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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
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 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
The 10th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific has just finished in Busan, Korea. On behalf of The Pleasure Project, our brave reporter Revati hunted out mentioned of good safe sex or any mention of pleasure in sex education at the conference.
Revati is an old time pleasure propagandist who has written sexy tips and run pleasure workshops. So she is well equip to seek erotic safe sex in Busan.
Here is her third and final post. She found someone talking about sexual pleasure as a motivation for sex.
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I’ve been at the Asia Pacific AIDS conference for a week and so far, in all the sessions I have attended, only one person has spoken about pleasure and the need to recognise pleasure as a key motivator for safe or unsafe sex and that was a question from the audience.
But hurrah. At last I found someone who confronted the elephant in the room. Dr Malonzo, from Brokenshire College in The Phillipines, please step forward and take a bow.
Dr Malonzo’s study looks at why men having sex with men choose not to us condoms, or have “intentionally condom-less sex” aka “bare-backing”. bare- backing was initially a description used in the 
1990′s by HIV positive men who declared their intention to have sex with other HIV positive men without condoms. It has now become the term used to describe condom less sex in a more generic view, regardless of HIV status. So for example, there are pornography studios who specialise in bare back films, sex workers or dating sites who use the term. Dr Malonzo studies the current phenomenon in Davao City in The Philippines in interviews with 40 young gay men.
Many of them felt that bareback sex feels good, is their own choice and demonstrates intimacy in their relationships.
Although knowledge was not always great, quite a number of the men thought that HIV could be transmitted in the hot tub or swimming pool. But all the participants knew that condom-less anal sex carried considerable risk.
The study recommends that there should be more focus on testing and signs of HIV infection and “ Focus on the men’s desire for intimacy, closeness, and pleasure needs”
So people we need to think harder about how we can replace bare-backing with other ways of getting intimacy or feeling intimate. Unfortunately condom-less sex has become a sign of trust, a deeper relationship or commitment.
So pleasure seekers, what could be the replacement ?
Tags: bare backing, gay men, men who sex with men, phillipines, pleasure
The 10th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific has just finished in Busan, Korea. On behalf of The Pleasure Project, our brave reporter Revati hunted out mentioned of good safe sex or any mention of pleasure in sex education at the conference.
Revati is an old time pleasure propagandist who has written sexy tips, run pleasure workshops at the Colombo AIDS Conference where she diplomatically pointed out that maybe a woman’s head could be part of a pleasure body mapping. So she is well equip to seek erotic safe sex in Busan.
Here is her second post.
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I just came out of a satellite session on Sexual and Reproductive Health and HIV integration called “Is SRH/HIV Integration serving the needs of key populations?”
There were four presenters, and two discussants. the presenters covered service provision to men who have sex with men and trans gender groups, and one was on sex workers.
One presenter – Sunita Grote from the AIDS Alliance, spoke about the need to reach young people who are affected by AIDS. At the end of the presentation, two people were given time to speak and one of them was Milinda – from Youth LEAD. His posed a brave question asking about
“ Why the available services are not being youth friendly and that messages around pleasure are missing in the discourse around sex when talking to young people ?”
(three cheers for Milinda, The Pleasure Project).
The moderator of the session agreed and in his concluding remarks he said that one of the key issues from this session was the need to provide youth friendly sexual health services including HIV services that do not forgetting that people have sex for pleasure and that sex with only an association with disease needs to stop being the focus.
For the first time in any of the sessions I attended, I heard the words sex for pleasure being mentioned.
I shall keep on hunting…
This is our third and final post from Arushi at the World Sexual Health Congress in Glasgow, where she also explored the wonderful world of the orgasm.
Score one for pleasure
Orgasm – the word itself is orgasmic. It begins with making your mouth open into the O of wonder, astonishment and exciting shock and ends with your mouth closed in an mmmm of pleasure, contentment and satisfaction. Right? Hmm, not necessarily actually!
I learnt about the tome which is used by psychologists, psychiatrists, sex and 
relationship therapists, sexologists and other health professionals to help their diagnoses and treatments. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) has been revised several times, including the time when homosexuality was struck off it as a mental disorder.
According to the DSM, most sexual dysfunctions are defined as either not having an orgasm during sex or having one too quickly. So does that mean that orgasm is or should be the main outcome of sexual intercourse and sexual activity? No, says Dr Meg Barker. Orgasms mean different things to different people and constitute different experiences, from an expression of power to a mechanical release or a display of intimacy.
This is why, she says that sex and relationship therapy aimed at enabling orgasms and being goal focused rather than pleasure focused is forcing norms on people that just don’t fit.
Sexual satisfaction shouldn’t just be about having an orgasm.
Guess who agrees with her? Dr. Beverly Whipple – yup, the one who told us all about the G-spot! She emphasised the need to be pleasure oriented rather than orgasm oriented. An orgasm is not an end in itself and all the other activities, commonly considered to ‘lead up’ to the orgasm, like kissing, holding, touching, are each an end in themselves. Also, the idea really is to experience an orgasm, rather than be under pressure to ‘reach’ or ‘achieve’ an orgasm. In her words, “a person can express their sexuality in many ways, not only through their genitals.”
That’s what we at The Pleasure Project believe as well – there are sooooo many sexy and safe ways of pleasuring yourself or each other that you could spend a month of O’s and mmmm’s just going through our list on sexy tips !
Tags: Beveley Whipple, DSM, g spot, Meg Barker, orgasm, orgasms, satisfaction, sexy tips
