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A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Hugo Schwyzer for his article He Wants to Jizz on Your Face, but Not Why You Think. Without stepping into the latest internet uproar about Hugo and the various things people are saying about him online (feel free to google it, if you like), I think there’s actually more to be said about the topic of that post.
Hugo’s thesis was that, while facials can certainly be an act of degradation, they can also be interpreted as “men’s desire for that same experience of being validated as desirable, as good, as ‘not dirty.’” For some people, male sexual desire and male bodies are seen as dirty, disgusting, or unpleasant and men who have internalized these …
Continue reading Where Does Validation Come From?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be empowered. It’s a question that frequently comes up in discussions about sexuality, sexism, porn, choice, and sex-positivity. I recently ran across this post on the topic by Jennifer Kesler which points out some of the ways in which this word is misunderstood and the effects that can have on how we think about our sexualities.
One of the things that Kesler points out (rightfully, I think) is that the word empowerment has been co-opted by a variety of people and forces that don’t have our best interests at heart. Rather than the original definition as “a multi-dimensional social process that helps people gain control over their own lives,” it’s often used in ways …
Continue reading What Does It Mean To Be Empowered?
I have a confession to make. Once upon a time, I was a Sensitive New Age Guy.
I suppose I should explain what I mean. As I’ve written in other posts, I’ve always been rather dainty. And in my struggles with the Act Like a Man Box, there were several years where, rather than rejecting the either/or dynamic of the Box, I tried to reject everything in the Box. This started when I was in college and many of the folks I was spending my time with were some flavor of feminist/dyke/lesbian. I got a lot of encouragement to reject masculinity, rather than the construct of the Box.
Looking back at it, I can see that this was partly because of the …
Continue reading Confessions of a Former Sensitive New Age Guy
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”
One of my favorite sex nerds, Dr. Debby Herbenick, recently retweeted something that I’ve been thinking about for a while:
Today is the 20th anniversary of the date that I met my partner. In the last two decades, we’ve both changed a lot. We’re both much more secure and solid in who we are. We’ve grown and challenged each other to overcome many of the habits that caused friction in our lives and in our connections with other people. We’ve learned many, many ways to support our relationship. And yes, our bodies have …
Continue reading Getting Older, Getting Better
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
Have you ever noticed the different meanings we have for the phrase “I’m sorry”? I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately because I’ve noticed how often some folks say it when they aren’t really apologizing. I’m not talking about those times when someone gives a false apology without actually changing their behavior. I mean those times when we say “I’m sorry for your loss” or “I’m sorry that this has happened.” It seems to me that when we use one phrase to mean a bunch of different things, it often makes it harder to communicate clearly.
Apologies are one of the most important tools we have to keep things happy and thriving. All relationships will have times of misattunement, mistakes, or moments of thoughtlessness, …
Continue reading Some Better Ways to Say “I’m Sorry”
An article on theatlantic.com caught my eye. How to Land Your Kid in Therapy takes a look at the effects of “overparenting” on the development of kids. The point that the article is making is that our emotional and mental resilience in the face of challenges, adversity, and failure needs to have the chance to grow in response to setbacks and disappointments, in much the same way that our immune systems need to have exposure to germs in order to develop. This idea makes a lot of sense to me.
In education circles (among others), people talk about learning edges, which are the boundaries of our comfort zones. If we never leave our comfort zones, we don’t learn. The trick is to discover how to …
Continue reading Leaning Into Discomfort
My partner and I have been together for quite a while. Nineteen years, in fact, and we have certainly had plenty of challenges and triumphs in that time. I don’t think the fact that we’re deeply in love with each other after almost two decades makes me an expert on relationships. After all, each person and each relationship is unique and I try to not be arrogant enough to think that what works for us will work for others. At the same time, between that personal experience and my work as a sex educator (just about twenty-one years), I’ve picked up a few tidbits along the way. There’s one that I’d like to offer you. If it helps, great! And if not, that’s ok, too. …
Continue reading Something I Wish I’d Known About Relationships Earlier
When I read the post Some laughter with the lovemaking, please: on porn, performance, and deadly seriousness, I was struck by his observation:
If there’s one thing that we see rarely — if at all — in porn, it’s laughter. What strikes me about most pornography is that it’s always so deadly serious. A nervous giggle is permissible in a few instances (such as those ghastly “casting couch” videos that are evidently ubiquitous, in which “innocent newcomers” are interviewed and then fucked for the first time on camera.) But laughter during sex, a shared joyful recognition that getting naked and sweaty and contorted is frequently hilarious? Nope. For too many, porn reinforces the obligation to perform, which creates anxiety, which creates in turn a
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Continue reading Sex in Porn is a Serious Business
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