Here’s What It’s Like to Attend AASECT, the Conference Known As the Sexology Super Bowl

 

Every year, thousands of football fans fly from various locations across the country (and from outside the United States) to attend the long-awaited Super Bowl. After a full season of hard work and determination, people around the world tune in virtually and in person to see the best athletes compete, show off their talent, and apply the skills they’ve accumulated throughout the past several months. However, this concept of a final display of entertainment or celebration of the top people in a particular career path goes beyond football.

Other career paths have their own version of the Super Bowl too. The music industry version of the Super Bowl is the Grammys. The film industry has the Oscars. The fashion industry has the Met Gala. And, last but not least, the sexuality field’s version of the Super Bowl is the annual conference hosted by AASECT, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists.

AASECT is the largest organization to certify sexuality professionals, providing opportunities for training, community, and visibility to promote understanding of human sexuality and healthy sexual behavior. In other words, being an AASECT-certified educator, counselor or therapist is like being a chef who earned a Michelin star. It’s a pretty big deal. It’s also a big deal to have the honor of speaking at AASECT’s annual conference or even being involved with such a prestigious event whether you’re on the conference planning committee, volunteering, or attending.

This year’s conference was hosted at the prestigious St. Louis Union Station Hotel, a remarkable venue in Missouri that offered spacious rooms with jaw-dropping interior design, mouth-watering food, and tons of space for hundreds of sexuality professionals from across the globe. The conference’s theme was “All Together Now: Lifting Our Voice for Community.”

According to the organizers of the conference, this year’s theme was inspired by a new sexual revolution, empowering all bodies, sizes, abilities, races, ages, genders, and sexual orientations to come together to protect our society’s freedom of choice, expression, and bodily autonomy. “In a time when fundamental human rights are not guaranteed, we face some of the most significant challenges of our time. AASECT joins in answering new calls to collective liberation — where underutilized and historically oppressed voices are centered, where advocacy is transformed into action, and where we can create a more just world for all of us,” AASECT announced as an opening statement to kick off the 4-day conference.

It didn’t take long into the conference for attendees to realize how engaging the learning experience would be. The presentations included information on topics like the improvement of parent-child sex education among Muslims, LGBTQ legislation across the country, the healing of past trauma through kink & BDSM, and more.

Dr. Debby Herbenick, an internationally recognized sexual and reproductive health professor and researcher gave the presentation “The Rise of Rough Sex: What Sexuality Professionals Need to Know About Today’s Emerging Trends” and it was certainly a crowd favorite, More studies have shown that rough sex (e.g., choking, smothering, face slapping, genital slapping, name-calling) has increased dramatically in prevalence.

Interesting fact from the presentation: A 2020 campus-representative survey of nearly 5000 college students showed that 80% had ever engaged in rough sex.

Herbenick’s presentation analyzed this research and other recent studies on rough sex to address its prevalence, frequency, and styles, as well as implications for communication, consent, mental health, and physical health.

Another noteworthy presentation was the “Sex & Love Around the World: A Deep Dive Into Cultural Influences on Sexuality & Sexual Function” panel. Did you know that sexual dysfunction affects up to a third of Americans, impairing sexuality, intimate relationships, and mental health? The “Sex & Love Around the World” panel of multiple professionals in the field discussed how Americans are slowly but surely shifting from a medicalized view of providing sex therapy to a more holistic approach to the treatment of sexual issues. The panel also compared and contrasted how other cultures across different continents conceptualize values and dilemmas regarding sex and relationships.

Another educational highlight was the presentation “Finding the Room Next Door (to the Room Where It Happens)” by Dr. Emily Nagoski, a famous sex educator and author of Come as You Are. She used an interactive and artistic approach to navigating the loss of desire and other changes in sexual responsiveness by mapping our “emotional floorplans.” To help the crowd understand their turn-on triggers, Nagoski facilitated group activities among the crowd, asking the following questions and prompts:

• How do you know you’re in the space of lust and/or romance?
• What happens in your body, thoughts, and emotions when you’re there?
• How do you feel about this space?
• What pulls you into that space, and what pushes you out?
• Write or talk about a time that you were in this space. What did you like about it? Where were you before you got into this space?

There was more to learn, but if we re-capped everything in all the presentations, there wouldn’t be enough room in this review to talk about other noteworthy parts of the conference, like Kinky Bingo and the Dazzling Drag Show!

Kinky Bingo was hosted during the evening of day 2 of the conference. If you’re scratching your head wondering what kinky bingo entails, it’s a bold and tantalizing twist on the classic game. Imagine regular bingo cards, but instead of placing your chip on the board for spaces like B12 or G51, you place your chip on spaces like “riding crop” underneath the B column or “golden shower” underneath the G column. And of course, the winners received prizes risqué like flavored lube, high-tech sex toys, and BDSM accessories.

Next, the Dazzling Drag Show was hosted on the evening of 3 of the conference. As you can imagine, it was a fun night full of glitter, glamor, and grand performances. The crowd came dressed to impress while watching the high-energy dance-offs and lip-sync battles. The impromptu “Who can lick the pudding from the pudding cup the fastest?” competition was a nice addition to the event too.

Ultimately, the 2024 AASECT conference will always go down as one of the most memorable conferences of all time. The atmosphere was unreal and each day felt like a family reunion regardless of whether people had already known each other for years or just met each other in person despite following each other on social media since the pandemic.

Curious about AASECT’s plans for next year? We won’t leave you hanging, so here’s a sneak peek: The next AASECT conference will be held June 4-7, 2025, at the JW Marriott Las Vegas Resort & Spa in Las Vegas! If you’re interested in being a speaker, stay tuned because the call for 2025 abstracts will open by the end of the month.

To stay updated with upcoming news about AASECT, look through their website’s homepage here and sign up for their newsletter!