The earth is our lover.
This past week President Trump tragically began the process of pulling the U.S out of the Paris Climate Accord. Although this is just one in a series of devastating decisions made by Trump, this one in particular wounds our hopes for a sustainable future for humanity.
We want to add our voice to those artists decrying this action as inhumane, disgraceful, and wildly reckless. At Flirtmoji, we believe it’s important to focus that frustration into art. So today, we’re excited launch a new Friends X Flirtmoji pack that celebrates the connection between sex and the environment. The Ecosex pack is a collaboration with artists and activists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens.
While the term ecosex was floating around for a few years, Stephens & Sprinkle launched the new identity concept into an international movement with their Ecosex Manifesto. The Ecosex movement has since become an epic multimedia project aiming to shift our perspective from earth as mother to earth as lover. Through exploring the sensuality of our human experience within the miraculous natural world, Ecosexuals seek connection and collaboration with our planet. Most importantly, ecosexuality celebrates our role not only as Earth’s citizens, admirers, protectors, but also as an inseparable part of the planet.
(Grab the Flirtmoji Ecosex pack for *free* in the Friends X Flirtmoji section of our Web Packs Shop.)
When we first started drawing this pack, we had a tendency to come up with concepts that were sort of hippie-ish, fixated on the cultural language of tree-hugging and flower-power. This revealed the limitations on our imagination and language when it comes to visualizing our sacred and sensual relationship with nature.
(Early Ecosex sketches.)
Annie and Beth, who have been exploring these concepts for years, had some great suggestions. Annie wrote to us about imbuing our Ecosex art with a literal fetishization of nature. She advocated for a more radical and punkrock celebration nature’s cosmic and cellular freakiness. Less tree-hugger, and more plant-a-tree-in-the-bottom-my-soul-and-let-me-bloom-forth-into-lush-connection-with-lover-earth. If you’ve ever got dirt under your fingernails while fucking in a garden, or masturbated in the sunshine by a creek while trout nibble your toes, or just got a warm tingle in your loins after witnessing a shooting star, you know what we’re talking about.
Since basically forever, poetry and the arts have used nature as a metaphor for the human condition. We’re proud to continue that tradition by creating a series of naturally sexual Flirtmojis that can be used to describe orgasms (hello, Volcano!), body parts (geode Dick!), and sensuality (drippy sunset vulva). We also took some inspiration from Annie & Beth’s new book The Explorer’s Guide to Planet Orgasm: for Every Body. The book takes you on a whimsical, space-themed journey through orgasms. The illustrations by Yu Dori are beautiful and arousing, and we were excited to to translate a few of them into Flirtmojis for the Ecosex pack. Namely, Yu Dori’s Orgasmanaut clit-rider is one of our new favorite Flirtmojis. We just had to draw a Cock Maverick to keep Orgasmanaut company.
Flirtmoji has always appreciated a more primal representation of nature and the animal kingdom. Much of the inspiration for our Wild Style pack emerged from realizing how sterile emoji animals are. The cutesie and plush-toy forms totally miss the essence of the beasts they represent.
(Don’t these icons really miss something fundamental about the majesty of the King of the Jungle? Not to mention, where is our mighty huntress lioness emoji?)
The artistic process of creating an Ecosexual Flirtmoji pack has truly highlighted how distanced humans are from the down and dirty reality of nature. Amidst the confusion and despair of climate change, our exploration has reminded us of how useful the natural world is for communication, for inspiration, and for understanding our role and responsibility as humans. We hope our Ecosexual pack helps in your own exploration of your body and mind’s relationship with earth.
Love,
Katy and Jeremy
(The Flirtmoji Wild Style pack, available in the Web Packs Shop for $1.49. A great companion to our free Ecosex pack.)
