The scene is lunar. A naked man, on all fours, plunges his nose into ferns while miming a sexual act under the watchful eyes of his audience, while a sex-toy planted in the ground sits by his side. This sequence does not come from a bad pornographic film, but from an “artistic performance” produced in June 2021 by the Lundy Grandpré collective, to which the town hall of Lyon would consider granting a subsidy of 1,500 euros.
This aid, unanimously validated by the cultural commission of the city (the vote must take place on June 29), aroused indignation, in particular on the right, after the mayor Les Républicains of the second arrondissement of Lyon, Pierre Olivier , released a video on June 13 showing children in the audience at one such performance. Clans against clans, the left and the right have since denounced “fake news” and “shortcuts”. Some refer to the “wokist” ideology of the ecological town hall. The others, including the mayor of Lyon (EELV), Grégory Doucet, denouncing in a letter to the president of the LR party, Eric Ciotti, that Le Figaro was able to consult“” Trumpist ” excesses which consist in distorting reality in order to discredit political opponents”.
Still, this collective advocates ecosexuality, a movement that claims a privileged link between sexuality and the environment. On its site, the description of the performance “Becoming a larva”, produced in 2022, enjoins the spectator, for example, to let themselves be “tempted by the joy of the sticky, the soft and the flaccid. The pleasure and the enjoyment of doubt. The intoxicating hell of your own impotence.” In the same spirit, the artists indicate, concerning their performance “Small indocile manual of introduction to ecosexuality”, to have wanted to “question[r] our relationships with the Living”: “A garden as a space for the subversion of established norms. A garden where we dance together in homage to dildos, subversive links between the public and the private, the intimate and the political. A garden where we kiss with plants and share herbal teas. A garden where you awaken your body to the joys of ecosexual practice and thought”.
“Dance naked for the planet”
This notion would have emerged at the beginning of the 2000s, in particular on dating sites, before becoming a real movement under the aegis of two American feminist artists, the ex-porn star Annie Sprinkle and his wife Elizabeth Stephens, professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In 2008, they had organized a symbolic marriage with the Earth, laying the groundwork for the movement, namely that “the earth is our lover”.
Stephens and Sprinkle have thus written an “Ecosex Manifesto” aimed at rethinking our relationship to the planet according to this principle. “We shamelessly hug the trees, massage the Earth with our feet, and talk erotically to the plants,” it reads. “We make love to the Earth through our senses […] We are very dirty”. In other words: ecosexuality includes any mark of affection for nature, up to the sexual act.
There are no reliable figures to quantify the enthusiasm for this movement, although Elizabeth Stephens estimated that around 100,000 people considered themselves openly ecosexual in the world in 2016, compared to only 1,000 at the beginning of the century. . Asked by Release in 2013, Annie Sprinkle even went so far as to assure that “everyone has had ecosexual experiences, like cumming in a waterfall, masturbating with water, basking in the sun, not to mention all the people who have had sex sex with fruits and vegetables”. And to question in rhetorical mode: “When you’re facing a beautiful tree, don’t you want to hug it like a giant phallus?” The two activists even published a list containing “25 ways to make love to the earth”, among which “[dire] from junk food to plants”, “dance[r] naked for the planet”, or even “plant[r] [ses] seeds in it”.
We would almost forget that in theory, ecosexuality is supposed to be part of an ecological approach (taking care of the planet rather than exploiting its resources). “We will save the mountains, the waters and the skies by any means necessary, in particular love, joy and our powers of seduction”, thus promises the Ecosex Manifesto. While most environmental activists regret that the climate issue is not taken seriously enough, now the two artists aim to make the environmental movement “more diverse, funny and sexy”.
Anarchism and criticism of patriarchy
In hollow of this movement, reads in an underlying way the rejection of a system considered sclerotic, excluding, and patriarchal. In his test From Ecofeminism to Ecosexuality: Queering the Environmental Movement (2015), the American sociologist Jennifer Reed thus described ecosexuality as “an ecological and erotic practice that deconstructs the heteronormative constructions of gender, sex, sexuality and nature, in order to continually destabilize identities”.
Regarding the great idea of the manifesto aimed at transforming mother earth into a “loving earth”, the director of the documentary “Ecosex: for the love of the planet”, Isabelle Carlier, was enthusiastic about the magazine Antidote that this “shakes up the relationships of hierarchy and domination, because Mother Earth is also the one that is exploited by patriarchal man in general. And then a mother, she is always there for you while a lover, if you mistreat her, she dumps you. There, we are therefore more in a relationship of partnership with her and the air of nothing, it is very powerful”.
Ultimate proof, if needed, that ecosexuality is just another concept aimed at rejecting the “system” as a whole: the Lundy Grandpré collective also sells herbal teas, one of which is entitled “L’ Pain killer”. The calligraphy of the “A” taking up that of the symbol of the anarchists, and the illustration representing a person hitting a policeman.
In short, consistent with the founding manifesto of the movement driven by Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, to which Lundy Grandpré claims to belong, which promises not to tolerate “the use of violence, although we admit that some ecosexuals may choose to combat those most responsible for the destruction of the Earth through public disobedience, anarchism and radical strategies of environmental activism”. For the love of the planet…