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There’s an interesting pattern I’ve seen over and over: a lot of people equate nudity and sexuality.
This probably isn’t news to you, but I think it has some really important consequences. One of them, of course, is that there are all sorts of laws regulating things like nudity or topless women in public, even when there’s nothing sexual going on.
I suspect that one reason that a lot of folks freak out about women breastfeeding in public (or in photos on Facebook) is that if you equate uncovered breasts with sex, seeing a mother feeding her child is going to make you think of both infants and sex. If you can’t separate breasts-as-erogenous-zone and breasts-as-food-source, then you can either avoid looking at breastfeeding …
Continue reading Nudity, Sexuality, and Censorship
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”
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
There’s a new post up on the Good Men Project, Is Sex Positive Ever Negative?, which highlights many of the ways in which sex-positivity is seriously misunderstood. The writer, Lili Bee, starts with an account of a conversation she had with a friend and the roadblock they hit when he suggested that she do some reading on sex-positivity. So she went to her mentor, Robert Jensen, to get his thoughts on the issue. And that’s where things get squirrely.
Bee starts off pointing out that one of the problems with what many people think of as sex-positive communities is that there’s often a reactivity to the overboundedness that has been imposed on sexuality. I agree with her that a lot of people who say …
Continue reading Robert Jensen Doesn’t Understand Sex-Positivity
Utne Reader’s new article about Dirty Girls Ministries is getting a fair amount of notice. DGM is an organization dedicated to“helping women struggling with pornography and sexual addiction, which sounds laudable until you start looking deeper.
Like many sex educators and sexologists, I have a lot of problems with the ways in which “sex addiction” is framed. For example, the issue is usually discussed in the context of how many partners someone has or how often they have sex, rather than looking at the deeper motivations behind their behaviors. It’s also used to attack people whose sexual desires or practices fall outside the “norm”. (As if the “norm” has any meaning besides the strictly statistical.) It’s often based on pseudoscience …
Continue reading Dirty Girls Ministries: This Is What Sexual Shame Looks Like
When I first became a sex educator, I figured I’d be learning a lot about relationships. Over time, I discovered that helping people explore sexuality also meant that I learned a lot about shame. So much so, in fact, that I went back to school and started learning about the interplay between sex & shame. I’ve been on that journey for about 10 years now and one thing that I’ve discovered is that the more I understand how shame works, the more I understand relationships.
Shame is one of the more difficult topics to talk about. Just discussing it can trigger it, especially if you have a lot of undigested shame lurking in your psyche. My grad school studies led me to work through a …
Continue reading If You Want To Understand Relationships, You Need To Understand Shame
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
CNN.com has a report today about Kirk Andrew Murphy, a man who committed suicide in 2003. His story is especially poignant because he was subjected to treatment when he was younger that was intended to force him into gender conformity. As part of it, he was given blue poker chips for rewarding masculine behavior and red ones for effeminate behaviors. The blue ones would get rewarded and the red ones would result in being spanked, once to the point of welts on his body.
While George Rekers, the doctor who convinced Kirk’s parents to follow these rules, used his case to build a career on the premise that homosexuality can be “cured”, according to his younger sister:
“It left Kirk just totally stricken with the
…
Continue reading Escaping The Prison of Gender
I’ve been teaching workshops on male gender socialization for about 15 years or so. The foundation of my presentation is the Act Like a Man Box, which I learned about from Paul Kivel’s book, Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart. I like calling it the “Act Like a Man Box,” rather than “The Man Box” (which is a title I’ve also seen used for the basic idea) because it highlights how masculinity is a performance.
When I do this exercise, I ask the group to brainstorm words that describe “real men.” And while I influence the responses by asking leading questions like “what does he do for a living?” or “what does he do for fun?”, the responses …
Continue reading The Performance of Masculinity
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
…
Continue reading Critical Thinking in a NY Times Opinion Piece on Sex? Unfortunately, No.
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