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As anyone who’s been a regular reader of my stuff will know, I’m a big fan of consent. Of course, very few people will come out and say that they’re not. But for me, consent is one of the three supports for sex-positivity, the other two being pleasure and well-being. I firmly believe that the only important measure of a sexual experience or relationship is whether the participants’ consent, pleasure, and well-being are attended to.
I’m also a big fan of sexual fantasy. I think that there’s no such thing as an inherently dangerous or bad fantasy. The kinds of questions that I think are important are: How do you feel about your fantasies? Do they support your sex life? Do they get …
Continue reading Consent and Public Disgrace
This comment on another post has had me thinking.
It’s in response to something I wrote about an anti-porn conference and the commenter is trying to make a point about “green sex” or “sustainable sex.” I like the motivation behind it, but I think he’s missing the mark. Here’s what he offered:
For a positive vision of what sex without porn can be like, I offer “Green Sexuality”.
Green sexuality is sustainable sexuality. It is characterized by long-term, mutually respectful relationships that enhance the lives of the lovers and the wider world. Green relationships look more like erotica and less like porn, as defined at NoPornNothampton.org. Green sexuality is a union between two equals, embracing both heterosexual and homosexual bonds but excluding polygamy, adult-child sexual
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Continue reading What Makes a Relationship Sustainable?
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
The NY Times has an opinion piece up the other day by Ross Douthat, Why Monogamy Matters, which highlights what happens when people who don’t think all that clearly about sex write about sex.
Douthat starts with the recent research from the Centers for Disease Control that says that US teens and 20-somethings are waiting longer to have sex. Leaving aside an analysis of that research, I think there’s a pivotal sentence in the piece that shows how muddy Douthat’s thinking on sex is:
But there are different kinds of premarital sex. There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one
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Continue reading Critical Thinking in a NY Times Opinion Piece on Sex? Unfortunately, No.
You might already know this, but I like to geek out about language. In my experience and observation, our language both reflects and shapes how we think and feel. I also believe that we can only think clearly about something to the degree that we have a language for it. Plus, interpersonal friction often arises when we use words differently than other people, so developing a mutual language can help a lot. When it comes to sex and gender, I figure that anything that helps us think more clearly and communicate more gracefully is a good thing.
I recently found an amazing article by Dean Spade, called About Purportedly Gendered Body Parts that addresses some of the word choices that have been floating around …
Continue reading Gender, Bodies, and Language
One of the big debates that comes up over and over in sex education is the role and effectiveness of the strategy of harm reduction. And part of why it’s tricky is that a lot of people have so many judgments and opinions about sexual practices that it’s hard to have a reasonable discussion. When folks can’t separate their discomfort, triggers, and squicks from the discussion of sexual practices, things go nowhere fast. So I’d like to use an example from my life that illustrates the value of harm reduction.
First, a little background. I’m pre-diabetic. My body is somewhat resistant to insulin, so even when there’s fuel in my system, it doesn’t get transported into my cells as efficiently as it might. This makes …
Continue reading Harm Reduction Cookies
I recently ran across a fascinating article: Why rejection hurts: A common neural alarm system for physical and social pain. According to the authors, physical pain and social pain (which happens when social relationships are threatened, damaged or lost) are both processed in the same part of the brain.
It seems that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is activated when we experience pain in order to create a sense of distress. There’s a different part of the brain in charge of the actual sensation of pain. You can think of it as a partnership- one portion receives the message that some part of the body has been damaged, so it sends a signal to the ACC, which sets off the alarms so you know …
Continue reading The Pain of Rejection and Shame
Margaret Brooks, the noted anti-sex work activist who thinks that arresting sex workers somehow protects them (because hundreds of years of evidence isn’t enough to show that it always makes things much worse for them), is at it again.
Citizens Against Trafficking just released a statement from her that’s full of scare quotes, misinformation, and misdirection to try to convince readers that sex education is the source of all evil. Let’s take a look:
She starts off with a statement about how “At least four students attending universities in Rhode Island have contracted acute HIV infections within recent months,” which she describes as a sudden increase and a recent outbreak. According to wikipedia, there are 12 colleges and universities in the state, with a …
Continue reading Margaret Brooks Attacks Sex Ed Again
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
Last week, hyperconservative Maggie Gallagher wrote a piece in which she rather unsuccessfully tries to link women’s right to make reproductive choices and anal sex.
The first thing that set off alarm bells for me was her citing a research article mentioned in the book “Premarital Sex in America,” on the possible relationships between abortion and depression. According to the authors, this research may “suggest that abortion may contribute to depression in emerging adulthood, independent of sexual-behavior patterns”. Of course, what she left out was this article from the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, which analyzed whether women who had had abortions reported depression or low self-esteem within a year of their …
Continue reading Maggie Gallagher Does It Again: Sweeping Statements and Lies About Abortion and Anal Sex
This post first appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
A post about the relationships between sex-positivity and asexuality over on feministe.com caught my eye. And before I knew it, I was reading this post and this newsletter from the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network. And I think that there’s a lot of food for thought there.
Now, I want to be very careful since, as a non-asexual person, it’d be easy for me to get up on a soapbox and talk about the experience of folks who identify as asexual. There’s a parallel between that and the way that white folks often feel comfortable talking about the experiences of people of color, or heterosexuals do about queers, or men about women. That only …
Continue reading Sex-Positivity and Asexuality: Bringing Them Together
As a lot of people have heard, Oregon State University dropped Tristan Taormino from the lineup for the Modern Sex conference last week. It’s an unfortunate situation that highlights many of the effects of sexual shame.
The irony of my still being on the schedule while Tristan was removed isn’t lost on me. As Toby Hill-Meyer points out, I also have porn connections. They’re not as direct as Tristan’s, but I work at Good Vibrations and we sell porn. We also make porn, although it’s not like most of what comes out of LA, and I train the GV staff on how to talk with customers about porn. So yes, I definitely have connections to porn. But I think that there’s more …
Continue reading Oregon State’s Decision to Drop Tristan Taormino is About Sexual Shame
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