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 Lad ..read more

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 o ..read more

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 ..read more

This week on The Pleasure Podcast we welcome actor Paapa Essiedu. He’s been named a BAFTA breakthrough Brit and won huge acclaim for his performance as the RSC’s first black Hamlet. In Michaela Coel’s series I May Destory you he plays the sex positive Kwame, a gay man whose assault is ignored by the Police – a beautifully nuanced performance. But Naomi will always think of him as the man she met at the RSC who in one memorable show played a singing seal as her understudy – a role she'll never let him forget. Paapa grew up in east London, and was raised by his Ghanaian Christian mother, after h ..read more

Next week we’ll be returning to business as usual but for now it’s the finale of our mini-series on parenthood. This week we welcome doctor and sexual function specialist, Janine David to speak to us about sex and sexuality in pregnancy. Janine is a GP working in Wales who specialises in Men and Women’s sexual health. She developed an interest in sexual health in 2013 and, like Anand, is a Fellow of the European Committee of Sexual Medicine (FECSM). This is the highest qualification you can achieve in this field and she is the only active GP in Wales to hold this. Janine has a diploma in Obste ..read more

This week’s guest is Bruntwood Prize winning playwright, screenwriter and director Anna Jordan. Her work has been performed in theatres around the country from the Royal Court to the Royal Exchange. On screen you’ll have heard her whip smart dialogue in shows such as Succession and Killing Eve. Her down to earth charm is combined with a furiously wicked humour – finding laughter and hope in the darkest of places. And it’s this combination that is so striking in her monologue for The Bunker’s Everywoman, in which playwrights wrote confessions on parenting and identity. Anna’s piece was on her m ..read more

Today we welcome award-winning Guardian journalist, writer and full-time single dad, Freddy McConnell. Freddy is perhaps most well-known for the film Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth directed by acclaimed director Jeanie Finlay which documented his journey into fatherhood as a trans man. Freddy speaks to us about the empowering experience of realising he was trans, of coming off of testosterone to become pregnant, and how being trans is not necessarily a transition but a state of being. We also discuss the misinformation given to trans men about the effects of testosterone therapy on their fe ..read more

Today we welcome renowned child-birth coach and author Lindsey Bliss. Lindsey is co-founder of doula agency Carriage House Birth which has assisted in more than 1100 births across the US and is mother of seven including two sets of twins! As Naomi has been pregnant with twins for all of lockdown, Lindsey was the perfect person to speak to about the role of a doula in supporting people through a momentous but often stressful time. Anand had been taught to be suspicious of doulas at medical school but speaking to Lindsey was transformational and totally turned around his understanding of exactly ..read more

Our guest is Sunday Times Bestselling author, award-winning podcaster, novelist, blogger and speaker Emma Gannon. Her debut novel Olive follows the lives of women whose friendship shifts as babies enter the frame. Emma adds a refreshing voice to the dialogue around motherhood, through a story whose main character has actively chosen to live a child-free life without regrets.  When Emma asked if there was anyone out there who is child free by choice, she was inundated with responses from women who felt like they weren’t seen, from those saying they regret having children to simply not want ..read more

Candice Brathwaite launches us into our brand-new season 4 and our mini-series on parenthood. And WHAT guest! She’s the Sunday Times Best-seller author of I Am Not Your Baby Mother and the founder of Make Motherhood Diverse, an online platform to provide visibility for all the “types” of mother you can possibly think of to stand tall, proud and heard. In her memoir she explores her childhood, her pregnancies and what it’s like to bring Black children into a racist society in which Black British women are 5 times more likely to die in childbirth. We talk to Candice about the kind of motherhood ..read more