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One of the most important and most tricky issues when it comes to sex is what we mean by consent. The notion of consent is often used to explain the difference between kinky sex and abuse, for example. And it’s often part of the conversation when we talk about how to tell sex and rape apart.
When I talk with people about what I think consent means, I usually use a three part definition:
- You have to say yes. Giving consent means that you have actively taken action. Consent is more than not saying “no.”
- You have to be able to say no. If you don’t have the freedom to say no without repercussions, you
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Continue reading Consent, Compliance, and the Challenges of Negotiating 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?
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
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
I recently wrote about some of the things that I see causing conflict between sex-positivity and feminism. There’s quite a bit more to unpack here and I’ve been sitting with it for a while. It seems to me that these two movements have a lot to offer each other and could be really strong allies, if they can find a common ground.
One of the biggest sticking points, in my experience, is that people in sex-positive communities generally don’t openly acknowledge the ways in which sexual intrusion, assault and trauma shape sexuality. Discussions of sex-positivity rarely include what it means to live in a world in which effectively every woman (both cis- and transgender) and many of the men (again, both cis- and transgender) …
Continue reading Sex-Positivity, Setting Boundaries, Hearing Boundaries
One of my Facebook friends posted a question recently that I think has a lot to do with sex:
how do you differentiate holding non-negotiable boundaries from issuing ultimatums?
This is one of those tricky questions that gets to the heart of relationships, communication, and (by extension) sex.
On some level, both boundaries and ultimatums are an attempt to set a limit on what someone else might do. They may even use the same words. Take a look at this sentence: “If you go out tonight, I won’t be here when you get home.” I can easily imagine this being said in anger as an ultimatum, firmly and calmly spoken as a boundary, or for that matter, a piece of information that might be important. …
Continue reading Boundaries vs. Ultimatums
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?
There’s yet another report showing that lots of people don’t consider oral sex to be sex. According to Sex Redefined: The Reclassification of Oral-Genital Contact, 98% of respondents said that penis/vagina intercourse counted as sex and 78% said that penis/anus intercourse counted. But only 20% said that oral-genital contact was sex. And predictably enough, some pundits are calling it the “Clinton-Lewinsky Effect.”
Similarly, the study Misclassification Bias: Diversity in Conceptualisations About Having ‘Had Sex’ reports that 95% said that penis/vagina intercourse is sex (although that dropped to 89% if there was no male ejaculation), 81% said that penis/anus intercourse is sex, 70% said that oral/genital contact is sex and about 50% said that manual contact of genitals was sex. I’ve seen this sort of …
Continue reading Defining Sex
One of the most common pieces of advice that you’ll ever hear about sex is “communicate with your partner(s)”. And while that sounds good, it can be difficult to follow. Almost everyone has ways in which talking about sex brings up challenges. Perhaps you don’t have the language to ask for what you want. Or you’re worried about how your partner might react. Or that if you ask for what you want, it will mean something about you. Or you fear rejection. Or that you feel shame for your desires. Or maybe, simply that you’ve had unpleasant experiences when you’ve tried talking about sex and that makes it harder to bring up again.
If we want to develop happy sex lives, we need to be …
Continue reading Yes/No/Maybe Lists
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