March letter 2025

March in the North is the time when Nature in a tense span of time moves from ice to melt. Spectacular beauties rise from the soil, rivers and creeks are flooding and birds sing serenades to the morning sun.

Some things happen also within our own nature:

Levels of melatonin decrease in daytime, adding alertness to our living; sunlight brings about boosts of serotonin adding hormonal support to experiences of happiness and wellbeing; increased sunlight can also enhance the level of dopamine in our bodies supplying senses of joy and contentment; not to mention the heightened levels of vitamin-D, improving overall health and mood; sunlight also improves the regulation of cortisol levels promoting healthier daily levels; some studies suggest that even the thyroid stimulating hormone increases, adding more positive incentives to our overall metabolism, and lastly, sunlight also have stimulating effects on both estrogen and testosterone production adding vigor both to fertility and libido.

All this of course on the condition that we for some hours a day, move away from the blue light of our many screens out into the yellow light of one of the most basic sources of sustenance on all varieties of life on our globe.

Then, where does sexology come in?

We do see a lot of frozen, icy relationships in acute need of warmth and melt.

We do see much justified rage frozen into minds of icy bitterness due to sexual assaults, traumas and discrimination linked to sexuality and gender.

We see cultures that meet their members needs with icy cold shoulders and lack of the melting capacity of empathy.

We see cold and inhumane cultures freezing unwanted fellow human beings out the icy cold chambers of no belonging.

As clinical sexologists, as professionals with deep insights to human wishes and needs in the fields of gender and sexuality, we are often faced with forces that we cannot control, forces that leave both us, our clients and fellow humans in a deadlock of cultural winters.

How then can we let the sun in and hence improve also sexual lives? Empathy is the capacity to take the perspective of the other without losing one’s own.

We must stick to our professional insights and standards, we must find ways to take in the perspectives, the wishes and needs of the people we encounter, be in in therapy or elsewhere. In order for more ice to melt and for more warmth to fill the spaces both within and around us, we must advocate for sexual- and gender rights, justice and wellbeing.

The Latin speaking playwriter Publicus Terentius said: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.  Meaning I am a human being, nothing human can be alien to me!

I myself like to add: Nihil humanum a societatibus humanis excludendum est. Meaning nothing human must be excluded from human societies.

Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad

EFS president  

March 13th in our garden in the very South of Norway