I can’t believe the conference is happening tomorrow. I’m excited for my first time presenting at AASECT, and also nervous as hell.
I first attended AASECT – the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists – in June 2015. And I had a blast. I did a SAR, a.k.a watched porn with my colleagues (which I chronicle here with memes), and connected with a bunch of awesome colleagues, including many of the authors of my top ten sex books. I learned so much about what’s going on right now in the interconnected fields of sex education, sex therapy/counseling, and sexuality research and advocacy. I skipped last year, so I was eager to return this year when I figured out it’d be feasible.
But this is also my 3rd conference this year (out of 6 total, eek), and I’m presenting, which is a pretty big deal (I think it’s mostly due to the amazing brain and organizational skills of my colleague Lucie Fielding). You can read our abstract here.
I think we’re going to make a unique and important contribution to the dialogue on hypersexuality and sex addiction, which is a very controversial topic right now. Yet I also feel like I’m always kinda out of place at these events as a folklorist; people are generally interested in folklore but I need to sell them on how it connects to sex (which it totally does). So, we’ll see how it goes!
As usual I’ll be live-tweeting everything I can get my hands on, so I’ll update this post with a hashtag to follow once I find out what it is (it’s #AASECT17). And I’ll be blogging about sexuality-related topics for the next couple of days in keeping with the conference theme.