This year, the theme of International Women’s Day is #ChooseToChallenge, so Lustery is putting out the call to defy gender inequality, one taboo at a time.

Rising With The Challenge | Lustery POV Blog

Rising With The Challenge 

Women are no strangers to adversity – there’s no woman that hasn’t had to ‘prove herself’, ‘overcome’ or ‘step up’. As we approach International Women’s Day on Monday 8 March, ‘a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women’, we’re putting our foot down and saying we’re done proving ourselves; this year we’re setting the bar and demanding that the rest of the world ‘step up’.

By opening a space for candid conversations and personal stories around topics that concern women – the things we were always told were inappropriate to discuss in polite company (“too personal”, “too dirty”, “too shameful”, or “too deviant”) – we’re sharing information and normalising our bodies, our lusts and our lives one amplified voice at a time. Polite company won’t change the world but we will. 

Throughout the course of March (and beyond!) Lustery is inviting every woman to join us in telling it like it is with the following #RealTalkWomen topics:

Women’s pleasure is often portrayed as ‘mysterious’ and even complex to grasp. Here’s the thing: basic arithmetic would also be complex to grasp if we weren’t taught it at school. Women’s pleasure is often little more than a note scribbled in the margins of traditional sex education, which centres around venereal disease, pregnancy and contraception, and antiquated values around gender roles, abstinence and ‘purity’ (I’ll wait for your eyes to stop rolling…). Rather than being a recognised and even celebrated part of healthy sexuality, women’s desire has become viewed as a source of mystery, at best, and shame, at worst. And because women get reduced to a homogenous group, when our pleasure does get spoken about, it’s too often focused on cis, heterosexual, white, young women

Lustery invites all women to speak up about their pleasure, describe the ways they achieve and enjoy orgasms, and to create a conversation to inspire and create visibility for diversity. As Lustery is focused on the behind-closed-doors of real couples from around the globe, we’re even offering 50% off from 8 to 14 March to celebrate women’s pleasure.

As central to our lives as embracing our bliss, whatever form that may take, is acknowledging our pain. Aside from being an issue that disrupts women’s pleasure, we need to challenge the lack of awareness of – even belief in – women’s pain. Chrissy Teigen’s very public experience of miscarriage and then endometriosis surgery has sparked debate over what stories we can and can’t share. This, despite the fact that 

up to 28 percent of American women experience chronic vulvar pain

, or pain with penetration. As long is women’s stories go untold or unheard, there will be gender discrimination in healthcare.

This month, to begin to unpack the topic, Lustery will feature an interview with 

 and speaker on taboo topics like endometriosis, weed and painful sex.

At the intersection of pleasure and pain is BDSM, a sexual practice as hotly contested as it is, well, hot. (Yes, the author of this text is a shameless pain slut.) In a society riddled with gender-based violence, do we not need to say something about the concept of women gaining pleasure through playing with pain or submission? Really, the only thing to be said is “Fuck yes, you do you!” We erase women’s agency by assuming that BDSM practices are degrading to women or that getting exactly what you want out of your sex life could ever be ‘unfeminist’. When practiced under the guiding BDSM tenets of SSC (safe, sane and consensual) and RACK (risk aware consensual kink), power play and pain play are a normal, healthy and yes, even fun, part of human sexuality, and shame around these topics can only ever be detrimental to getting the pleasure we want.

This month, Lustery speaks to women who have found their niche in the kink scene about different approaches, kink practices and the role kink plays in their lives.