I applied for a fellowship with The Pleasure Project!🤞

Hi friends,

How ya doing? I hope you're enjoying my last post in the jungle themed citrus-filled bathtub 😂

I wanted to share something special with you.

It was important for me to keep you in the loop of some things I am doing behind-the-scenes since many of you contribute to my content and my education 🤓.

I applied to a fellowship program with The Pleasure Project: https://thepleasureproject.org/

It's an international education & advocacy organization whose mission is to promote safer sex by adding pleasure into the conversation. You can check out their site if you're interested.

Anyways, the fellowship is a 6-month virtual learning & collaboration program, run by The Pleasure Project, aimed at changemakers who want to center pleasure in sexual health, rights, education, advocacy, or creative work.

They also let you run a special project. And give you a small amount of money to see it through.

Anyways, I wanted to share with you my project idea:

I’m relatively new to pleasure-based sexual health work, but as a curious world traveler, I’ve found myself repeatedly drawn to the questions no one wants to ask out loud, especially when it comes to sex tourism. I’ve spent time in places where sex work is both highly visible and deeply stigmatized. And yes, I’ve also been a client. Those experiences opened my eyes not only to the complexities and contradictions of transactional sex, but also to how much silence, shame, and misunderstanding still surround it.

My project proposal is a creative and educational initiative that explores what more ethical, mutually pleasurable sex tourism could look like. If this industry isn’t going anywhere (and it let's be honest, it isn’t), then how can we ensure the experience is safe, humanizing, and fulfilling for everyone involved?

The project has two parts:

1) Postcards from the Edge: An anonymous storytelling campaign where sex workers from popular tourist destinations share real “postcards” to their clients, sharing reflections on their experience when it comes to desire, pleasure, labor, joy, discomfort, and the emotional complexity of being someone’s fantasy.

2) Decolonizing Desire: A Pleasure-Based Sex Ed Toolkit for Ethical Travelers: An educational guide (PDF + short videos) designed for tourists visiting countries with visible sex work. It offers harm-reduction info, consent education, and reframes what ethical intimacy can look like when traveling.

This is a learning journey for me. I’m not an expert, but someone committed to amplifying voices that matter and asking questions that make pleasure safer, more ethical, and more reciprocal, for all.

So that's it! Not sure what you all think about it... I want to explore sex tourism and sex work a little more, and I think this is a good opportunity for me to do so.

But there are SO MANY applicants and I usually don't have a good chance at these things...

I get intimated in these large spaces with people who have more of the "activist" type of traits inside them...if that makes any sense!

Anyways, I wanted to share because I want you to know what kinds of things you are motivating me to do simply by being on this platform!

Thanks and have a wonderful day!!

Ali

xx