The Principles of Pleasure, and What the Silence Taught Instead

Late on a weeknight, a woman in her forties watches an animated diagram on a screen and learns, for the first time, the shape of a part of her own body. It is not an erotic moment, and the programme she is watching does not try to make it one. What arrives may be closer to a question with an edge on it. Why did nobody ever show me this?

The programme is The Principles of Pleasure, a documentary series in three episodes, released by Netflix in 2022. Near the start of the first, its narrator asks the question the whole series is built on: how would the rest of a life be different if a woman had learned about her body, and about what she wants, without fear? It is a gentle question, asked in a warm voice over bright animation. The series around it is less gentle than it looks.

On the surface it is a friendly science documentary about women’s pleasure: researchers, educators and a roomful of women on a couch remembering how they first learned about sex. Underneath, it makes an argument that sounds mild and turns out to be sharp. Women’s pleasure was left out of what science, medicine and schooling taught, and the leaving-out had causes. The subject is not technique. It is who has been allowed to know her own body.

This essay adds one claim to that argument, and it rests on the series’ own evidence. A silence is not an absence. When a subject is left out of every place where a girl might learn it, she does not grow up knowing nothing. She grows up knowing whatever reached her first. In the history the series tells, what reached her first came as three lessons: shame, which arrives long before information does; a script in which pleasure belongs to somebody else; and the idea that a body’s response can answer for the woman whose body it is. None of the three was written into a syllabus. All three were taught.

The Principles of Pleasure was directed by Niharika Desai and is narrated by the actor and comedian Michelle Buteau. It was released on 22 March 2022 in three episodes of around fifty minutes each, called Our Bodies, Our Minds and Our Relationships. Animation and diagrams carry the science, and interviews carry everything else. The experts include the psychologist Lori Brotto, the sexual psychophysiologist Nicole Prause and the sex educator Emily Nagoski, whose book Come as You Are is one of the best known on the subject. In the last episode the Swedish director Erika Lust talks about making erotic films with women’s desires in mind. Between the experts sit women and non-binary people of different races, sexualities and body sizes, remembering their first lessons in sex and in shame.

In Japan the series streams with Japanese subtitles, under a title that sets two different Japanese words for pleasure side by side, and its episode titles translate the English ones just as plainly: our body, our mind, our relationships. Both details come back later.

A documentary has no twist to spoil, but this essay discusses all three episodes, including where the last one lands. What it describes comes from the series’ published record and from reviews, and lines from the screen are described rather than quoted. Where this essay repeats a research claim, the claim has been checked at its source. Where that could not be done, or where the source says something different, the essay says so.

The first episode is a history lesson, and it is built as a list of omissions. Early on, Emily Nagoski says plainly that science still lacks a basic understanding of the very system everyone wants to take part in. Lori Brotto explains how women’s sexuality was long blamed for their illnesses. The word hysteria still carries that theory inside it: it was coined as a medical term from the Greek word for the womb, for a condition once thought peculiar to women and caused by the uterus. This Library traced the long career of that idea, and what it was used for, in “What the Body Actually Does, and What It Does Not”. The series runs through the same history at speed.

Then Freud. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, first published in 1905 and revised over the next two decades, a grown woman’s excitability is supposed to pass from the clitoris to the vagina. He compared the clitoris to a chip of pine wood used to set fire to harder wood, and he wrote that a woman whose clitoris would not give up its excitability might remain unresponsive. The series presents this as a dismissal, and it is one. The organ is allowed to matter as kindling, on the way to something else.

The series’ own title holds an irony here. The pleasure principle belongs to Freud’s vocabulary too, and there it is the rule of infancy, the one that growing up is meant to master. Whether the echo was intended, this essay does not know. Either way the title takes his phrase and turns it round, from something a woman is supposed to grow out of into something she is owed.

Next, the series says that a 1948 edition of Gray’s Anatomy, the standard English-language anatomy textbook, left the clitoris out. The claim belongs to a larger story, that mid-century anatomy textbooks deliberately stopped drawing or labelling the clitoris, and a much-cited 1995 study of textbook illustrations that tells that story has since been challenged. Writing in the journal Clinical Anatomy in 2022, an anatomist argued that its methods cannot be replicated and that its conclusions are not justified. The quarrel may never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction. The series does not need it, because its strongest evidence lies somewhere better.

In 2005 a team led by the Australian urologist Helen O’Connell published a comprehensive account of the anatomy of the clitoris, reviewing work that had used dissection, microdissection and magnetic resonance imaging of the living body. The series presents this as the moment the organ was finally mapped in full, and for modern medicine it was. But the paper’s own conclusions contain two sentences that make the story sharper, not softer. Typical textbook descriptions, it says, lack detail and include inaccuracies, and a single diagram in one plane, the kind textbooks usually print, makes a structure look flat that is not flat. And it credits a German anatomist, Georg Ludwig Kobelt, who published in 1844, with a highly comprehensive and accurate description. Modern study, the paper says, has provided objective images and few novel findings.

That last sentence deserves to be read slowly. The knowledge was not missing. It had been published, in detail, more than a century and a half before, and what followed was not ignorance but a failure to carry it. Nobody had to forbid anything. A textbook only had to keep printing the flat picture, a lecturer only had to move on, a curriculum only had to stop where it stopped. Omission of that kind needs no villain, which is exactly what makes it so durable. If anything in this history deserves anger, it is that: not a plot, but a page that existed all along and was never handed on.

Since the whole complaint is that this was never said plainly, here it is, following the 2005 paper. The clitoris is not only the small part at the top of the vulva. That part, the glans, is the only piece that shows on the outside, and it is densely supplied with nerves. The rest lies beneath the surface. Paired bodies of erectile tissue run back from the glans and continue into two legs, the crura, which are anchored along the pubic arch. There are also two bulbs of spongy erectile tissue, which the paper counts as part of the same organ. Centrally it is attached to the urethra and the vagina, and the paper describes the three together as a single cluster of tissue that appears to be the centre of female sexual function and orgasm.

None of that is erotic information. It is the kind of sentence an anatomy book exists to carry, and the kind a woman needs in order to ask a question at a clinic, of a partner or of herself. A thing without a name is hard to point to, and a thing drawn flat is hard to imagine as anything else.

The first episode also takes on the myths that grow where plain sentences are missing, among them the belief that the hymen shows whether a woman has had sex. It does not. The World Health Organization said so in 2018, in an interagency statement calling for an end to so-called virginity testing: the appearance of the hymen is not a reliable indication of intercourse, and no known examination can prove a history of it. A myth like that is not a gap in knowledge. It is what grows in the gap.

The most affecting parts of the series are not the diagrams. They are the faces on the couch, women and non-binary people remembering, in their own words, how sex first entered their lives and what they were made to feel about their bodies. One of the women says, in the first episode, that we are taught to be ashamed of our bodies from childhood. After that the series hardly needs to argue the point. The couch argues it.

It is worth being exact about why shame wins the race, and what follows is this essay’s reading rather than the series’ claim. Information needs a curriculum: a teacher, a textbook, a slot in the timetable, somebody’s decision that this will be taught. Shame needs none of that. It is taught by a face that changes when a child asks a question, by a hand moved away, by a subject changed too quickly, by a word said about another girl’s skirt. It is usually taught by adults who were taught it the same way and who believe they are doing their best. It arrives early and without a syllabus, and by the time information comes, if it comes, it is not landing on an empty page. It has to write over something.

That is also why the series keeps asking who has been doing the teaching. It returns more than once to the fact that the public conversation about sex has mostly been led by educators who are white, cisgender and able-bodied, and it gives its time to people that conversation left out: women who are not white, trans and non-binary people, women in larger bodies, disabled women. Laura Berger, writing for Women and Hollywood, called this a through-line of the series rather than a one-time acknowledgement. The episode titles say our bodies, our minds, our relationships, and the series spends two and a half hours widening who that our includes.

The series takes in what has come to be called the orgasm gap, and the best-known study of that gap is worth reading at its source, because its most revealing figure is rarely the one quoted. Published in 2018 in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, it asked more than fifty thousand American adults how often they reached orgasm when sexually intimate during the past month. Among heterosexual men, 95 per cent said usually or always. Among heterosexual women, 65 per cent. Among lesbian women, 86 per cent.

Put the three numbers side by side and the gap stops looking like a fact about women’s bodies. Lesbian women report orgasm nearly as often as men do; heterosexual women report it far less. That is this essay’s inference, and the authors themselves weigh cultural and evolutionary explanations for the gaps, but if the difference lay only in female anatomy, it would hardly move this much depending on who her partners are. The study also listed what went with more frequent orgasm for women, and the list is ordinary. It includes receiving more oral sex, longer sex, asking for what they wanted, and a last encounter that included deep kissing and manual or oral stimulation alongside intercourse. None of it is exotic. Most of it is simply sex that has not been organised around one person’s finish.

The caution belongs right beside the numbers. These are self-reports from American adults about a single month, and they describe associations, not causes. They say nothing about any particular woman or any particular bed. What they do show is that the gap is not simply a property of being female.

From the inside, the second lesson looks like this. If sex is defined as intercourse and is over when he finishes, then whatever her body needs is framed as extra: a warm-up, a courtesy, a favour to be asked for. Nobody has to say that pleasure belongs to him. The shape of the evening says it. A woman can absorb that script so early and so thoroughly that faking an orgasm comes to feel less like lying than like good manners.

The same lesson has a version inside the science. Nicole Prause, who in the series defines orgasm by its pelvic contractions, describes research proposals on women’s arousal and orgasm, her own among them, that were turned down. Reviewing the series for The Guardian, Beth Ashley put the rejections down to male discomfort in the science community. That is the reviewer’s summary, and nobody can audit a funding panel’s motives from a documentary. But the pattern rhymes with the one in the survey: a quiet, repeated decision about whose pleasure counts as a question worth answering.

The second episode turns to the brain, to hormones and to what makes something feel erotic, and the series draws the distinction that matters most of all. A body’s genital response and a person’s desire are not the same thing. A body can respond while the mind has not agreed.

This is not a slogan. In 2010 a meta-analysis in the same journal gathered 132 laboratory studies, published between 1969 and 2007, that had measured both genital arousal and people’s own reports of how aroused they felt. For men the two agreed fairly closely, with a correlation of .66. For women they agreed only weakly, at .26. In plain words, what a woman’s genitals were doing in the laboratory was a poor guide to what she said she felt. The finding describes groups, not individuals, and it predicts nothing about any one woman. What it establishes is narrower and more useful: a body’s response is not a report of what its owner wants.

Here the essay has to be as plain as it can be. Arousal is not consent. Lubrication is not consent. An orgasm is not consent. A body that responds is reporting on itself, not on the person, and it does not speak for her in a room. Consent is something a person gives and can take back, and nobody else can read it off her body.

The silence taught this lesson most dangerously, because it hands other people a reason to override her. Erotic fiction has long had a stock line for it, that her body was saying yes whatever she said, and Japanese has a compact version: the body is honest. The science says something else. The body is neither honest nor dishonest. It is not casting a vote.

This Library has made the point before, in “What Come As You Are Gets Right About Desire: Context Matters More Than a Score” and in “The Body Stopped Reporting Because Nobody Acted On It”, which also drew on this series. What the series adds is the framing. It treats the gap between response and desire as ordinary science about how bodies and minds work, not as a moral lesson, and so the old excuse loses its claim to be science at all. Nagoski supplies the sentence that belongs beside it: that women live in a world where they feel they must say yes to everything or no to everything, and that good sex needs a clearer kind of talk than either. The consent the series offers, as The Guardian’s review summed it up, is a question asked during sex, part of the sex itself.

The third episode moves to turn-ons and turn-offs, to what people look for in a partner, and to pornography, including the work of Erika Lust, who talks about making erotic films with women’s desires in mind. It is the part of the series most likely to divide viewers, and it follows directly from everything before it.

Here is the connection as this essay reads it. A silence does not stop anyone learning. It only decides who gets to teach. If school stops short and home changes the subject, the lesson passes to whatever reaches a young person first, and for many people that may have been pornography that gave little thought to the pleasure of the women in it or of the women watching it. The series does not answer this by pretending the lesson can be prevented. It answers by asking who makes it, and for whom.

That answer has limits worth naming. A film made with women’s desires in mind is still a film. It can widen the picture of what pleasure looks like, but it cannot answer back, ask a question or stop when someone changes her mind. It may be a better teacher than the one it replaces. It is still not a conversation.

It would be easy to watch this series in Japan as a report from somewhere further ahead, and it would be wrong. The Principles of Pleasure is an American complaint about American medicine and American schooling, and the textbooks it criticises were English-language textbooks. The silence it documents did not belong to one country, and its questions land here as they land anywhere, in local ways.

Some of those ways are in the language. The Japanese title sets two words side by side. The main one, kairaku, is a common word for pleasure that in everyday use can carry a faint sense of indulgence, of something one gives in to, and it is also, almost character for character, the word used to translate Freud’s pleasure principle. The subtitle reaches for a second word, yorokobi, closer to joy, and adds our: in search of our joy. Whether or not anyone meant it this way, the title stages the very discomfort the series is about, a pleasure that seems to need a gentler word beside it before it can be named in public.

Another way is a borrowed word. The Greek womb travelled into Japanese too. In ordinary speech the Japanese form of hysteria still names a fit of uncontrolled anger or tears, and dictionaries still trace it to the Greek word for the uterus and to the old belief that the uterus wandered through the body. The theory left medicine long ago. The word is still in daily use.

And one way is written down. Japan’s national curriculum guidelines for fifth-grade science, the year in which children learn that a baby grows inside its mother’s body before it is born, state that the process leading up to human fertilisation is not to be covered. The guidelines for junior high school health say that fertilisation and pregnancy are covered and the course of pregnancy is not. The two provisions are widely known as the brake clauses, and whether they should stay is being argued over again as the guidelines are revised; in April 2026 the Japan Federation of Bar Associations called for their removal. A syllabus built to stop before a pregnancy begins leaves little room in school for the questions this series treats as ordinary science.

Something has moved as well, and it deserves to be said as clearly. Since 2021 the education ministry and the Cabinet Office have produced classroom materials for what they call life safety education, meant to keep children from becoming perpetrators, victims or bystanders of sexual violence. In March 2026 the materials and their teaching guide were expanded and revised to include content on sexual consent, in response to changes such as the 2023 revision of the criminal law that created the offence of non-consensual sexual intercourse. Whether and how they are used is left to each school. A woman who left school before any of this may never have heard consent discussed in a classroom at all. That was not a failure of attention on her part. It was not there to be heard.

The silence has a Japanese face in fiction as well. In My Husband Won't Fit, the 2019 drama adapted from Kodama’s autobiographical novel, a young couple find they cannot have the sex they are trying to have. They search magazines and the internet for anyone with the same trouble, find no one, and she comes to believe that she is defective. For years neither says a word. What the silence teaches her is not a fact about her body. It is that she is alone with it.

Pain, bleeding, or being unable to have the kind of sex a couple is trying to have are questions for a gynaecologist, and nothing in a documentary or an essay replaces that conversation. What the story shows is how long a question can be carried alone when there are no words to carry it in.

For a woman who grew up in another language and lives in Japan, the gap can be doubled. She may have English words for all of this and not the Japanese ones a clinic will use, or the other way round. The words are worth having in both languages, not because anything is wrong, but because a question that cannot be named is a question that tends not to be asked.

Four objections, and then one this essay owes its reader.

The first is aimed at the ending. After two and a half hours establishing that women’s pleasure was left out by medicine, schooling and science, the series closes, as The Guardian’s reviewer recorded it, by telling the viewer to get quiet, because the answers are within her. A structural failure is diagnosed, and a private assignment handed out. There is something true in that ending, since some answers can only be found by attending to one’s own body. But a woman who has just learned that the textbooks drew her flat is entitled to notice that the homework has been handed back to her.

The second is that counting orgasms can become a tyranny of its own. A gap measured in orgasms invites women to measure themselves the same way, and a series that insists everyone deserves pleasure can leave a viewer who is not feeling much of it with one more thing to fail at. The series’ own conclusion, that pleasure lives in the mind as much as in the body, is a partial answer, not a complete one. Pleasure turned into a target stops being pleasure and becomes a performance review.

The third is commercial. This is a Netflix series, its first episode includes a practical tour of sex toys, and one reviewer admitted to adding several to a shopping basket after watching. A documentary about a withheld education can end up as a shopping list, and as this Library argued in “What Is on the Shelf: Femtech, Self-Pleasure and the Limits of Buying Your Way Out”, buying something is not the same as having a right. Nothing on a shelf restores a missing chapter of a textbook.

The fourth goes to the history, and it is the most serious. A much-cited study arguing that anatomy textbooks deliberately stopped showing the clitoris has been challenged by the anatomist mentioned above, who argues that it rests on methods that cannot be replicated and on a biased reading of its sources. If that critique is right, the series’ claim that the omission had causes may be too strong in places, and some of it may have been neglect rather than design. This essay concedes the point about motive and keeps the point about the picture. Whatever anyone intended, the anatomist who produced the modern map says that the typical textbook description lacked detail and was wrong in places, and a woman is failed by a flat picture whether or not anyone meant to fail her.

And the one this essay owes. This house sells private companionship, and an essay concluding that women were denied their own pleasure is convenient for a business like this one. So it is worth saying plainly what the series actually prescribes, because none of it is sold here. A diagram. A vocabulary. A room of people saying aloud what they were taught to hide. A question asked during, and an answer that is allowed to be no. All of it is free, and none of it needs to be bought.

Strip away the animation and the series makes a claim this Library shares without reservation. The right to know your own body comes before any promise about pleasure, and does not depend on one. Knowledge here is not a technique for better sex. It is the ground a person stands on when she asks a question, refuses something, describes a pain to a doctor, or notices that she has been faking for years out of courtesy.

Knowledge that arrives late is still knowledge. The same year the series was released, Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande gave the narrator’s question a fictional face: a retired teacher who has never had an orgasm, who is ashamed of her body, and who was once the adult telling girls what their skirts said about them. The film takes her there through a hired hotel room, which is a subject of its own. But its last image is not of the room or the man. It is of her alone before a mirror, looking at her own body without apology. Nobody taught her that at school either.

The series’ form deserves the same seriousness as its content, because the couch is the argument. Shame works best on a person who believes she is the only one. Putting women in a room to say aloud what they were taught to hide is the simplest thing the series does, and it is also the thing most likely to undo the first lesson. The science matters. The company matters as much.

None of this is medical advice, and the series is not a clinic. If something hurts, bleeds when it should not, or has changed in a way that worries a woman, that is a question for a gynaecologist or a doctor she trusts, and it deserves to be asked in plain words, the ones the textbooks should have printed.

It is not medical advice and it diagnoses no one. Nothing here is a statement about any reader’s body, and a reader who recognises nothing of this in her own life is not being described.

The orgasm figures come from one large study of American adults, each reporting on a single month of their own lives. They describe associations, not causes, and say nothing about any individual. The laboratory finding on arousal describes groups, not persons.

The claim that a 1948 edition of Gray’s Anatomy left the clitoris out is reported as the series’ claim. A much-cited study that tells the same story has been disputed, and this essay does not settle the dispute. What the essay says about textbooks in general comes from the 2005 anatomical paper itself.

The series was not screened for this essay. What is described comes from its published record and from reviews, and lines from the screen are described rather than quoted. No one on the couch is named or described individually, and the experts are reported only as saying what they say on screen.

Nothing here implies that anyone who made or appears in the series knows of this house or endorses it, and the house’s interest in the conclusion is stated in the body of the essay, not only here.

A few questions, for anyone who met that diagram late.

What was the first thing you learned about your body, and who taught it to you, whether or not they meant to? Which of the three lessons did you take in without anyone saying it aloud: shame first, pleasure as somebody else’s, a body that answers for you? Is there a question about your body you have carried for years because you did not have the words for it, and who could you ask now?

The narrator asks how a life would be different if a woman had learned all this without fear. That is a question about the past, and the past cannot be taught again. But it has a present tense too, smaller and more useful: what would you like to know now?

Nobody gave you the plain sentences. That was never your failure. They exist, they have existed since before your grandmother was born, and they are yours whenever you want them.