It’s time, once again, to post my annual pride posting.
In my lifetime I’ve witnessed a most remarkable change in societal attitudes toward those of us on the sexual fringe. One only needs to go back 50 years in time. I was 17 years old then and I knew I was queer. When I looked out on the world around me this is what I saw. Homosexuality was deemed a mental disorder by the nation’s psychiatric authorities, and gay sex was a crime in every state but Illinois. Federal workers could be fired merely for being gay.
Today, gays and trans folks serve openly in the military, work as TV news anchors and federal judges, win elections as big-city mayors and members of Congress. Popular TV shows have gay and trans protagonists.
Six years ago this month, a Supreme Court ruling lead to the legalization of same-sex marriage throughout the whole country.
The transition over five decades has been far from smooth — replete with bitter protests, anti-gay violence, backlashes that inflicted many political setbacks, and AIDS. Unlike the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, the campaign for gay rights unfolded without household-name leaders.
And yet some still experience a backlash in the dominant culture. I don’t relish the idea, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. And while we endure this be reminded that it won’t smart nearly as much if we know our history. And we should also remember the immortal words of Martin Luther King, Jr. “The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.”
In honor of gay pride month, a little sex history lesson — The Stonewall Riots
The confrontations between demonstrators and police at The Stonewall Inn, a mafia owned bar in Greenwich Village NYC over the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 are usually cited as the beginning of the modern Lesbian/Gay liberation Movement. What might have been just another routine police raid on a bar patronized by homosexuals became the pivotal event that sparked the entire modern gay rights movement.
The Stonewall riots are now the stuff of myth. Many of the most commonly held beliefs are probably untrue. But here’s what we know for sure.
In 1969, it was illegal to operate any business catering to homosexuals in New York City — as it still is today in many places in the world. The standard procedure was for New York City’s finest to raid these establishments on a regular basis. They’d arrest a few of the most obvious ‘types’ harass the others and shake down the owners for money, then they’d let the bar open as usual by the next day.
Myth has it that the majority of the patrons at the Stonewall Inn were black and Hispanic drag queens. Actually, most of the patrons were probably young, college-age white guys lookin for a thrill and an evening out of the closet, along with the usual cadre of drag queens and hustlers. It was reasonably safe to socialize at the Stonewall Inn for them, because when it was raided the drag queens and bull-dykes were far more likely to be arrested then they were.
After midnight June 27-28, 1969, the New York Tactical Police Force called a raid on The Stonewall Inn at 55 Christopher Street in NYC. Many of the patrons who escaped the raid stood around to witness the police herding the “usual suspects” into the waiting paddywagons. There had recently been several scuffles where similar groups of people resisted arrest in both Los Angeles and New York.
Stonewall was unique because it was the first time gay people, as a group, realized that what threatened drag queens and bull-dykes threatened them all.
Many of the onlookers who took on the police that night weren’t even homosexual. Greenwich Village was home to many left-leaning young people who had cut their political teeth in the civil rights, anti-war and women’s lib movements.
As people tied to stop the arrests, the mêlée erupted. The police barricaded themselves inside the bar. The crowd outside attempted to burn it down. Eventually, police reinforcements arrived to disperse the crowd. But this just shattered the protesters into smaller groups that continued to mill around the streets of the village.
A larger crowd assembled outside the Stonewall the following night. This time young gay men and women came to protest the raids that were commonplace in the city. They held hands, kissed and formed a mock chorus line singing; “We are the Stonewall Girls/We wear our hair in curls/We have no underwear/We show our pubic hair.” Don’t ‘cha just love it?
Police successfully dispersed this group without incident. But the print media picked up the story. Articles appeared in the NY Post, Daily News and The Village Voice. Theses helped galvanize the community to rally and fight back.
Within a few days, representatives of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (two of the country’s first homophile rights groups) organized the city’s first ever “Gay Power” rally in Washington Square. Some give hundred protesters showed up; many of them gay and lesbians.
The riots led to calls for homosexual liberation. Fliers appeared with the message: “Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are!” And the rest, boys and girls, is as they say is history.
During the first year after Stonewall, a whole new generation of organizations emerged, many identifying themselves for the first time as “Gay.” This not only denoted sexual orientation, but a radical way to self-identify with a growing sense of open political activism. Older, more staid homophile groups soon began to make way for the more militant groups like the Gay Liberation Front.
The vast majority of these new activists were under thirty; dr dick’s generation, don’t cha know. We were new to political organizing and didn’t know that this was as ground-breaking as it was. Many groups formed on colleges campuses and in big cities around the world.
By the following summer, 1970, groups in at least eight American cities staged simultaneous events commemorating the Stonewall riots on the last Sunday in June. The events varied from a highly political march of three to five thousand in New York to a parade with floats for 1200 in Los Angeles. Seven thousand showed up in San Francisco.
In order to get down and play with submission, you have to relinquish the societal norms of “masculinity.” Being submissive means relishing in surrendering, relaxing and being turned on by not being the one in charge during sex. It’s a chance to let go and capitulate.
And this scares people a whole lot. Many men want to embrace and enjoy this side of themselves but are worried about the social implications of handing over their power to a partner. It can feel too vulnerable, even when it’s something you desire very badly.
Why is it so frightening to want to embrace your inner sub as a cis dude? In short, toxic masculinity. “Somehow, still in the year 2023, many people consider subbing to be a feminine activity, so men are ashamed to explore a submissive side sexually,” explains Zachary Zane, the author ofBoyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto and sex expert for Momentum Intimacy. “They think it makes them ‘less of a real man.’”
Suffice to say, this is ridiculous. You’re not “less manly” just because you want to get pegged, tied up or slapped while in the sack. In fact, the men who are able to embrace their sexual desires and have the confidence to explore are the ones showing true masculinity. To be that secure is sexy as hell.
If being submissive is something you’ve been wanting to try, you’re in really good company. It’s totally normal, fun and hot to want to get into this role. The key is embracing it is to create an experience that feels right and pleasurable for you and your partner(s). You may have a clear idea of how you see your submissive role, or you may not right now — and that’s okay! Here is everything you need to know about submission in sex, and how you can play with it in a way that feels authentic to you.
What Is a Submissive?
Before being able to be submissive, it’s important to be clear about what a submissive is and what this role entails. The role can manifest in many different ways, depending on the people involved in the play. But Dr. Celina Criss, a certified sex coach specializing in BDSM and GSRD (gender and sexual relationship diversity), tells us that “the essential core concept of submission is about intentional power exchange with a partner.”
The power exchange with submission can take place in vanilla/non-kinky sex if one partner is being submissive to the other, but usually when we refer to this dynamic, we’re talking about BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism and masochism). The submissive role is one half of a dominant/submissive (D/s) role play. The submissive hands over their power (with enthusiastic consent) to the dominant partner. “By granting the dominant their power, the submissive increases the dominant’s power over them,” Criss says. “It’s a gift that requires self-awareness and trust.”
The range of D/s activities is truly limitless, but Julieta Chiaramonte, a kink instructor and sex expert, tells us that some typical play may include “being dominated, restrained and controlled.” The sub may derive sexual pleasure from these activities, but not all D/s play involves sex.
The Appeal of Being Submissive During Sex
The reason people enjoy submission is rooted in giving up control. Criss tells us that for cis men specifically, the turn-on can be about challenging the social order. “Cis-het menfolk are traditionally expected to have greater agency and power in their social roles,” she says. Through submission, you can subvert these roles and embrace a side of yourself that isn’t traditionally expected (or accepted) of you. And the taboo nature of this is freakin’ hot.
Zane says that it’s also about simply being able to relax and not think for a hot minute. “This is especially true for overthinkers or high-powered professionals who manage a team and have to make a ton of decisions,” he says. “When you sub, you don’t need to decide anything. You simply do as you’re told. It can be very freeing.”
Lastly, the appeal of being a submissive can be plain old fun. Giving up your power in a trusting way to a dom partner and engaging in agreed-upon activities that you enjoy is a good time. “Being a sub is also associated with elements of physical pleasure that you typically don’t experience while domming,” Zane says. For example, you may like the sensation of being spanked, slapped or receiving anal stimulation when you sub. It’s a change-up.
Four Expert-Approved Tips to Play With Being the Submissive in a Safe Way
If you’re feeling inspired (and we hope you are), here’s what you can do to let your inner submissive run wild.
Do Some Research First
The first step is to take some personal time to think about your desires and limits. This takes a bit of research. “Self-awareness is essential to this kind of play because it enables partners to communicate in the creation of their dynamic, in the post-play debrief and if a scene doesn’t go as planned,” Criss says.
If you’re interested in learning about BDSM and D/s play, this beginner’s course from Chiaramonte is the perfect place to start. Part of learning is about understanding “the risks involved and [taking] steps to mitigate them,” Chiaramonte explains. “Learn about safe practices and techniques that make you feel safe in submission.”
Get Very Clear About What You Want (and Don’t Want)
Zane tells us that nothing should be a surprise when you’re engaging in this play. Scenes need to be highly negotiated beforehand, which takes clear and honest communication. He suggests considering the following questions: What do you like to be called during sex? Where do you want to be spanked? Do you like spit in your mouth? Do you like your hair pulled? Is anal play on the table?
“Have a safe word,” he adds. “You may think something turns you on, but then in the scene, you feel uncomfortable. That’s totally okay. You’re allowed to stop at any point.”
Take It Slowly
Our experts agree that taking things slowly is absolutely essential when you’re starting out with playing as the submissive. It is vulnerable territory, both emotionally and physically, and therefore it should be handled with caution and care. “Start with some dirty talk,” Zane says. “See how that feels. Then maybe incorporate some light spanking. There’s truly no rush. If you enjoy what you’re doing, you can then take it one step further.”
Once you feel safe and comfortable, you can open yourself up to more advanced play.
Have a Plan for Aftercare
Aftercare is the period post-scene where you take some time to come down and return to baseline. Emotions run high during D/s scenes — and when you’re playing with power dynamics as a cis dude, intense feelings can come up because of all the societal pressure around what it means to “be a man.” Zane suggests having “your partner hold you, bring you water or support you in another way once the scene is over.”
Remember, playing with the submissive does not say anything about who you are as a person. It simply means you enjoy certain kinds of dynamics in the bedroom. Everyone deserves to have the kind of sex they enjoy and to feel safe in expressing their desires.
— SF State prof sees reasons for rethinking LGBTQ history
by Brian Bromberger
For Marc Stein, professor of history at San Francisco State University, queer history is a calling, realizing he is part of a network and a community of gay intellectuals. Many U.S. college history departments don’t even define queer history as a bona fide field or it’s been ghettoized to a few classes, despite the fact courses in the subject are very popular with students. Even Stein is technically a historian of constitutional law and politics at SF State.
Stein has become an evangelist for the promotion of gay and lesbian history, rooted in his orientation as an activist. His passion for the field is exhibited in his newest book, a totally revised second edition of his 2012 classic, “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement,” (Routledge, $42.95) including a new chapter, “LGBT and Queer Activism Beyond 1990.” When he wrote the first edition his aim was to provide an up-to-date account of the movement that was “national in scope, comprehensive in chronology, and synthetic in ambition,” he noted.
In his book’s introduction, Stein lists the reason why gay and lesbian history needs to be rethought: to help address the widespread lack of knowledge about that history; to serve the needs of today’s gender and sexual dissidents, along with everyone who identifies with the movement’s agendas and aspirations; and to teach people about some of the major political and philosophical questions that have absorbed the U.S., such as what is meant when referring to freedom, liberty, equality, and democracy, especially pertinent in these politically partisan and divisive times.
Stein mentions that studying this history can help readers reflect on why some people become activists, why movements develop when and where they do, why they adopt particular strategies and goals, and why they rise and fall. He notes in the introduction that the book also underscores the historicity and variability of sex, gender, and sexuality, especially how these forces changed the movement and vice versa; shows how people can support those who are working to promote equality, freedom and justice in the 21st century; and finally, to show the interrelationship between political and cultural activism, which has promoted social change.
Stein, 59, discussed the new second edition with the Bay Area Reporter in an email interview, and explained why he decided to add the new chapter.
“As a gay man who was born in the 1960s and came of age in the 1980s, I’ve long been fascinated by the history of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the decades that most directly shaped the world I came to know in the 1980s,” Stein wrote. “I don’t think historians are particularly good at analyzing the present or the very recent past. Other types of scholars, including sociologists and political scientists, tend to focus on the present. But many publishers and many members of the public commonly want historians to include a ‘bring the story up to the present’ chapter or conclusion. I often teach my students that those chapters are commonly the weakest in historical studies. As I say in both editions of my ‘Rethinking’ book, that perspective haunted the writing of the book’s final chapter.
“In any case, I was pleased when Routledge informed me that my volume was one of the most successful in its social movements series and commissioned me to write a second edition. Since the original version was published before the U.S. Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decisions and before the Trump era, the 2012 edition was outdated,” he added, referring to the high court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide and Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.
“I originally was only going to substantially revise the final chapter, but because there’s been such great LGBT history scholarship about the pre-1990 era published in the last decade, I ended up revising the whole book. Because the post-1990 period now includes the Trump era, I was able to strengthen my arguments against historical narratives that assume that progress is linear and inevitable,” Stein stated.
Stein writes that the gay and lesbian movement has been replaced or superseded by LGBTQ and other movements in the post-1990s era. There’s even been controversy in the title of his book.
“My book’s title has been misunderstood as implying that I am anti-queer or that I don’t appreciate the broader coalition that we invoke when we refer to the LGBTQ+ movement,” he wrote in the email. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I helped found an early queer activist group, Queer Action, in Philadelphia in the early 1990s. My first book, published in 2000, offers critically queer perspectives on the history of gay and lesbian politics in Philadelphia. I have commonly used LGBT, LGBTQ, and queer as key terms in other projects. But as a historian, I believe it’s important to be true to the historical evidence of the periods we’re studying.”
Stein doesn’t think there was an LGBTQ+ movement before the 1990s, but rather a gay and lesbian movement.
“For most of the period from 1950 to 1990, the gay and lesbian movement functioned largely as just that; it was commonly anti-bisexual and anti-trans, even as bisexuals and trans people argued for the gay and lesbian movement to change,” Stein explained. “Bisexual and trans people were part of the gay and lesbian movement, but that doesn’t mean the movement prioritized their issues. People with disabilities were part of the movement, but we don’t talk about the [lesbian, gay, disabled] movement because the movement did not organize or understand itself that way.”
Stein stated that a largely autonomous trans movement started in the 1950s and 1960s, which he discusses in the book.
“Starting in the 1970s, there was a largely autonomous bisexual movement and I discuss that,” he stated. “We know of key episodes in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s when bisexual and trans activists pushed the gay and lesbian movement to be more inclusive; they commonly failed in those efforts until the 1990s. ‘Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement’ devotes lots of attention to these issues, in some cases more so than other books that purport to cover LGBTQ+ history, but I try to avoid the problem of projecting today’s favored terms and concepts onto historical periods when they don’t work particularly well.”
Political coalitions
Stein is interested in the ways in which political coalitions come together and fall apart.
“I think the LGBTQ+ political coalition is a remarkable achievement; we should pay attention to how, why, and when it happened (and how, why, and when it did not include other groups that might have become part of the coalition but didn’t),” he wrote in the email. “I’m glad that since the 1990s we’ve developed a stronger LGBTQ+ political coalition; I just don’t believe that we should minimize the efforts that it required to make that happen. As for the future, movements come, go, change, adapt, and reconfigure themselves. It would be arrogant for anyone to assume that today’s language and today’s way of thinking will be embraced by future generations; haven’t we learned enough from the past to know better?”
Queer activism today
In characterizing the new queer activism of today, Stein stated that he resists the tendency to consign the pre-1990 movement to the dustbin of history.
“It shows that much of what queer activism values — celebration of gender and sexual dissidence; rejection of gender and sexual privilege; critiques of racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, and ableism; intersectional multiculturalism — existed in nascent form in the pre-1990 era,” Stein stated. “But something happened in the 1990s, when radically queer tendencies within larger LGBTQ+ worlds became more influential and powerful. This had happened before — in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall, for example, and in the second half of the 1980s, when radical AIDS activism emerged — but in the early 1990s there was a more sustained transformation, one that was significant enough that we now find it difficult to talk about the ‘gay and lesbian’ movement when we’re talking about post-1990 developments.”
Stein also talked about the gay and lesbian movement’s biggest success and failure.
“If we’re talking about the period from 1950 to 1990, I would say that the movement’s biggest success was changing mainstream and lesbian/gay ideas about lesbian/gay people,” he wrote in the email. “We could talk about concrete policy successes, including the 1973 declassification of homosexuality as a mental illness; the decriminalization of sodomy in half of the states in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the passage of sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws in many local and state jurisdictions in the 1970s and 1980s; and the emergence of lesbian/gay people as an important part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition in the same period. But underlying all of those policy successes was lesbian/gay political mobilization, which transformed mainstream and lesbian/gay consciousness about gender and sexuality.
“As for the biggest failure, I think the movement was more successful at combating anti-homosexual bias, discrimination, and prejudice than it was in challenging heteronormative privilege,” Stein stated. “The movement succeeded to some extent at convincing many straight people to adopt ‘live and let live’ philosophies, but not at forcing straight people to renounce their special rights and privileges or encouraging everyone to come out. More concretely, I think the movement of 1950 to 1990 failed at transforming the country’s educational system, which continues to relentlessly reproduce heterosexuality, heteronormativity, and gender normativity.”
Current backlash
Stein was asked how to interpret the rash of anti-trans legislation sweeping across the country and whether it’s a backlash to the queer movement’s successes.
“I think in part we can see the rise of anti-trans legislation as an example of backlash politics, and the particular type of backlash politics that bullies some of the most vulnerable components of a disenfranchised community,” Stein stated. “Without the trans-affirmative reforms that occurred in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, I don’t think we would be seeing the anti-trans backlash that we are seeing in the 2020s. But, there’s also something else going on that relates to the politics of conservatism, populist conservatism, and fascism, in and beyond the United States.
“In the 1960s and 1970s, key conservative leaders in the United States made critical decisions about the future of their electoral coalition,” he explained. “Faced with the prospects of permanent political marginalization, foreign policy and economic conservatives formed coalitions with religious and social conservatives, most notably in the Christian right. By the Trump era, the culturally reactionary tail was wagging the economically conservative dog. Anti-trans politics, like anti-Black and Brown, anti-abortion, and anti-immigrant politics, works by deluding working-class and middle-class white people into thinking that their interests are aligned with corporate America, traditional values, and strong-man authoritarianism rather than with broad-based democratic coalitions of the dispossessed.”
Stein also discussed the current effort on the right to ban books in schools and libraries, including many on LGBTQ topics.
“I think this is all about so-called child protection. For centuries, we’ve seen gender and sexual conservatives weaponize ideas of “child protection” to further their aims,” Stein wrote in the email. “We’ve also seen them instigate ‘moral panics,’ where popular sentiment is mobilized to address problems that are exaggerated far beyond empirically valid foundations.
“In the past, cultural discourses about sexual ‘perverts’ and gender ‘deviants’ played up the innocence of youth, who were seen as vulnerable to enticement, grooming, recruitment, and seduction,” Stein stated. “This led, for example, to the passage of ‘sexual psychopath’ laws in many states in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In the 1970s, similar dynamics led to Anita Bryant’s ‘Save Our Children’ campaign against sexual orientation anti-discrimination laws and to California’s Briggs initiative, which targeted LGBT teachers and their allies.”
Stein talked about work he has done.
“In one of my recent research projects, published this spring in the journal Law and Social Inquiry, I showed that in the 1970s, students at 14 U.S. colleges and universities, including two California State Universities, had to go to court when their institutions denied formal recognition to newly established lesbian/gay student groups; one of the common justifications offered by school administrators was that vulnerable young people might be tempted to try out homosexuality if there were officially recognized lesbian/gay student groups,” he explained.
Parallels
Stein sees many parallels between what is occurring today with what happened in the 1970s.
“In both cases, social and cultural conservatives responded to gender and sexual liberalization by attempting to freak people out with moral panics,” he stated. “Unfortunately, many media outlets play into conservative hands by reporting relentlessly on issues that are framed in reactionary terms. Today, for example, we rarely hear about the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public education [including California]; we rarely hear empowering stories about drag queen story hours; we rarely hear about the joys of athletic competition from the perspectives of young trans people and their allies.
“We also don’t hear about the ways in which social and cultural conservatives want our children to be taught rigid and inflexible ways of thinking about gender and sexuality — we don’t hear, for example, about the ways in which traditional educational practices offer up narrow and propagandistic lessons about gender identities and sexual orientation,” he added. “It would be fascinating to see what would happen if the states that are banning public school lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation actually were true to that notion — imagine a future world in which ‘boys’ were not taught to be ‘boys,’ ‘girls’ were not taught to be ‘girls,’ and children were not taught to be straight!
“As for book banning in particular, this arises in all of the contexts I’ve just mentioned, but it also arises in the context of declining support for public education in the United States, attacks on colleges and universities, and anti-intellectualism in public discourse,” Stein stated. “LGBTQ+ liberals and leftists should be mobilizing to support public education, not just to defend LGBTQ+ interests. Beyond that, I would just add that it’s a little bizarre to be focusing on banning books at this particular historical moment, when information is increasingly shared in forms other than books.”
Effort to silence queer history
Stein is concerned about the silencing of queer history in school curriculums.
“First, I would encourage us not to ignore the seven states that have mandated LGBT history education in public schools. When’s the last time we read a mainstream media report (or even a queer media report) about how that’s going or how things are going in the next set of states that will do likewise?”
Stein mentioned Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which Republican Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis signed last year that bans discussion of homosexuality or gender identity in schools through the third grade. Recently, DeSantis signed a law extending the ban through eighth grade — and the Florida Board of Education expanded the limiting of classroom instruction through 12th grade.
“As for what’s going on in more conservative states, I wrote a satirical piece recently for the History News Network that praised “R. DeSantis” for banning lessons about gender and sexuality in public schools. I was trying to get at what I hope will prove to be a legal fatal flaw in these policy initiatives,” Stein wrote. “We commonly refer to these laws as ‘don’t say gay,’ but they’re more than that: they ban lessons about gender identity and sexual orientation, which presumably means that public schools should no longer be teaching boys to be boys, girls to be girls, or all people to be straight. Imagine a second grader who asks which bathroom to use; under Florida’s new laws, the teacher should be prohibited from answering. And the laws have to be framed in theoretically neutral ways, or they would be vulnerable to First and 14th Amendment challenges based on free speech and equal protection. If interpreted literally, these laws ban teaching youth about gender and sexual normativity, just as they ban teaching youth about LGBTQ+ identities and orientations.”
Stein stated that as a college professor, the bans don’t really affect him. But he has other concerns.
“As someone who teaches in the post-secondary education sector in California, I’m not concerned about those types of bans,” he stated. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have ongoing concerns about how we teach LGBTQ+ history in colleges and universities. My university seems to be happy to have a set of specialized courses on LGBTQ+ topics. But do colleges and universities have ways to encourage faculty who teach courses on other topics to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ issues? Do my colleagues who teach introductory history courses incorporate LGBTQ+ history into their classes? I honestly don’t know.”
The future
Stein discussed the future of the queer movement.
“I’ll say that asking a historian to talk about the future is like asking a doctor to draw up architectural plans for a new house,” he stated. “I know this: there’s much more work to be done. My book’s new conclusion references a whole series of recent commentators who contend that the LGBTQ+ movement is finished, having succeeded in accomplishing all of its major goals. And these are not comedians. I’d like to see the movement broaden out, forming effective coalitions with other gender and sexual dissidents. I’d like to see the movement more effectively utilize creative direct action protests and mass grassroots mobilization. I’d like to see the movement focus more on education.”
Last year, Stein authored his “Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism” (University of California Press, $29.95). He defines himself as a queer scholarly activist. He explained that role.
“My ‘Queer Public History’ book reprints more than 30 essays that I’ve written for general rather than scholarly audiences, some for LGBTQ+ newspapers such as the B.A.R.,” he stated. “It also reflects on how queer publics nourished LGBTQ+ history projects, long before there was a place for LGBTQ+ history in college and university history departments. I use the notion of scholarly activism in a few different ways. It refers to the use of research for activist purposes; it refers to the activism that was necessary to make a place for LGBTQ+ studies within higher education, academic disciplines, and scholarly associations. I’ve been engaging in that work for decades and I used ‘Queer Public History’ to reflect on that.”
Accolades
Stein recently has received two accolades recognizing his role and contribution to both academic and public history.
“In January, gay public historian Jonathan Ned Katz selected me to replace him as the director of the OutHistory website,” he stated. “One of my first major exhibits on OutHistory, since becoming its director, is a study I completed with my students that documents more than 600 LGBT direct action protests from 1965 to 1973; we’re now working on expanding the study to cover 1974-76.”
The B.A.R. reported on the direct action history study when it was released in March.
“Then in April, the Organization of American Historians, which represents thousands of U.S. historians, nominated me to become its president in several years,” Stein stated. “If elected this fall (and I’m the only candidate, so I’ll be very embarrassed if I lose!), I’ll be the first president whose work has focused primarily on LGBTQ+ history and the first to come from the California State University system. I see the nomination as a statement about an entire generation of us who succeeded in using scholarly activism to make a place for LGBTQ+ history in primary, secondary, and post-secondary education.”
Ultimately, Stein believes that rethinking the history of the U.S. gay and lesbian and LGBTQ movements should lead to a more general rethinking of U.S. history.
“This will likely only occur if more students, teachers, and scholars engage in political activism to change the ways in which history is learned and taught in primary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions,” Stein stated. “It might mean trying to convince LGBT, queer, gender, and sexuality studies programs to make the history of political activism more central in their courses and curricula. And it might mean developing new ways to promote critical thinking about LGBT and queer history outside the classroom: in libraries and museums, on television and the internet, in film and video, and in various other venues. In other words, we need a new movement to rethink history.”
— The pioneering gay writer and editor Michael Denneny, who died on April 12, learned from his teacher Arendt that an individual can be free only as part of a free community
by Blake Smith
Hannah Arendt left behind little in the way of an obvious institutional or intellectual legacy during her brief years at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought during the 1960s. The student who best understood her ideas—and the example of her life—as a summons to action in the world, was Michael Denneny, who died recently, shortly after the publication of a memoir-anthology, On Christopher Street. The book records how his teacher inspired him to abandon his Ph.D., follow her to New York, and found what would become America’s most important magazine for gay men—Christopher Street, along with its associated publishing line, Stonewall Inn Editions—in the late 1970s and 1980s, those pivotal years that saw first the emergence of a distinct gay male urban culture and then its near-annihilation from AIDS.
Arendt would not seem to be an obvious inspiration for a gay men’s magazine. Even if there is a certain chain-smoking archness in her 1964 interview for the German television show Zur Person, she is not among the straight women whom gay men single out for a typically ambivalent yet ardent brand of admiration, in what is usually a perverse sort of drag-performance-by-proxy. Arendt’s political philosophy, organized around claims about human nature supported by examples taken from ancient Athens (while engaged in a covert but insistent critique of her own former mentor, Martin Heidegger, who had awakened her to philosophy before covering himself with shame as a proud member of the Nazi Party), can seem both frustratingly distant from the historical present and icily indifferent to the problems of minorities. Denneny’s insight, however, is to have grasped how the apparently abstract universals of Arendt’s teaching grew out of her urgent engagement on behalf of the Jewish people in the 1930s and 40s.
Reading Arendt’s philosophical writing in light of her Zionist activism from that era, Denneny saw how central concepts of her later work made what can be easily dismissed as “lifestyle politics”—the publishing of magazines and novels; the demand for a space of cultural distinction—not a distraction from “real” politics, but an urgent task that makes politics, in Arendt’s special and widely misunderstood meaning, possible. Arendt, Denneny continually reminds readers in On Christopher Street, held that a person can be connected to humanity in general, to his own uniqueness, and indeed to the possibility of transforming himself, only insofar as he is a member of a free community—of a group that possesses the power to build and maintain what Arendt called a “world,” a domain in which members of a group can appear to each other, revealing, remaking, and remembering themselves.
Today, Arendt has many admirers in American academia, and a wide midwit readership that consults her writings for political and moral apothegems applicable to our ongoing crisis, whose origins they imagine as coming from the right and never from inside their own intellectual homes. Every university of any repute has on staff some left-liberal scholar who mistakenly sees in Arendt an ancestor of her own utterly conventional politics while doing her best to ignore the difficult, apparently reactionary positions Arendt took on everything from racial integration to immigration and the welfare state. If Arendt had been a man, she would have been, if not “cancelled,” then consigned by right-thinking scholars (and therefore cherished by right-wing cranks) among such other Teutonic anachronisms as Oswald Spenger and Eric Voegelin. Arendt is spared this fate at the price of being misunderstood.
Homosexuality is perhaps only a little less ancient than Adam and Eve, but, like Zionism, gay male life is a much more recent creation, one elaborated by activists who tried to transform themselves into something like a people.
She gets no better treatment from her centrist humanist admirers, who transform her into a defender of the warmed-over nineteenth-century liberalism that passes among them for “free thinking.” Her work—with its horror of cliché and mental conformity, its appreciation for the exchange of diverse perspectives, and its appeal to the fragile vitality of independent thought (its reminder, indeed, that these two words form a pleonasm) —is one of the fragments that hold-outs within the academy shore up against their ruin. To find a prestigious ally (a woman! a refugee!) in their resistance to the identitarian posturing that has become essential to elite self-performance, they make of Arendt a liberal individualist, an understanding to which Arendt would surely have responded with a Germanic feminine version of the genteel revulsion that Marshall McLuhan summons for the movie-goers in “Annie Hall.”
Arendt’s famous 1963 letter to Gershon Scholem, who had reproached his old friend in the aftermath of her reporting on the Eichmann trial for her apparent lack of love of the Jewish people, seems, but only seems, to confirm the cosmopolitan tote bag re-imagination of the philosopher. Her famous statement, “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective… I indeed love ‘only’ my friends,” seems to find Arendt a kindred spirit of those who wish to thwart our hastening spiral of mutually antagonizing collective narcissisms by insisting—in an apparently more humane version of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum—that there is no such thing as society, only individuals. But, as Arendt continued in her letter, if she could not “love” the Jewish people it was because “I cannot love myself.” Her response should be read not as a declaration of independence from the demands of the collective, but as a political equivalent of Cordelia’s speech to Lear.
Arendt did not remind Scholem that from 1933 to 1949 she had abandoned scholarship for Zionist activism, sometimes at personal risk, engaging in everything from the practical organizing of relief efforts to writing essays for German and English-language magazines like Aufbau and Menorah Journal—in which she called, with urgent anger sharper and hotter than any merely speakable “love,” for a Jewish army and a new Jewish self-consciousness. Arendt’s life had for so many years been lived for the Jewish people, she implied, that she could not look on “them” as something separate from “herself.” She was not proclaiming the sovereignty of the individual, but rather the non-existence of the latter in isolation from the group that provides its stage of action and frame of meaning—what Arendt called its “world.”
Arendt’s Zionism was as idiosyncratic—and to many, as frustratingly perplexing—as her view of a person’s constitutive mix of personal uniqueness and un-withdrawable membership in a human community into which we find ourselves thrown. She called for Jewish unity while acerbically critiquing every Jewish political institution, tradition and perspective, from Europe to the United States to Palestine—advocating an implausible post-war order in which a Jewish homeland would be secured as part of a vast post-Ottoman federation of nationalities extending from Europe to the Middle East.
Her disappointed hopes, her years of struggle alongside and against other activists, and, as she reminded Scholem, her sense of propriety—her inner alertness that to speak of such things would be an obscene self-sundering, bringing to light feelings that have their authentic life only in intimate darkness—perhaps explain why in her later reflections on politics, such as The Human Condition (1958)and On Revolution (1963), Arendt wrote as if she had not spent a decade and a half as a Jewish activist. Some would say, hardly as if she were a Jew. But the political experience she did not acknowledge having was specifically Jewish, and the path to the rediscovery of what she often called the hidden treasures of ancient Greek thought went directly through Zionism.
Indeed, many of the claims Arendt makes in her work after the 1940s should be understood as translations into universalistic terms of lessons she derived from her reflections on the world-historical emergency of European Jewry. What she described in later years as the problems of modernity—the end of authoritative traditions for orienting moral and political thought and action, the dangerous seductions of Marxism and ethno-nationalist fascism, and the stupidity of self-satisfied liberal elites unable to recognize these desperate conditions—were a cosmopolitanized version of the story she had told in her Zionist writings about, and to, Jews. She saw the latter as unable to return to traditional religion (cut off from it forever by the failure of Sabbatai Zevi’s messianism and the transformations of the Jewish Enlightenment and Reform movement) and faced with the task—from which Communism and Revisionist Zionism threatened to divert it—of building a specifically secular Jewish “world” anchored by, although by no means taking place only in, its historic homeland.
So what about Arendt’s vision appealed to Michael Denneny, a young man from a working-class Irish Catholic background? In part, simply the brilliance of the teacher. As a friend of his told me after his death, Denneny had met Arendt while working as a busboy in the faculty dining room. He would talk with her as he cleaned tables; gradually, she began timing her meals to coincide with his shifts. Arendt convinced Denneny, then an undergraduate with dreams of serving in the newly founded Peace Corps, to stay on at the university for doctoral study under her supervision. When she left Chicago in 1967 for the New School in New York, he followed her, continuing to sit in on her seminars even as he left academia for publishing.
In an essay written during these years about her own teacher, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” Arendt recalled that he had made her believe that “thinking can be learned.” That is—and rather contrary to the solitary vision of thinking Heidegger provides in much of his written work—thinking, however much it happens only within an isolated person, is a relation between people. Arendt, too, taught thinking; and, in a manner surpassing her teacher, taught how thinking is an uncanniness that connects and recombines us.
Arendt taught thinking—and she taught that thinking requires what she called a “world.” Just as the student needs a teacher, the thinker, in order to think at all, needs a community whose members she can address and argue with. It is not a question, of course, of creating a community out of thin air, or of taking an abstract, universal humanity as one’s audience. Rather the task, which is explicit in Arendt’s Zionist writing but only implicit in her later work, is one of more fully and expansively elaborating the world we already share with those with whom we are by virtue of historical circumstance, but perhaps not yet by virtue of our own conscious concern, in community.
Denneny saw Christopher Street magazine, which he helped found in 1976, and its associated publishing line Stonewall Inn Editions at St. Martin’s Press, as instruments for building a gay male world. In Arendt’s theory, a world is sustained by, and maintains the possibility of the exchange of, different perspectives on what interlocutors understand as being—albeit in a not yet fully agreed-upon way—the same object. In her later work, this is usually presented as a problem of “judgment” in which people have diverse points of view about some third thing—whether they are making aesthetic judgments about, say, a painting, or ethical judgments about an action. But in the case that most compelled her early thought, as in the case that preoccupied Denneny, the “object” at stake was the supposedly common identity that did not quite unite those who debated its meaning.
For it was not at all obvious how different sorts of Jewish people from across the globe constituted a single Jewish “world” as a stage for debate about so-called Jewish politics. Indeed, Arendt in her Zionist writing insisted that this world and this politics would have to be created through exchanges of judgments, and through appeals to a community that as yet existed more in the eyes of its enemies than in the hearts of potential future members.
Homosexuality is perhaps only a little less ancient than Adam and Eve, but, like Zionism, gay male life is a much more recent creation, one elaborated by activists who tried to transform themselves into something like a people. In its cultural politics of building a gay male world, Christopher Street featured poetry and short stories, helping launch the careers of the major gay writers of the late 20th century, such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. It also ran many essays that contributed to an emerging awareness that there was a gay male canon in American letters, running from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to John Ashbery and James Merrill.
Christopher Street was by no means the only venue for the construction of a gay world, but Denneny and his colleagues were perhaps the sharpest-minded defenders of its specificity—their demand that it be a world for gay men. In a debate that has now been largely forgotten, but which dominated gay intellectual life in the 1970s, Denneny’s Arendtian perspective, with its debts to Zionism, was ranged against a vision of politics in which gay men were to be a kind of shock force for a broader sexual-cum-socialist revolution.
Christopher Street’s main rival for the minds of gay male intellectual readers was the Boston-based Fag Rag, a self-proclaimed “radical” left newspaper. Fag Rag’s writership did not see gay men as a distinct group that needed to build a world of their own. Rather, it saw them as one of a number of oppressed groups with a common interest in overthrowing heterosexual, patriarchal, white, Christian, etc., power. Its pages gave equal space to women and men (Christopher Street, after a few experimental power-sharing issues with lesbians, booted them from the magazine). It featured gay men who made feminist-inspired critiques of masculinity, pornography, and leather, while promoting a supposedly sex-positive, gender-bending neo-paganism. They were the eunuch vanguard of the post-male alphabet soup left.
In the years before the AIDS crisis (1976-1981) Christopher Street did not have an obvious line on “sexual liberation” countering that of Fag Rag. While some of its articles cheekily investigated the history of gloryholes where anonymous oral sex was on offer, many others lamented what was already seen by many gay intellectuals as the excessive hedonism of the era immediately before AIDS. One March 1980 essay critiqued the “Tyranny of the Penis”—a title that could have been taken from an issue of Fag Rag. But promiscuity tended to be seen as problematic because it might undermine the possibility of forming stable couples among gay men, rather than because it epitomized the patriarchal power of the phallus (Christopher Street’s contributors did not evince any great opposition to the latter). They tended to be sympathetic observers or active participants in the shift over the course of the late 70s towards a more masculine gay male style of dress and comportment, featuring denim, cowboy boots, and other items of masculine accessorizing.
The lack of agreement, however, was the point—Christopher Street was meant to be a space in which gay men could disagree with each other about what gay men should do (what they should wear, read, and suck), and even about what it meant to be a gay man, provided they agreed that there are, and should be, gay men. Christopher Street did grant occasional room for feminist perspectives, from an interview with Gloria Steinem to a short story by Andrea Dworkin, and to representatives of the Marxist left like Jean-Paul Sartre. But these were presented as glimpses on something of potential interest to an imagined gay community, not as voices that must be, as we say today, “centered”—as a moral-political teaching to which gay men should conform.
Michel Foucault—whose thinking in his last years was deeply informed by his encounter with the emerging American gay culture presented in its pages (and thus, in a strange roundabout way, to Hannah Arendt)—explained in an interview with Christopher Street that he was excited to see that gay men were, thanks to its efforts, at last able to imagine themselves as political agents in their own right without recourse to feminism, Marxism, and other rhetorics of the left. Foucault had perhaps read Denneny’s 1981 “manifesto,” published in Christopher Street, consisting of sixteen “propositions” for gay politics. The central proposition, number eight, began with a quote from Arendt, in which she claimed that “a man can live as a man,” that is as an individual (although perhaps with a special unintended resonance in its new context as a call for gay male specificity), only “within the framework of a people.” The word “framework” is deliberate and significant. “A people” is something made—to be sure, out of existing materials. Culture—the exchange of perspectives in philosophy, fiction, criticism—creates the framework within which we can act together. Denneny concludes, “a gay culture is a political necessity for our survival.” The point of gay politics, Denneny insisted, was not to make gay men’s discontent a kind of lever for the overthrow of our regime, but to build “power” so that gay men could invent forms of life together, creating the cultural resources by which they could pursue their necessarily mutual happiness.
Many readers took issue with Denneny’s propositions, and particularly with his ninth, which rejected the Fag Rag line that gay politics was just one iteration of a broader “social question.” In a response to discontented readers’ letters, charging Denneny of decoupling gay liberation from its alliance with the left, he answered that “genuflecting before the icon of socialism,” as he, in passing, charged his long-time collaborator Ed White of doing, “is an act of cultural piety, not political insight… a very weak basis on which to build a new politics.” (When I emailed White to ask about Denneny and his Arendtian view of politics, White replied tersely that he had never known Denneny to speak of her—a statement that contrasts with the memories of others in their circle).
Denneny countered that a “radical gay politics” was one reflecting and contributing to the creation of the forms of gay male life that were developing in the present—“not to the century-old theoretical tradition of the left, which strikes me as intellectually conservative, even old-fashioned.” That tradition subsumed supposedly local and contingent struggles in an over-arching agenda intended to bring about a new social order. It had a place for gay men qua gay men (or for Jews qua Jews, women qua women, etc.) only to the extent that their social movements could be interpreted as vehicles for progress towards a universal egalitarian horizon in which antagonisms would, at last, be dissolved.
Although many activists and academics try to prove the contrary, the left’s grand horizons have have often disappointed gay men. For much of the twentieth century, their primary manifestation was Marxism, which saw male homosexuality either as a revolting bourgeois (even fascist) practice—or as one of the many sites for political combat to be redirected towards the Revolution. Gay men who desired the freedom to create a specifically gay male culture were at best nuisances and at worst enemies.
The New Left of the 60s and 70s was only apparently more open to sexual minorities. If it promoted “sexual liberation,” it was in order to use gay men as a battering ram against traditional morality—not least masculinity. That gay men remain men—that their stubborn inassimilable particularity consists in nothing less than their attachment to masculinity, even if it might strike Judith Butler as ‘parodic’—made them permanently suspect allies of the post-Marxist cultural left that saw men (white men anyhow) as the oppressor class. Attachment to masculinity, however much attenuated today, makes gays equally unreliable members of the coalition of supposedly marginalized groups imagined to constitute the “progressive” or “woke” left, or whatever it is one might call the current ruling ideology of the Democratic Party and its associated elites in corporate life, media and academia.
Arendt was a critical reference point not only for Denneny but a number of other contributors to Christopher Street, who often compared the gay male experience in the 1970s with the historical experience of Jews in Europe and the United States. Some of the appeal of such parallels, doubtless, was that so many writers and subscribers were New Yorkers, whether Jewish or not, who were living in a milieu where debates about Jewish identity, culture and politics were commonplace. Moreover Jews—like gays and unlike most women, black people, prisoners or the other oppressed groups whose troubles were given much place in Fag Rag—had to think about their relationship to the non-Jewish world with some connection to the problem of “passing,” of having it within their power, to an extent that was always uncertain, shifting, and never total, to hide or reveal their “identity.”
It was no accident that the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre had made Jewishness (in the 1944 essay “Antisemite and Jew”) and homosexuality (in his 1952 book Saint Genet) special topics of analysis; they illustrate, with particular clarity, what he understood as the complex union of determination and freedom that makes up every human life. We are born with certain traits, and involuntarily acquire others in the course of living. We are said by others to be such-and-such kinds of people on the basis of these traits, and are treated accordingly. Thrust by our bodies, desires, environments, families, cultures into roles, we are free within them, to a degree we can perhaps never rightly know, to act them out in various ways, including, sometimes, to deny them and “pass” as something else.
If Arendt had been a man, she would have been, if not ‘cancelled,’ then consigned by right-thinking scholars among such other Teutonic anachronisms as Oswald Spenger and Eric Voegelin.
Gay men and Jews—that is, those homosexuals who choose to live a distinctly modern “gay” life and those Jews who, with whatever relation they bear towards their religious traditions, live in a secular society—have seemed at times to instantiate the problem all modern people face of having to invent a life for themselves out of materials we have not chosen, to wrest, in some measure, autobiography out of biography. For the contributors of Christopher Street, Arendt’s ideas could be a call to resoluteness in addressing this challenge—or the grounds for a condemnation of what seemed to be the sterility of gay and Jewish life in America.
In a 1981 essay, “The New York GayCult, the Jewish Question… and Me,” journalist Neil Alan Marks used Arendt’s writing on political theory and Zionism to critique the “bourgeois” gay male scene that had emerged in New York, San Francisco and, to varying intensities, other major American cities. Gay and Jews in the United States, he argued, were still at the level of what Arendt had described as the “parvenu” Jews of pre-war Western Europe. These parvenus were often more “European” in taste and consciousness than the gentile elites they thought they were imitating. But, as Arendt saw it, they lacked both religious and political virtues. They had lost the faith of their ancestors but had not become true secular elites; they merely play-acted as wealthy Frenchmen, Germans, etc., and as beneficent leaders of charity organizations that cared for their ostensibly less fortunate brethren in the same manner that animal-rights activists care for animals: as ignorant recipients of benevolence.
Instead of building a modern, secular, Jewish world, Arendt implied, parvenu elites kept playing to a gentile audience that regarded them with condescension or hatred. Their charity to poor and foreign Jews was not an attempt to create a world in common with them by recognizing them as both an audience and actors on Judaism’s stage. It was because they were alienated from the very possibility of, or desire for, such a world, that parvenu Jewish leaders were so unable to respond to the steadily worsening challenge of antisemitism in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Marks drew parallels between what he saw as the American Jewish parvenu experience and that of the emerging gay culture. American Jews with a “traditional humanist middle-class” sensibility hoped they, or at any rate their children, could succeed at “making it”—that combination of economic success and social climbing—“without taking advantage of anyone along the way.” Likewise, gays had hoped for a kind of “sexual liberation” that would free them from legal repression and moral stigma while also giving freer rein to the “universal desire to be sexually exploiting and exploited.” Both groups wielded progressive slogans appealing to the possibility of a gentler, less discriminatory America, while organizing their personal lives around competition for status—which is indeed another name for the American dream.
Denneny’s account in On Christopher Street, understandably but regrettably, writes out voices of despair likes Marks’, which reveal how, even on the verge of the AIDS crisis, some who shared his intellectual debts to Arendt saw a much bleaker picture than he did. Denneny likewise wrote out of his story how Charles Ortleb, for many years Christopher Street’s editor-in-chief, drew on Arendt in a hyper-ventilating 1979 essay that treated the release of William Friedkin’s film Cruising, set in the gay S&M subculture, as a prelude to anti-gay hatred that could culminate in something like the Holocaust. In a grim irony, as AIDS devastated the world of Christopher Street in the following years, Ortleb frequently denied, in print, any connection between the disease and sex, making himself responsible for innumerable deaths (having survived the crisis, Ortleb now devotes himself to COVID denialism—battling in both struggles the same foe, Dr. Fauci).
Invoking the ideas of Arendt—and using them to build a shared world in which ideas can be exchanged among members of a group to enlarge their inseparably collective and individual freedom—offers no guarantees of decent outcomes, anymore than it did for Arendt herself, whose campaign for a particular, perhaps impossible, kind of Zionism linked to a peaceful, federal solution in Palestine, ended in a failure on which she rarely reflected in public. But Arendt’s legacy still challenges us, as she put it in The Human Condition, to consider “that the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse… action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness.” In this breathtaking departure from all conventional standards, in her declaring the building of a world for magnificent action and thoughts to be as much beyond good and evil as it is beyond prudent and foolish, Arendt shows herself to be, no less than Foucault and more than her despisers like Costin Alamariu, a radical heir to Nietzsche whom we have only begun to understand.
Denneny’s 1979 essay, “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” is the only scholarly paper in which he addresses the work of his mentor. It begins where Arendt ended, with the opening sentence: “After Hannah Arendt’s death in December 1975, friends found in her typewriter the title page, with two epigrams, of her projected work on Judging.” It then brilliantly retraces the problem of judgment throughout Arendt’s work, showing how the thread linking her otherwise confounding redefinitions of terms like “world” and “politics” is the exchange of different perspectives on a common object or problem, within a community of interlocutors whose points of view vary but who remain committed to communication and to the sense that what they are disagreeing about is in some not-yet-defined way the same thing.
For the next four decades, Denneny pursued what he called, in an email to me, “Arendtian praxis, putting many of her ideas into practice in a concrete way” by building a world of gay letters in which the pursuit of individual excellence within a community of competitors, admirers, peers and fellow strivers was directed towards an open-ended freedom to invent new forms of life. When I emailed him earlier this spring, for an essay on their relationship that has suddenly become an obituary, he was reading again through her complete works. A few days before his death, he told me that he had not read his 1979 essay since it had been published, and, looking back over it, in what he did not know were some of his last hours, he was relieved to find that he and Arendt had been struggling with the same problems. To continue that struggle is to continue their world.
Human sexuality has long been a subject of fascination and curiosity in the scientific community. Researchers from different fields have sought to understand why we are attracted to certain people and how our sexual orientation develops.
From Sigmund Freud to Judith Butler, the road to a science of sexuality is a fascinating history of ambition and culture wars, error and scientific breakthrough.
Psychoanalysts believe desire follows specific laws and follows predictable patterns, while queer theorists argue that laws have exceptions and advocate for a more creative view of sexuality.
My research proposes an information theory of desire that straddles the line these two groups by arguing we should consider the object of our desire as information.
Psychoanalysis can help us understand how this particular kind of information is stored, while queer theory can help us understand how this information is organized and re-organized internally.
Birth of psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, originally trained as a physician, believed in the scientific basis of sexuality. He was the first to regard sex as the subject of a serious discussion. Starting in 1902, colleagues gathered every Wednesday in his apartment to discuss the psychoanalytic practice he established.
“The source of its vitality does not lie in any hazy mixture of science and sectarianism, but in having adopted as a fundamental principle that which is the highest principle of all scientific activity. I mean honesty.”
Though Freud retained Andreas-Salomé’s loyalty until the end, he didn’t share her optimism about the uniting power of honesty and thought divisions at the heart of his movement would delegitimize it.
In France, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan urged his colleagues to return to Freud’s methods. Consumer culture silenced similar voices in North America.
Psychotherapy lost its scientific motto — the pursuit of truth — and became a matter of pursuing happiness. Keenly aware how the big screen dumbed down Freud’s psychology, Marilyn Monroe — a serious reader of psychoanalysis — turned down starring in a movie about him out of respect.
Despite the politically correct turn away from “why gay?” to “how gay?” in post–1970s clinical research, and the anti-psychological turn in feminism known as the Freud Wars of the 1980s, the prospect of a science of sexuality almost vanished until queer theorists made its case again in the 1990s.
This disconnect between what we see and the meaning we give it is a chance for sexuality to break with habit and become unpredictable.
The challenge of our current moment
Nowadays, many regard sexuality as too complicated or too subjective to become a science. Freud’s theories are often dismissed as pseudoscience.
But this outlook is dangerous to the pursuit of science. According to Elizabeth Young–Bruehl, a queer psychoanalyst who practised in Toronto until her death in 2009, we have abandoned Freud’s depth psychology and his theory of the unconscious and promoted instead superficial psychological theories.
Homophobia and caricatures of psychoanalysis originated with our relationship to science, not Freud’s. Though he was keen on establishing a science of sexuality, he regarded that science as historical rather than experimental.
Historical sciences aim to reconstruct past events and favour the uniqueness of detail and individual cases. Experimental sciences, on the other hand, are concerned with the future and whether an event will repeat itself.
Information theory of desire
Why do individuals come out as gay or bisexual at a particular point in their lives, but not earlier? Why do some first same-sex experiences shape a queer identity while others do not?
An information theory of desire might offer insights into these questions. When queer people talk about the defining moment when they came out to themselves, it can be useful to think of self-acceptance as a kind of computing command — an input that demands a radical re-organization of someone’s information network or identity.
Life events become inputs, and sexual orientations and gender identities become information networks. Certain same-sex experiences may only result in partial changes to the information network, while others may lead to the complete re-configuring of someone’s identity.
What can we discover with a science of sexuality? Freud’s loyal friend Andreas-Salomé was right to regard honesty as the highest principle of any scientific activity. Without it, we would be dealing with incorrect inputs or information networks viewed upside down.
Pride Month is not just a celebration of sexuality — it’s also a celebration of science.
In Weimar Germany, the gay Jewish doctor Magnus Hirschfeld performed the first gender-affirming surgeries and collected research on sexuality. The 1933 book burnings destroyed his life’s work
Just a few months after Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, pro-Nazi university students celebrated the nascent Third Reich by organizing public book burnings in 34 German towns and cities. These ceremonial destructions of “un-German” texts, often accompanied by parades, concerts and speeches, were carefully documented by Nazi officials and are now symbolic of the country’s descent into fascism. Some of the core images associated with the Holocaust show piles of books smoldering in the streets of Berlin, and the new regime’s antipathy for Jewish authors like Heinrich Heine and Max Brod is now well-known. But another category of literature that perished in the book burnings — troves of research on sexuality — goes largely unnoticed today.
One of the institutions ransacked by the Nazi student groups that organized the book burnings was the Institute for Sexual Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft). Founded by the pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute was the first medical center devoted to the study of gender and sexuality. At the institute, trans patients received gender-affirming care, activists campaigned for the rights of queer Germans and doctors conducted research on gender-affirming procedures — much of which was lost forever in the book burnings.
Today, the United States is experiencing a moral panic about transgender rights, with attempts in many states to ban gender-affirming care and public expressions of queerness. Meanwhile, book bans are proliferating across American school districts, with activist parents agitating to remove books about marginalized groups and the United States’ long history of racism. Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the free expression organization PEN America, described the book bans as a “relentless crusade to constrict children’s freedom to read.”
Comparisons between Weimar Germany and the current American political climate are often simplistic. But historic campaigns against transgender people and efforts to limit access to literature can inform us about the implications of such attacks today. Here’s an introduction to the Institute for Sexual Research, its radical vision and its tragic demise.
Who was Magnus Hirschfeld?
Born in 1868, Hirschfeld was a gay Jewish doctor, sexologist and activist. At a time when the medical establishment pathologized homosexuality, treating it as evidence of mental illness or moral degeneracy, Hirschfeld argued that queer people were acting “according to their own nature” and should be respected as such. He coined the phrase “sexual intermediaries” as an umbrella term to describe any person whose gender or sexual identities did not conform to cisgender, heterosexual norms, identifying Socrates, Michelangelo and Shakespeare as famous historical examples. Even more radical in the context of his own era, Hirschfeld also recognized that some people have no fixed identity.
In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, one of the first gay rights organizations. The group adopted the motto “Through science to justice,” reflecting Hirschfeld’s belief that if Germans could be persuaded that homosexuality was a biological trait, they would relinquish their prejudices. He lobbied against “Paragraph 175,” the section of Germany’s legal code that criminalized homosexuality.
Hirschfeld’s concerns were not limited to the rights of gay men. He also gave sex advice to heterosexual couples and argued for wider access to birth control. On lecture tours in America, his wide-ranging expertise earned him the nickname “the Einstein of sex.” He even played a fictional sexologist in the 1919 film Different From the Others, about a gay violinist who dies by suicide. The cameo was a testament to his reputation in Berlin’s gay community.
In order to put his ideas into practice, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Research in 1919.
Hirschfeld also worked to protect his patients from the indignities of life in a hostile society. When some trans women could not find work after surgery, he employed them at the institute. And although his efforts to decriminalize homosexuality were unsuccessful, he procured “transvestite” identity cards for his patients, a stop-gap measure that helped them live openly as women without being arrested.
Besides serving patients, the institute housed offices for feminist activists and a printing press for progressive sexual health journals. The institute regularly hosted lectures and film screenings. Hirschfeld and his colleagues also developed an enormous library of rare texts and notes on gender-affirming surgery.
Why was all this happening in Berlin?
While the most famous and successful gay rights movements occurred in the late 20th century, historians have argued that the first attempts to gain public recognition for queer people took place almost a hundred years earlier in Germany. In 1867, a year before Hirschfeld’s birth, a lawyer contended before a German legal body that the government was punishing queer people for desires that “nature, mysteriously governing and creating, had implanted in them.” In 1869, an Austrian thinker coined the term “homosexuality” (in German, Homosexualität).
In the early 20th century, Berlin’s queer bar scene was famous enough to earn mentions in tourist guides. The city provided a safe haven for gay people from less hospitable countries. The British writer Christopher Isherwood, who lived in the city from 1929 to 1933 and whose work inspired the musical Cabaret, summarized the city’s vibe succinctly: “Berlin meant boys.” So while Hirschfeld was thinking far ahead of his time, he also worked within one of Europe’s most empowered queer communities.
How did the book burning happen?
In 1933, after Hitler was elected chancellor, the government began to purge cultural institutions of “degenerate” art and the artists who produced it. Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels drew on pro-Nazi student organizations for help in this project. In April, the Nazi German Student Association proposed an “Action Against the Un-German Spirit” that would culminate in a series of book burnings.
Students broke into and occupied the Institute for Sexual Research on May 6. Four days later, they burned its entire library, along with thousands of other “un-German” books. University students accompanied the burnings with torchlight processions.
Hirschfeld, who was working in Paris when the institute was ransacked, learned of the library’s destruction through a newsreel and never returned to Germany. He stayed in Paris until the threat of a Nazi occupation caused him to flee to Nice. En route, he died of a stroke on his 67th birthday.
The western drift away from seeking moral instruction from the church is understandable; the morality plays staged every day on Reddit’s infamous “Am I the Asshole?” threads are far more entertaining.
A few weeks ago, a post went viral in which the author seeks a public verdict on the question “AITA for asking my roommates to remove their dildos from the bathroom mirror in a way that was not kind?” The young poster had responded to the presence of newly washed sex toys in a shared space with a disgusted hostility and the dildo-owning flatmate complained the poster should have requested the removal more politely.
This brash – and now VERY public – story of objects once unlikely to be mentioned outside (ahem) the most personal of circumstances appears at the same time US magazine the Atlantic has been discussing “America’s intimacy problem”.
Researchers in the US have noticed a decline in secure attachments between individuals. Growing numbers of Americans find themselves either avoiding or incapable of maintaining intimate social relationships, with the consequence being loneliness and isolation. Psychologists report that even when their clients do want the security and comfort of meaningful connections, “there’s a lot of confusion and fear in terms of how to get there”.
In a cultural moment where liberalised attitudes towards sex and sexuality have destigmatised so many forms of sexual behaviour, younger generations appear to be growing less sexually intimate.
It’s not an exclusively American problem. In Australia, younger generations have also been in a “sex recession” for years. Figures compiled in 2020 revealed 40% of people in the 18-24 age bracket had never had a sexual partner. Disturbingly, some of those who know sexual contact may not necessarily know it with intimacy, but with coercion.
Sociologists and other researchers have speculated that social media is driving this. From chat to porn, the new networks provide on-demand experiences of connection that resemble in-person interactions without sharing the awkward, human rhythms of the real-world thing. The digital allure is of relationships that can be curated, controlled and contained.
Simultaneously, the portability of image-capture technology has facilitated an era of relentless self-surveillance. Powerful forces incentivise the exploitation of the personal, from the monetisation of the influencer to the desperate social competition for online attention.
The digital paradigm has come to contain us. To admit one is messy, inexperienced, scared, human-shaped or in any way truly vulnerable is an act of trust before another person and we’ve all learned by now to never trust anything pretending to be a person on the internet. Maybe the culture of mistrust fostered on the internet is what’s bleeding into our external lives? The relentless exposure of it renders any revelation of frailty a dangerous prospect.
Meanwhile, experiments such as Arthur Aron’s “36 questions that lead to love” established that it’s the mutual revelation of vulnerability that creates our most intimate bonds.
The terror is valid. The personal cost is incalculable.
Recently I received the sad news that an old theatre friend had passed away, and far too young. We lived on separate continents and had not been in touch for quite some time.
This news of his death, though, has shattered me. The memory that replays itself dates from 19 years ago; we’d stumbled into my apartment to crash after an all-night drunken adventure, and in his besozzlement he found himself unable to remove his contact lenses. He asked for help. My careful fingers peeled the plastic droplets from the eyeballs of my prone-on-the-spare-bed, fully clothed friend and it remains one of the most intimate experiences I’ve had with another human being. It changed the channel of our relationship – not into anything romantic, but into another kind of closeness that remains tricky to explain.
The pain of loss I’m feeling now is the price humans pay for the intensity of these connections.
Restless and raging at the sky in the wake of too many recent deaths, I’m yet to be convinced that the worst flatmate or view-aggregating Tokfluencer doesn’t yearn for the intimacy of a profound friendship, or a loving family, or true romantic love.
For those who may find themselves insecurely attached and sad about it, some gentle guidance: it’s not our social performances that leave an indelible impression behind us – it’s the risk taken to trust someone else when we are in our greatest vulnerability. It’s in these moments we become immortal to each other.
Mainstream society tends to label kinks and fetishes as taboo, which is ironic because a kink is simply anything besides standard “vanilla” sex. Based on this description, being kinky is normal!
I like to think of kinks as the sprinkles of life — anything that deviates from the norm. For instance, perhaps I am loving life and missionary position and my partner gently sucked my toe for a few seconds and I enjoy it. Perhaps I like to call my partner Daddy. Ladies and gentlemen, I just partook in a kink.
Studies have shown that people with kinks and fetishes tend to possess above-average intelligence — so it’s not exactly a bad thing! Kinky folks are the type of people to taste vanilla ice cream and think, wow that is delicious, what happens if you add chocolate syrup?
No, I am not trying to get you on the kink train. What this is really about is why does such a large portion of our society see kinks and fetishes as taboo?
Being kinky is normal
Kink is a consensual practice that includes role-play, power dynamics, or fetishes. It doesn’t have to involve actual sex. Perhaps I love the feel of furry socks on my skin under the sheets. Kinky sex requires communication about desires and limits to make sure everyone enjoys the experience. We often do not even realize we would enjoy something because we label it as being weird or “societally unacceptable.”
When you are close-minded you deny yourself the opportunity to explore your mind and body. Kinks can be simple or they can be complex.
Exploring your partner’s body while alternating between drinking hot tea and sucking on an ice cube or putting on a furry costume and dancing to the electric slide before engaging in wild sex in a kiddy pool full of jello. Spanking, group sex, polyamory, exhibitionism, whipping, slapping, or even just talking about kinky stuff during sex, all fall into the “kinky spectrum.”
Most people fit somewhere on the ‘kinky spectrum’
It never occurred to me that kink could be considered a “bad” thing until I became familiar with an online BDSM test. I often recommend this quiz to online daters who want to see if a potential partner might be sexually compatible. Half the time, clients would look appalled and respond with some variation of, “I’m not a pervert.” Which I find unfortunate. After all, as we’ve established, kink is normal!
Is it perverted to admit that I love pizza with lots of toppings? What is a normal for pizza? To discover cheese pizza and then never eat anything else besides cheese pizza or do I start to wonder, “What would it be like if I added green peppers, pepperoni, or jalapeños?”
This doesn’t mean I no longer appreciate pizza, I’m just a normal human being exploring my creativity.
I have had numerous clients over the years who at some point in time during a long-term relationship developed a desire to explore something new. One client started to become aroused by the idea of being dominated. They were extremely afraid of revealing this to their partner. So much so that they hired a dominatrix in order to avoid that conversation completely. This is an extremely common occurrence — but being deceptive or secretive when you have promised your partner you’d be monogamous or honest about interacting with other partners is not healthy.
Wouldn’t it be healthier if we could accept that wanting to try new things in bed is normal and healthy?
People change, and so do their fantasies & desires
It would be stranger to be in a long-term relationship with someone who at no point in time wants to try something new in the bedroom. Something important to remember: People change.
If you develop a new side of yourself you want to explore but choose to ignore it it could lead to anxiety and depression. Failure to overcome a stigma and internalizing that stigma has negative effects on every aspect of your life.
Dirty talk during foreplay or sex is a great way to add variety and keeps things hot. Kinky sex does not have to include BDSM.
When you find someone and you get married it is highly unlikely that their sexuality will not evolve in any way. It’s perfectly normal to encounter something and wonder if it might be enjoyable. It’s normal to want to try something new.
Open communication leads to healthier relationships
It’s important that you have a partner you feel comfortable with so you can discuss your thoughts openly but with compassion. What you don’t want to do is approach your partner with, “Hey we’ve been together a long time and I’m really getting bored. I like variety, you know this, babe. Do you think we could include one of your friends in the bedroom?” or whatever is intriguing you.
I often encounter male clients who want to convince their partners to have an open relationship or at least the occasional threesome. A large portion of the time their partner is not comfortable with bringing another person into their relationship. For these people, I suggest partaking in fantasy. Yes, even this would be considered kinky!
One good way to do this is to go there in your mind and talking through it during foreplay or while having intercourse can be so stimulating that many of my clients were completely satisfied without partaking in an additional partner. The great part is in your mind the rules of life are irrelevant.
When it comes to bringing toys into your sex life, there are two schools of thought: There are those who are all for it, firmly believing that the more assets the better for both partners, and there are those who view sex toys as a sign that something isn’t working. To be candid, the only thing not working in those toyless bedrooms is the lack of imagination.
“Let’s think of the pleasure spectrum as an ice cream shop,” sensuality coach and sex educator Eleanor Hadley tells Vice. “There are so many flavors and combinations of pleasure available to us at all times. Sometimes you’ll stick with your go-to classic, but other times you might try something brand new and be sweetly surprised at how delicious it was … No flavor is categorically better than the other, and they’re all simply different … Adding sex toys into the mix when it comes to partnered sex is simply a way for you to enhance pleasure and experience new sensations.”
According to a 2020 study by sexual wellness brand Ella Paradis, 61% of sex toy consumers make purchases for themselves and for partnered play. While this is only the findings of one survey, the fact is, sex toys are very much becoming a part of people’s sex lives. In fact, the same survey found that 98% of U.S. adults believe sexual pleasure is essential to sexual health.
If you’re unsure about whether sex toys have a place in your sex life, the following benefits might just convince you it’s time to try.
It closes the orgasm gap
Although more people with vulvas are learning how to pleasure themselves, and are achieving orgasms on their own and with their partners, the disparity between them and those with penises still exists. This is called the orgasm gap, and it persists because our culture has failed to make the sexual pleasure of those with a vulva just as important as it is for people with a penis.
According to a 2016 study of 52,000 U.S. adults published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, 95% of heterosexual men reported that they always or at least usually climax during sex. As for heterosexual women, that number was 65%. While this is just one of the thousands of studies that examine the difference in orgasm rate, no matter which way you turn, the results are always the same: People with penises orgasm far more than those with vulvas.
When you bring toys into the bedroom, you and your partner are closing that gap. For most people with vulvas, clitoral stimulation is necessary to orgasm. In introducing toys like vibrators, those with vulvas are given a greater chance at climaxing.
It opens up a dialogue about desire
While we tend to think of sex toys as dildos and vibrators, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. From cock rings to anal toys to nipple clamps to the kinkiest BDSM toys that surpass your wildest imagination, there’s a sex toy out there for everyone. Sex toys are a multi-billion-dollar market that’s going to continue to grow — not just in financial gains but also in innovation.
Having so many types of sex toys to choose from gives you and your partner the chance to talk about your sexual interests in ways you might not have in the past. Both you and your partner may have fantasies that you were too shy to bring up, but adding toys to your sex life can open up a conversation about specific desires. According to a two-year-long study published in 2018 by Kinsey Institute’s Dr. Justin J. Lehmiller, 97% to 98% of U.S. adults report having sexual fantasies. With those numbers, there’s a very good chance that you and your partner have some fantasies you just might want to share with each other.
It allows for more sexual exploration
Like a lot of things in life, sex toys tend to get grouped into gender stereotypes — like thinking vibrators are only for those with vulvas, and butt plugs are only for those with penises — but it’s time to see past that. Vibrators shouldn’t be limited to clitorises. Instead, they should be viewed for the multi-purpose stimulators that they are. The sensation that vibrators provide is just as enjoyable on the perineum (that space between scrotum or vulva and the anus) as it is on the clitoris, nipples, or other erogenous zones.
Whether you’re masturbating alone or engaging in sex acts with your partner, sex toys can radically expand how you think about sex and sexual pleasure. Half the fun is the exploration. It’s always important to keep in mind that sex is an umbrella term for a whole universe of sex-related acts and avenues toward sexual pleasure.
It’s a good way to stay on top of your wellness together
We’ve finally reached a point in our culture where we realize that sex, in all its forms, isn’t strictly about pleasure, but also about mental and physical health. While orgasms may feel amazing, what they do for the body and mind is even more astonishing in regard to overall wellness — so much so that people are making masturbation part of their self-care routine.
“In the past, people tended to focus on one area of human wellbeing. But the dialogue has changed. We have a more holistic view,” CMO of luxury sex toy brand Lelo, Luka Matutinovic tells Wired. “We now know that sex is one of the key ingredients. Orgasms give us serotonin and dopamine, which also boosts the immune system. It’s part of our whole wellbeing.”
When you and your partner bring sex toys into the bedroom, it’s not just a sign of wanting to experience pleasure together, but to partake in keeping your wellness in check together too. Caring for each other’s health in such a way strengthens intimate bonds and you both reap the emotional and physical benefits of it.
It creates a deeper appreciation for the human body
The human body is amazing. Not to get all existentialist about it, but the form of the body is, and all its pieces, an extraordinary work of art that we often take for granted. When we make time to understand our own bodies, as well as the bodies of our partners, we learn to appreciate every aspect of it — not just the genitals, but the whole package. Sexuality and sexual pleasure reside on a very long spectrum, and this looks and feels different for everyone. Getting to know what you enjoy, what your partner gets off on, and how you can bring those sensations and feelings together creates a deeper appreciation of the body. It opens our minds to the complicated fragility of what it means to be human, as well as a sexual being.
Even if you think you’ve mastered the understanding of your body and your partner’s body, there’s always more to learn. Sexuality and sexual pleasure ride that spectrum up and down over our entire lifetimes, so nothing is ever set in stone. Welcoming sex toys into your sex life won’t just make you and your partner better lovers, but better friends because of the conversations that will emerge from throwing, say, a double-ended dildo into the mix. Now that’s a chat that’s going to open up a lot of potential for exploration and experimentation.
— Teens weigh in on evolving definitions — and habits
By JOCELYN GECKER
Situationships. “Sneaky links.” The “talking stage,” the flirtatious getting-to-know-you phase — typically done via text — that can lead to a hookup.
High school students are having less sexual intercourse. That’s what the studies say. But that doesn’t mean they’re having less sex.
The language of young love and lust, and the actions behind it, are evolving. And the shift is not being adequately captured in national studies, experts say.
For years, studies have shown a decline in the rates of American high school students having sex. That trend continued, not surprisingly, in the first years of the pandemic, according to a recent survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study found that 30% of teens in 2021 said they had ever had sex, down from 38% in 2019 and a huge drop from three decades ago, when more than half of teens reported having sex.
The Associated Press took the findings to teenagers and experts around the country to ask for their interpretation. Parents: Some of the answers may surprise you.
THE MEANING OF SEX: DEPENDS WHO YOU ASK
For starters, what is the definition of sex?
“Hmm. That’s a good question,” says Rose, 17, a junior at a New England high school.
She thought about it for 20 seconds, then listed a range of possibilities for heterosexual sex, oral sex and relations between same-sex or LGBTQ partners. On her campus, short-term hookups — known as “situationships” — are typically low commitment and high risk from both health and emotional perspectives.
There are also “sneaky links” — when you hook up in secret and don’t tell your friends. “I have a feeling a lot more people are quote unquote having sex — just not necessarily between a man and a woman.”
For teens today, the conversation about sexuality is moving from a binary situation to a spectrum and so are the kinds of sex people are having. And while the vocabulary around sex is shifting, the main question on the CDC survey has been worded the same way since the government agency began its biannual study in 1991: Have you “ever had sexual intercourse?”
“Honestly, that question is a little laughable,” says Kay, 18, who identifies as queer and attends a public high school near Lansing, Michigan. “There’s probably a lot of teenagers who are like, ‘No, I’ve never had sexual intercourse, but I’ve had other kinds of sex.’”
The AP agreed to use teenagers’ first or middle names for this article because of a common concern they expressed about backlash at school, at home and on social media for speaking about their peers’ sex lives and LGBTQ+ relations.
SEXUAL IDENTITY IS EVOLVING
Several experts say the CDC findings could signal a shift in how teen sexuality is evolving, with gender fluidity becoming more common along with a decrease in stigma about identifying as not heterosexual.
They point to another finding in this year’s study that found the proportion of high school kids who identify as heterosexual dropped to about 75%, down from about 89% in 2015, when the CDC began asking about sexual orientation. Meanwhile, the share who identified as lesbian, gay or bisexual rose to 15%, up from 8% in 2015.
“I just wonder, if youth were in the room when the questions were being created, how they would be worded differently,” said Taryn Gal, executive director of the Michigan Organization on Adolescent Sexual Health.
Sex is just one of the topics covered by the CDC study, called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. One of the main sources of national data about high school students on a range of behaviors, it is conducted every two years and asks about 100 questions on topics including smoking, drinking, drug use, bullying, carrying guns and sex. More than 17,000 students at 152 public and private high schools across the country responded to the 2021 survey.
“It’s a fine line we have to try to walk,” says Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which leads the study.
From a methodological standpoint, changing a question would make it harder to compare trends over time. The goal is to take a national snapshot of teenage behavior, with the understanding that questions might not capture all the nuance. “It doesn’t allow us to go as in depth in some areas as we would like,” Ethier says.
The national survey, for example, does not ask about oral sex, which carries the risk of spreading sexually transmitted infections. As for “sexual intercourse,” Ethier says, “We try to use a term that we know young people understand, realizing that it may not encompass all the ways young people would define sex.”
IS LESS TEEN SEX GOOD NEWS?
Beyond semantics, there are a multitude of theories on why the reported rates of high school sex have steadily declined — and what it might say about American society.
“I imagine some parents are rejoicing and some are concerned, and I think there is probably good cause for both,” says Sharon Hoover, co-director of the National Center for School Mental Health at the University of Maryland. Health officials like to see trends that result in fewer teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.
“But what we don’t know is what this means for the trajectory of young people,” Hoover says.
This year’s decrease, the sharpest drop ever recorded, clearly had a lot to do with the pandemic, which kept kids isolated, cut off from friends and immersed in social media. Even when life started returning to normal, many kids felt uncomfortable with face-to-face interaction and found their skills in verbal communication had declined, Hoover said.
The survey was conducted in the fall of 2021, just as many K-12 students returned to in-person classrooms after a year of online school.
Several teens interviewed said that when schools reopened, they returned with intense social anxiety compounded by fears of catching COVID. That added a new layer to pre-pandemic concerns about sexual relations like getting pregnant or catching STIs.
“I remember thinking, ‘What if I get sick? What if I get a disease? What if I don’t have the people skills for this?’” said Kay, the 18-year-old from Michigan. “All those ‘what ifs’ definitely affected my personal relationships, and how I interacted with strangers or personal partners.”
Another fear is the prying eyes of parents, says college student Abby Tow, who wonders if helicopter parenting has played a role in what she calls the “baby-fication of our generation.” A senior at the University of Oklahoma, Tow knows students in college whose parents monitor their whereabouts using tracking apps.
“Parents would get push notifications when their students left dorms and returned home to dorms,” says Tow, 22, majoring in social work and gender studies.
Tow also notices a “general sense of disillusionment” in her generation. She cites statistics that fewer teenagers today are getting driver’s licenses. “I think,” she says, “there is a correlation between students being able to drive and students having sex.”
Another cause for declining sex rates could be easy access to online porn, experts say. By the age of 17, three-quarters of teenagers have viewed pornography online, with the average age of first exposure at 12, according to a report earlier this year by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit child advocacy group.
“Porn is becoming sex ed for young people,” says Justine Fonte, a New York-based sex education teacher. She says pornography shapes and skews adolescent ideas about sexual acts, power and intimacy. “You can rewind, fast forward, play as much as you want. It doesn’t require you to think about how the person is feeling.”
IS THERE AN EVOLVING DEFINITION OF CONSENT?
Several experts said they hoped the decline could be partly attributed to a broader understanding of consent and an increase in “comprehensive” sex education being taught in many schools, which has become a target in ongoing culture wars.
Unlike abstinence-only programs, the lessons include discussion on understanding healthy relationships, gender identity, sexual orientation and preventing unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Contrary to what critics think, she said, young people are more likely to delay the onset of sexual activity if they have access to sex education.
Some schools and organizations supplement sex education with peer counseling, where teens are trained to speak to each other about relationships and other topics that young people might feel uncomfortable raising with adults.
Annika, 14, is a peer ambassador trained by Planned Parenthood and a high school freshman in Southern California. She’s offered guidance to friends in toxic relationships and worries about the ubiquity of porn among her peers, especially male friends. It’s clear to her that the pandemic stunted sex lives.
The CDC’s 2023 survey, which is currently underway, will show if the decline was temporary. Annika suspects it will show a spike. In her school, at least, students seem to be making up for lost time.
“People lost those two years so they’re craving it more,” she said. She has often been in a school bathroom where couples in stalls next to her are engaged in sexual activities.
Again, the definition of sex? “Any sexual act,” Annika says. “And sexual intercourse is one type of act.”
To get a truly accurate reading of teen sexuality, the evolution of language needs to be taken into account, says Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University professor who specializes in adolescent sexuality.
“The word intercourse used to have another meaning,” he points out. “Intercourse used to just mean talking.”
At the entrance to the Kinsey Institute, at Indiana University, there’s a plaque with a famous quote from its founder, Alfred C. Kinsey: “We are the recorders and reporters of facts — not the judges of the behaviors we describe.”
That ethos is at the heart of all the institute’s research.
For generations, the Kinsey Institute has shined a light on diverse aspects of sex and sexuality, in pursuit of answers that bring us closer to understanding fundamental questions of human existence. In a time of divisive politics and disinformation, it is more imperative than ever to preserve and defend the right of such academic institutions to illuminate the unfolding frontiers of science — even, and especially, research that might challenge us as it advances our understanding of ourselves.
Thus it is tremendously disappointing that Indiana lawmakers voted late last month to approve a budget that specifically blocks Indiana University from using state funding to support the Kinsey Institute, and that last week Gov. Eric Holcomb signed it into state law. This is an unprecedented action that takes aim at the very foundation of academic freedom.
The Kinsey Institute, where I serve as the executive director and a senior scientist, is the leading sex research institute in the world. We publish dozens of scientific and academic articles each year, across multiple disciplines. Our faculty are internationally renowned biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, health scientists and demographers. We house the world’s largest library and research collection of sexuality-related materials, and scholars from across the globe visit us to study these materials and to train in our research theories and methods.
Our unbiased, apolitical, scientific approach to human sexuality makes the Kinsey Institute unique. It is also what makes the work we do so controversial.
Since its founding in 1947, the institute has been the target of disinformation and attacks. The original “Kinsey reports” (“Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” in 1948, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953) drew data from the most thorough sexological study ever conducted. Both books were instant bestsellers, and Kinsey went from scientist to celebrity.
Yet the reports were also met with shock and moral panic — especially following the second volume, which documented the real sexual lives of America’s wives, sisters, mothers and daughters. So much controversy ensued that the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its sex research funding for the institute in 1954
In 1950, a U.S. customs officer seized a shipment of sexually explicit images and other materials being mailed to the institute’s research collection on the basis of their being “obscene.” The federal court case that followed, United States v. 31 Photographs, resulted in a historic ruling in favor of the institute’s right to collect materials and data for sex research, which has profoundly shaped our understanding of academic freedom from censorship.
Another wave of attacks came in the 1980s, whipped up by conspiracy theories that Kinsey’s research had unleashed the sexual revolution and, with it, a moral decay on America.
As Kinsey wrote in 1956: “It is incomprehensible that we should know so little about such an important subject as sex, unless you realize the multiplicity of forces which have operated to dissuade the scientist, to intimidate the scientist, and to force him to cease research in these areas.”
Yet, Kinsey and his researchers persisted. And three-quarters of a century after the institute’s founding, the contribution of sex research to our understanding of sexuality, relationships and well-being is clear.
We know that one of the biggest predictors of relationship satisfaction is sexual satisfaction, and that one’s sex life affects the trajectory of relationships and marriages. That comprehensive sex education, including understanding consent and identifying interpersonal abuse, is associated with positive psychological and health outcomes — from prevention of unintended pregnancy to protecting against sexually transmitted infections.
We also know many questions still need to be answered. The complex associations between sexual activity and fertility outcomes. The long-term effects of covid-19 on people’s relationships and sexual lives. How the loneliness epidemic is affecting mental health across demographics. How new social technologies are changing the concept of intimacy and redefining sexual behavior. Why 1 in 4 women in the United States still experience attempted or completed rape.
Given these major unknowns, why do attacks on our research continue? The state representative who first proposed this recent legislation parroted false allegations of sexual predation in the institute’s historical research and ongoing work, which the institute, the university and outside experts have repeatedly refuted. Indiana state Rep. Matt Pierce described these conspiracy theories as “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back.” The legislature still acted on this disturbing, easily debunked misinformation.
Indiana is not alone. Across the country, legislation is being passed that affects millions of lives, restricting reproductive health care, discussions of gender identity and basic sex education. The people passing this legislation are fundamentally failing to leverage scientific evidence as a guide through these complex issues
I am optimistic that this latest culture war will pass. And the Kinsey Institute will carry on. While this recently passed legislation stings, the majority of the institute’s funding comes from outside the university, from research grants and contracts, as well as philanthropic donations. But I worry what the future will look like, for our institute and others — and for the students and researchers who rely on us — should state legislatures continue to act on misinformation around sexuality.
Some years ago, an Indiana University alum shared with me why the Kinsey Institute was so important to him. He was a gay man in his late 60s, and he recalled how as a student in the 1970s he was struggling to come to terms with his sexuality. At times, he felt so confused and isolated, he wasn’t sure he would ever find his way through that dark time. He was too afraid, he told me, to set foot inside the Kinsey Institute back then, but “just knowing it existed, that someone was out there searching for answers, saved my life.”
His words took on new resonance last week. I think about this story often, and I’m reminded what’s at stake when we limit the right to even ask questions.
Having sex is healthy. Most experts also agree that it’s beneficial to couples — it’s basic human nature! Plus, who doesn’t want to see their partners enjoy sex? It’s easy to navigate your way while getting it on in the bedroom. However, communicating with your partner to find out what she likes in bed is easier — just ask her!
If you’re not sure which questions to ask to find out what she likes in bed, we got you! Here are 10 ways to find out what she likes in bed (not necessarily in order):
Ask your partner these questions to find out what she likes in bed:
1. “How do you like to be kissed?
Sex or no sex, kissing is an intimate act — not only can it oftentimes be a wholesome act, but it’s also a great way to show your emotional and physical admiration for her. But what’s important to know is how she even wants to be kissed in the first place.
Asking her how she likes to be kissed may not sound that important, but you can find out what she likes in bed by getting to the details of how she likes kissing and being kissed — how much tongue does she like? Does she enjoy her lower lip lightly bitten or sucked? What’s her preferred pace?https://www.laweekly.com/how-to-find-out-what-she-likes-in-bed/
Moreover, even though kissing is commonly done, some women don’t like being kissed at all! If she’s one of those people, respect her preference — it’s probably not because of you. But if it is you, then this question is even more relevant to ask — because you’ll find out how you can improve your kissing game.
2. “Do you like to give oral sex?”
To some women, going down on their partner can be intimidating — because not a lot of them are confident with their fellatio skills. If this is the case, you can reassure her or teach her how you prefer receiving oral sex. But if she’s just not into it, that’s her decision to make.
But if she does like giving oral sex, then, well…it’s a win-win for you two!
3. “Do you like being on the receiving end of oral sex?”
Again, oral sex — some women like giving it, some women like receiving one, and some just don’t! One reason a woman doesn’t like receiving oral sex is because they’re insecure about the “odor” that they think they have down there. If this is her reason for having an aversion to cunnilingus, let her know that the vagina isn’t meant to smell like roses — and there will be a certain scent that shouldn’t be considered “foul!” Unless, of course, she has an infection — if so, that should be treated right away!
Another reason for a woman not wanting to be on the receiving end of oral sex is it simply just doesn’t do anything for them — some might even feel that their clitoris can get “overstimulated.” On the other hand, if she doesn’t mind cunnilingus, then, there’s another act that can amp up your sex life!
4. “What makes you orgasm?”
Women climax to different triggers. Some like their nipples played with, some prefer clitoris massages, others need g-spot or cervix stimulation — other women also get off to anal sex. Regardless of which one it is, it’s important to find out what makes her orgasm. Isn’t that the ultimate goal anyway?
5. “How do you feel about having sex in public places?”
If you and your partner agree that public sex is a “yay,” and you guys plan on doing it, find out first the laws in which the sex act will be committed. Public sex is common and it’s typically done in planes (aka the mile-high club), cars, parks, and so on. It’s generally harmless when no one catches you in the act, but, in California, public sexual activity is an offense.
The California penal code 647(a) states that it’s a crime to “engage in or to solicit anyone to engage in lewd or dissolute conduct in any public place or in any place open to the public or exposed to public view,” Therefore, when engaging in public sex, you and your partner should be very careful. It’s also best that you’re aware of the possible repercussions if you get caught!
6. “Are you into threesomes or group sex?”
Group sex is a common sexual fantasy — and lots of folks also engage in one. If you or your partner is into threesomes or group sex, discuss first who and how you’ll get other people to join the ”party!” What will the situation be like? — MFM? MMF? FFM? FMF? Are you and your partner exclusive? Will it remain that way afterward? These are the few questions that you and your partner should discuss.
But if you’re not into threesomes, group sex, swinging, or polyamory, in general, you don’t have to engage in one! She also has to respect your decision, if so — and so should you with her decision, if she’s the one who refuses to participate in those aforementioned non-monogamous sex acts.
7. “Do you like using sex toys?”
Adult toys have made their way into countless women’s nightstands. But if your partner doesn’t own one, doesn’t plan on owning one, and she’s not open to being stimulated by one, then you can stick to — uhh — sticking your own junk inside instead.
On the other hand, if she does like sex toys, then sex can become even more exciting — because you’ll have a device (or two, or more!) to help you make her achieve an orgasm!
8. “What’s your favorite position?”
Sometimes, we have to go back to basics: a simple switch in position is enough to make a woman orgasm! You just have to find out what she likes in bed by asking what her favorite position is! Whether it’s eye contact from an intimate missionary position, or she likes to receive it from behind — for maximum cervix stimulation — there are creative ways to make her climax.
9. “Are you into sexting?”
Turning her on doesn’t always have to involve physical contact. Sometimes, sexting is enough to make her want you in the bedroom ASAP! But find out first if she’s into that. Furthermore, ask her how she feels about dick pics, sending her nudes, or if she also wants to send you some.
10. “Do you have preferred erotic acts, kinks, fetishes, or sexual fantasies?”
In essence, penetrative sex is the act of repeatedly thrusting the penis inside a woman’s orifice — be it the vagina or the anus. But most people don’t settle with just that! That’s why it’s practically normal to have sexual preferences, fantasies, kinks, and fetishes — even if it’s simple hair-pulling or spanking. Additionally, some are into, say, shower sex or dirty talk.
Some women also like being tied up or blindfolded — and other women prefer doing these to their partner instead. Regardless of what it is, she probably has one erotic act that she enjoys doing — or be done to her. Just like you!
Speaking of kinks…
However, some kinks, fantasies, or fetishes have to be thoroughly thought of before you and your partner perform them — some of them may be commonly done, and they sure as heck wouldn’t be common if they weren’t enjoyable to many, but there are possible dangers to some sex acts.
Here are common sex acts and kinks you can ask to find out what she likes in bed, and the potential consequences:
Age gap kink
Age gap kink, DDLG (Daddy Dom, Little Girl), or as the internet calls it: the daddy kink! Some women like to role-play that they’re being dominated by someone older than them — or someone who will simply just dominate them. But it also depends on her fantasies about how big the “age gap” will be and how sexually aggressive their “Daddy” will be. In some instances, it’s she who wants to role-play as the older person — or be called “Mommy” in some situations.
However, make sure that the age gap kink remains a kink or act of role-play — under no circumstances should either party involve an actual minor! According to Searah Deysach, a sex educator based in Chicago, in her interview with Insider (regarding the age gap kink), “It’s important to note that an age gap kink involves consenting adults (not children) pretending to be younger than they really are,”
Role-playing as a minor (whether it’s her or if she asks that it be you) isn’t necessarily a “red flag,” but the actual involvement of a minor is a serious, serious crime that can inevitably land you both in jail!
Foot fetish
Foot fetish involves performing sexual acts using the feet. But sometimes, the feet are the “main event.” Some women like her feet adored, and some like her feet tickled, licked, or stimulated. Now, a foot fetish is far from dangerous. If she has this fetish, and you’re willing to give it a go, just make sure that you guys are licking each other’s clean feet! It harbors tons of bacteria!
Choking
Choking, erotic asphyxiation, or breath play seems to be another trending topic or widely-discussed kink on the internet. It involves cutting off the oxygen supply to the brain — which enhances sexual excitement. This can be a safe sexual act if you know how to properly perform it. If she’s into choking, and you’re willing to perform it on her, do your research first on how to properly sexually choke someone!
The United States National Library of Medicine published a journal and they estimate that 200 to 1,000 people die from erotic asphyxiation every year. Therefore, we cannot stress it enough: do your research first!
BDSM
You can say that BDSM is one of the few all-time favorite kinks! That’s why if she’s into BDSM, or Bondage, Discipline (or Domination), Sadism, Masochism, you shouldn’t be too surprised! Lots of sexual acts fall under the BDSM category. Therefore, there isn’t a single act to define what it is — or what she would want you guys to do.
However, again, BDSM is supposed to involve non-dangerous or non-permanent ways of inflicting mild to moderate pain or discomfort for erotic purposes. Thus, one should be very careful when performing BDSM with your partner. Have a safe word!
All in All,
The best way to find out what she likes in bed ultimately boils down to one thing: communication. Whether she’s your wife, girlfriend, or FWB, it’s important to find out what she likes in bed — so you guys can make the most out of your experience and both of you achieve la petite mort! Because neither of you deserves an uncomfortable one — and definitely not a risky one!
— By focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote.
By Robert Reich
The Republican Party, once a proud proponent of limited government, has become a font of government intrusion into the most intimate aspects of personal and family life.
Last Friday, a judge who previously worked for a conservative Republican legal organization and was then nominated to the bench by Trump and pushed through the Senate by Mitch McConnell, invalidated the FDA’s approval of a 23-year-old abortion pill (mifepristone) used in over half of pregnancy terminations in the United States.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the Dobbs case (in which Republican appointees on the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade), Republican states are criminalizing abortion. Some are criminalizing the act of helping women obtain an abortion in another state. Texas gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion. Idaho just passed an “abortion trafficking” law that would make helping a minor leave Idaho to get an abortion without parental consent punishable by five years in prison. Tennessee Republicans have made it illegal to mail medical abortion pills. In the last Congress, 167 House Republicans co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, conferring full personhood rights on fertilized eggs.
At the same time, Republican lawmakers want to make it more difficult for couples to buy contraceptives. Sixteen Republican-dominated state legislatures already bar abortion clinics from receiving public contraception funds.
So far, at least 11 Republican states have enacted laws restricting or banning gender-affirming care for minors, even if parents approve. Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has ordered state child welfare officials to launch child abuse investigations into reports of transgender kids receiving such care. Republican lawmakers are also pushing teachers to refer to students by their gender assigned at birth. Many are restricting which bathrooms trans students can use.
Republican states are also limiting discussions of gender and sexuality in classrooms. Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill banning public school teachers in kindergarten through third grade from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity, calling it an “anti-grooming bill” and accusing opponents of wanting to groom young children for sexual exploitation.
Republican lawmakers are also putting obstacles in the way of same-sex marriage and are considering appeals to the Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. Texas’s Republican attorney general says he’d “feel comfortable defending a law that once again outlawed sodomy” in the wake of Dobbs.
Oh, and Republicans now routinely accuse political opponents of favoring child pornography. In her confirmation hearings, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was barraged with questions from Republican senators about her alleged lenient treatment of child pornographers. (In four days of hearings, the phrase “child porn” or “pornography” or “pornographer” was mentioned 165 times, along with 142 mentions of “sex” or related terms like “sexual abuse” or “sex crimes.”)
Three Reasons Why Republican Lawmakers Are Obsessing about Sex
First, by focusing on sex, Republicans can court both the evangelical right and the right-wing extreme QAnon vote (with its loony “Pizzagate” conspiracy claim that Democrats are pedophiles).
Second, by focusing on sex, Republican lawmakers don’t have to talk nonstop about Trump. They don’t have to discuss his indictment or other pending cases against him. They don’t have to say whether they agree with his vitriolic diatribes against other Republicans (DeSantis, McConnell, and any other Republican who criticizes him). They don’t have to defend his bonkers positions (on Ukraine, NATO, George Soros, immigrants, and all else).
Finally, creating a culture war over sex allows Republicans to sound faux populist without having to address the practical problems faced by most Americans — lack of paid sick leave, unaffordable child care and elder care, stagnant wages, and inadequate housing. And by focusing on sex, they believe they can ignore the sources of populist anger — corporate profiteering and price gouging, monopolization, union busting, soaring CEO pay, and billionaires who pay a lower tax rate than the average worker (courtesy, in part, of the 2017 Republican tax cut for the wealthy).
But the Republican obsession about sex is backfiring on them, as we saw in the 2022 midterms and again in last week’s elections in Wisconsin and Chicago. It’s drawing a contrast between the two parties that pits the GOP against the vast majority of voters.
It’s becoming increasingly apparent to Americans that while Democrats want to make life easier for average working people and end corporate abuses of economic power, Republicans want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives.
Impact play is an umbrella term for all things sexual involving hitting or being hit with an object in a safe and consensual way. Impact play “can [involve] hitting, punching, or slapping, but you can also get creative like [being] pummeled with fists, alternating different strokes or slaps,” explains Lucy Rowett, a certified sex coach and clinical sexologist. You can also use equipment other than your hands, such as paddles, whips, floggers, or something you find around the house.
Is your interest piqued? Would you say that chains and whips excite you? (Sorry.)
Impact play is one of the cornerstone practices in the BDSM community. But it’s not just for dungeons. Impact play can be used by anyone. The key is doing it safely.
Impact play encompasses getting hit with things, or hitting a partner with objects, as a way to heighten sexual arousal and up the ante on Dom/sub power dynamics.
Misinformation about BDSM and impact play, among other kink practices, is rife on TikTok. It’s important, therefore, to get your kink education from reputable sources. Mashable spoke to kink educators about impact play to get the lowdown on how to practice it safely.
If you’re interested in learning how to be an expert with a whip, flogger, or crop, or just feel like that booty deserves a (very consensual) hiding, look no further. Let’s immerse ourselves into the seductive universe of impact play and all that it involves.
What is impact play?
If it’s not clear by now, impact play is using objects (or hands, etc.) to hit or be hit. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It might sound pretty straightforward, but impact play is nothing short of an art (when done correctly and safely).
This modality within the BDSM community offers a Dominant and submissive partner the chance to explore tactile sensation, pain play, and physical endurance. Plus, it just feels really, really good.
Here are some examples of impact play:
Flogging.
Paddling.
Caning.
Spanking (with hands or tools).
Using a crop.
There are plenty more ways to enthusiastically smack someone around. You can get really creative with it.
The importance of safety and consent.
There is absolutely nothing more important in impact play (and all play) than safety and consent. Each scene that involves impact play needs to be highly negotiated between partners. We’re talking about literally hitting people with objects.
Sure, it’s fun, but it is NO joke. Dr. Celina Criss, a certified sex coach specializing in BDSM and GSRD, explainsL “BDSM players of any type need to understand the risks inherent to the play they want to engage in: physical, mental, and emotional.” “Experienced players have typically studied their activity of choice, the anatomy involved, first aid care for when things go wrong, and are practiced in communicating throughout the play.”
Communication is so, so key. “Don’t ever attempt to start hitting or striking your partner during play or during sex without communicating beforehand, it can put them into a threat response,” Rowett says. This can be highly traumatic. Sorry to have to say this to y’all, but hitting someone without their consent is straight up domestic violence.
Don’t rush into this kind of play.
The safety and consent checklist:
Do your homework. You need to know which parts of the body are safe to hit and which aren’t.
Practice makes perfect. Both partners need to be fully aware of the risks involved in their chosen activities as well as the skill needed to perform them well.
Thoroughly discuss the scene: What are your boundaries? Do you have a safe word? What tools will you be using?
Have an aftercare plan in place to ensure both partners have time and space to emotionally “come down.”
Check in regularly throughout the scene to be sure everyone is enjoying themselves.
Things to avoid during impact play.
“There are no prizes for being the kinkiest or toughest player in the dungeon, especially if you’re just starting out,” Criss says. Don’t rush into this kind of play. You need to have patience, go slowly, and be willing to experiment. If you rush in, you might end up getting injured or injuring someone. This will lead you to miss out on a whole lot of fun.
You want to stay away from the lower back literally always. Hitting this area can cause kidney damage. The stomach is also a very sensitive area and should be avoided unless the impact is very light. You also want to stay away from any joints, the neck, or any injuries or body parts that experience chronic pain.
When in doubt: The squishy bits are best. Think: Booty, legs, breasts, and arms.
When in doubt: The squishy bits are best. Think: Booty, legs, breasts, and arms.
After figuring out the where, figure out the how. The kind of pressure and intensity you want to feel is key to enjoying the experience. Do you enjoy stingy, lighter sensations? Do you prefer a deeper, thuddier sensation? This might take some time, practice, and patience to figure out. Experimenting is totally OK as long as everyone is following the safety plan.
You’ll also want to chat through marks on your body. Are you OK with bruises? Definitely not down for that? Be open, thorough, and communicate.
How to get started.
First of all, if you’re a novice, the best place to start is with spanking, either using a hand, riding crop, or a ruler. You could also use a plastic spatula or a wooden spoon. We have so many great items available at home and we love that for us. “Go slow when you’re starting out,” Criss tells us. “Agree to try one or two things for a short period of time and debrief with your partner after: what worked, what didn’t, and what you’d like more of.” You want to co-create a foundation and then go from there.
Start with the butt. It’s meatier and you have less of a risk of bruising. Always check in with your partner and be sure they are comfortable and enjoying the experience. “Using a flat hand, get started with light spanking on the outer middle quadrant of the glute,” Chiaramonte explains. “Play with the intensity of how hard you (and your partner) can handle giving and receiving.”
If you decide you enjoy playing with impact, you can always invest in specialty gear. “A beginners BDSM kit may come with mini versions of things like paddles, floggers, and crops/canes,” Chiaramonte adds.
And don’t forget: COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE.
It makes sense why people would love this, from a neurobiological perspective. The same areas of the brain light up when you feel pain as when you feel pleasure. Our nervous systems are incredibly intricate. When we feel pain, our central nervous system releases endorphins. These hormones are designed to stop pain. When we experience this rush of endorphins, it can lead to pleasure, causing a dizzying euphoria.
Some people are just really, really into pain. People who enjoy pain for sexual pleasure are called masochists – and they make up the “M” in BDSM. “Aside from the sensation, [impact play] is a magnificent tool to reinforce kinks/BDSM dynamics like dom/sub as tools for ‘punishment’ or ‘reward,” says Julieta Chiaramonte, a kink instructor, writer, and sex expert.
There is a caveat here that we need to clarify: Not all impact play is pain play.
Words like spanking, flogging, or caning “might sound violent, but they don’t have to be,” says Criss. “Players will vary their strikes to achieve the desired effect, ranging from soft and gentle to firm to stingy.” Some people enjoy an impact that gives them deep sensation without going into the realm of pain. They are into the tactile sensation and the power dynamics. However you enjoy your impact, it’s totally valid.
OK, kinksters! Are you feeling prepared to get your spank on? Go forth and prosper!
Get out the whips, chains, and leather corsets, because we are getting down and dirty with BDSM today. For kink newbies, BDSM might seem intimidating, which makes complete sense—it’s a practice that can include a lot of high intensity activities. But don’t worry, it really is an accessible kink that can be practiced safely, provided you and your partners know your stuff. Which, hi, is where we come in.
There’s obviously a lot of stuff on the internet about kink, but a no-frills guide for beginners is hard to come by. If you’ve been wanting to get into BDSM but don’t know where to start, you’ve come to the right place.
According to a 2017 study published in the research journal PLOS ONE, a lot of people are into kinky sex. The study found that of the participants surveyed, about 20 percent said they have tied up a partner or been tied up during sex. About 15 percent said they have playfully whipped a partner or been playfully whipped as a part of sex play, and 33 percent reported they have spanked a partner or have been spanked during sex. So yeah, people are into this stuff big time.
“People like BDSM because it’s psychologically and physically thrilling, pleasurable, and fulfills needs, just like any typical sexual act would,” says Julieta Chiaramonte, a kink instructor and sex expert. “Why would you like [to have] orgasms? Well, because they feel good! Same goes for BDSM.”
But for all the hype, it’s important to be aware that BDSM needs to be practiced with extreme caution—especially for beginners. This kink comes with risks, and understanding them (and how to mitigate them) is fundamental to engaging in play that is safe, fun, and consensual.
So, without further ado, here is everything you need to know about BDSM as a beginner. We’ve all gotta start somewhere, so congrats on starting here.
What Is BDSM?
BDSM is a specific kind of play that falls under the broader umbrella term of kink. Kink can involve a much larger range of activities, whereas BDSM focuses specifically on dynamics within Bondage/Discipline, Dominance/submission, and Sadism/Masochism—which, you guessed it, is what BDSM stands for.
“BDSM encompasses a wide variety of practices involving intentional play with power dynamics and intense sensations,” says Celina Criss, PhD, a certified sex coach specializing in BDSM and GSRD (Gender, Sexual and Relationship Diversity). “It is often understood to include role play, fetish, and other practices that aren’t considered ‘typical.’”
BDSM can be physical, emotional, and psychological. Play can include sex, but it doesn’t have to include sex.
What Does BDSM Play Look Like?
BDSM relationships involve a Dominant partner(s) and submissive partner(s). This is known as a D/s relationship. The sub willingly and consensually gives up power to the Dom during the play (often referred to as a “scene”). Scenes are co-created between the Dom and sub, and can include a wide variety of different acts.
BDSM play can look like:
Spanking/Impact play: Using implements and hands to spank/whip/flog your partner.
Bondage: The use of ropes, cuffs, and other restraints.
Discipline: Where the Dom disciplines the sub.
Humiliation: Using certain words or behaviors to consensually degrade the sub.
Worship: Where the sub engages in worship of their Dom.
Sensory play: Engaging or restricting the senses to intensify arousal.
Various role play dynamics (Caregiver/little, Pet Owner/pet, Master/slave, etc.)
…And much, much more. BDSM play can really include anything within the realm of consensual power exchange, and that’s what makes it so thrilling.
Why Are People Into BDSM?
At its core, BDSM is all about the giving and receiving of control. When we engage in high-intensity activities like pain-play and bondage, our brains release chemicals likedopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, and cortisol. The rush can be euphoric, explains sexologist Ness Cooper, a sex and relationships therapist.
Adrenaline is the hormone released when our bodies experience a “fight or flight” response. This happens when our brains and bodies perceive that we are in danger. “Pain and pleasure are closely related and processed in the same parts of the brain, meaning that those [who are] into receiving consensual pain can feel pleasure from these BDSM acts,” Cooper says. (Studies confirm this, BTW.)
That said, BDSM is about more than just spankings, chains, and pleasure by way of pain. A large part of its appeal can actually be, dare we say, downright wholesome?
“BDSM is about playfulness, expression, and exploration,” Criss says. It’s an “opportunity to explore your desires and embrace parts of yourself that might not have another socially accepted outlet.” BDSM play offers a place for us to explore our most taboo desires. It’s a safe space to enjoy our sexuality and release shame, which can be liberating on multiple levels.
Emotionally, engaging in these activities can also foster intimacy between partners, as there’s a huge amount of vulnerability and trust involved in the consensual exchange of control.
Breaking Down the Misconceptions About BDSM
It’s no secret that we live in a pretty sex-negative culture. We constantly receive messages that sex is dirty and bad. And when it comes to sex that falls outside of the socially prescribed, exhaustingly heteronormative framework—well, let’s just say there’s an actual eff-load of misinformation to weed through.
Let’s unpack some of the misunderstandings that people have about BDSM, because being armed with (actually useful!) information can make play much more accessible, pleasurable, and less intimidating.
Only traumatized people are into BDSM
Allow us to be very clear: There is nothing wrong with you if you want to try BDSM. According to a 2008 study, those who engage in this kind of play are no more “depraved” or psychologically “damaged” than anyone else. “The notion that only traumatized people like BDSM is harmful,” Chiaramonte says. “BDSM is a very normal human behavior.” Kink is fun, lots of people enjoy it. It’s simply not that deep.
BDSM is domestic abuse/intimate partner violence
God, this one gets thrown around so much it is truly unreal. BDSM is all about consent, boundaries, and positive intent—sooo, pretty much the exact opposite of abuse.
“Partners negotiate their boundaries and agree to what they are going to do before they do it,” Criss explains. While accidents may happen (because, hello, we’re all humans capable of making mistakes), there is no intent to cause harm or injury to a partner in BDSM.
“Responsible partners have safety protocols in place to prevent this from happening before, during, [and] after any scene,” says Criss. “This means they know what they’re doing and [are aware of] the risks involved. They’ve practiced, learned about anatomy and physiology, keep their first-aid skills up to date, use safe words, and know what sort of aftercare their partner needs.”
You must like pain to enjoy BDSM
“Almost all BDSM can be modified to be done without experiencing any pain at all,” says Chiaramonte. BDSM is about power play dynamics. While pain can be a part of it, it really doesn’t have to be. For example, you might enjoy being blindfolded and having a feather run all over your body by your Dom. It’s not painful, but it’s still BDSM.
What’s more, Criss says that pain isn’t a useful metric in BDSM, and that most practitioners don’t even measure sensation this way. Rather, intensity is a more accurate way of thinking about the BDSM experience. That intense sensation “could be thuddy, stingy, or even feather-light,” says Criss.
BDSM is a fetish
BDSM refers to a variety of sex acts and practices that fall under the broader kink umbrella. A fetish is a specific act or object that a fetishist must engage with during sex in order to be aroused or reach peak arousal state. You might have a fetish for a specific act that falls under the category of BDSM (such as spanking or bondage), but BDSM is a wider range of behaviors, not a fetish in and of itself.
How to Have a Conversation With Your Partner About Wanting to Try BDSM
These conversations can be emotionally fraught and intimidating, but have no fear! Introducing the idea of kink to a partner does not have to be scary. Obviously, how you initiate this convo will depend on your relationship and how comfortable you and your partner(s) are with talking about sex, but here are some general guidelines that should help things go smoothly.
First of all, you’re going to want to have this conversation in a neutral, non-sexual place. This isn’t something you should spring on someone in the middle of sex, or even during foreplay, as your partner may feel pressured. Rather, opt for a time when you’re both relaxed, maybe while lounging at home watching TV or enjoying a nice dinner together.
Chiaramonte says to approach BDSM as a point of interest, something you can unpack together, conversationally. “Something along the lines of ‘I saw/heard of this, and it sounds interesting. I would love to try it. Can we talk about it?’” she suggests.
Encourage your partner to bring their fantasies to the table, too. “An essential part of BDSM is being able to have neutral and honest conversations around our desires,” says Chiaramonte.
Also! It’s okay to acknowledge that these conversations can be a little awkward—and doing so might actually help relieve some of that uncomfy-ness.
How to Start Practicing BDSM as a Beginner
So you’ve had the talk, and now it’s time to get into the good stuff. Here are some ways to start actually dipping those toes into the wide world of BDSM.
Do your research
If a certain BDSM act has piqued your interest, learn all you can about it. Being able to engage with play safely means expanding your knowledge of all it entails. “Curious about shibari and suspension bondage? Take a class! If you’re interested in Florentine flogging, find someone who does this and ask them to show you how,” Criss says. “Learn about the body. Anatomy, physiology, and first aid are essential to make sure you don’t hurt your partner.”
Communicate, communicate, communicate
BDSM can be quite complex and risky, which means every scene needs to be thoroughly negotiated and talked through with partners. “You need to know your own boundaries and respect your partner’s boundaries,” Criss says. This means that we need to be aware of everyone’s limits and work within their confines for the duration of play.
Go shopping for some goodies
Shopping for sex toys together can help you and your partner(s) explore and discuss certain acts or scenes you might be interested in trying out in a fun, lower-pressure environment, says Cooper. It’s a chance to co-create an erotic adventure with your partner, one that can make a potentially intimidating experience feel more playful.
Live by the RACK
In the BDSM world, RACK, which stands for Risk Aware Consensual Kink, is king. “In short, this structure explains that safe kink can only be practiced with consent, education, and understanding [of] the risks,” says Chiaramonte. The idea of RACK is not to eliminate all risks (that’s not possible, FYI), but to ensure all parties involved in a particular sex act are aware of the risks and give their informed consent to engage.
Choose a safe word
Safe words are non-sexual words that indicate a boundary has been reached during play. If you’re new to BDSM, you might not know a boundary until you come into contact with it, so it’s important to make communicating those boundaries as easy as possible. “An easy-to-use word can let your play partner know that you’ve reached your limit and need a break from that particular form of erotic play,” says Cooper.
A traffic light system (“red” = stop; “yellow” = proceed with caution; “green” = go), is a common and convenient safe-word option. Some other examples that you can consider yours for the taking right this way.
Start slow
“A lot of people start with blindfolds, light bondage, or a little bit of spanking,” says Criss.<
Don’t dive right into the deep end with more extreme practices like breath play, rope play, or other forms of edge play. Many of these more advanced acts require a significant degree of skill and training to practice safely.
Find your people
You can learn a lot about kink by, well, connecting with other kinky people. You might be able to find local kink communities and educators near you to mingle with at events like a “Munch,” aka a casual gathering of kinksters to talk and get to know one another. “BDSM practitioners tend to be into education and community. If there is a group near you, they’re probably hosting play parties, workshops, and mentoring newcomers,” says Criss.
Practice aftercare
BDSM can involve a lot of intense emotions, which means there can be a bit of a “crash” after play. Aftercare is the set of actions we engage in post-play to help everyone return to a state of equilibrium. It can “help ground you after a heady mix of feel-good hormones,” says Cooper
This can include kisses, cuddles, talking about the scene, having a shower together, or tending to bruises or scrapes. You and your partner should discuss the kind of aftercare both of you feel you need and be willing to accommodate those needs accordingly.
If this all seems like kind of a lot, that’s because it is! There is so much to know about BDSM, and getting informed is a crucial first step for anyone interested in exploring the kinkier side of the street. That said, it’s supposed to be fun, and learning and exploring all there is to learn and explore about BDSM is all part of that fun. Wherever you are in your BDSM journey, trust that there is a lot of fun to be had in your future. Go forth and get kinky, my friends.
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