*What We’re Up To

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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 !

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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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Oh Sexy Hauz Kaus – fantasies from the village

25/06/2011 in *What We're Up To, News About Us, Pleasure News & Views, Uncategorized by Annie | No comments

Well hello Hauz Kaus Village. HKV  is the Soho or the Greenwich village of Delhi. It’s surrounded by parks and a beautiful lake and tomb – and is filled with antique shops specializing in old Bollywood posters, quirky cafes, wonderful neighbourhood restaurants and an independent bookstore Yodakin.  Now you might remember Yodakin, it was they who asked The Pleasure Project to hold one of our special “Share Your Pleasure” events. It rocked.

So they asked us back. This time to sit and share some fantasies from our safer sofa – during the village open night. Basically the village on open night

credit: Vidura Bahadur

has lots of fantasy potential. All the shops were open and spilled out onto the streets,  and  we sat amongst the knick knacks and read some gorgeous erotica and then encouraged the hordes (and there were) to give us their fantasies into our now famous fantasy box. We asked you what your fantasies are, what turned you on, what you played through your mind as you played with yourself.

 

So guess what we got from the hordes.  We’ll give you some clues – they were a young sexy urban and urbane Delhi crowd. Dressed to the nines. Strolling the lanes of the village.

And out of the 150 fantasies we collected the top 7 topics were …….in this order….

1. Travel – and boy would you love to travel and have sex.  In a “European train carriage” whilst “sky diving naked” “on the 18th hole of Augusta” or very specifically a “threesome with an Afghani and a Baster tribal in Paris under the Lourve”. And our personal haunting favourite ” one night with Candice again (first lover) in Timbaktoo (near Anantpur Village) under a million stars, by Shakti”

2. No surprises here at number 2 – ORGIES and threesomes in all their variety. Harems, lots of firemen, supermodels, lots of money at the orgy, “with the entire band” in a trailer van – you name you want to do it. But of course our personal favourite is “my wish is to engage in all manner of sex, really enjoy it without ever falling sick”. Yep that’s us all over – keep is good’n safe.

3. This might be a Haus Kaus thing (or maybe not) but food and sex fantasies came in at number 3.  You want to “swim in pomegranate seeds” have “chocolate mountains and chocolate fall” or quite unusually “threesome with a man doused in maple syrup and a woman wrapped in newspaper”.

Number 4 was (tra ra ra) girl on girl fantasies. In “bath tubs with petals” “wearing a dildo” “getting totally soaked in my partners cunt” and the poignant ” if you were here, we would lean into each other, duck into lanes, extract the real use from each other and life would be good. But you’re not, so I got it alone” . Ahh.

And at number 5 is a category that we classified simply a poetic – we cannot possibly do justice to the term in the space we have here. We will need to come back to it- and especially a wonderful poem that was given to us about bamboo, filtered sunlight and a cool pool of water. But here a taster or the others – your fantasies included “magnificent pink” and “trek to the hidden waterfall and romp naked with caveman beats”.

At number 6 was public sex. You are fantasizing about being super drunk and having sex with people you don’t know ( is that possible in these days of facebook…and oh have the youth of today lost the possibility of the totally anonymous fuck ), to act in porn movies  and even“the library scene from Atonement”.

Lastly we had a couple of very well described scenes where lovers turn into something else – in our case a mermaid or a cat who lived in a house under the water of the Yamuna. They were wonderful and we were there in that moment of morphing lovers as we read them. The “salt touched breasts ” “how you would love every glistening fishy scale before you had to leave heading for dry land again”.

We has a few fantasies very kindly given to us that did not fit any of these categories – and for that reason we are greedily holding them back for another time, another blog. Leaving you fantasy richer with the selection from a fun  Sunday night and with a slight sense of delayed gratification.

After all we don’t want to overwhelm you – but leave you feeling merely satisfied with the Hauz Kaus fantasy deposit into our global open source fantasy collection project. There is, after all,   nothing safer than reading a fantasy.

Enjoy. Thank you Hauz Kaus. We love you….

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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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