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Via Sinclair Sexsmith
Just helping get the word out. See below for details, and please pass it on.
- Are you a female-to-male transsexual age 25-45?
- Have you been on testosterone for five years or more?
- Do you live full time as a man?
- Were you primarily sexually attracted to women before transition, and now have a primary sexual attraction to men (after transition)?
Dylon is a graduate student studying clinical psychology at the California School of Professional Psychology, and he is recruiting participants for a confidential study about their experience of sexual orientation in relation to their transition. It is his hope that this project will increase trans visibility, and consequently increase the availability of resources to our community.
If you would like to …
Continue reading FTM Dissertation Study: Participants Needed
I’ve written about [SSEX BBOX] before because it’s such an amazing project. The filmmakers have been interviewing smart, thoughtful, sexy people in São Paulo, Barcelona, Berlin and San Francisco, four cities known for sex-positivity and celebration of sexual diversity. They’re putting together a fantastic documentary and the last time I spoke with them, they were working on getting Portuguese, Spanish, German, and English subtitles translated in order to help spread the stories and wisdom their participants shared. That’s especially challenging since each culture has created new languages for talking about sex, so SSEX BBOX is going to bring some new connections into the world. Ultimately, there will be a whole series of web episodes for the project.
On January 30, the Center for Sex …
Continue reading Come To the [SSEX BBOX] Premiere Party!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be empowered. It’s a question that frequently comes up in discussions about sexuality, sexism, porn, choice, and sex-positivity. I recently ran across this post on the topic by Jennifer Kesler which points out some of the ways in which this word is misunderstood and the effects that can have on how we think about our sexualities.
One of the things that Kesler points out (rightfully, I think) is that the word empowerment has been co-opted by a variety of people and forces that don’t have our best interests at heart. Rather than the original definition as “a multi-dimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives,” it’s often used in ways …
Continue reading What Does It Mean To Be Empowered?
I have a confession to make. Once upon a time, I was a Sensitive New Age Guy.
I suppose I should explain what I mean. As I’ve written in other posts, I’ve always been rather dainty. And in my struggles with the Act Like a Man Box, there were several years where, rather than rejecting the either/or dynamic of the Box, I tried to reject everything in the Box. This started when I was in college and many of the folks I was spending my time with were some flavor of feminist/dyke/lesbian. I got a lot of encouragement to reject masculinity, rather than the construct of the Box.
Looking back at it, I can see that this was partly because of the …
Continue reading Confessions of a Former Sensitive New Age Guy
A post on HuffPo Women from a few months ago is making the rounds again. Author Yashar Ali’s article A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not “Crazy” makes some excellent points on the ways that some men use accusations of craziness to control women:
My friend Anna (all names changed to protect privacy) is married to a man who feels it necessary to make random and unprompted comments about her weight. Whenever she gets upset or frustrated with his insensitive comments, he responds in the same, defeating way, “You’re so sensitive. I’m just joking.”
As Ali points out, this sort of behavior is “gaslighting,” a term which comes from the 1944 film Gaslight. In the movie, a man manipulates his wife …
Continue reading Some Thoughts on “Crazy Women”
One of my favorite sex nerds, Dr. Debby Herbenick, recently retweeted something that I’ve been thinking about for a while:
Today is the 20th anniversary of the date that I met my partner. In the last two decades, we’ve both changed a lot. We’re both much more secure and solid in who we are. We’ve grown and challenged each other to overcome many of the habits that caused friction in our lives and in our connections with other people. We’ve learned many, many ways to support our relationship. And yes, our bodies have …
Continue reading Getting Older, Getting Better
Last week, I was chatting with a friend who was telling me about her polyamory difficulties. Specifically, she’s perfectly happy having multiple partners, but some of the guys she’s met have tried to convince her to be monogamous with them and she’s rather frustrated with that, understandably.
Her story reminded me of the first cat that ever came into my life. Carter was a huge orange tom cat who terrorized the neighbors’ cats, and in once case, a Doberman Pinscher. But with people, he was sweet and friendly. In fact, he was so friendly that he managed to convince several people up and down our street to feed him. He’d always sleep at our house (usually on my bed), but during the day, he’d wander …
Continue reading Polyamory: Some Kitties Are Just Like That
Jaclyn Friedman, the author of What You Really, Really Want (an amazing book that I think everyone should read), has a guest post over at feministe.us about the ways that women attack and shame other women around sexual assault. It’s a great read, but then, pretty much everything she writes is.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is how gendered the mechanisms of social control often are. My experience has been that men are more likely to exert this control through violence, while women tend to use shame, although of course, those are simply trends. While men’s violence has gotten much more attention in some circles, the effects of shame are often discounted or minimized even though they can sometimes be even …
Continue reading Shame and Violence: The Mechanisms of Social Control
This post first appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
I don’t recall when I first heard about AIDS.I was 11 when the first cases were documented by the CDC in 1981, but it took a while before the news percolated down to me. I remember being 12 or 13 and the panic that hit everywhere. Suddenly, there was a sexually transmitted disease (as they were called then) that was killing people and nobody really knew how it spread. The complacency around STIs that penicillin gave us for a few decades suddenly evaporated and freaked out doesn’t even begin to cover it.
There were people who refused to shake hands or even be in the same room as people with AIDS. There were people who …
Continue reading World AIDS Day: Looking Back
Back in the day, before we had this thing called the internet, options for getting information out to the world were much more limited. There was the media of course, but when it came to spreading info about HIV & AIDS, the newspapers and TV messages usually fell into two camps: panic or silence. Neither was particularly effective at sex education. Of course, the government’s silence until Surgeon General C. Everett Koop published his report in 1986 didn’t help, either.
So one method for spreading the word was posters. They’d show up in bars and community centers when non-profit organizations took the lead, wheat pasted to walls and bus stops when activists took over, and even on buses, trains and other public places when public …
Continue reading An Amazing Collection of AIDS Awareness Posters
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