(CR!S) What is an “ecosexual” you ask? Basically, it is a person who makes the land their lover. This individual might have intimate encounters with plants, dirt, trees, and fantasize about Mother Nature to achieve romantic and sexual feelings toward the environment.
The term “ecosexual” was coined by two women who, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, two women who claim to be passionately and fiercely in love with the earth, on May 1, 2014, married the soil. Yes, you read that right. The two were attracted to the soil for its ability to give life and its beauty. You can bet they got down and dirty on the honeymoon.
Ecosexuals talk dirty to plants, kiss and lick the earth, bury themselves in soil and do nude dances while the environment watches on.
They also swim naked in natural waters, hug and stoke trees and give the earth massages.
How do you know if you’re an ecosexual?
According to Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkles, an ecosexual is someone who likes to:
“……talk dirty to plants, kiss and lick the earth, bury themselves in soil and do nude dances while the environment watches on. They also swim naked in natural waters, hug and stroke trees and give the earth massages.”
But if you’re a closet ecosexual, where can you let your freak flag fly? The “Ecosexual Bathhouse” is a series of rooms located at the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens in Australia.
Ecosexual Bathhouse Development Trailer from Loren Kronemyer on Vimeo.
“We believe the biggest sex organ is the brain, and that if we apply our faculties for imagination and sensory immersion to the environment, we can learn to love the earth and respect the diversity and intricacy that exist around us everyday,” according to Ian Sinclair and Loren Kronemyer who created the Ecosexual Bathhouse.
We’re not actually out there humping trees—even though sometimes we will kind of perform that—but it’s more about breaking down separations between humans and nature.
Contraception is too an important part of ecosexuality and people have to slip a condom over their finger before they stroke the flowers. “The experience depends on the approach of each participant,” the duo said.
Participants can sit in a bathtub full of dirt, wear surgical masks with grass growing out of them and even stroke plants in the various rooms. Worried about catching an ecosexually transmitted disease?
Stephens and Sprinkle, in 2011, created the Ecosex Manifesto which outlines both how much they love the earth and how to interact with it. The manifesto translated ecosexuality for a wider audience, establishing it as a flexible combination of activism and identity, not a salacious sexual preference.
Stephens, a professor of art at the University of California, Santa Cruz, grew up in West Virginia, in the shadow of the Appalachian Mountains and the heart of coal country.
Sprinkle grew up in Los Angeles and worked in the adult industry in New York City for 22 years. She spent the first few decades of her life out of touch with nature, though she’d always dreamed of living by water or in a redwood forest.
“Do you find skinny-dipping pleasurable? Do you ever lay in the sand and feel the heat of it and get a little turned on? I think most people do, but because they see the earth as something spiritual, or nature almost like God, they don’t want to have sex with it. But we think sex can be spiritual,” says Sprinkle. We’re trying to shift the metaphor from “earth as mother” to “earth as lover”.
According to Stephens, you can be asexual and still be ecosexual. It has to do with your feelings toward the earth. “We’re not actually out there humping trees—even though sometimes we will kind of perform that—but it’s more about breaking down separations between humans and nature. If you can separate yourself from nature, then you don’t have much of a problem killing nature, exploiting it for resources, and so on,” says Stephens.
Sources: Outsideonline.com; Concreteplayground.com; News.com.au; Sexecology.org; Google, Wikipedia, Facebook