Embracing the pleasure of being an erotic expert at the Porn Film Festival Berlin
By Ana P. Santos
Can you be erotic and still be seen as an expert?
If you follow The Pleasure Project on Instagram, you’ll see that I kind of took over the IG stories to share a daily selfie of what I wore for my assignment to report on the Porn Film Festival Berlin (PFF Berlin).
I’d like to thank you for indulging my #OOTDs. In this blog post, I tell you the reason behind my self-indulgence.
In a Facebook post, my friend, sex therapist Dr. Rica Cruz, wrote about how people are sometimes confused by her provocative photos on IG and her work as a therapist. Is she erotic or a person of authority as an expert? The person she was talking to told her that her problem was she could not be erotic and still be seen as an expert in her field. She could only be one or the other.
Seriously?!
I started my journalism career writing a sex column for a now out of print sex men’s magazine. My writing has since expanded to reporting on the intersections of gender and sexuality with development and public health issues like labor migration and HIV, but whenever I would write something that tested my knowledge about sexuality, I would always be questioned.
Case in point, when I was asked to a write piece about Viagra, I had to interview urologists who were usually men. They always questioned if I could credibly write about Viagra–as a woman. One asked me if I was married, as if my civil status determined my writing skills.
“No, I’m not. But I guarantee you, I know enough about the topic to write about it,” I told him.
“I am also the other client (of Viagra), you know,” I told another.
As a journalist, I have to dress to what the assignment calls for. I’ve worn a flak jacket and a Kevlar in a war zone, hiking boots with soles like tires for the traction needed for me to walk through the mounds of thick creamy mud in villages drowned by typhoons, and a Hooters Girl uniform to review the restaurant opening. For the PFF Berlin, I wore mesh and leather. I didn’t really have to. Plenty of attendees were wearing clothes that anyone would have in their closet, but I so much wanted to make a point. For my friend, Rica. For me. And for everyone who works in the vast field of sexuality and is dismissed in one way or another for it.
Ana Santos, a pleasure expert photo by Robert Wilde
In writing, there is the principle of “show, don’t tell”. So my OOTD showed how I was being my erotic and expert self, chasing interviews, writing copious notes as I watched films and took in the scene in the cinema and on the dancefloor. When the PFF Berlin official photographer stopped me while I was typing notes on my iPAD to take my photo for the festival website, I was thrilled.
In the Pleasure Project, there is the Pleasure Principle called Embrace Learning. It is based on the need for public health interventions that consider sexual pleasure as a main motivator for sex and for encouraging safer sex. Even the World Health Organization put some erotic behind their health expert vibe when they published a report that called for considering pleasure in designing sexual health programs because, “sexual pleasure can be an important success factor for improving knowledge around sex and uptake of safer sex practices such as condom use.”
To embrace learning means moving away from using traditional research methods and interventions that view sexual health, sexuality, and sex education only from a clinical perspective. You’ll know what this means when you think about all the messages you got about sex growing up—the ones that focused on fear and disease.
Sex and sex education can be healthy and sexy. Educational and erotic. Factual and fun.
Just as anyone can be both playfully erotic and authoritative experts.
A journalist
Still a journalist
I will learn. I will write. I will be erotic and an expert in my field. Whatever I wear.