Krissy is a Master of Sexuality (MSc) and a Bachelor when it comes to Comparative Religion (BA). She enjoys shopping at the market, teaching people to put condoms on with their mouths, walking in the park, and spending all morning in bed.
Everyone here at the Pleasure Project would like to wish you a fun and pleasurable holiday season! We’re going to be taking a bit of a break ourselves (not from pleasure, mind you, just from writing about it), but we’re looking forward to seeing you again next year!
Have you read something that you think should be on the blog? Are you interested in being a guest blogger next year? Drop us a line: info@thepleasureproject.org. We’d be happy to hear from you!
While I was in Mexico at the SSSS meeting, I went to a brilliant session by Mark Schoen of SexSmartFilms.com. Mark’s presentation, entitled “100 years of sex education films”, was enthralling enough to draw and keep awake an audience at 8am on a Sunday morning, the last day of the meeting – even though we were sitting in a darkened room. If that’s not impressive, I don’t know what is. Mark is himself a film maker, and has made it his mission to collect different films relating to sex. He’s always looking for more contributions, and would be especially interested in those relating to pleasure and sexuality. Here’s what he has to say:
SexSmartFilms.com is just as its name implies, instructional films about sex from around the world. The collection is culturally and sexually diverse. It includes explicit and non-explicit, instructional and clinical, Public Service Announcements, documentaries and more. The library grows weekly and now has nearly 200 videos. The oldest film is from 1896 – the first screen kiss, and the newest films are from 2009. Many films are professionally produced and others come from student filmmakers.
Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: film
This week, I’m attending the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality’s annual meeting in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Aside from being a beautiful place where the balmy ocean breezes are caressing my skin even as I type (and the sounds of Mexican karaoke are assailing my ears), it is home this week to a gathering of 250 sex researchers. Let me just say this… I have never felt so much at home.
These are people who would never talk about the “insertive probe and the receptive cavity.” These people know about sex and are not afraid to talk about it. Awesome!!
Today, the first day of the conference, saw two brilliant plenary speakers. I’ll only mention one here in passing – Richard Parker. Of course, Richard Parker is someone who I’ve been reading for years, and always thought was brilliant. You know, the kind of brilliant that means you don’t just walk up to him at a conference and say “hey, I love your work!”. But still, he was there, talking about sexual rights and sexual citizenship. The most useful thing I derived from his talk was the distinction between negative and positive rights – something I had thought of before, but that he articulated very clearly in the context of sexuality.
Tags: sexual rights
We’re incredibly happy to have the wonderful Ana Santos as our first Pleasure Project guest blogger. Ana will join us once a week during the month of November to give her thoughts on sex, pleasure, lovin’… whatever strikes her fancy.
Ana is a freelance journalist based in Manila, Philippines. She writes mostly about sex & relationships and gender-based issues. In her articles, she strives to prove that those topics are two entirely different things!
Amazed that she has been able to write about sex in the Philippines, a devoutly Catholic country, for the last five years, she pushes the envelope further by diversifying this scintillating topic into advocacy on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and safe pleasurable sex.
Ana’s full-length features and essays have been published in men’s magazines like Manual, UNO and Playboy; and in the Philippine editions of Marie Claire and Women’s Health.
Ana received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of the Philippines.
Tags: bio
The media has given some attention this week to a new report from the UK’s NHS that shows condoms becoming more popular (for instance, The Times and The Daily Mail). I must say, the report contains a wealth of information. But it’s also kind of strange. Let’s first look at the pill/condom issue:
Source: Opinions Survey Report No. 41 Contraception and Sexual Heath, 2008/09
So, there has been an increase in the popularity of condoms, but for most groups, they are still less popular than the pill. The report doesn’t offer any suggestions about why the 30-34-year-olds have a seemingly high rate of pill use, nor on why the 40-44-year-olds have a low rate. Nor does it tell us if those differences are statistically significant. In fact, I couldn’t find any information about how many people composed each age group… so I have my doubts.
Anyhow, there were other interesting contradictions that the media didn’t pick up on. For instance:
Tags: contraception, Europe, study
In the latest of the never-ending series of news articles about what women want, why they have sex, and what they want to get out of it, Newsweek brings us this jewel describing the findings of a new book Why Women Have Sex. Let’s just say that I hope the book is more insightful than the article.
The article describes how women have sex, believe it or not, for many different reasons. Unlike the stereotype that women have sex for love while men have sex for pleasure, the study authors found that women’s reasons for having sex were “complex”. But, not to worry, sexual pleasure still ranks at the top:
Tags: North America, reasons, research, women
