Meet Emma Colangelo, the somatic sexologist exploring sex, power and self-trust

How would you describe yourself in three words?

Curious, playful, sensitive

Tell us more about yourself…

I got kicked out of preschool for teaching my classmates how to masturbate during nap time, so, you know, that might be my villain origin story. I think that may also have been my first introduction to the fact that curiosity about our bodies comes with a surprising amount of shame.

Now I’m a somatic sexologist. I’m an educator. I’m a writer. And from the very bottom of my heart, I believe that every being on this planet deserves to live a life of autonomy and pleasure. I believe it so passionately that if I’m not actively trying to embody that freedom and become an agent of it in the world, it will swallow me absolutely whole. Not much has changed since nap time obviously.

What services do you offer on Sensuali?

Somatic Sex & Intimacy Coaching: Explore desire, pleasure, shame, confidence, intimacy, embodiment, and erotic self-trust.

Men’s Embodiment & Erotic Confidence: Dating, seduction, becoming a better lover and partner, relating to women, and unlearning the masculinity myths holding you back from living in connection and authenticity.

Women’s Embodiment & Erotic Liberation: Untangle desire from performance, desirability, and being chosen. Reclaim pleasure, boundaries, intuition, rage, and the parts of you that are entirely yours.

Desire & Arousal Work: Understand your unique erotic wiring: your turn-ons, fantasies, and the conditions your body needs for pleasure.

Erotic Communication: Learn to ask for what you want, give and receive feedback, navigate boundaries and consent, initiate intimacy, talk about fantasy, and communicate during sex.

Power & Kink Exploration: Explore dominance, submission, surrender, fantasy, erotic identity, and your relationship to power, in and outside the bedroom.

Relationship & Couples Coaching: Attachment, conflict, mismatched desire, rebuilding erotic connection, non-monogamy, jealousy, boundaries, and creating relationships that actually fit the people inside them.

Tantra & Erotic Presence: Explore breath, sensuality, erotic energy, nervous-system regulation, and what becomes possible when you slow down enough to actually feel.

Custom Intimacy Experiences & Workshops: Personalized sessions and immersive experiences built around a specific curiosity, fantasy, relationship dynamic, or area you want to explore.

Where are you based?

Nashville, TN is my current home, and NYC/the greater New York area is my frequent second home. I travel often to work with clients in person, and offer virtual sessions to people all over the world.

What price do your sessions or experiences start from?

Coaching sessions start at $150/hour. Experiential work is custom-priced depending on the experience, location, and length of our time together.

What turns you on?

There are approximately one billion things that turn me on, but they all kind of exist within the same ecosystem: merge souls with me or meh.

I crave that almost obscene level of intimacy where you’re lovers but you’re also best friends and you know each other so completely that there’s very little you couldn’t say out loud.

I want to feel like our inner worlds have become extremely familiar places to each other. Everything is more fun because they’re there. That’s the foundation.

And then, once I feel that safe with someone, I want to play. I want to be curious about every weird little corner of eroticism together. Like: power, fantasy, jealousy, role play, tenderness, transcendence, whatever we stumble into.

What was your journey into this world?

Growing up, the adults who were supposed to protect me did not. I learned really young that I couldn’t trust people who were in power. I didn’t learn that my body belonged to me. I didn’t learn that I had a right to boundaries or “no.” I didn’t learn that my intuition was something I could trust.

I think questioning systems of power, and the people who uphold them, is a common experience for those of us who were let down by them. It certainly was for me. It left me with an obsession: who actually has power, and why don’t I?

That question has followed me everywhere. I became obsessed with trying to figure out which rules were real and which ones were just… rules someone made up and everyone agreed to follow. Who am I supposed to obey? Who am I supposed to love? What am I supposed to want? How am I supposed to look? How much of who I am did I actually choose, and how much was handed to me by culture before I was old enough to question it?

Eventually, I realized sexuality was where all of those questions collided.

What do the first 60 minutes of your day look like?

The only true constants are taking my dog outside, an irresponsible amount of coffee, and listening to Up First from NPR while I do my skincare. After that, it’s between me, God, and whatever my hormones have decided we’re capable of that day. If I’m ovulating, maybe I’m running, going to yoga, writing morning pages, and embodying an aesthetic morning girl. If I’m on my period, we’re doing the absolute bare minimum and I’m so proud of us. I’ve gotten really committed to building my life around my body instead of expecting my body to organize itself around my life.

Why do you do what you do?

Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst and radical thinker who wrote about sex, politics, and power, had this idea that has never left me. He was watching the Nazis rise to power and basically asking: how the fuck does this happen? How do you get so many people to support a system that takes away their own freedom, and then participate in taking freedom away from other people? He became fascinated by the relationship between authoritarianism and sexual repression: what happens when people are taught to suppress their bodies, their desires, and huge parts of their emotional lives. I definitely don’t subscribe to everything Reich believed, but THAT question lives in me.

Because look at what happens when we teach people to distrust themselves. Women learn to perform instead of desire. Men learn to suppress enormous parts of their emotional lives. Queer people are taught that the ways they love, desire, relate, and express themselves have to fit inside structures that weren’t built with them in mind. We become ashamed of our bodies, afraid of each other, and disconnected from the empathy and pleasure that make being alive actually feel worth protecting.

I want to participate in undoing that.

What is an unexpected pleasure you discovered in your work?

We’re all just meatsacks flying through space on a rock, and I’ve always said that! It’s not that serious.

Sex is not that serious. Life is not that serious. And somehow, simultaneously, it’s everything. I’ve learned there’s so much freedom in looking at the parts of ourselves we think are weird, shameful, embarrassing, or uniquely wrong and finding some of the absurdity in them. Giving ourselves a break.

And maybe the more unexpected pleasure is how much I genuinely fall in love with people. Not romantically, but I get invited into these incredibly tender, strange, vulnerable corners of people’s inner worlds, and I get to watch them become more themselves. I didn’t expect to feel so much affection for the people who trust me enough to let me in.

What should more people know about your work?

I don’t have any answers for you. And I think more people should know that that’s the point. I have tools, questions, education, and experiences that can help you find your own answers, but I don’t know what your life or sexuality should look like.

This work isn’t about replacing one set of rules with another. I don’t want to liberate you from “you should want this” just to hand you a new version of “you should want that.” I’m interested in what’s yours.

What’s your superpower?

I see people, and I’m really good at making them feel safe being seen.

We love vices. What’s yours?

Skinny cigarettes and dirty martinis.

Who are your sensual inspirations?

This movement is full of so many baddies I am constantly and deeply inspired by. I could never make a comprehensive list. Audre Lorde and adrienne maree brown taught me to think about the erotic and pleasure as political. Emily Nagoski completely changed the way I understand desire. Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel shaped me as a practitioner. Karly Sciortino and Shan Boodram make sex education feel alive, personal, and culturally relevant. Victoria Alexandra, Ari Kytsya, and Via G, in very different ways, make me think about what it looks like to be provocative, sexually expressive, playful, embodied, and completely yourself out loud.

There are so many artists I look up to for their sensuality, too: Megan Thee Stallion’s unapologetic sexual agency, FKA twigs’ almost otherworldly embodiment, Doechii’s complete permission to be weird and queer and theatrical.

And then, honestly, my clients, my friends, my lovers, and the people I meet through my work. I’m so inspired by people who seem to be discovering their own version of sensuality rather than performing someone else’s.

Closing thoughts?

I guess the preschool thing really did work out in the end.

Related reading

Meet Lisbon somatic sexologist and erotic embodiment guide: Julian Marcus

Sexological bodywork in Cape Town: meet Simona Ferrari

Meet Auckland sex and pleasure coach: Mandy Rose