Transcript: Sheila Kelley on Let’s Get Naked at TEDxAmericanRiviera

I know, right? The personal reclamation of the female body and the sexuality within. It’s crazy, right? A stripper pole representing the feminist movement — there’s got to be some people rolling over in their graves! Heros of mine! But I’m going to tell you about this wild journey I took over the last 23 years that brought me to this place of clarity and conviction.

I’ll set the scene for you. 1989, La Cienega Boulevard Star Strip Gentleman’s Club. The first time I went into a strip club I was a young actress, I was helping a friend with a writing project and I was very unhappy that I had to go on to this place that I felt subjugated and objectified women. But once inside I fell in love with the movement of some of the dancers, their bodies undulated and they teased and they were provocative and sexual, and so feminine. And I was desperate to learn how to do it. But I didn’t want to be a professional stripper. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

What I did is I wrote-produced a film where I actually got to play a stripper. And in the movie I needed to create a character who lived and moved through her sexuality. And I thought this is going to be fun. So I, first day of rehearsal, put on this outfit that I thought would communicate my sexy stripper-self into the world, please don’t laugh or you can laugh! So I got on stage in this outfit and the music comes on and my body just goes: uh-uh — uh-uh — ain’t moving! And she froze.

Now I was a dance major, New York University, I’m a professionally trained ballerina, I should know how to do this. But my body was like, “I am not having anything of it!” And I started to force her to kind of — bop from side to side, trying to be really sexy, it was so pathetic, it was totally not sexy. And what I was realizing is that nowhere in my being did I know how to embody my sexuality in my everyday life. It wasn’t that I didn’t have sexuality. I for myself though it was fine.

It was bringing my sexuality into my everyday life. I was faltering at being overtly feminine, like — wow, the body, which is a brilliantly intuitive creature, speaks. And what my body was saying is: “You can clearly see, is you have no idea who I am.” And she was completely right. So I knew something was missing inside of me. I spent the next 4 months, as we developed the film, hunting for who I was as a sexually embodied creature. I went to the strip clubs, I met dancers, I dissected the movement and I learned it, and what I found inside of myself I did not expect. I found its dark, soulful, emotional sexuality that gave me a confidence in my body and my femininity that I’d never had before. What awoke in me was my Erotic Creature. All this is amazing, but it gets so much better, because not only did I awaken that side of myself but this side of myself started changing everything on the home front.

My marriage went from “Eh” to “Oh my God!” It’s stayed there for 23 years. I became a happier mother to my children, I became a more complete woman on to myself. And I had to share this with other women. I was like, ‘You’ve got — this is it, this is the Holy Grail of empowerment!’ and they’re like, ‘OK.’

I developed this movement called ‘S Factor,’ and I started teaching it to fellow pre-school moms and women in the neighborhood and they too started releasing their sexuality into their everyday lives and into their bodies and — the same changes that I’d had in my life they were having in theirs. Happier relationships, happier children, happier women, it caught on like wild fire.

The next thing I know I am on Oprah’s. We become — our effort becomes international news. I’m inundated with e-mails from all over the globe. Apparently, the desire to be whole — it crosses not only geographic boundaries but political and cultural boundaries as well. I had tapped in a world-wide artery of women all missing the same something I had been missing. The Erotic creature was asleep globally.

But how was that possible? I couldn’t understand how could the woman from Saudi Arabia, the woman from Beijing, the woman from Buenos Aires and me in Los Angeles, how could we all be missing the same thing? I needed to understand this. And I call it the ‘Yin effect.‘ Think of each person, male or female, having within the potential of Yin-feminine and Yang-masculine energy, we live in a world that cuts out a piece of Yin in all of us. And if you jump into that Yin, you’ll see that it’s the physicality and sexuality of the feminine body that’s shut down. And the more women I talked to, the more I learned.

And what I learned is that the shutting down of the Yin starts with the first offense. The first offense is the first time anyone or anything brings negative attention, judgment or shame to your body. So my first offense happened when I was 7 and this is the picture of what a 7-year-old little girl’s body looks like just for you to refer to throughout the story — this is my daughter. I was hanging out with my best friends, Brian and Donald Doyle, they were 7 and 8 respectively, we were hanging out in the backyard, it was summer, it was really hot, we were playing, we decided to take a break and we went to cool down, so we all took our tops off and we laid back in the grass, arms over the head, it was an awesome day, the air was cooling my chest, it was a beautiful, innocent day. And all of a sudden the upstairs window of their house was flying open and Mrs Doyle stuck her head out and she screamed in the most piercing voice, “Sheila Kelley! You naughty little girl! You put your top on immediately, you ought to be ashamed of yourself and go home.”

My shoulders started to pinch up towards my ears, my chest caved-in with this new-found emotion of shame, I couldn’t breathe, it was the moment I began to separate from my female body. Mrs Doyle hadn’t yelled at her boys but she yelled at me but we did the same thing. What I learned that day is it’s safe and good to be in a male body, and it’s not safe, it’s dangerous to be in a female body. Mrs Doyle didn’t hate me, she was trying to curb a sexuality that scared her, that didn’t even exist yet. She thought she had the right to tell me what I could and couldn’t do with my body.

These kind of stories play out every single day all over the globe. We are stealing the light and the life from these creatures, these beautiful feminine creatures. Every single woman you know has had a first offense, whether she’s aware of it or not. And she’s had subsequent offenses every day of her life, offenses like ‘keep your knees together’, ‘don’t move like that’, ‘she’s a slut’, ‘you look like a whore’. These offenses eat away at the emotional boundary and the ego of the body until you do not know where your body begins and where your body ends. You think anyone, anytime, anywhere can tell you what you can and cannot do in your body and the only choice you have is to shut it down.

So let’s understand these offenses a little better because they’re tricky and you can’t always tell they’re offenses. And there’s a spectrum of them and they’re global and they range in noticeability. If some of these pictures are difficult — please avert your eyes. They range from barbaric, such as the stoning to death of a woman who expresses her sexuality. Or brutal, the creating of a human chastity belt made of flash. Or overt, the mandatory veiling of the female body. To subtle controls, things like offensive advertising that eats away your integrity of your body. To subliminal controls, the infantile global uproar over a pair of royal nipples.

Now really, honestly, I just don’t know which pair of nipples were so offensive. But that’s another talk! So I want to switch the table on you for a second. Do you know who I find incredibly attractive and I think if I saw his bare nipples I would be so sexually aroused that I couldn’t control myself? Daniel Craig. I don’t even look over there because — I kind of think Daniel Craig should cover his nipples, too! I know, I know, it’s absurd, but is it? We are laughing at this but we are doing this to the female body. Globally.

What each and every one of these offenses have in common is the desire — their end-goal is to control and limit the female body and sexuality, to control the clitoris, to control the vagina, to control the uterus, to control all of it. We don’t want to think that atrocities like acid-burnings for turning down a marriage proposal are related to atrocities like domestic abuse for turning down a marriage proposal. But as you can see they’re the exact same thing, they’re just using different tactics of control in different degrees.

And when you hear repeatedly that your body is obscene or indecent you begin to internalize it, and you start to self-control and you start to try and hide your body, you try and hide your sexuality in unhealthy eating habits, or you hide in skin and bones, you’ll do anything you can to hide. Or you start to cut. Or you try to become somebody else’s ideal of perfection. Or you’ll mini-man yourself up so that you can be taken more seriously in a world that values all that is masculine. Or you just live where 80% of the women in America live which is where something is missing and you have no idea what it is.

What we have done to the ego of the female body is — it’s horrific. We have squandered and abused one of the sweetest, most vulnerable, most adorable creatures on the planet, and we — all of us — we are all paying the price, because if you think women are the only one scarred in the relationship to their body, think about this: what the Doyle boys learned on the day of my first offense was exactly what I learned. They learned that their body was more valuable than my body. They learned that if their mother could tell me what I could and couldn’t do in my body then maybe someday they could, too. Men too are scarred in relationship to the feminine body through these offenses.

In a UCLA study of normal college students over 50% of the young men said they would rape a woman if they knew there was no punishment. For the majority of men the most arousing fantasy was the rape of a young woman where she experienced both orgasm and pain. Right? Kind of sobering.

There was a time when the female body was worshiped, not just for her life-giving ability, but for her heightened senses, her emotional acuity, her brilliant intuition and her dance of the fertility. And this dance took place at night when the women — and only the women — would gather over the fields and they would do — they would undulate their pelvises over the crops to fertilize the soil, to feed the village. That’s the true origin of what we know as ‘fertility dance’, which became erotic dance, which became what we know today as strip-tease and pole-dancing. It was a celebration of the feminine body. It began as a dance of life.

The great mythologist and philosopher Joseph Campbell wrote, “Woman is life and Man is the protector of life. The male’s job is to protect the women.” Somehow we have — the way we’ve learned how to protect has become perverted. We are protecting by dousing the flame of the feminine. We are serving by controlling the body of the feminine instead of doing what we have to do and what we have to do is we have to turn our masculine energy out and face any on-coming threat so that the feminine can blossom and grow and radiate and be alive.

The next wave of the feminist movement is actually — it’s a human movement and it includes all of us and it is the reclamation of the beauty and the genius of both the masculine and the feminine. And it all begins with the awakening of the Erotic Creature in every woman because when a woman steps into her power in her body she calls every single masculine into his greatest power. When she gets stronger he gets stronger. When we as a culture diminish her we are diminishing our culture. The female-male complement can exist and only when we cultivate it are we really going to live up to the potential — the true potential of ourselves individually and collectively. This is my guy. We cultivate every single day, it’s not perfect, there are ups and downs, but we dance the dance of empowering one another.

Now here I am totally naked. If we all strip bare every day and expose our deepest truth, we can live naked in our passion, naked in our power, naked in ourselves, naked in the moment. I reclaimed my body after a lifetime of self-criticism brought on by a society that curbed her enthusiasm for life, and in doing so I have become, as Charles Dickens so beautifully wrote, ‘the hero of my own life’. So the choice is yours.

Do you dare to become the heroes of your lives and reclaim your essence? Do you dare to live naked? So when you walk out of this talk, when you leave this talk, women, step into the grandeur, the beauty, the gorgeousness the sway, the curve, the power, the fire of your body, of your spirit, of your emotions. I want you to undulate your spine and just rock your body, sway it, move it, stretch it, reach your arms up, you can do it right now if you want to. I want you to go out and throw a hip-circle in the middle of the grocery store! Just for the fun of it. I want you to spread your radiance with a smile like right into the eyes of a stranger. And I’m going to feed you and you’re going to feed me.

And men, step into the magnificence of the masculine creature that you are. Create a space of safety for the feminine to thrive. Serve her, protect her, face out and hold her in your gaze and elevate her. Because when you elevate her you will behold in front of you the eternal and the sacred feminine. She’s here right this minute, she is in front of you, she’s next to you, she’s behind you, she is every woman, she is the swoop of the neck, and the turn of an ankle, and the curve up the lower back, and she’s the deep emotional heart, she is the wise intuitive soul, and when you see her, when you awaken her when you behold her — oh my God — whether you are a man, a woman or a child, you will be filled up, split open into your bliss because that is the power of the feminine.

And one more thing. Women — when you walk into a room, remember your breasts should enter 5 minutes before you and your glories ass should leave 5 minutes after you’re gone.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

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