Good Vibrations Magazine

Staci Haines came to work at Good Vibrations in the early 1990s. Things were shaking in her life and at the business — we were exploring worker-ownership and growing fast, and Staci was developing supportive, sex-positive workshops for survivors of sexual abuse. It was a worker-workplace match with bountiful benefits for her and for us. At that time no prominent members of the sex abuse support community came from a really sex-positive background, but Staci found that selling vibrators and teaching women about their bodies by day dovetailed perfectly with her work with survivors. She was able to educate Good Vibes staff, too. We carried the book most often recommended to survivors in those days, Ellen Bass and Laura Davis’s Courage to Heal. It was and is a great resource for women coming to terms with abuse in their pasts. But it didn’t deal very adequately with a crucial question for most such women: Once I’ve gotten in touch with and come to terms with the pain, betrayal and anger — once I’m ready to truly heal — what about sex?

There were lots of sex books we could recommend to such women, of course, but none of them was written to speak directly to women in recovery from abuse. Not a single book married that issue to a joyful, supportive, liberatory sexuality. All of us felt that rediscovering adult, empowered sex is a crucial part of healing, and none more than Staci. Yet there was no single book we could recommend that would help a woman get there.

So Staci decided to write it.

Many books and videos have been inspired by Good Vibes staffers’ experience on the sales floor and the mail order phones: The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex, of course; my own Exhibitionism for the Shy; the Herotica® series, begun when Susie Bright still worked for GV and there were few women’s erotica books in print (likewise Sex Spoken Here, whose stories come directly from our long-running Erotic Reading Circle); Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano’s Bend Over Boyfriend videos (on which I collaborated, with my partner Robert); Carol Queen’s Great Vibrations: An Explicit Consumer Tour of Vibrators, which I made with GV founder Joani Blank because so many women asked for such a resource. This list names just a few, and there are more projects in the pipeline. These are inspired and supported in part because we know there’s a market for them: many customers have asked for such a resource.

So Staci set to work on The Survivor’s Guide to Sex: How to Have an Empowered Sex Life After Child Sexual Abuse. Staci was a thorough researcher and stepped up her workshop schedule so she’d have the benefit of participants’ input, experiences, and wisdom; she also conducted many interviews. She developed her own exercises for women survivors to do, also adapting existing exercises to better serve her purposes. Several years in the writing, her labor of love is finally on the shelves and in the catalog. It is compassionate, supportive, sex-positive, and wise — just the book so many survivors came looking for but could never find. To get everything that’s packed into Staci’s book, you would have had to carry a whole armload of books home and spend a season reading up on how to have a good sex life.

Of course, anyone’s dedication to learning about sex and having a more empowered and pleasurable sex life is time well spent; in a way, that’s what Good Vibrations is all about: a resource center for everyone who wants to learn about and explore eroticism. But some people have a harder time finding tools and support for this exploration than others.

In my work I see two distinct kinds of abuse, both of which can hobble a person from growing into a healthy and satisfying adult sexuality. The first is the sort Staci addresses: child sexual abuse. Whether violent or seductive, one-time or ongoing, this sort of abuse distances a person from her or his own body and desires, making the focus of sex into a decision someone else has made. Such abuse survivors, whose associations with sex may be completely negative and who may have gotten little support for discovering new and pleasurable associations with it, often have a very challenging time deciding to become sexually empowered and finding the resources to do so. The Survivor’s Guide to Sex is definitely for them, and though mostly the book focuses on the experiences of female abuse survivors, I think men who have had this experience will find a lot of value in it as well.

So will the people who’ve grown up with a different kind of abuse: not the kind which someone physically perpetrates, but the kind in which the child gets absolutely no supportive or positive messages about sexuality and may get very negative ones. Even if these messages are only verbal (or non-verbal, for that matter), they can poison adult sexuality. This sort of abuse often seeks to drill the child into believing that “sex is dirty” (or evil, or sinful, or dangerous) — and just like physical sexual abuse, it often runs in families. (In fact, research shows that many adults who sexually abuse kids got exactly this sort of message about sex when they were growing up.)

Staci’s book will be enormously useful for these sorts of survivors, too. Though this abuse would be more correctly characterized as emotional, it is still abuse, and like physical and/or sexual abuse it can affect a person’s sex life forever if not healed from. It does not get as much attention as sexual abuse, but it too can poison people’s lives. (I do not mean by discussing this to minimize how horrific physical abuse is, by the way — only to address another way adults can damage children’s sexuality, one that, in an essentially sex-phobic culture, is often not even noticed.)

For that matter, The Survivor’s Guide to Sex is a compassionate and passionate read for anyone who doubts the importance of sexuality to our lives. Staci has written a book that truly goes to the heart of healing, making that notion even deeper — and more embodied — than ever.