This SRHM collection is being launched in collaboration with The Pleasure Project and Agents of Ishq:
two international organisations that follow a pleasure-focused approach to sex education and advocate for a sex-positive world. The collection highlights content that explores the often-neglected subject of sexual pleasure, as well as the need to destigmatise and engage with the politics of pleasure to achieve holistic sexual and reproductive health and rights. Traditionally, the development and health sector has viewed sexual life in terms of what to avoid – such as death, danger and disease – but this collection acknowledges that pleasure is both a motivation and a desirable outcome for many people.
We hope to help create safe spaces to explore desires and engage with experiences of pleasure, as well as an expansive approach of pleasure politics. We wish to see more pleasure-rich knowledge that would lead to broader senses of love and liberation.
Because Pleasure is Progress and Pleasure Matters.
Papers from the SRHM Journal
EDITORIAL
Finding the cosmos of intimacies: where pleasurable safe sex dances with liberation (2024)
Anne Philpott & Paromita Vohra
Opening a portal to pleasure based sexual and reproductive health around the globe; a qualitative analysis and best practice development study (2023)
Rhiana Mills, Katie Northcott, Emese Kovacs & Anne Philpott
Sexual and reproductive health and rights and bodily autonomy in a digital world (2023)
Rajat Khosla, Vidisha Mishra & Sagri Singh
Assessing acceptability and effectiveness of a pleasure-oriented sexual and reproductive health chatbot in Kenya: an exploratory mixed-methods study (2023)
Julius Njogu, Grace Jaworski, Christine Oduor, Aarons Chea, Alison Malmqvist & Claire W. Rothschild
Lubricants for the promotion of sexual health and well-being: a systematic review (2022)
Caitlin E. Kennedy, Ping Teresa Yeh, Jingjia Li, Lianne Gonsalves & Manjulaa Narasimhan
Sexual health, sexual rights and sexual pleasure: meaningfully engaging the perfect triangle (2019)
Sofia Gruskin, Vithika Yadav, Antón Castellanos-Usigli, Gvantsa Khizanishvili & Eszter Kismödi
The Pleasuremeter: exploring the links between sexual health, sexual rights and sexual pleasure in sexual history-taking, SRHR counselling and education (2019)
Antón Castellanos-Usigli & Doortje Braeken-van Schaik
Pleasure, sex, prohibition, intellectual disability, and dangerous ideas (2017)
Natasha Alexander & Miriam Taylor Gomez
Skin, Tooth, and Bone – The Basis of Movement is Our People: A Disability Justice Primer (2017)
Sins Invalid
Headline violence and silenced pleasure: contested framings of consensual sex, power and rape in Delhi, India 2011-2014 (2016)
Emme Edmunds & Ankit Gupta
The Arab Bed Spring? Sexual rights in troubled times across the Middle East and North Africa (2015)
Shereen El Feki
“Sex is sweet”: women from low-income contexts in Uganda talk about sexual desire and pleasure (2015)
Florence Kyoheirwe Muhanguzi
Pleasure and Prevention: When Good Sex Is Safer Sex (2006)
Anne Philpott, Wendy Knerr & Vicky Boydell
Blogs
Sex tech for sexual health, rights and justice: findings from the first public interest sex tech hackathon (2022)
Zahra Stardust, Kath Albury and Jenny Kennedy
Pleasure and Pride (2022)
Anne Philpott & Amanda Kamanda
Talking taboo: can female masturbation be good for reproductive health? (2021)
Jessica Bo
Adolescents and sexual education during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond (2021)
Lucy Guan
Pleasurable sex as a human right: an idea that has happily caught up to its constituents (2019)
Christopher Purdy
Poetry
Wellbeing (2021)
Alice d’Aboville
Podcasts
Pleasure Matters (2022)
Anne Philpott, Ana Santos, Mahmoud Garga & Jessica Sanders
Webinars
Sexual pleasure in times of COVID-19 (2020)
Anne Philpott, Dr. T Mofokeng & Vithika Yadav