Durban - Are South Africans a nation of prudes? Judging by the poor ticket sales of the first Conscious Sexuality Conference to be held in Durban, Cape Town and Joburg, it seems we are.
The conference has been cancelled. Durban sold a measly five tickets for the event, which would have answered questions such as why women can have multiple orgasms and men can’t or why women take longer to get aroused than men?
Other topics include why many women have difficulty reaching orgasm while many men have difficulty delaying theirs, what we can learn about human sexuality from studying other primates and why so many people are willing to risk so much just to have sex with someone new.
If you want to know the answers, you will have to travel to Australia because that is where the conference is moving before heading to Europe.
The conference was meant to be held in Durban on Wednesday.
Nash Singh, marketing manager for Alpine Events, the conference hosts, said they were disappointed they hadn’t met ticket sales targets.
“We had to cancel because we did not sell at least 300 tickets by mid-April. We sold only five tickets in Durban. Cape Town had the highest number of sales, unsurprisingly.
“Despite an intense marketing campaign, which caused a lot of controversy and comments, this didn’t translate into sales. South Africa is not ready to engage in open dialogue about sexuality,” he said.
Tickets cost R595 for the full-day conference.
“We will never host an event in Durban again; we have never seen such poor ticket sales,” he said.
Singh said they had a line-up of powerful speakers, local and international.
Locals Rahasya, the founder of the Advait Tantra School in South Africa, and Dr Eve, award-winning writer, columnist, television and radio talk show host were on the line-up.
Tantra is the exotic art of prolonging your passion play to reach new levels of satisfaction by building arousal and staying below the boiling point for as long as possible.
Internationally, Margot Anand from France, bestselling author and leading expert in the field of tantric doctrines, James Wesson from Canada, the author of Conscious Relationships, and Christopher Ryan, the author of Sex at Dawn: How we Mate, Why we Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships, were all lined up to talk.
Singh said it seems South Africans were not interested in the spiritual side of sexuality.
“With South Africa having one of the highest rates of rape in the world and with the gender inequality experienced here, we thought it would be great to start the international tour here. But it seems South Africa is not ready.”
He said perhaps South Africans were afraid that notions they long believed to be true would be dismissed.
“One of the speakers used science to dispel the whole notion of human sexuality and had found evidence that humans were not meant to be monogamous as we have been led to believe.
“Monogamy is a choice. He has written several papers and a book on this issue. That is just part of what would have been discussed at the conference. It is not a sex conference, but an academic one where your mind would have been opened.”
Sunday Tribune