Darlings,
This woman brings me peace. I can breathe more easily on this earth because she is here.
Why?
Because of her extraordinary love for women, and her willingness to jump, with abandon, into the creation of a frame from which a woman can continually source the best in herself.
Every woman is a genius creatrix, as long as she has access to her deepest intuition. Who knew that the gorgeously, deliciously moving body of a woman gives her access to her strength, power and vibrant truth? Sheila Kelley, that's who. Read on, and meet my inspiring Sister Revolutionary . . .
Yours in Pleasure,
Regena
SCHOOL OF WOMANLY ARTS: Sheila, what did you discover in creating S Factor that you are hoping to share with women?
SHEILA KELLEY: What you discover when you move your body in the way that S Factor encourages is that you live for the first time, possibly, in your life in 100% of your body as a woman. You discover the full range of motion that your body is capable of. That is a revelation. And then you discover the power of that movement and how that movement affects not just you personally, but how that movement affects the other half—the male counterpart. But that comes after the revelation of “Oh my god, look what my body can do and look how good it feels! I can’t believe that my hips can do that, and I don’t believe my legs can do this and I don’t believe my arms can do that.” It’s truly a discovery, almost like a birthing of a side of a woman that in our culture that tends to atrophy.
SWA: Can you talk about the transformation that takes place in S Factor women from when they begin taking classes to after they’ve been studying for awhile?
SK: It’s the evolution of a part of you that has been dormant and you birth it and you raise it and you become whole in a way that I had never been whole in my whole life before S Factor. It’s that evolution into becoming a fully moving woman instead of cutting certain kinds of movements or certain parts of your body off.
I was talking to a man the other day and he couldn’t understand what S Factor meant to women and why women who had done S Factor became such rabid fans. So I said to him, “You know what? When you smile, it really turns me on. I get really aroused, so I’d appreciate it if you’d stop smiling. I’d appreciate it if you did not smile your whole life. Every time that you smile, I get too aroused and every other woman I know gets way too turned on, so you need to stop smiling and every other man needs to stop smiling.” And he got it, of course. Because if you were to learn to smile after it had been taken away, how can you describe that? How can you put a feeling to what I just told you? It’s your joy.
Women have primitively loved to dance, women love to move. It’s physiological fact. When you take away someone’s joy and then they finally find it, it’s exactly the same thing as stealing a man’s smile and then giving it back to him. When you steal someone’s joy because of shame or blame,. . . It’s why women are so judgmental and so harsh on themselves and their bodies. It’s why we have bulimia running rampant in our high schools. It’s why we have obesity and anorexia, self-judgment and cutting. This is not natural. It is a man-made, patriarchal culture phenomenon of women slowly tearing themselves apart.
SWA: It’s clear that S Factor is so much more than a fitness movement. It is part of a larger movement.
SK: Yes. But it does stem from freedom of the body. If you’ve been in shackles all your life, if you’ve been enslaved your whole life and you are released from that slavery, the freedom, the joy . . . it’s indescribable. I’ve got to use these analogies to get a man to feel why a “stripping/pole dancing” class can change your life. I think that’s why I like to separate those words from S Factor. Those are simply elements of a much more profound movement. S Factor is not used for the sole purpose of titillating the male of the species, or for exploiting your body in any way. It is for having your own bliss in your own movement.
SWA: I feel like you have a grand vision for women through this work. What is your desire for womankind?
SK: What I’ve seen and realized through this journey of the creation of S Factor and the response to it is that we women have no culture anymore. Our culture has basically been stolen from us and my goal in life—my one goal—is to reestablish the feminine culture, because right now the culture that we live in is the masculine. We live in the male culture. We look at the world through the man’s eyes.
And with the female culture not existing right now, it has no eyes. It does exist with people like Mama Gena and with S Factor and myself. There are disparate, little communities sprouting up that need to bond together to create this culture, because this culture has got to be created consciously. It’s hard for women to bond together and establish a culture strongly unless they are consciously aware that there is none. The things that create a culture are points of view, history, and stories that are handed down from one generation to another. And not only does this not exist, but our culture has been usurped by the male culture. So trying to resurrect the feminine culture is my goal in life.
SWA: Is a big part of that accessing female sensuality?
SK: A big part of that is accessing everything feminine, from dance to movement to sensuality to stories to music to history to way of life, to insisting upon and insinuating our points of view into the media—into the culture and into advertising. For example, you drive by a bus advertisement and it says, “Latinos.” “Latinos” is a phrase that encompasses all Latin people, but it is a masculine word and point of view, instead of “Latinas” which is feminine. Simple little things like that that slip by you every day reinforce a very strong male eye. I love that we have a strong masculine eye. I love men. But I don’t like that we have a weak feminine eye.
Remember the song “House of the Rising Sun”? That original song was written in 1928 by a prostitute who was writing a song to her sister trying to warn her not to come and become a prostitute in the house of the rising sun. Now if you go back and listen to those words, you are going to have your heart broken. Because that is an extraordinary story from one culture, one generation of women to another generation, which was taken by the male culture and turned into a song about a guy.
There is an anthropologist/ archaeologist who was working in the 1950s—Maria Gimbutas—and she was extremely maverick and ahead of her time. She did these digs in Lithuania and she found a lot of artifacts from the Neolithic period. She uncovered a goddess-centered, agrarian culture that worshipped women. Archaeology was a very male-driven career in the 1960s, and they basically kind of wrote her off as an ultra-feminist distorting history, because she had a feminine point of view in her conjectures.
SWA: A lot of that stuff is emerging now . . .
SK: Well, it’s re-emerging, because she did this in the fifties and sixties but it was covered over. People like myself and Regena are resurfacing this stuff. It’s what I talk about in my newsletters.
There is a book called blood magic about menstruation. A great anthropological book. What you find in that book is that in a lot of the research done on tribal cultures and menstruation, the researchers interviewed both the male and female members of the culture, but what you find in the published report is the male point of view, saying that menstruation was simply dirty and lowly and you couldn’t touch a woman because she had poison and you couldn’t touch the food because it was poison. What you didn’t find, and this the writer of Blood Magic went back and researched the paperwork is that there was an entire interview with the women of the tribe and the point of view of the women of the tribe was that it was such a sacred time for them that the men could not come near them because they were so holy. They were so sacred. They were so beautiful. They were so powerful at this time. They were so touched by God and spirituality at that point in their cycle that they shouldn’t be doing housework. They shouldn’t be cooking. Because they were so in the grace of God. Now, what an extraordinary point of view! And that was erased. Wouldn’t it be astounding if that point of view were made public, made acceptable to everybody—and not just that, but made virally acceptable? That is the beginning of a culture with a female point of view—women consciously resurrecting what was taken from us.
SWA: I love where you are going, and so my next big question is: how do we get there? For moms of young girls, what do we do?
SK: That’s a big one. First of all, the most important thing is to write it, talk it, speak it, say it and send people to S Factor and send people to Mama Gena. The most important thing is to get women cohesive, spread the word and constantly write about it.
As far as raising girls, this is a tough one and I am trying to pioneer a new way. Because there is what I call the black hole of adolescence where all of a sudden you are getting pubic hair, you are sprouting little breasts. No one talks with you anymore and all of a sudden you notice the gaze—what I call the penetrating gaze of the male: the men, the boys, all of them. They can’t help it. It’s a physiological response they have to a blossoming female body. Men are geared physiologically to respond to the curve of a feminine body. That’s okay. But what are we doing by having that black hole where no one is saying anything? No one is saying that there is a pink elephant in the room. No one is saying to the girls, “Your beauty is so powerful, your new body is so gorgeous and so revered and so powerful that you are going to have lots of men wanting to look at it, wanting to touch it and wanting to own it. And it is yours and no one else’s and only you choose who can partake in your body and when.”
So it’s a very, very touchy evolution, I think, in raising our daughters. My daughter was told at the age of four to put a bikini top on at a pool. That has altered her life. Now, whenever she takes her top off, she takes her little hands and cups them over her tiny little nipples. And then she was obsessed with the fact that boys could walk around topless in the summer when it’s hot. She said, “Why is that, Mommy?” I said to her “Because it is an unfair world, but the way I choose to see it, Ruby, is that my beauty is too powerful for the world and I want to choose who can be a part of seeing my beauty and who can’t be a part of seeing my beauty. So I will keep my body covered and I want my beauty to have its own privacy.”
On one hand, the obscenity laws infuriate me beyond words because they treat women like children, but on the other hand I need to somehow connect it to empowerment: the covering of the breasts, the covering of the genitals that are a sacred, beautiful, powerful place. It is a sacred, beautiful body that has such incredible power to draw attention and eyes and the desire for people to touch. This is a message that I have never seen delivered properly to a young woman, and I am trying my hardest and I will write about it and try to teach women how to do this.
SWA: Even if you are consciously trying to raise your daughter a certain way, you can’t protect her from the culture. She’s going to be out there in the world and she’s going to encounter it.
SK: But you can. Education is the greatest protection you can offer. “There are two points of view, baby,” is what I say to my girl. “There is the way a man looks at the world and there is the way a woman looks at the world.” And, you know, we have kept that hush hush, quiet, internal because that is the way we communicate, but what I am saying is that the only way that we will obtain a voice is to talk within our culture. It’s to share it, to insinuate—we’ve got muscle our culture into existence. We’ve got to push the male culture a little bit and say “It's good for you. It works for you. Doesn’t work so much for me.” I respect it. I honor the male view because, I’ll tell you what, I think the male is in as dire a situation as the female—not a good place. I think the male culture needs to be honored as well and that it needs to be exclusively male and, you know, this whole idea of “we are all the same” is bullshit. And that is where the old school feminists get angry with me, but I can’t help it.
SWA: The old school feminists are angry. What is nice about the work that you and Regena are doing is that it is not angry. It’s a very empowering, embracing feminism.
SK: Very embracing of me, and him. I love my husband, but I do not want my husband to be a girl. Uh uh. He does not need to be the girl. I’ll be the woman, you be the man. I don’t need him to be touchy-feely, lovey-dovey. I honor and respect who and what he is and how he communicates. It is difficult sometimes, because we want our partner to be everything to us, and that is our mistake. They can only be what they can be to us and the rest you have to fill in. I really honor the male and I think the culture of the male has been perverted and raped like the female has.
SWA: Who do you think has perverted the male culture? It’s very easy for women to say, “The patriarchy, the patriarchy . . . ”
SK: Well, you know what? I don’t need to blame the male culture. The fact that their mouths are bigger and that their energy goes out in a much more linear way—that is their gift. The fact that I am extraordinarily sensual and emotional and I am of the earth—that is my gift. That doesn’t mean that I communicate as linearly or as forcefully as they do. But I’m trying to, for my sisters. What perverted the male culture? Ultimately, you want me to really point a finger? I think organized religion. That goes back to the real profound—the moment when the death- worshipping, male religious cultures dominated and brought to their knees the peace-loving, goddess-worshipping cultures. A goddess-worshipping culture is a culture that worships birth. Many of the modern religions of male cultures are cultures that worship death. And, you know, ownership of land, religion . . . these things have brought the male culture to their knees—and confusion over the fact that, “Where is the female voice”? We desperately need a female voice, yet no one knows that is what we need except me (laughing). It’s a horrible time for the male culture, and unfortunately it is because the female culture has disappeared. And I believe if the female voice is united and made strong it will change the whole tenor of the world.
SWA: There definitely seems to be a call for the female voice right now, which is very beautiful.
SK: Here’s the thing. So many women live within the male eye that their eye is still male. What S Factor has to offer is the feminine point of view, the new way of looking at the world. “Hey, did you know that you could do this? And look how it feels and look how empowered it is!” So that is what Regena and I do—embrace the feminine, embrace the power of the qualities of the feminine. Because it is not weak. I usually say Feminine with a capital F. Don’t F@#$ with me!
After
years of acting in film, television and theater, Sheila
Kelley co-wrote, produced and starred in the film “Dancing
at the Blue Iguana.” It was during the research and preparation for
her role as a stripper that Sheila, a trained classical dancer, realized a more
fit body, increased sensuality and a newfound take on her sexual power – discoveries
that planted the seeds of the groundbreaking S Factor movement, which has
become a fitness phenomenon among women everywhere. Married to actor
Richard Schiff, Sheila is also the proud mother of son Gus and daughter Ruby.
