Beth Hankes said her sex shop in Burlington was meant to be “the resource that I hadn’t had.”
Struggling with sexual health issues and feeling trapped in the corporate world, she noticed a lack of modern, accessible and “joyful” stores selling sex products in the area. So in 2021, she opened Earth + Salt, the first women-owned sex shop in Burlington.
Now a certified sex educator, Hankes runs educational events at the store at least once a month. When Kell Arbor, health and wellness director at the Pride Center, approached the store to ask if they would sponsor Burlington’s first-ever Sex Week, she was so eager that she ended up becoming heavily involved in organizing it.
The upcoming Sex Week, scheduled from Sept. 14 to 20, features 18 events and runs the gamut from educational panels to art shows and performances to how-to workshops. Earth + Salt plans to host two events, and others will take place at the Spiral House, the Karma Birdhouse, the Pride Center and the Burlington Waterfront Park.
Hankes and Arbor pulled together local sex educators as well as their connections in New York and elsewhere to offer the events, which vary in price from free to roughly $20.
Arbor said Sex Week was partly meant as a counterbalance to Burlington’s more “family-friendly” Pride event, which took place on Sunday.
“I have been hearing from community members that we need more saucy, juicy, sexy things, not just within Pride, but within the community, centering queer and trans folks,” Arbor said.
Arbor, whose pronouns are fae/faer, said the events were meant to be LGBTQ+ friendly by nature, but all are welcome. Only two events, mixers for BIPOC Vermonters and bisexual Vermonters, are restricted to people in each of those groups.
“That’s what equity is about, right? Lifting up the perspectives of people most left out, that we might all see new ways forward,” fae said.
Arbor said that as an HIV-positive Vermonter, fae have encountered ignorance around sexual health, even among health providers. “I’ve seen where the gaps were in my care with doctors saying women don’t get STIs,” or sexually transmitted infections. “That’s very inaccurate. One, I’m not a woman, and two, women get STIs,” fae said.
Three events are aimed specifically at health practitioners, including one on sexual health for older adults and one on trans-inclusive practices in health care, according to the event website.
At the same time, the organizers hope to draw people into the conversation by centering and celebrating pleasure in its workshops on kink and other sexual practices. “Pleasure is more of a sustainable invitation in. That’s why I like ‘edu-taining’ models,” Arbor said.
Hankes said the event will feel like a release point for all the pressures and restrictions that have been building up this year regarding sexual health and marginalized communities.
“We’re still going to be ourselves,” she said. “We’re still going to have this point of pleasure, education, community and give ourselves access to that, because obviously the government and the current cultural climate is not going to give us that.”
Arbor said events like these feel even more essential in the current political climate. The Pride Center was hit hard by federal funding cuts to HIV prevention earlier this year.
“When we’re being attacked at our identities because of who and how we love, that’s all the more reason to invite people into education about how we might all free ourselves into more pleasure,” Arbor said. “I’m always like, ‘if we’re too busy having orgasms, we can’t bomb the world.’”
