(Applause)

Thank you.

Wow, that was fun.

Ok, let's get naked! (Laughter)

Ready, set, strip!

No, teasing, I'm joking!

The kind of naked that I'm referring to

is the naked that makes you squirm on the inside.

It's naked of the heart.

Naked to the soul. Naked to the truth,

which is what I want to share with you today as the truth

about men, women and the Erotic Creature.

But it's going to require some stripping on both of our parts.

I need you to strip away all those false pretenses

as ideas you have about the female body

and I need you to strip your minds wide open.

So this is my laboratory

where I've spent the last 12 years guiding women

toward awakening their feminine body movement

which awakens their feminine nature

which awakens what I call their Erotic Creature.

Every woman on the planet has an Erotic Creature.

She's the primal feminine body.

She's the wild, untamed, sexual alter ego

that lives deep within.

Very often she's buried under furry brows,

tensed frozen bodies, judgmental thoughts and fear,

but she is there.

And when you awaken her

and you integrate her into your being,

it sends you into a place of wholeness

and this wholeness of the feminine is capable

of elevating every living creature within its reach.

Let's talk for one second about -- oh, there it is,

the Erotic Creature -- the Unthinkable.

What if I tell you that the pole that I was just dancing on

is a symbol for the next and fourth wave

of the feminist movement?

I know, right!?

The personal reclamation of the female body and the sexuality within.

It's crazy, right?

A stripper pole representing the feminist movement --

there's got to be some people rolling over in their graves! Heros of mine!

But I'm going to tell you about this wild journey

I took over the last 23 years that brought me

to this place of clarity and conviction.

I'll set the scene for you.

1989, La Cienega Boulevard Star Strip Gentleman's Club.

The first time I went into a strip club

I was a young actress, I was helping a friend with a writing project

and I was very unhappy that I had to go on to this place

that I felt subjugated and objectified women.

But once inside I fell in love with

the movement of some of the dancers,

Their bodies undulated and they teased

and they were provocative and sexual, and so feminine.

And I was desperate to learn how to do it.

But I didn't want to be a professional stripper.

Not that there's anything wrong with that!

What I did is

I wrote-produced a film

where I actually got to play a stripper.

And in the movie I needed to create a character

who lived and moved through her sexuality.

And I thought this is going to be fun.

So I, first day of rehearsal, put on this outfit

that I thought would communicate

my sexy stripper-self into the world,

please don't laugh or you can laugh! (Laughter)

So I got on stage in this outfit

and the music comes on and my body just goes:

uh-uh -- uh-uh -- Ain't moving! And she froze!

Now I was a dance major, New York University,

I'm a professionally trained ballerina,

I should know how to do this.

But my body was like, "I am not having anything of it!"

And I started to force her to kind of --

bop from side to side,

trying to be really sexy, it was so pathetic,

it was totally not sexy!

And what I was realizing is that

nowhere in my being did I know

how to embody my sexuality in my everyday life.

It wasn't that I didn't have sexuality. I for myself though it was fine.

It was bringing my sexuality into my everyday life.

I was faltering at being overtly feminine, like -- wow,

the body, which is a brilliantly intuitive creature, speaks.

And what my body was saying is:

"You can clearly see, is you have no idea who I am."

And she was completely right.

So I knew something was missing inside of me.

I spent the next 4 months, as we developed the film,

hunting for who I was as a sexually embodied creature.

I went to the strip clubs, I met dancers,

I dissected the movement and I learned it,

and what I found inside of myself I did not expect.

I found its dark, soulful, emotional sexuality

that gave me a confidence in my body and my femininity

that I'd never had before.

What awoke in me was my Erotic Creature.

All this is amazing, but it gets so much better,

because not only did I awaken that side of myself

but this side of myself started changing everything

on the home front.

My marriage went from "Eh" to "Oh my God!"

It's stayed there for 23 years.

I became a happier mother to my children,

I became a more complete woman on to myself.

And I had to share this with other women.

I was like, 'You've got -- this is it,

this is the Holy Grail of empowerment!'

and they're like, 'Ok.'

I developed this movement called

'S Factor,' and I started teaching it

to fellow pre-school moms and women in the neighbourhood

and they too started releasing their sexuality

into their everyday lives and into their bodies and --

the same changes that I'd had in my life

they were having in theirs.

Happier relationships, happier children,

happier women, it caught on like wild fire.

The next thing I know I am on Oprah's.

We become -- our effort becomes international news.

I'm inundated with e-mails from all over the globe.

Apparently, the desire to be whole --

it crosses not only geographic boundaries

but political and cultural boundaries as well.

I had tapped in a world-wide artery

of women all missing the same something I had been missing.

The Erotic creature was asleep globally. But how was that possible?

I couldn't understand how could the woman from Saudi Arabia,

the woman from Beijing, the woman from Buenos Aires and me in Los Angeles,

how could we all be missing the same thing? I needed to understand this.

And I call it the 'Yin effect.'

Think of each person, male or female, having within the potential

of Yin-feminine and Yang-masculine energy,

we live in a world that cuts out a piece of Yin in all of us.

And if you jump into that Yin, you'll see that

it's the physicality and sexuality of the feminine body that's shut down.

And the more women I talked to, the more I learned.

And what I learned is that the shutting down of the Yin

starts with the first offense.

The first offense is the first time anyone or anything

brings negative attention, judgment or shame to your body.

So my first offense happened when I was 7

and this is the picture of what a 7-year-old little girl's body looks like

just for you to refer to throughout the story -- this is my daughter.

I was hanging out with my best friends, Brian and Donald Doyle,

they were 7 and 8 respectively, we were hanging out

in the backyard, it was summer, it was really hot,

we were playing, we decided to take a break

and we went to cool down, so we all took our tops off and

we laid back in the grass, arms over the head, it was an awesome day,

the air was cooling my chest,

it was a beautiful, innocent day.

And all of a sudden the upstairs window of their house was flying open

and Mrs Doyle stuck her head out

and she screamed in the most piercing voice,

'Sheila Kelley! You naughty little girl!

You put your top on immediately, you ought to be ashamed of yourself and go home.'

My shoulders started to pinch up towards my ears,

my chest caved-in with this new-found emotion of shame,

I couldn't breathe, it was the moment I began

to separate from my female body.

Mrs hadn't yelled at her boys but she yelled at me

but we did the same thing.

What I learned that day is it's safe and good

to be in a male body, and it's not safe,

it's dangerous to be in a female body.

Mrs Doyle didn't hate me,

she was trying to curb a sexuality that scared her,

that didn't even exist yet.

She thought she had the right to tell me what

I could and couldn't do with my body.

These kind of stories play out every single day all over the globe.

We are stealing the light and the life

from these creatures, these beautiful feminine creatures.

Every single woman you know

has had a first offense, whether she's aware of it or not.

And she's had subsequent offenses every day of her life, offenses like

'keep your knees together', 'don't move like that',

'she's a slut', 'you look like a whore'.

These offenses eat away at the emotional boundary

and the ego of the body until you do not know

where your body begins and where your body ends.

You think anyone, anytime, anywhere can tell you

what you can and cannot do in your body

and the only choice you have is to shut it down.

So let's understand these offenses a little better

'cause they're tricky and you can't always tell they're offenses.

And there's a spectrum of them and they're global

and they range in noticeability.

If some of these pictures are difficult -- please avert your eyes.

They range from barbaric, such as the stoning to death of a woman

who expresses her sexuality.

Or brutal, the creating of a human chastity belt made of flash.

Or overt, the mandatory veiling of the female body.

To subtle controls, things like offensive advertising

that eats away your integrity of your body.

To subliminal controls, the infantile global uproar

over a pair of royal nipples.

Now really, honestly, I just don't know which pair of nipples were so offensive!

But that's another talk!

So I wanna switch the table on you for a second.

Do you know who I find incredibly attractive

and I think if I saw his bare nipples

I would be so sexually aroused that I couldn't control myself?

Daniel Craig. I don't even look over there

because -- I kind of think Daniel Craig should cover his nipples, too!

(Laughter) (Applause)

I know, I know, it's absurd, but is it?

We are laughing at this but we are doing this to the female body.

Globally.

What each and every one of these offenses have in common

is the desire -- their end-goal is to control

and limit the female body and sexuality,

to control the clitoris, to control the vagina,

to control the uterus, to control all of it.

We don't want to think that atrocities like acid-burnings

for turning down a marriage proposal

are related to atrocities like

domestic abuse for turning down a marriage proposal.

But as you can see they're the exact same thing

they're just using different tactics of control

in different degrees.

And when you hear repeatedly

that your body is obscene or indecent

you begin to internalize it, and you start to self-control

and you start to try and hide your body,

you try and hide your sexuality in unhealthy eating habits,

or you hide in skin and bones,

you'll do anything you can to hide.

Or you start to cut.

Or you try to become somebody else's ideal of perfection.

Or you'll mini-man yourself up so that you can be taken more seriously

in a world that values all that is masculine.

Or you just live where 80% of the women in America live