Prioritising Pleasure

Often young people criticise school sexuality education for presenting sexual activity ‘like it's some kind of scientific thing’ focused on reproduction and/or diseases. The young people I have interviewed desire that ‘real’ experiences of pleasure be included in the teaching material - seeking that sexuality education embody and normalise sex, rather than disembody and de-eroticise it in the way that they had observed it was. Research participant Chloe put it this way:

“They talked about penises and vaginas and STDs and condoms, and all that sort of stuff, but they didn’t talk about pleasure or multiple orgasming or cunnilingus or fellatio - they didn’t talk about any of THAT stuff… No one had told me how pleasurable it could be.”

A UK study found that out of a possible 31-item list of topics regarding sex and sexuality ‘how to make sexual activity enjoyable for both partners’ was the issue most young people wanted to learn about. This is a positive and heartening finding – that when it comes to sex, young people are most keen to learn about how to make sex pleasurable for their partner.

Locally, findings of the National Survey of Australian Secondary Students and Sexual Health (2018) detailed high school students desire for sex positivity and pleasure to be a greater focus in school sex ed.

Most consent education centres on the management of risk and danger. Here at Learning Consent, we teach a communicative approach to consent. It is predicated on the assumption that the aim of consensual sex is mutual pleasure. We teach young people to consider three key principles when it comes to negotiating consent – pleasure, responsibility, and communication.

Given that we know young people are keen to learn about pleasure, situating consent as a process of negotiating mutual pleasure aligns with their priorities for sexual learning. A communicative approach is just as much about the pursuit of mutual pleasure as it is about the avoidance of harm or danger.

Sexual self-esteem is defined as ‘feeling capable of being involved in safe and pleasurable sexual practices’ and that is essentially what we are all about at Learning Consent. That is our end goal – that the young people we are working with feel capable of making ethical sexual decisions and are equipped to lead healthy, enjoyable and meaningful sex lives when the time is right for them. Prioritising pleasure in consent education programs is a critical factor for ensuring sexual self-esteem.