About.com

My New Book, What Makes a Baby is Out

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:00:48 +0000

I haven't talked about this project very much on my About.com site, but today I'm excited and nervous to let you know that my new book is available for sale.

I wrote What Makes a Baby for the four-year-old son of one of my closest friends. He and his partner were about to have a second child and their son started asking questions about his mom's pregnancy. My friend is Trans and so he isn't biologically related to his son. They wanted a book that would allow them to share their families story without devaluing a parent who didn't also contribute genetic material to the baby making process.

I quickly realized that this book really works for everyone. When you open up a story to make it inclusive you don't just bring people in who are usually pushed out, but you make room for those people who often are in the center to be more of who they are, share more of themselves. In decades passed the conventional wisdom was that you shouldn't share with your young child the story of how they came to be, especially if that story didn't involve intercourse in a heterosexual marriage. Adoption, sperm and egg donation, surrogacy, were all topics to be kept quiet and feel some shame about.

Many of us still do feel some shame or embarrassment about this, but more and more of us are being open about it as one way of resisting the shame, and transforming something oppressive into something that can be empowering. Mental health professionals are part of this, now regularly counseling parents to be open with even very young kids about how they came to be in their family, making it something that isn't strange or secretive, but something to be proud of and to celebrate.

After two years, dozens of re-writes, a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, the book is being released today from Seven Stories Press.

It's geared to children ages 3 and up, and describes the basics of reproduction, gestation, and birth in a fun and engaging way. It doesn't give all the answers. Instead it creates a space for parents to tell their children as much or as little as they want.

If you want to know more about it, you can check out our book trailer (featuring kids explaining just why the book is needed) and you can find it at your independent bookstore or your favorite online bookshop.

I also wrote a free Reader's Guide for parents which can be downloaded directly from the book's website. It includes general suggestions for talking with young children about sexuality, plus a page by page guide to using the book.

Thus ends the gratuitous self-promotion. I will now return to my more comfortable place of self-deprecation.

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A Short Guide to Flavored Lube

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:19:46 +0000

I got my first job at a sex shop in 1987. At the time I don't know if there was such a thing as flavored, water based lubricant. What we did have was a product called Emotion Lotion. Emotion Lotion (we never called it "EL" for short, but now I wish we had) came in a shapely clear plastic bottle with a white flip top. It was thick, sickly sweet, and branded itself as the original warming lotion. Put a little on your skin, rub it in, and blow on it, and the lotion would feel as if it is warming up.

This was not something I'd recommend anyone put in their body, and while tests had never been done, I was pretty sure that the high sugar content and sticky consistency during use would have been harmful to condoms.

Still, there was something sort of throw-back groovy about the product. Legend had it that the manufacturer began by making large batches of it in a bathtub in their home. It was always fun to watch people's reaction when they would pick up the sample and try it out on their wrist (less fun to watch the reactions of customers who would complain of burning...I learned to warn people after that).

Once Astroglide made a splash as the first lubricant designed for pleasure, the lube market blossomed and along with it the sub-category of flavored lubes has grown. I worked for over 20 years in sex shops and have heard customers opinions about the taste of hundreds of different flavored lubes. And to this day I still would never say to someone that brand X has the best taste or brand Y is the worst. Taste is taste, and for every hundred people who swear that one kind of lube is horrible tasting and should be banned, there will be a few who love it, and can't get enough.

Evaluating the flavor and taste of flavored lubes is a thankless job, and so I have avoided it for a while. But a few weeks ago an About.com reader asked if I would share with them a few recommendations, and in the interests of steering them away from Emotion Lotion and it's many step-children, I wrote the article below.

A Short Guide to Flavored Lube

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At What Age Do You Become an Adult Virgin?

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:00:02 +0000

Growing up in the 70s I heard bad things about virgins from all sides. My friends were desperate to shed their virginity. They were excited to get to try out sex (after years of practicing on their own). But the desperation came as much from the sense that, like nerd or loser, virgin was a label you didn't want to stick.

I didn't feel that kind of pressure at home, but I was raised to understand that sexuality was something wonderful, something to be explored, and in contrast to the messages my parents received growing up in the 50s, sex was something that you probably should try out before settling down.

I wasn't convinced that I was even human so the idea of being a young virgin didn't bother me. Something in the culture let me know that it was okay to wait a little while, but if wait too long you might miss the boat entirely. Being an adult virgin was a problem.

Now that I'm older I realize that being an adult virgin isn't a problem. The idea that it is something that's clearly defined, diagnosable, something that someone else says about you, that's the problem.

When it comes to sexual identities it can be so easy to forget that these terms are labels. They are meant to help describe or define some aspect of our experience. For some people the label adult virgin works. And that's great.

But if it doesn't, it's time to peel back the label and remember that sexual experience is more what you've done, with who, how often. Sexual experience is first and foremost an experience.

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Onanistic Inquiries

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:00:48 +0000

A few weeks ago an issue of New York Magazine featured a story about men who were quitting masturbation and finding solidarity and guidance on a Reddit forum called "NoFap". The piece was a mess of misinformation and confusion. It referenced to faddish research ("Your Brain on Porn") and conflated sexuality, desire, gender identity, and gender roles. All of this made it a pretty accurate reflection of many mens understanding of their own sexuality, and a good reminder of why things rarely get better for cisgender men.

As long as it doesn't involve coercion, everyone should get to choose how they want to be sexual, including whether or not they want to masturbate. But the idea that not masturbating makes you a better man is a sad, old chestnut that only looks new because of the technological platform and shiny stock rubber chicken images that accompany our current public discussion of it.

We're half way through National Masturbation Month and it seemed like a good time to review some of the most common questions I get asked on the site about masturbation, which perhaps tellingly almost always come from men.

Questions About Masturbation

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National Masturbation Month Comes of Age

Wed, 08 May 2013 09:00:19 +0000

It was back in 1995 when a group of political sex shops came together to do what they always did best: combine consciousness raising with politics with pleasure. National Masturbation Month (NMM), and the month's main event the Masturbate-a-Thon were inspired in part as a response to the firing of Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders for daring to suggest that masturbation might be something that should be mentioned in school based sex education.

The month was also a tongue-in-cheek response to the kind of Hallmark holidays that other industries create. Despite being the most commonly practiced sexual activity, and one that in most cases carries the lowest risk of any negative consequences, masturbation remains a second class sexual citizen. Who better to be out and proud about masturbation than those businesses that profit (financially, emotionally, and spiritually) from it each and every day.

Since 1999 the Center for Sex & Culture, under the leadership of Carol Queen and Robert Morgan Lawrence have kept the self-love fires burning, organizing events and a live Masturbate-a-Thon each year. This year they are celebrating NMM's 18th birthday by combining the Masturbate-a-Thon with the Jack-and-Jill-Off. As in previous years it is a live event you can participate in (if you're in the Bay area) or you can participate on your own by downloading a pledge form from their website.

I'll be celebrating this month by featuring articles about the ups and downs, the highs and lows, the ins and outs, of masturbation. Apparently I'll also be celebrating by dragging out every cheesy double entendre I can think of.

I hope you can find a more fun (possibly equally groan inducing) way to celebrate this month!

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Envisioning a New Model of Mental Health (Sort Of)

Mon, 06 May 2013 09:00:59 +0000

Last week the National Institute of Mental Health made a significant announcement: they will no longer be prioritizing research proposals that are framed around categories of mental disorders promoted by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, also known as the DSM.

The announcement, which I first read about on the excellent Mind Hacks blog, comes two weeks before the American Psychiatric Association is set to release the newest iteration of the DSM, the DSM-5. I'm sure there are loads of politics behind this shift in policy and the timing of the release. Certainly there's a lot of money at stake, and it must be causing a lot of anxiety over at the APA (I wonder what their health care is like?)

For those of us who see the DSM primarily as a tool of insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and corporate medicine, one that represents such an extreme compromise as to not be very helpful to the people it purports to both categorize and help, this seems like good news.

In a nutshell, the NIMH is saying that the DSM categories are fundamentally flawed, and so research that is based on those categories will never get us to where we want to be.

The DSM approaches our thoughts and feelings as if they are the same as our blood and bones. It pretends to offer objective diagnoses, but they are based on symptoms that are highly contrived in their description and orientation. It confuses symptoms with disease. The director of the NIMH Thomas Insel pointed out in a prepared statement,

Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment.

He goes on to say that the DSM lacks validity and "patients with mental disorders deserve better."

This is something that doctors, academics, activists, and many of those aforementioned "patients" have been pointing out for years. It's not news that the DSM lacks validity. It is news to have someone in a position of such power and influence admit it. Mind you there is a lot of history and a lot of politics to be read between the lines of this decision, and it's worth noting that the head of the NIMH doesn't have to rely on industries that profit from the DSM for his salary, making him freer to speak this way in public.

Still, it seems like good news for some, and at least interesting news for most. But for those of us who are less interested in the idea of some grand classification system that allows us to describe all the ways it's hard to live in the world, for those of us who are most interested in how we can support people to live in the world in ways that allow them to participate as much as they want to, there are other questions to ask. We should be asking ourselves, what is the alternative being proposed by the NIMH? Where is the place they want us to be, that they believe the DSM is leading us away from?

I'm encouraged by the fact that the NIMH is pointing out the ways the DSM essentially produces mental disorders by clustering symptoms around diagnoses. I don't think that what gets called mental illness is the same as physical illness and disease. And I agree that we need a better conceptualization of mental health. But there are a few lines in Insel's statement that make it sound as like their answer is to double down on science that hasn't served this area very well, by applying what they call "precision medicine" which relies more on " genetics, imaging, cognitive science."

Imaging technology (like fMRI) are only gaining in popularity, and researchers are now looking for (and claiming to find) everything from gender to PTSD to Internet addiction in the brain, thanks to imaging technologies which remain controversial and questionable. The critiques of imagining technologies are never as easily reduced to sound bytes as the research often can be, but if you're wondering what I mean see here, here, here, or here, to name but a few.

I'm happy that the DSM is being called out for it's problems, I'm less excited if we are only going to turn to a new kind of guessing game, one that uses euphemisms like "precision medicine" (could that be anything like a "precision airstrike"?) and continues to deploy the power of Science in order to impose one dominant bio-medical, socio-cultural understanding of illness and health on all of us.

Weekend Reading - Sex Across the Lifespan Edition

Sat, 04 May 2013 14:25:57 +0000

I've been spending most of my time reading off line these days (gems including Nevada and Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe) which means I have a lot online reading to catch up on. Here are three pieces that cross the lifespan and are open in my browser as I type this:

Canadian Women's Health Network: Adolescent Sexuality: Out of Hand?

Wonders & Marvels: Masturbation and the Dangerous Woman

The Globe and Mail: Facts & Arguments: I'm a sexually liberated woman, finally - at age 80

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Parsing Porn's Influence

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:00:43 +0000

A study, to be published this month in the Journal of Sexual Medicine has been getting surprisingly little coverage in the US. The paper, titled "Does Viewing Explain Doing? Assessing the Association Between Sexually Explicit Materials Use and Sexual Behaviors in a Large Sample of Dutch Adolescents and Young Adults", tries to examine the influence of watching pornography (which is currently being called sexually explicit material or SEM by researchers) on sexual behaviors among teens. The researchers surveyed 4,600 young people aged 15 to 25 who live in the Netherlands.

What they found was that there are statistical associations between watching pornography and some behaviors, like having what they call "adventurous sex", but that the associations are, statistically speaking, weak, and that there are other factors that may just as well account for, or at least mediate, the relationship between watching sexually explicit material and doing sexually explicit things. From an NBCNews.com blog post:

For example, Hald [the lead author] explained, "only 2-3 percent of our sample engaged in transactional behaviors, and the proportion of these behaviors explained by porn viewing was only 1 percent for men and 2 percent for women." Other factors, he said, such as poverty and culture, were more important.

That was true across the board. The frequency of looking at porn explained only about .3 to 4 percent of behavior.

"This suggests that frequency of [porn] consumption is just one factor among many that may influence the sexual behaviors of young people," the study concluded.

It's much easier, of course, to blame porn than to blame poverty when adults go looking for something to blame for the high rates of teen STIs and unintended pregnancies in the US. Although I'd suggest we spend a little more time paying attention to what we as grown ups are doing when we produce sexual panics and then deny our hand in their production. Like poverty, bad things rarely "just happen" and even when they do, its our responses to them that can change the world. I'm not sure complaining counts (if I were right about this, and we all stopped it, online comment fields would be blissfully empty and Facebook would be a much nicer place to visit).

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New Resource: Sex Work in Canada

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:00:58 +0000

As a Canadian who spends a lot of time in the US I often find myself answering questions and trying to explain differences in laws and customs between that country and this one. These conversations always start with a reminder of the kind of settler privilege that makes talking about borders and customs seem like natural or fixed concepts, when in fact they are very new and always changing.

But in short order we end up talking about sex. I never know what to say. Or more to the point I never know where to start, because there's so much to say. If you aren't trying to sell a product, cliches about the ways Canadians and Americans are different or the same have little value or relevance. As is usually the case, the differences within groups is greater than the differences between them.

Sometimes, particularly in the past few years, I find myself talking about sex work. This might be because it's hard for me to imagine the kinds of challenges making their way through the Canadian courts would ever happen in the US.

At some point in the conversation I get lost. My understanding of the Canadian Charter is stuck somewhere around Grade 6, and I can't always remember which legal challenge is taking place where, and who said what, in the decades-long fight that Canadian sex workers have been engaged in.

Which is why I'm extra grateful for a series of infosheets developed by Stella on the history and current status of sex work legal challenges, efforts toward decriminalization, and what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has to do with sex work. Stella is an amazing Montreal based organization and these resources are thorough introduction to the topic.

You can download them from the Stella homepage (in French and English) and directly from the links below.

If you find the information useful, consider making a donation to Stella to help them continue to do the work they do.

From Stella:

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Phrase of the Week: Uncircumcised Penile Environment

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:00:17 +0000

One of the first things I look at when I receive the New York Times email digest every morning is the quote of the day. I like reading the quote first and thinking about what it might be before letting my eyes read on, beneath the quote to the speakers name and the context.

Words can cause us so much trouble and so much pain, but they can also be a whole lot of fun, and phrases out of context make me giggle and excited in the ways that words like "penis" and "boobies" once did, before I started saying them for a living.

Today, while reading an article on Time.com titled Why Circumcision Lowers Risk of HIV I came across the phrase "uncircumcised penile environment" and knew that a column was born. I mean how many times have you been looking for an apartment to rent when you stumble on a Craigslist ad for a place that looks perfect only to arrive and find it more or less an uncircumcised penile environment? You have to ask, is everything an environment these days?

Infantile jokes aside, the article is pretty interesting and the research it's reporting on is fascinating. Like many people I have all sorts of problems with the lack of context and general colonial look and feel of much of the research on circumcision and HIV in Africa. One of the problems for me has always been whether or not such an invasive procedure is justified given how little is known about why the research studies delivered the results they did.

The research being reported on in the Time piece was conducted to address some the why. Researchers took swabs from the penises of men in one of the circumcision studies in Uganda, both before and after they were circumcised. What they were looking at was how circumcision changes what they call the "penis microbiome" which is a term that describes the microbial stuff that is present on the penis, particularly around and under the foreskin. They found, not surprisingly, that when you remove a piece of skin and the head of the penis is constantly exposed, some microbes die off and others grow more. Their next step is to consider how those changes may be linked to HIV transmission or HIV protection.

While I continue to find the original research claiming circumcision as a prevention tool to be troubling, this penis microbiome stuff is fascinating. And in a prepared release one of the study's authors, Lance Price, reveals a surprise twist for all those who only see this topic as the most recent front in their war either for or against circumcision. As it turns out, he is interested in researching circumcisions positive impact on health as a way to prevent the need for circumcision in the first place. From the release:

To Price, this study has implications beyond circumcision. Understanding the changes in the microbiome following surgery could eventually lead to interventions that don't require a surgical procedure. "The work that we're doing, by potentially revealing the underlying biological mechanisms, could reveal alternatives to circumcision that would have the same biological impact. In other words, if we find that it's a group of anaerobes that are increasing the risk for HIV, we can find alternative ways to bring down those anaerobes," and prevent HIV infection in all sexually active men, says Price.

So the same research that is supposedly proving the utility of circumcision may also provide evidence that makes the procedure unnecessary. It's enough to make one want to book a vacation in some tropical uncircumcised penile environment.

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