Naming the Erotic (NTE) was born from a conversation between two friends at a party, one of those late-night conversations where both people seamlessly fill in each other’s thoughts before they are spoken. We started talking about how so many “sex positive” conversations still revolve around performing sexuality like a competition for the best story, and how limiting that can feel when pleasure, intimacy, and connection are so much more complex, messy, and expansive than that. Simply affirming each other in that moment made us both feel more seen, understood, and confident in our relationships to sex and our bodies.

That conversation eventually turned into a shared commitment to relearning sex outside of shame, expectation, and rigid narratives and sharing that journey publicly. From there, NTE evolved into a creative sexual health platform dedicated to making conversations around sex feel more honest, accessible, playful, and liberatory.

Through zines, workshops, facilitation, digital media, and physical media, we compile, analyze, and repackage ideas from sexual wellness, public health, and critical theory into content that feels engaging, understandable, and actually relevant to people’s everyday lives. Our work is grounded in values of sex over the lifespan, human variance equity, pleasure, harm reduction, and social justice. We explore topics like safer sex, STI stigma, non-goal-oriented sex, bodily autonomy, and intimacy in ways that are both educational and, at times, intentionally unserious because we believe sexual health education should feel playful and filled with curiosity.

At its core, NTE is about creating a world where everyone not only knows how to access pleasure, but is guaranteed the right to it.