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 (hard to do in public), or demand that moms cover up or go away.

But sometimes, it goes the other way. For example, I recently tweeted this picture:

The twitter app I use automatically uses lockerz.com to store photos and adds a link so that my followers could see the image. And within minutes, the photo was removed. If you clicked on the link, this is what you’d see:

You’ll need to click on the picture to see, but the reasons listed are:

1. It was removed by the person who uploaded it
2. The link you clicked was not valid
3. The connection was lost during the file upload
4. The photo contained nudity or SPAM
5. The photo was a copyright violation

I can only assume that their justification for pulling the photo is the idea that it contained nudity. But if you look, you’ll see that a) she’s still got her underwear on (though clearly, not for much longer) and that b) he could be wearing shorts or underwear. You can’t see anyone nipples or genitals, the usual standard for defining nudity. Sure, nudity is implied in this photo, but there’s nothing showing that isn’t showing in plenty of other photos I’ve seen on lockerz.com. In fact, because of the way the photo is cropped, there’s less skin showing than in the average Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo.

What there is more of in this picture is sex, or at least, implied sex. I’m certainly not denying that. But there’s nothing in the list of reasons given that says anything about sexual expression or activity. It says “nudity”.

If these two people were covered in spandex or liquid latex so that no skin was showing, would it have been pulled? It seems to me that if lockerz.com wants to pull photos that are about nudity, they need some clarity around what that means. And if they want to pull photos that are too sexual (whether implicitly or explicitly), they need to make that clear. Nudity doesn’t equal sex and sex doesn’t require nudity.

Just saying.

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 into thinking she’s crazy by making small changes to things in order to make her doubt her senses. When people deliberately provoke a reaction and then tell the person that it’s just a joke or to not take it so seriously, that’s gaslighting.

But I think that Ali makes a mistake when he conflates gaslighting and something that may be more common in male/female relationships: men telling women that they’re too sensitive because the guys don’t know how to handle big emotions.

Just to be clear, I’m not denying in any way that this is a form of emotional manipulation. I know full well that it can cause the recipient to doubt themselves, and that it can make a bad situation worse. I’m not making excuses for it. Instead, I want to suggest that the reasons for men doing this are more complex than Ali describes and I think we need to look at them more clearly if we want to change things effectively. So let’s leave aside the men who are purposefully using phrases like “don’t make such a big deal about it” in order to abuse someone, I want to take a look at what might be going on when it’s not a deliberate act.

One of the common challenges in m/f relationships is that, generally, boys and men don’t have the same tools to talk about emotions that girls and women often do. While girls are more commonly taught how to navigate the sometimes-rough waters of feelings, boys are usually denied these skills. In fact, boys are often shamed for any expression of emotions in order to force them into the Act Like a Man Box. As a result, lots of them grow up into men who have little capacity to make room for strong feelings (theirs or other people’s). When women express big emotions, especially anger, many men feel anxiety because they don’t know how to respond. Or they might feel shame as a result of past experiences that have bound that feeling up with other ones. Or they might feel anger, whether that’s in response to their anxiety or shame, feeling like they don’t have any control over the situation, feeling blame from their partner (or self-blame), or for a number of any reasons.

Given that these guys are in this place because they don’t know how to manage emotions, it’s easy to see how this can spiral out of control. Some men will try to avoid that by withdrawing. (Can you say man cave?) Some will attack and blame in order to deny responsibility for the situation that has resulted in their discomfort. And some will try to control their partners’ emotions by minimizing them, shaming them, or denying their importance.

Without excusing any of these forms of manipulation in any way, I think it’s important to recognize that most people have done something along these lines, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation. I know that when I was younger and less practiced at juggling big feelings, I tried to get other people to “not feel bad” because I didn’t know any other way to make my discomfort stop. While I didn’t ever tell anyone that they were being too sensitive (as far as I can recall), I know that I tried to minimize the impact of whatever it was that had bothered them, especially if it was something I had done. I wasn’t doing it in order to make them think that they were crazy. I was doing it because I felt fear and wanted to make it stop.

Of course, it’s much more effective to learn how to work with those uncomfortable feelings. It’s much better for the relationship to find ways to hold space for those difficult emotions and listen to what they have to say, rather than running from them or trying to control them. And it’s also unrealistic to expect that someone who has been denied those skills and/or has been shamed away from them will be able to use them. Further, when someone doesn’t think that they have the capacity to deal with what feels like a scary situation, it’s unrealistic to expect them to not try to change it. You can call it “manipulation” if you want, but I think it’s fundamentally different when it’s a defense reaction than when it’s an act of abuse, even if they look superficially similar.

None of this changes the fact that women have often been trained to respond to accusations of sensitivity by silencing themselves. Nor does it deny the impact that has on women’s well-being or on male-female relationships. I think that Ali hit the target when we wrote:

Whether gaslighting is conscious or not, it produces the same result: It renders some women emotionally mute.

These women aren’t able to clearly express to their spouses that what is said or done to them is hurtful. They can’t tell their boss that his behavior is disrespectful and prevents them from doing their best work. They can’t tell their parents that, when they are being critical, they are doing more harm than good.

When these women receive any sort of push back to their reactions, they often brush it off by saying, “Forget it, it’s okay.”

That “forget it” isn’t just about dismissing a thought, it is about self-dismissal. It’s heartbreaking.

No wonder some women are unconsciously passive aggressive when expressing anger, sadness, or frustration. For years, they have been subjected to so much gaslighting that they can no longer express themselves in a way that feels authentic to them.

…

From the way women are portrayed on reality shows, to how we condition boys and girls to see women, we have come to accept the idea that women are unbalanced, irrational individuals, especially in times of anger and frustration.

At the same time, I think that our strategies for dealing with these behaviors need to reflect the fact that the underlying causes can be more complex than we often acknowledge. The difficulty, of course, is that assuming good intentions that don’t exist is a great way to get stuck in an abusive relationships. But assuming bad intentions that don’t exist doesn’t create the kinds of change we need to see in the world.

I learned a useful tool for this sort of thing from Thorn Coyle: don’t coddle weakness. We can confront people who act in ways that harm themselves or other people (including emotionally manipulating them) and look for a good faith effort towards change. If we don’t see it, we can set boundaries or disengage from them. We can even support them as they move through whatever changes arise, if we want to. But if we don’t create the opportunity for them to start that process, we can hardly be surprised if they don’t. I find that bringing some fierce compassion to the conversation can help, too.

Since lots of boys and men are stuck in these cycles, simply because they don’t know how to get out, here’s some language that I’ve found helpful in situations that feel like they’re bigger than I could handle:

Instead of saying “don’t make such a big deal out of it” or “you’re being too sensitive,” try saying something like “Your feelings are bigger than I know how to deal with. I need to step back for a moment so I can keep from feeling overwhelmed.” You might even add, “I want to be able to focus on what you’re saying and my feelings are getting in the way. Can I have some time to calm them down?” You might move across the room while maintaining the conversation. You could step out of the room for a couple of minutes, calm down, and then return. You could even take a break for an hour or two, a few days, or even longer. The important thing is that you’re taking responsibility for your reaction, you’re communicating about your needs, you aren’t disconnecting or attacking, and you’re coming back to finish the conversation.

And guys- no matter how much it might feel like it, you aren’t going to drown in someone else’s emotions. You can learn the skills you need to make room for them and for your own feelings without getting lost. You’ll need to let go of the idea that that’s for women and sissies. You’ll need to get over the idea that emotions are a sign of weakness. I strongly suggest that you get some support for the from someone who isn’t your partner. Lots of men have been trained to get all of their emotional needs met by their girlfriends or wives, which can be a disaster when we’re struggling with issues that relate to them. Get a therapist, find a men’s group, talk to someone else. Take off the armor and learn to open up.

Maybe if enough men can let go of the defensive reaction that prompts them to tell women to stop being so sensitive, the men who are doing it in order to abuse won’t be able to camouflage themselves anymore. If the only men who are saying things like that are deliberately manipulating others, it’ll be a lot easier to call them out. To help make that happen, we also need to teach boys how to use their words when they’re experiencing big feelings. Adults of all genders need to model it so that kids have role models and they can learn to manage their own emotions.

The more we can each take responsibility for our emotions and our reactions, the more graceful our relationships can become. And the payoff from that is well worth the effort it takes to get there.

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 more long-lasting.

I think there are a lot of reasons for these patterns. After all, violence is much easier to see and measure. It doesn’t really require us to ask how the person on the receiving end feels about the experience. And the effects are often pretty visible, whether we’re looking at damage to objects and property or to someone’s body.

On the other hand, shame can be much more subtle. We might observe its effects in the moment if we understand how it works, but all too often, we simply don’t see them or we don’t think they’re as serious as the more obvious results of physical violence. I remember a PSA about child abuse from when I was a kid that pointed out that words can hit as hard as a fist. And I know from talking with some of my therapist colleagues that sometimes, shame can continue to harm people for years. Think of all of the recent discussion about bullying. It’s not just beating someone smaller or weaker up. It also includes mocking, teasing, and humiliating them.

When used in small doses, shame can actually be an effective way to teach boundaries, limits, and values. The problem is that when it’s used too often or not carefully, or when we shame people for things they have no control over, it can have lingering consequences. The challenge we face is how to work with this all-too-human emotion. After all, we often turn around and shame other people when our own shames have been triggered. Brene Brown’s book I Thought It Was Just Me has some of the best advice for how to interrupt that cycle.

Part of the difficulty in calling shame out is that people can feel shamed even when there wasn’t any intention or desire to cause that. Sometimes, we feel it because we’ve internalized criticism or shame from past experiences. Sometimes, it’s because we don’t know how else to respond to someone’s anger. Sometimes, we fall into a shame spiral because we lack resilience when someone calls us out. There’s a difference between “you’re shaming me” and “I’m feeling shame”, and I’ve seen plenty of relationships get stuck as a result. Lots of online discussions get bogged down there, too. But those challenges don’t change the fact that shaming is incredibly common and causes real harm.

As Friedman points out, we also use shame to avoid looking at the real issue at hand. For example, if we judge people who have been raped, it makes it easier to imagine that sexual assault happens to “those folks over there” and that can help us feel like we’re safe over here. But that’s only an illusion of safety since it doesn’t do anything to address the root causes, such as the choices that perpetrators make to assault someone. It rather reminds me of the ways in which we use security theater to create feelings of safety rather than creating actual safety. In her words:

What’s worse, all this finger-wagging about booze doesn’t make even the waggers of said digits any safer. It makes them feel safer, sure, but there’s miles of difference between feeling safer and being safer. Believing that being more virtuous than the next girl will keep you safe from rape actually puts you in greater danger, because you’re less likely to spot warning signs that you’re being targeted if you think you’re at less risk.

If we’re going to start making things better, we need to take a hard look at how violence and shame are woven into our culture, our personal histories, and our actions. We need to be willing to acknowledge how deeply they run, to explore the ways that they work, and to look for better ways to respond to our situations and our fears. We also need to stop pretending that one is worse than the other or making excuses for them- they both have rippling effects that can last for a long time. We need to look within ourselves and ask whether we’ve used shame or violence to win arguments, influence other people’s behavior, or try to get what we want. When we do, we might be surprised at how often we use one or both of them. And ultimately, we need to find ways to talk about these issues with compassion instead of blame, shame, or violence. Until we do, we’re only making things harder for ourselves and the people around us.

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 they’re sex-positive have judgment towards folks with concerns or squicks about a particular sexual act, which only reinforces and perpetuates the cycle of judgment. But Bee doesn’t get that a big part of the problem is the result of how people “express objections to” a particular sexual act.

There’s an important difference between saying “I don’t enjoy that” or “I don’t understand what draws people to that” and saying “that sexual act is bad/sick/wierd.” When someone expresses an objection to a sexual practice, there’s often a theme of judging the people who do it and of saying that there’s something wrong with them for enjoying it. Even if it’s not intentional, that judgment is still likely to come out. Bee doesn’t seem to understand that while reactivity to that judgment is unfortunate, it’s also understandable given how much shame people have received for their sexual desires.

As I’ve written many times, sex-positivity is the idea that the only relevant measure of a particular sexual act, practice, or desire is how the consent, pleasure, and well-being of the participants are cared for. And the two pillars that reinforce sex-negativity are the Myth of the Normal and the idea that there are ways that anyone’s sexuality should be. The more we can let go of the idea that there is such a thing as “normal” sexuality that people “should” enjoy, the more we can let go of sex-negativity.

It’s not a surprise that a lot of people get confused around this. Even Jensen, who usually has a more nuanced understanding, seems to not get it:

I think the whole notion of it is absurd. The notion of a “Sex Positive” category or a sex-positive feminism is truly ridiculous since no one I know of in these arenas is sex negative. The only people who might be truly sex-negative are extreme religious fundamentalists who believe that sexual conduct is somehow inherently shameful.

First off, there are a lot of people besides extreme fundamentalists who believe that sex is shameful. Like the Catholic Church. Want another example? The all-too-common practice of slut-shaming rests on the idea that women who have sex are dirty and that certainly isn’t limited to “extreme religious fundamentalists.” Or how about the ways in which queers are asked to desexualize themselves in order to gain acceptance? When two men kissing gets a negative reaction in settings where male/female couples can kiss without reprisal, at least part of the cause is likely to be sex-negativity. Given how pervasive these sorts of things are, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s not just “extreme religious fundamentalists” who express sex-negativity.

Further, maybe Jensen would do well to talk with some therapists about how their clients feel about sex. Any therapist worth their fee can tell you that many, many people feel shame for their perfectly benign fantasies and desires, simply because they’ve internalized the belief that anyone who wants to do those things must be sick. Unless he’s going to argue that being a feminist somehow automatically absolves you of that shame, I don’t see how he can reasonably argue that there are no sex-negative feminists.

Even people who have few negative feelings about their own sexualities can still have negative feelings about other people’s sexual desires or practices. It’s easy to say that you think sex is good. It’s a lot harder to honor, value, and celebrate someone’s sexuality when you find it challenging, confusing, or triggering. And speaking from personal experience, I’ve had plenty of feminists (and non-feminists) judge or try to shame me for my sexuality because of their own issues around it to buy what Jensen is selling.

The reason I find this so frustrating is that there are many ways in which he & I are on the same page:

The question now is: How does one fashion a healthy, sexual culture and the question I use to frame that is to ask: “What is sex for?” Sex has a role in human life. Obviously it has a basic role in procreation but it’s much more than that. The question is, and at any given point in time, sex can mean many different things and what do we want it to mean?

To ask that question is not to impose a single answer, it’s to recognize that not all forms of sex are consistent with healthy, human relationships.

Yes, this. I take it a bit further when I suggest that one way to find the answers to the question of “what do we want sex to mean?” is to ask about the consent, pleasure, and well-being of the participants, but we’re pretty much in alignment, I think. But then, they take the conversation here:

Lili: When one looks at the tone of many of the comments following articles about porn use, one can really get a sense of the contention and hostility. So it leaves me wondering: Whom does it really serve to create distinctions like “sex positive”? Why even create the distinction?

Bob: Well, it serves the people who want to undermine critique by labeling any critique as being “sex negative”. That’s the only function it serves as far as I can tell, which is why I don’t use the terms and don’t accept the terms in conversations or debates I might be in.

While that might be one use for the term for some people, it’s not the only one. One of the historical roots of sex-negativity was the idea that sex is inherently sinful or shameful unless it was validated by procreative sex within the bounds of heterosexual, monogamous marriage. While that has changed over the last century or so, what we’ve mostly done is shift the boundaries. For example, when van de Velde published Ideal Marriage in 1926, his suggestion that non-intercourse sexual stimulation was acceptable (provided that it led to intercourse) was groundbreaking. That’s only 85 years ago, which isn’t a long time compared to how long sex-negativity has been around.

Over the last century or so, we’ve seen some pretty significant shifts in terms of what kinds of sex are considered acceptable and which aren’t, but the fact that we’re still discussing things like how many partners someone can have before she’s a slut, or whether it’s possible to respect someone and have casual sex with them, or whether there’s something inherently oppressive about anal sex shows that we’re still stuck on the idea of categorizing sexual acts or desires as good or bad. The very notion that a sex act can be good or bad in and of itself is simply the current iteration of sex-negativity because it locates the value of sex in the activity rather than in the experiences of the individuals who do it.That’s like saying that sandwiches are good or bad without reference to the personal tastes of the people who eat them. It’s much more productive to ask how a given individual feels about what they do and make room for a diversity of responses, instead of judging the acts themselves.

Now, I do think it’s worth asking a question that a lot of feminists bring up: in a world that pressures people to make certain choices around sexual expression, how do we know what our authentic desires are? But at the same time, I find it rather telling that Bee is so honest about her judgment:

When I do raise the question in conversation, it’s not uncommon to get a considerable amount of pushback from women, who’ll say, “No, I do love walking around in a see-through dress with no underwear on in public”, or “I love when I know my man is out enjoying himself at strip clubs” or any of these statements which I have to admit, sound bizarre to me. [italics added]

Right there, where she admits that what turns someone else on sounds bizarre to her: that’s sex-negativity. It’s not the fact that she doesn’t get what makes those things appealing to others. It’s not the fact that she’s not drawn to them. It’s the fact that she says that they’re bizarre that makes it sex-negative. If she had said “…any of these statements which I have to admit, I just don’t understand,” I wouldn’t say that this is an expression of sex-negativity because she’d be owning her confusion instead of labeling other people’s desires. And while she toned it down by saying that they sound bizarre rather than being bizarre, it’s still an expression of judgment instead of taking responsibility for how she feels. It’s ironic that it happens in the same interview in which Jensen claims that sex-negative feminists don’t exist, which I really take to mean that he doesn’t have a really good grasp on what sex-negativity means.

I think that’s what I find so frustrating about him. I can add one word to his question about body image to make it a really relevant question about sex-positivity:

How do we shape [sex] lives that are sensible, sane and consistent with both physical, emotional and mental, long-term health?

And again, when he talks about authentic desire, he and I are really in agreement:

The other question is, “How much of that comes from authentic desire?” and ‘authenticity’ is a difficult word in this context because all of our desires are in some sense, conditioned by society. I’m not sure anybody has individual, authentic desires. What I come to desire is always going to be, in part, shaped by the society around me. But we have to be able to ask, “How are those social pressures sometimes healthy, or unhealthy? How are they sometimes connected to domination/ subordination dynamics in oppressive systems like patriarchy?”

So in a lot of ways, I do agree with him that feminism can be very much in alignment with sex-positivity. But where it falls down is when people arrogantly judge others and in the use of shame and disgust to try to sway people, both of which are unfortunately common in discussions with feminists, in my experience. Those are the mechanisms of erotophobia and I believe that’s a big reason why some people equate feminism with sex-negativity. I have difficulty imagining how one can create a truly liberatory set of sexual ethics if you’re using tools that create and reinforce sexual shame.

The difficulty for anyone who wants to ask questions that challenge people’s sexualities is that shame is so pervasive that it’s really easy to accidentally trigger it, causing all sorts of defensive reactions including attacking the questioner. So if you’re going to ask those questions, as many feminists do, it’s a lot more productive to learn about how shame works and then adapt your inquiry to minimize how likely you are to trigger it. (Some good places to start are here, here, and here.) It’s also really useful to learn how to compassionately inquire or set boundaries instead of attacking or blaming someone.

In any case, given that Bee wanted to explore sex-positivity, I think that she would have done better to have found someone who has something to say about it beyond the claim that it doesn’t exist. Since Jensen is one of her mentors, I assume that she already knew what he had to say on the topic and I can’t help but wonder why she asked him for his take on it. So here’s an open invitation to her, or to Jensen, or anyone else. I think that sex-positivity has a lot to offer feminism and I’m always happy to talk about these issues. You can get in touch with me anytime.

facepalm

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 about brain chemistry, as well as sex-negativity, shame, and a lack of critical thinking. And while anti-porn perspectives don’t have to be anti-sex, they often are.

When I read the Utne Reader article, I was struck by how much shame is woven into the very fabric of Dirty Girls Ministries and its operations. Even the name resounds with the notion that masturbation makes women dirty, as does the title of the founder’s book Dirty Girls Come Clean. And it’s amazing how often this kind of rhetoric sneaks in. For example, the article says that

because of their below-the-belt explorations, [the online support group members] report feeling tainted, undesirable, and perverted.

Now, I might suggest that the reason they feel this way could be because of the deep stigma, secrecy, and shame that are attached to solo sex and female sexuality rather than the fact that they’re masturbating. William Stayton, a professor of human sexuality and Baptist minister offers a similar perspective:

“To feel that they’re addicted only means that they enjoy doing it and they don’t want to…Real sexual addiction is when someone has no control over it. Things that get blamed for addiction are often just things that people don’t like.”

Unfortunately, the message that heterosexual, monogamous marriage validates sex often leads to further problems:

Many girls in Renaud’s ministry think that once they get married, they will be free to express their sexuality and enjoy orgasms with a man. This causes some to take the fast track to the altar, only to find that after they’ve married, they still feel the same taboo urges. One forum commenter married at 19 in the hope that pious matrimonial intercourse would rid her of her sinful thoughts—only to find that during sex with her husband, she would have the same fantasies. “I cannot cleanse my mind of these images,” she says. “I try so hard to focus on my husband only, but my thoughts are so warped.”

There’s really very little that gets in the way of sex more than judging yourself while you’re doing it. One version of is is specatoring, or focusing on yourself from a third-person perspective and evaluating yourself instead of enjoying the experience. And while this quote seems different at first, there’s a real parallel between judging your body or sexual technique and judging your thoughts and fantasies. In both cases, the critical thoughts get in the way.

But then, this is how shame works. It makes us critical of ourselves. It makes us think we’re bad or dirty or sinful. It tells us that we have to try harder if we want to be accepted. And ironically, this kind of obsession often makes it worse because it brings our problem front-and-center. When we can learn to accept our difficult thoughts and develop mindfulness practices that encourage self-compassion, it’s often easier to let go of the painful patterns. The more we fight our Shadows, the stronger they become; when we embrace them and learn to listen to them, our Shadows often calm down.

It’s a problem that so many people and organizations that have the stated goal of helping people free themselves from the cycles they’re stuck in reinforce some of the ways of thinking that make those patterns stronger. It’s even more unfortunate that so many of them use language that reinforces the idea that sex is dirty, rather than helping people see that it’s the relationship to sex that might be a problem, rather than the sex itself. And it’s a tragedy that Dirty Girls Ministries is built on the sexual shame that has plagued us for so long. Regardless of their intentions, they’re feeding the problem instead of cutting it off.

If you find that your relationship to sex or to masturbation or to porn is problematic, I 100% encourage you to explore that. (This book is a good place to start, as is this and this one.) And I suggest that you do it from a place of self-compassion and without attaching blame to sex or masturbation. You might find that it’s a much smoother way to go when you don’t shame yourself.

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 lot of my old shames, which was challenging and ultimately rewarding. Unfortunately, it also meant that I inadvertently triggered other people’s difficult emotions when I was talking about what I was learning. My partner, in particular, had a rough time of it for a while.

There isn’t a lot of clear language for discussing shame. When I use that word, I’m talking about a whole range of feelings, from mild embarrassment to guilt to shame to deep humiliation. Similarly, “fear” encompasses worry, anxiety, fear, and panic. Other people say that guilt, shame and embarrassment are different emotions entirely. That’s the one point in which I disagree with Brene Brown’s amazing book I Thought It Was Just Me. I find that these different emotions are  similar in feel and effect, while occurring on different scales and in response to different events.

Another reason shame is so hard to talk about is that when we experience it, there’s a shift in how our nervous system functions, which makes it difficult to tap into our higher-order cognitive skills. We tend to sink into the emotion and lose our ability to think clearly about what we’re experiencing. Granted, that can happen with any emotion, but shame in particular makes it challenging. Allan Schore’s very dense but incredible book Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self offers an impressive amount of info on the neurobiology of those mechanisms, but let’s just leave it for now that shame is an especially tricky emotion to process because when we’re in it, our capacity to think clearly often diminishes.

So if the shame feelings are so challenging, why do I talk about them so much? Because shame is the emotion of disconnection. When we feel shame, we tend to disconnect from others, and when we disconnect from others, shame is often triggered. Gershen Kaufman described shame as a “rupture of the interpersonal bridge”, which I think captures it nicely. Anything that weakens or damages or severs a connection that we have with someone else can trigger a feeling on the shame spectrum. The scope and intensity of the feeling will vary from person to person, and is partly dependent on how much we want that connection as well as how much the relationship is injured. Some people are very shame-prone and even minor disconnections trigger big emotions. Some relationships are more important than others, so disconnections are more threatening. This is part of why coming out to parents or family members is often harder than coming out to strangers. And minor ruptures will usually result in smaller emotions, unless they bring old feelings or memories to the surface.

Unlike a lot of people, I don’t think that shame is inherently bad. It can certainly be a hard emotion, but it’s there for a reason. It’s one way that we learn rules, boundaries, and expectations. Problems arise when it’s used too much or when we don’t have a way to apologize, make amends, and reconcile. It’s common for people to use shame to enforce rules that don’t make sense or to avoid talking about the rules they’re imposing. (That comes up a lot around sex.) And quite often, people use it in the wrong settings, such as when there isn’t a positive relationship in the first place. But even with all of those limits, shame can also serve us. For example, I once broke one of my relationship agreements with my partner. The shame that I felt when the truth came out has kept me from doing the same thing ever again- it hurt us both, it was incredibly unpleasant, and I won’t go through that another time.

Some people have argued that we don’t need our difficult emotions to keep us in line, and that we should be able to abide by our agreements by making an intellectual commitment to them. But our emotions are what motivate us, which is why both words share the same root. Our feelings are there to give meaning to our experiences and they’re pretty effective at it, even though they can also be very confusing. Anyway, given that we have them, I’d rather learn to use them than deny them.

I think that this is crucial to our understanding of relationships because it helps explain many of the ways that people act. For example, in Passionate Marriage, David Schnarch discusses one of the common pitfalls of relationships: enmeshment (aka codependence). Couples who are enmeshed are so tangled up in each other that they’ve lost their individuality. Learning to step back a bit and give each other some room requires the ability to tell the difference between moving back and disconnecting. And when someone is shame-averse or has a lot of undigested shames, they often have a hard time telling the two apart. As a result, fear of shame and/or the inability to process it tends to encourage enmeshment. When you’re scared to move back, all you can do is move closer together until you lose your individuality.

Another reason understanding shame is useful is that misattunements, miscommunications, and small ruptures in the connection will happen in every relationship. When we explore how shame works, it becomes easier to see the patterns and find ways to work through them. When we avoid or fear shame, minor disconnections can become big triggers and reconciliation becomes much more difficult.

Here’s an example: people who are afraid of disconnection and shame often apologize reflexively, as if to say “I’m sorry. Please don’t leave me.” But apologizing before the other person has a chance to put their feelings on the table is ultimately an attempt to control them. Instead of letting their partner have their reactions and then finding ways to work through the situation together, the shame-averse person is trying to limit how their partner acts in order to protect themselves from disconnection & shame. Seeing how shame contributes to this pattern can help us change how we respond. Instead of immediately apologizing, one might say (either to oneself or to the other person), “I’m having a shame reaction.” That can give them the room to manage their feelings, self-soothe, and ground in order to deal with the situation instead of reacting to the anticipation of disconnection.

In my view, shame and love are two sides of the same dynamic. Love is the emotion of connection, and shame is the emotion of disconnection. Or another way to think of is is that shame is the shadow side of love. My experience has been that running away from my shadow makes it chase me, while fighting it makes it stronger. But when I’ve learned to sit with it, and maybe even dance with it, it has often calmed down. In fact, it can even offer me marvelous insight into my inner workings. The more I’ve learned to sit with my shames and listen to them, the quieter they’ve become and the stronger I’ve grown. In many ways, my shames have been some of my most powerful teachers.

I’m not suggesting that we wallow in our shames- that’s not usually very helpful. Instead, we can discover how to pay attention to the feelings, learn when to let them be and when to lean into them, and develop the tools we need to be able to stand on our own in connection with others. It’s not an easy path, and it can be richly rewarding.

If shame and love are complements of each other, then it makes sense that the more you know about how they each work, both in general and for you in particular, the easier it is to navigate relationships. Learning how they operate is part of developing the tools for emotional self-regulation and communication, which are essential relationship skills. In my personal experience and in my observation of other people, the more we discover how this all-too-human part of our psyches work, the more we can make our relationships thrive. On the flip side, when we don’t understand how the mechanisms of shame influence us, we’re missing some significant information about our interactions with other people. It’s no wonder so many folks are confused about how relationships work when they’re missing such important pieces of the puzzle!

Out of all of the books I’ve read on the topic, I Thought It Was Just Me is one of the most useful. Brown’s description of the mechanisms of shame is incredibly clear and her compassion shines through every page. While the book focuses on patterns of women’s’ experiences, anyone of any gender is likely to find it useful. On the topic of love, bell hooks’ All About Love and Stephen Levine’s Demystifying Love stand out, although the latter is written for therapists so the language might not be as directly accessible for some folks. Pema Chödrön’s Getting Unstuck and When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times are also great resources.

Although it isn’t an easy path, unpacking shame and figuring out what makes it tick can be a source of incredible wisdom and power. When disconnection inevitably arises in your relationships, you’ll be much more able to talk about what’s going on, move through the feelings, and create new ways to move forward. Finding ways to make room for moving apart gives us the freedom to discover new ways of coming together. And it creates more resilience, in each person and in the relationship.

So rather than avoiding shame or trying to deny it, I invite you to integrate it into your life, to pay attention to how it plays out in your relationships and those that you see around you. After all, it’s already there, so we might as well figure out how to work with it.

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 gender diversity are fueled by the difficulty some folks have with people who are “abnormal.”

Ever since Kinsey published his groundbreaking research, we’ve been obsessed with worrying about whether we’re normal or not. Actually, it started earlier, but that was the first time we had any data we could compare ourselves to. And while I’m glad that we have more information about what sorts of sexual practices people get up to, I also know that it fuels a lot of anxiety.

The reason I call it the Myth of the Normal is that, when it comes down to it, it’s nothing more than a story we tell ourselves. From a statistical perspective, we can certainly measure many of the facets of sexuality: how often people have sex, how they do it, how long they do it, whether they orgasm or not, who they do it with, and so forth. Other aspects of it can be described, although measuring them in empirically valid and reliable ways gets tricky: how people feel about they do, what their preferences and desires are, what meanings they make of their experiences, etc. For each of these dimensions, there’s an incredible range of diversity. I’ve been learning about sex for over 20 years and I still learn about out things that some people do that I’ve never heard of before, simply because there are so many possibilities.

Not only that, but our positions on any of those continua usually change over time. How much we each want to have sex, what kinds of people we find attractive, what pleasures bring us to orgasm, how we feel about all of it, and any other variable can shift for a number of reasons. Sooner or later, almost everyone is going to find themselves outside the statistically defined norm, at least in some way. If someone never diverged from that middle portion of any of the distribution curves, they’d be so uncommon that they would, in fact, be abnormal. The only thing that’s normal about sex is that nobody is actually normal.

Unfortunately, most people use the word in a moral sense rather than a statistical sense, which builds the Myth of the Normal upon a foundation of shame. That usually leads people to hide or deny their divergence from the expectations they think they need to meet. When I hear someone say “I shouldn’t want to do this…”, I know that there’s some shame. There are few people who police the boundaries as rigidly as those who are afraid that their non-compliance will be noticed. It seems to me as if the story in their heads is “if I can act like I’m normal, maybe nobody will notice that I’m not.” And so the Myth of the Normal and sexual shame are reinforced and the cycle accelerates. I think it’s time to step off that ride.

There are a few different ways we can do that. First, we can learn some tools to change our habits and stop letting ourselves get caught in the hamster wheel. I’m a big fan of Pema Chödron’s audio lecture Getting Unstuck, which is full of useful insights and suggestions. Therapy can also be a really helpful process for uncovering our internalized sexual shames and moving through them.

Another possibility is learning how to listen to the experiences and stories of people who do things differently than you. In The Trouble With Normal, Michael Warner writes that through that process,

You learn that everyone deviates from the norm in some context or another, and that the statistical norm has no moral value. You begin to recognize how stultifying the faith in the norm can be. You learn that people who look most different from you can be, by virtue of that fact, the very people from whom you have the most to learn. Your lot is cast with them, and you begin to recognize that there are other worlds of interaction that the mass media cannot comprehend, worlds that they can only deform when they project images of ghettos and other deviant scenes. (p. 70)

It takes a lot of practice to learn to do that because it can challenge some of our most deeply held and unexamined attitudes and beliefs. It can also inspire difficult emotions and trigger deep shame, fear, and anger. And just when we think that we have it figured out, we might discover something new that challenges our complacency. Cultivating a sense of curiosity, setting aside defensiveness, and finding ways to hear people’s stories takes a lot more work than judging and shaming them. And my experience is that it’s much more rewarding.

My last suggestion (although I don’t think this is a complete list) is that we can let go of striving to be normal and striving to appear normal. There’s a certain amount of privilege inherent in “normal,” but that rests on pluralistic ignorance rather than any real difference between folks who are supposedly normal and folks who aren’t. After all, if nobody’s actually normal, then it’s really a question of how many people are out of the closet about it.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The difference is that in the story, the emperor was naked and nobody would say anything about it because that would supposedly show that they were unfit for their position. In the real world, we’re all walking around naked, and most of us pretend otherwise since acknowledging it means stepping outside of “normal,” with all of the shaming that can result.

But there’s a lot of freedom in coming to terms with the fact that there isn’t any real normal/abnormal distinction other than whatever we make up in our heads. Once we see that, we can stop letting that story rule us and instead, we can discover our authentic sexualities. We can learn to celebrate (and not just tolerate) our diversity. We can explore new ways to craft our relationships. We can try out different pleasures and experiences to see if we like them, and we can learn how to do them more safely because we don’t have to feel embarrassment, guilt, or shame. We can stop working so hard to put up false fronts, and we can stop worrying about what will happen if people find out what we really like to do.

Unfortunately, the benefit that comes from being perceived as normal makes that difficult for a lot of people. There can be a certain amount of privilege that accrues when you’re in the closest, which is easier for some folks than others. That’s why, in my world, nobody is normal. Not me, not you, not your parents, not your children, not your friends, or your lovers, teachers, or co-workers.  From where I sit, nobody gets to be normal. I find a lot of freedom grows out of that. After all, if nobody gets to be normal, then I can do the things that I enjoy (within the bounds of the consent, pleasure, and well-being of the folks involved), you can do the things you want to do, and maybe we’ll find some things we have in common. Or not, and that’s fine, too. Either way, we don’t need to judge each other or fall into the trap of believing that either of us is normal.

So say it with me. “I don’t get to be normal. You don’t get to be normal. We don’t get to be normal. They don’t get to be normal. Nobody gets to be normal.” And let’s see where we go from there.

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 belief that he was broken, that he was different from everybody else,” she recalled. “He even ate his lunch in the boy’s bathroom for three years of his high school career, if you want to call it that.”

If Rekers’ name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the guy who was photographed while traveling with a 20-year-old rent boy who claimed he had been paid to give Rekers nude massages.  Given the research linking homophobia to same-sex desires, the whole situation is more than a little ironic.

During the “therapy”, Rekers consulted with two psychologists. One of them has died, but the other one reported that “the family was well adjusted and he did not see any “red flags” when evaluating Kirk.” Kirk’s sister responded that he had learned how to tell the experts what they wanted to hear. And in the end, his family is saying that he committed suicide as a result of being beaten and shamed for his gender non-conformity. While I think that this probably more complex than “this is what led to his suicide, ” the effects of such deep shame and abuse from both parents and medical professionals in order to “fix” a child are profound.

As a cisgender, queer man who’s most decidedly gender-non-conforming in some ways, this story both inspires anger and makes me feel fortunate. I’m fortunate that my parents let me be who I was, even though I had very little interest many of the things that lots of boys liked. I was fortunate that they let me discover who I was without shaming me for it. I was fortunate that they kept any anxiety they felt about that to themselves. Kirk Andrew Murphy didn’t get that. And too many young people today don’t get to have that, either.

How many more children and young people are we going to shame for letting themselves shine? How many more are we going to slut-shame and fag-bash in order to keep them in line? How much longer are we going to pretend that there are only two ways of moving through the world and we each only get one, depending on what we have between our legs? How much longer are we going to pretend that this is a prison for all of us? Some of us might be in solitary confinement, some of us might be trustees with a lot of privilege, and we are all behind bars.

There’s really nothing wrong with many of the aspects of gender roles. The difficulty comes in when we have to conform to all of them and visibly perform them in order to present as female or male. I’d love to live in a world in which we could pick and choose which pieces fit us. I’d love to see people put any of them on for a while, whether it’s for an hour, or a day, or a span of years, knowing that when it was time to take them off, that would also be just fine. And I really want to live in a world in which nobody was attacked, assaulted, or shamed because of which ones they happen to be wearing at that moment.

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 have been pretty consistent, regardless of the age, gender mix, sexual orientation, or racial makeup of the group. As long as the participants grew up in or have spent significant time in the US, they know what this guy looks like:

After we come up with this list, I ask the group to name the things that men are called if we’re not all of these things. Here are some of the more common responses:

One of the primary reasons that boys and men gay bash and bully queers is that they need to perform masculinity in order to show the world that they’re in the Box. And since very few guys can always be in the Box for their entire lives, the trick is to act like you are in order to cover for any lapses. In effect, the performance of masculinity requires constant vigilance to make sure that nobody sees any missteps. Since the logic of the box is an either/or, you’re either all the way in or you’re all the way out.

On the other hand, all of the words on the outside fit into one of three groups: gay, female, loser. I think that says pretty interesting things about homophobia and sexism. The way I think of it, those are the bricks that make up the Box and shame is the mortar that holds it together.

The Box is one of main reasons why men harass women on the street and why catcalling and violence tends to escalate when men are in groups. Since the Box is hierarchical as well as performative, the guy at the bottom of the heap is at risk of being cast out. So each guy has to compete with the others in order to not be the one who’s outside the Box. And as each one’s performance becomes more vigorous, it forces the others to do the same.

As a sex educator, I often see how the Box affects sexuality. The guy in the Box has lots of partners, a really big penis, and always gets it up, gets it in, and gets it off. So it’s no wonder that lots of guys look for a quick fix for their erection difficulties like Viagra or cockrings. Just to be clear, I don’t think that there’s any inherent problem with either meds or toys. But when you’d rather use them than deal with whatever the source of your erection challenges might be, that’s a problem. And when it leads you to buy non-prescription erection pills, that can also be dangerous.

For example, I once had a guy ask me if cock rings would help his erection. With a little inquiry, I found that he had lost his job, his house was in foreclosure, and he & his wife were talking about divorcing. With all of that stress, the fact that he wasn’t getting erections wasn’t a dysfunction, it was how his body was supposed to work. Adrenaline (which is one result of stress) keeps the blood vessels in the penis from relaxing, so you don’t get erections. There’s a difference between a dysfunction and your body not doing what you want it to do. But he wanted a quick fix so that he could get back into the Box and “perform”. And isn’t it telling that when we talk about “sexual performance,” we’re always talking about men? Shouldn’t a “sexual performance” be what strippers do?

So the notion that masculinity is fleeting and requires vigilant reinforcement isn’t new to me, but there’s some new research to back it up. Time Magazine has an article about a new paper, Precarious Manhood and Its Links to Action and Aggression, in which the researchers looked at the ways that men deal with the fleeting nature of manhood. Men have to constantly prove and re-prove their status, as they showed in three experiments.

In the first, participants finished 25 sentences that began “A real man…” or “A real woman…” and they reported that:

Findings revealed that men, but not women, described “a real man” with more fleeting actions than enduring adjectives, and they described “a real woman” with more enduring adjectives than fleeting actions. Notably, this pattern emerged when we controlled for the gender-stereotypical content of the sentence completions. When men completed “real man” sentences with gender atypical content (e.g., “A real man cooks dinner”), they still used action language to do so. Thus, men define their own gender status in terms of the active things that men do rather than the ways that men are.

In another project, researchers asked people to read a mock police report about either a man or a woman who punched a person of the same gender in front of a potential romantic partner.  When they were asked to evaluate the motivations of the hitter, there was a difference in responses. Women attributed their actions to intrinsic factors like “his/her own immaturity” or “the kind of person he/she is typically, ” while men mentioned extrinsic factors like being provoked by the stranger” or “being publicly humiliated.” I’m assuming that the “potential romantic partner” was not of the same gender as the recipient of the punch, and I’d love to see how this plays out when the characters are queer.

As a follow-up, they asked men to braid hair (the control group braided rope) and tested their actions afterward by giving them the choice of solving a puzzle or punching a bag, and they were more likely to punch. In a similar experiment where both the hair-braiders and the rope-braiders were given a pad to punch, the hair-braiders punched harder. And in another version of the braiding experiment, all of the participants braided hair and were either allowed to punch a bag or not. The ones who punched it felt less anxiety.

What does all of this tell us? Well, it helps explain why so many men resort to violence when they think that their masculinity is threatened- it’s an easy way to demonstrate that they’re in the Box. And it also shows how delicate masculinity can be. If all it takes to hurt it is braiding someone’s hair, it has to be pretty fragile.

Unfortunately, while masculinity is pretty delicate, the construct of Box is quite resilient. When I get up in front of a group and start talking about it, I immediately demonstrate that I’m not in the Box because the guy in the Box doesn’t talk about it. The difference, of course, is that I reject the entire notion of the Box. I’ve learned to pick and choose what aspects of masculinity work for me and which ones don’t, since some of the things in the box are positive or at least dependent on one’s relationship to them. In effect, I’ve queered the Box but to the guy who’s stuck in it, the only place he can imagine me being is outside the Box. And he’s so used to not listening to those men that it’s hard for my message to get across. That makes the task of helping get rid of the Box really difficult.

It’s also pretty telling that the Time article ends with this:

The authors said this research also begins to illuminate the negative effects of gender on men — depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and violence. And, at the very least, it may persuade ladies to cut their guys a little slack. “When I was younger I felt annoyed by my male friends who would refuse to hold a pocketbook or say whether they thought another man was attractive. I thought it was a personal shortcoming that they were so anxious about their manhood. Now I feel much more sympathy for men,” Bosson [one of the researchers] said in a statement.

There’s a difference between having understanding and compassion for the men who are trapped in the Box and cutting them slack. After all, it isn’t as if the dude in the Box is giving any slack to women, queers, transgender or genderqueer folks, or for that matter, heterosexual cisgender men who refuse to pretend to be Real Men. And cutting men slack is another way of coddling them instead of helping them learn to let go of the Box and discover the freedom that comes from being who you are. Having compassion without coddling people is fierce. It’s powerful. And it requires the ability to hold onto both the fact that the Box hurts us all and that it gives heterosexual cisgender men privilege.

It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the effect of gender. It’s the effect of a limited and limiting ideas of what gender means. It’s the result of rigid rules of masculinity, of fag bashing, of homophobia and sexism and gender-based violence. It’s the result of kyriarchy. And yes, it’s the result of how we’ve created gender, but it isn’t the effect of gender.

As this blogger said,

I don’t have slack to offer men. What I have is the alternative to a life spent swallowing one’s emotions and feeling a constant anxious insecurity where one’s contended self-esteem should be—and that seems a lot more valuable to me than “slack.”

For real.

Update: In response to some of the comments below, I wrote a follow-up piece: Picking and Choosing from the “Act Like a Man Box”

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 day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.

From www.nytimes.com (share this quote)

He seems to think that there are only two paths worth mentioning. There’s sex that’s part of a path that takes you towards marriage and there’s sex that’s promiscuous. Now, he seems to try to soften that by saying that it might be promiscuous or it might be ill-considered, but given that the definition of promiscuous is indiscriminate, or lacking standards of selection, this is another case of someone projecting a false dichotomy onto sexuality.

This is a problem for at least three reasons. First, it not only continues to place “matrimony” on a pedestal (something which is especially fraught with challenges in a political climate that restricts marriage to heterosexuality in most jurisdictions), it also requires that any and all relationships need to be a trial run for marriage. There’s no room to have a relationship for any other purpose- if it’s not going to lead you down the path to marriage, it’s no good.

Now, I certainly support people who are looking for a lifetime commitment when they evaluate their relationships with that yardstick. But it’s not the only reason to be in a relationship, monogamous or otherwise. For example, you might enjoy someone’s company and want to be with them while you’re in college or working in a city that they live in, knowing that when you move, the relationship will end. When we base the success of a relationship on whether it leads to a lifetime commitment, rather than on whether it supports the well-being and authenticity of the people involved, we use an external measure rather than an internal one. And that is a source of a lot of people’s problems.

Second, it’s possible to have sex that is neither part of a “let’s see if this person is marriage material” nor lacking in careful selection. It might be based on a different set of criteria, but it’s still a selection process. Researcher David Buss surveyed college students about their reasons for having sex and tallied 237 different ones. With all of those reasons, don’t you think it’s possible that people might have different ways of deciding whether to have sex or not? Even if you, or I, or Douthtat might have a different motivation or decision-making process, I think it’s disrespectful to decide that someone is “lacking in standards” or is “ill considered” without knowing their individual story.

Third, when slut shaming fuses with the idea that marriage or trial-run relationships as the only context in which sex is acceptable, many women end up fearing their sexual desires to the point of needing to be “swept away” on a tidal wave of love/passion/emotion in order to justify sex. (Carol Cassell did a marvelous job of describing this.) As a result, they might not prepare for sex by, say, having condoms handy since that would mean that they were sluts. And that ends up putting them in the very same risky situations that Douthat decries. Perhaps if he actually understood how these sorts of things work, he’d have a better grasp on the situation.

Douthat goes on to write:

Among the young people Regnerus and Uecker studied, [in the book Premarital Sex in America] the happiest women were those with a current sexual partner and only one or two partners in their lifetime. Virgins were almost as happy, though not quite, and then a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.

From www.nytimes.com (share this quote)

This is a much more complex issue than he makes room for. Certainly, some people try to soothe themselves by having sex, even when that makes them feel worse. This is one of the causes of sex addiction, or for that matter, any addiction. But it’s also true that the more closely one fits the loudly-proclaimed definitions of acceptability, the less stress one is under. Given our culture’s obsession with female virginity, many women who have more than a small number of sexual partners experience some stress about their sex lives. And it’s often because of the slut-shaming they experience, both directly and indirectly, rather than their actual histories. Similarly, gays and lesbians often experience distress and pain, not as a result of being gay but as a result of homophobia. Do we say that being gay causes their distress? Well, people used to, but now we know better. Perhaps that’s a lesson that Douthat missed.

This is a perfect example of someone confusing correlation and causation. Does having lots of sex cause depression? Does feeling less happy cause people to have more sex? Are they both caused by some third element? What are the factors that influence these shifting dynamics? What about people who have more sexual partners and are perfectly happy? And what about the folks who are miserable, even though they’ve had a smaller number of partners?i Rather than acknowledging these complexities, Douthat jumps to conclusions in order to support a weak argument.

He also misrepresents the research on sex education:

This is what’s at stake, for instance, in debates over abstinence-based sex education. Successful abstinence-based programs (yes, they do exist) don’t necessarily make their teenage participants more likely to save themselves for marriage. But they make them more likely to save themselves for somebody, which in turn increases the odds that their adult sexual lives will be a source of joy rather than sorrow.

From www.nytimes.com (share this quote)

If you follow the link he offers, it’ll take you to an article called evaluated a single program which was not representative of abstinence-only programs in general. And that program was used with sixth & seventh graders, so there’s absolutely no credible justification to say that it will make their “adult sexual lives will be a source of joy rather than sorrow.” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to see a thin shred of evidence stretched to promote his belief, but it’s further evidence of his sloppy thinking.

Not to mention that using language like “saving themselves” is deeply rooted in the notion that sex (or at least “pre-marital” sex) stains, ruins, or disgraces one. Do I need to explain how that’s based on sex-negativity and shame, or can I leave it as it stands? Or how about how this sort of rhetoric is consistently used to control women’s sexuality much more harshly than men’s?

Douthat wraps things up with another distortion:

But [social conservatives] also see Planned Parenthood’s larger worldview — in which teen sexual activity is taken for granted, and the most important judgment to be made about a sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically “safe” — as the enemy of the kind of sexual idealism they’re trying to restore.

From www.nytimes.com (share this quote)

Leaving aside his use of scare quotes, I can tell you that the folks at Planned Parenthood and other sexuality education organizations aren’t suggesting that the most important thing to consider about a potential sexual encounter is whether it’s clinically safe, which I take to mean “at low risk for STI transmission or unintended pregnancy.” The most important issue is whether it supports everyone’s health, well-being, consent, and pleasure. And having known and worked with and spoken with more Planned Parenthood educators than I think Douthat has, I can say with a lot of confidence that they would agree with me. And just to prove it, here’s what they say on their website:

We all have sexual feelings. But we don’t always engage in sexual activity when we have those feelings. When to have sex is a personal choice. Figuring out when you’re ready for sex continues through life. People need to make decisions about sex in their teens, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond — every time a sexual situation develops.

A good sex life is one that keeps in balance with everything you’re about — your health, education and career goals, relationships with other people, and your feelings about yourself.

If you’re considering having sex, ask yourself these questions:

* How clear can you be with your partner about what you do and don’t want to happen?

* How will having sex will make you feel about yourself?

* How will sex affect you physically and emotionally?

* Are you considering having sex because you want to or because someone is pressuring you?

* Will sex change your relationship with your partner?

Sometimes it’s helpful to talk these kinds of decisions through with someone you trust — a parent, a friend, a professional counselor, or someone else who cares about you and what will be good for you.

From www.plannedparenthood.org (share this quote)

That’s a far cry from Douthat’s misrepresentations of the matter. But then, Planned Parenthood is used to having people distort their work in order to score easy points.

What Douthat leaves out is that whenever we hold monogamy as the gold standard against which every other type of sexual relationship is measured, we reinforce sex-negativity and sexual shame. Monogamy works well for some people, not so well for others, and not at all for still other folks. What we need is room for people to figure out where they fall on that spectrum, to develop the skills they need to navigate whatever relationship structures work for them.

We don’t need more sexual shame in the name idealizing monogamy. And we certainly don’t need more muddy thinking about sex pretending to be intelligent analysis of the issue. What we need is intelligent analysis and critical thinking around sexuality topics. Unfortunately, that’s not what Douthat brings to the table.