Happy New Year Pleasure Propagandists ! Its been quite a year out there for pleasure and safer sex.
The year really kicked off for us when we attended an International Women’s Day Festival in London although we got a bit depressed about the lack of encouragement for women to seek pleasure. We did find a pussy blanket that was magnificent, and not unlike our very own Great Wall of Vagina and we take part in a wild session about feminist porn or the ability to make explicit materials that are sexy, consensual and hot. The audience trumped the panel for entertainment values with the sweetest mum in the world making a daring confession spurred on by discovering cherry lube in his room. However, the debate was terrible with polarized positions, complete lack of evidence and personal emotional attacks. And to top it all no one mentioned sexual health or well-being. Porn was being blamed with causing sexual violence in the Congo to erectile dysfunction in ten year olds in the UK. We agreed there needs to be better research especially on access to internet porn, which allows unheard of ease to see hard core porn.
And of course the world needs to still wake up to lube and safer sex.
In the meantime getting frustrated about the lack of any informed debate on good safe porn we wrote a chapter (hurrah) in the rather brilliant book focused on pleasure ..Could watching porn increase our expectations of safe pleasure ?
‘Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure’ published by Zed We give our new view of harm reduction and the possibilities of good safe sex in porn and some of the wonderful people who do just that. We quote a few brilliant dirty writers who always do it safe to show how much the safer sex world has to learn about pleasure from the pleasure world. The book is filled with pleasure propogandists talking good sense such as Jo Doezema who busts some myths about sex workers and pleasure, such as ….they never getting it at work or that sex work is ’easy money’. Jo talks sex workers as ‘pleasure professionals’ have a huge amount of skills to teach non sex workers about pleasure, something we could not agree more with at Pleasure Towers, as the best good safe sex skills can often be traced back to a sex worker.
And then in March Bill Gates dared to say the word pleasure…..and issued a call for more pleasurable condoms. WOW. We held onto our hats and
got quite excited. It felt like the Pleasure WAVE was building and we also had pleasure articles on national US radio and the Huffington Post. So we said “Hurrah!” to the Gates Grand Challenge – but with some trepidation – as the call asks for only ‘product changing’ proposals. This is not just a techno fix…We know that the biggest sexual organ is the brain. …
That is a vibrating cock ring feels sexy, why can’t the ring of a female condom ? Or if a tight fitting latex pants are hot ?
Why can’t the slow roll of a condom down a dick feel the same way ?
But onward and upward….and upward indeed. In April we were featured in a rather brilliant article in The Guardian ‘Lets be more open about the Joy of Sex’ In this our work to map pleasure work and see pleasure as the primary motivation for sex as a positive and a way forward. The Pleasure Project took part in an online chat with The Guardian about how sex education needs to move away from the mechanics of sex to the skills and joy of it.
In May, International Masturbation Month we urged you all to take pleasure into our own hands and have some good safe solo sex and got a mention in the New Yorker about our pleasure salons in Delhi’s bookstores..
Later in the year we were asked to give an Ignite Talk at the HIVOS Open for Change which brought a huge range of social innovators to Rotterdam to talk about how they are changing the world. We heard about alternative currencies in Brazil, art in Kenya and computer gaming for social change. We also gave an Ignite Talk, a rather petrifying experience..called the TED X on speed.….
and ran a workshop with the rather Brilliant ‘O Project’ our long lost sister spreading the word about the beauty of female pleasure in Indonesia.
The year wrapped up with a BIG bang. We launched our new website and tool kit ‘ The Trainers Guide to the Secrets of Mixing Pleasure and Prevention‘ at the Bangkok AIDS conference.
We hosted a packed out satellite meeting ‘Saying Yes to Good Safe Sex’ with interesting debates about the skills needed to have good and safer sex, but also some interesting questions to one of our speakers. See the chat on twitter. Ana Santos, ever the good sport got down on all fours to show some really practical ways to have good safe sex. Arushi talks about it all here and how the audience called for some pleasure GPS. And videos of the workshop attendees selling good hot safe sex are here.
We also launched in partnership a good sexy erotic video site Tongue in Cheek TV with real couples enjoying satisfying good safer sex and a huge video library to download for your pleasure.. Here is a snap from one of the scenes..and take a look at the videos. You can try three for free..
See you all in 2014 for more hot safe sex…