Hello, I’m Yang Rui.

Vistopia’s editors really are the kind of people who quietly devote themselves to ambitious work every day. Without fanfare, they have produced this excellent new program—Female Sexuality from the Ground Up, an educational series about women’s bodies and sexual health.

I have always thought of myself as someone deeply interested in sex and unafraid to think or speak about it. But when I saw the outline for this program, I suddenly felt both ashamed and awakened. I realized that my actual knowledge and reflection about sex were extremely limited.

For a long time, my attitude toward sex resembled many people’s attitude toward gender issues: “It is enough to live my own life well. I already know enough and do not need to think any further.” 

I had been curious about sex since adolescence and was never remotely “conservative.” Yet strangely, at some point I suddenly became an adult who never spoke about it—as if sex could exist only in late-night search histories, never in open conversation.

What caused this change? My first thought was that I had grown tired of the hyper-sexualized culture I encountered while living in the United States. Everything seemed capable of being packaged or interpreted as sex, and “sexual liberation” was often treated as the ultimate form of liberation. Over time, I came to feel almost instinctively that I had already “seen it all” and neither wanted nor needed to discuss sex anymore.

Looking back now, however, I think that was only part of the reason—perhaps even a respectable excuse. The fact is that even in a place where “sex” seemed to be discussed everywhere, it remained extremely difficult to discuss it deeply, especially women’s sexual experience, desire, and confusion with women themselves as the subject.

When I returned to the Chinese context, this difficulty became even more obvious.We are so accustomed to avoiding the topic in every possible way: it is absent from classrooms, absent from families, and seldom discussed seriously even in intimate relationships. We instinctively feel embarrassed to say even neutral anatomical words such as “breasts” and “vagina.”

So I chose the easiest path: “As long as my own life is going reasonably well and I am satisfied, I do not need to concern myself with anything else.”

The program reminded me of my student days, when several women from different countries and I unexpectedly began talking in an office about how we had explored our bodies while growing up and how we first encountered the subject of sex. Remarkably, despite our entirely different cultures, we shared very similar confusion, shame, and pleasure.

This program may be more than such a space. Although it might be described as a “self-study room” or shared course in sexuality for adult women, I believe its beneficiaries will by no means be limited to ourselves, because—

I very much look forward to learning and exploring with everyone in this program: our bodies and desires, at once personal and shared.