What does make-up have to do with sexual health?
This is the speech that I delivered during the sexual health and make-up workshop we did with MAC cosmetics last July 3, 2010. I have gotten requests to post the speech on-line and I’m only too happy to oblige.
It’s great to be in the company of women because you know what that means, right?
We can shamelessly talk about sex without the men around and I’m sure Wanggo won’t mind. : )
You know, when we first announced this workshop, I got a lot of inquiries. A lot were to make reservations but mostly, a lot of people were asking what does sexual health have to do with make-up?
Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper – this year’s MAC Viva Glam endorsers may know a thing or two about sexual health and make-up. Lady Gaga, named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2010 has even surprised us by saying, “It’s okay to be celibate.”
This year, they’re specifically calling all the ladies and encouraging them to celebrate relationships that are “sexy, satisfying and safe”. They’re pointing out something that we often don’t want to think about – the fact that women are also at risk for HIV. A recent UNAIDS study on intimate partner transmission estimates that there are about 50 million women in Asia at risk for HIV not because of their own risky behavior, but that of their partner’s.
It’s great to hear such things straight from women like Cyndi Lauper and Lady Gaga who know what they’re talking about when it comes to the steamy subject of sex… because we don’t spend enough time talking about sex, may be because we’re too busy having it, with 3.1 million pregnancies each year and 4 babies being born every minute!
We shouldn’t keep ourselves in the dark about ways to properly protect ourselves. What Lady Gaga and Cyndi Lauper are actually talking about the concept of “emotional safe sex”. If you look this up, this is the idea of protecting yourself not just physically, but also emotionally when you decide to become intimate with someone.
We deserve to be emotionally secure with someone. Someone who isn’t going to make us feel cheap after you sleep with him; someone who, when he sees us naked, will make us feel like a goddess.
We deserve to be with someone who will not leave us alone in fear if we’re pregnant or going thru a pregnancy; who will think that birth control is a shared responsibility. Because you know, until we start getting pregnant on our own, birth control, birth spacing will always be a shared responsibility.
We bring this up because in real life, when we’re in madly love or sometimes when we’re wildly drunk, we get carried away and think that it’s okay not to use a condom or say yes to a guy who won’t respect our choice NOT to have sex without one.
That someone is depriving you of our right to choose; and we are denying ourselves CONTROL over when to get pregnant, who to get pregnant with and our basic right protect yourself from STIs.
An OB that I once interviewed told me that she’s shocked at how many of her patients are sexually active. It’s not because they are sexually active, but because when she asks them about the birth control method they use, a lot of them say, nothing. When she asks them what they plan to do if they get pregnant, they say, “Eh, I don’t get pregnant naman e.”
Among the top reasons that they cite for not using a condom is that their boyfriends don’t want to wear one. Some others cite that they like the skin to skin feel of it or just plain, “Bahala na”.
Filipinas spend 19.4 years out of their 25 reproductive years trying to postpone or avoid pregnancies.
We always hear in our culture:
Mahalin mo ang iyong mga magulang. {love your parents}
Mahalin mo ang iyong asawa. {love your husband, partner or lover}
Even mahalin mo ang iyong bayan {love your country}
But we rarely hear anyone ever saying Mahalin mo MUNA (first) ang iyong sarili [love yourself first]. I inject the word MUNA (first) there to stress the importance of loving ourselves first before we can love another. Doing that will be an ultimate guide for us to make right decisions and take rightful control when it comes to our bodies, our relationships and our sex lives.
Every year in the Philippines, there are:
1.43 million unintended pregnancies
473,000 abortions
79,000 treatments at facilities for abortion complications
800 deaths of women due to abortion
It’s your right to say no to a boyfriend, a lover or a husband. It is your right to decline / oppose sex without a condom even if it is a boyfriend, a lover or a husband that you are in effect closing your legs to. It is your body, your right and your pleasure. It is your right to choose when to have kids, how many or none at all.
By loving yourselves first, we remind ourselves of these facts.
I’ll end with another short story. One girl friend of mine was telling me about a boyfriend she once had. She was talking about the many passions and reasons she loves life and she stopped and asked him. Hey what about you? What are your passions?
His answer completely mortified her. You want to guess what his reply was?
He answered. “YOU” with complete and utter admiration.
You complete me?
She left the guy shortly after that because she knew one thing. You complete yourself; you don’t look to another person for that. My friend knew and foresaw that her then boyfriend would constantly need to be assured that he was loved, that he was smart, cute. And she really didn’t want to burden herself with that.
So what does make-up have to do with sexual health? It’s all about completing ourselves; making ourselves look and feel pretty; it’s about being safe physically and emotionally. It’s all about self-love.
Let’s all leave this make-up workshop more beautiful, with more self-love and closer to that day when we say the words, “you complete me” to the person looking back at us in the mirror.
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