The History of Pleasure: Power & Culture

  About the Event 

This fall, TSC is launching a new monthly speaker series in New York City. The vision is simple: gather educators, clinicians, creators, and culture shapers for nights that give us more than talking points. These events are built for the conversations that make you think differently, challenge what you thought you knew, and connect you with people who are asking the same questions about where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Every month we’re putting something real on the table. Topics each month range from history, technology, media, politics — and always through the lens of intimacy, identity, and culture. The speaker series is more than programming; it’s a chance to build the community and conversation that censorship keeps trying to shut down. It’s for people who want to be in the room where the ideas are raw, the dialogue is sharp, and the connections actually matter.

We’re opening the series with The History of Pleasure: Power & Culture, featuring bestselling author and scholar Nadège aka @pleasurescience. For tens of thousands of years, pleasure was celebrated as sacred. Then came shifts in power that reframed intimacy as taboo, erased queer and gender-expansive communities from the record, and introduced shame as a tool of control.

Nadège will trace these histories and pull them forward into the present. Because the truth is, what we’re watching unfold right now — book bans, censorship, cultural battles over autonomy — isn’t new. It’s history repeating itself. This night will give us the context to see it clearly and the community to imagine something different.

CE Credit Information

 This program meets the requirements of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT) and is approved for 1 CE credit. These CE credits may be applied toward AASECT certification and renewal of certification.

To receive CE credit, attendees must be present for the full program and complete the post-event evaluation; certificates will be emailed within 14 days.

Completion of this program does not ensure or guarantee AASECT certification. For further information, please contact [email protected]. 

Learning Objective
By the end of this class, participants will be able to analyze how sexual norms have evolved across history as societies shifted from partnership-based structures to domination and assess the impact of these historical shifts on contemporary sexual freedom and how they shape possibilities for the future.

Goals
Participants will be able to:

1. Describe partnership-based versus domination-based societal structures and their implications for pleasure, intimacy, and community care.
2. Identify mechanisms of control, including shame, censorship, and erasure, across history and in current cultural debates.
3. Apply historical context from the presentation to professional practice in education, therapy, coaching, media, or advocacy.

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