtesy of JR Tavares at Pexels

**This text was transcribed from SHAG’s live Mini-Workshop on September 22, 2022 and edited for clarity. This opinion piece is not intended to constitute licensed expert advice; all content is for general informational purposes only.**