The Development Industry Should Get Over its Obsession With Bad Sex and Start to Think About Pleasure
By O’maera Mike


NAIROBI – September 6, 2007 - The development industry has emphasised the dangers of sex and sexuality, in relation to population control, disease and violence. This negative approach to sex has been filtered through a view of gender which stereotypes men as predators, women as victims, and fails to recognise the existence of transgender people. In reality, pleasure and danger are often entwined – not least because for many, seeking pleasure entails breaking social rules. However, the oppressive frameworks which forbid pursuit of pleasure are not the only dangers associated with sexuality.

How should development actors negotiate this ambiguous mix of pleasures and dangers in sexuality? This question is important to many aspects of human development – such as dealing with HIV/AIDS, tackling sexual violence, and supporting more fulfilling relationships.

Part of the answer is to move to more positive framings of sexuality which promote the possibilities of pleasure as well as tackling the dangers at the same time. The promotion of sexual pleasure can contribute to empowerment, particularly but not only for women, sexual minorities, and people living with HIV/AIDS, who may have been subject to social expectations that sexual pleasure is not for them. The pleasures of safer sex can also be promoted to reduce HIV/AIDS transmission and improve health. These are important ends. However, it would be sad to reduce sexual pleasure to a means of reaching development goals. Sexual pleasure can be wonderful in itself, and indeed it can be argued that people have a right to seek such pleasures, and that an enabling environment should be created for them to do so.

Sexuality has been sidelined by development. Associated with risk and danger, but hardly ever with pleasure or love, sex has been treated by development agencies as something to be controlled and contained. The AIDS epidemic has broken old taboos and silences, and begun to open up space for the recognition of how central sexual rights are to human wellbeing. But more is needed to take us beyond the confines of narrow problem-focused thinking about sexuality towards approaches in which pleasure and desire play as large a part as danger and death do today.

Sexuality is a vital aspect of development. It affects human livelihoods and security, well being, and sometimes survival. Sexual rights are a pre-condition for reproductive rights and for gender equality. Lack of sexual rights affects heterosexual majorities as well as sexual minorities – lesbians and gay men, trans-gendered and inter-sex people, who are so often denied basic human rights and subjected to violence and exclusion. In some countries, women are denied a choice of partner, subjected to coercive marital sex and restricted in their mobility. Pervasive homophobia places those married men who desire other men, their male partners and their wives at greater risk of HIV and AIDS.

Adolescents schooled into abstinence learn little about their bodies or their desires, and may be more vulnerable to unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection as a result. And sex workers are routinely denied basic legal, employment, and broader human rights. The current world climate of rising conservatism, from the USA, the Vatican and Muslim states has only served to exacerbate matters. Rare is the environment which allows people to live out a fulfilling and pleasurable sexuality of their choice and that empowers people with a sense of their right to say ‘yes’ as well as ‘no’ and enjoy safe, loving relationships free of coercion and violence.

Issues of sex and sexuality are all too often associated with silence, shame and stigma in many cultures, and particularly in the African context. Solutions that are framed by a discourse that problematises sex offer limited scope for transforming the way in which development actors work on these issues. It is all too easy to focus on the negatives highlighted above and to conspire with a silence within them about unruly desires, about pleasuring the senses, and about love. The shift to rights in international development discourse may offer new routes for the articulation of sexuality and development, and new opportunities for realising sexual rights.

A new study and over view is being proposed in this study of sexuality, and enters the debate about sexual rights from the perspective of development. Together, the study seeks to challenge orthodoxies and bring fresh thinking to the challenges of making sexual rights real.