Pleasure Matters

We are thrilled to invite you to a dynamic and engaging webinar co-hosted by Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters (SRHM), The Pleasure Project and the Agents of Ishq, in commemoration of World Sexual Health Day.

This is a uniquely significant occasion: we're launching The Pleasure Project and Agents of Ishq's editorial and the first Special Collection of the SRHM Journal on sexual pleasure. With over 30 years of advocacy and research combined, we’re bringing you a wealth of knowledge and excitement.

Why Attend?

- Insightful Discussions: Hear from feminist researchers, pleasure activists, and the brilliant authors behind the collection.

- Innovative Approaches: Break away from the traditional view of sexual life as mostly risky, fraught with disease, shame, and constant threats and embrace a radical understanding of pleasure as political.

- Global Expertise: Learn about pleasure from a global perspective through local, lived experiences.

Who are we?

Agents of Ishq (AOI) is a pathbreaking multimedia comprehensive sexuality education project enabling conversations about about sex, love and desire for young Indians in English and Hindi, across online and offline spaces. Using a feminist, arts-based approach, AOI shifts conversations about sex and sexual life from culturally polarised, negative and shame-fostering to pleasure-positive, honest, rooted and inclusive. 

The Pleasure Project builds bridges between the public health world and the pleasure and sex industry, and helps to develop the evidence base for a sex-positive and pleasure-based approach to sexual health and rights. The Pleasure Project has been putting the sexy into safer sex for twenty years and are the leading global voice advocating for pleasure based sexual health.

Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters is the only global organisation linked to a scientific, highly reputed journal in the field of sexual and reproductive health (SRH) that provides an independent voice, has a long-time, trusted reputation, and offers space to a truly global network of researchers, policy makers, programme managers, lawyers and activists in the field of SRH.

We believe that rights- and evidence-based knowledge is power.

Hosts

Eszter Kismödi is the Chief Executive of Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters (SRHM). She is an international human rights lawyer specialising in sexuality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and gender diversity.

Anne Philpott founded The Pleasure Project in 2004, in frustration of the avoidance of pleasure in sexual health. She is passionate about ensuring pleasure based sexual health becomes the norm, and created the first evidence to prove it is significantly more effective than negatively framed sex education.

Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker, writer, Founder and Creative Director of Agents of Ishq. Her work focuses on gender, feminism, urban life, desire and popular culture and spans many forms.

Panellists

Shereen El Feki is the Director for Solidarity for Change and Voice (S4CV) at the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). A British-Canadian-Egyptian writer, academic, and activist on sexualities and masculinities in the Arab region, she is best known for her book, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World.

Lawrence Shapiro is a validated Deaf and Disability Artist with the Canada Council for the Arts and a leading disabled dancer in his native Canada. His current book on the physically disabled dancer will be published next year by Routledge Press in the UK. In addition Lawrence is a published researcher on sex and disability. His writing on sex and disability has appeared in a variety of journals including Disability Studies Quarterly, Canadian Scholar's Press as well as SRHM. A proud member of SHADA, the UK's leading organization on sexual empowerment for the disabled, he is passionate about sex and disability and plans to write a book about how physically disabled men experience sexual surrogacy. Lawrence will be sharing his views and experiences with British-based sexual surrogates and the critical role pleasure plays in the political empowerment of the disabled man.

Zahra Stardust is a sexual media scholar working at the intersections of sexuality, technology, and social justice. She is the author of Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation and Resistance (Duke University Press).