Dakota Johnson wants you to have better sex

By Fiona Sinclair Scott, CNN

(CNN) — We live in a world that won’t stop reminding us that people have a lot to learn when it comes to sex. The news is filled with disturbing stories of sexual violence and, while it rarely makes headlines, everyday misogyny exists in our schools, workplaces and homes.

Maude, the purveyor of aesthetically pleasing, elegantly designed vibrators, condoms, candles and lube, isn’t going to fix these systemic, largely patriarchal, problems. But the intimacy brand is focused on making people think about sex as a form of health and wellness, starting from inside our bedrooms (or wherever one chooses to enjoy themselves). And every little helps, maybe?

I spoke with Maude’s founder Èva Goiccochea and her co-creative director, the actor Dakota Johnson, about sex toys in the Louvre, Shere Hite being run out of America and why we might need a Miss Rachel for sex ed.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Fiona: How did the two of you meet and decide to make it official?

Dakota: I was on the verge of launching my own sort of sexual wellness brand, but I didn’t really know where to begin. There are so many sexual wellness brands that I find to be incredibly offensive and tacky and really kind of diminishing, especially towards female sexuality.

So they brought Maude to my attention and then I wanted to talk to Éva and we really, really got along and I learned so much from her.

Fiona: Your products are in big retailers like Sephora and Ulta Beauty. Two of your vibrators were also included in a museum exhibition — at the Louvre, no less! That’s certainly one way to insert yourself into cultural conversation. But I assume it also says a lot about the suave aesthetics of Maude. Why was it important to move away from the comedy dildo?

Dakota: Ha!

Éva: Great design is a language and it creates the potential for, in this case, destigmatization.

Fiona: It’s hard to ignore the backdrop to which we’re having this conversation about sexual education and wellness — just in the last month, we’ve seen the stories of sexual violence coming out of Cornell University, the Russel Brand trial that’s ongoing here in the UK.

Dakota: Sexual violence and misconduct has been occurring since the beginning of time. So I think now it’s about the people who are victims of that feeling like they can speak honestly without being like sent to the guillotine.

Humanity is both incredibly advanced and evolved and deeply stunted. There are cycles, it’s like two steps forward, five steps back, and I just think that if we can create a place where people are supported to talk about their experiences and, and get also access to education and help… I think it’s about building a safer conversation around the topic.

Éva: We have a lot of customers who write us to say they’ve been victims of sexual violence. Some of them just haven’t been ready to think about this part of their lives, and they’re like, ‘Thank you for existing, the products you make don’t make me feel uncomfortable, they are so neutral, I don’t feel ashamed anymore.’

Fiona: That’s powerful feedback to receive. I’m thinking about women later in life, too, a time when many women might feel like, ‘Well, I’m just not going to do that anymore! My sexual years are over.’

Éva: We get taught for maybe one to two hours, especially in the US, in school when we’re teenagers, and then we become ill-equipped to have these conversations about intimacy later in life. We wanted to be there throughout your adult life because the truth is we’re educating ourselves at every point. And Dakota, I’m not sure if you want to mention this, but I thought it was so powerful that you were involved the documentary “The disappearance of Shere Hite,” because she championed what was really happening with people and intimacy so early on.

(Shere Hite was a pioneering and outspoken sexual educator known for the groundbreaking 1976 study, The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, which surveyed thousands of American women about their sex lives. Her challenges to traditional patriarchal ideas of sex, including the revelation that roughly 70% of women were unable to achieve orgasm through penetrative intercourse, received a huge amount of backlash and upset many fragile men.)

Dakota: Yeah, and she was publicly so silenced and so devalued for that. My production company TeaTime produced that documentary and I narrated it. I wasn’t even aware of the book, but my mom was and so many people in her generation and friends of hers who I would talk to were. She was such a fabulous woman. So strong… she was so cool and chic, and she was just telling the truth, and she was basically run out of America!

Fiona: What other films or books do you think we have out there that are good, in terms of building a healthy sexual education?

Dakota: To be honest, I haven’t really seen much.

I guess you know that show “Sex Education” was good but also lacking like basic information about sex, like what you want your kids to learn when they start to understand what that is. Eva and I have talked about sex ed in schools and now like that’s not really even a thing anymore, is it Eva?

Éva: Barely.

Dakota: They’ve taken it out of schools. There’s not really a conversation around sex, which is such a huge issue because human beings are sexual by nature, and a human is going to have sexual urges at some point in their life. If they’re not educated, then that leads to the kind of behavior that we were talking about earlier, where it’s more aggressive, it’s more violent, it’s like something where you don’t understand where it’s coming from and how to identify with it. But in my line of work, I truly cannot give you an example.

Fiona: The other way to help people talk about sex is to make it fun, and to even make it funny? One film that got me thinking about sex in a different way recently is Olivia Colman’s new film “Wicker” with Alexander Skarsgård.

Dakota: I haven’t seen that yet! But even in Alex’s other movie “Pillion,” there’s a more subversive conversation about sexual discovery and something that’s really quite beautiful, even if it’s a niche pocket of sexuality. So, yes, there is a way to do this in film, but then, do you think that there’s a disconnect between people watching a narrative scripted story and then going back to their own lives? I don’t know, does there need to be like a Miss Rachel for sex ed??

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