A Pleasurable 2011 from all of us at The Pleasure Project
you to all our fans, friends and fellow pleasure propagandists for your support over the year – here is our round up of the year of Pleasure and Safer Sex ..
January – Sari Rippers in Jaipur
The Pleasure Project has had an exciting year spreading the joy of good safe sex all over the world. We started the year in the UK and India. In Brighton, UK we attended a meeting about pleasure and women’s empowerment – we debated the links for example “Can sexual pleasure be a mark of women’s empowerment?”. We vote yes.
We voted yes Then we urged her to include sexy descriptions of safer sex in her “sari rippers” that get huge audiences in India.
February – Excitement in Ethiopia
By February we were preaching our pleasure message at the “4th African Conference on Sexual Rights” in Addis with Support, the female condom people, where we advocated how female condoms can be as exciting as sex toys. A theme we have been building on through the year and here is a film made with our help. We were also excited to see a whole session at the conference devoted for desire and pleasure.
W e hit the high spot with mainstream attention from playboy magazine in April, with a feature on porn, safer sex and women directors.
May –Vaginas in Delhi
July – Playing with ourselves in Vienna
The high point of our year however was the amount of attention our Good. Safe. Sex campaign got at the AIDS 2010 conference in Vienna, Austria. All we did was highlight that masturbation is safe and more people should do it….but maybe what got people talking was highlighting that people do and can have sex at AIDS conferences in many ways by spanking, sending naughty sms or indeed writing fantasies. We loved the fantasies we were sent about sofa sex, anonymous encounters and presenting in front of a crowd. We got a special mention in the plenary and heaps of press coverage. Although we were surprised that some epidemiologists seriously questioned the rigour of our research – how dare they we personally counte d each and every one of those wanks and spanks 😉
October – Condoms in Porn
After those heady heights we slowed down a little towards the end of 2010 and just got outraged yet again that condoms are not yet compulsory in porn after the latest HIV infections in California and that not enough people in the porn industry agree. We remember the 2005 infections were just after The Pleasure Project was founded when we were working on the set of a porn film, and the actors and actresses were very keen to use condoms.
November – Pleasure in Condom Programming
The International Planned Parenthood Federation has been getting more and more excited about pleasure and we have been pleased to work with them and exchange tips. They highlighted pleasure and our work in their resource young people and disability resource in 2007 and then produced “Happy, Healthly and Hot” which highlights the right to pleasure for people with HIV . In November we featured in their HIV newsletter and blog with a great article by Arushi Singh.
December – Lube in your stocking?
We signed off in 2010 singing the praises of lube and hoping that you got some in your stocking. It’s the great unsung hero of sexual health and we may soon have a lube that not only makes using condoms more fun but may protect against HIV itself. Hip Hip Hurrah for Lube…..