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This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
I don’t watch a lot of TV these days, but back when I did, there was a subplot on Friends when Rachel & Ross “took a break” in their relationship, during which Ross had sex with someone else. When they got back together, it turned into an ongoing source of drama. Rachel thought that he had cheated because, by her definition, they had still been in a relationship even if they were taking some time apart. Ross didn’t think so since they were “on a break,” which meant to him that the rules of being in their relationship didn’t apply.
Miscommunications of this sort are pretty common, as I’m sure most of you know from …
Continue reading New Research: Young Couples Disagree About Whether They’re Monogamous
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
The fabulous Clarisse Thorn wrote a great article in which she asks why men who are honest about their sexual desires get written off as creepy (among other things). It was originally posted on Alternet and it’s interesting to read through the comments and compare them to the comments on the Jezebel repost.
This is really good timing for me, since I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately (see my posts here and here). In my experience, most of the people who talk and write about male sexual energy and how men act upon it are women. While I owe a huge debt to the many women who helped me shape my understanding and …
Continue reading Sex Tips For Men: How to Ask For Sex
Ever since I wrote The Most Important Thing That Men Who Have Sex With Women Need to Know, I’ve been finding myself in more conversations with other men about how we manage our sexual energy. A few weeks ago, I was at an event, talking with a couple of friends about it and one of them said something that stuck with me.
We were talking about what it’s like to get cruised by men, which has happened to all of us, and how some guys have an overly aggressive approach that we find off-putting. Now, none of us particularly freak out about men flirting or cruising with us, in and of itself. In fact, at least two of us like it some of the …
Continue reading How Do Men Manage Sexual Energy?
Every so often, there’s another cycle in the fight over casual sex. This time, the argument was sparked Jaclyn Friedman’s piece on Yes Means Yes! The author describes her sexual explorations and describes how they brought her pleasure, fun, and healing. She never suggests that her path will work for everyone. In fact, her entire story is simply a personal reflection.
But of course, that doesn’t mean she won’t get attacked for trying to ruin the world. Susan Walsh over at Hooking Up Smart insults Friedman and calls her dangerous, while making spurious claims about the current understanding of how oxytocin works:
Oxytocin is not some disinformation cooked up by the evil patriarchy. It’s a chemical that
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Continue reading The Complexities of Casual Sex
The amazing Logan Levkoff has stirred up a hornet’s nest of angry guys. First, she wrote a post called 5 Ways to Get Your Wife to Have More Sex With You, which is full of useful tips for heterosexual men who want to improve their sex lives. Now, I have to say that there are a lot of generalizations in there, but having talked with Logan quite a few times, I can confidently say that she wrote that way because it’s a limit of the medium.
Blogs and websites (especially mainstream ones or Fox) don’t usually want you to write with qualifiers like “some people like this…” or …
Continue reading The Most Important Thing That Men Who Have Sex With Women Need to Know
Ever since my post the last week about resentment, I’ve been thinking a lot about why so many people allow resentments to build and what we can do to avoid them. And it seems to me that one of the easiest things we can do is to tell the people in our lives what we appreciate about them.
I’ve noticed how often people seem to have difficulty being appreciated. In fact, I used to have a hard time of it myself. I was amazingly skilled at deflecting compliments, even when (looking back on it now) I genuinely deserved them. For a few different reasons, it was really hard for me to believe that the other person meant what they said and that I deserved …
Continue reading Using Your Words, Offering Appreciation
The other day, I was interviewed by a reporter who asked me what I think the biggest challenge to sex in a long-term relationship is. I suspect that she was expecting me to say something like keeping the passion alive, or finding new things to try, or even that old standby, communication. But I think that there’s one that is rarely talked about, even though pretty much everyone experiences it : resentment.
In my experience, both as a sex educator and in my personal life, resentment is one of the most common and difficult strains on a relationship, especially a sexual relationship. It’s pretty difficult (if not actually impossible) to treat someone well when you feel resentment, even if it’s not directed at them. Resentment …
Continue reading Resentment: The Biggest Relationship Killer
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
There’s a new article on ways that people are creating new visions of what monogamy means on the Psychotherapy Networker site. And while The New Monogamy is written for therapists and other mental health professionals, I think that there’s a lot of wisdom there for anyone interested in creating sustainable relationships.
The author, Tammy Nelson, describes some of the shifts that she has seen during her career as a therapist. As she sees it:
People no longer marry for economic, dynastic, or procreative reasons, as they did for millennia; they can’t be compelled to marry by law, religion, or custom; they don’t need to marry to have sex or cohabit or even produce and raise
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Continue reading New Ways to Envision Monogamy
Greta Christina has a great piece on the Blowfish blog (note: the original link is broken) about asking for what you want from a lover. And I think that, for the most part, she’s right when she says:
“Oh, I don’t know. What do you want to do?”
It took me way too many years to learn that this is not always a nice thing to say. That, in fact, it’s usually not a nice thing to say. It took me way too many years to learn that, although “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” may seem like a good way to be polite and accommodating and easy-going, much of the time it’s actually a gigantic buzz-kill. It’s a great way to
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Continue reading What Do You Want?
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