Annie founded The Pleasure Project after attending one too many sexual health meetings where the normal words for our “downstairs bits” were rarely used – let alone the clitoris ever being discussing….Her current safer sex obsession is air sex (after attending an air sex competition) which she thinks has rare potential for extremely safe sex education. Annie currently lives in India – where is learning more about pleasure from the places where is was recognised as sacred first. She has worked in international public health for 20 years and thought about sexual pleasure for longer – with experience that ranges from female condom promotion in Mongolia to school sex education in the UK. She has qualifications in Psychology and Health Policy.
We got some great coverage in Man’s World Magazine in India. Read is here and see if you can spot a mention of your fantasy (or pick up a new one).
The link to The Pleasure Project in a Mansworld
And then read the unedited version here at Manavi’s blog where she talks about attending our Delhi fantasy evening and me rambling on about women, guilt and pleasure, group lust fests without the sex and access to porn in India.
Never a dull moment at The Pleasure Project.
Tags: fantasies, mans world, porn
You read it here first.
Today is World AIDS Day. Globally 34 million people are living with HIV. 2.7 million people new people are infected per year. That’s the same as the total population of Jamaica.
This years theme is “Getting To Zero” . Zero New HIV Infections. Zero Discrimination and Zero AIDS Related Deaths.
One of the Getting to Zero campaign goals is that by 2015 is ‘HIV-specific needs of women and girls are addressed in at least half of all national HIV responses” ….(just half …how sad).
Now you know what we are going to say.
The way to zero new infections. Is to recognise. That in general lots of people like sex. Even woman.
Especially women.
And how can we learn to say no (to sex we don’t want) if we have not learnt how to say sex YES (to sex we want).
The brilliant Tsitsi B Masvawure explains just this in a more clever way, with her special article today here: “Let’s get real: female sexual pleasure and HIV prevention”. We know Tsitsi and her work. We love her bold recognition of young women’s enjoyment of sex, the joys of sex and their quest for sexual pleasure. And how no HIV prevention campaign will really work until it recognises female sexual desire as a reality.
70% of new HIV infections happen in Africa. The UN calls woman ‘The face of AIDS in Africa” and yet as Tsitsi says ” mistrust of African women’s sexual pleasure has become the default position in the HIV prevention world.”
Societies are on the whole uncomfortable with young women’s sexual pleasure. It’s something that they needs to be controlled. Young women are warned of the dangers of sex constantly. Wherever they live.
So just to give you a treat on this World AIDS Day we give you a colle
ction of best condom adverts from around the world, that happen to have many feisty, sexy, pleasure seeking young women in them.
And one of them even has her own condom fairy.
Now, how do we get one ?
Tags: condom adverts, condom fairy, female sexual pleasure, world AIDs day, young women
Delhi is gearing up to a fantastic concert tomorrow and we are just a little bit over excited here at The Pleasure Project.
Rock for Rights will follow the city’s growing queer pride march – letting us all continue the party. It’s only two years since same sex relationships were de-criminalised in India, but since then the flourishing of queer arts and culture is obvious. Rock for Rights celebrates this with some amazing artists the Bollywood singer Rekha Bharwaj, the multi-talented Ma Faiza, The East India Company, Alisha Batth and Indian rock group Papon.
As all us pleasure seekers know learning about good safe sex is challenging the world over when sex education tends to tell you what you should NOT do and how many diseases you will get when you do IT. But trying to get good information about how to have sex you want and be safe at the same time is near impossible when the type of sex you like is illegal. Decriminalizing same sex relationships allows us to talk about sexual health in an open way.
I had a lovely chat with the marvelous Ma Faiza who will be playing her brilliant brand of sexy, uplifting electronic music tomorrow at Rock for Rights about just this. I asked her what events like Rock for Rights could do to help deliver good safe sex messages.
“Entertainment is a great platform for a social message -it reaches a more diverse audience and makes the message and the process fun”
We could agree more – after all we are all over the fun sexy safe sex message here at Pleasure Project. Traditional sex education tends to bore people and then moralise to them. But Ma says
“Access to sex education is limited in India – and especially women’s right to pleasure. Many women here don’t feel that they have the right to enjoyment – that their life and their sex life should be a journey of sufferance. That has to change.”
So roll on Ma Faiza’s set tomorrow – we love her positive attitude and think we have found a true pleasure propagandist to add to the growing ranks..
See details on how to get to Rocks for Rights and get tickets here
Tags: delhi, ma faiza, pleasure rights, rock for rights
To all those lucky pleasure propagandists who happen to be based in India.
Sunday will be a special evening of music for a good cause – to advance human rights and have fun.
The Pleasure Project is very pleased to be a promotional partner – and keep your eyes peeled you might get to see some images of good safe sex and get some postcards all for yourself. Come say hi and share a sexy tip…..or two…..
Tags: good safe sex, India, rock for rights
The Pleasure Project is lucky enough to be in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As well as enjoying beautiful views, delicious coffee and a variety of adventures we are most impressed by this poster we regularly see around the city.
It’s a new kind of eroticism of safer sex. Selling good safe sex as an exclusive club, with privileges. And it comes to us courtesy of the brilliant condom social marketing organisation DKT.
DKT Ethiopia provided 85 million condoms in 2010 in Ethiopia alongside other family planning methods and provided a stonking 2.4 million “couple years of protection” in that year alone. But their talent does not stop at the “members only” ribbed and dotted brand but stretches to include a “sensations” brand.
Sensation condoms come in a whole ranges of tastes – including mint and cinnamon. However our personal favourite is coffee flavour and has been pleasuring the population since 2008. Even better cafes in the city have been offering free coffee flavoured condoms with cappuccinos.
Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, has amazing pavement cafes and a traditional coffee ceremony where coffee is roasted and drunk sitting together. Every house and shop has a small arrangement of coffee pot and cups for all of us addicts. So how refreshing to get your delicious condom in the saucer of your coffee rather than sloping off to pick one up behind the closed door of a toilet or from a late night petrol station.
Thank you Ethiopia for coffee and a new take on the coffee ritual.
Watch out soon for more blogs about DKT and their amazing good safe sex products. For starters here is the intriguing DKT Ethiopia advert for mint condoms that combines basketball and breaking pots to the tune of a Michael Jackson song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eomsu4aoxAQ
The Pleasure Project gave a presentation this week at the offices of Plan 
International and Interact Worldwide in London, in achingly hip east London’s Shoreditch. We we very excited because these are charities that do amazing work to improve the health and quality of people’s lives globally. Also Interact Worldwide is very clear about it’s commitment through its programmes to The right to a safe and pleasurable sex life. Woo Hoo.
Many other cool things happen in this neighbourhood. Madonna holds birthday parties. Kate Moss has casual drinks. Keira Knightly kisses a man in the high street. The Pleasure Project does a sexy female condom demo just off the high street.
We have to admit that we have been to Shoreditch in a pleasure propaganda capacity before – to talk to the African HIV Network about good.safe.sex.
But we had never talked quite so dirty about female condoms there. It’s gonna to catch on and be all the rage in about 5 minutes. Watch this space.
The people gathered by Interact Worldwide were great; interested to know more about what is a pleasure approach to sex education and wanting to know how to make it happen. They had some really interesting questions;
They were all very sweet about the presentation and discussion and had this to say.
In our work on sexual and reproductive health in Africa and Asia we tend to focus so much on the prevention of disease and negative ideas of sex and sexuality.We tend to talk about people’s right to pursue pleasurable sex but often struggle with taking this approach when we implement our programmes. Now we feel more confident being able to say not only is it people’s right, it also supports people being able to more successfully negotiate safer sex for themselves. Rutti Goldberger, Programme Advisor
A woman who can negotiate pleasurable sex can negotiate safer sex, and indeed can negotiate almost anything! So very true, and yet so very challenging to achieve in many of the contexts in which we work, but let’s keep trying! My mind is now positively whirring with ideas for collaborating and incorporating the pleasure project’s no-nonsense principles into our work on reproductive health and sex education for adolescents with our partner organisations in Ethiopia, Malawi and Uganda. Ceri Angood, Africa Programme Manager
I was struck by the fact that the HIV world has done a far better job of including pleasure in their approach to safer sex, but this still doesn’t seem to be the case with contraception and family planning. This is definitely something that Interact wants to take forward with our partners in future. Alan Smith, COO of Interact
Others said that they liked to hear about actual examples of work where people are sexing up safer sex and want to do more to make their work with young people relevant, engaging and more mainstream.
By chance there was a big news story that day on the BBC about the views of teenagers of their sex education, which provided a good context that young people’s sex education in the UK is failing to be relevant.
A survey conducted by Brook UK, a leading UK sexual health organisation found that only a third of young people surveyed in the UK felt that their school sex education was good and 72% of those surveyed wanted more say in what is included in their sex education. British young people were also asked “where they learnt about sex ?” and not surprisingly over a third said they learn about sex from a friend and 5% from online pornography.
It provided an apt and timely reminder that sex education tends to fail young people not only in the UK but also globally. It’s a good time to remember that pleasure is one if not the key motivation for sex for us all.
“Rail against it, repress it, and moralize it ad infinitum; nevertheless, sex will find a way.” Abramson and Pinkerton .
UK Government Safer Sex poster 2006
Tags: good safe sex, interact worldwide, plan international, sex education, sexy family planning, young people
