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Low Desire Partner or High Desire Partner: which one are you ?

07/07/2011 in *What We're Up To, Guest Bloggers, Meetings & Publications by Annie | No comments

Here is the next report from our intrepid Pleasure Propogandist, Arushi, who is reporting back from the World Sexual Health Congress in Scotland. This time she is getting right down to brass tacks and finding out how to ignite the fire of pleasure in longer term relationships…

Good Safe Sex:  reducing the worry in the playful and exploratory erotic

Are you the LDP or the HDP in your relationship? No, these are not medical or psycho-analytical terms from the Sexual Health Congress. LDP is low desire partner and HDP is high desire partner. This, according to marital and sex therapist, Dr David Schnarch , is the inevitable between every couple.

And in societies where consent is considered important, the LDP controls the amount of sex happening in the relationship, whether or not they are aware of it.

Also, sex is all about leftovers (Dr. Schnarch’s words, not mine!). What do you mean, you ask, as you squint your eyes in indignation, thinking back to your hot and steamy capers. Well, a couple engages in those sexual practices that both are comfortable with. Meaning if one likes anal sex and the other doesn’t, they are most likely not going to have anal. So it’s all about what is ‘leftover’.

A slightly different take on erotic desire among long-term couples is that of Ms Esther Perel, another marriage and family therapist, who talks about reconciling the erotic and the domestic. Did you ever come across the couple who says, “We love each other very much but it’s been a long time since we had sex”?

The spark of the erotic needs air to ignite – just the way a couple needs space. The erotic and desire is playful, alive, experimental and all about exploration, says Ms. Perel. She also says that there is no ‘care-taking or worry’ involved in desire. Seems to me, she’s saying that including a sexy toy like a condom in those ‘leftover’ acts of yours removes worries around unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections and increases the amount of desire.

So you need to start giving each other that space and letting go of the anxieties. Doesn’t matter if you’re LDP or HDP as long as you can get the spark to ignite! After all, the more playful and exploratory you get with each other’s bodies, the longer that list of ‘leftovers’ might get.

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Next up Arushi reports back on the big O, watch this space

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Safe play-doh porn direct from Scotland

05/07/2011 in *What We're Up To, Guest Bloggers, Meetings & Publications, Pleasure News & Views by Annie | No comments

Arushi Singh, ace Pleasure Propagandist based in Delhi and Goa, spent June in the sunny climes of Glasgow learning all there could be about good safe sex. Here is her first report home.

Ever heard of a soggy sao?

This Pleasure Propagandist got to go to a sexology conference for the first time and boy was it an incredible experience! The 20th World Congress for Sexual Health  in Glasgow, was jam-packed with sexologists, sex and relationship therapists and sex educators.

I found a sex education specialist who could well feature in the third edition of The Pleasure Project’s “The Global Mapping of Pleasure”. Dr. Lorel Mayberry runs a 14-week Sexology elective at the Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia. I was lucky enough to participate in a two-hour workshop by her where she took us through some of the teaching methods she uses with young people. One of these being the ‘Saucy Sexy Scale’.

A scale that helps people understand which sexual acts are high risk, low risk or no risk for sexually transmitted infections, including HIV. It does this in the sauciest way possible – with pictures!

Now before I describe the scale to you, the story of how it was developed must be told. A group of ‘at-risk’ young people from a Brisbane Youth Centre got a $1000 grant. They spent $990 on food and alcohol and $10 on Play-Doh. Do you know how many sexual positions you can create with Play-Doh?! That’s what they did – they used the Play-Doh to make little, colourful people in all kinds of sexy positions, including golden showers and a soggy sao ! A friend of theirs took photographs of each position and voila! They had postcards, each with a saucy sexy act on it with the Play-Doh figures getting it on and the description written behind. So you get to discuss each of the positions and sex acts, learn about new ones you never knew of and place them on a scale from no, low, medium to high risk – so you know how to be safe too.

Play Doh will never look the same to me . Maybe they inspired this play doh porn – looks pretty safe to us..

Arushi Singh, Pleasure Propagandist based in Delhi and Goa, India has been working with The Pleasure Project for the past few years in a number of ways, training young people to sexy up their sex education in the UK, doing pleasure body mapping at the Bali Global AIDS conference and encouraging all to draw on our Great Wall of Vagina in Delhi. She attended the World Association of Sexual Health in Glasgow and we asked her to write about it for us…..more coming later this week

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Strange bedfellows: how to get academics to take pleasure seriously ?

17/06/2011 in *What We're Up To, Meetings & Publications, News About Us by Annie | No comments

The Pleasure Project has been featured in a special Supplement of Health Research Policy and Systems published yesterday.

We are naturally quite pleased with ourselves. Our article “Strange bedfellows: bridging the worlds of academia, public health and the sex industry to improve sexual health outcomes” is part of a series that discuss how get sexual  health  research into policy and practice.  After all, research that gathers dust on the shelf will not help us tackle HIV and  sexually transmitted diseases.

We talk about  how walk a thin line to build bridges between the health industry, academia and the pleasure industry to promote good safe sex. How we have featured in very diverse media, from Playboy to the Washington  Post. How we have spoken at the Royal Society of Medicine and been nominated for an Erotic Oscar by the UK Sexual Freedom Coalition.

Our fabulous Wendy Knerr speaks here at a Liverpool conference with the awesome title “Sex sells everything from cars to toothpaste..could it also sell safer sex and empowerment”.  Her presentation led to the writing of this article about our communications methods and our successes and challenges in bridging these very different worlds. How people assume  many things about our work;  like erotic images are always harmful to women, poor people are never interested in sex, women cannot be agents of their own desires and sexy images, pleasure or erotica is not worthy of serious research.

The article also is a little bit of self interrogation – because despite all this resistance  have we have managed to appeal to a wide audience -  “The Global Mapping of Pleasure” had been dowloaded 20,000 times and we get around 5000 unique visitors a month to our website.

The rest of the articles are an interesting exploration of how researchers have had a real life impact – from expanding public spaces where sexual minorities can talk together in Bangladesh to improvements in HIV treatment outcomes in Ghana.

 

 

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What do Delhiites fantasize about ?

16/05/2011 in *AIDS2010 Fantasies, *What We're Up To, Meetings & Publications by Annie | No comments

Two weeks ago we put out a call for fantasies for the “Share Your Pleasure”

most common fantasies ?

event in Delhi – and on the night we had a fantasy box into which we collected all your lovely fantasies. This was all to make us wealthy, healthy and wiser in our fantasy banks. We are adding them to the huge amount we collected in Vienna at AIDS 2010.  It’s all good.safe.sex.

dilli desi-aunties ?

So its time …..to reveal……..what do those dirti delhiites  fantasise about during the long hot summers…..         ice cream? cold showers ?                                   a functioning AC unit ?

So we asked the gathered listeners to tell us how their fantasies smell, feel, look and taste like…

Someone was very specific. Their fantasy tastes of vanilla or cucumbers on water, feels like midnight showers  and looks like a man in a top hat. Such poetry -  we do hope they get all of that all at the same time soon.

Food predominated, as did water and a bit of light bondage and domination. (Oh ho Dilli Dilli).

And so of food; you wanted yoghurt covered blueberries, you wanted chewing gun stuck to nipples , you wanted to force feed your blind- folded lover green chillies and finally when all was said and done you wanted to “make alphabets in jam on bellies and clitorises” .  (Was that the plural  …..Phew)

But if that is making you a little too hot in this unbearable summer heat – you will be glad to know that water was a key preoccupation of our Delhi frantic fantasizers.  We had lovers in with “the aroma of last night’s rain on a sandy terrace” or seeing him “dancing naked in the sprinklers in the lawns around the monument at 8am” and we had some lucky slave being dominated by her mistress in the jacuzzi.

And then some more unsuspected fantasies – two people like moustaches on a woman  “its good to find a little to rub face to face, lip to lip” Oh hello. We hear you.

We also had a very sexy ode to a sexy Jacaranda tree and the man sheltering below it.

“You BLUE tree, wet dark and mossy carpety ! So so moist, cool, you thick trunk ! and millions of your blue blue flowers, falling, anointing my nakedness”.  “Jacaranda you lucky bitch …look at the latino, caramel boy, sprawled, spread out to dry his beauty on your kind slope.”

We had a couple of very sexy nerdy fantasies. And before you say ANYTHING I always use the word nerd as interchangeable with sex god.

One was an OCD (very neat top of the class ) list of 4 exciting foreplay activities and then a sweet sad plea, to say  ” I cannot think of more, I’m single and dying to try“.  H, I do hope your time has come because that was a well organised list.

We also got a  loudly titled “A Gay Fantasy’”

with a mathematical feel.

Licking armpits+licking chest hair+Rimming my guy’s ass =You know me!……… (well I do hope so ;-)

We had people wanting sex on railroad tracks, in dark cinemas and three people in a place we all knew.

Yodakin bookstore itself. Oh hello. A whole new meaning to sexuality resource centre. So we shall leave you with one of those very fantasies.

“I’m in a quiet corner in this bookstore in Haus Kaus village. I am slightly tipsy and aroused by the erotic images showing on a projector screen. I glance at a man in the corner. He smiles at me. I smile back. I start to touch myself. I can tell he is aroused. He starts to touch himself. We stare at each other, engrossed in our mutual masturbation. Suddenly we notice the room is silent. We have an audience. I decide to stop. I got shy”

I guess it really was alright on the night.

And THANK YOU DELHI. The fantasy bank is overflowing.

The Pleasure Project is looking forward to hearing what other cities might have to say on the subject of their fantasies. Will Bangalore be all about sex against their hard drives  ? or Bhopal enjoying the lake at midnight ?

Who knows ? But keep those fantasies coming……..we are all ears.

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We came, we read, we shared our pleasures

01/05/2011 in *What We're Up To, Meetings & Publications, News About Us, Pleasurable Products, Uncategorized by Annie | 4 comments

Thanks to all who came to Yodakin Bookstore last night and bravely wrote, read and shared their fantasies at our “Share Your Pleasure” event. We are now all the richer in our collective fantasy bank.

Let it long continue this participatory literotica festival  . . .

We had a wonderful array of fantasies -  both ones we had prepared earlier and others spontaneously added to our “fantasy box”.  Whilst people read we watched a backdrop of polymorphously perverse  images including some that attendees had sent to The Pleasure Project in advance – you naughty exhibitionists you.

The evening began with a beautiful feast with Rosalyn who whetted everyone’s appetite with her soaking, marinating chicken. Taking us deep in the art of lustful food.

 
Then with perfect timing Sumit arrived fresh from the exertions of his Haus Kaus run to glow and deliver his running fantasy. Oh the sexiness of the competition between male runners. He dis-robed and then re-robed as a laburnum tree in bloom. He admitted that he was a mixture of
“ speeding machismo, and admiring legs”

 

I then came out to admit my fetish for sofas and clasped a shiny cushion and described my current  favourite one, it’s beautiful dark wood edges and it’s perfect height, just right to catch that space between thighs and hipbone. How I often

“let the soft skin of my forearm sneak a touch of it’s upper edge”.

We also heard a couple of anonymous readings from people who were in the bookstore – but did not want to read. We like shy people, sooooo cute.

So Oroon had the pleasure of reading them. We loved hearing about the threatening intimacy of two women shaving each other and then were immediately plunged headlong  into the cool relief of two wet women with

“Handfuls of wet stretchy fabric and then finally cool skin, firm waist, a shoulder blade, the beautiful smooth roundness of her ass, a billowing curtain brushes both bodies with rain smelling wind”.

Arushi then treated us to  her favourite fantasy of public sex and one man’s unusual take on unsafe sex – that its not to be encouraged because it makes you travel through wormholes in time and space. Not worth the risk of where you will end up, we reckon.

Which led us neatly to the sex toy demos; the wonderful remote controlled vibrating egg or  the beautifully snug lubed male sheath that can be carefully teased down a dick with your lips. Even be filled with a dab of lube to give a warm wonderfully squishy feeling all over the head of his erection – and last but not least the FC2 that gives you a special tickle and if you like it a rough bump and grind during sex. The ring pushed deep into your pussy gives a feeling like someone is lightly teasing the back of your eyeballs. . .

Phew. It was a steamy night. As I walked down the quiet lane of Haus Kaus village, dazed people spilling out into the dry hot night. One woman said to me

“I have never been to anything like this, to hear people’s fantasies and write my own, but now I can’t stop thinking about that one, that one where my best friend will watch me having sex and direct the action.”

So go forth and have fun, but please pleasure each other safely.

Next up – what did people write in that fantasy box ?

What sweet inspiration did occur to you all after hearing all these fantasies ?

For that you will need to wait a while . . .

 

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The Art of Lust

22/04/2011 in *What We're Up To, Meetings & Publications, Pleasure News & Views by Annie | No comments

Always dutiful, your faithful Pleasure Project reporter is here in Sydney attending the “Festival on the Art of Lust”.

Its a celebration of creative sexuality with artists exploring lust and sexuality. Just to add to your envy , it’s being held in a dance centre overlooking a bay in Sydney. So as I attend workshops intended to improve our sexual skills I can  gaze at the boats  zipping across the bay and glimpse the sun on the opera house.

Although good safe sex is not a focus of the conference my personal mission to talk to artists can help us deliver sex education that is sexy, appealing and accessible.

So I have to admit I started the day by being too shy to attend naked yoga. Aimed at getting you comfortable with your body. Just too much too quick for this intrepid reporter.

But I did go to two workshops both aimed at how to negotiate the type of sex or play  you want. This I hoped to be able to expand to increase safer sex.

So the day started with a workshop where half of us were blindfold and half not – the blindfolded people were encouraged to shout, push, avoid the touch they did not like. We explored through a series of gradually more daring exercises how to say no or how to accept the touch we liked. We focused on saying no in different ways. Shouting it, hitting back or escaping from it. It felt strange to touch strangers and sometimes have them tell you in no uncertain terms to leave them alone – but also respond positively. We could always use a safe word to make people leave us alone.

It’s rare that we have the opportunity to practise reacting to touch and fighting back. I imagine that women who have to deal with fairly constant sexual harassment, in many parts of the world, on public transport or other public spaces, might enjoy the chance to sharpen their reactions and the loudness of their “nos”.

There was also a workshop about “playfighting” – the kind of roll about puppy like play that we stop  as we grow up. It was surprising great fun. Again learning to let go and fight in a fun way.  We started with only our hands fighting and ended up rolling around with complete strangers giggling as we wrestled each other to the ground. And some of these Australian men are quite large and quite strong.

So all in all , it was a much more physical day than I expected, and not at all like a sexual health conference.

More from the frontline of lust, in your service, tomorrow.

 

 

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