I’m reading My New Gender Workbook by Kate Bornstein right now, and teaching a class on women’s folklore, so I’ve got women and women’s identities on the brain. I’m really interested in the ways in which we construct womanhood and femininity, and which traits get to go in those boxes vs. which are excluded. We all know […]
Culture
Whether It’s “Appropriate” to Write/Talk/Blog About Sex
I am occasionally seized with fear that someone will find it “inappropriate” that I talk and blog and write about sexuality as much as I do. While recently reading Mary Roach’s book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, it struck me how many sex researchers have been vilified as perverted freaks for being […]
Reflections on Gun Control vs. Sexual Control
In one of my blog posts at MySexProfessor.com, I explored some of the overlapping areas between gun culture and rape culture. I argued that the question of gun control cannot be a neutral issue in a country where domestic violence and rape are so prevalent and skewed in such a gendered way. I’d like to […]
Sex Work Debates: “Against Your Best Interests” ≠ Illegal
As sexuality professionals who follow the news know, in late August there was a federal raid on Rentboy.com’s office in New York. Sex educator Charlie Glickman describes the news (and provides some rhetorical analysis) at his blog. Glickman characterizes Rentboy.com as “a website designed to connect trans and cisgender male escorts with clients.” In Melissa Gira Grant’s […]
Compulsory Monogamy Going Mainstream?
Perhaps I should clarify: compulsory monogamy is already mainstream. It’s already the norm, and a largely unexamined one at that. What I mean to discuss here is how the idea of compulsory monogamy is now under discussion in the mainstream, thanks to its application to The Hunger Games movie franchise. This essay, Compulsory Monogamy in The Hunger […]
All Sex is Transactional, Because It Takes Resources
FYI: This will be an obnoxiously Marxist blog post, and I hope everyone appreciates the helpful (and somewhat impish) spirit in which it is offered. While at the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit this past week, I listened in on a lot of conversations about sex work. The consensus in many feminist and sex-positive communities these […]
Sexual Folklore: The Podcast
I love talking about the intersections of folklore and sex, gender, and sexuality. Thus I was thrilled when Cooper Beckett, host of the non-monogamy podcast Life on the Swingset and author of My Life on the Swingset, invited me to be a guest on an episode of the podcast. This has been an interest of […]
Stigma & Sexuality
If we define stigma as an undesirable identity that gets attributed to a person (often against their wishes), then it’s possible to explore the intersections of stigma and sexual identity, sexual acts, and so on. In this blog post I’ll describe some of these connections, and in an upcoming post, I’ll talk about why the stigma around […]
What is Stigma?
A lot of our cultural conversations around sexuality, STIs, slut-shaming, and more are shaped by the concept of stigma. Seems worth a blog post, right? In the academic world, stigma became an important concept with the publication of sociologist Erving Goffman’s 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. In it, Goffman defines stigma […]
Abortion Exceptions and Medical Marijuana: An Uneasy Parallel
I was struck by a sense of unease when I saw the news that a Senate committee is backing legislation that would allow VA (Veterans Affairs) doctors to recommend medical marijuana for their patients. I’m in favor of legalizing medical marijuana for a host of reasons (harm reduction primary among them), but this seemed weird […]