Dakota Johnson wants you to have better sex

We live in a world that won’t stop reminding us that people have a lot to learn when it comes to sex. The news is filled with disturbing stories of sexual violence and, while it rarely makes headlines, everyday misogyny exists in our schools, workplaces and homes.

Maude, the purveyor of aesthetically pleasing, elegantly designed vibrators, condoms, candles and lube, isn’t going to fix these systemic, largely patriarchal, problems. But the intimacy brand is focused on making people think about sex as a form of health and wellness, starting from inside our bedrooms (or wherever one chooses to enjoy themselves). And every little helps, maybe?

I spoke with Maude’s founder Èva Goiccochea and her co-creative director, the actor Dakota Johnson, about sex toys in the Louvre, Shere Hite being run out of America and why we might need a Miss Rachel for sex ed.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Fiona: How did the two of you meet and decide to make it official?

Dakota: I was on the verge of launching my own sort of sexual wellness brand, but I didn’t really know where to begin. There are so many sexual wellness brands that I find to be incredibly offensive and tacky and really kind of diminishing, especially towards female sexuality.

So they brought Maude to my attention and then I wanted to talk to Éva and we really, really got along and I learned so much from her.

Fiona: Your products are in big retailers like Sephora and Ulta Beauty. Two of your vibrators were also included in a museum exhibition — at the Louvre, no less! That’s certainly one way to insert yourself into cultural conversation. But I assume it also says a lot about the suave aesthetics of Maude. Why was it important to move away from the comedy dildo?

Éva: Great design is a language and it creates the potential for, in this case, destigmatization.

Fiona: It’s hard to ignore the backdrop to which we’re having this conversation about sexual education and wellness — just in the last month, we’ve seen the stories of sexual violence coming out of Cornell University, the Russel Brand trial that’s ongoing here in the UK.

Dakota: Sexual violence and misconduct has been occurring since the beginning of time. So I think now it’s about the people who are victims of that feeling like they can speak honestly without being like sent to the guillotine.

Humanity is both incredibly advanced and evolved and deeply stunted. There are cycles, it’s like two steps forward, five steps back, and I just think that if we can create a place where people are supported to talk about their experiences and, and get also access to education and help… I think it’s about building a safer conversation around the topic.

Éva: We have a lot of customers who write us to say they’ve been victims of sexual violence. Some of them just haven’t been ready to think about this part of their lives, and they’re like, ‘Thank you for existing, the products you make don’t make me feel uncomfortable, they are so neutral, I don’t feel ashamed anymore.’

Fiona: That’s powerful feedback to receive. I’m thinking about women later in life, too, a time when many women might feel like, ‘Well, I’m just not going to do that anymore! My sexual years are over.’

Éva: We get taught for maybe one to two hours, especially in the US, in school when we’re teenagers, and then we become ill-equipped to have these conversations about intimacy later in life. We wanted to be there throughout your adult life because the truth is we’re educating ourselves at every point. And Dakota, I’m not sure if you want to mention this, but I thought it was so powerful that you were involved the documentary “The disappearance of Shere Hite,” because she championed what was really happening with people and intimacy so early on.

(Shere Hite was a pioneering and outspoken sexual educator known for the groundbreaking 1976 study, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which surveyed thousands of American women about their sex lives. Her challenges to traditional patriarchal ideas of sex, including the revelation that roughly 70% of women were unable to achieve orgasm through penetrative intercourse, received a huge amount of backlash and upset many fragile men.)

Dakota: Yeah, and she was publicly so silenced and so devalued for that. My production company TeaTime produced that documentary and I narrated it. I wasn’t even aware of the book, but my mom was and so many people in her generation and friends of hers who I would talk to were. She was such a fabulous woman. So strong… she was so cool and chic, and she was just telling the truth, and she was basically run out of America!

Fiona: What other films or books do you think we have out there that are good, in terms of building a healthy sexual education?

Dakota: To be honest, I haven’t really seen much.

I guess you know that show “Sex Education” was good but also lacking like basic information about sex, like what you want your kids to learn when they start to understand what that is. Eva and I have talked about sex ed in schools and now like that’s not really even a thing anymore, is it Eva?

Dakota: They’ve taken it out of schools . There’s not really a conversation around sex, which is such a huge issue because human beings are sexual by nature, and a human is going to have sexual urges at some point in their life. If they’re not educated, then that leads to the kind of behavior that we were talking about earlier, where it’s more aggressive, it’s more violent, it’s like something where you don’t understand where it’s coming from and how to identify with it. But in my line of work, I truly cannot give you an example.

Fiona: The other way to help people talk about sex is to make it fun, and to even make it funny? One film that got me thinking about sex in a different way recently is Olivia Colman’s new film “Wicker” with Alexander Skarsgård.

Dakota: I haven’t seen that yet! But even in Alex’s other movie “Pillion,” there’s a more subversive conversation about sexual discovery and something that’s really quite beautiful, even if it’s a niche pocket of sexuality. So, yes, there is a way to do this in film, but then, do you think that there’s a disconnect between people watching a narrative scripted story and then going back to their own lives? I don’t know, does there need to be like a Miss Rachel for sex ed??

我们生活在一个不断提醒我们，人们在性方面还有很多东西需要学习的世界。新闻里充斥着令人不安的性暴力事件，虽然很少登上头条，但日常生活中存在的厌女症却无处不在，它存在于我们的学校、工作场所和家庭中。

Maude，这家专营设计精美、风格优雅的振动器、避孕套、香薰蜡烛和润滑剂的品牌，并不能解决这些根深蒂固、父权制色彩浓厚的系统性问题。但这个私密用品品牌致力于让人们将性视为一种健康和幸福的体现，而这一切都始于我们的卧室（或者任何我们选择享受性爱的地方）。或许，积少成多，对吧？

我与 Maude 的创始人 Èva Goiccochea 和她的联合创意总监、演员 Dakota Johnson 谈论了卢浮宫的性玩具、Shere Hite 被驱逐出美国以及为什么我们可能需要一位像 Miss Rachel 那样的性教育老师。

以下对话内容经过编辑，以使其更简洁明了。

菲奥娜：你们俩是怎么认识的，又是怎么决定正式在一起的？

达科塔：我当时正准备创立自己的性健康品牌，但我真的不知道从何入手。市面上有很多性健康品牌，我觉得它们非常冒犯、俗气，而且很贬低女性，尤其是对女性性健康方面。

于是他们让我注意到了莫德，然后我想和伊娃谈谈，我们相处得非常融洽，我从她身上学到了很多东西。

菲奥娜：你的产品在丝芙兰和Ulta Beauty等大型零售商都有销售。你的两款振动器甚至还入选了博物馆展览——而且是在卢浮宫！这无疑是融入文化对话的一种方式。但我认为这也充分体现了Maude优雅的审美。为什么摆脱喜剧风格的假阳具对你来说如此重要？

伊娃：优秀的设计是一种语言，它创造了消除污名化的潜力。

菲奥娜：我们很难忽视我们正在进行的关于性教育和健康的对话的背景——就在上个月，我们看到了康奈尔大学发生的性暴力事件，以及正在英国进行的拉塞尔·布兰德审判。

达科塔：性暴力和性骚扰自古以来就存在。所以我认为现在重要的是，那些受害者能够坦诚地表达自己的遭遇，而不用担心被送上断头台。

人类既拥有令人难以置信的先进性和进化程度，又存在着严重的缺陷。发展总是有周期性的，就像前进两步，后退五步一样。我认为，如果我们能创造一个让人们可以畅所欲言、分享经历，并获得教育和帮助的地方……我认为这关乎围绕这个话题构建一个更安全的对话环境。

伊娃：我们有很多顾客写信告诉我们，她们曾是性暴力的受害者。她们中的一些人还没准备好面对生活中的这一部分，她们会说：“谢谢你们的存在，你们的产品不会让我感到不舒服，它们非常中性，我不再感到羞耻了。”

菲奥娜：这真是个很有价值的反馈。我也在想，很多女性到了晚年可能会觉得，“唉，我再也不想做那种事了！我的性生活已经结束了。”

伊娃：我们，尤其是在美国，青少年时期在学校里可能只接受一到两个小时的亲密关系教育，之后就很难在人生后期进行这些关于亲密关系的对话。我们希望在你成年后的生活中一直陪伴着你，因为事实上，我们每时每刻都在学习和成长。达科塔，我不知道你是否愿意提及，但我认为你参与拍摄纪录片《谢尔·海特的消失》非常了不起，因为她很早就勇敢地揭露了人们在亲密关系方面所面临的真实困境。

（谢尔·海特是一位具有开拓精神且直言不讳的性教育家，她因1976年开创性的研究《海特报告：一项全国性的女性性行为调查》而闻名。该报告调查了数千名美国女性的性生活。她对传统的父权制性观念提出了挑战，包括揭示约70%的女性无法通过性交达到性高潮，这招致了巨大的反弹，并激怒了许多脆弱的男性。）

达科塔：是啊，她因此被公开噤声，被贬低得一文不值。我的制作公司TeaTime制作了那部纪录片，我担任旁白。我之前甚至不知道这本书，但我妈妈知道，我跟她那一代的很多人以及她的朋友们都聊过。她是一位非常了不起的女性。她非常坚强……她很酷，很有型，她只是在说真话，结果却被赶出了美国！

菲奥娜：你认为还有哪些电影或书籍有助于建立健康的性教育？

达科塔：说实话，我其实没看到什么。

我想你也知道，《性教育》这部剧虽然不错，但缺乏一些基本的性知识，比如你希望孩子在开始了解性是什么的时候应该学到什么。我和伊娃聊过学校的性教育，现在感觉学校的性教育好像已经不存在了，对吧，伊娃？

达科塔：学校里已经把性教育撤掉了。现在几乎没有关于性的讨论，但这其实是个大问题，因为人类天生就有性欲，每个人一生中都会有性冲动。如果缺乏性教育，就会导致我们之前讨论的那种行为，更具攻击性、更暴力，让人无法理解这种冲动的根源，也无法与之认同。但就我目前的工作而言，我真的举不出什么例子。

菲奥娜：帮助人们谈论性的另一种方法是让它变得有趣，甚至搞笑？最近让我对性有了不同思考的一部电影是奥利维娅·科尔曼和亚历山大·斯卡斯加德主演的新片《异教徒》。

达科塔：我还没看过呢！不过，即使是亚历克斯的另一部电影《后座乘客》，也对性探索进行了更具颠覆性的探讨，而且探讨的内容非常精彩，即便它只是性方面的一个小众话题。所以，是的，电影确实可以做到这一点，但是，你觉得人们看完一部叙事性的电影后，回到自己的生活中，会不会产生脱节呢？我不知道，难道真的需要像瑞秋小姐那样的性教育老师吗？