Luna Matatas In Bed with Eva
Cripping Up Sex: Today on In Bed with Eva we are chatting with the fabulous Luna Matatas.
Cripping Up Sex: Tell me your name, pronouns, and a bit about yourself.
Luna Matatas: I'm so excited to be here, thanks for having me! I’m Luna, my pronouns are she/her, I'm a sex and pleasure educator and I'm afraid of spiders and love brownies.
Cripping Up Sex: Awesome. That’s so cool that you are a sex and pleasure educator! On your website, you have a ton of available workshops - which ones are your favorite?
Luna Matatas: ooooooh I love that question because I love teaching them all but I definitely have favs:
Luna Matatas: I like teaching classes where we take erotic creativity to the next level
Luna Matatas: so I'm really into teaching my Be a Fab Femdom webinar, as well as my Sexy Skills for Submissives, and my most fav has to be my Sexual Confidence in and out of the bedroom
Cripping Up Sex: That's so important about erotic creativity! I too am always talking about how important creativity is.
Luna Matatas: I remember loving hearing you talk about creativity in our sex lives and really letting go of what kind of script we 'think' we're 'supposed to have'. Glad we are like-minded in this!
Cripping Up Sex: You say your workshops are inclusive to everyone, which is so cool. How do you make them disability-friendly?
Luna Matatas: I think inclusivity for me is an on-going practice, finding ways to not only meet the needs but center other identities other than my lived experience. Moving my classes online has definitely helped me reach people I normally wouldn't have reached in ways that are unique to the online platform. In terms of format - my webinars have live captioning and I'm working on captioning for on-demand vs. just having transcriptions available.
Luna Matatas: For content - I love paying other sex education experts in disability to co-create together for webinars and class content. I think it's important for me to create collaborative spaces
Luna Matatas: For techniques - I provide options as part of the regular curriculum for potential ways to adjust and support different bodies and abilities.
Luna Matatas: I welcome ideas, feedback - and am doing my own homework on how to continue to be more accessible and inclusive. I definitely have areas where I have more unlearning to do and insight of others to benefit from!
Luna Matatas: such a good question, thank you!
Cripping Up Sex: That's definitely one of the perks of the pandemic - a lot of stuff was forced to go online, and therefore became much much more accessible than it was before. That's awesome and super important you are talking about how to adapt different techniques as well. As you know, not many sex educators even think of people with disabilities at all so thanks for doing that in your work.
Luna Matatas: I agree - I think our sex-negative and discrimination against people with disabilities has desexualized this community unfairly - and dangerously. We all need access to healthy, supportive, accurate, RELEVANT, info to live our best sex lives- and the dominant narrative is just not cutting it.
Cripping Up Sex: You talk a lot about self-love and body-positivity; How does that relate to disability?
Luna Matatas: ooof, this is such a big topic for people and it's amazing how we all have trouble feeling good enough in our bodies but
Luna Matatas: for bodies that are systemically oppressed - it's not just in our heads, it's literally woven and built into the world that we live in. So we can't just 'think' our way out of body negativity
Luna Matatas: I think it relates to disability in that much of the world is not built to be accessible - and this means that in dismantling conventional standards of attractiveness we must also dismantle ableism intentionally
Luna Matatas: Living with disabilities also might mean your access to resources is different - from income to accessible infrastructures - so it's not so simple as 'go have a spa day and feel good'. It's more about the deep work to uproot what the world has told us to feel about ourselves and how worthy or not worthy our bodies are
Luna Matatas: I think I intentionally speak to ableism and its intersections in the body-positivity movement which has largely become taken over by able-bodied, average-to-thin bodies, white cis women. So our work as falling outside of that...means that we have to name and identify our unique experiences and have them validated.
Cripping Up Sex: Definitely. For example, there needs to be much more media representation of Disabled people datings, having sex, etc so that people with disabilities can see themselves and also normalizes this concept for everyone in general.
Luna Matatas: YES!!!
Cripping Up Sex: Can you give our readers a few tips on self-love and body-positivity?
Luna Matatas: For sure!
Luna Matatas: A big part of self-love and body-positivity is self-compassion
Luna Matatas: the world has decided we should betray our need for tenderness towards ourselves because feeling not good enough is what is used by big industries like fitness, health, beauty, makeup and diet industries to make us buy stuff. So the more that we can remind ourselves daily that it's ok to be gentle towards our difficult feelings, the more that we start to want to become a better friend to our bodies. And
Luna Matatas: this can be done as simple as smiling at yourself once a day
Luna Matatas: saying something nice to yourself - reminding yourself your appearance is probably the LEAST interesting thing about you
Cripping Up Sex: I love that
Luna Matatas: Reminding yourself this work is years of learned shame, it is a practice to begin to make our self-love voices louder than the shame we learned
Cripping Up Sex: Absolutely! It does not happen overnight by any means
Luna Matatas: I think sensual practices are great - smelling your food and enjoying the moment of smell and taste. noticing your skin or hair texture. being so visually delighted by something it actually brings a smile to your face
Luna Matatas: all these things help us come back into ourselves and unhitch our wagon from external validation
Cripping Up Sex: Hell yeah. As you know, disabled people don’t always have a lot of power in their lives, and some of us use Dom/sub relationships to give us back some sense of power. Being Dominant or Submissive is something you talk about often - what are your thoughts about being disabled and in a Dom/sub relationship and the power it can give to the people involved in those relationships?
Luna Matatas: oooooooooooh YES! I think role play, especially power exchange can give us a sense of empowerment in areas where we feel disempowered or uncomfortable. Dominance and Submission allow us to feel as if we have real-world power or feel as if we can surrender. Because these things should be played within a boundaried space that contains limits, safe systems, and trust, they are amazing for pivoting into feelings of power that live inside of us. It allows you to transcend the body and take up even more space in the erotic imagination - which is such a huge center of arousal for most of us
Cripping Up Sex: I soooooo agree!
Luna Matatas: I love beating up big white cis men in role-play in a dom-sub situation - because in the world, they scare me and I often have to edit myself to try to protect myself. But in a consensual space where we have safe words, safe systems and we both know what we want to get out of it - I get to act as if I have the power that I actually don't have day to day - that powerlessness gets a chance to be released from me and replace with dominant power in a consensual power exchange
Luna Matatas: it's beautiful to exchange power with someone - both giving and receiving it is really stimulating for our erotic selves and can wake up parts of us we didn't know we have!
Cripping Up Sex: That sounds like so much fun lol
Luna Matatas: LOL 😈
Cripping Up Sex: Have you done any workshops and/or coaching for disabled people, and if so, what was it like?
Luna Matatas: I have had the joy of being on a panel for disabled people - and I actually feel like I learned more from the engagement and questions in the group than I brought to the table! It was great because any chance to engage, learn, and humbly become a better educator is totally my jam. I have two disabled clients right now, who are both exploring kink in different ways. I LOVE one-on-one coaching because it does allow for you to be your full self, vs. in a group format, we're balancing many people's needs. What's great in coaching these two clients, is that I get to apply my sex-ed knowledge to help connect them with resources that meet their individual needs.
Luna Matatas: I think when I first started, I had to unlearn the paternalism that ableism teaches us - and I made a lot of assumptions about what disabled people need
Luna Matatas: so I try to work from what do I need to know about you and your desires, and I put in the work to make sure I'm meeting those needs with new resources if I don't have the knowledge.
Cripping Up Sex: That's such a great approach, I think teamwork is so crucial for any coaching relationship, but especially if the client is disabled.
Cripping Up Sex: Where would you like to see your work go in the future?
Luna Matatas: SOOOOOOOOOOOO many ideas 😍
Luna Matatas: hahahah I definitely want to host more intensive classes
Luna Matatas: I would love to host a retreat on sexual confidence someday when we're allowed to gather again
Luna Matatas: I'd love to partner with other experts to offer more sex-ed workshops (wink wink nudge nudge Eva) 😉
Luna Matatas: and I'm putting out more resources for understanding cannabis and sex for 2021
Cripping Up Sex: That all sounds amazing Luna!
Luna Matatas: Thank you!
Cripping Up Sex: Where would you like to see society’s views on disability and sex go in the future?
Luna Matatas: I would LOVE to see society throw out its standards of 'sexy' or 'attractive'; both physical and emotional standards. I would LOVE to see more representation of disability and sex in mainstream media, I'd LOVE to see more disabled content creators getting gigs and sponsorships so their platforms can be funded, and I'd love to see our views on intimacy change from this cis able-bodied heteronormative mindset we currently have. And I'd love to see more space taken up by disabled people in love, in kink, in relationships, and their voices integrated instead of tokenized.
Cripping Up Sex: 100000% agree
Cripping Up Sex: Well, that was my last question Luna, thanks so much for coming and chatting with me. Is there anything else you would like our readers to know?
Luna Matatas: These were amazing questions, thank you so much for curating this space and knowledge. I really enjoyed chatting here with you. I think readers should know that sexy is a feeling, not a look, and that feelin' yourself is the most confident thing you can do - and is actually a radical act of self-love!
Cripping Up Sex: That's a fabulous way to end such an awesome conversation. Have a great rest of your day!
Luna Matatas: Thank you! You too!
luna@lunamatatas.com
@lunamatatas on Twitter and IG
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