Month: February 2020

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Bridging the research gap on the sexual health of men in the LGBTQ+ community

Findings could inform health policy, but professor warns against jumping to conclusions

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Health-policy makers often make decisions that drastically impact people all across the country, but before they can do that, they need to understand what the population truly needs. That can be difficult, though, when policies affect specific groups with even more specific health needs — such as men who have sex with men.

Gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (gbMSM) can be uniquely affected by sexual health-related policies, but it’s historically been very difficult to get information that truly represents their needs as a diverse population.

A survey to bridge the gap

A major initiative to gather information has been the European Men-Who-Have-Sex-With-Men Internet Survey (EMIS), which asks questions about the mental and sexual health practices of gbMSM all over Europe — and, in the 2017 version, also those of men in Canada. “This is really meant to be kind of a public health report,” said Dr. David Brennan, a professor and assistant dean, research at U of T’s Faculty of Social Work, who was instrumental in implementing the survey in Canada.

This was the first study in a long time to gather health information about the sexual health of gbMSM on a national scale. It contains results from both transgender and cisgender respondents from a variety of backgrounds all across the country. The survey’s questions were informed by health experts from across Canada, and cover topics like safe sex practices, drug use, depression, anxiety, and homophobia.

Some of these trends have been investigated by more specific studies in the past, and the new study is consistent with past results. For example, rates of anxiety and depression in gbMSM were higher than rates in the general population, according to Brennan. There’s still, however, a wealth of new information to be found from the study, as it measured some things that have, frankly, not been measured before.

Reducing the risks associated with sex between men

Today, gbMSM in Canada can find plenty of information online about safe sexual practices. In fact, Brennan recounted that his research lab, CRUISElab, discovered that most gbMSM turn to Google for sexual education.

However, over the last few years, there have been a few very important developments for HIV-related sexual health, and it’s unclear how far this information has travelled. One of the goals of this survey was to measure the prevalence of knowledge and usage of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a drug that can be used to prevent infection in HIV-negative people who are at risk of contracting HIV.

PrEP’s a fairly recent development that has only become widespread since the last EMIS in 2010, and it is not covered by provincial health insurance in most parts of Canada, including Ontario.

This may pose a significant barrier to men interested in using the drug, as evidenced by the numbers in the study — while only about 8.4 per cent of Canadian respondents had ever used PrEP, over 50 per cent said they’d be likely to use it if it were both available and affordable. More respondents had used PrEP in Québec and in British Columbia — where the drug is covered by the province — than in Ontario.

Another important area the study illuminated is ‘party-and-play’ sex, or ‘chemsex,’ in which participants use drugs to enhance their sexual experience. When injectable drugs are introduced in sexual situations, there can be a much higher risk of participants contracting certain sexually transmitted infections.

Conclusions do not indicate a lack of concern with safe practices

That being said, Brennan recommended that readers be wary about assuming chemsex participants are automatically less concerned with sexual safety. Some researchers have found that in gatherings where participation incurs a greater risk of sexually-transmitted infections, participants build up a community of sorts to take care of each other’s sexual health.

Not only should the general public avoid leaping to conclusions, but researchers should as well. It’s easy to draw conclusions that might be unconsciously influenced by our prior biases, especially when reading research on gbMSM. In Canada, the survey reached out to a lot of participants through dating apps, which could affect the study’s results, as these participants may be more likely to have more or more frequent sexual partners.

This doesn’t, however, mean that they’re necessarily being less safe than the general population.

“I’ve had many calls from reporters wanting me to tell them that people using these apps are actually having more unsafe sex. And, no, there’s really not much evidence to show that,” said Brennan. “It’s less about the venue or the location and more about… preferred behaviour.”

The survey is, of course, limited in its sampling methods — it can only collect data from participants who were willing to reach out in response to ads on dating apps, or at sexual health centres that the study has paired with across the country.

But that doesn’t mean the data is any less useful. This data could be instrumental in drafting a health policy that accounts for the realities of being a Canadian man in the LGBTQ+ community.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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50 Shades of Confusing:

When Older Adults Date

When seniors find love, their kids don’t always respond well.

By Anthony Cirillo

The divorce rate for people age 50 and up has doubled since the 1990s, in a time when divorce rates overall have fallen 18%. It appears that younger generations are contributing to that decline, marrying later when their career and finances warrant the commitment and being more selective in whom they marry. Of course, many millennials cohabit without the legalities of marriage, so the jury is out in terms of the stability of their overall relationships.

That said, boomers have given their kids one more thing to be infuriated about when mom and dad decide to divorce, start dating and – the horrors! – even have sex in their 50s and 60s. Living longer has caused many of these boomers to re-evaluate their lives. They’ve raised their kids, and now it’s their turn to have some fun … and “their” doesn’t necessarily include their partner. Plus, let’s face it: Women outlive men, so there are a lot of older women alone – and senior isolation is a real and dangerous thing.

Is Senior Dating Different Than Dating When You Were Younger?

The first two lines of the song “The Second Time Around” by Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen state: “Love is lovelier the second time around, Just as wonderful with both feet on the ground.”

Perhaps the “both feet on the ground” is the key piece here. You’re older and supposedly wiser. Where you meet could change. I admit I met my wife at a nightclub. Caveat – I was in the band, and a friend brought her to see us play. Still, seniors returning to the dating scene probably won’t be hitting the nightclub. A different kind of club might be in order.

Joining groups where your interest matches others is a good place to start. These include: dance classes, art cafes, group theater excursions, senior gyms, special interest and hobby groups, senior trips and excursions. The point of any of these is to meet in a safe, public place. And perhaps it’s a sign of the times for anyone, but let others know where you’re going to be. (We’ll get to the kids in a second!) As for the first kiss and who picks up the check? Opinions differ. Follow your intuition.

So, What About Sex?

Well first, it’s a health issue. The earliest boomers came from the “free love” generation, the 60s. At a stage in life when many would expect sexually transmitted diseases to be waning, STD rates for those 55 and older have increased by 43%. Over the past several years, some 2.2 million Medicare recipients received free tests for sexually transmitted diseases, about the same as the number who received colonoscopies.

Many older adults didn’t get the safe-sex messages that younger generations received, so their condom use is lower. More seniors are living in retirement communities where there’s more socializing. As you age and your immune system weakens, fighting these diseases becomes harder. Add to that the availability and marketing of sex-enhancing drugs, and – well, you can see the issue.

Sex in the Nursing Home

Make no mistake, people are having sex in senior living. A survey of 250 residents in 15 Texas nursing homes found that 8% had sexual intercourse in the preceding month. And according to a study in Clinical Geriatrics, of 63 physically dependent nursing home residents, 90% said they had sexual thoughts, fantasies and dreams.

There are all kinds of implications with this, of course. Then add granny cams to the mix, and you can really complicate things. If someone is in a home, you have to pointedly ask how they handle relationships and sex.

Many nursing-home workers simply don’t look at the elderly as mature adults, but as children who must be policed out of fear of legal or medical repercussion. Most facilities do not train their staff to see residents as sexual beings.

Providers walk a fine line balancing person-centered care with risk management. Yet risk can be minimized with sensitivity and empathy toward resident needs. The Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, New York, is a national model, so I encourage you to see how they handle these issues.

But consider this true story: A son walked in on his 95-year-old father in bed with his 82-year-old girlfriend in an assisted living facility. Both had dementia. He went ballistic and removed his father from the home. After that, the woman stopped eating. She lost 21 pounds, was treated for depression and was hospitalized for dehydration. Clearly, for them, the relationship was real.

OK Boomer, What Will the Kids Think?

The knee-jerk response from me, a boomer, would be “get over it.” But it’s not that simple.

Understand where adult children are coming from first. The thought of mom or dad in a new relationship can be frightening – and maybe hurtful. Subliminally, kids might want to sabotage the relationship. And even when the children acknowledge their mom or dad’s right to date, they draw a mental line at marriage, which, in their mind, eliminates one parent from the equation entirely.

So as with most things, ease into a conversation. It’s natural to be curious about a parent’s partner. So ask. Maybe mom or dad has a history of being abused or taken advantage of, and the children want to protect them from heartache. In that case, intrusion is necessary.

Older adults are much more forthcoming than you might think. Keep in mind that the love of children and grandchildren can’t satisfy a person’s needs for love, romance and companionship.

A national poll reveals more than 3 out of 4 (79%) of adult children say telling their parents they’re taking away their car keys because they’re no longer fit to drive is the most uncomfortable conversation they could have. Talking to their parents about sex actually ranked third.

In a New York Times piece, Jake Maynard put things in perspective. At first appalled that his grandmother was marrying her former brother-in-law, he wrote, he eventually came to this realization: “I saw my grandmother and Bill not as old people seeking each other’s comfort or as old people at all, really. I saw them as newlyweds, love-struck and hopeful. I thought about how they both had lost love twice before and how they entered into this new love, at 80, knowing they would lose it again. And all at once, they seemed brave.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Using Pornography to Rewrite the Script for Consent

Anti-pornography feminists see porn as inherently degrading and exploitative, but for some viewers it can be hugely empowering and even a challenge to rape culture.

Pornography is far from a monolithic cultural phenomenon, and the meanings we make from it are complex and varied.

By: Milena Popova

There is a strong and long-lived strand of feminist thought that regards pornography as deeply implicated in the prevalence of sexual and other violence against women. Pornography is seen as inherently degrading and exploitative of women, as normalizing violent sexual practices, and as contributing to the subjugation of women under patriarchy. The argument is that the images presented in pornography are both in themselves violent and that those who consume them are likely to want to reenact them. In this way, radical feminists argue, pornography makes men into rapists and women into willing victims.

This article is excerpted from Milena Popova’s book “Sexual Consent.”

While this strand of thought has a history going back to the 1970s, the simplistic causal link between pornography and sexual violence has by and large been discredited. A more recent expression of anti-pornography feminism focuses instead on the ubiquity and accessibility of online pornography specifically, and particularly on its alleged effects on children and young people. Campaigners cite cases of very young children being exposed to pornography, of teenagers sharing nude images of themselves, and of the alleged normalization of sexual practices deemed intrinsically “pornographic,” such as anal sex, as examples of pornography’s contribution to sexual violence. They claim that the ubiquity of pornography in our culture creates an environment where it is difficult for young people to know what normal, healthy sexual practices and relationships look like, which in turn puts pressure on them to consent to acts they may not want. If you grow up thinking that porn sex is normal sex, in other words, you may not have the tools to negotiate the kind of sex that works for you.

Over the last decade, campaigners subscribing to these views have had a number of successes in influencing government policy. The United Kingdom, for instance, has legislation banning the possession of “extreme pornography.” Until recently, the Crown Prosecution Service’s guidelines for what constitutes extreme pornography included a list of sexual acts, many of which are common in queer and feminist productions. These guidelines were updated in January 2019 to focus on consent and harm rather than specific acts. The government also requires big internet service providers to switch parental controls on by default, and has recently implemented a requirement for pornography websites to be able to verify their users’ age, thereby compromising users’ anonymity. All this is ostensibly in aid of protecting children from the harmful effects of pornography and from using pornography as a source of (bad) sex education and sexual scripts.

Yet even if we accept that pornography is easy to access and that it may give us sexual scripts and act as a source of knowledge about sex for young people who don’t have access to other kinds of sex education, the picture is more complicated than the simple anti-pornography argument would have us believe.

Over the last 20 years or so, there has been a shift in cultural studies from talking about “pornography” to talking about “pornographies.” This reflects a growing understanding that while some materials are explicitly produced with the intention to arouse, a wide range of other types of material are read as pornography by individuals, and even among the former category, there is an enormous variety of style, content, and circumstances of production. Pornography, for instance, can be written as well as visual. It can be produced by large mainstream studios or small independent producers, including ones with a feminist and queer outlook. And audiences who may not be able to access what we traditionally think of as pornography may still make pornographic meanings from materials such as women’s magazines, advertising, or lingerie catalogs. We cannot reduce the meanings or effects of all of these diverse materials to simple statements such as “this causes violence” or “this reproduces rape culture and limits individuals’ ability to negotiate consent.” What, then, are some of the possible alternative meanings we make with pornography, and how might they shape our views and relate to our ability to meaningfully consent to sex?

With the proliferation of digital technologies and online distribution, there has been a rise in small, independent pornography producers, particularly ones following a queer and/or feminist ethos. Many of these producers emphasize representation of diverse bodies (in terms, for instance, of race, body type, or disability), different genders (including non-binary ones), sexualities, sexual practices beyond the dominant sexual script, consent, and safer sex practices. They have a strong focus on ethics in both what they choose to depict and in their production processes. Interviews with performers emphasizing the consensual nature of the encounters depicted have become commonplace in queer and feminist pornography.

The audiences for this kind of pornography are disproportionately women and non-binary people of a range of sexual orientations, as well as queer men. Studies of women consumers of queer and feminist pornography indicate that their experiences with this kind of material are complex. How they relate to it, and the meanings they make with it, depend on their attitudes and expectations but also on social factors, and they may experience contradictory emotions ranging from arousal to disgust, all at the same time, as one researcher found. These experiences and emotions are in turn used by women viewers to develop their understanding of their own sexuality. They learn to identify and challenge dominant discourses and sexual scripts in both media and their own lives and develop a better sense of their own sexual agency. In this way, some kinds of pornography can function as a way of negotiating one’s place within (or outright challenging) rape culture.

Representation in queer and feminist pornography of diverse practices, communities, and body types also has important effects when it comes to consent. It can help counteract some of the discursive operations of power limiting marginalized people’s ability to exercise their sexual agency. Particularly groups who are commonly either desexualized (such as fat women) or hypersexualized (such as black women) can find alternative representation in pornography validating and empowering, giving them more confidence in their day-to-day sexual practice and consent negotiation.

Pornography is neither monolithic, nor universally harmful. Viewing it and engaging with it can be a complex, multilayered experience for anyone. Some pornography, for some viewers, may indeed reproduce the dominant sexual scripts that prop up rape culture. Equally though, some types of pornography, for some viewers, can be hugely empowering. It may reflect our identities and experiences, help us explore our sexuality, help us exercise sexual agency and bodily autonomy, and challenge and rewrite dominant scripts of what sex is and how it should work.

It is perhaps ironic, then, that the kind of legislation that anti-pornography feminists campaign for, and that bans “extreme pornography,” most severely impacts small and independent producers — the kind more likely to produce queer, feminist, ethical, and consent-focused pornography. The legislation focuses on specific acts: acts that go off the default sexual script, that are more prevalent in queer (and to an extent in feminist) pornography. It casts them as intrinsically deviant and undesirable, regardless of the context of either production or representation. It closes down avenues for challenging default sexual scripts and consensually exploring sexual possibilities beyond that default. This and other similar legislation does not necessarily stop young people — or anyone else — from picking up default sexual scripts from mainstream pornography, and it does nothing to improve education about or understanding of consent.

An alternative and perhaps more constructive approach to the idea that pornography acts as a major source of knowledge and sexual scripts not just for young people but for many in our society has come in the form of sex and relationships education materials. Rather than seeking to ban or restrict access to pornography, this approach seeks to equip young people with the knowledge and resources to explore their own sexuality safely and consensually regardless of any messages they may pick up from pornography or other media.

In 2018, for instance, Teen Vogue published an article on anal sex. Consent, as well as inclusivity of queer and trans identities, is at the core of the article. It starts out with a disclaimer for readers who may be uncomfortable reading about the subject and points them at other Teen Vogue content they could read instead. It emphasizes consent issues throughout, including the idea that consent should be negotiated beforehand and can be withdrawn at any time. It goes on to dismantle the idea that penile-vaginal intercourse is the only type of sex one could or should be having. Rather than simply dismissing anal sex as an intrinsically deviant, abusive, or “pornographic” practice, it acknowledges that many people genuinely enjoy it. Finally, the article discusses the practicalities of anal sex, while being careful to use gender-neutral language and not make assumptions about who the insertive and who the receptive partner might be. In these ways, it puts images young people may have seen in pornography in the context of real-life sexual experiences and possibilities. It reduces social pressures on them and gives them the space to consider whether some of the sexual practices they see on screen are things they might enjoy without stigmatizing them. It helps young people develop new sexual scripts inclusive of all genders and sexualities in order to negotiate consent and explore their sexuality safely, and with respect for each other’s bodily autonomy.

Pornography and its relationship to issues of sexual consent remains a thorny issue. It is a part of our cultural landscape that is here to stay, and like other media it has an effect on how we view sex, consent, and our own sexuality. But it is far from a monolithic cultural phenomenon, and the meanings we make from it are complicated and varied. They depend as much on the kinds of pornography we come into contact with as on the other cultural resources we bring with us.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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On How To Create Your Sexual Potential

7 Lessons From A Sex Therapist

By Nan Wise, Ph.D, MSW, M.A., LCSW, CST

According to Canadian sexologist Peggy Kleinplatz, Ph.D., the vast majority of problems that bring people into sex therapy stem from what she calls the “North American sex script” that centers on having heterosexual intercourse with orgasms in all the right places, meaning, women should be experiencing orgasms reliably through sexual intercourse, which is actually not the case.

Even with additional clitoral stimulation, less than half of women (43%) report experiencing orgasm through intercourse 75% of the time. In other words, our cultural view of sexuality is narrow, limiting, and performance-oriented, favoring what does not appear to come naturally.

Inspired by Kleinplatz, I have gleaned seven lessons from my own research and work with clients. These lessons, or take-aways, offer an invitation to understand and explore yourself and your lover in a whole new dimension of sexual pleasure:

1. Do not judge your erotic self or the erotic experience.

Practice radical self-acceptance. Learn to love your body, exactly as it is. This is one of the biggest lessons, mentioned by nearly all of my participants. They also become curious about their own sexuality and went about exploring what turned them on. Learn to embrace your unique erotic fingerprint—whatever it is.

Let yourself be exactly as you are in the moment. And let the moment be exactly as it is. Sex is our willingness to be sexual beings, however that shows up. Remember first and foremost that good sex is about being present.

2. Tune in.

Shift your focus inward to listen closely to what you want and what your body yearns for. What are your fantasies? How do you like to be touched? Why not explore all areas of your body that can give you pleasure? Become keenly aware of what pleases you across the senses beyond touch—don’t forget about sounds and tastes. Are you interested in perhaps being more active when you tend to be receptive? More receptive when you’re usually more active? Making subtle shifts in your habitual roles may reveal new ways that you can be turned on.

Paying attention to sensations is key for pleasurable sex. If your mind wanders and starts to get into “spectatoring” mode—becoming goal-directed or self-conscious—simply notice that without judgment, letting those thoughts be exactly as they are while you bring your attention back to the senses. 

3. Be patient—about getting turned on.

When you want to have intercourse, for example, don’t begin until you and/or your partner are sufficiently aroused. Allow the sex to unfold without rushing into it. Although this advice may seem simplistic, it’s hugely important to experiencing the pleasure of sex. Slow down and savor the sensations. Let them build. Enjoy the journey without concern about the destination.

4. Stay connected to your partner.

You have a number of tools to use with your partner—to manage defenses, be an attentive and active listener, and be open to differences in erotic fingerprints or desire. Respect these differences and you will feel more connected. Often the best way to connect is actually going beyond words.

Look into your partner’s eyes and breathe with your partner while sitting silently. See the person in front of you, the being you fell in love with. Spoon your partner and hold them and synchronize your breath to synchronize your nervous systems. This actually works. We are like tuning forks and go into “cardiac” entrainment with lovers (and even our pets) when we settle into the connection. Good sex is connected sex.

5. Take risks.

We often feel hesitant to speak up with partners about parts of ourselves that we think they will judge or worry that if we tell them how we truly feel, we will hurt them. We tend to play it safe when in doubt. But another way to look at this is that there is a risk to not taking risks. If we don’t explore some of the scarier places with our partners, if we don’t explore the corners of our erotic selves, we tend to shut down and stagnate. And stagnation, itself, is dangerous to relationships.

Sexual potential unfolds when we bring all of ourselves into the mix. We are always, always shifting and changing and growing. Taking the risk to reveal how these changes affect us, our thoughts, our fears, our feelings, even our fantasies tends to revitalize the partnership.

6. Prioritize pleasure.

Allow sex to play a larger role in your life. Your work with your seven core emotions has paved the way for more keen awareness and insight into how and why pleasure is so important to your life, so allow sex to play a larger role. Make time for sex, expand your notion of what sex is, nurture it, and explore it. It’s a journey without an end.

7. Tolerate emotions and embrace the transformative nature of sex.

Because of the blend of emotional and physical drivers of sex, any type of sexual experience or activity has the capacity to stir up all kinds of emotions. One of the most important lessons for good sex and also good relationships, in general, is to learn how to more fully tolerate our feelings, other people’s feelings, and our feelings about other people’s feelings. And sometimes the most challenging feelings to tolerate, believe it or not, are intense feelings of pleasure—which for some can feel scarily out of control.

When we can learn to simply allow the feelings to be as they are, stay present to ourselves and to each other, the experiences we can have with and through sex can be truly healing and can revitalize our mind, body, and spirit. It is a tangible form of connection to others, a source of immune-boosting energy, and a vast reservoir for pleasure.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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I Spent Five Years Talking to Women Across the U.S. About Pleasure and Desire.

Here’s What I Learned About Inequality in the Bedroom

By Katherine Rowland

In the fall of 2014, I stood in a crowded auditorium as a parade of women described to regulators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration how their libidos had been whittled down to a fraction of their former power. For some it was a gradual decline. For others it was instantaneous, “like a switch that went off.” One woman lamented, “I don’t even think about sex.” Others spoke of how intimacy had become more a duty than a source of delight. “I am able to grit through it,” one woman said. Another: “I might not even want to have sex—but if he wants sex and I give it to him then, yes, I was a good wife today.”

The women were there to weigh in on whether female sexual dysfunction represents an unmet medical need. Their testimony, taken collectively, described the personal fallout of low desire which, along with related sexual concerns like difficulty reaching orgasm, experts estimate affect a quarter to a half of American women. Such complaints are commonly chalked up to female biology. However, as a journalist who spent five years talking with 120 women across the United States about their pleasure and desire, I rarely heard anyone say the main culprit was hormones, neurochemical balance or the biased stamp of evolution. Instead, the women I interviewed described how the greater culture had derailed their desire. Heterosexual women in particular shared that their partners routinely dismissed their pleasure or that they had themselves absorbed the idea that it was a lesser priority. What emerged was that a lack of sexual entitlement—much like the pay gap, the glass ceiling and the countless other ways women are systematically held back—diminished what they received and what they felt they could rightly claim in their lives.

These dynamics pervade women’s intimate relationships, contributing to well-documented struggles like orgasm disparities, chore-like sex, unenthusiastic consent and ubiquitous pretending. Moreover, they inform how women physically feel. The sole purpose of the clitoris, so far as science can surmise, is to confer pleasure on its owner. And yet, possession of this uniquely dedicated organ is no guarantor of delight, or even sensation. Numerous women told me they felt numb and disconnected—a lack of sensation that is especially poignant in an era when the control of their bodies so often comes into question. As one woman put it, “My genitals feel dead.”

Among the women I interviewed, direct experience or close knowledge of sexual trauma was a persistent undercurrent, and some women attributed their dimmed sensation to prior episodes of harm or to feeling objectified, inappropriately sexualized and socially unsafe. Numerous women also relayed that they were too caught up in their heads to register what was happening in their bodies. Distracted in the extreme, they were surveilling their performance, critiquing their physique, hastening an encounter to an abrupt conclusion or fixedly tending to their partners’ pleasure at the expense of their own. In those encounters, an intimate touch was no more arousing than a tap on the elbow.

Contemporary researchers use the term sexual concordance to describe the extent to which mind and body, or subjective report and genitals, are in sync. Studies using graphic sexual images have shown that men react bodily and report that they are most aroused by stimuli that conforms to their sexual orientation. Queer women also display a specific response, reacting most positively to images of other women. But heterosexual women are all over the place. Physiologically, they react to couples, men, women, even scenes of copulating bonobo apes. But when asked whether they find these images arousing, they state that they’re unmoved.

Meredith Chivers of Queen’s University in Ontario, a leading expert in this field, told me, “We continually underestimate women’s sexuality.” Yet she cautioned against concluding that women’s genital reactions are a truer marker of sexual interest than their verbal accounts. A pressing question for her is why heterosexual women display seemingly indiscriminate patterns of arousal and yet do not consciously detect that they’re being turned on. One possible explanation, she says, is that reward patterns our behavior: we desire certain things because we associate them with pleasure. For lesbian women, sexual intercourse is more consistently associated with orgasm and gratification, and so images of other women will activate a clear positive response. But for many heterosexual women, the status quo has left them underwhelmed, and there is no reinforcement of pleasure one way or another. Penetrative sex results in orgasm for only a minority of women, and for some, who equate it with, say, pain, guilt or obligation, it may spark outright aversion.

Chivers is not the first to note the tension between women’s capacity for sensuality and their actual enjoyment. A half-century ago, pioneering researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson documented women’s sexual athleticism, stating that the range and depth of their pleasure “infinitely surpasses that of man.” However, they also found that women internalized “prevailing psychosocial influences,” like the sexual double standard or the equation of desire with impurity, that might interfere with their sexual response. Anthropologists have similarly observed that in cultures that expect women to enjoy sex as much as men do, women have regular orgasms, whereas cultures that question the propriety of female pleasure are home to greater sexual difficulties. If the climate doesn’t cloak female pleasure in shame or mystery, or cast it as second rate, it may lie within easier reach.

Fortunately, these findings suggest that erotic potential is not etched in stone and women can become proficient in experiencing progressive states of pleasure. Among the women I spoke to, great sex was not a matter of mastering a particular technique or communicative style. In fact, it was not about what women did so much as how they did it, and for many that required unlearning what they thought sex and love were supposed to look like. Desire lay on the other side of giving up their freighted assumptions.

For one married lawyer, who for decades assumed she was “frigid,” kindling eroticism was a process of claiming the freedom to do as she pleased in her intimate life, which eventually meant having consensual relationships with men other than her husband. “It didn’t happen overnight. It was a bit of a roller coaster,” she said of prising open her monogamous partnership. “It takes time to feel you have the space to do whatever you want, to create whatever relationship structure you want, to have whatever kind of sex you want. And then, oh my God, it’s like the bottom drops out.” For another woman in her late 20s, experiencing desire meant drawing new boundaries. Raised to believe that she should make herself available and pleasing, she came to equate intimacy with allowing her body to be relentlessly accessed. After working with a sex coach, she gradually felt empowered to say, “I don’t want to be touched anywhere,” and to stop viewing sex as a grudging performance for her partner’s benefit. Through learning to say no, she was able to eventually start saying yes.

For the women I interviewed, low desire rarely stemmed from a medical malady or a psychological condition. Rather, it was often a healthy response to quietly unwanted or lusterless sex. My conversations revealed that persistent sexual dissatisfaction is a sign that many women do not feel free to enjoy their sexuality, or know how to do so, and so engage in activities that are not necessarily inclusive of their pleasure. If women struggle in overwhelming numbers to inhabit their own bodies, it is a measure of feeling, or being made to feel, undeserving or less than. As dire as this sounds, it is also cause for hope. It’s far harder to rewire biology than it is to alter belief. While their paths to sexual healing varied, the women I spoke to made plain that satisfaction was rooted in their social power, in being entitled to explore and express their sexuality and in feeling equal to their partners. Pleasure and its value can be learned, and once learned, are not readily relinquished.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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What is edge play?

Everything you need to know about the high-risk kink

Professionals explain consent and more.

By Ana Valens

Chances are you’ve heard the term “edge play” before, either while browsing a BDSM guide or chatting with a friend about Domination and submission. Like many kink terms, it has taboo energy to it. You aren’t supposed to mess with stuff on the edge, right? But that’s what makes it so fun!

Let’s say you’re familiar with what edge play entails, but you don’t know where to start. The Daily Dot interviewed two professional dominants who clued us in with unique considerations that arise when negotiating edge play scenes with their clients.

What is edge play?

Defining edge play is complicated, in part because it’s so specific to each partner’s interests, limits, and boundaries. In The New Topping Book, Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy describe the edge as “wherever things start to feel risky, where you start to feel vulnerable, the edge of the cliff that looks over your personal abyss.” This can look like “playing on the edge of [one’s] skill and knowledge,” although Easton and Hardy also talk about “shadow play.” This is a form of BDSM where “we find acceptance for emotions and behaviors that would be unacceptable outside scene space.”

Edge play can play with both of these things. But everyone’s relationship with the kink varies, including what they are (and aren’t) willing to doing at their edge.

“What constitutes edge play is different for everyone. I consider edge play to be play that occurs at the edge of what one can bear. Play where there is enough trust to push past what is comfortable creates the possibility of a new outcome,” Mistress Blunt, a professional dominatrix based in New York City, told the Daily Dot.

Arizona-based, nonbinary professional dominatrix Domina Elle stressed there’s some “confusion” around the name edge play, as not all edge play necessarily involves “edgy” and “controversial” kinks, let alone “literal sharp objects.” Instead, edge play is “as broad as the number of kinks that exist today.”

“What constitutes edge play is largely subjective,” she told the Daily Dot, “but most of the time playing with a person’s edges simply refers to consensually pushing an individual person’s boundaries or limits.”

What are examples of edge play?

Edge play is ultimately defined by its practitioners, but there are some common topics that regularly appear. Domina Elle says she commonly works with themes around “expression of sexual orientation, pain tolerance, germophobia, fear of kidnapping, fear of public humiliation, fear of sexual harrasment/assault, and fear of death.”

Some additional kinks that may appear on dominants’ and submissives’ edges include:

Of course, one person’s edge may be another person’s Saturday night D/s session.

“My own experience with edge play is complicated. I push people’s boundaries all the time, but I never cross limits. I explore dangerous forms of play on a regular basis, but I recognize and respect the danger for what it is,” Domina Elle said. “It is my job to do my research in advance, communicate risk as effectively as possible, negotiate consent, listen for withdrawal (or nullification) of consent, know what to do when something goes wrong, and to listen to my gut when I do not feel comfortable providing a certain type of experience for any reason.”

Because “edge play” is a subjective umbrella, some forms of play require extensive negotiation between practitioners. This can include “intense preparation” with days to years of “negotiation and planning,” Domina Elle said. Additionally, creating a safety plan and providing plenty of aftercare (“going beyond basic first aid, giving affection as appropriate, taking time away from work”) are all important.

“Before each appointment, a submissive and I do a consultation where we talk about our interests and limits for the day … My scenes only ever consist of the mutual interests that are shared between both my sub and myself,” Domina Elle said. “If a sub brings something up in consult that I am uncomfortable with, I disclose that right away. If it comes up later during session (usually meaning a sub does something against or without asking for my consent), then I have to find a tactful way to protect myself depending on the circumstances.”

What do I need to know before doing edge play?

If it isn’t clear by now, edge play is a risky undertaking. Then again, BDSM is fundamentally dangerous in its own right. Acknowledging that from the start is part of practicing risk-aware consensual kink (RACK). In RACK, all parties know that play may be dangerous, but they are fully aware of the circumstances and are agreeing to them.

“Edge play is not safe. In the same way that the only true wisdom is knowing we know nothing; the only true way to play safely in BDSM is to know that nothing is safe. Choking, fire play, rope bondage, gun play, etc. all have their best practices written in blood,” Domina Elle said. “That being said, freedom and autonomy is more important to me than safety. That is why I practice risk aware consensual kink.”

Domina Elle said empathy is a core component to any form of ethical domination, along with “respect, mercy, and a fierce willingness to admit when you are wrong or don’t know what you are doing.” However, Domina Elle stressed that edge play isn’t defined by neurotypical dominants’ experiences. She said that as an autistic professional dominatrix who does not understand most social cues, BDSM allows her by nature to “break social norms, and shape the circumstances to help me gather information about how a submissive is feeling.”

“Edge play is definitely more about empathy, knowing your subject, and understanding the specific type of play you’re about to engage in than prior practice and advanced skills,” Domina Elle said. “Not all forms of edge play have different levels that can be practiced, not to mention mastered, in advance.”

A medical background, reading comprehension, and good communication skills are all ideal, as are practicing the specific skills required for your edge play scene. Domina Elle also suggests these best practices for edge play practitioners:

    • Ask yourself why you are considering playing with a person’s edge
    • Examine whether this type of play falls within your system of ethics
    • Get educated on the type of play you decide to engage with
    • Negotiate with your scene partner(s) at least 24 hours in advance
    • Use a safe word within the scene.

Mistress Blunt agreed that edge play’s most important qualities are “having intuition, attunement, and communication,” and that it’s incredibly important to know yourself, including what your edges are and your role as a top or a bottom. That includes dominants, too. While most kink advice revolves around the submissive’s safety, doms also have their own edge along with boundaries, feelings, desires, and a need for aftercare after certain scenes.

“Know if you want to explore those edges, if pushing feels good, cathartic, and empowering,” she said. “Some questions I ask folks I play with is if they feel comfortable saying no and stopping or redirecting a scene. Most people say yes, but I use how they say yes as my gauge. I also ask most play partners that if one of us fucks up, if they feel comfortable talking about it after. I don’t think assuming best intentions is always safe, but I try not to play with people who I don’t have that understanding with.”

Technical skills, such as proper rope tying procedures or knife play techniques, are still important, and their necessity during particularly high-risk scenarios cannot be overstated. “Most people don’t exercise those skills as often as they could. These skills are cultivated over time,” Mistress Blunt explained. “These skills are built within individual relationships and don’t necessarily translate to every relationship.”As for newcomers interested in edge play, Domina Elle has strong words of advice: “Take it slowly and take it seriously.”

“There is no need to rush,” she told the Daily Dot. “It is super reasonable to be nervous having your edges pushed, or even playing with another person’s limits. It can be just as rewarding as it can be devastating. Give it the respect it deserves. Listen to your gut instincts.”

So go ahead and explore your edge. Just make sure you and your partner(s) are on the same page, and be honest with yourself if you’re not ready. Your edge can wait for you.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Da Vinci’s sex life reveals a complex understanding of male love

Leonardo da Vinci ‘loved penises,’ but remained celibate argues historian Elizabeth Abbott

Historian Elizabeth Abbott argues that understanding Leonardo da Vinci’s sex life, or lackthereof, provides a rare glimpse into how sexuality and male love was understood and practised in Renaissance Italy.

By Elizabeth Abbott

Leonardo da Vinci is known as a brilliant artist and scientist — a genius who dreamed up flying machines 400 years before the first airplane ever took flight.

He’s also known for his exquisite art, and the ways he captured the complexity and nuance of female beauty. In his life, his relationships with women were positive, supportive and kind.

But he was repulsed by female sexuality.

“He had an almost clinical perception of heterosexual intercourse,” said historian Elizabeth Abbott in a lecture she delivered at Carleton University in Ottawa.

“He said, quote: ‘the sexual act of coitus and the body parts employed for it are so repulsive, that were it not for the beauty of the faces and the adornment of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.'”

She points to a sketch da Vinci drafted of heterosexual intercourse as a prime example of his revulsion.

“The woman is only represented by her cavities — there is no face, or head, or torso,” Abbott observed in conversation with IDEAS host, Nahlah Ayed.

“He referred to [sexual intercourse] as repellent. And certainly this would be a good illustration of that point of view.”

Meanwhile, he drew countless beautiful sketches of the phallus and anus.

“He loved penises,” said Abbott, who is a senior research associate at Trinity College at the University of Toronto.

“In fact, he wrote: ‘The penis sometimes displays an intellect of its own. When a man may desire it to be stimulated it remains obstinate and goes its own way, sometimes moving on its own without the permission of its owner. Whether he is awake or sleeping, it does what it desires. Often when the man wishes to use it, it desires otherwise. And often it wishes to be used and the man forbids it. Therefore, it appears that this creature possesses a life and intelligence separate from the men.'”

Humiliated into celibacy

Abbott describes da Vinci as homosexual — a term that would not have been understood in Renaissance Italy, where male love was accepted and celebrated.

“His sort of male sexuality was understood and accepted,” said Abbott. “He preferred the company of and the beauty of men…But what was despised [in Renaissance Italy] was sodomy. Why? It was probably because it was considered by the Church to be unnatural. Sex was supposed to be for procreation only.”

In 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was arrested by the Office of the Night under the accusation of sodomy. The Office of the Night was the moral policing unit in Florence. While eventually acquitted, the experience was so humiliating for him that Abbott argues da Vinci vowed himself to live a life of celibacy.

“Celibacy is defined in many different ways. For him it was not a privation,” she argues. “I think it’s a kind of celibacy that was very satisfying for him.”

She points out that he continued to surround himself with beautiful young men, and developed a deep relationship with a young man named Salai, who lived with Leonardo for more than 30 years as his muse and artistic inspiration — despite da Vinci’s own observations about how rude and untrustworthy Salai could be.

“Some claimed that [Salai] was his lover,” said Abbott. “But I prefer to describe him as the keeper of Leonardo’s erotic fantasies. I don’t think that … he actually had sex with him. He dressed him lavishly like a doll often in pink and dandyfied clothes and extravagant stockings and 24 pairs of shoes! It was an awful lot of shoes back in the Renaissance.”

She says that the way da Vinci directed his sexuality helps us recognize the fluidity of sexual identity today.

“We are so intent on understanding and defining ourselves,” Abbott said. “I think it’s fascinating to realize that the concept of homosexuality as we know it didn’t even exist then.”

And of course, Leonardo’s distaste for women’s sexuality did not influence his skill and passion for painting them, so long as they were fully clothed.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra de’ Benci beside his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.

“He was very pro-women and he had good relations with many of them,” said Abbott, pointing out the care and artistry he displays in his painting of the Mona Lisa, and the lesser-known portrait of a young Ginevra.

She argues the beauty and sensitivity of da Vinci’s portraits of women would not have been possible if he did not develop a respect and connection with them.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How to start dominating in the bedroom,

according to a professional dominatrix

By Lindsay Goldwert

  • Deciding to be dominant in the bedroom often means subverting traditional gender roles.
  • Professional dominatrixes see that all sorts of people want to be dominated.
  • You don’t need to invest in handcuffs, whips, or ropes to get started. All you need are your words, according to Mistress Ava Zhang, a New York City-based professional dominatrix. 

Not all of us have leadership roles at work, but at some point, we’ve given an order.

We’ve told someone where to sit, where to hang their coat, to stop talking and listen. We’ve asked people to bring napkins to our parties, to pick up groceries on the way home, to turn down the thermostat.

You may not consider yourself a sexually dominant person, but you’ve probably made things happen by asking for what you want. Have you ever texted someone “come over tonight ;)” and had them show up at your door ten minutes later? Said “kiss me” and then found yourself kissed?

Yet the idea of being dominant in the bedroom, especially for women, can still seem strange since it goes against everything we’re taught. We must be fair, things must be equal, we must take care of the other person, we must make sure everyone else’s needs are met before ours.

Being dominant in bed doesn’t just mean being on top. It means knowing why you’re there and being bold about pursuing your pleasure.

Professional dominatrixes are the first to scoff at the idea that all men enjoy being dominant in bed and all women enjoy being submissive. They see firsthand that all sorts of people long to be taken out of the driver’s seat.

Here’s how to reexamine the idea of taking control in bedroom, putting the power dynamic in your favor.

Dominating isn’t the same as being cruel or mean

“One of the most common misconceptions surrounding a woman taking a dominant role is the assumption that she needs to be a display cruel behavior towards others, for the sake of her own gain or pleasure, and without consideration for their safety or well-being,” said Mistress Ava Zhang, a New York City-based professional dominatrix. “That is not dominance but rather narcissism bordering on sociopathy.”

Taking the lead in bed doesn’t mean being a sadist or demeaning your partner. It doesn’t mean you have to change who you are. You’re simply connecting with a powerful side of yourself that was always there, and sharing it with a person who wants to make you happy. It’s about closeness and connection, not cruelty.

“The culture of BDSM is heavily rooted in ethics, empathy, and consent,” said Zhang. “The one who assumes the dominant role need not force others to submit, but inspires them to do so by first and foremost displaying compassion and understanding as befitting a moral person.”

You need to understand yourself before you can take on a dominant role

The first step to taking on a more dominant role is to figure out what turns you on. This is easier said than done. We may be ashamed of our desires, we may worry that our partner will laugh or be disgusted by them.

But there’s a reason why the Fifty Shades of Grey books and films were so successful. People were able to point to something on a page and say, “That’s hot.” And then show it to their partner.

Think about scenes in movies and books that have turned you on, and ask yourself why. It may make you feel weird at first, but it’s normal to ask yourself if your desires are normal. It’s up to you to accept them as part of who you are and make the next move.

Great sex starts with communication

Taking cues from mainstream media can also have a downside. Great sex in the movies is often led by the man, or else it’s a magically equal exchange where all the parties seem to intuitively know what the other wants.

Now that’s fantasy.

The reality is that great sex is born of great communication, but it can be hard to wants to talk about what you want. Someone has to take the lead. It should be you.

Taking the dominant position with a partner requires the ability to articulate what you want, explain what pleases you, and why.

“Two of the most important lessons I have learned in my time as a professional dominatrix is to know myself, and to communicate what I want to others. Taking a more dominant role means first having a command and understanding of oneself,” said Zhang.

You don’t need to invest in handcuffs, whips, or ropes

Yes, the things we see on television and the movies can inspire our sexiest thoughts, but they can also be intimidating and stop you from giving things a try.

Being dominant in the bedroom doesn’t mean you have to invest in kinky gear, like handcuffs, whips, and rope. They’re symbolic props.

For example, you can use your words to tell your partner not to move. Handcuffs may just provide an extra layer to the experience.

“Begin with some universal concepts by asking your partner if she or he is enticed by the following: being teased, delayed gratification, the freedom from not having to decide/think, or simply just giving you pleasure,” said Zhang. These ideas can inspire any number of playful activities.”

It’s normal to struggle with outdated attitudes about sexual roles

We’re all prisoners of our upbringings. We have ideas of what people are supposed to do in bed. Even if we think of ourselves as progressive, we may still be dogged by out-of-date attitudes about sexual roles.

It’s up to you to examine why you believe that sex has to be a certain way. If it makes you feel good, great. But if you’re unsatisfied and afraid that your fantasies disrupt your ideas about gender roles in bed, you need to stop and think.

“The mind is the sex organ and all it really takes to be dominant is assuming the right attitude,” said Zhang. “And remember, a willing and open-minded partner will want to please you.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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How to Have Good Sex,

According to a Neuroscientist

By Dr. Nan Wise

Look anywhere in the media or on the streets of any major city (or suburb or small town, for that matter) and we appear to be wholly focused on pleasure. Invitations to enjoy sex, food, sports, spas, exotic vacations, romantic escapes, and game-ified apps abound, all promising a hit of relaxation, a high of excitement, an emotional or physical reprieve, and an answer to our aching need to destress. From this vantage point, an anthropologist visiting our planet might conclude that ours is a culture gluttonous for pleasure and sexually ravenous.

We should be feeling tons of pleasure. But are we really that turned on?

The answer, unfortunately, is no. What I observe daily in my clinical practice is that for all of this pleasure-seeking behavior, all this wanting of pleasure, very few of us seem able to fully experience the sensations or satisfaction we seek. Interspersed with these pleas or promises for pleasure is an equally consistent message: almost continual advertisements for antidepressant and antianxiety medications. One in five Americans will experience an episode of mental illness, while the rates of major depression and anxiety disorders steeply rise.

This is where my work comes in. The experience of pleasure can be described as sexual and sensual but also intellectual and fanciful, physical and emotional. The brain is not only the command center for sex; it’s also a generator of pleasure. This is why for the past 12 years I have been working in the lab to study what happens in the brain during sex.

Like many a scientist before me, I began my research by using myself as a guinea pig for my own studies. I spent endless hours conducting brain-imaging studies of women having orgasms in the fMRI in order to understand more about how pleasure—in the ultimate form of an orgasm—plays out in the brain, showing that an orgasm not only feels good but is good for us.

I have gleaned seven lessons from my own research and work with clients about how to have good sex and why it matters. These lessons apply to all of us who want to leave anhedonia—the inability to feel pleasure—behind and truly embrace our sexual potential.

1. Don’t judge your erotic self.

Learn to love your body, exactly as it is. This is one of the biggest lessons, mentioned by nearly all of my participants. Become curious about your sexuality and explore what turns you on. Learn to embrace your unique erotic fingerprint—your sexual style reflecting how typically think about, experience, and desire sex—whatever it is. Sex is our willingness to be sexual beings, however that shows up. Remember first and foremost that good sex is about being present.

2. Tune in.

Shift your focus inward to listen closely to what you want and what your body yearns for. What are your fantasies? How do you like to be touched? Why not explore all areas of your body that can give you pleasure? As Beverly Whipple, my beloved mentor, and world-renowned expert on sexual health recommends, become keenly aware of what pleases you across the senses beyond touch—don’t forget about sounds and tastes. Paying attention to sensations is key for pleasurable sex. If your mind wanders and starts to get into “spectatoring” mode—becoming goal-directed or self-conscious—simply notice that without judgment, letting those thoughts be exactly as they are while you bring your attention back to the senses.

3. Be patient about getting turned on.

When you want to have intercourse, don’t begin until you and/or your partner are sufficiently aroused. Allow the sex to unfold without rushing into it. Although this advice may seem simplistic, it’s hugely important to experiencing the pleasure of sex. Slow down and savor the sensations. Let them build. Enjoy the journey without concern about the destination.

4. Stay connected to your partner.

Often the best way to connect is by going beyond words. Simply do what people who are in the ecstatic state of new romantic love spend tons of time doing—eye gazing. Look into your partner’s eyes and breathe with your partner while sitting silently. See the person in front of you, the person you fell in love with. Spoon your partner, hold them, and synchronize your breath to synchronize your nervous systems. This actually works. We are like tuning forks and go into “cardiac entrainment” with lovers when we settle into the connection. Good sex is connected sex.

5. Take risks.

We often feel hesitant to speak up with partners about parts of ourselves that we think they will judge or worry that, if we tell them how we truly feel, we will hurt them. We tend to play it safe when in doubt. But another way to look at this is that there is a risk to not taking risks. If we don’t explore some of the scarier places with our partners, if we don’t explore the corners of our erotic selves, we tend to shut down and stagnate. And stagnation, itself, is dangerous to relationships. Sexual potential unfolds when we bring all of ourselves into the mix. We are always, always shifting and changing and growing. Taking the risk to reveal how these changes impact us, our thoughts, our fears, our feelings, even our fantasies tends to revitalize the partnership.

6. Prioritize pleasure.

Allow sex to play a larger role in your life. Seeking pleasure that feels good and is good for us—what I call healthy hedonism—is not a luxury but a necessity for a healthy, balanced emotional brain. And sex is a potent form of healthy hedonism. Make time for sex, expand your notion of what sex is, nurture it, and explore it. It’s a journey without an end.

7. Embrace the transformative nature of sex.

Because of the blend of emotional and physical drivers of sex, any type of sexual experience or activity has the capacity to stir up all kinds of emotions. One of the most important lessons for good sex, and also good relationships, is to learn how to more fully tolerate our feelings, other people’s feelings, and our feelings about other people’s feelings. Sometimes the most challenging feelings to tolerate, believe it or not, are intense feelings of pleasure—which for some can feel scarily out of control. When we can learn to simply allow the feelings to be as they are, stay present to ourselves and to each other, the experiences we can have with and through sex can be truly healing and can revitalize our mind, body, and spirit. It is a tangible form of connection to others, a source of immune-boosting energy, and a vast reservoir for pleasure.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Seven factors that influence sexual consent

By Valeria Escobar

Through over 150 interviews spanning five years, two Columbia researchers have tried to “pull back the curtain” on the sex lives of Columbia undergraduates. As concerns around sexual assault have become a central part of the undergraduate student experience, during which as many as one in three women and almost one in six men will report being sexually assaulted, the researchers sought to find the factors of college living that enable these acts and the ways in which colleges can best prevent them in the future.

Last week, Jennifer Hirsch, professor of sociomedical sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health, and Shamus Khan, chair of the department of sociology, released the culmination of their work in their book, “Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus.” Through their work, Hirsch and Khan argued for a need to reevaluate popular notions about consent to empower students to feel as though they have the right to choose their sexual experiences.

To begin their book launch, Hirsch and Khan participated in a panel at the Forum on Columbia’s Manhattanville campus, where they discussed the scope of their project to an audience of hundreds of students and faculty.

“The thing that complicated consent for us was that people consented to sex that they didn’t want to have and people had sex that they wanted to have without ever consenting to that sex,” Khan said.

“Consent education thinks fundamentally not about the moment of transaction between two people in the presence of the ‘yes’ or the expression or affirmation, but tries to understand bringing that social world into that moment,” he added.

Hirsch and Khan’s publication follows the 2018 findings from the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation tam, which noted that race, gender, and class play significant roles in shaping students’ experiences with consent. In interviews with Spectator, students noted that these factors contribute to their complicated experience with consent, which the straightforward “yes means yes” model that is taught during the New Student Orientation Program fails to address.

At the panel, Hirsch and Khan highlighted among these factors the “Seven Dimensions of Consent”—““gendered heterosexual scripts,” “sexual citizenship,” “intersectionality,” “men’s fears,” “alcohol,” “peer groups,” and “spatial/temporal factors”—as wrinkles that have yet to be ironed out by the affirmative consent model.

Gendered Heterosexual Scripts:

In heterosexual sexual encounters, the male-identifying partner is traditionally expected to ask for consent, affirming the idea that masculinity is associated with “unceasing sexual desire.” According to their findings, this expectation has reinforced the expectation for men to ask for rather than provide consent, making it difficult for men to recognize their own experiences as nonconsensual.

The book recounts the story of Boutros, a pseudonym for a student, who was leaving a pub crawl in Edinburgh when a woman undressed and groped him, even after he repeatedly asked her to leave him alone. The account of the story became very muddled, the researchers wrote, as he hesitated over his words.

“Come on, a girl can’t really sexually assault a guy,” Boutros told the researchers, noting that he would never “sue her” or seek compensations. “Unless I get grievous bodily harm or come to serious financial detriment.”

Sexual Citizenship:

Personal experiences, including childhood, sexual education, and interactions with family and peers inform one’s right to determine one’s own sexual involvement, according to the researchers. Khan said that sexual citizenship is more than having the “right to say yes or no” due to differing conceptions of social responsibilities; rather, he emphasized, it entails engaging both partners’ personal desires.

Adele Chi, BC ’22, told Spectator in a 2018 interview that she received a comprehensive affirmative consent education at her private high school, which allowed her to feel more confident in making decisions about her personal experiences with sex and consent in college.

“When I walk into [a] frat house, I don’t think, ‘Oh, I am setting myself up automatically to enter into a sexual relationship.’ It is my own free will, and I am my own person. I don’t feel like women should feel like their bodies are entitled to other guys, even if [they] enter into an environment where it welcomes that sexual context to happen,” she said.

Intersectionality:

Factors such as differences in race and ethnicity, physical strength, social status, and age further complicate consent. These differences, which are indicative of social inequalities, contribute to a fear of physical intimacy, according to the researchers, who highlighted the importance of underscoring social inequalities that contribute to sexual assault.

“Sex is not a cognitive behavior, it’s not a health behavior, it’s a social behavior,” Hirsch said. “You can’t understand what people are trying to do when they are having sex without understanding the world [around them].”

Gender and race are both factors that affect people’s ability to contest or request sexual encounters. Additionally, Hirsch noted in the discussion that every single black woman who spoke to the researchers had experienced unwanted sexual contact.

“If you’re thinking of sexual assault prevention, you have to also think about racial justice,” she added.

Men’s Fears:

Men worry that there is a gap between actual consent practices and the legal standard that they were taught. While there is no evidence to suggest that false accusations are common, men still largely fear the possibility of being accused because they are usually responsible for obtaining consent.

The paper emphasizes the fear on the part of students of color, and particularly black men, who have an “intense awareness of racialized risk of sexual assault accusations.” Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen attributes this notion to the impact of “overcriminalization, mass incarceration, and law enforcement bias” that disproportionately penalizes racial minorities.

Alcohol:

During the panel discussion, Khan raised the question of why alcohol and sexual activity are so commonly paired; Hirsch noted that “people get drunk in order to have sex” to avoid the awkwardness that arises from social interactions that limit sexual opportunities. Their work notes that although one can’t give consent while intoxicated, drunk sex is a normalized part of the college experience.

“If you view sex as something that is so shameful or you’re so afraid of that you can’t do it until you get really drunk, we need to ask ourselves why is it the case that we are relating to sex in [through sex],” Khan said.

A number of high-profile cases of college sexual assault have recently involved intoxication, leading the two researchers to examine alcohol as an important component in the discussion of sexual assault prevention.

However, Khan also noted that many incidents of sexual assault occur when people are sober, so looking to alcohol as a major contributor of sexual assault “isn’t going to get us very close” to understanding the complexities of consent.

Peer Groups:

Students’ lives are centralized around peer communities that maintain an identity through group harmony and a collective reputation. As such, peer groups can facilitate sexual interactions that will benefit the standing of the group, the researchers emphasized. However, members of these groups may also downplay instances of assault so as not to cause a disruption in the community’s cohesion.

While the peer group benefits from a student’s decision to engage in a sexual encounter or avoid labeling an incident as “assault,” the student consequently sees their sexual partner only as a means of social leverage rather than as a result of personal desires.

“Part of the idea of sexual citizenship is not just if you have the right to say yes or say no but that you treat the other person that you’re active with like they’re a human being and not a sex toy,” Hirsch said.

Spatial/Temporal Factors:

The urban setting of Columbia causes a divergence from the quintessential New England college campus; space is limited, and the University is not the most prominent feature of its city. Space and time are noted as contributors to “implied” consent throughout their research; in certain “sexually charged” places and at certain times, such as party spaces and bars, sexual activity is an essential component of the experience for students.

Most recently, Columbia researchers at the Society for Applied Anthropology suggested that there are specific times within the calendar year, relationship stage, and span of the sexual interaction when a person establishes expectations for their partner and limits the ability to refuse consent. Students perceive an invitation to a fraternity formal, a long-term relationship, and an encounter organized through a dating app as temporal factors that indicate consent.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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It’s not just about sex:

How to talk to young kids about consent, and why it matters

By Amber Leventry

As a parent who is also a survivor of incest, I want nothing more than to protect my children from sexual violence. I constantly wonder what it will take to improve, if not end, rape culture in our society.

Every 73 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, or RAINN. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 38 men have experienced completed or attempted rape — forced or coerced vaginal, anal or oral sex. Rape can happen at the hands of known or unknown assailants, including spouses or significant others.

My oldest daughter is 9, and my twins — a boy and a girl — are 6. They are not too young to be educated about sexual health and what healthy relationships look and feel like. We refer to their body parts with the appropriate names; we talk about hygiene, privacy and boundaries. I have taught them about tricky people, and the thing we probably talk more about than anything else is consent.

At the core of its meaning, consent is about permission or an agreement to give and take something. When we use the word “consent,” we often use it in a sexual context because when someone is raped, permission has not been given, and something incredibly personal has been taken.

My goal is to protect my children, but I also have a responsibility to send them into the world with respect for all bodies and an understanding of how consent works and why it is important. The nuances of communicating our wants and then hearing the response or seeing it in a person’s body language during nonsexual situations are lessons we can teach our kids now so that later, when the stakes are higher, they already have the tools to build safe sexual relationships.

I was in the kitchen one evening and could hear my kids trading Pokémon cards. My 9-year-old daughter asked her 6-year-old brother if he would give up one of his cards for one she was offering. He hesitated and told her he wasn’t sure. She tried again. He considered but was reluctant. She tried to negotiate. He said no. She continued to offer him cards he might like, but he clearly didn’t want to trade. She was badgering him. I knew it was making him uncomfortable because he wanted to please her, but he didn’t want to say yes; he was saying no but, in my daughter’s opinion, not enthusiastically enough.

The situation was making me uncomfortable, too, so I stepped in. I praised my son for using his voice to communicate what he didn’t want. I told my daughter that she needed to walk away from the situation. He was telling her and showing her that he didn’t want to trade. I explained that her desires should never be forced onto someone else.

I reminded my daughter of the phrase “You asked, I/she/he/they answered.” This is meant to eliminate nagging when my kids want me to change my mind, and it helps me teach them that they can’t always get what they want. The phrase is a lesson in consent. “You asked for the card, he said no.”

Lexx Brown-James, a licensed marriage and family therapist, certified sex educator and author of “These are My Eyes, This is My Nose, This is My Vulva, These are My Toes,” is also a parent navigating these issues. “When we teach consent to our children — across the gender spectrum — we also have to teach and model respect, [but] respect has changed so much even throughout my own lifetime,” she says. Brown-James grew up in the South and was taught to obey authority without question, but she points out that the definition of respect has changed. It can be a shared goal of treating others how we would want to be treated, no matter the age or power difference, she says.

Brown-James says it is important to empower our children to say yes as well as no, and to make them feel like they will be heard. But kids can’t be in control all of the time, so it’s necessary for adults to model informed consent. Brown-James gives the example of a child going to the dentist. It’s scary, and a child may not want to go, but healthy teeth are important. She suggests giving power to a child’s voice even in those situations. Let them choose the side of the mouth the dentist can look at first. Allow the child to say when they need a break. And be sure you or the dentist check in to see how the child is doing.

Consent also needs to be visible and identified in everyday acts. Asking kids if we can hug them, tickle them or take a bite of their food are great ways to model patterns of asking before taking and then showing them that their voice has power. Notice how none of the situations discussed so far have anything to do with sex? This is important.

I emphasize “no means no” and “stop means stop” with my kids, but it’s not always easy. If something hurts or makes us uncomfortable, telling someone to stop is still confrontational. We may want to keep the peace rather than face another person’s negative reactions. Although I hope my kids will speak up for themselves, I also want them to be able to interpret the other side of the no. If they are ever in a situation where consent is not clear through words, I want my kids to learn how to read body language so they can safely stop an action that is making someone uncomfortable.

Joe Navarro, 25-year FBI veteran and author of “What Every Body is Saying” and “Louder Than Words,” writes that parents should start to teach about body language as soon as their children can understand simple instructions. He emphasizes that all nonverbal communication has meaning and that body language conveys our emotions. Navarro encourages parents to remind children that learning to read body language is a way to make people comfortable.

But what happens when consent is given, but with hesitation? Not all consent is enthusiastic, so Brown-James refers back to teaching kids how to check in. Kids provide plenty of teachable moments for this when they want to do something but are nervous. Brown-James uses an example of her daughter wanting to pet a dog but feeling anxious. She said yes, but her body language did not convey excitement. By using a slow, check-in-as-you-go approach, Brown-James’s daughter got close to the dog, decided where and when she wanted to pet the dog, then finally touched the dog and was ecstatic. With each step, Brown-James asked whether her daughter felt okay.

The work and mindfulness necessary to teach these nuances are worth the initial stumbling points or emotional labor involved. Rape culture will not improve with a one-time talk at puberty. A foundation of empowerment, respect and thoughtfulness for others needs to be put in place early so kids’ intuition can guide them, whether because someone has touched them inappropriately or because they are navigating a new physical relationship as a teen.

Before our kids become teenagers, though, they need the skills to say no for themselves and for others if a situation doesn’t feel right. Deliberate, ongoing and forward-thinking conversations about consent in nonsexual situations will help them navigate higher-stakes sexual decisions when they are older.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Nuanced Push for American Sex Education

By

According to the Sexuality and Information Council of the United States, only 38 percent of high schools and 14 percent of middle schools across the country teach all 19 topics identified as critical for sex education by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Despite research demonstrating the health benefits of comprehensive sex education that dates back to the 1980s and even earlier, abstinence-only curricula have historically been the federal go-to, establishing a dichotomy between what the science reveals and what American classrooms have the funds to teach. While federal barriers may complicate the conversation around sex education, many advocates and legislators are working tirelessly to ensure comprehensive sex education. When the need for comprehensive sex education is explained, especially by young people who feel its impact the most, the public tends to listen, even in areas where resistance to sex ed is strong.

In truth, sex education in America is not as controversial as it seems. In fact, public opinion overwhelmingly supports sex education. But while most Americans believe in sex education, Americans do not all agree on the best way to do it. And, as far as experts are concerned, sex education is not practiced across the country the way it should be.

At the federal level, certain initiatives and politicians have tried and failed to regulate sex education. Given the variety of opinions and sensitivities around the once taboo topic of sex, sex-ed legislation works best when approached at the state or local level, as demonstrated in states such as Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington.

By the Numbers

The fight for sex ed gets complicated because sex is complicated. But while sex may be complicated, the American desire for education is not. When America argues over sex ed, the disagreement is never really about the need to educate our children, but rather about the topics of politics, religion, sexuality, and gender that are all inherently linked to sex.

For this reason, as Jennifer Driver, vice president of policy and strategic partnerships at SIECUS told the HPR, successful advocates for sex ed provide a nuanced, gradual, “half-baked approach” to sex education.

Historically, there has been a major gap between public opinion and public policy with regard to sex education. According to a study by NARAL Pro-Choice America, “the public overwhelmingly supports age-appropriate, comprehensive sex education, yet anti-choice policymakers promote restrictive abstinence-only programs that censor information about contraception and STD/HIV prevention strategies.”

“Sex education is incredibly popular,” explained Dr. Sara Flowers, vice president of education at Planned Parenthood, who holds a doctorate in Public Health. “Whether looking at political beliefs, geographics, socioeconomic status, or demographics, we have seen through likely voter surveys that there’s resounding support for sex education across the country. There’s this stereotype that sex ed is controversial, but it really isn’t. There’s resounding support for sex ed.”

And, according to NARAL, a 2012 survey demonstrated that 93 percent of adults and 87 percent of teens deem it important to receive information about both abstinence and contraception. For Americans, it cannot just be one or the other.

A Planned Parenthood study from 2014 also demonstrates that Americans overwhelmingly support sex education, with over 90 percent of parents reporting that it is important to have sex ed in middle and high school. These parents advocated for comprehensive sex ed, saying that sex ed should incoporate topics including birth control, STDs, healthy versus unhealthy relationships, abstinence, and sexual orientation. According to these statistics, abstinence-only sex ed is insufficient.

Abstinence-Only, and a Look at the Resistance

But as mentioned, federal policies have historically favored abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula, and these programs have been popular across the aisle. The federal government has allocated over $2 billion to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs since 1982. In particular, the Clinton administration heavily supported these programs, and even allocated $250 million for them. Although they came to an intermittent pause in 2010, abstinence-only programs have again seen the light of day with the Trump-Pence administration.

Beyond the aforementioned abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, it is critical to note that there has always been and still is a resistance movement to sex education in general. Across time, resistance to sex education has arisen in communities with a tradition of little sex education, and which thus become shocked at the introduction of comprehensive sex ed.

“There’s a very strong-but-small movement against sex and sexuality. That movement is very well-funded and has done a successful job of getting people to have doubts about sexual education and [believe] that if you provide sexuality education, young people are more likely to be sexually active. But that is inaccurate info,” Tamara Kreanin, director of the Population and Reproductive Health Program from the Packard Foundation and former executive director of Women and Population at the United Nations Foundation, told the HPR.

From Kreanin’s experience, when advocating for sex education in school districts where sex education had previously faltered — for example, a community on the border in Texas — “ultimately what had the major impact was the young people from the school themselves speaking out and talking about how important comprehensive sex education is. They talked about their peers getting pregnant and syphilis and HIV, and I think what ended up having the biggest impact was the voice of the students,” she said.

The Role of Third-Party Organizations

There is no denying that it has been difficult to implement comprehensive sex ed in American schools. As a result, third-party organizations and groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Unitarian Church have stepped in to offer comphrensive sex education outside of the classroom while simultaneously advocating for better sex ed within schools.

For example, Planned Parenthood, the largest sex-ed provider in the country, not only delivers its own sex-ed workshops and online information, but also develops relationships with schools to build school specific sex-ed curricula. Other groups that are similarly nonpartisan and geographically wide-reaching, such as the Unitarian Church, have created their own sex-ed curricula. The Unitarian Church’s comprehensive sex-ed cirriculum, Our Whole Lives, is one of the most well-regarded in the country.

These third-party organizations who supplement and foster sex ed in America’s schools have made major headway in the push for comprehensive sexual education.“We recognize sex ed in schools as an incredible opportunity because young people are in schools,” Flowers told the HPR. “But it’s important to understand that sex ed in schools is not the only place where sex education happens neither historically nor currently. It’s always been a partnership in schools and out-of-school spaces where sex education happens.”

Kreanin agreed with Flowers. “It’s important to think of sex education from three different lenses,” she told the HPR. “In schools, out of the school setting, whether that’s an afterschool setting or a safe community, and online. In an ideal world, you have all three,” she said.

Keeping It Close To Home: State Level and Local Policies

While it may be easy to keep after-school and online curricula similar across state lines, it proves much harder to do so in public schools. When it comes to sex ed in schools, individual states, and often even individual districts, have the ability to implement their own curricula — or not incorporate sex ed at all. In recent years, many advocacy groups and state level governments have made concerted pushes to improve their commitment to comprehensive sex-ed curricula in public schools.

“There’s definitely a pathway to legislation for sex ed at the state level,” Driver told the HPR. “We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to improve the education system and sex ed is a component. In science classes, there’s a foundation you need … The same thing needs to happen with sex ed. There needs to be a focused foundation setting in K-5 that introduces what it means to be a good friend and how to have strong friendships and family relationships.” Driver emphasized that students can move into much stronger conversations about sex ed after, and only after, that foundation is set. Comphrensive sex-ed curriculums are lauded by experts because they incorporate foundation setting and a focus on relationship building before launching into higher-level material.

State legislators are latching on to the push for comprehensive sex ed too. Successful campaigns for state-level comprehensive sex-ed legislation have happened across the country, with notable crusades in Colorado, Illinois, Texas, and Washington. Although Colorado public schools are still not required to teach sex ed, Colorado abides by local control laws. This means that if districts decide to teach sex ed at all, they have the ability to choose their own sex-ed curriculum. Experts praise Colorado’s local efforts and commend a new state law signed by Governor Jared Polis last May, which mandates that if schools are to teach sex ed, they must teach a comprehensive curriculum that includes conversations around consent. The bill also gives $1 million to fund sex-ed grants in schools and districts; these grants will be overseen by a parent representative and a youth reprenstative, as well as someone to represent students of color.

Illinois has followed a very similar path and also now requires that when sex ed is taught, it is comprehensive. This means it must include conversations around healthy relationships and consent. Meanwhile, policymakers in Texas, a state where abstinence-only sex ed has been a prescribed norm for the past 20 years and the fervent anti-sex-ed movement has a strong foothold, have suggested reworking state law to incorporate conversations about contraceptives, healthy relationships, and consent as well. And in Washington, while a proposed mandatory sex-ed bill failed last April, policymakers continue to fight for comprehensive state wide sexual education. The bill’s passage through the state senate demonstrates the progress made by Washington’s sex-ed advocates.

And At The Federal Level …

In addition to advocating for policy at the state level, Driver told the HPR that her organization continues to push for two priority bills at the federal level. One of these bills is the Real Education for Healthy Youth Act, sponsored by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), which “would be the first ever comprehensive sex-ed bill,” Driver said. The other is the Youth Access to Sexual Health Services Act, sponsored by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.), which would ensure access to services particularly for LGBTQ youth and communities of color.

In prioritizing sex ed at the federal level, Driver said that society must recognize sex ed’s impact on many other social issues: “Sex ed links to overall education. It links to reducing trans- and homophobia and reducing sexual assault. If we were to prioritize and recognize the connection to so many other social issues it would be easier. Our downfall is that people see sex ed and see a 6 to12-week curriculum and then we’re done, but that’s not sex ed. It may be a curriculum and more.”

When discussing sex education in America in 2020, advocates need to make clear that sex education has support across parties and geographic lines, and that sex education is, after all, just education. All in all, sex education is just “responding to an inextricable part of our humanity,” said Driver. “There are real opportunities in this field to think about how we scaffold and integrate sex ed into adulthood. The knowledge and skills of sex ed provide and support relationships with others.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Can You Orgasm Without A Partner?

Here’s How To Have A Pleasure Party For One

By Griffin Wynne

Though sex can be a multiplayer game, there’s a lot to be said for getting it on with your bad self. Whether you charge up your favorite toy or prefer to get your own hands dirty, knowing how to orgasm without a partner can be a total game-changer.

“Each body is equipped for pleasure all on its own,” Brianne McGuire, host of the Sex Communication podcast, tells Elite Daily. “For those struggling to reach orgasm, the absence of pressure and observation [from partnered sex] often allows for great success.”

As McGuire shares, masturbating, or bringing yourself to orgasm, can allow you to learn about your own erogenous zones and “unique pleasure points” at a pace that’s comfortable and enjoyable for you. When you’re not worrying about being in tune with a partner or trying to arouse someone else, you can turn all your attention to yourself, and really learn about your body.

“[Orgasming without a partner] is a great way to reduce stress, connect with your body, and feel pleasure that’s in your control,” Kayna Cassard, sex therapist and founder of Intuitive Sensuality, tells Elite Daily. “When you know what makes you feel good and orgasm, you can better explore and reach orgasm with your partner.”

While some people may reach orgasm by stimulating their genitals, Lola Jean, sex educator and mental health professional, shares that because everybody is different, orgasms look and feel different for everyone. “There are prostate orgasms, penile orgasms, breath orgasms, skin orgasms, clitoral orgasms, [and] cervical orgasms which can be induced manual or via the vagus nerve,” Jean says.

For Dr. Christopher Ryan Jones, sex and relationships therapist, experimenting with different sensations on different parts of your body is a great way to understand yourself more. “I highly recommend that everyone experiments with different erogenous zones on their body (nipples, genitals, anus, etc. ) using their hands and adult toys,” Dr. Jones tells Elite Daily. “This is a fantastic way to explore and understand your body, which is really important so that you can communicate your likes and dislikes with your partner later on and increase both partners’ satisfaction in the bedroom.”

Jean adds that while it’s possible to orgasm from directly stimulating these locations, it’s also possible to reach the big O from indirect touching. “You can achieve a G-spot orgasm via accessing it through the anal canal. You can have a blended orgasm — prostate and penile, or g-spot and external clitoris. There are so many ways to experience pleasure that we tend to limit ourselves by receding the definition down to one or two things,” Jean says.

Additionally, Cassard shares that some orgasms don’t need physical stimulation at all. “For all kinds of people, there can be the ability to have energetic orgasms or orgasms that typically come through breathwork, meditation, and the right mindset without even touching the genitals,” Cassard says. In addition to breathing and meditating, Jean suggests listening to guided masturbation tracks and imagining different sexual fantasies in our brains or visual stimulation.

All of the experts suggest exploring your own body and seeing what feels right for you. “Getting to know your body through touch is the easiest path to solo orgasm,” McGuire says. “If visuals help get your blood flowing, then pull out some porn or whatever turns you on and begin there. Toys are extremely helpful, and there are many options — try external and internal toys, even a combination of the two, and find what works best for you.”

In addition to finding what toys work for you and incorporating porn or other erotic media, Cassard suggests using different props or stimuli, like a showerhead or a couch cushion. “[You can orgasm by yourself] in a lot of the same ways that you orgasm with a partner,” Cassard says. “Lying down with your back on the bed or couch stimulating the genitals, facing downward ‘humping’ a pillow or rolled-up towel, in the shower with a water-safe toy or with the showerhead directly on the clitoris — [there are ] so many ways!”

Of course, no matter what road to take to the big O, it’s important to listen to your own body. “The most important thing being to listen to your body, be patient, and don’t emulate what you think you’re ‘supposed’ to do,” Jean says. Though orgasming may look a certain way in movies or on TV, Jean shares the importance of learning your own orgasm. Cassard also urges you to keep an open mind as you learn about your body. “Notice the places in your body that feel neutral or pleasant to help you stay out of your head and in the pleasure,” Cassard says. “Explore! Have fun with it!”

While you may enjoy the connection and intimacy from partnered sex (which, BTW, is totally cool), Jean shares that it can still be important to take some time to get it on with yourself, even when you’re seeing someone. “It is often easier and potentially faster to orgasm by one’s self,” Jean says. “You can adjust based on your own feeling without having to communicate that to someone else.” Though you may love nothing more than getting it on with your partner, it’s always OK to want some one-on-one time as well.

From using a toy to touching yourself with yourself, knowing how to make yourself orgasm can be super empowering. Though it may take two to tango, it only takes one to reach the big O.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Real Orgasms And Transcendent Pleasure:

How Women Are Reigniting Desire

By Malaka Gharib

How can more women allow themselves to experience sexual pleasure?

That’s one of the central questions in The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution, a book published this month by public health researcher and journalist Katherine Rowland.

Rowland explores why American women aren’t happy with their sex lives — and what they can do about it. A landmark study from 1999 found that over 40% of women surveyed experienced sexual dysfunction — the inability to feel satisfied by sex. A contributing factor, noted the researchers, was the lasting psychological effects of sexual trauma.

The Pleasure Gap
American Women & the Unfinished Sexual Revolution
by Katherine Rowland

The Pleasure Gap highlights how desire and the mind are linked for women. “Pleasure is inextricable from our social status, compressed and constrained by financial factors, by safety factors, by objectification,” she says. We need to remove these barriers, she says, to experience sex with the “full freedom, expression, range and truth that we’re endowed with.”

Rowland argues that it is possible for women to take charge and reignite their libidos. She talked to NPR about why fake orgasms are a cause for alarm, how much sex couples should have per week and “sexological bodywork.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You take issue with some of the research that tries to quantify sexual frequency and the idea that once a week may be the “optimal” amount. So how much sex should we be having?

Our national obsession with sexual frequency and the terrifying specter of dead bedrooms overrides the fundamental importance of sexual quality. There is no volume of sex that’s more or less good.

For whatever reason, researchers have embraced this idea that we should be having sex once a week — that it’s enough to sustain relationships and that it keeps depression, heart disease and obesity at bay.

But none of that research looks at how participants actually feel about that sex — other than feeling good that they can check the box for having done it.

You interviewed more than 120 women for this book. Many in heterosexual, long-term relationships told you that sex was an act of drudgery and that they often did whatever it took to get the job done. This felt sad to me.

I found myself feeling beaten down by the near ubiquity of stories of faking it in that context.

We tend to treat faking it as such a jokey matter. When the media reports on studies that try and capture the percentage of women who fake orgasm during sex, it tends to be from a male perspective saying “ouch” — focusing more on the bruising of men’s feelings that occurs when women are lying to them as opposed to concerns surrounding the fact that women aren’t feeling good.

That women are feigning their pleasure in order to hasten that experience along — I think we need to treat that with real alarm. We need to ask: What’s going on in that women are engaging in spectacle as opposed to actually allowing themselves to feel sensation?

Your book explores how some women have a low desire for sex. How does this happen?

Among the women who I spoke to, the persistent low desire was heavily associated with the idea that sex should revolve around penetration as the main course, with maybe a polite prelude of a foreplay, rather than thinking about sex as a broader universe of intimacy.

It’s the combination of a larger culture that privileges male sexuality over women’s, a culture that doesn’t teach women that pleasure belongs to them. A lack of anatomical self-knowledge. And feelings of sort of persistent danger and women being often censored and censured for expressing their desire.

You push back against the idea that the female orgasm is mysterious and elusive, which is how the media has sometimes described it. What would be a more accurate way to understand the female orgasm?

It’s more like riding a bicycle. You learn how to do it. And what we see is that as women become more versed with what their body can do, orgasm becomes more readily achievable.

The female orgasm tends to get wrapped up in these fuzzy terms like “elusive” and “hazy” and “mysterious” because women aren’t encouraged to explore what actually feels good. But if they were encouraged to self-pleasure and explore in real, sincere ways by themselves and with their partners, I think they would find that there is a world of pleasurable sensation available to them.

In your book, you say that the goal is for women to have a “profound sexual experience.” What do you mean by that?

It can mean a number of things, and I don’t think it necessarily has to be a sexual encounter in terms of our often narrow understanding of sex. The women who I spoke to describe it to me as feelings of transcendence, of approaching sex not just as a way for getting off or feeling good, but as a portal into a deeper state of self-knowledge.

They often use the word “spiritual” — the alignment of self, sensation and possibility. Pleasure so deep it felt like a homecoming, like they had been restored to themselves, to the depths of their potential.

How can women regain control over their sex lives?

The first thing to do would be to stop absorbing [unscientific] outside knowledge. There is such a rash of faulty information out there as a result of our lack of sound science and solid education. We’ve seen this proliferation of experts pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Online, you’ll find doctors who promise that by injecting more blood into the vagina, it will give it a face-lift that will bolster orgasmic potential. Or self-proclaimed “sexperts” who put on female ejaculation retreats. Those kinds of offerings often exist side by side with credentialed and validated interventions.

The second thing is to get to know your body. I think the most powerful intervention that I documented in my book was the realm of sexological bodywork.

What is that?

It’s a somatic approach to sexual healing that can — but does not necessarily — include genital touch. There’s a profound opportunity there for ethical violations, especially because it’s not a regulated practice. But for some of the women who I spoke to, they’ve said that this was the missing link in understanding their bodies.

Sexological bodywork practitioners facilitate your self-knowledge of your body, pleasure, comfort, boundaries, feelings of confidence and being able to articulate “no.” For example, “No, I don’t want you to touch me here” and “I don’t want you to look at me here.” This helps women ask why they feel this way — and get to a point where they can say “yes.”

For women in a relationship with a man, how can male partners do more to help?

Men can — and should — play a central role in helping women fully engage with their desires and sensations.

They can do this by being compassionate and nonjudgmental listeners. By creating an erotic atmosphere in which men and women’s needs command equal importance, and by encouraging interactions that depart from the wearied script of male arousal and release. Just as society tends to overly complicate female sexuality, we oversimplify men’s, and they also benefit from shifting dynamics around.

Any ideas of how to do that?

I spoke with a number of couples, and one shared a story that made a deep impression.

They’re both middle-aged and both are experiential sexuality educators, so in many respects they’re versed in subjects like male privilege and the ways female satisfaction gets short shrift. But all the same, these issues were showing up in their intimate life.

At the woman’s request, they decided to make sex just about her — so that it flowed from her interest and followed the course of her arousal. She told him, she didn’t care how he took care of himself, but she didn’t want to be a part of it.

They came to call these sessions “The Experiment.” To their mutual surprise, it lasted for a whole year. As they recounted this experience, the woman thanked her partner for his generosity, and he immediately and firmly responded, “No, it was my pleasure.” They both felt they had benefited from the woman’s sexual growth and the shared opportunity to expand their erotic vocabulary.

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I’ll Handle This

Hey sex fans!

It’s Product Review Friday again.

This week we will feature another product from a swell new company, Kiiro, from Amsterdam.  If you missed last week’s edition, which featured our first Kiiro product, you can find it HERE.

I am delighted to welcome back Dr Dick Review Crew members, Hank & Glenn, for this review.  They’ve been away for a long time, but now they’re back and ready to introduce us to The…

TITAN by KIIROO  ——  $149

Hank & Glenn,

Hank: “HEY SEX FREAKS! We’re back…after a nearly two-and-a-half-year absence. And we’re rarin’ to go.”
Glenn: “I am one of the founding members of the Dr Dick Review Crew. I did my first review in October on 2007. Some of the other members burnt out along the way. Then back in 2014, I think it was, Dr Dick decided to close down the reviews only to revive them again in 2018. It’s been kinda spotty since then, but I think our reviews do a great service to those who read this blog.”
Hank: “I joined the Dr Dick Review Crew in August 2008.
Glenn: “A couple of months ago, Dr Dick asked us if we’d be interested in reviewing a brand-new, fancy-schmancy stroker that he scored from a company in Amsterdam. Hank and I have had the pleasure of visiting Amsterdam a couple of times in the past, so, or course, we said yes. Amsterdam is fuckin’ amazing and is one of the great sex capitols of the world.”
Hank: “You can say that again! We had a blast in Amsterdam. So, we were expecting a great product from this horned-up corner of the globe.”
Glenn: “This here is the TITAN by KIIROO, a high-tech male masturbator. It’s jet black cylinder is sleek as shit and looks pretty much like a Bluetooth speaker. It’s a little over 8.5” tall and about 3.5” wide, and weighs about 2 pounds. Its hollow internal sleeve is 7.5” long.”
Hank: “TITAN is a lot more than just a jerk-off gadget. It’s a toy for both individuals and couples. (More about the couple thing in a minute.) Like Glenn said, the overall design is very stylish. But will it live up to its hype? That’s what I want to know.”
Glenn: “I wanted to know that too. But first, we needed to charge the TITAN. A USB charging cord is included in the package. The initial charge took about 5 hours. Ya get about 40 minutes of play from a charge.”
Hank: “While it was charging, we decided to take a closer look at the

TITAN. The plastic shell has ridges on it to aid you in keeping a hold with lubed up fingers. There’s a power button and three glossy areas (control panel) where you place your fingers to adjust speed and vibration. There’s a side panel on the shell that opens to expose the sleeve. It’s kinda cool just to look at. The sleeve has three rods running through it. These rods have nine vibrating bullets (three on each rod) built into them. The sleek control panel on the surface of the unit controls the vibrating bullets offering a variety of sensations. I have no idea what the sleeve is made of, but it ain’t silicone. It’s too squishy to be silicone. It’s more like the SuperSkin of a Fleshlight. That means it’s porous and contains phthalates. Finally, a really flimsy clear plastic lid, like the kind of lid you’d get on a soft drink cup, covers the top.”
Glenn: “I was disappointed with the sleeve. I know from experience how difficult it is to clean and maintain super squishy materials like this. They feel good the first time ya use ‘em, but if extreme care isn’t used in cleaning it and thoroughly drying it, it will breakdown and you’ll have a huge mess on your hands. Yeah, and what’s up with this ridiculous lid? It doesn’t even stay in place.”
Hank: “The TITAN is pretty light weight and it’s surprisingly quiet too. There’s a bunch of other stuff in the box — user manual in a bunch of languages, quick set up guide, charging instructions, a warranty card, and a free trial for an interactive porn site. (The TITAN can sync with this porn site. It can also sync with another toy using a downloadable app for partnered use.) We didn’t use either of these two features, but they are available to anyone who wants them.”
Glenn: “OK, now that the TITAN is all charged up I offer Hank the first go at it. Nowhere on the box, or in user manual, or set up guide tells you that you can only use water-based lube. But, trust me, that’s all you can use with this toy. So Hank lubes up his big old dick and attempts to slide it in to the sleeve. Hank is heavy hung, so this takes some doin’. But once he’s got his chub situated, he begins to fiddle with the control panel.
Hank: “As it turns out, the three “buttons” on the control panel adjust vibration and speed on the three sets of bullet vibes on the rods embedded in the sleeve. This provides loads of different sensations up and down your pecker. I was impressed. You still have to use it like a stroker though. You have to pump up and down your dick. I got into a very satisfying rhythm while I was watching some of my favorite porn. In no time I was ready to unload a three-day supply of spooge.”
Glenn: “Hank has the best orgasms. He roars like a bear. When he was finished, he pulled the TITAN off his boner and set it down upright on our wooden computer desk. Remember how we said at the beginning that the sleeve was hollow? Well we had forgotten about that. When Hank picked up the TITAN to carry it to the bathroom, we discovered to our horror that all his jizz and all the lube he used ran out the hole in the bottom of the blasted thing. What a fuckin’ mess.”
Hank: “My bad! Now I had an extra mess to clean up and I had to do it super-fast so it wouldn’t destroy the desktop. Speaking of clean up, I suppose you can just run some warm water and soap through the inside of the sleeve, rinse, and let it air dry. But I like my toys really clean, so I had to open the side panel and roll the sleeve off the three rods with the bullets. This way I could thoroughly clean the sleeve. I set it aside to air dry. Because the material used to make the sleeve is so porous, just as we thought, once dry it was really tacky. It needed to be powdered before it could be used again. And, in order to use it again, you will have to re thread the sleeve back on to the rods with the vibes. And let me tell you, that is no easy task.”

Glenn: “If I wanted to use the TITAN, I would have had to use a condom. This material, whatever it is, is not designed for sharing. I thought that was too bad. But just for the hell of it, I went to the Kiiro site to see if they sold replacement sleeves. They do. There are two sleeves (They don’t say what the sleeves are made of on there site either.) and they are $39 apiece. Imagine if you had to replace the sleeve every couple months.”
Hank: “By the way, the whole Kiiro site is exclusively heterosexual. They certainly don’t do anything to welcome the gays.”
Glenn: “So there ya have it. A really great tech savvy stroker with loads of features for your (and a partner’s) pleasure. But there are a number of sometimes glaring problematic issues…I’m looking at you sleeve.”

Full Review ↪HERE↩!