Vanessa is sexologist and the founder of Mia Muse
Ashe Davenport: Has your work as a sexologist made you more comfortable with yourself?
Vanessa Muradian: I’ve been proactive about trying to be comfortable with myself, but it’s definitely an ongoing journey. I have this specific memory of being 18 and living in the States, on Turtle Island. I was running around a party telling everyone they were beautiful, and meaning it, from my heart. I would just go up to people and say, ‘You're beautiful.’ And they’d receive it. By the end of the night I was screaming it to people out the window of the car.
I’m often surprised by the amount of love I have for myself, despite all the messaging coming at me to think otherwise. At school, I never felt I fit in physically. My mum was Australian-Irish and my dad is Armenian, and I look quite mixed. I started to acknowledge my experience as a mixed race person growing up in white Australia.
What was the conversation at home around those feelings of not fitting in?
The Armenian side of my family talked to me about all the ways I should look more white; that I should remove hair, have a nose job. My Nene told me to get a nose job when I was 13, to ‘get the sides pinned in just a little’.
Later on I started exploring hair as a woman in the west, and my own hair growth. During lockdown, I grew out my lip hair - a nice easy transition underneath the mask - which then got me questioning gender stuff. I identify with being a woman, but I never really fit with what society’s idea of that is.
My pronouns at the moment are she / they, but I feel like I’m landing more towards she / her. I often have these conversations about gender with people. I’m comfortable with them and feel like my role is often to be the bridge between worlds. It’s not always easy to hold that space, but I do it anyway because it’s in my personality and my core. People think I do it out of self-confidence, but it can be scary putting yourself out there. I do it courageously so others can feel a bit more love for themselves.
What would you say to someone who was feeling uncertain about their pronouns?
It's okay to be fluid and forever changing. I asked one of my friends who identifies as trans and non-binary, is it okay for me to use ‘they’? And they said I should do whatever I like. That felt really permissive to me. I’ve found that since using ‘they’, people tend to assume a lot about me. I think it’s also because of the moustache. I’ve had to clarify that I don’t identify as trans. I’m often tending to what is being projected onto me, but I'm really into fluidity. We can change and adapt whenever we want and however we want. We are constantly in motion. By pigeon-holing ourselves any which way, we're creating binaries and saying that we should be one way and not the other. The innate experience of gender expression, and therefore pronouns, is that you should be allowed to test things out. You’re not going to know how they feel until you actually put it out and see.
As long as we understand the different points of privilege that people hold. Some of us have a completely traumatic or painful experience of not identifying with the sex that we’re assigned at birth, and therefore the gender that's put on us. The whole thing is a spectrum and that’s what we're trying to liberate for everyone. People should be able to be fluid in their exploration, while holding the privilege of having a choice to begin with.
Adrienne Maree Brown talks about ‘The politics of feeling good’ in her book Pleasure Activism. How does pleasure inform activism?
In order for activism to be sustainable we have to make it pleasurable. What I see in my work is that people don’t feel that they have a right to pleasure. Our bodies have been oppressed and born into systems that don't really serve us, especially femmes and people with cycles. Our society is extremely linear. We’re expected to be goal-oriented and constantly moving forward, when our bodies require us to move in waves and cycles. We’re robbed of our innate wisdom and embodiment and compassion for ourselves. Without those things, how can we be okay?
Pleasure activism is working out who we are; that we deserve to feel good and that we need to prioritise feeling easy and peaceful and A-OK. We have a right to enjoy our lives, not just work so that we can go on a holiday, and then work for another 10 years so that we can potentially retire and then be okay. Pleasure activism asks: How can I integrate enjoyment all day long?
As far as we know, we’ve only got this moment, this day, and maybe tomorrow. We have an innate right to feel good. Feeling good is a really dynamic exploration because of the systems that we've been put into and the oppressions that we've all felt in different ways.
How can we access self-care when we're resource poor?
Self-care gets thrown around as a bit of a buzzword, but the journey of learning how to care for oneself is long. For me, it's been a decade in the making. I think it's important for people to know that; it's okay for it to take a lot of time. It's more involved than taking a bath. Meaningful self-care needs to be integrated into our lives, using the tools we already have.
I've learned to constantly check in with my body. I'm disarming it at every moment. Our bodies are in constant relationship to one another. You know, your kids' bodies respond to your body, your partner is responding to your body. In sexology, we don't even talk about the body as being separate from the mind. It's one word: bodymind. The bodymind is one. We can't separate them.
What do you mean by ‘disarming your body’? How do you do that?
An armed body is in a stress response; on a physiological level, there’s cortisol and adrenaline pumping. It’s a state of survival. Disarming the body might only take a couple of seconds of noticing that; breathing, scanning your brow, jaw, shoulders, lower belly.
Once I had an osteopath put her hands on my back, at the edges of my lungs, and asked me to breathe into her hands. Suddenly I got to experience what it was like to breathe into my back body. My breath became four times bigger. Those learnings about ourselves become part of our system and part of our tool kit. We wire them in over time.
You’ve talked before about the need to remove the patriarchy from the bedroom. What does that look like?
I think the patriarchy looks like a map. It’s a prescribed outline; this is how we get from here-to-here. It's another goal-orientated system, where there should be a penis and a vagina, and penetration equals sex. There are three things we can dismantle there. People say to me: 'I like to be goal-oriented. I want to have an orgasm.' I like to be goal-oriented sometimes too, but if we remove that pressure and that expectation, and we focus on the experience and enjoying the moment, we get to be exploriative and curious. And again, it comes back to that more cyclical, fluid way of being, as opposed to a structured, linear map. If we're focussed on the outcome, we're two steps ahead of ourselves. And the best sex comes from being responsive and present.
But I’m not against patriarchy. It’s just out of balance with matriarchy. It’s not one over the other. There’s toxicity in the binary of anything. We want to come to that whole place; Yin and Yang. It's a constant dance of nature. We just come from hectic amounts of patriarchy. So right now, we’re rebalancing. That's what Big Pussy Energy is about.
Yes! Can you tell us about Big Pussy Energy?
Big Pussy Energy means so much to me! It’s a deck of cards of daily rituals to help people find their femme power. The name is fun, but the concept is rich and deep and worthwhile pursuing. The cards explore how we can honour the cyclical within a linear system, balancing internalised patriarchy, embodying our full erotic selves. And lots more. They’re a culmination of all my years working as a sexologist and body explorer. They’re for anyone who wants to open to more pleasure beyond gender constructs and constraints.
Big Pussy Energy is available to purchase at the QVWC shop
You can find out more about Vanessa and her work here at miamuse.com
Interview Ashe Davenport, Photographs Mia Mala McDonald
