Pleasure and Safety: The Issues at Stake

Placing Pleasure and Desire Centrally in Our Work, TARSHI (India)/Ford Foundation, One of the most lively, interesting, and certainly relevant Conference sessions, the panellists were from the Philippines and India - working with young people, men who have sex with other men, and lesbians. They criticised the lack of prominence of pleasure and desire in the discourse and work in public sexual and reproductive health programs. Using language that clearly reflects their philosophies of emphasizing pleasure and desire in sex and sexuality, panellists lamented how public health programs can be and possibly are already new forms of control in the way religious and state authorities have controlled our sexualities. Strongly based in qualitative methodology, the panellists showed convincingly that categories such as "sex workers" are poor, since they do not define pleasure giving and taking in a sophisticated way. In other words, sex workers are not just passive "victims" but often actively negotiate their agency in front of an admittedly coercive setting.