Shane Diamond, Speak About It

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Shane diamond is the executive director of SpeakAboutIt, a Portland based nonprofit promoting consent education and sexual assault awareness at high schools and universities around the world. It's good to have you in. Thank you.

Shane Diamond:

I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Tell me about SpeakAboutIt.

Shane Diamond:

Absolutely. So SpeakAboutIt was started in 2010 to talk about consent and healthy sexuality in a way that talked about consent, positivity and healthy relationships in the context of getting consent so that both people can enjoy it or all people can enjoy it. The show was written originally in 2009 at Bowdoin College where I was a senior and I was asked to be in that original version. There were eight of us and it was a blast. And we thought we would do this thing for the first years and then nobody would care. And it turned out to be way cooler than any of us thought it would be. And I graduated in 2010 and I was like, this should be everywhere. And I sat down with some folks in the administration and they were like, okay. And I was like, wait, what? So I moved to Portland and was working part time at Bard Coffee and kind of kicked this off. And in 2009, when the show was written, all the dialogue around consent was no means no go until you hear stop, this is bad. You will like burst into flames. And so speak about it was written to kind of counteract that and say yes means yes and ask for what you want and be able to talk about healthy sexuality and what it means to be in a relationship and not be in a sexual relationship, that those two things can be separate and what does that look like and how do we talk about it? And giving people language to talk about consent in a way that sort of demystifies the awkwardness of it. And also talking a lot about bystander intervention. So if I'm at a party and I look a little funny, ways to empower you to step in and say, shane, come with me to get a slice of pizza. Let's go to the bathroom. Let's go change the music to step in and help prevent situations that might lead to sexual assault.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what was your initial interest in this? Why did you think that this was an important thing to put out there into the public conversation?

Shane Diamond:

I guess, yeah, that's a great question. I think most people are having sex, everyone's talking about sex, and no one is talking about how to make it better, how to make it fun. And so my like wish upon a star unicorn, snowflake dream is that everybody has good sex.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Everybody.

Shane Diamond:

I don't care who you're having it with or when. If you're waiting for your wedding night or if you're not, it should be good, it should be enjoyable. You're not there to bake a cake. You're there because you want to enjoy it. And hopefully you want the other person to enjoy it and speak about it. To me, is giving people that language to be able to talk about it, to talk about what we want and also where our boundaries are. And through this conversation and through this education and this dialogue, we are preventing sexual assault by empowering people to take ownership over their sexuality and speak their minds. And that's, you know, ultimately we want to end sexual assault. I know that's not going to happen. We've been doing this for seven years. We're not going to fix it, but we can hope to chip away at it and make sure that people have healthier, more positive experiences.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So is it in your mind a problem with communication that can ultimately cause either one to not enjoy sex or maybe even one to end up having a sexual assault experience?

Shane Diamond:

I think communication is certainly at the heart of it. There have been some studies and people can believe or not believe, and of course they've been refuted, because what study hasn't? But one study a few years ago found that the majority of sexual assaults are perpetrated, like 90 something percent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by a small percentage of people, most of whom are men and many of whom are repeat offenders. So those People we're not going to fix, right? If, if 95% of assaults are caused by 5% of people, we're not going to fix those 5% of people. Some people are just bad apples, but the other 95% of people who are good, who are well intentioned, who have good hearts, who, if you ask them if they're going to get consent, would say, of course I would. Why wouldn't I get consent? And people don't have the language to say, hey, can I do this? Does this feel good? And if you think, now I'm 29, so I got a cell phone when I was 16 because I wrecked my car. And this was, my parents were like, we, we can't trust you. And this was when it was to send a text message and two to receive, right? And so now 17, 18 year olds who are coming to college grew up with cell phones, grew up with smartphones, and the majority of the way they're communicating is through technology. Nobody's having face to face conversations anymore about benign stuff. So we're encouraging people put the phones down, go out to lunch with someone, talk about the weather, ask about stuff that doesn't matter so you can practice language, practice communication. So when you want to make out with someone, you can look at them and say, hey, do you want to make out? You're not going to text them and then look over, smile and wait for them to receive the text and then text you back. That's not how the world works. So it's encouraging people to find their voices and find language that works for them.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

See, I can't help but think this is, it's a funny place we've gotten ourselves to that we are so connected with technology that we are disconnected as humans, that we now need to encourage people to go out and learn how to have conversations as humans. I mean, yeah, this is not a, it's not a judgment. I mean it just, it is what it is.

Shane Diamond:

But no, I mean I, I remember being in high school, in middle school and like calling my friends houses and having a conversation with my mother about, like, here's how you address your friend's parents and here's how you answer the phone at our house. And now people just text each other. Like even all of us have smartphones. How often are we calling versus texting? And if, you know, if you're calling me, it must be important. Like if it's something, something simple, you can just text me, but if you're calling me, it must be important because nobody calls anymore.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That's true. Generally when my children call me, it's because something bad has happened or they need money or something. So what type of pushback have you gotten from people who just want sex to be. Don't have it, just wait forever. You need to be married. I mean, there's so much interesting psychology wrapped around the.

Shane Diamond:

Yeah. I think one of the most diverse shows that we do, we've been hired by the U.S. naval Academy, and this is gonna be our fourth year there, which is really exciting. We speak to their sophomore class every year because the first year they're there, they're called plebes, and they pretty much just run around in uniforms and get tied to desks and stuff. Not actually. But they don't have a lot of freedom. So we speak to the sophomores once they've gone through that first year of training. And it's really cool now that all of the upperclassmen have seen the show and so the seniors are able to say, hey, we think this is important in our culture here. But it's one of the most diverse shows that we do because of the breakdown of the Naval Academy. Right. They have students from all 50 states and Puerto Rico and D.C. and you have to be highly recommended. And so we have a very diverse audience and different opinions, and people love it or they hate us. And I think you have to think about my. I'm trying to think of life like Olympic diving scores. Bear with me on this. So in Olympic diving, they give you scores, and then the judges immediately throw out the highest and lowest scores, and you just look at the ones in the middle. And so everywhere, we're going to get a lot of great praise and we're going to get people who hate us. And if we let those two opinions kind of drive what we do, we're going to go crazy. And so a lot of the pushback is people who are religious, people who think that talking about casual sexual is bad. I think people want to see themselves on stage. And so folks who are choosing not to have sex or choosing to wait until marriage, we talk about that in the show. But we're also talking about when you have sex or are you sexually active. Right. We're not just talking about, like, P and V G sex when you're sexually active, about communication, respect, and people who aren't ready, who aren't at that point, often push back against it. But really, we don't have a ton of negative feedback. We're very lucky. I mean, schools don't hire us. So if they hate us, they won't bring us in. But among the schools that we go to, our feedback we're grateful is pretty positive.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, you mentioned the Naval Academy. What other schools have hired you?

Shane Diamond:

We are about to send four separate troops to 41 colleges in the next three weeks. So this fall alone, we're going as far south as Florida. We'll be at Florida Polytechnic University. We're hitting Southern Methodist University in Dallas. We'll be at Hendricks College in Conway, Arkansas. We're sending a trip to North Carolina. We'll have a group in groups in Pennsylvania, Ohio, upstate New York. We do a lot of the Ivy League schools. We're at Harvard, Cornell, Penn. We just got hired by the U.S. merchant Marine Academy outside New York City, which will be really fun. We're going to Vassar College outside New York City. We are fortunate to do work here in Maine. We work with une, smcc, usm, Colby, and now Thomas College. And I said that speakabout it started at Bowdoin. And so they do a show in house with student actors. And we don't go there, but we kind of high five as we drive up to Colby. We're sending a group four hours north of Toronto this year to North Bay, Ontario. I've instructed them to eat some Timmy Hose donuts for me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So did you ever, when you were starting this as a senior at Bowdoin, did you ever think, I'm going to be coordinating all of these people to go all over the country to talk about something that I feel is really important?

Shane Diamond:

Never. Never. There were a couple years in the beginning where I felt like I was holding sand in my hands and just, like, waiting for all of the grains to fall through my fingers. And it's been a remarkable journey, and I'm very lucky to have had a lot of support from the community. And my wife has been incredible supporting me through this. You know, her partner talks about sex all the time, and it probably gets old, but I got into this because I loved being on stage and seeing people's minds change, letting people know that you can talk about it, that it's okay that you should be talking about it, that no one's gonna light you on fire, that it's okay to talk about pleasure and seeing people's faces change when they realize they have power in this. And I never thought I would be behind the scenes coordinating spreadsheets to send other people out. And I'm learning to get. Get that warm, happy stage feeling by empowering my educators to go out and make that change. And then they Tell me about it in the office.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Do you still get to go out on stage yourself?

Shane Diamond:

I don't. I actually rewrote the script a couple years ago so that I don't know all the lines or I didn't know my lines. I know the entire script backwards and forwards from hearing it for eight years. But it was too much to get on stage and try to coordinate things. As the executive director, we do offer some programs that I get to run. We were just at a retirement home talking about consent and communication, which was really cool. We do programming for high school juniors and seniors and then college freshmen is sort of our meat and potatoes. But we offer programs for parents of high school students to encourage parents how to have a dialogue about consent with their kids. You know, you were saying that if your kids call, it's because something bad has happened. And so we're encouraging parents to talk to their kids about sex, about sexuality, about communication in ways that are non threatening. So that when something bad happens, they. Or if something bad happens, your kids feel comfortable talking to you. So you know, if you're in the car and a song comes on, you're like, oh, this song is kind of rapey. This song is like sort of misogynist. You can plant those seeds in a way that's kind of informal. And then it's easier to have more difficult, bigger conversations down the road. So I get to do that. Which fills my soul.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I don't want to undersell my children because to be great, they do call me at other times.

Shane Diamond:

I got photos here in the studio.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Exactly, exactly. They are really great kids. But I am thinking about, you know, you talk about songs coming on the radio and I'm thinking about my daughter, who's a woman's. Well, she's a gender studies major and which used to be, I guess called women's studies, but now I get to encompass all genders. So that's seems more inclusive. And she will talk about things coming on, things that she watches on television, movies, song is on the radio. And it really does lead to interesting conversations in the car.

Shane Diamond:

Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But it was. She's 21 now and this is something that started. We had to start talking about a lot of this stuff when she was much younger. So how did you start having these conversations with your parents?

Shane Diamond:

My mother's gonna kill me. My parents have been divorced almost my entire life. They get along really well and co parented very well. We were very lucky to have both parents in our lives. My sister and I and I must have been like 9 or 10. And I was getting something out of my mom's purse. She was like holding our wallets and I pull out a string of condoms and I was like, mom, like, what is this weird gum? Like individually packaged weird gum. And she goes, no, no. And she opens it up and blows up a condom. And if you see a blown up condom, it's like the size of a watermelon. And she holds it up to me and goes, don't ever let a guy tell you he's too big to wear one.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I love your mom.

Shane Diamond:

Now I'm queer. So what are you gonna do?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think that's great, but that must have, again, that must have started when you were much younger, the ability to even have a conversation about that when you were nine.

Shane Diamond:

Yeah. I think my parents are really great about empowering us and our bodies and our choices. My sister and I are both athletes, and so we talked a lot about what it meant to be in our bodies and taking care of our bodies, obviously from working out and nutrition, but also about the relationship our bodies get to have with other people and empowering us to make those decisions and being able to talk frankly about it. I remember talking to my dad about early relationships, and he was a straight dude who had straight dude opinions and passed them on to the two of us. And it was helpful to be able to have someone speak bluntly about what's about to happen. And here's what to look forward to, and here's some speed bumps that can happen and. And how to talk about it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You're sending a group in to talk to an older population. What types of. What's the difference between what that group is going to say and what a group of. A group that's speaking to college freshmen.

Shane Diamond:

Yeah. Oh, you're talking about the retirement home. Yeah, that was super interesting. It's actually not too dissimilar from talking to college students. So I went in with my program coordinator and it was just the two of us. And really, people in retirement communities, they're living with strangers. Meals are provided, they probably aren't working. And so it's kind of a very similar dynamic to living in college. And some of these people are with partners, some are widows or widowers and maybe are dating again, maybe are not, but probably haven't had many conversations about consent because it hasn't been relevant or no one, you know, when they were 20, like, certainly nobody was having this conversation. And so it's again, being able to talk about pleasure and respect and making sure that your Partner is awake and excited and, you know, is. Is consenting, is agreeing to engage in something. And if we say this across the board, but if you don't feel comfortable asking for what you want, you might want to hold off until you're comfortable asking for it. And what does that language sound like? It was awesome. It was a ton of fun. It was the second best question I've ever been asked. Happened at this. At this training.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And that would be.

Shane Diamond:

Spencer, you ready to edit? So we, we went and we were talking all about pleasure and consent. And one of the women who was probably in her 60s or 70s, raised her hand and asked. She was like, what are your thoughts on self pleasure? And we were like, girl, get it. And get into the. Some of the biology about like, you know, the body changes and so it might take a little bit longer to get the car started and don't give up. Just dynamics change and, you know, think about introducing lube and that might be helpful. And she was like, what's lube? And we were like, yeah, like a lubricant, you know, ky jelly. And she was like, oh, yeah, I know that. I was like, but if you've got any sensitivity to yeast infections, anything with glycerin probably isn't gonna help. She was like, okay, cool. I was like, this is. I have the best job.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I didn't really hear anything in there that needed to.

Shane Diamond:

Okay, good.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Edited out.

Shane Diamond:

Really perfect.

Shane Diamond:

Facts, yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But it. You know, this conversation that I'm having with you reminds me of a lot of conversations I have as a doctor with really, it's young women who come to see me. Young men don't tend to come see me. It's usually young women. And it used to be when I started in medicine 20 years ago, it was all about birth control. That was like the conversation. Nobody wanted to get pregnant. And now young women, they're not even necessarily interested in the birth control because some of them haven't even started having sex yet. They just want to have a conversation about sex in general and what things that they need to think about. And it's very interesting that it's always traditionally was birth control and prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. And both of those are very negative. And you're talking about something on the other end of the spectrum which is not as negative.

Shane Diamond:

And we have some programs in the fringes that we're excited to start working on, one of which is really talking about pleasure and the anatomy of pleasure. And again, we can talk about this and it can sound like we're promoting sex or we're straying from our mission of sexual assault prevention. But the more we can talk about owning your body and making empowered, informed decisions, this is all primary prevention of sexual assault. And so in having a conversation about pleasure, teaching people that you can ask for pleasure, you can know what feels good, and that makes you a better sexual partner and a more communicative one. This all sort of fits together. But really excited to start thinking about how do you talk to people about what your anatomy looks like and how to treat it and how to interact with other people's anatomy and what words to use, what makes people feel comfortable, what makes people feel sexy. And of course, encouraging people to say no, or here's my boundary, and this is, you know, as far as I'm gonna go. One of our favorite videos that we like to show is a high school teacher from outside Philadelphia named Al Vernacchio. And he does a talk about changing how we talk about sex education. That in America we've sort of overlaid sex. I'm using air quotes with baseball, right? Everybody knows the bases, analogies, they're a little bit different, but everybody kind of gets the gist. And he kind of breaks it down and says, that's really restrictive. You know, in baseball you can only run the bases in a certain order. In sexual activity, you can go anywhere you want and you don't have to follow a set path. You can start at third base and then run to the outfield, and that's okay. And baseball makes it sound really competitive. It's one team against another. It's a spectator sport. You're telling all your friends about it. And so his solution is that we think about it instead. Like pizza, because when do you have pizza? When do you want to have pizza? And what's the first question? Hey, do you want to have pizza? What kind of pizza do you like? What's your flavor? What's your pleasure? And if we can start having these open ended questions with people in terms of sexual activity, it makes for just much healthier, safer, more enjoyable situations.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You mentioned that your original mission was really and is centered around preventing sexual assault. And there has been a lot in the news in the last five years.

Shane Diamond:

Yeah, absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Really? That's been difficult, really controversial. You know, it's, it, it probably was never clear cut, but it seems like maybe things are even less clear cut than they once were.

Shane Diamond:

Well, it's tricky. On the one hand, we're seeing, in the past few years, we're seeing more reports of Sexual assault on college campuses. And one can look at that and say it's because there's more sexual assault happening, but the stats are actually relatively the same. It's just that students feel more comfortable talking to their administration, which shows trust and action and faith in the process for a lot of people who are reporting these assaults. So if a school tells you they have no sexual assaults, that's not good. That's saying that their students don't have any faith in the administration to come forward and report it. It's not saying that sexual assault doesn't happen there, but it certainly is getting muddier. And I think part of this ties into the media and how that we were able to have access to all this, and we're writing BuzzFeed articles, and things are happening on Twitter. Anybody can be a writer now, and so things kind of get bigger quicker. But it is certainly interesting. One of the things we recently started talking about was that we have a legal driving limit for alcohol. It's 0.08. And there's no legal consent equivalent. In a lot of states and a lot of schools, they say if you're. If you're intoxicated, you're unable to consent, but it doesn't say what intoxicated means. And that's different for everybody. Right. I might process alcohol differently than you do based on what I had for lunch or if I worked out and if we're drinking enough water. So two drinks to me might be different than two drinks to you. And there's no line for that. There's no, like, sex Breathalyzer. And part of what we do is encourage people to have these conversations that if you think you or your partner might be too drunk to consent, don't. Don't do it. Wait until you're both sober. The risk of hurting someone or breaking the law is much greater than asking to wait until another time. But it's tricky. You know, we get that question a lot. How drunk is too drunk? And where does that. Where is that line? And the answer is, we don't know. But we encourage people, again, to communicate and check themselves and think about what they want and how their partner is doing. And, you know, even if you're looking for notches on the bedpost, what kind of a notch is it if someone is unable to consent?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think we've also even had to come to the place where we recognize that we used to think of rape as being stranger. And now the fact is that a lot of, well, sexual assault is acquaintance.

Shane Diamond:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And that's kind of something that's tough to wrap your head around, that somebody that you are friends with could potentially do something harmful to you.

Shane Diamond:

Yeah, it's really hard. I remember I was looking at colleges in 2005 and the Blue light system was really popular. And so you should be able to see a blue light from another blue light. And they were emergency phones because someone could jump out of the bushes and rape you. And what they're finding now is that over 70% of assaults, the perpetrator is known to the survivor. So you're right, it's someone you have a class with, it's a friend, it's a partner. And certainly there are people who are malicious, but I think for the most part it's miscommunications and it's a lack of language and it's making assumptions either based on past activities, oh, we had sex last Saturday, it's okay to have sex this Saturday, or I don't want to ask because it's my partner and I know, or it's my partner and I don't want to say no. And so a lot of this kind of muddied communication, mostly well intentioned people with a lack of language and then confidence to be able to use it. And that's what we're trying to teach.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

The other thing that I think we've had to work on is the fact that as a woman you can sexually assault a man. And traditionally this idea was with, at least with penetrative assault, it was always the male that raped the female. And that's had to change.

Shane Diamond:

It has. And I think that has probably always been happening. We just haven't been talking about it. And so one of the things that I love about SpeakAboutIt is we present a range of experiences. So people who are having sex, not having sex, experimenting with their sexuality. We share about 18 monologues throughout the show. It's an hour long performance. We share about 18 monologues, all of which are true stories that have been sent to us by students. And our hope is that everybody in the audience can relate to some part of the show. Whether it's one of these monologues, if it's one of the skits that we do, some of the dialogue, or if it's just seeing someone on stage who looks familiar. It's really important to us that we don't have five straight white people of equal height on stage. And one of the monologues that we got recently was about a man who was assaulted by a woman and his, you know, he had a physical response to something, he didn't have an emotional response. But if you touch a body in a certain way, it's gonna respond. And him feeling a little bit betrayed by his body. And you know, this stereotype of men can't be assaulted, especially if you're not being penetrated. And how do you talk about that and how does queer assault play into this, you know, if you're to female bodied people and what does assault look like if we've got this paradigm of penetrative rape? You know, this leaves a lot of people who have bad experiences who are assaulted out of that, out of that equation. And so we're trying to add more language to say in any situation, regardless of your gender identity or who you're sleeping with, you're being sexually active with, if there's no consent, it's sexual assault. And of course then the other side of that is we don't want to put a label on anyone. So if someone comes to me and says I had sex, I realized it wasn't consensual, you know, like, I didn't really consent to this. It's not my place to say, oh, you're a survivor of sexual assault. So we can have the legal definition that says anything without consent is sexual assault. But it's not for us to place labels on anyone about their experiences.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've been doing this now for seven years.

Shane Diamond:

Seven years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What would you like the next seven years to look like?

Shane Diamond:

Oh, boy. I'm really excited to have more conversations about pleasure and what that looks like, about empowering people about how to be healthy media consumers, healthy porn consumers and what that looks like. We do, as I said, a lot of our programming is high school juniors and seniors and college freshmen. You could argue that by the time people are high school juniors and seniors or college freshmen, they've already decided how they're supposed to be sexual beings. We've been saturated with media, with people telling us how we should look, how we should dress, what we should do. And one could argue that by the time we speak to these students, it's too late. So I would love to see programming for younger high school students, maybe even middle school students, to be able to talk about boundaries and respect and bodies and communication. We're, as I said, we're going to be at 41 schools in the next few weeks. I want to be everywhere. We should be everywhere. Let's go everywhere. We've done this program at Wayne Fleet, we've done it at Cape Elizabeth. We do programming at casco Bay High School. Let's get all the main schools. We're here, we're in Portland. Let's make it happen.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I'm sure that that's gonna happen because it seems like you've had great success so far. I've been speaking with Shane diamond, who is the executive director of SpeakAboutIt, a Portland based performance nonprofit promoting consent education and sexual assault awareness at high schools and universities and also apparently retirement facilities around the world. Congratulations on the work that you've done so far and good luck with your future endeavors.

Shane Diamond:

Yeah, thank you so much. And if people want to check out what we do, you can find our website, speakaboutitonline.com we're on Facebook, Facebook, speakaboutit or Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat. Snapchat. Behind the scenes, speakaboutit. And keep in touch. Follow us like us. We'll like you back. Be a part of the conversation. And thank you again for having me. I'm really honored to be a part of this.