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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
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
I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about the connections between sex & shame. To be honest, I think it’s a real problem that we have so little language for thinking about and exploring shame because it’s part of everyone’s life. And it’s especially part of almost everyone’s sex life.
One of the assumptions that I hear quite often is the notion that shame is a bad thing. And while I agree that it’s often difficult to experience, and although I certainly know that it gets used with a too-heavy hand, I believe that it’s not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, I find that when I am able to listen to shame, when I can give it the …
Continue reading Shame is a Powerful Medicine
I’ve never liked the idea of the “walk of shame.” The idea that you should be ashamed when you’re heading home the morning after rest on and reinforces the notion that sex is something to be ashamed of. And anyway, in my experience, this sort of shame is leveled at women much more often and much more harshly than at men. Meh.
Kiersten at mysexprofessor.com has a post about exactly that. I’m especially in favor with how she ends it:
Thus, we come to my proposition. I think we should reframe the “Walk of Shame” as the “Walk of AWESOME” or some other positive feeling. Someone doing the “Walk of AWESOME” would easily be able to make
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Continue reading The Walk of AWESOME
I’ve been really intrigued by they way that people are referring to Melissa Petro, the elementary school teacher who has been taking a lot of heat for being honest about having been a sex worker, as “that woman” or “that kind of woman,” among other things. It highlights the belief of sexual contagion. Once a woman has been soiled by sex, she loses status to the point that she’s seen as less than “clean” women. It’s a classic way to shame someone. Virgin/whore dichotomy, anyone?
Yesterday, Debauched Domestic Diva wrote a post in which she asked why the anti-sex work folks like Margaret Brooks, Melanie Shapiro, Donna Hughes and Gail Dines aren’t coming out in …
Continue reading Do I Hear Crickets? Where Are The Anti-Sex Work Folks?
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
An article on the Stranger.com asks the question “why are so many gay kids killing themselves?” And the answer is that queer kids have always been at higher risk for suicide, drug abuse, depression, and sexual assault. For example, queer kids comprise up to 30% of teen suicides. And although we don’t know how many people are queer, it’s safe to say that it’s less than 30%, so there’s clearly a disproportionate impact.
Queer youth are also more likely to be homeless, mostly because their parents kick them out of the house when they come out (the awful term for it is “throwaway kids”). Imagine having to choose between being true to yourself or …
Continue reading Homophobia, Bullying, and Queer Youth Suicides
This piece also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
At the beginning of September, I wrote about an opinion piece published on the Chronicle of Higher Education website. The original piece, by Margaret Brooks, is a pretty standard example of how people attack sex education through fear, shame, innuendo and misrepresentation of the facts. And several of my colleagues and I responded to it. We also collaborated to write a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, which we sent them on Sept 16:
Dear Chronicle Editors,
We were deeply disappointed by your recent publication of economics Professor Margaret Brooks’ op-ed, “‘Sex Week’ Should Arouse Caution Most of All.” It is clear
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Continue reading Sex Educators Call Out the Chronicle of Higher Education
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
Google just launched Google Instant, a somewhat nifty feature. You’ve probably noticed recently that when you start to enter a search query, Google would give you suggestions so you wouldn’t need to keep typing. They’ve taken it a step further. Now, as you type, the search results from the first item in the list of suggestions appears. Keep typing and new results show up. If you want to search for “George Washington,” you’ll see search results for “Gmail”, then “Geico”, then “Georgia”, then “George Steinbrenner”, and then the ones you want.
I’m sure that this will be useful to a …
Continue reading Google’s Acting in Loco Parentis
When the topic of slut-shaming comes up, it’s often said that there is no equivalent for men. After all, the terms used for men who have a lot of sex or a lot of sex partners are things like ladies-man, stud, or Don Juan. They lack the negativity of slut and I’m certainly not going to claim that there aren’t different rules for men and women when it comes to sex. After all, I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone called a stud to try to shame him into complying with gender roles or to punish him.
At the same time, it’s often overlooked that there is a comparable dynamic that affects men. Boys and men who act in ways that don’t …
Continue reading Fag Bashing & Slut Shaming: It’s About Policing Gender Roles
Over on the Ms Magazine blog, there’s a post exploring whether porn is racist, which was sparked by some of the things that Gail Dines has said about the industry. And in among the various comments, Dines herself includes a link to the chapter in her book on race and the porn industry. Since I believe in both giving different perspectives a fair shake and not talking about things that I haven’t checked out myself, I read through it. She also has another sample chapter on the topic of growing up female in a culture influenced by porn.
At the risk of saying something that may surprise some folks, I actually agree with quite a bit …
Continue reading If Gail Dines Would Stop Shaming People, Maybe Folks Would Listen
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