LEADING with PLEASURE
Gen Z aren’t putting up with mediocre hookups. Maggie Shui, director of new series Dating While Asian, talks to Nomuna, one of her interviewees in the series, about claiming the right to sexual pleasure.
Sex advice is no longer confined to a few flimsy pages in the sealed section of the magazines you read as a teenager. You can now get sex advice from therapists on TikTok, infographics on Instagram and well-meaning, anonymous people on Reddit. You can laugh at people’s hookup horror stories, recounted in explicit detail, on Facebook pages such as Bad Dates of Melbourne.
That influx of information has raised a generation who are more fluent in the language of pleasure, and better at knowing what they should and shouldn’t put up with.
While directing a docuseries called Dating While Asian, where five Pan-Asian New Zealanders tell stories from their love lives, I was struck by how much one subject had explored this facet of her life.
Nomuna, 22, is an actor in Tāmaki Makaurau. In the past few years, she had experienced a series of hookups that left her ambivalent – one involved the guy suggesting they watch an entire season of After Life with Ricky Gervais, inexplicably, and ended in perfunctory sex.
Motivated to get more pleasure out of life, Nomuna tried tantra, sex toys and information online, honing her desires and boundaries. I chatted with Nomuna about what sex education looks like for the younger generation.
One cool thing about you is you were a part of a theatre show called Sexwise that toured around schools educating about sex, consent and pleasure. Can you tell me more about that?
The structure of it was a 50-minute performance followed by a discussion with the students. We played characters dealing with things such as porn addiction, toxic relationships, STIs, having sex for the first time. I remember at one girls’ school I got real preachy and said: “Do not stand for bad sex! You have a right to pleasure!”
That would be such a cool thing to learn at the age of 15. I feel like even a few years back it would’ve been rare to get an education like that.
I think limited funding means [the show] only goes to specific regions and councils. I didn’t get it in my school.
Through working on that show, you learnt about the cone of consent. What can grey areas of consent look like?
I learnt that consent is a strong “yes”. Then there’s compliance, pressure, coercion and force. Those are the five stages. Compliance is the thing that I’ve experienced where you just kind of go along with it because it’s the path of least resistance.
I’ve had experiences like that. You can consent at the beginning of a hookup, and then there will be little moments that push what you’re comfortable with, or you find yourself going along with the current. I’ve talked about it with others and they could relate as well. It’s wild so many people have experienced not fully consensual, not fully enthusiastic “yes” kind of sexual experiences. Why is it so common? It probably lies in not knowing how to define our own boundaries? And that it’s a possibility that you could have boundaries as well. You just know that it doesn’t necessarily feel 100% right, but it’s not affecting you majorly. But then you do that for a long time and it could feel a little bit shit. I think it’s about equipping people with the tools to be able to recognise that. And the time and space to discover it.
Why does pleasure matter to you?
I think it’s a human right. Do you know Sadhguru? He’s this yogi and he rides a motorcycle. He talks about how the goal in life that people are searching for is pleasure. And not just from a physical point of view, but just for things to be pleasant. It ties into a deeper soul and energy thing for me.
That reminds me of something [sex coach] Michelle Kasey says, which is this notion of leading with your p...y. In all parts of her life, she leads with intuition and listening to her body, following what gives her pleasure.
This is my actor-y side coming out but hips have so much power, and they hold on to so much emotion. That’s where all of your stress goes. I’ve been doing a lot of yoga this month and I was doing some kind of stretch with my hips and I literally started bawling. It’s such a heavy part of our body. And especially as a woman, with the womb, there is a kind of intuition or sixth sense. There’s so much untapped power there.