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This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
Last week, hyperconservative Maggie Gallagher wrote a piece in which she rather unsuccessfully tries to link women’s right to make reproductive choices and anal sex.
The first thing that set off alarm bells for me was her citing a research article mentioned in the book “Premarital Sex in America,” on the possible relationships between abortion and depression. According to the authors, this research may “suggest that abortion may contribute to depression in emerging adulthood, independent of sexual-behavior patterns”. Of course, what she left out was this article from the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, which analyzed whether women who had had abortions reported depression or low self-esteem within a year of their …
Continue reading Maggie Gallagher Does It Again: Sweeping Statements and Lies About Abortion and Anal Sex
This post first appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
A post about the relationships between sex-positivity and asexuality over on feministe.com caught my eye. And before I knew it, I was reading this post and this newsletter from the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network. And I think that there’s a lot of food for thought there.
Now, I want to be very careful since, as a non-asexual person, it’d be easy for me to get up on a soapbox and talk about the experience of folks who identify as asexual. There’s a parallel between that and the way that white folks often feel comfortable talking about the experiences of people of color, or heterosexuals do about queers, or men about women. That only …
Continue reading Sex-Positivity and Asexuality: Bringing Them Together
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
Two articles came through my in-box the other day. I found one of them rather thought-provoking and the other quite irritating. But they both had one thing in common. Well, actually, more than one thing, but they had one thing in common that I found especially difficult.
They were both using gender-essentialist language to talk about men and sexism.
In Fight the Sexualization of Young Girls the Right Way, Sarah Seltzer discusses why we need to shine a light on the sexualization of girls and young women without ending up being anti-sex. It’s a good look at the challenges in navigating that. She argues very convincingly that what we need to do is make room for young people to explore and discover their authentic …
Continue reading Gender Essentialism, Masculinity, and Sex-Negativity
One of the difficulties I’ve seen when it comes to discussions and debates around sexual practices and communities of erotic affiliation centers on the notion of consent.
On one side, there are the folks who bring everything back to the question of the individual. The general argument is that if a person consents to a particular act, then there isn’t any reason that they shouldn’t be allowed to do it. Yes, this is a vast oversimplification of a much more complex statement, but it often boils down to the notion that people should be able to anything they want, as long as they and their partner(s) consent to it.
On the other hand, there are people who …
Continue reading Consent, Open Relationships, and Sex-Positivity
Last month, I finally got to meet Sinclair Sexsmith in person, after months of emails and tweets. We were both presenting at the Talking About the Taboo Conference, hosted by the Center for Sexual Pleasure and Health and it was a real treat to get to geek out with Sinclair and other sex education folks.
Sinclair sat in on my presentation on sex-positivity and sexual authenticity and I’m deeply flattered to read her reflections and responses to what I said. Here’s a snippet:
Everything and anything can be sex positive. Sex positivity is about a state of mind, not what you do in bed—a fundamental acceptance of what other people do, even if it isn’t
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Continue reading The Courage to Be Sex-Positive
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
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
There are a lot of reasons people have sex. We do it because we want to express love, feel pleasure, or build connection. We also do it because we’re bored, we’re stressed out, we want to distract ourselves from our problems, we want to manipulate our partners, or to avoid arguments.
In one of my workshops, I have the participants list some of the reasons that people might choose to have sex. I (and other sex educators) have been doing this sort of exercise for years, so I’ll admit that I wish I’d published it before David Buss. His research team interviewed people about their reasons to have sex and came up with a list of 237 different ones. Now, I don’t think his …
Continue reading When Sex Almost Works
This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine.
Every year, I get dozens of calls and emails from university groups, professors, fraternities and sororities, and residential assistants, asking about sex education presentations. I send trained educators to them to talk about sex-positivity, the physiology of pleasure (as compared to “reproductive anatomy”), safer sex, body image, sex toys, sexual diversity, relationships and communication, and many other topics. It’s a valuable part of our mission to provide accurate, non-judgmental information about sex, pleasure, and relationships to young adults.
So I was curious to read Margaret Brooks’ article ‘Sex Week’ Should Arouse Caution Most of All, in which she raises both questions and fears about these …
Continue reading There’s Nothing Wrong with University Sex Weeks
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