July letter 2025

I have experienced that winds can carry Sahara-sand

all the way to Croatia.

Ships can sail around the globe by assistance of the winds,

and even planes can fly by wind alone.

Winds can sooth our worried souls

Wind can tear the castles of the rich

and wipe away the shackels of the poor.

Still winds are our trusted friends,

we cannot do without them.

We use them frequently as metaphores as in:

It was like a cold blast from the past

We felt winds of love pass gently through the room.

Cold blasts from the past are sweeping societies and legislations in the 2020’ies.

By the time of now, not only LBGTIQQ+ people are struck by these unfriendly, unempathetic winds. Sexuality as such has become an open threat to authoritarian minds. Only fear and shame can make fellow human beings behave with such a lack of compassion for their neighbour others.

We have been there before. There where ages where rulers had a need to harness human minds and especially human sexuality. That need has been held back for a number of years. We thought it dead, but it never did lie down. Cold powers have surfaced again by the means of permissions and money. Permissions from authoritarian people in power, money from the rich, fearful and shameful. We need to see that the aggression of restricting others basically is a way to protect oneself.

Sexuality is a powerful drive that sustains human lives as it sustains us while we are living. Like challenges from powerful winds, sexuality cannot be administrated without skills. The same goes for gender, sometimes gender is difficult to comprehend, so blessed when it finds a peaceful haven, saying: I am in line with me.

Cold blasts from the past will deny children the knowledge they need to maneuver in the often unexpected ways where sex and genders go.

Still, we teach children as much as we can about traffic, about wrongs and rights for their lives ahead. Only fear and shame can find it meaningful to deprive children of good handling capacities in their future sexual and gendered life.

Many people are scared from seeing that which they have feared.

We need to qualify the insights we actually have.

Sexology is as old a science and a profession as is psychology and psychiatry, but

sexology has encountered obstacles by blasts from the past. Banned by nazis and other authoritarian regimes.

Even though sexology is hard to define with all its facets from sociology, psychology, medicine and theology, we are many who define ourselves as sexologists.

The cold blast from the past is assisted by money-wealth, but not by insights, lived experiences, clinical insights and science.

Sexology is one profession to turn to when we feel overwhelmed by lack of love, empathy and compassion in our sexual and gendered beings.

Even people of ultra ideologies need assistance in their sexual life, assistance to battle fear and shame, assistance to conquer better emotional living conditions for themselves.

Gender and sexuality cannot be controlled or in other ways harnessed. A late example was the endlessly happy event that Budapest saw its pride parade in spite of heavy blasts for the past.

Some gentle winds of love and pride did overcome the fear and shame.

Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad

President EFS