Review: Ejaculation – Discussions About Female Sexuality

Do you feel sexy? Ejaculation – Discussions About Female Sexuality opens with a simple question. Well, do you? Director-performer Essi Rossi and musician Sarah Kivi perform an understated, often quiet show that probes, gently, at questions of desire, shame and knowledge. Rossi’s first time on stage, she shares that she was driven to explore her body after realising that she hadn’t felt like a “sexual being” for a very long time.

Meandering and conversational, Rossi guides the audience through their investigations, while Kivi’s intimate a cappella soundscapes offer necessary interludes for musing on the results. Snippets of recorded conversations with mostly anonymous women about squirting, sex work and self-esteem play out from a laptop and prove that the only consistency is inconsistency: everybody’s body is different, all of the time. The questions are concise—What is pleasure? How do you know? Where do you find it?—needling at knotty unknowables with the caring bedside manner of a close friend.

A deeper exploration of Rossi's own journey would have given shape to a show that seemed indecisive about its status as personal confession or public service announcement. It also has a narrower remit than a discussion would suggest; a brief nod to non-binary and gender fluid identities does not disguise the cis, hetero leanings of the interviews.