Anarella is a filmmaker, artist, and sex educator who explores intimacy, desire, and emotional literacy as interconnected experiences of the body and mind. Through workshops, visual storytelling, and collaborations with sex professionals, she creates spaces where people can engage with sexuality, consent, and pleasure in honest, nuanced, and empowering ways.
Her approach blends art, education, and lived experience, emphasizing emotional presence, consent, and self-discovery over performance or expectation. For Anarella, understanding desire isn’t just about knowledge; it’s about listening to your body, embracing vulnerability, and seeing intimacy as a practice of connection and care.
In this conversation, we explored her journey reclaiming her body, transforming sexuality into both art and education, and reshaping narratives to make space for voices and experiences often left unseen. It’s a candid look at how pleasure, curiosity, and emotional literacy can become tools for empowerment and authentic connection.
Exploring Desire Through Art
Your work blends sexuality, education, and visual storytelling. What first drew you to explore intimacy and desire through a creative lens rather than a purely academic one?
Anarella: Thank you so much for the invitation. It’s an honor to be part of The Sin Edit and to explore these thoughtful questions about sexuality, art, and intimacy. I’m truly grateful for this exchange.
I come from art and performance art, from a space where the body was my medium. I spent years exploring fetishes, understanding my femininity, and making peace with my body after trauma. My work was about transformation, creating spaces where people could talk about abuse, relationships, and the body, or creating pieces for kids that could understand and name what’s not okay. That’s my artistic background.
For me, art is about real experiences and real people, and yes, theories too. That’s why working with sex professionals at XO Sex School feels like the only honest way to approach this work. They are the ones who live, perform, and embody sexuality every day. Giving voice and value to sex workers and sex performers isn’t just ethical; it’s essential if we want to talk about intimacy with truth and depth.
So when I moved into filmmaking and sex education, it wasn’t really a change of direction; it was a continuation. I never wanted to talk about intimacy from a safe, 100% academic distance; I wanted to live it, question it, and translate it into experiences people could actually feel. The classroom gives you knowledge, but embodiment gives you truth.
Art is where education and emotion meet, where learning happens through empathy, not through theory. That’s where real sex education begins: in the body, in conversation, and in the courage to stay with what’s uncomfortable.
The Missing Sex Ed Skill
You talk about the importance of emotional literacy in conversations about sex. How do you define emotional literacy, and why do you think it’s still missing from most mainstream sex education?
Anarella: Emotional literacy is the ability to recognize what you feel, hold space for it, and express it without fear or manipulation. It’s knowing how to say “I’m nervous,” “I feel rejected,” or “I want this” and still stay connected to yourself and the other person.
It’s missing from most sex education because we were taught to perform, not to feel. Schools teach anatomy, protection, and danger, but not what happens when your body says yes and your mind says maybe. We learn consent as a rule, not as a conversation. And for many of us, especially those who grew up with shame or trauma, emotional literacy feels dangerous because we were never rewarded for honesty.
In my offline consent workshops, I do an exercise that always reveals this gap. I ask people to turn to someone they don’t know and ask a question like, “Can I kiss your neck?” Everyone laughs, and almost everyone says yes, because it’s the easiest way to please, to stay liked, and to avoid tension. Then I say, “Okay, now yes is not an option. You can only answer maybe or no.”
That’s when the energy changes. The laughter disappears, voices get quieter, some start to feel guilty, and that’s where reality begins. The body reacts. You can feel the tension, the discomfort, but also the honesty. I always remind them: say “thank you” to the “no,” move away, and then notice what happens inside you. That’s the moment emotional literacy starts, when you study the feeling, not the performance.
If I had to name a few things that help us build it:
- Pause before reacting. Don’t rush to please or protect. Give your emotions time to become words.
- Name sensations, not stories. Say, “my throat feels tight,” or “my stomach feels warm.” It’s a bridge between body and mind.
- Say thank you to the no. Because boundaries aren’t rejection; they’re information, they’re truth.
We can’t teach healthy sexuality without emotional education. One belongs to the body, the other to the heart, and they finally start speaking the same language when we stop performing and start listening.
Seeing the Unseen: The Power of Visual Media
In your view, how can art and visual media reshape the way we talk about sex and relationships, especially for audiences who feel unseen in traditional narratives?
Anarella: By giving people real mirrors, not the glossy, filtered fantasies that dominate screens, but reflections that carry truth: messy, emotional, imperfect, human. Art and visual media can make visible what’s been hidden or erased: different bodies, different desires, and different ways of loving and being loved.
Most mainstream erotic and educational content still centers white and straight privilege, often without naming it. That shapes the gaze, who gets to be seen, who gets to be desired, and who disappears.
The way Sex School is built is through collaboration. It begins with a shared intention to open space for stories that rarely get told. Performers, sex workers, educators, filmmakers, art designers… everyone brings their own voice, their background, their truth. It’s a collective process, not one person’s vision. The producer’s role, in this sense, is to hold space, to facilitate, and to make sure those voices are treated with care and visibility.
As a white-presenting she/they person with mixed ancestry, I’m constantly navigating the space between visibility and belonging. I carry different histories in me, and that teaches me to listen more, to notice who gets to speak, and who’s still being spoken for.
Representation isn’t just about including more identities; it’s about shifting who has the power to tell the story, who holds the mic, and who gets to be seen as complex, sensual, and human.
When that happens, when the frame expands, visibility becomes an act of care. It’s not just about showing sex; it’s about showing connection, tenderness, humor, discomfort, and agency. Because those things belong to everyone.
When people finally see themselves reflected, not fetishized, not erased, something changes. They start to believe that their pleasure, their body, and their story have value. And that’s how visual media can truly reshape how we talk about sex and relationships: by redistributing visibility, power, and tenderness all at once.
When Desire Talks
Explore desire not just as a physical experience, but as a form of communication. What have your own experiences taught you about the ways desire can reveal or conceal emotional truth?
Anarella: Desire speaks, sometimes clearly, sometimes in code. It’s one of the most honest and confusing languages we have. It can reveal what we long for and at the same time hide what we fear.
For many people, desire isn’t steady or simple. It’s shaped by trauma, hormones, mental health, and the sense of safety we feel in our own skin.
Someone living with PMDD might feel deeply sensual one week and disconnected the next. A neurodivergent person might crave closeness but find certain types of touch overstimulating or unpredictable. For someone living with PTSD, desire might come with flashes of memory or a sudden need for control or distance.
These experiences show that desire isn’t broken; it’s contextual. It moves with our bodies, our cycles, our nervous systems. There’s no “right” way to feel desire.
That’s why I think of desire as communication more than performance. It tells us something about our emotional truth, our need for safety, recognition, tenderness, or freedom. Listening to it requires curiosity, knowledge, and judgment.
For example, feeling turned off might not mean disinterest; it might mean exhaustion, fear, or a need for slowness. Feeling turned on might not mean readiness; it might be curiosity, power, or even a desire for comfort. Not every desire needs to be acted on; some just need to be understood.
When we stop treating desire as proof of normality or success and start seeing it as dialogue between body and mind, past and present, self and other, we begin to understand it as something far deeper than arousal. It becomes a form of emotional truth-telling, even when the words are hard to find.
Freedom or Facade?
There’s often pressure to be sexually “woke” or liberated. How do you feel about the idea that sexual freedom can sometimes become another form of performance?
Anarella: It happens all the time. Sexual liberation has been turned into an aesthetic, something to show rather than something to feel. We’re told that being “free” means being open, experimental, and always in touch with desire. But when freedom becomes something we have to perform, it stops being freedom. It becomes another mask.
Real liberation isn’t about how many partners you have, how “sex-positive” you sound, or how confident you appear. It’s about choice, the ability to say yes, no, maybe, not today, or not at all, and still feel respected.
People with trauma, PMDD, neurodivergence, or chronic conditions often experience how complex desire can be. But this pressure affects everyone. Even people without any conditions can feel forced to act sexually “comfortable” or “progressive” just to fit in. That comes from a lack of education, not just about sex, but about emotional literacy and consent. We don’t teach people that freedom can also mean not wanting, not knowing, or not performing.
Inside supposedly progressive or sex-positive spaces, there’s often an unspoken rule that you have to be okay with everything, every kink, every dynamic, every form of exposure to prove you’re evolved. But that’s not growth; that’s another layer of performance.
True sexual freedom is quieter and more personal. It’s about feeling safe enough to choose, to change your mind, and to stay connected to your body instead of chasing an image of empowerment.
When we stop performing liberation and start living it, with boundaries, honesty, curiosity, and care, sexuality stops being about proving who we are and starts becoming about feeling who we are.
Learning from Porn?
In your opinion, is porn helping or hurting how people learn about pleasure and consent?
Anarella: We can actually learn a lot from porn, especially from the kind that’s made with care, consent, and intention. The problem is that most people don’t learn how to watch it.
Porn that lives behind a paywall, made by ethical creators and sex workers, can teach us about communication, boundaries, and diversity. You can see how performers check in, how trust is built, and how real pleasure can exist in front of a camera. You can also learn about different bodies, genders, races, and ways of relating, things mainstream culture still hides or simplifies.
But we also need to be honest: porn wasn’t created to educate. It’s made for recreation, fantasy, and stimulation. The issue isn’t porn itself; it’s that we treat it as sex education because we’ve never been given proper tools to interpret it.
That’s where porn literacy becomes essential. Porn literacy means learning to ask questions like, “Who made this?” and “For whom?” Was everyone paid fairly? Do these scenes show consent, emotional connection, and diversity, or are they repeating stereotypes and power imbalances? , “Who
And yes, porn can also confuse or hurt when consumed without context. But the responsibility doesn’t belong only to the adult industry. It’s shared with parents, educators, and institutions that refuse to talk openly about sex, porn, desire, or pleasure. When we leave young and not-so-young people alone with curiosity and shame, they will naturally turn to porn for answers. The harm-so-young often comes not from what they see, but from the silence surrounding it.
So yes, porn can teach us, but only if we learn to look consciously. If we treat it as one expression of desire, not the definition of it. Ethical, feminist, queer, and independent porn has so much to offer, not just as fantasy, but as a record of human creativity, vulnerability, and consent done right.
Finally, when you think about your legacy both as an educator and an artist, what kind of shift do you hope your work inspires in how people experience and talk about intimacy?
Anarella: If my work leaves anything behind, I hope it’s the permission to talk about intimacy as something human, not as something to hide, perform, or prove.
I want people to feel that sex and emotion, pleasure and vulnerability, can live in the same space. That learning about intimacy isn’t about being “good in bed” but about being honest, connected, and kind with yourself and with others.
I hope to inspire a shift from performance to presence. From pretending to be curious again. From consuming stories to creating them together, through collaboration, through representation, through care.
Art and education can only do so much, but they can open doors. And when those doors open, we begin to see intimacy not as a secret or a skill, but as a practice of empathy, something we keep learning our whole lives.
If there’s a legacy, it’s not mine alone. It belongs to everyone who dares to speak, to listen, and to imagine a world where desire, consent, and tenderness can finally exist without shame.
Thank you again for the smart questions and for creating space for such an honest conversation. It’s been an honor to reflect on the work I do and the values that guide it: collaboration, emotional literacy, and intimacy without shame.
With love and respect, Anarella from XO
Editor’s Note
Intimacy, desire, and pleasure are not things that you have to do on a list. Instead, they are languages that you can learn using your body, mind, and the courage to be honest with yourself and others. We need to rethink what “education” about sex really means, not just facts or rules, but also emotional literacy, consent as a talk, and making sure that people whose experiences aren’t often seen are seen.
It’s an invitation: to pause, listen, and engage with our own and others’ desires without fear or pretense. In a world that too often asks us to perform freedom, her work reminds us that real liberation comes quietly, in presence, in care, and in the courage to honor truth over expectation.
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