Human sexuality is a taboo subject that makes many people uncomfortable when it’s brought up in public. Do you ever mention what happens when you get down and dirty to your grandma? (Yeah, we didn’t think so.) But why exactly is sexuality so deeply embedded into our culture, yet not as openly and closely discussed as it’s portrayed in the media? Why is sexuality ever present, yet totally absent from education and public discourse?
Sexuality is implanted in everything in our society: philosophy, religion, ethics, politics, media, literature, psychology, medicine, etc. Most definitely, sexuality can be a hard subject to navigate, especially within mainstream discourses that are influenced by things like social learning and agenda setting, which infiltrate our perception of what is deemed “healthy” or “normal” in regards to sexuality.
Today, the internet—and most importantly, pornography—have risen in popularity as resources for young adults to form their beliefs and behaviours concerning sex. But what are the consequences of this? How can we as young adults educate ourselves and participate in healthy sexuality, despite all of these institutions?
These were the questions on my mind when I arranged an interview with UVic’s own Dr. Charlotte Loppie. The beloved professor works in the school of public health and social policy, and has conducted research in areas such as Indigenous health inequality, HIV/AIDS in Indigenous people, and sexual and reproductive health of Indigenous women. She has published papers? on these subjects and has been involved within several other research projects concerning Indigenous health and wellbeing.
Many UVic students have heard of her through Health 251: Healthy Sexuality, a highly popular class for first and second years. Dr. Loppie is a leading figure within her field and her Indigenous community. I had the pleasure of interviewing her so that Her Campus readers may delve deeper into the issues of sexuality.
HC: What lead you to teach about sexuality at UVic?
Loppie: I started teaching this class in 1999 at Dalhousie University, and when I was recruited here at UVic, they hadn’t completely finished writing the curriculum for the school I teach within, which is Health and Social Policy. The university approached me about teaching a class during the interim, and I had previously taught Human Sexuality at Dalhousie. That’s how I started teaching it here.
I started teaching it at Dalhousie because I actually took the class previously. It was taught by this sex researcher who specialized in female ejaculation, during the time that Perry and Wipple began conducting these experiments as well. The professor and I became friends, and in 1998 when he retired, he suggested that I should teach the same class. He supported me, and at the time I was just starting in my PhD. I’ve been teaching it ever since then.
My research was looking at menopause within Indigenous women in Nova Scotia at the time. I was quite interested in the medicalization of sex and women’s reproductive processes, and sexuality was a part of that. And I was quite comfortable with teaching this topic—you honestly can’t teach it to hundreds of undergrads if you aren’t comfortable with it.
HC: What does it mean to have a healthy sexuality/sex life?
Loppie: Well, I think it’s really hard. I think it’s harder now than when I was a young woman. That is quite a big question. We’re still living with the legacy of Victorian sexual repression. There is this whole historical legacy of female sexuality that is defined for us, that is prescribed to [diminish us]. We worked through that sort of through the women’s movement in the 1960s, and I was alive for that. I was a young teenager and I remember all of that.
When I was in junior high, if you were female, you weren’t allowed to wear pants to school. And then we were allowed to wear pants, but not jeans. I think what happened is the women’s movement basically said, “Hey, we’re sexual, we’re not just receptacles for males. We have a sexuality, too, and it is okay for us to express it.”
But what we didn’t do a good job of was defining what that was. So, women were repressed from being sexual, and then once we claimed the right to be sexual, we didn’t really have many models to follow. So we continue to follow what could be defined as male sexuality, and then women tried to adapt to that model of being sexual. But keeping in mind that everyone has their own sexuality, this normative script for the majority doesn’t necessarily work for all. And in my mind, that’s where we have left off.
Keep in mind there has been some work by some really amazing women that have talked about the sociopolitical implications, etc. I’m not saying that there hasn’t been work done, but there hasn’t been enough. And so there are all of these different forces that shape who we are sexually before we are even aware of being sexual. I would say —and not entirely, but for most—it is almost impossible to be completely sexually authentic, because we are shaped by so many different social, political, historical, and economic forces that we really cannot be “authentic.”
And so, in my opinion, if I were to define the goal of having [healthy] sexual development, [it] is to try to attain (as best as we can) some degree of sexual authenticity. That is, authenticity that is true to your nature without harming others or yourself. A lot of the recent discourse surrounding sexual authenticity has been having interactions with the people that you desire, mainly around the subject of same-sex sexuality. And that’s how far we have gotten so far. There have been other developments in phenomena like kinks and variations in sexual behaviour. But even that does not reach the complexity of who we are as sexual beings.
HC: What are some measures that one can take to improve aspects of their sexuality/sexual relationships?
Loppie: The first thing that I would say is to hope for a good education at home. So if you’re parenting children, provide as many answers to questions in a non-judgemental way as you can. The key to understanding who you are sexually is to get that sort of information relatively soon in life and for that information to be “neutral.”
If you’re already at that stage in your life of maturity, I would say self-exploration (and that doesn’t mean just your physical body) as it relates to what you know about sex, how you feel about sex, what you think about sex, and how you interact with other people. Your personality type is not disconnected from your sex life. People think about a sex life as this sort of universal thing that everybody taps into. But every person as an individual is going to have an individual sexuality. In pursuing healthy sexual relationships, you have to know your body intimately without shame.
And I hate to “prescribe” these things to people, because they are very difficult, if not impossible, goals, because they’ve been led to believe things about their body or sexuality as shameful. But [the goal is] to get to a point where you know your body without shame, that you can bring pleasure to your body without shame, that it becomes [as] commonplace as taking [care of] any other aspect of your health.
And [also] that you can relate to other people in the same way, that you don’t enable shame or judgement against them. For instance, what their sexuality is, what body type they have, what their genitals look like, etc. That’s superficial stuff that, in the end, is not conducive to a great sex life.
And [to have] honesty with a lot of compassion, because people are super sensitive to sex. Even people who most of us would look [up to] and are admired, who emulate our sexual ideals, they might not have the greatest sex life, either.
We need to be honest about our own needs and understand that, when you are engaging in sexual activities with other people, they might not necessarily have the same needs, desires, feelings, or thoughts that you do. There is this internal sexual script that we know intimately, but we cannot expect others to know what we know, either. You have to be able to engage fully in order to have a great sex life.
Another key thing, especially for women, is masturbation, and to become comfortable with it, and to be able to discuss with others and define their own self-exploration.
HC: In your opinion, do you believe that female/non-binary/queer sexuality is stigmatized within mainstream discourses, institutions, and depictions of sexuality? Why or why not?
Loppie: So the answer is generally, yes. It is changing, but generally, yes. [Canadian society] is made up of many cultures, but most influential on our laws, etc., have been the settlers who colonized the country. Canadian society is primarily a Judeo-Christian society, and that was the dominant religion. Up until very recently, it has dominated education and law. There is still this legacy running through our sociopolitical and economic systems.
According to the Judeo-Christian religion, the purpose of sex is reproduction. There are a lot of references in the Bible that many use towards their arguments that masturbation is sinful. Most commonly stated is that any non-reproductive sex is sinful, which made it then illegal. Up until 1973, having sex with someone that was the same gender as you was illegal in this country. That’s not even that long ago: that was in my lifetime. We definitely are still living in that legacy.
When we take into consideration the concept of contraception, that also applies to this legacy. So this doctrine dictates this female/male [binary], like the two sexes “Adam and Eve”—there is not conversation about folks who don’t fall into that binary. And that’s not the only religion, but religion has been influential. And that reified these two distinct sexes, and that [they are] “normal” or “natural.”
People have this idea that what is natural is normal, and anything outside of that is “abnormal,” and [they] attach all kinds of values to that idea in ways that they wouldn’t necessarily do if it wasn’t related to sex or sexuality. If we don’t relate to the statistical average or the norm, then those people are in trouble because people have this intense discomfort [with regards to] sexuality. Anything related to sex that deviates even slightly from what people consider “normal” is going to be stigmatized and discriminated against.
So I think yes, and the reasons are that people with more education and enlightenment, with regards to the spectrum of gender and sexuality, have a hard time holding onto the stigma and prejudice because it is simply not logical. We are a diverse people.
HC: People who identify as LGBTQ, Indigenous, or who work in the sex industry face more challenges when accessing sexual health services. Why do you think that is so, and what can we do to change this?
Loppie: When we look at those three groups, they are marginalized groups, but they are also very different populations. Most of my work is in Indigenous health and HIV/AIDS as it affects Indigenous women. Racism, homophobia, stigma of any kind is a social problem, and so it gets carried around by people. Health care services are provided by people, and they are designed by people.
An analogy I always use is of a tree. So, there is a tree’s environment, the trunk, and the branches, [which] you can most likely [use to] tell the health of it externally. And it is the same with sexual health care. If you look at the environments that people engage in for their sexual health needs, you’ll see pockets of really healthy environments and people who do a lot of good things, and a lot of really unhealthy pockets where a lot of problems occur. Why is that?
The people who work there have very bigoted ideas about sex workers, Indigenous women, peoples’ lifestyles, and their sexual activity and their drug use, if they use drugs. They also have bigoted ideas about the LGBTQ+ community and sex workers, who I deal with quite often in my work as well. Those [sexual health care workers] create unsafe environments for these people to access their care.
But this isn’t the end of the story. These people work in a system. If you look at the core or the trunk of the tree, those are the systems: they are feeding the branches, where the public access their sources. The tree is rooted in a system of [the] racialized, homophobic, patronizing, Judeo-Christian roots of our society. You can’t do patchwork and expect the problem to change. You’re not going to get a complete system that is safe for everybody.
You have to change that within the roots—that is, change the social structures that ground our entire society, that feed those systems, and that feed those environments where people are encountering people with power who can use that power to hurt them or keep them out of the system.
A lot of people who are marginalized will not want to engage with these systems because of how they will be treated. In consequence of this, they aren’t able to access these services, which can sometimes be life saving for these people. The work that I do with Indigenous women for HIV/AIDS testing and treatment is literally life or death. And so people die, because they aren’t treated as human.
HC: What are some challenges that Indigenous women face within their own sexuality that you have encountered in your work?
Loppie: When Canada and the Americas were colonized, Indigenous women were treated horribly by the institutions and groups who came to these places. They were victims of sexualized and racialized violence. The institutions that evolved as a result of colonization, such as the residential school system, which lasted almost two hundred years, were sites of horrific abuse. But not just sexualized abuse, but gender segregation as well. Many siblings couldn’t interact with each other. It kept people away from their families, their communities, their languages, and their culture. The sexual violence that resulted from this (for males and females) led to sexualized trauma.
The other thing about that is you have a generation of women who almost all have been sexually traumatized, and then you have to take into account their daughters, and their daughters’ daughters, up until recent years.
Another thing that happened, like in most racialized ideologies, Indigenous women —and any women of colour—were sexualized in a way that [was] demeaning to them as human beings. These things happened during slavery in the United States as well. Indigenous women were seen as being “promiscuous,” as not having the same sexual value as women of European descent. The racist rhetoric of Indigenous women was that they were, and are, of “lesser value.” And so that’s why you see sexualized violence experienced higher in Indigenous women. Most of the murdered and missing women in Canada are, in fact, Indigenous.
So there is that challenge, to move beyond that picture of yourself who is not who you are, and that requires a whole lot of support. And then there is the racialization of women of colour as not being as attractive in comparison to women of European ancestry by the mainstream population.
There is so much more to talk about. I’m painting a dark picture, but it’s not the entire picture. I know of a lot of organizations, such as the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, that is run by fierce and strong young Indigenous women who are leaders within this community. There are programs run in the North that teach about sexual health to Indigenous people. There are sexual carnivals being done at pow wows now, handing out condoms [there] and [in] creating and educational spaces.
So the young people who didn’t go to residential schools, but who are still living through that legacy of historic trauma, they are starting this healing journey and are leading the way towards this sort of sexual revolution amongst young Indigenous people. It is incredible what is being done, and they have the support from many in these communities. There are so many elders within these communities that experienced so much trauma that they are unable to talk about it. It’s really the young Indigenous people that are carrying this, and I think they are amazing and incredibly strong.
HC: If you could give advice to your younger self about sexuality, what would it be?
Loppie: I would say to myself as a very young teenager that sex is not something that you give to somebody, it’s something you share with somebody. You have to own it first. It has to belong to you, and then you pick and choose in the same way that you share your innermost feelings, your lunch, or whatever. You can share your body and give your body to someone, but I would say to myself back then that this isn’t something that you need to give—they don’t have the right to it.