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There’s a youtube video making the rounds of a TEDxSF talk by Nicole Daedone, founder of OneTaste Urban Retreat Center, and there’s a lot of great stuff there. She talks about many of the challenges we have around sexual shame in general, and female orgasm in particular. She speaks with authenticity about topics that many people only whisper about, if that. And she offers some great insight for how we can change that. I liked it a lot and I definitely recommend checking it out.
At the same time, she said something that I found troubling:
Female orgasm is vital for every single woman on the planet… It roots our fundamental capacity for connection.
This is the kind of sweeping statement that a …
Continue reading Nicole Daedone and the Invisibility of Asexuality
This showed up in my RSS feed today. If you’re transgender or genderqueer, these lovely people would appreciate your input on trans-inclusive and respectful language. See below for details and pass it on!
Greetings!
Ten years ago, we conducted a short survey of our community’s reactions to the use of descriptive terminology in the professional literature of gender identity issues. Basically, we were interested in reforming the literature so it could speak respectfully about transsexual and transgender persons. To do that, we wanted to find out which terms transsexual and transgender people liked, and which they didn’t like. The results of our study were reported at the 2001 scientific symposium of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), and had an immediate impact on …
Continue reading Call for Participants: Survey on Transgender Language
You might already know this, but I like to geek out about language. In my experience and observation, our language both reflects and shapes how we think and feel. I also believe that we can only think clearly about something to the degree that we have a language for it. Plus, interpersonal friction often arises when we use words differently than other people, so developing a mutual language can help a lot. When it comes to sex and gender, I figure that anything that helps us think more clearly and communicate more gracefully is a good thing.
I recently found an amazing article by Dean Spade, called About Purportedly Gendered Body Parts that addresses some of the word choices that have been floating around …
Continue reading Gender, Bodies, and Language
The ever-fabulous Becca got in touch with me recently and asked if I knew of a word for the receiving penetrative sex that’s more active. After all, you can be the one who gets penetrated and be the active one. Heck, you can even be the dominant one and be penetrated. But most of our language rests on the assumption that penetration = active and being penetrated = passive.
I’ve heard a few people use the word “engulf”, although I don’t think that really captures the essence of what Becca & I were talking about. So imagine how happy I was when she emailed me and suggested a new word: valprehend.
According to Becca, if you break it down to its roots, val means strong …
Continue reading A New Sex Word: Valprehend
This showed up in my tumblr feed today. It’s from the UC Davis LGBT Center and according to their site, you’re welcome to download it and pass it along.
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Continue reading Words That Are Transphobic
On one of the sex education email lists that I follow, someone posted a question about “porn use.” And while I’ve seen this phrase used more times than I can count, it suddenly seemed to me that the term implies a bias that runs so deeply that it’s effectively invisible.
I think it’s rather interesting that people often talk about “porn use” even though they don’t talk about “sitcom use,” “talk show use,” or “romantic comedy use.” Instead, we might ask someone how often they watch TV, or talk shows, or movies. We might say that we enjoy Law & Order, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that they “use” Law & Order.
But when we get into the area of porn, …
Continue reading Why Do We Call It “Using Porn”?
There’s a really useful word that’s been floating around in certain communities and I want to take a moment to help it spread.
Cisgender refers to people who experience and present their gender in a way that’s aligned with the sex of their body. It contrasts with transgender, which refers to people who experience their gender as different from the physical sex they were assigned at birth. Generally, transgender folks take various steps to bring them into closer alignment, such as wearing clothes of the gender they feel themselves to be, surgery, taking hormones, and having their legal name changed.
The word has been since at least 1994, although it has become more well-known since Julia Serrano’s book Whipping Girl came out. The …
Continue reading Vocabulary Lesson: Cisgender
You may have already heard about the Facebook group “Kill Your Hooker So You Don’t Have To Pay Her”. Apparently, after the group got reported as hate speech and taken down, the same person set up another group called “GTA Taught Me That If You Kill Your Hooker, You Get Your Money Back”. I don’t really have much to add about the issue, other than to point out that violence against sex workers is incredibly common, in part because they are often vilified, denigrated, insulted and disrespected. Plus, the police and legal system don’t take crimes against sex workers seriously. So I find this a symptom of a larger issue and I’m really glad that the Sex Workers Outreach Project has made December …
Continue reading On Using Sex Words as Pejoratives
I’m fascinated by the ways in which guilt and shame play out in our lives, especially our sexual lives. I don’t think there’s a sex educator out there who hasn’t had someone come to them with these feelings and, unfortunately, most of us don’t have much of an understanding of how these emotions work. It’s pretty common for people to say that they want to get rid of shame, or that they want to feel no shame. And I think that’s just as problematic as feeling too much shame.
I should clarify what I mean. Shame exists at one end of a continuum of emotions that also contains guilt, remorse and other less intense feelings. It’s comparable to how rage exists at one end of …
Continue reading Sex, Shame and Letting Go of “Should”
I spend a lot of time reading sex info websites and blogs as part of my job. They can be a great place to find the latest information about sexuality, get answers to questions, and check out the current thinking about issues that affect sex. Having said that, I’m not the first one to notice that one of the greatest strengths and biggest weaknesses of the internet is that anyone can post a webpage and make it look like they’re an expert. Lots of the writing on sexuality is simply inaccurate or entirely wrong. So here’s an easy thing to look for when you’re checking out the sex info online.
Look to see if the writer makes sweeping statements. That might be something like “women …
Continue reading some/many/most
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