People We Like

You are currently browsing the archive for the People We Like category.

Keeping our eyes on the orgasm prize might just be a distraction

12/07/2011 in Guest Bloggers, Meetings & Publications, News About Us, Pleasure News & Views, Sexy Tips by Annie | No comments

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: , , , , , , ,

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.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….

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

Tags: , , , , , , ,

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

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

And now for the incredible erection encouraging condom . . .

19/05/2011 in Pleasurable Products, Pleasure News & Views by Annie | 3 comments

So as we pleasure propagandists know – the main problem with getting men to put it on – is that they say it stops their pleasure.

These are of course, the men who don’t realise yet that they have been missing years of sexy safer sex. The kind of sex where their lover says

“Lie still I’m going to fuck you slowly and slowly so slowly” and  slow like continental drift, they unroll a condom carefully down and around their erect dick  with their wet mouth.

Or they drop some lube in the end to give that warm squishy feeling inside the condom just where it matters.

Or they consult The Pleasure Project’s sexy tips page and get really creative.

Anyhow we digress.

A new condom  has been invented that will enhance its sexiness by putting a gel inside it to make erections last longer.  It works by increasing blood flow to the penis and making it hard for longer.

 

It all sounds good on the good.safe.sex front and similar  to the condoms with a dab of climax controlling or anesthetic gel in them – that make you “so numb you don’t come”.

Showing that a little bit of numbness can be good when it comes to some of that stuff us human beans get up to in the bedroom.

 

 

This new one has been touted as the “Viagra Condom” and should be on the shelves first in the UK.  So it makes erections last longer, so making men (and their partners) keener to use them and also stops condoms sliding off during their softer moments.

The last stage of approval apparently is to ensure that the gel only rubs off on the men not their partners . Hum. Why so ?

 

Tags: , , ,

What Do the Recent Democratic Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt Teach Us About Women Using the Web to Improve their Sexual Health? The Launching of SuzyKnew Part II

16/05/2011 in Guest Bloggers, People We Like by guest blogger | 3 comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the “what” behind the recently launched SuzyKnew website (www.suzyknew.com): what it is and how it seems like all my life I’ve been enjoying working in and writing about sex (and love!) Today, I want to explain why I think SuzyKnew can reach women in developing countries and encourage them to take charge of their sexual health and pleasure, attracting both modern and traditional women.

Well – it was about two years ago when I explained to friends and colleagues that I wanted to launch a website where women from different countries could go to have fun – you know like sexual and erotic fun! – and at the same time get accurate up-to-date facts on sexual and reproductive health.

“That’s a stupid idea. The internet is used by only the wealthy few in developing countries. Just keep it in the US.” most said. “Women in the developing world don’t use the internet – especially traditional women,” others quipped.

But, I didn’t let the statements discourage me. I wasn’t convinced that women in the developing world weren’t accessing the internet. Why? Between 2005 – 2009, I had to travel to 2 or 3 countries a month for my work in reproductive health and afterwards, I started living in Africa to manage public health projects. I visited health centers in remote districts and often had to use the local internet café for work. Off dirt roads in crumbling buildings, I would find women-run internet cafes in the peri-urban areas of Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda. In urban Jo’burg and Manila, I would see teenage girls laughing together at internet cafes, and in Phnom Penh and Kiev, the internet was a way of life for women, as it was for women in hijab in Kuala Lumpor. From their faces, I could tell that the time spent on the internet was one that gave them freedom from their day-to-day routine and an opening into a world and information beyond what they knew.

Looking at the data back in 2009 to determine whether to launch and which countries to focus on, I saw while the internet was not widely used in Africa, its growth was phenomenal. Top 5 internet using countries in Africa included Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria’s user growth was 5,400% at the time. Turkey and Russia, countries with burgeoning “women power” and strong and growing contraceptive use, ranked in the top 8 countries with the largest number of internet users. However, when looking at the per capita number of physicians globally, the lack of physicians in Africa was glaring and convinced me to start my efforts to improve access to sexual and reproductive health information in Nigeria and South Africa, in addition to the US and UK. I included the Philippines, another country with rapid internet user growth, when a young woman from the Philippines agreed to be my volunteer intern and cultivate a Filipina following.

Jump forward to the spring of 2011, a peaceful democratic revolution emerged in Tunisia to cause its leader to depart and then spread to Egypt. Read the rest of this entry »

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 . . .

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »