The crucial need for consent education has been brought sharply to national attention over the past year, culminating in news last week that holistic and age-appropriate consent education will be implemented in every school across Australia from 2023.
Lucy Wark has been long on the journey of promoting just how important this education is, as well as the need and opportunities in sex education more broadly.
She’s the Founder of NORMAL, a sextech company on a mission to revolutionise intimacy and wellness.
NORMAL was born after Lucy found herself struggling to find a guide that could help make exploring sexuality a little easier. She teamed up with certified sex coach, Georgia Grace, to help others overcome their sexual issues, and normalise the conversation around sexual wellness and safe sex.
They set about to “Reinvent the sex store”, to bring an incredible experience for women that integrates engaging education into what they offer, to promote the idea that talking and thinking about sex should be “easy , fun and informative”.
Overall, they’re working to destigmatise sexual wellness and make it as easy to understand as possible. Their mantra? Sexual wellness should be stress-free, stigma-free and regret-free.
Lucy personally landed on the founder journey after studying social science and business at university. She started her career at McKinsey in consulting and says she saw the opportunities in startups while working on The Cambridge Globalist, a new student publication she ran with a number of close friends at university.
She loved seeing how a vision came to life, and how people can come together to produce something new and exciting.
Once she left consulting, she found an interest in sex education and the fast-growing sextech space. After completing a StartMate Fellowship, she kickstarted the NORMAL journey with Grace.
Given Lucy’s mission around sexual wellness and intimacy, we wanted to ask Lucy to share how she manages her health. Her responses below are the latest in our ongoing series of profiles outlining the days, exercises, workout routines and general views of health from women living real and busy lives.
In the morning I…
Am not very sexy, cool or organised at all!
My day starts with removing the anti-teeth-grinding mouthguard (surprisingly common among people in startups and venture capital, everyone is a bit anxious), taking anti-reflux pills (my most glamorous malady), trying not to snooze the alarm, applying sunscreen and if things go well, going outside for a walk with a friend, a swim or an exercise class.
Aspirationally, I would love to say there is meditation, stretching or journalling in there, but that would be a lie 90% of the time.
I definitely do find that being able to start the day in a totally separate headspace to my work self is really helpful for me, and the combination of exercise and socialising does that – but it’s also important to note that I also have a lot of days where I pat myself on the back for just making it to my first meeting on time!
My exercise routine includes…
A couple of beach swims a week, and a lot of spin classes at Cycology – it’s an amazing workout, with a soundtrack full of bangers, and it’s something I really look forward to as a chance to feel a sense of flow (something I’ve come to appreciate with the constant to-do list you experience in running a business). I’ve become that really annoying person who raves to my friends about it, and I have no regrets!
My favourite workout is…
Spin! And also No Lights No Lycra, followed by Humming Puppy yoga (yoga in a heated, darkened studio that hums as you work out). I’ve noticed over time that all my favourite workouts are in the dark, with a soundtrack, and I think there’s something about feeling really absorbed while not feeling ‘on show’ that’s a running theme around that – for so many women, exercise feels like a performance in unpleasant ways, and I keep coming back to the formats that are the antithesis of that. I also think life is way too short to do exercise that feels like a punishment, so my rule is I only do things that I look forward to for fitness.
I find balance in…
A great therapist, great friends, my lovely family, interesting movies and moderately good wine.
I also deleted social media off my phone recently, and it is so peaceful – I am never going back! I have to check it for work regularly, but I’ve found it really nice to not fill my head with projections of other people’s lives, and I can feel my attention span starting to recover. I do miss the memes though.
On health, I encourage women to…
When it comes to engaging with the healthcare system, invest in a good GP early, get your STI checks and pap smears up to date, actually see a dentist in your 20s, take good notes during healthcare appointments and ask questions if you need a professional to explain something more clearly.
I think it can also be really helpful to curate a set of positive influences, relationships and spaces, which can help you combat some of the toxic pressures we experience as women (whether it’s around beauty standards, gendered expectations of behaviour, everyday sexism or deeper forms of trauma). The world is much better than it used to be, thanks to a lot of amazing people who came before us, but those issues are not solved, and I don’t know anyone who lives completely outside the shadow of them. So investing in self-care and self-compassion is also really important.
NORMAL’s team is currently running a free digital sex education course, The Modern Guide to Sex, to combat misinformation and prejudice in sex education in Australia. It is a 15 video masterclasses and a 180-page eBook, made with Georgia Grace, on everything you missed in school (pleasure anatomy, how arousal and desire work, consent, communication, safe sex, pain during sex, LGBTQ+ and straight sex, porn and pop culture, mental health and sex, libido mismatch). You can sign up with an email and learn more about it here.