Pleasure

Part memoir, part cultural critique, Pleasure explores Emma-Louise Boynton's experience of becoming disconnected from her body - unable to orgasm or even enjoy sexual pleasure - and what it took to reconnect through pleasure. The book starts in the sex therapy room, where Boynton first discovered that her years-long battle with an eating disorder might be affecting her connection to sex, then takes the reader through the layers of research and the innumerable discussions that brought Boynton back to her body. Ending her bulimia, bringing back her orgasm and sparking a new-found interest in the topic of pleasure and intimacy. Drawing on personal experience, interviews with experts, and immersive research (including four days on a porn set), Boynton reveals how this rupture between self and body is not an individual failure but a systemic one - one shaped by history, beauty culture, sexual mythology, and the modern dating economy. From narrow ideals around desirability and sexist narratives about aging, to the policing of women's pleasure and the emotional alienation of app-based intimacy, Pleasure interrogates the forces that teach women to mistrust their bodies, disconnect from their desires, and prioritise performance over pleasure for the sake of other people's sexual enjoyment. Bold, intimate and timely, Pleasure ultimately offers a hopeful and practical reimagining of what it means for women to reconnect to themselves in an increasingly disconnected world. To reclaim their bodies and their pleasure.