Home to Her

Celebrating Female Pleasure with Eleanor O'Brien

Episode Summary

Performance artist Eleanor O'Brien has dedicated her life's work to celebrating female pleasure and sexuality as a "practice of joy." Eleanor is the founder and artistic director of Dance Naked Productions, a sex-positive theater company based in Portland, Oregon. She is also the creator and star of the one-woman show, "How to Really, Really? Really! Love a Woman," which has been described by Broadway World as“funny, empowering and just slightly terrifying, all at once.” Eleanor will be performing the show later this year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the largest arts festival in the world (coronavirus permitting). In this episode, we discuss Eleanor's journey to becoming a proud pleasure activist, how we can explore sexual pleasure even during this time of enforced isolation, and how embracing the female orgasm can help us create a more just and joyful world.

Episode Notes

Eleanor's one woman show, "How to Really, Really? Really! Love a Woman," is available to view on Vimeo here.  She is making this available for all listeners to watch for FREE with the code "pussy." You can also learn more about Eleanor and her production company, Dance Naked Productions, here. 

We covered so much ground in this episode! Here's are links to more information about people, performances and ideas that we discussed:

• More information on Eve Ensler's ground-breaking play The Vagina Monologues 
• This is a great summary of the story of Baba Yaga as it was described in Clarissa Pinkola Estes' book, Women Who Run With the Wolves 
• The story of the Japanese Shinto Goddess Amaterasu comes from the book Pussy: A Reclamation, by Regena Thomashauer
• Vagina: A New Biography, by Naomi Wolf, is another great read that inspired both Eleanor and me 
• adrienne maree brown is an author, poet and pleasure activist who is definitely worth following
• Sheela Na Gigs are carvings of female figurines with exaggerated vulvas that are found throughout  Ireland, England, Wales and Scotland. The Sheela Na Gig Project  is an organization that is attempting to collect data and images of these carvings throughout the British Isles.