Germany/Philippines
She/Her
2021 Cohort
Ana P. Santos is an award-winning journalist reporting on sexuality, sexual health, and female migrant labour. Her writing about culturally taboo topics such as sexuality, sexual and reproductive health challenges damaging societal expectations about women’s roles and helps bridge the gap between vulnerable women in Philippine society and legislators who draft policies that affect their right to work, their right to decide about their body, and their right to own their future
Middle Me: stories of sex and pleasure after 40 
Ana P. Santos is an award-winning journalist reporting on sexuality, sexual health, and female migrant labour. Her writing about culturally taboo topics such as sexuality, sexual and reproductive health challenges damaging societal expectations about women’s roles and helps bridge the gap between vulnerable women in Philippine society and legislators who draft policies that affect their right to work, their right to decide about their body, and their right to own their future. Additionally, her stories have helped open narratives for female pleasure in the Philippines. She holds a postgraduate degree in Gender (Sexuality) at the London School of Economics as a Chevening scholar.
During the Pleasure Fellowship, Ana worked on her podcast “Middle Me: stories of sex and pleasure after 40” where she intends to shed light of the sex lives and experiences of pleasure of middle aged Filipino women. In her podcast, Ana and her guests from very diverse backgrounds, discuss and tackle different topics surrounding the experiences of women’s pleasure after 40. Ana has been actively engaged with The Pleasure Project, participating in an online advocacy module for pleasure based sexual health for IPPF and doing coverage of the Berlin Porn Film Festival, among other things.
Currently, Ana writes for different media outlets including Rappler, Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times and more. She has recently written an article on The Pleasure Principles for Vogue Philippines and has recently launched her new project along with Rappler titled ‘Sex and Sensibilities’.
Highlights
“Middle Me: stories of sex and pleasure after 40” is a podcast that tackles mid-life or middle-age, that awkward age between your 40s-50s, where you are neither too young nor too old.
Currently, the discussions around middle-age are either clinical and focus on managing the symptoms of menopause or “ageing successfully” and fighting off the physical effects of ageing like wrinkles. Either way, the emotional and psychological minefield of navigating mid-life is a blind spot – most especially when it comes to female pleasure, sexuality, and desire. The sub-text of this gap in information is that pleasure and sexuality are youthful pursuits that are foreclosed once you reach a certain age--as if female sexuality has an expiration date. Instead of fighting off ageing, what if middle-age were embraced as another life stage with particular milestones that could be enjoyed? What if it could be explored it for its promise of liberation and self-love? What would we find out about women’s feelings about pleasure, sexuality, and desire and how it intersects with age and changing social norms? “Middle Me” is an opportunity for other middle-aged women share their stories through this life stage and their explorations of sexuality and pleasure and their realizations about their identity. It is hoped that sharing these stories would other women and people who identify as women, feel less alone…and perhaps a little less lost.
"I think the most important thing for me was finding the camaraderie. I was always felt alone advocating sex positivity in the Philippines. I was always so concerned about going all out on sex. Who was you gonna talk to about this fear of what my family or kid would think. This is what I want to do, but how do I do that? I could never voice out those things with other people. As a journalist, I had focused a lot on human rights and oppression, that side of the gender and diverse identity experience. And it always made me think: “when do I get to talk about joy?". (The pleasure fellows) was a group where I could freely — and safely — share my anxieties and hopes with”.
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