Editor’s note: This section is a fairly long discussion, around 3000 words. We’d suggest around a 10-15 minute window to read it in detail.

When we think of pleasure, most of us think immediately about sex. But of course, pleasure covers much more than that. Consider, for example, the pleasure of a delicious hot meal, savoured on a chilly winter evening in front a roaring fire. A crisp, cool drink enjoyed with dear friends, served to you outdoors in the summer sunshine. A smile or an unexpected kiss bestowed upon you by somebody you love. These too, are all legitimate sources of pleasure. This research project, Pleasure Unplugged, aims to explore the entire spectrum of real female pleasure, from the innocent to the downright naughty.

The experience of pleasure can be a revolutionary act. On a physical, mental and emotional level, the experience of pleasure keeps us healthier, fitter, stronger and happier. It’s an essential part of the foundation for honest, loving and fulfilling relationships.

A moment of pure pleasure in fact, can pop you right out of space and time. You are, if only for a split second, completely in the moment, free of the tragedies of the past, the concerns of the future. Momentarily, you find yourself suspended in a space where the mind, body and emotions are in complete harmony. These moments of pure pleasure can arise from a myriad of situations, unique for each individual.

Pleasure is a wholly subjective, wondrous and multi-faceted thing to be celebrated, studied and enjoyed so we can better understand our own pleasure and that of others.

But there is a problem. Whilst information about male pleasure abounds – pick up any mainstream woman’s mag or typical porn flick and you’ll soon find lots of handy tips on how to please a man – where on earth do you go to find out what gives real women pleasure? Men are not given this information and woman are not encouraged to share it. The objective of Pleasure Unplugged is to provide exactly such a resource.

Let’s take a look at why that’s so important right now, more than at any other moment in history.

Female pleasure is routinely ignored by mainstream porn’s ‘male gaze’

The answer to the question of where most men (and boys) go to find out about the world of adult pleasure is that mostly they go to free, online porn. Here, they will find much attention is given to male pleasure. Produced predominantly by men, for men, the mainstream porn industry is brilliant at (mis)representing women as mindless, brainless, emotionless empty vessels, just waiting to be filled in by whoever (or whatever) happens to be in the nearby vicinity. Whilst this kind of crude gender stereotyping has been around in porn for decades, its increasingly violent nature and prevalence in mainstream popular culture – brought about by technology, the age of the internet and the phenomenal rise of the smartphone – has not.

In typical online porn scenarios, male pleasure and indeed men themselves are routinely equated with violent behaviour against women, whilst the emotions of love, tenderness and the art of seduction are rarely touched upon. Rape, gang bangs, violence and child sex are amongst the hottest topics on today’s porn scene, reinforcing the increasingly insidious rape culture that is so prevalent in our troubled, modern societies.

Double-think: pain and poverty packaged as pleasure

Porn, we are led to believe, is a pleasure product, dedicated to producing feelings of arousal in the viewer. Scenarios otherwise known to be illegal, painful, humiliating and disturbing are presented as titillating. They are consumed by billions of men, rapidly increasing numbers of women and countless children, who are being taught that the use of a woman’s body as a submissive receptacle for the most shallow pleasure of others is normal, acceptable and desirable.

The modern, mainstream porn industry is known to be populated by countless women who have been bullied, conned, or sold into becoming part of the sordid, tragic and illegal human trafficking that this industry feeds off.  Girls and women (plus boys and young men) from all over the world, but especially from war savaged or impoverished countries, are routinely sold into sex-slavery, their personal tragedy coldly repackaged and sold as a pleasure product. Some are forced into brothels, some to street hawking. Still others are channeled into filmed prostitution, which is essentially what today’s porn industry is.

Of course, there are also those struggling to bring up a child on their own, or those who are suffering from mental illness and/or addictions. Still others, ambitious and intelligent but locked into an increasingly cynical late consumer capitalist economic model, simply need the money to pay for their university fees so they can one day be a scientist, teacher, lawyer or artist. For many it is an unpleasant question of economics.

Porn power struggles and alternative pleasure products

That is not to say that all female sex-workers are tragic victims, nor is it to say that there is no porn that does not take female pleasure into account. Numbers of female consumers of porn are on the increase along with the amount of women making, producing and directing alternative sub-genres, such as feminist and lesbian porn.

Whilst lesbian porn, commonly known as ‘girl-on-girl,’ is clearly the most attentive to female pleasure,  it is still (with some notable exceptions) often made by men, for men. Moreover, lesbian porn, even when made by women, is not very helpful in illuminating the pleasure of billions of heterosexual women, whose likes and dislikes remain a mystery.

Ethical porn, meanwhile, aims to provide decent working conditions and re-numeration for both its male and female performers (wages, breaks, healthcare, contracts etc) and what’s more, there is a growing niche market for ‘real sex’ websites with profit share schemes for contributors on a pay-per-view basis. Cindy Gallop’s Make Love Not Porn and Erika Lust’s XConfessions are two excellent examples of inspired attempts by women to make porn a more appropriate vehicle for those interested in female pleasure (ie, most women!).

The answer to stopping the abuse of women in porn, many suggest, is to buy porn, using the logic that it’s mainly free, online porn that is abusive to women. Whilst this may be true to an extent, this argument does not even begin to solve the problem of the huge amount of children (or anyone without a bank account or with a lack of disposable cash) whose sole access to porn is exactly that lowest common denominator: free, online porn. It’s not only easily accessible – it’s said by many to be highly addictive. Fora detailed database of neurological studies pertaining to this, just check out Your Brain on Porn. Moreover, at closer inspection, a good chunk of paid for, ‘ethical’ porn is produced by exactly the same people who are producing the ‘abusive’ free porn.

What is clear is that whilst there are inspired, albeit minority attempts by some remarkable women and men to improve the misogynistic nature of the mainstream porn industry, it’s not enough. These measures do not sufficiently address the main cultural and social problems that modern use of online porn is creating.

Namely, that the more people who are relying on or addicted to fantasy porn scenarios for pleasure, the fewer people are achieving happy, fulfilled relationships out here in the real world where commonplace violent porn scenarios are both repulsive and illegal. Not to mention having very little to do with actual female pleasure. Women can only receive the pleasure they deserve, and men can only effectively give it to them if they both understand the truth of it.

Women of the world, together, we can write a new, true story about female pleasure.

The age of the internet: addicted to porn

Right now, the mainstream online porn industry, reliant as much of it is upon female pain and/or poverty, is increasingly the first source of information our sexual partners and children receive about the nature of human sexual pleasure. Porn is currently the number one global resource amongst young people for sex education. Sex, particularly penetrative sex, is held up in porn as the be-all and end-all of female sexual pleasure, an extremely misguided assumption which, as most women will tell you, is also painfully incorrect. It’s the view of the editors of Pleasure Unplugged, that we women must set the record straight.

Internet addiction is now a well-documented fact, despite still waiting to be officially classified as a psychiatric disorder. Pornography is said to be the most addictive online genre of all. It is estimated there are countless internet porn addicts who experience a range of unexpected and unpleasant effects in their real life, as Greg Wilson shows very clearly in his critically acclaimed Ted Talk, The Great Porn Experiment. From erectile dysfunction and anxiety to ADHD type symptoms and depression, internet porn addiction is having a devastating effect on many boys and young men. Children who become addicted to porn (as they are in growing numbers) experience changes in the neural pathways of the brain due to the young brain’s neuroplasticity (how the brain responds and changes in response to experience). The brain releases dopamine when porn is watched, and then each subsequent time the addict goes for their ‘dose’ of porn, they need more stimulation to get the same ‘hit,’ leading to the need for ever more extreme sexual images to get the same pleasure rush.

Men stereotyped and misrepresented by porn

It must be noted that men too are the victims of misrepresentation by the porn industry. They are objectified en-masse as aggressively sex-mad hyper-masculine predators who are always on the lookout for an easy, emotionless sexual encounter. This is in direct contrast to the reality of many men, who like women, have emotions and pleasures that run much deeper. In the world of porn, it seems that the most important attribute for a male is a large and constantly erect penis. Always gagging for it, the male porn stereotype ruthlessly sets most men up for failure.

For this reason, men themselves are becoming increasingly involved in the traditionally female realm of the fight for fair representation. As men begin to feel the pressure to conform to the violent and unpleasant manufactured ideals of masculinity spewed out routinely by the mainstream porn industry, a glimmer of hope shines out as men and women join voices. Those voices are saying that the truth must be told. Truths like, guess what? Men sometimes take pleasure in touching, kissing, loving and tenderness just as much as real women do.

Ladies and gentlemen, girls and boys the truth is, we are all being shafted (hard) by the modern, mainstream porn industry (pun absolutely intended) and it has to stop.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.  Buckminster Fuller

The time is ripe, right now, for real men and women to open up a dialogue about who they really are and what their pleasure really is. Because at the moment, both sexes are being hopelessly misinformed as to the nature of each other’s pleasure by a cynical, hard-nosed industry that profits from crime, poverty and the insidious nature of internet addiction. The mainstream online porn industry in its current form is socially toxic, unethical and in particular, is an extremely poor example to our impressionable young children whose brains are still developing. Studies indicate that children with access to smartphones are typically encountering hardcore internet porn at an average of 11 years old, sometimes actively seeking it out, but more often stumbling across it or shown by others. What effect is this unparalleled social experiment having on our young people?

Porn as sex-education: children learning WHAT about each other’s pleasure?

Young boys, too immature to realize that typical porn sex is a twisted caricature of the physical intimacy and emotional closeness that rises from healthy relationships, think that being like a dog-on-heat, sexually aggressive porn star is what will make girls like them (which of course they want). This desensitization and crude stereotyping of young boys can lead to complete sexual paralysis as the boy fears he will never measure up. Or even more sinisterly, it can lead to violent sexual behavior as early exposure to hard porn along with adolescent naivety and modern social media combine into a potential recipe for disaster.

Young girls, too immature to realize that typical porn sex is a twisted caricature of the physical intimacy and emotional closeness that rises from healthy relationships, think that emulating an always-hot-for-it porn star will make the boys like them (which of course they want). This hyper-sexualization of young girls is leading to a steady rise in depression and self-harming from those who do not feel pretty or sexy enough to live up to the wannabe porn star stereotype. Or even more sinisterly, for the young girls who bow to the pressure and acquiesce to the porn-star image, we are seeing ever more bullying, sexual assaults and suicides, as adolescent naivety, early exposure to hard porn and modern social media combine into a potential recipe for tragedy.

The future

With regard to adult pleasure, we could well be in the process of raising the most misinformed generation the World has ever seen. As we have discussed, what the porn industry presents as desirable, illicit pleasure is often based on the exact opposite for many of the females involved in its production, not to mention the countless numbers who are alienated by its content. Male sexual violence is normalized by mainstream porn and the results on real women’s lives can be horrific.

Traditionally, and one may argue quite naturally, being the recipient of a violent sexual assault, filmed or otherwise, was rarely the career aspiration of your average young female. Currently, thanks to the pervasiveness of porn images in today’s online media, where the porn-star image has become darkly fashionable and increasingly mainstream, being sexually abused by strangers on camera is in fact, increasingly seen by young girls as a legitimate career choice. Would you be happy if one of those girls was your daughter? Sister? Mother?

It seems clear enough that such extreme images represent a distorted and damaging introduction to the theme of adult pleasure for curious, naive, impressionable young people. Those young people are our sons and daughters. Our sisters, brothers and grandchildren.

Understanding pleasure is important for healthy human relationships

All this is a great shame as approached sensitively, the concept of sexual images and information online could be enormously helpful and instructive. Since the dawn of time, we have been curious about and aroused by looking at images of sexual intimacy between others. One can safely assume that this is completely normal. The Kama Sutra is just one example of the historical importance given by ancient cultures to provide instruction on how to give and receive sexual pleasure. There are many more. There is even erotic cave art. The problem is the clumsy, incorrect and unhelpful modern medium of misogynistic online porn, currently used to convey this important human information.

Many agree that a different perspective is needed. Pleasure Unplugged will provide one, via a vibrant, juicy database of real female pleasure. One that explores and explains the actual pleasure of real women, which may or may not be based on the violent and emotionless penetration of their most private bodily orifices. Because as most females would agree, whilst a hard sex session can occasionally be very pleasurable, it’s not for all women and certainly not all the time. Likewise, whilst women may fantasize about violent sex and rape scenarios in the privacy of her imagination and the safety of her own home, its a rare woman who actually wants to be the victim of such real-life horror.

The truth about female pleasure

Pleasure Unplugged is not against explicit adult media per se. There will always be a demand for explicit images of consenting adults getting it on. The aim of this project is not to deny any adult, male or female, the autonomy to take pleasure in what they choose, assuming that pleasure is not at the cost of someone else’s unwanted pain and tragedy.

Our complaint about mainstream online porn is its absolute disregard for the pleasure of a huge swathe of the World’s real women. That and its insidious miseducation of men and boys who are increasingly unaware of what does give women pleasure and what really doesn’t.

There are many serious, scholarly studies into the harm caused by porn and the relationship between porn and prostitution. If you’re interested in delving more deeply into this kind of research, I invite you to check out a few of the resources listed in the main menu of this site.

But for now, and for the purposes of this project, our focus is very specifically on female pleasure. Being aware of the problems is very important. But equally important is to devise solutions that challenge the standard porn worldview: that sexual violence against women is generally pleasurable for them. This project aims to present a uniquely woman-centred view of female pleasure. Most people have heard of the horrors that exist for women – how many have heard of the beauty we experience?

If we females wait for others to tell of our pleasure, I fear we will wait a very long time. As long as there is profit in producing cheap, misogynistic porn, no matter how harmful to human health and relationships, the industry will continue to bulldoze merrily along.

So. Let’s tell a different story, a true story. Let’s tell of our pleasure ourselves. Speaking in our thousands. In our millions. Muslim women, Christian women, fat women, pagan women, thin women, tall women, good women, bad women, gay women, trans women, black women, white women, brown women, rich women, poor women… you get the picture. Let’s make it beautiful for others to read. A treasure trove of truth. That is the mission of Pleasure Unplugged.

Pleasure Unplugged is important because it’s a snapshot of the truth. And there is nothing more powerful than a truth whose time has come. Women of the world, speak out! 

Click here to answer the Pleasure Unplugged questionnaire now