A reluctant sex radical explores barriers for women with disabilities to achieve sexual pleasure

This US-focused opinion piece investigated a variety of popular and professional discourses about the cultural expectations surrounding sexual pleasure that create barriers to access for women with disabilities. The study uses autoethnography, highlighting the author’s experience in critical care, graduate education and professional training roles in order to look at how to integrate 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. The paper explores ways that social work educators can increase knowledge about sexual pleasure as a complex concept, encourage client-centred attitudes and build communications skills. The belief underpinning the analysis is that, 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.¹