The Chilli Pepper Sex Club
Sally Turner
Sex is fundamental to our human experience – the creator of life, a powerful way of building intimacy, and a means of self-expression. In a world where mind-blowing sex has become an almost mandatory aspiration, how do you cope when the pursuit of pleasure causes excruciating pain? When your mind says “yes, yes YES!” but your body screams an agonising “NO”?
The Chilli Pepper Sex Club charts Sally Turner’s journey through the burning pain of vulvodynia – a gynaecological condition that affects millions of women worldwide, yet is often misdiagnosed. As a consequence, penetrative vaginal sex was intensely painful from her teens until the age of thirty-six, when at last she accessed successful treatment.
How does it feel to see your ailing vulva magnified on a TV screen with an audience of rapt viewers? To undergo hypnotic regression and connect with an unexpected sexual past? Or to have pleasurable sex for the first time after decades of pain?
Turner answers these compelling questions and more, and discusses the impact of other sexual health issues she has also experienced including HPV, lichen sclerosus, vaginal thrush, and pelvic floor dysfunction, as well as ME and clinical depression.
Often moving and provocative, at times funny and incisive, The Chilli Pepper Sex Club asks pertinent questions about the nature of intimacy, how we define ‘real’ sex and what it means to be a ‘real’ woman. In telling her story, Turner also discusses issues that are high on the cultural agenda including feminism, porn and erotica, culture and language, and body image.
Reviews
Pain Society