You are currently browsing the archive for the Uncategorized category.
We like this, condoms available at the moment of passion…..
The long lonely trip to the 24 garage may be a thing of the past…
but of course using a condom does not need to be so
discrete.…or hidden (inside a map or pizza box)….
but could be brandished as an invitation for
So we are a little bit plesed (well actually quite a lot) because Professor Haddad from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University has written all about our evidence review ‘Everything you have ever wanted to know about pleasurable safer sex but were afraid to ask’…..we have replicated it in full below. Cos he deserves a gold medal in our ongoing pleasure Olympics..
No, this blog is not a blatant attempt to increase my page views. It is about a new report produced for last week’s HIV/AIDS Conference in Washington DC: ‘Everything you have ever wanted to know about pleasurable safer sex but were afraid to ask Were Afraid to Ask.
It is produced by Wendy Knerr and Anne Philpott of the Pleasure Project for the IDS Sexuality and Development research programme.
The report is a literature review which asks a number of questions about the motivations for safer sex and the role that pleasure seeking plays in those motivations. It takes as its starting point the fact that much of the research on what influences whether safer sex is or is not practised comes down to safer sex being perceived as less pleasurable.
The report is a difficult one to read on a plane (which is where I wrote this blog) because it contains provocative (for a research review anyway!) pictures (yes, there is an erect penis in a condom). It is structured around 20 big questions (think Foreign Policy’s “Sex Issue”, but without the sexual repression) all of which are researched through online searches of the standard peer reviewed and grey literature databases.
The report is provocative for all the right reasons. It asks the question: if a lack of pleasure is one reason given for the non-practise of safer sex, can we make safer sex more pleasurable? Can it be eroticised either through framing, depiction or practise? If it can, will this lead to more positive attitudes towards safer sex, and therefore to the increased practise of safer sex?
Given the vast numbers of disability adjusted life years (DALYS) that sexual and reproductive health diseases still account for, finding ways of turning pleasure from a barrier to safer sex into an enabler seems sensible. The interventions need not be expensive and could lead to very quickly scaled up behaviour change, generating very large benefit-cost ratios (sorry, couldn’t help but bring that in).
The report concludes that we need more research at the intervention level, especially in countries with high burdens of HIV where evidence is scarcest.
Given the ease with which the topic can be (unfairly) dismissed, I would have liked the search and select protocols to have been ratified and even more transparent (was there a quality grading?) but for a non-systematic review the authors have given an admirably clear guide as to how they went about their review.
Pleasure is a driver of much human behaviour. Economists tend to use the unlovely term “utility” to describe some combination of satiation, satisfaction and pleasure, but as the newly discovered world of behavioural economics begins to be more and more influential, perhaps the role of pleasure will be explored in the world of financial transactions.
(It could give a whole new meaning to Freakonomics.)
“
Sex has been eradicated from the conference, it’s almost as if it’s an airborne disease”
Okay so when we said that to WAMU radio we were feeling kinda blue and bio-medicalised out. They interviewed us after our satellite session to launch “Everything you ever wanted to know about pleasurable safer sex but were afraid to ask” . Also Facebook closed us out for three days for putting up one of our postcards : so we got a slap on the wrist for that ( free postcard for whoever guesses which one it was ) . Next time we will shut down. I’ll be careful but sign up for our mailing list he and for blog alerts here…
But after initial dismay at the lack of any discussions of condoms, safer sex or just good old fashioned sex in the first couple of days we started to cheer up because of the growing band of pleasure promoters at aids conferences. We ain’t the single issue solo loonies anymore.
It kicked off with The Pleasure Project Hosted satellite at 7am Tuesday morning ….and people came ! Unbelievable and amazing. We didn’t go easy
on our audience with a sexy safe condom demo (7:05 am ) and then launched the evidence review “everything you ever wanted….” by posing questions particularly suited to that time of the morning such as ” is sex rational?” ” what is sexual pleasure?” and ” do positive attitudes to sex correspond to positive attitudes to safer sex ? “. Read it for the quick and dirty and more considered answers.
Next up Dr Scott Shelton blew our minds talking about the evidence she has analyzed and how it shows that making your sex education programmes and materials a turn on means people have more safer sex. So not only is it appealing but it works. We knew that but it we needed to see those randomised control trials prove it. See question 15 in the review for more on her research.
Next up was DKT International who last year sold 650 million condoms in 18 countries and kinda know a thing or two about good safe sex. Chris Purdy and Daniel Marun spoke about how they do this globally We especially….. Like the moped ad…. You’ll see….. What we mean about dotted….. Hello Fiesta Ribbed. All those presentations are here with the session description.
Ttitsi Masvaware from the University of Columbia in New York has been focusing her research on young southern African women and asking them why they have sex. And hello. They are not just saying that they are forced or raped or trafficked. Despite what most of the development literature tells you. They schedule it in. They want pleasure. As she said ” she told me that she had him....” read her talk Masvawure TB Pleasure Project Satellite IAS 2012 copy and see question 2 for more on her brilliant research that shows young women can be ’active lust seekers”.
And lastly but not least and the best titled talk at the conference by Professor Gary Dowsett and socked it to us with the ‘choreography of sex’, the improvisation in sex, the messiness of sex, the skills of sex , the joy of it and all of it they we don’t usually hear at AIDS conferences…read it here Dowsett presentation
The questions afterwards were great with some criticism of the images used to sexy up safer sex (more on that later because it deserves it own blog)
But what has been phenomenal is the number of other sessions at this conference on pleasure. We are normally the pleasure cultists, not any more
.
The American health care foundation had a “making safer sex sexy” satilite where we heard on their campaign to get condoms into porn . We loved the presentation by from NYC condoms and their health department. ” NYC will be awash with condoms and it’s river will run with lube” on how to saturate your city with condoms (and an app to find them whenever you need em!) and the chair thrilled us with her description of how she put her knowledge of cherry stem rolling in mouth to special use these days with a condom.
Other pleasure awards go to the IPPF youth group for their pleasure session on Thursday and keeping the pleasure flag flying with happy healthy ‘n’ hot. Some great questions and conversations “ how can you learn to flirt ? ” let’s remind ourselves that 48 % of new infections are in young people under 25 currently and we need to talk about safer sex and sexual skills for young people ALOT MORE . And another gripe there are just not enough of them at conferences presenting, sharing experiences and keeping the rest of us a bit more real. IPPF thrilled us with another condom controversy session on Sunday (with us and DKT) interjecting on erotic condoms which was standing room only. Go IPPF . You rock.
And another session I attended in the global village had interesting ways to start the pleasure conversation in the transgender community in Thailand. What I loved was that they did a pretend telephone call, as if a client was calling in and showed how they bring pleasurable safer sex into the conversation and talk anatomy and other sexy bits. How many chairs of sessions are brave enough to do that and lovely to see practical and tactical sex education at play.
So that’s a pleasure round up for now and it tales us up to Thursday at AIDS 2012 (there is more my active pleasure seekers) and I have not even got to female condoms, the unsung hero of sexual health and some more pleasure awards he at aids 2012 .
You’ll just have to enjoy the delayed gratification…
Ohh we are getting very excited about our session tomorrow morning at the AIDS conference here in Washington.
Mainly because we are just a little frustrated that safer sex seems to have slipped off the agenda even more than usual.
Although Hilary Clinton was still stating the path to an AIDS free generation is combination prevention – condoms, counseling and testing. There is also a large demonstration outside the conference against male circumcision – reminding us of another prevention method recently also found to be effective against HIV (the demonstrators think its mutilation) .
However most of the excitement at the conference is on the recent NIH research that showed if HIV infected people took HIV treatment early their sexual partners were almost completely protected from infection. It’s great news and a real boost to get people onto treatment. But we do hope that this does not reduce the already limited attention in the sexual health world on being creative when it comes to condom use. The HIV industry is a world with attention deficient disorder rapidly racing onto the next magic bullet – or ‘cure’
In fact whilst sitting in the opening ceremony yesterday I was trying to count how many times the word condom was used. I maybe wrong (and please correct me if I missed one) but I counted four times. That was in a two hour opening Session at the worlds largest AIDS conference. Franky I felt a little depressed. And answers on a postcard for how many time sexuality or pleasure were mentioned .
However despite condoms slipping off the agenda we are getting psyched about all the brilliant speakers we have at our pleasure and breakfast session tomorrow.
We will hear from brilliant researchers who have identified the link between more sexy sex education and having more safer sex, such as Dr Lori Sheldon from the US or how promoting pleasure sold more condoms in Brazil . Daniel Marun from DKT International will tell us more about the empirical evidence show receptiveness to safer sex messages have improved when pleasure and desire are incorporated into marketing efforts.
Dr T. Masvawure from Zimbabwe will talk about her research that looks beyond the stereotypes of African women and the reasons they have sex, pleasure of course being one.
And lastly Professor Dowsett will deliver the rather fabulously titled talk “Pleasure, Passion, Pulchritude, Sex, and Technology: HIV prevention is about to get even messier”
And I think he right.
So lets look at these wonderful condom ballgowns in the meantime.
We really like Kuber Sharma’s rant for positive porn in India: and we could not agree more that this is critical as internet access grows (30% of all Indians and growing) and access to internet porn grows (5% of all downloads at minimum) .
And this “guy next door”Kuber (read sex god/nerd) seems to have an intimate relationship with his IP provider ( all the best people do) has come out in favour of positive porn that educates and enriches our lives and teaches us confidence and safer sex.
He admits; learning about blow jobs in a mobile phone video leak scandal; 
how porn is often the only way young Indians can learn about women’s pleasure; and the joys of India’s first porn star – the awesomely sexy Savitha Bhabhi (which gives us a good excuse to use some cute cartoons).
And he mentioned us: that helped.
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
