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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
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
I have to admit that I find the debates about porn fascinating. Actually, they’re not really debates since, more often than not, what I see is people yelling at each other. Calling it a debate would imply that there’s a deeper level of dialogue than actually exists. I find this rather frustrating because I can understand the perspectives of the different sides.
So I was gratified to see this summary of some of the research on the effects of porn in this post on scienceblogs.com. Of course, the research on the topic is wide-ranging and it’s hard to grasp it all, especially since different definitions of pornography and harm are used. That makes it hard to compare studies and limits how well we can …
Continue reading The Both/And of the Porn Wars
Many of my sex-positive, pro-porn friends are talking about the Stop Porn Culture conference in a couple of weeks. I was resisting writing something about this because I don’t want to give them more attention (or, for that matter, more of my bandwidth). And after sitting with it for a bit, I realized I had something I wanted to say.
First things first. I really understand many of the critiques that anti-porn folks have. In fact, I share some of them, myself. There’s a lot of porn that is based on and reinforces maladaptive gender roles, performance-based models of sex, racist, sexist and/or homophobic stereotypes, narrow definitions of pleasure, and more. I absolutely get that and I feel a lot of anger around that.
I …
Continue reading Sigh. Another Conference Against Porn
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
The cliché that sex sells is so common that many of us don’t even think about it anymore. Sexy images are used to attract attention and convince us that we can buy something and either be more sexy or be attractive to the scantily clad person (usually, but not always a woman) in the ad. But sometimes, it seems to me that people use sex without really thinking about why they’re doing it.
For example, PETA has been using sexual imagery to try to convince people to stop wearing fur. And while I understand their desire to do what they can to catch people’s attention, I’m not convinced that their use of nudity has the effect that they want.
For example, Sasha Grey is well-known …
Continue reading When Sex Doesn’t Sell
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
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