Responsible Pleasure Is Not a Sin Says Sister Margaret Farley

Nicole Bentley captures Australian singer-songwriter and pianist Delta Lea Goodrem for the July issue of Vogue Australia.Responsible Pleasure Is Not a Sin Says Sister Margaret Farley AOC Sensual Rebel

Sister Farley makes the core argument for Smart Sensuality women — that being in touch with our sensual selves as Delta Goodrem acts out on video, opens up the door for a liberating form of self love that needn’t become a form of “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the sexiest woman of all? Me, me, me. Let me have sex with every man in sight”

“It is surely the case that many women, following the ‘our bodies our selves’ movement in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century, have found great good in self-pleasuring — perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure — something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers,” she writes. “In this way, it could be said that masturbation actually serves relationships rather than hindering them.”

For Smart Sensuality women, the appreciation — rather than disgust — of our bodies inspires our desire for connection with the world at large. Kind sensitivity to ourselves inspires a desire to care for others, just as Sister Farley writes.