California professor, Elizabeth Stephens, pushes ‘Ecosexual’ movement with graphic ‘sex with earth’ details, Teen Vogue article
In the latest bizarre and strange move from California, UC Santa Cruz professor Art Professor Elizabeth Stephens is promoting “Ecosexual Love Story” – a documentary filmed about her and her partner licking trees, playing with mud, and having sex with the environment while naked. Interest has grown as Teen Vogue even published a perverted article: “Ecosexuals Are Queering Environmentalism” in June.
Stephens, chair of the art department at the university, is promoting her new documentary “Water Makes Us Wet,” which is slated for this week in Germany as part of a large art exhibition.
public domain pic from May 4 1916
Over the summer, Stephens also co-led an “Ecosex Walking Tour” in Germany that offered “25 ways to make love to the Earth, raise awareness of environmental issues, learn ecosexercises, find E-spots, and climax with the planetary clitoris,” according to a description of the event on UC Santa Cruz’s website.
Teen Vogue told its young readers about a concept called “Grassilingus,” which was accompanied by a description of a musician laying facedown in grass and licking it.
“Whether it’s masturbating with water pressure, using eco-friendly lubricant, or literally having sex with a tree — a person of any sexual proclivity who finds eroticism in nature, or believes that making environmentalism sexy will slow the planet’s destruction, can be ecosexual,” the magazine explained in its June article.
“Ecosexuality is a way of enjoying the sensuality of pretty much anything,” says Stephens. “It’s really about embodiment.”
“Ecosexuality is not going to appeal to most indigenous people. … I teach it in my classes and my students are viscerally like, ‘This is weird, self-indulgent white people,’” says anthropologist Kim TallBear, a professor of Native Studies at University of Alberta, in a phone interview from Edmonton, Canada.
TallBear, a speaker at Sprinkle and Stephens’ recent University of California, Santa Cruz Ecosex Symposium, is writing a book which explores the effects of colonization on queer sexuality. For many of her students, she says, ecosex raises questions about consent. Can a tree do that?
“When people talk about the Anthropocene they typically say, ‘We as a species are now coming to realize that we have to stop putting humans at the top of the hierarchy. Other beings have agency,’ and I’m like, ‘No, it’s not we who are just now having this revelation; it’s a bunch of white guys’”. TallBear says there’s always a risk of subconsciously appropriating indigenous culture.
“Don’t forget that what you’re saying about humanity probably doesn’t apply to indigenous people,” she said. “And, yes, we’re still here.”
In an email to The College Fix, Stephens said she is inspired by living and working in Santa Cruz as well as growing up in West Virginia.
“I grew up around farmers, hunters, fishermen and miners. They all loved the earth and in fact, their health and livelihoods depended on loving the earth,” she told The Fix.
“Ecosexual art is an art project,” she added. “It really depends on the audiences’ reception as to whether it is cultural or political form of art. … An ecosexual is someone who loves the earth.”
