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Discount Sex Drugs for Soliders - Is This What Support Looks Like?

2012-05-16T00:01:24Z

May 19th is Armed Services Day (also called Armed Forces Day but I'll mention both since it's not clear who is winning that pr battle). Growing up in a big Canadian city my relationship to the military was simple. I didn't know anyone who was in the military. And the story is that my grandfather enlisted prior to the Second World War but never made it out of basic training because he had flat feet. The regiment that he was scheduled to be with did go to Europe and none of the service members in that regiment made it home alive. If not for his flat feet, none of us would have been born.

If you don't know anyone who has served in the military, and especially if you don't know anyone who has been deployed to a war zone, it's easy to think about service in black and white terms. I've met many who believe that the best way to support the troops is to question nothing and offer nationalistic platitudes till the cows come home. And I've met people who aren't able to see service members as humans deserving of the same rights and justice as the rest of us. There aren't a lot of folks in the middle.

Which is too bad since I bet a lot of service members would put themselves there. And I wonder, based on my very limited experience, how well equipped those of us who haven't served in the military are to offer the kind of support service members actually need. I worry that we aren't very well equipped at all. That we are failing.

Which brings me to an Armed Services Day promotion I came across. Some online pharmacy that specializes in "lifestyle drugs" (read: drugs for sexual functioning like Viagra, Cialis, Levitra) is recognizing the "service and sacrifice" of service members past and present by offering them $15 off their order of sex drugs on May 19th.

The truth is that service members are often un- and underemployed, and $15 off is $15 off, so it's hard to say "this is terrible and shouldn't happen". But it feels right to say "this is terrible". Service members get so little support with post-combat sexual health issues and the rates of sexual assault and suicide are so high, that I think it's fair to say this kind of shameless drug marketing simply doesn't have a place in any thoughtful consideration of what we might want to be thinking about on May 19th. And even though some might benefit from the discount, I have a hard time thinking of it as support in any meaningful way.

Discount Sex Drugs for Soliders - Is This What Support Looks Like? originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 at 00:01:24.

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Talking About the Porn Talk

2012-05-14T00:01:26Z

An article in the Times last week raised the complicated issue of talking with children about pornography. It was nice to see it there since it's been a reality for parents for years. Companies that make Internet connected technology (mobile devices, tablets, and old school computers) are increasingly marketing the devices as something suitable for young children. And plenty of parents agree.

But along with the free access to thousands of hours of kid friendly videos (thanks YouTube) and cool apps that turn classic kid's books into animated worlds of wonder, comes access to unwanted and inappropriate sexually explicit material, and pornography.

Filters don't do the job. And the always filter out plenty of important, age approriate, sex education material. The kind of material that can make it easier for parents and children to navigate sex education together.

The article describes several parents and their approach to the topic, ranging in degrees of openness to talking, and willingness to acknowledge that while pornography isn't appropriate material for children, sexuality and sexual health are topics that can and should be talked about. Some of the framing is off. Like the idea that teaching about sex is a series of discrete conversations, and all parents have to do now is add porn to the list.

But more than the article, I appreciated the accompanying piece which they call an "interactive feature" (I'm not sure what to call it, not exactly journalism, not exactly educational material, but the Times is producing more and more of it in an effort to get readers to stay on their pages).

In this feature the writer provides a more detailed description of each parent's response to the situation they found themselves in, and then they asked the two sexuality professionals who were quoted in the article to weigh in on the parents responses.

Something that stuck with me had to do with how we explain to children that pornography isn't appropriate for them. Saying "it's for adults" might be enough for some kids, but many, certainly older, kids will want to know more. Embedded in the answer is the assumption that you get to an age when you can comprehend the material and then it's "appropriate" or "safe" for you to see it? But what age is that?

I don't have an answer but I'm pretty sure it isn't a chronological age at all. I think it might be something along the lines of what Marty Klein (one of the professionals who is quoted in the article) calls "pornography literacy". The idea that what is most harmful about legal pornography is not what it depicts, but what we do with it in the absence of decent sex education and media literacy skills. It's an interesting question and one I'm glad the Times is raising.

NYTimes.com: When Children See Internet Pornography

For Parents: How to Talk With Your Kids About Pornography

For Educators: BISH Training - Working With Young People Around Porn

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Talking About the Porn Talk originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 00:01:26.

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Doing It Solo

2012-05-11T11:22:58Z

One can never know for sure what statistics about our online searching habits mean. Does the trending of a search term related to a celebrity illness or breakup "tell" us something about how much we care about that celebrity, or our health, or fidelity? Are we what we search for?

I think about this every time I look at the statistics for the Sexuality site on About.com. Millions of people visit the site, often finding me because they entered some term into a search engine. And based on a non-scientific sampling, it's my impression that far more people are interested in how to masturbate than in how to have sex with some one else.

What does this mean? And considering the gender stereotype that all boys/men know how to masturbate, how come masturbation techniques for men are at least as popular as those for women?

I don't have answers to any of these questions, but I like thinking about them and talking to people to hear their take. And also, it does my heart good to know that people are curious about feeling pleasure, and producing that pleasure on their own.

If you don't have a lot of plans for this second weekend of National Masturbation Month, I thought I'd offer some suggestions by way of my most popular masturbation tips. Maybe it's time for a date with yourself?

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Doing It Solo originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 11:22:58.

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Masturbation Month Turns 17

2012-05-07T10:35:23Z

In 1994 when President Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders for answering yes to a question about whether masturbation was an appropriate topic to be addressed in sexual health education, many of us shook our heads. Not that we couldn't believe he fired her for it. Most of us were dismayed (or depressed) by the level of hypocrisy that would make it a forgone conclusion that she'd lose her job for suggesting that the most common sexual behavior on the planet be at least mentioned when we teach about sexuality.

The following year in a collaborative move that is hard to imagine today, three feminist sex shops got together to simultaneously celebrate Dr. Elders forthrightness, raise the topic of masturbation in public, and raise their own profiles. And so National Masturbation Month and the Masturbate-a-Thon were born.

It's been 17 years, and the longest running Masturbate-a-Thon (brought to you by the Center for Sex and Culture) is scheduled for May 27th, while a Canadian contingent (from the worker co-operative Come As You Are) will be raising funds all month.

If you haven't heard of it before, a masturbate-a-thon is a fundraiser where people commit to heroic sessions of self-pleasure, and ask others to pledge them. Sometimes it's by the minute, other times it's by the orgasm. But however you do it, it's a whole lot of fun, and always for a good cause.

I'll be highlighting my own odes to solo sex all this month, and after reading an article about a college student who is pledging to abstain from masturbation for a month (because she feels she's doing it too much), I thought I'd start with a question that I get whenever I'm on a college campus: how much masturbation is too much masturbation. Read on, and if you aren't sure how to celebrate the month, later in the week I'll be offering tips in that direction.

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Masturbation Month Turns 17 originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Monday, May 7th, 2012 at 10:35:23.

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Stopping It Before It Starts: Banning Talk of Gateway Sexual Activity

2012-04-30T00:01:42Z

Is it a sign of the apocalypse that it's harder and harder to tell the difference between so-called real news and the fake news delivered by places like The Onion or The Daily Show? It certainly makes it harder to know when to laugh and when to cry. Case in point, this item from WREG in Memphis:

Lawmakers have passed a bill changing the language of how sexual education is conducted in Tennessee.
The bill, Senate Bill 3310, focuses primarily on abstinence, but allows for comparison of contraception methods. However, contraception is no longer allowed to be distributed on school property.
The confusing part is where they prohibit instructors from encouraging "gateway sexual behaviors." The bill also allows for teachers to be disciplined, and for third-party instructors to be sued, if the rules are not followed."

Never mind that the idea of gateway sex is undefined, unproven, and unintelligible fantasy cooked up by the kind of people who say sex is bad, and then won't stop talking about it. In a television interview Rep. John Deberry, Jr. (ahem...(D) Memphis) explains that gateway sex is something most people would be able to understand if they saw it.

Except of course you provide sex education in part because it's a topic that most of us don't understand that well. At the end of the news item the Representative was paraphrased saying that the bill "would be a way to ensure that abstinence is a cornerstone of any sexual education."

It's also a way to ensure that even the best teachers won't be able to their job, and none of the students in Memphis can expect decent sex education in their public schools.

WREG Memphis: Lawmakers Pass "Gateway Sexual Activity" Ban

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Stopping It Before It Starts: Banning Talk of Gateway Sexual Activity originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Monday, April 30th, 2012 at 00:01:42.

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Making Meaning Out of a G-Spot

2012-04-25T13:38:03Z

There's yet another article claiming to prove the existence of the g-spot. This one comes from a gynecologic surgeon whose website encourages patients to "regain" their "self-confidence with genetalia rejuvenation". Whether you want it thinner, thicker, plumper, or otherwise plasty-er Dr. Ostrzenski has the procedure for you.

He also managed to get access to an 83-year-old dead woman's body in Poland, and performed a "stratum-by-stratum vaginal wall dissection" on her. The results, he says, proves the existence of the g-spot. In this woman's body the g-spot he found was 8.1 mm long, 3.6 mm wide, and .4 mm high. He describes three parts, and a bluish grape like color. There are color photos embedded in the article.

I can think of no better example of the process by which we make meaning of the world around us, than this on again off again search for the g-spot. Through the Science Media Centre, Petra Boynton offered an excellent comment on this latest paper, and she's expanded on it here on her own blog. It's worth reading in it's entirety (it isn't posted yet, but I'll add a link once it is, but I particularly appreciate that she highlights how, on the one hand, researchers, journals, pharmaceutical companies, and retailers all benefit for the production of a "debate" about the g-spot, and, the other, the people who all this information is being targeted to, lose.

There's nothing wrong with the slow and steady development of a body of knowledge. And in and of itself I'd like to say there's nothing wrong with this paper. Only then I read the discussion. In it the author offers a framing for the "controversy" surrounding the g-spot. Have a read:

"The absence of the identification of the G-spot as an anatomic structure created considerable controversies and a biased interpretation of the scientific results worldwide, leading to a monolithic clitoral model of female sexual response. However, women have held the unwavering position that there are distinct areas in the anterior vagina which are responsible for a sensation of great sexual pleasure. "

So first, in case you missed it, what he's describing, among other things, is the impact of the women's movement on public discourse and personal experience of sexuality. When he says it it sounds a bit different. If I read this correctly his understanding of what's happened is men and the media have been pushing some "monolithic clitoral model" while women have all along said that vaginal penetration is where it's at.

It's a great story. But it deserves a great big "What?!?" What monolithic clitoral model? Which unwavering women? I know that surgeons think they can do everything (and when they are operating on me I guess I'm grateful for their hubris), but maybe they should leave political, cultural, and historical analysis to folks with some context.

Again, there's no reason this guy can't cut up a body and make a case, but along with a handful of other white male researchers, it's the undercurrent of aggression in the writing that gives me pause. It reminds me a lot of those men's groups that claim to be fighting for father's rights when they really seem to be about eliminating mother's rights. Some of those father's are being discriminated against, for sure. And there may very well be an anatomical structure that can be called a g-spot. Why not. But it doesn't have to be one or the other. Lots of fathers are actually trying to screw their exes out of spite. And even if there is some sac of purplish tissue on the superior surface of the dorsal perineal membrane, that doesn't actually say much of anything about sexual pleasure (which is what ultimately this article and most of the others make claims about.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. I know it's more complicated when you think that way but that's why debating is only one way of advancing knowledge, and not a particularly good way at that. But it does make for a good show.

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Making Meaning Out of a G-Spot originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 13:38:03.

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Sexual Violence and Conjugal Visits

2012-04-25T00:01:36Z

A paper published recently in the American Journal of Criminal Justice caught my attention. The report, titled "The Effect of Conjugal Visitation on Sexual Violence in Prison" brings attention to a topic that is seriously under studied among social scientists: sexual violence in prisons.

The authors, citing previous research, refer to prison sexual violence as "America's most ignored crime problem". It might seem like a small thing but I was thankful that the authors acknowledge sexual violence in prison as a crime in the first place. People who are incarcerated tend to be painted with one giant dehumanizing brush. All too often in conversations I hear people express the belief that if you are in prison, you must be there for doing something very bad, and whatever it is, it means you deserve the bad things that will most certainly befall you while you are incarcerated.

But if you pay even the slightest bit of attention to what is actually happening across the prison industrial complex, or if you know anyone who has ever been imprisoned, you know that prisons are full of people, not caricatures. And those peoples lives are governed at every turn by violence and injustice.

So I was glad to see the topic being discussed. And I was interested in how they might address their central question: does allowing conjugal visits reduce the amount of sexual assault that takes place in a prison.

The authors begin by contrasting two theories of sexual violence. The first identify as a feminist theory which suggests that sexual violence is primarily about power and control, and not about sexual activity or desire. The second, which they call a sexual gratification theory, argues that sexual violence is the result of sexual needs that cannot be satisfied through consensual sex. Their not entirely correct understanding of conjugal visits is that they offer inmates the opportunity to have consensual sex, and satisfy their need for sex. And so, they argue, if there is less sexual violence in prisons that allow conjugal visits, there is more support for the sexual gratification theory of sexual violence.

The authors used data gathered between 2004-2006 from all 50 U.S. states on the rates of reported inmate-on-inmate sexual violence. They compared the rates of violence in the 45 states that don't allow conjugal visits with the rates in the five states which do. They found much lower rates of reported sexual violence among inmates in states that allow conjugal visits (57 per 100,000) than in those states that do not allow conjugal visits (226 per 100,000 inmates). They conclude, among other things, that sexual violence in prisons might be better explained as a problem of sexual gratification than as a problem of power and control. If you're scratching your head at this point, I'm with you.

In and of itself I suppose this is a useful statistic to know. Certainly I'm glad that someone is even looking at these numbers. But there is so much missing from the discussion, so many voices that need to be heard, that it's hard to know what to make of the numbers.

The authors don't tell us how often prisoners in the five states that allow it, were given the right to actual have conjugal visits. It's not as if the five states which allow conjugal visits, make them available frequently or willingly (see, for example, the description of who is allowed conjugal visits in Mississippi). It would be good to know how many requests are made and how many are granted. Maybe this data isn't available, although it must be recorded somewhere. Without it, there is a kind of echo chamber right in the heart of the paper, a space where the role of the prison industrial complex would be factored in. So we have no way of knowing whether this discrepancy is actually tied at all to conjugal visits (which when they are granted are not always for sexual contact, instead they are often used to allow family to visit and simply hang out as best they can given the setting).

In the paper there is no discussion of sexual violence perpetrated by prison staff. The authors would argue that this isn't relevant because they are interested in whether giving prisoners the ability to engage in consensual sexual activity reduces non-consensual sexual activity. But sexual violence in prisons can't be so neatly parsed out. The violence that takes place takes place in a larger context of both injustice and violence done not only physically but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, often in the name of rehabilitation.

It's this larger context, which is so much in the face of everyone who experiences prison life (regardless of which side of the bars you're on, or whether you are a family member, social service professional, activist, advocate, or sexual partner) that seems too much to leave out. But I understand that research like this is kind of built to leave this stuff out. Taking narrower and narrower slices of experience is what so much social science research does. I don't want to suggest it shouldn't be done, but what worries me is what conclusions are arrived at when one is only looking at a speck of dirt on a prison wall covered in blood.

Another head scratch-er for me is the sexual gratification theory itself. I mean how much gratification does a person need before they won't commit sexual violence in this theory? What if I have sex but it's not satisfying? Does the sex have to be good? Does it have to happen once a month? Every six weeks? I appreciate that this theory tries to engage with sexuality not as a uni-dimensional construct, and agree that the competing theories which suggest that sexual violence is never about sex are flawed as well, but I'd hate to see something like policy and procedure be guided by theories that leave so many questions unanswered.

In their conclusion the authors do recommend that more states allow conjugal visits. And they acknowledge that while they chose to look only at a reduction in sexual violence perpetrated by inmates against other inmates, there are other benefits that have been associated with allowing people to visit with partners and family in a separate space inside the prison.

More distressing, the authors say that their findings support greater use of "chemical castration" to reduce sexual violence in prisons. Since, they suggest, their findings show that sexual violence is a function of gratification and not control, taking sexual desire out of the equation (through "chemical castration") should reduce sexual violence.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, sexual violence in prisons will never be, can never be, about one thing. The same is true, by the way, for sexual violence outside of prisons. Only we treat people outside of prison differently. We treat them, well some of them at least, like they are human.

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Sexual Violence and Conjugal Visits originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 00:01:36.

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Problems Initiating Sex

2012-04-23T00:01:19Z

Last week I got an email from a reader who wanted help figuring out how to initiate sex with her boyfriend. She explained that he always starts things up and she felt bad about that. But her desire to make things a bit more equal in the relationship was coming into conflict with her own feelings of shame around sex, which makes it hard for her to imagine taking up sexual space in a way that would allow her to initiate sex.

There's a paradox (or maybe it's a riddle, or a conundrum, I'm not sure which) for people in long term relationships that I often encounter when I'm working with groups of them. If you talk to a group of couples who have been together for five years or more then tend to act as if they know everything about each other. Sex can become routine and both partners may be working under the assumption that it's routine because there's nothing left to discover.

But then get either partner on their own, and start asking them about what they ARE NOT saying or doing in the bedroom, and you invariably find a wealth of sexual curiosity and desire. The trick is bringing it into the room when both people are there and have the time and energy for sex.

One of the biggest obstacles I encounter in all of this are the number of stereotypes and expectations based on gender when it comes to who initiates sex. Challenging those is a life long endeavor, and one thing that helps is when folks actually hear from one another. It's one of the reasons I was so happy to get and publish this letter, as far too often what I hear is that one person initiates sex and they assume the other person just doesn't care. As opposed to thinking about why their partner might not be starting things up.

In responding to this reader I offered her a few ideas on how to get more comfortable initiating sex, and I thought I'd share with you too.

Three Sexual Ways to Celebrate Earth Day

2012-04-20T00:01:46Z

Type the phrase "ecosex" into your favorite search engine and pretty much all you'll get are for profit companies hawking their wares with a few coats of green washing. It's too bad because there's no question that many of the ways we express our sexuality leave a mark on the earth, and at a minimum it would be helpful (for us and for our planet) if we gave some thought to that.

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions of ways you might privately mark Earth Day, which is coming up this Sunday and is being marked all week by people around the globe.

Imagine Sex on Earth
One of the ways that we lead relatively impoverished sex lives is that we keep our sexuality separate from the rest of our lives. Sex is a "special" topic. We need an excuse to bring it up at work, in the media, at home, in schools, and in most places of workshop. But people are expressing their sexuality all the time, and people are having sex all the time (globally, not individually). If one of the goals of Earth Day is to become just a little more conscious about your individual and our social impact on the planet, I would like to suggest you take ten minutes some time this week and just imagine sex on the planet. You can think about the sex you've had or are having, and it's impact; you can imagine people around the world, at this very moment, having sex. Good sex, bad sex, sex for money, sex for fun, sex for procreation. Where are they? What is their relationship to the planet and what is our relationship to each other as humans? This might seem a bit flaky but just try it, and see where your mind wanders.

Inspire Yourself to Think About the Planet, Sex, and You
You might be someone who already thinks about yourself sexually in relation to other people and the planet. But since few of us are ever encouraged to think about it, you probably don't. Most of us need help, inspiration, to let our minds go, and that's the second Earth Day sex task I'd like to give you. Watching a documentary about the planet may teach you a lot and inspire you too, but since documentary filmmakers tend to compartmentalize sex like the rest of us, you'll probably find sexuality is left out. So you may have to dig around a little more. Whether it's poetry, film, music, or fiction, take something in this week that will get you thinking differently about the planet, yourself, and sex. If you haven't seen it before, you could start with Isabella Rossellini's award-winning Green Porno series. It will absolutely make you think of the sexual habits of various earth inhabitants in a different way. You might also enjoy photographer and sex educator Heather Firth's Earth Erotica series.

Learn More About What You Don't Know
There are plenty of concrete ways that you can reduce the impact of your sex life on the environment, and reduce the negative impact of various sexual products on your sex life. Make one of your tasks this week to be doing a little homework. Here are some places to start:

Phthalates in Sex Toys (from About.com)
BPA in Sex Toys (from About.com)
Birth Control's Environmental Impact (from Feminists for Choice)
Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets (available for sale online and at most independent sex toy retailers too).

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Three Sexual Ways to Celebrate Earth Day originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Friday, April 20th, 2012 at 00:01:46.

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You Can't Spell Awaretdness without S-T-D

2012-04-16T00:01:05Z

Isn't that how you spell that word? As a sex educator whose work is mostly NOT about rsexually transmitted diseases my own level of awareness can always be raised. And since April is STD Awareness Month I thought I'd share the folks I regularly turn to for help and for the most up-to-date information on a part of sexuality that seems to always be changing.

First up, we have About.com's very own STD Guide Elizabeth Boskey, who manages to write about food security, trauma, non-monogamy, and circumcision, and that's just on the homepage.

I usually want to send you right to the InfectionSection of Scarleteen's website. But the oldest and busiest website dedicated to sex education for teens just recently launched a new homepage which is a treasure-trove of sex ed advice.

The International Rectal Microbicide Advocates may sound like a very narrowly defined group, but their over 1,100 members from 6 continents bring an incredibly complicated and diverse array of approaches to sexual health that results in all sorts of interesting work and one of the best listservs for professionals out there. Most of their resources are available in multiple languages.

Finally, I often find myself at a site that has the possibly dubious tag line "The world's most popular HIV and AIDS website" (I guess that's meant to be a good thing, I understand why it is, but it still reads like something you wouldn't want to say about yourself). Still, there is an amazing amount of material on AVERT.org.

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You Can't Spell Awaretdness without S-T-D originally appeared on About.com Sexuality on Monday, April 16th, 2012 at 00:01:05.

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