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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
I’ve written before about Advocates for Informed Choice, an amazing organization that advocates for the civil rights of children who are born with variations of sex anatomy. It’s estimated that 1 in 2000 children are born with reproductive or sexual anatomy and/or chromosome patterns that don’t fit the usual definitions of male or female. And in most cases, the medical response is to perform surgeries. In fact, many doctors view children born with DSD (differences in sex development) as an emergency that requires an immediate response. This often results in pressuring parents to make quick decisions about things that they might not even have heard of before. Fortunately, AIC is working to change that and there’s been some progress.
On January 26, 2012 in …
Continue reading Save The Date! “XXXY” Screening 1/26/12
One of the complaints about sex education for children is that it sexualizes them. Generally, I hear this sort of thing from people who push for abstinence-only programs even though they don’t work. But whatever the motivations behind it, I think it’s worth taking a look at the idea that talking about sexuality creates sexualization, especially since it’s used to attack sex education.
For example, The Guardian has an article about Lynette Burrows, a “family values” campaigner who said:
I think parents have the absolute right to protect their children from this sort of education which is so unhelpfully obsessed with destroying childhood innocence, in a way that’s reminiscent of paedophilia. To me, anyone who wants to talk dirty to little children is
…
Continue reading The Difference Between Talking About Sex And Having Sex
There area lot of ways in which pain can get in the way of sex. Health issues, pelvic pain disorders, STIs, and injuries can all make it difficult to relax and feel good. But recently, I got a question from someone that inspired me to do a little research.
It’s pretty common for people to tighten different muscles during arousal. I’ve heard some experts suggest that it’s because it can heighten the level of sensation and excitement. Some folks will hold their breathe or squeeze their legs or hips, or grab and pull on the sheets, or arch their backs. And if you do that consistently, over time, you might develop some habits around that. A few people have told me that they’d been doing …
Continue reading When Pain Gets In The Way of Sex
One of the most common questions that sex educators hear is “am I normal?” A lot of people feel incredible amounts of anxiety when they imagine that they aren’t normal, especially when it comes to sex. That has plenty of consequences for people’s sex lives and relationships. Ironically, it’s rooted in what I call the Myth of the Normal, rather than how things really are.
I’m sure you’ve seen the magazines that offer articles with headlines like “Am I Normal Down There?” I’ve lost track of how many sex advice columns and books I’ve read that talk about sex as if there’s one way to do it or experience it. And of course, many of the ongoing debates arguments about homosexuality, polyamory, BDSM, and …
Continue reading You Don’t Get to Be Normal
If you need some evidence that we’re not actually in a post-racism world, here’s another bit of proof.
When adolescent women show up at emergency rooms saying that they’re experiencing lower abdominal pain and/or urinary or genital symptoms, just over 26% of them test positive for gonorrhea, chlamydia, and/or trichomonas. And since many adolescents don’t have primary care doctors, they end up at the ER, so it’s especially important that they get appropriate care. Of course, in a society that offered both accurate sex education and universal, affordable health care, we wouldn’t be asking ER staff (who are more used to dealing with actual emergencies) to deal with STIs, would we?
In any case, it turns out that when young women (13-21 years old) …
Continue reading Race Bias Influences Who Gets STI Tests
When Viagra was first discovered as an erection-enhancing medication, it was an accident. It was originally formulated as a blood pressure medication and during clinical trials, they discovered what else it could do. Since then, the market for erection medications has grown tremendously and the competition is stiff. (OK, that was unnecessary, but I needed to get it out of my system.) So it isn’t a surprise that pharmaceutical companies are looking for an equivalent product for women. However, as the film Orgasm Inc. documents, the efforts to find a “pink Viagra” haven’t met with much success.
One of the main reasons is that the attempts to find a sex-enhancing medication for women are focusing on increasing arousal. But Viagra and other erection medications don’t …
Continue reading Arousal, Erection, and the Search for “Female Viagra”
I just ran across a 2009 article in the Journal Of Sexual Medicine called Emotional Intelligence and Its Association with Orgasmic Frequency in Women and it’s pretty fascinating.
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, and work with emotions. You could also think of it as the ability to control one’s emotions and influence other people’s feelings, although I prefer to think of it as “working with” rather than controlling them. In my experience, we don’t control our emotions as much as decide how we want to respond to them. EI is a really useful skill, although there are some criticisms of the tools used to measure it.
In any case, I think it’s pretty easy to see how EI can help us in …
Continue reading Emotional Intelligence and Better Sex (For Women)
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
This morning, I fielded an inquiry from a reporter who’s writing a piece about sexually transmitted infections. Among her questions, she asked “What’s the big deal about having an STD?” After I explained that the current term is STI, since you can have an infection without having a disease (like if you don’t have any symptoms), I explained that there are a few different reasons why many people consider an STI a big deal.
There’s a long history of seeing STIs as divine retribution for “sexual immorality,” especially in Europe, the US, and the countries that Europe colonized. I can understand the logic- if you see that someone can have sex and then get sores …
Continue reading STIs Don’t Make You Dirty
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