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Tales of a Reluctant Sex Radical: Barriers to Teaching the Importance of Pleasure for Wellbeing

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Abstract

Cultural studies scholars are investigating everyday practices that deny sexual pleasure and create barriers to wellbeing and health. Human rights violations regularly happen at the level of sexuality, which has prompted discussion about formal sexual rights by feminist and disability scholars. People with disabilities often negotiate medical settings that make sexual autonomy challenging. Cultural expectations surrounding sexual pleasure contribute to oppression. Based on the professional values of social work, social workers need to consider the importance of sexual pleasure to wellbeing and advocate against cultural barriers. This analysis will use mixed method by investigating a variety of popular and professional discourses about the cultural expectations surrounding sexual pleasure that create barriers to access. Medical education discourse about approaches to training professionals about sex will be synthesized as potential models for social work education. Autoethnography will be used to support the analysis by highlighting the experience of the author in critical care, graduate education and professional training roles that include integration of sexual pleasure into social work practice. Medical educators have been dealing with reluctance and avoidance of health care professionals to discussions of sexual pleasure for decades. Health care providers, in large numbers, do not feel prepared to integrate sexual pleasure into general care and consumers of health care report insensitivity on the part of professions when pursuing assistance with sexual concerns. This paper will explore ways that social work educators can increase knowledge about sexual pleasure as a complex concept, encourage client-centered attitudes, and build communications skills.

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Notes

  1. Communication is more than verbal and many people communicate quite effectively through touch alone. The sexual pleasure scripts that are identified by Dune and Shuttleworth happen at a rapid speed, which helps to keep a television show moving along narratively, but the pace of the sexual action does not lend itself to good communication even if unspoken.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Social Justice and Human Services, University of Toledo Social Work Program, Toledo, OH, USA

    Heather M. Sloane

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  1. Heather M. Sloane
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Correspondence to Heather M. Sloane.

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Sloane, H.M. Tales of a Reluctant Sex Radical: Barriers to Teaching the Importance of Pleasure for Wellbeing. Sex Disabil 32, 453–467 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11195-014-9381-5

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