Ana Autoestima (Brazil)

Ana Autoestima

Ana Autoestima is the a pleasure-focused sexuality education messaging service for adult women in Brazil. The initiative was co-created between TabuTabu and a group of visionary women from Favelinha, a favela (shantytown) community in the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, in firm agreement that understanding and practicing one’s pleasure is key to developing self-esteem.

We prototyped Ana Autoestima in 2022 with support from The Pleasure Project, and scaled the initiative in 2023-2024 to more communities with support from DTK International through the Phil Harvey SRHR Innovation Award and from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation through the Quality Innovation Challenge (in partnership with The Pleasure Project).

In the second half of 2024, the Ana Autoestima team secured and implemented its first Brazilian funding through the Futuro do Cuidado network—an independent milestone, with support from TabuTabu. What started as a TabuTabu project is now becoming its own initiative, led by the women it was created with and for.

visit Ana's website

How it's going

Ana Autoestima’s objective is to include all people who identify as women, although she promotes her services in favela communities across Rio, so as to reach those women who are furthest removed from sources of comprehensive sexuality education.

Ana’s friends (service users) face multiple barriers to access both information and services, and often report being subjected to judgement and biased information if/when they seek out sexual health services.

Here is how Ana talks differently to them:

Program Summary

Ana Autoestima breaks the narratives of disease and unwanted pregnancy prevention by normalizing pleasure as a key motivator to consensual sexual encounters. She takes into consideration that her friends (service users) have varying levels of understanding of their bodies, their pleasure, and their sexual health. Ana therefore talks about:

Sexual and non-sexual pleasure, erogenous zones, desire vs. arousal
What bodies with vulvas and bodies with penises can be like - anatomy and physiology, and how every body is it’s own world
Masturbation as a means of self-discovery and self-pleasure
Orgasms - the changes bodies can go through during sexual activity to (maybe) reach different types of orgasms, and reframing orgasms from being the only goal to sex
The ins and outs of how sex works, and expanding the concept of sexual intercourse from penis-in-vagina sex to include non- and other penetrative encounters, activity between people of the same sex assigned at birth, etc.
Pleasure and contraceptives - how contraceptives can be sexy!
Pleasure in partnered sex, the importance of knowing what feels feels pleasurable so one can communicate about it, how to get to know one’s partner’s/partners’ body/bodies, and (sexy) consent.

Sample of Ana’s content on WhatsApp Status

“The sex-positive and pleasure-positive information Ana [shares] is not about how others feel about us, but about how we perceive ourselves, and how we feel about ourselves.”

Evelyn, Project Ideator & Service User

Impact Model

THE WOMEN

BEHIND ANA

The women behind Ana Autoestima bring the character to life with a range of experiences and identities that make her content instructive, relevant and inclusive of all of Ana’s (potential) friends.