It’s the finale of season four! Thank you to all our guests and pleasure podders for making this a brilliant season, we’ve reached more people than ever before. We love our growing community and thrilled to know you’re as passionate as us when it comes to talking about pleasure. I’m taking a break to have my babies, but we’ll be back in January with a brand-new season. Don’t worry, there’s a juicy archive of episodes to explore so please dig in. But now for our finale guest, and this really is a special one…

It’s international changemaker, Black Pride co-founder, MBE rejecting, aptly named Lady Phyll! Phyll Opoku-Gyimah co-founded UK Black Pride. She’s the exec director of Kaleidoscope Trust, an organisation working towards the liberation of LGBTQ people around the world; an Albert Kennedy Trust patron, and a public speaker focusing on race, gender, sexuality and class. She successfully campaigns for the better treatment of people of colour in the LGBTQ+ community and this year was voted number 4 on the Pride Power List.

This is a gloriously personal conversation where we discuss the genesis of Black Pride and Phyll’s search for intimacy after her marriage ended and she was able to finally fully explore her sexuality with women.

She shares the emotional connection found in her first sexual experience with a woman which allowed her to be ‘seen’ in the most profound way, as well as her thoughts on polyamory and having sex that allows for vulnerability rather than performance, not ignoring of course, the simple joy of fucking!

We talk about the paths trodden by Black lesbian women who have come before her and why UK Black Pride has come together as an ongoing movement rather than a moment providing an inclusive safe space to connect with your chosen family. And the importance of recognising the broad range of identities that we have - the intersections of race, gender, sexuality that are all important to recognise to manage true allyship.

In a zoom miracle, in under an hour, the three of us fell in love - we hope you do too.

Lady Phyll is the is the co-editor of Sista!, an anthology of writings by same sex living women of African/Caribbean descent with a connection to the United Kingdom, released by Team Angelica Publishing in 2018, which includes work by 31 writers and available on Amazon and all good bookshops.

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We would love to hear from you: email us at hello@thepleasurepodcast.com or tweet us @ThePleasurePod.

Please do rate, review, and share the podcast, it helps other people find us.

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Social Media:

Lady Phyll: @MsLadyPhyll

Naomi Sheldon: @NaomiSheldon1

Anand Patel: @therealdranand

Follow us at @ThePleasurePod and visit us at www.thepleasurepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today on the Pleasure Podcast we welcome Sangeeta Pillai, founder of feminist online platform Soul Sutras and fighter of Indian Patriarchy! Sangeeta developed SoulSutras to be a safe space for South Asian womxn to tell their stories openly without shame or fear, connecting with one another, sharing a common cultural identity.

Soul Sutras has developed into a feminist platform hosting the award-winning taboo-shaking Masala Podcast to developing Masala Monologues, a series of writing workshops and theatre shows in the UK and US.

Sangeeta talks to us about her childhood, growing up in the slums of Mumbai and expected to follow the narrow familiar trajectory planned and expected for South Asian women of obedient daughter, wife, and mother. Sangeeta pushed against traditional expectations from a very young age, being the first woman in her family to work and decline marriage, but not without significant personal cost.

We discuss the cultural drive for purity and the responsibility of women to guard that safely between her legs. Sangeeta received the message from her family that physical pleasure is not for her, that sex will be the ruin of the archetypal good Indian woman. The strongly conditioned links between nudity and sex and shame at an early age limited access of even simple intimacy.

Having a breakdown led to Sangeeta's sexual awakening and eventually her drive to create a safe space for women to speak to each other and open up. A blog became a writing workshop which developed into a theatre space and an award-winning podcast.

We talk about reclaiming the sexual heritage of India such as the Kama Sutra for a great seductive sexual experience, and look at India as a liberal secular place of openness and possibility. We discuss the deification of boys that is endemic in Indian culture and how growing up feeling like you are somehow better is harmful for both men and women. We discuss how her more traditional extended family have responded to her work by silence, how to move forward when you are not seen as a success by your family, and how the price she has paid for the path she has chosen is loneliness.

Sangeeta keeps pushing the boundaries, recognising the importance of keeping challenging the silence and taboos in Asian culture to allow us all to normalise sex and intimacy and affection.

Learn more about Soul Sutras here and catch Sangeeta’s wonderful Masala Podcast on Spotify, iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts!

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We would love to hear from you: email us at hello@thepleasurepodcast.com or tweet us @ThePleasurePod.

Please do rate, review, and share the podcast, it helps other people find us.

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Social Media:

Sangeeta Pillai: @Soul_Sutras

Naomi Sheldon: @NaomiSheldon1

Anand Patel: @therealdranand

Follow us at @ThePleasurePod and visit us at www.thepleasurepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on The Pleasure Podcast we welcome German portrait photographer, music video and lesbian feminist porn director Julia Schönstädt. Julia is passionate about platforming unheard voices, working with prisoners, refugees as well as sex workers, helping the world to see them beyond their labels. Her 16 Bars Project, a prisoner's portrait series that aimed to raise awareness for the penal system, led to a Guardian award.

Her work as a guest director for Erika Lust, the pioneer in feminist porn, was her first foray into the adult film world. Fed up with the mainstream representation of girl on girl porn, Julia’s work centers on authentic content for the LGBTQ community. She sent us a couple of her films and they are breath taking, fusing a music video aesthetic with erotica to create a delight for the senses, far removed from mainstream porn.

You can access the films we discuss All Eyez on Me and Pleasure Seekers . Warning...they are very sexy.

We discuss the problems of mainstream porn and how ethical porn is fighting to counteract them, from consent and sexual health, to making sure that women are behind the camera as well as in front.

Julia shares her experience as a porn director on and off set; how language is key when making sex scenes believable and why revealing that she works in the sex industry was more scary than coming out.

We look at the importance of speaking openly about porn, why we should be paying for it, and how porn has a role and a duty of care to teach about consent, diversity and sexuality to a whole generation of kids who rely on porn for their sex education.

Julia has a production company @sugartowngirls and you can access Julia's films we discuss here:

ALL EYEZ ON ME

PLEASURE SEEKERS

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You can find out more about Julia's other work on her website: www.schonstadt.com

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We would love to hear from you: email us at hello@thepleasurepodcast.com or tweet us @ThePleasurePod.

Please do rate, review, and share the podcast, it helps other people find us.

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Social Media:

Julia Schönstädt: @j.schoenstaedt

Naomi Sheldon: @NaomiSheldon1

Anand Patel: @therealdranand

Follow us at @ThePleasurePod and visit us at www.thepleasurepodcast.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.