— 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.
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A science of sexuality is still possible
— But not in the traditional sense
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.
My recent research continues the quest to make a science out of sexuality. Two opposing schools of thought currently divide the field: psychoanalysis and queer theory.
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.
Debates about how to study sexuality soon divided Freud’s circle of colleagues. In 1911, Alfred Adler broke away and turned psychoanalysis into social and cultural studies. Two years later, Carl Jung broke away and turned toward philosophical and existential questions.
At the time, Lou Andreas-Salomé, the first female psychoanalyst, did not believe either separation threatened the scientific status of psychoanalysis:
“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.
North American psychology
The quest to turn sexuality into a credible science survived Freud, especially in North America. Clinically trained psychologists in the post-Second World War era borrowed Freudian theories and employed traditional scientific methods to empirically test them.
Dismissing Freud’s exclusive interest in individual case studies, American and Canadian psychologists aimed to understand populations more widely. However, this shift led to seeing homosexuals as a separate social group, which ultimately gave rise to homophobia and conversion therapy.
In the United Kingdom, Freud’s daughter Anna promoted curing homosexuality even though her father had denounced similar practices.
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.
Sexuality nowadays
By the time Canada decriminalized homosexuality in 1969 — and the American Psychological Association unclassified it as a mental disorder four years later — sexuality studies had shied away from its psychological origins.
But biological explanations prevailed. Scientists wondered whether homosexuality ran in the family and hypothesized the existence of a gay gene and its relationship to natural selection.
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.
Queer theory rejected fixed collective identities and re-emphasized individual case studies the same way Freud had. Instead, queer theorists viewed sexuality as something more dynamic.
Queer theorists like Judith Butler emphasized the relationship between internal and external life. They highlighted how drag artists disrupt the way we assign gender on a daily basis.
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.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
Emily Morse Wants You to Think Seriously About an Open Relationship
By David Marchese
For nearly 20 years, Emily Morse has been publicly talking with people about sex. She has done it in intimate, small-group conversations with friends; she has done it on radio and TV and social media; and the sex therapist has done it, most prominently, on her popular “Sex With Emily” podcast. A lot of what she has talked about over the years hasn’t changed: People want to discuss why they’re not having orgasms or their insecurities about penis size or their changing libido. But lately she has noticed something different: There’s a growing desire for more information about open sexual relationships. Indeed, Morse was already late in submitting a draft to her publisher of her new book, “Smart Sex: How to Boost Your Sex IQ and Own Your Pleasure,” when she decided that she needed to add a section on nonmonogamy because she kept being asked about it. “People are realizing,” says Morse, who is 53, “that monogamy isn’t a one-size-fits-all model.”
Why do you think so many people are curious about nonmonogamy these days? People are in therapy more, taking care of themselves and thinking more deeply about their relationships. Now that’s part of the conversation; therapy is no longer stigmatized. That has been a big switch, and when couples get into their feelings and emotional intelligence, they’re realizing: We can love each other and be together, and we can create a relationship on our own terms that works for us. If you are in a long-term committed relationship, it can be exciting to experience sex in a new way that is equitable, consensual and pleasurable but doesn’t take away from the union of marriage.
A term I hear a lot now is “ethical nonmonogamy.”1
1
Broadly, it’s the practice of being romantically or sexually involved with multiple people who are all aware of and give consent to the arrangement.
My sense is that some couples experiment with that because one-half of a relationship feels that things have to open up or the relationship isn’t going to last. But in a situation like that, how ethical is the ethical nonmonogamy? That’s coercion. That’s manipulation. If you say to your partner, “We have to open up, or I’m leaving you” — I don’t feel great about the future of those couples. I can say that there usually is one partner who starts the nonmonogamy conversation. They might say, “I’ve been thinking about it, and our friends are doing it, and what would you think about being open?” They’ll talk about what it might look like and how they would navigate and negotiate it. But if one partner is like, “We should open up,” and the other is like, “I’m shut down to that; it doesn’t work for me,” and then the partner brings it up again and again and the answer is still “No,” then it won’t work. For a majority of people, their first thought is, I never want to hear about my partner having sex with somebody else; that is my biggest nightmare. That’s where most people are. So for nonmonogamy to work, you need to be self-aware and have self-knowledge about your sexual desires and do some work. Maybe we’ll talk to our friends who we know are into it. Maybe we’ll listen to a podcast about it. Maybe we’ll go to therapy. Maybe we’ll take baby steps and go to a play party.2
2
A party where people are free to engage in public sex or kinky behaviors.
But to do it to spice up your relationship is not the reason to do it. Do it because you’re open and curious and understand that your desire for pleasure extends beyond your relationship.
In the book, you say nonmonogamy is not a way to fix a relationship. Why not? The people in successful ethical nonmonogamous relationships have a very healthy relationship to their own sex life and their own intimacy, their own desires. People who are like, Yeah, let’s go find someone else to have sex with, to spice it up — usually those couples don’t have a deeper understanding of their own sex life and what they want from a partner. Another version of that is, “Let’s have a baby!” These drastic things that people do to make their relationship more interesting or to distract themselves from problems usually don’t work. Couples who are successful have rigorous honesty and a deeper knowledge of their own sexual wants and desires.
What about couples who stay together because their sex life is great but the rest of their relationship is bad? People who have great sex but they can’t stand each other? I think that’s rare. If they’re not connected in other areas and the sex is what’s carrying them, I would want to sit with that couple and find out more. Maybe the relationship is better than they think. But listen, people get to decide what works for them. To me, the most satisfying pleasurable sex is when you have trust and depth and openness and intimacy and communication. If you loathe your partner outside the bedroom? I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum; I’m sure that situation exists, but I don’t hear about it often.
It’s funny to hear you say you don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, because in my life — If that’s you, David, in your relationship, that’s awesome! I’m so glad for you and your partner.
No, no. What I was going to say was that I use that phrase with my kids. One will say to the other, “Why are you eating that Jell-O?” or whatever, and I’ll say, “Don’t yuck their yum.” It’s a very different context! Well, that’s a big sex thing, too: You never want to yuck your partner’s yum. This is what comes up with fantasies and arousal and desire. If your partner tells you they want to use a sex toy, and you’re like, “Ew,” it’s hard to recover from that. So don’t yuck the yum if you don’t like Jell-O and if you don’t like anal sex.
You said a second ago that the best sex is about communication and depth and so on, which goes along with ideas in your book about what you call the five pillars of sex IQ,3
3
Which are embodiment (meaning awareness of your self in your own body), health, collaboration (relating to and working with your sexual partners), self-knowledge and self-acceptance.
which are basically all things that also go into being a balanced, healthy person. Obviously sex ties into one’s overall sense of self and well-being, but is there any way in which making it as central as you do also makes it more daunting? Or sets people up for disappointment? Because maybe sometimes sex is just OK, or sometimes it’s disappointing, or sometimes it’s great. Does it always have to be a referendum on one’s holistic well-being? I want people to think deeply about sex, to prioritize sex, to be intentional about sex and to think about it differently than just, I’m going to close my eyes in the dark and hope it works out. The problem is that most people compartmentalize sex. It’s shrouded in mystery. Since it’s so mysterious, people don’t want to talk about it, and they don’t have a lot of information — there’s a lot of misinformation. People are surprised every day to learn that maybe they can’t get an erection because they haven’t been working out or because of the food they’re eating. We don’t want to talk about sex unless we get a quick fix. For many years, I was like: Here’s the vibrator! Here’s the sex position! Here’s a quick-fix tip! Tips are great, but because sex becomes such a problem in relationships, I want to give people the tools to say: “I wonder if it’s a problem because I haven’t communicated with my partner lately. Maybe that’s how I can have better sex tonight.” So understanding all the elements to it might help you have more satisfaction. Once people realize this is foundational work that’s going to help you for a lifetime, once it becomes more integrated, it’ll help everybody have more freeing, satisfying sex
What are examples of misinformation about sex? That the most pleasure comes from penetration; that men want sex more than women; that men don’t fake orgasms; that desire stays the same in long-term relationships; if there isn’t desire, it means your relationship should end; that if you don’t have penetrative sex, you’re not really having sex. There’s so many of them, and every day I get hundreds of questions from people who you would think would know better. I have friends who have three children, educated, who are like, “Is the g-spot thing real?”
Can I ask about the ring you’re wearing?
4
It was quite a large ring.
I realize it looks like a vulva.
It does. It’s a vintage ring. At the time I got it, I literally didn’t realize what it looked like until the next day. [Laughs.] But now it’s my magic vulva ring!
What’s the most far-out thing that everyone should be doing? And I don’t mean far-out as in kinkiest. I mean what’s the thing that people are prudish about but need to get over? I think it’s important to masturbate. Solo sex is a great way to understand your body, what feels good. Healthy masturbation is good for people of all ages, in and out of relationships — when you are intentional about it and it makes you feel good, not bad. You don’t want to have shame after. You want to be accepting of your body, feel more in touch with yourself, feel your sexual energy. You can start to understand what turns you on. You know and accept your genitals for how they are today, and you do it without consequences.
On the subject of masturbation: In the book you write about this technique of “Meditate, masturbate” — remind me of the third one? Manifest.
Right. So the idea is that I’m supposed to meditate. Then once I’m in the right head space, I can start masturbating. And at the moment of climax, if I think about the thing I want to happen in my life — “I hope I get that raise!” — then it’s more likely to happen? Yeah. I mean, manifestation is the science behind the law of attraction and all the things you think about when you are in a heightened state. So when you’re meditating, which, I don’t know if you meditate.
I do two out of the three M’s. Two out of three! You’re good! So you meditate for a few minutes, you get in the zone, then you masturbate, and at the height of orgasm, when your sexual energy is at a peak level and you’re at a clear state to transmute whatever you believe into the universe — it’s very potent, clear energy at that moment to think about and feel what it is that you want. It could be about a raise. It could be about a better day. I feel like this is so woo. I’m from California! [Laughs.] But at that moment of your orgasm, if in that moment you can feel what you want, picture it, it has powerful resonance.
But that’s magic. Magic is not real. [Expletive.] I know. I wish I could explain this better to you, the science behind it, but a lot of people have had a lot of success with this feeling. I just think that meditate, masturbate, manifest is basically a way of using your creative energy to fuel your intentions in the moment of pleasure.
What are you working on in your sex life right now? I’m always working on my sex. Research is me-search, as I say. I’m working on staying connected. I love to slow down sex and take time to experience one-way touch.
5
Which in this context means when only one of the partners is offering touch without the expectation that the other will reciprocate.
So having a night where it’s more about giving and receiving. Expanding connection and understanding what feels good is something I’m always working on.
Just to go back to the five pillars of sex IQ: It seems self-evident that if you get healthier, become more self-aware, collaborate more honestly and openly, and if you’re more comfortable in your own body and you accept yourself, you’re more likely to have better sex. So what is your unique insight there? That’s a great question, because, yeah, those are the five pillars for a better life. But if you have a better sex life, you have a better life. So my thing is that you need to take a more holistic approach to your sex life. People don’t realize that all of those things matter. I don’t think these are so groundbreaking. It’s more applying them to sex on a daily basis. What I’m hearing you say is, Don’t people know this? They don’t.
You’re a doctor of human sexuality. I don’t mean this in a glib way at all, but what is that? So, 20 years ago when I was starting this career — and I know the school isn’t there anymore. It’s a whole thing. But I’m fully open about this. I wanted to go back to school and get a degree in human sexuality. In 2003 when I started looking, there weren’t really many places to go, and I wanted to learn more about sex and education. One school was in San Francisco, called the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.6
6
The institute operated from the mid-1970s to 2018. In 2017, California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education denied its renewal application to continue operating educational programs. In its decision, the bureau did note that the institute’s faculty and graduates “have produced a well-respected body of research and scholarship.”
A few people I admired highly recommended this school to me. So I did that for three years: an intensive program of learning everything about human sexuality and writing papers and reading everything about sex. That’s where everyone at the time in this space was going to school. Now I think there are other programs. There are some places popping up that I think are a bit better, but not a ton. It’s kind of a newer path.
My understanding is that the school didn’t meet California’s standards for private higher education. I know. This is my nightmare. But you can write about this if you want. Here’s the thing: It was run for like 40, 50 years, but it didn’t meet the criteria to be accredited, which is not fun. I haven’t really been following it. But then I went and got other degrees — in somatic sex therapy, and I’ve taken other things.
Do you think people assume that you’re a medical doctor? I hope not. I always make it clear. I don’t want people to think I’m a medical doctor. Then people think I’m a Ph.D. — not at all. I think after 20 years I’ve been doing this, people know that I’m not a medical doctor. I know putting “Dr. Emily” in the book might have been misleading, but I do say that I’m a doctor of human sexuality, which I understand might not be as well known.
I was interested in your ideas in the book about “core desires”
7
The term came to Morse from the sex educators Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel. She defines it as “the specific feeling you want to experience during sex.” That could be feelings like power or humiliation, not merely arousal.
and how they shape our sexuality. Do you mind if I ask what your core desire is? I think to be nurtured, to be seen — loved, cared for, nourished and sometimes ravished. Twenty years ago, I was nervous around sex, disassociated. I was much more in my head and much more about my partner’s pleasure, and if they got off, that meant it was a success and a good time. I knew nothing about my body, my clitoris. I’m a totally different person. Growing up, maybe I wasn’t in an environment — divorced parents and life was hectic. I don’t think I felt as nurtured as I needed to feel. People have really intense core desires. I want to give permission to people to find out what they need, release any shame around it, express it to your partner and then see how that goes. Hopefully it goes well.
What’s the wisest thing someone ever said to you about sex? David, you with the good questions! I don’t remember who said it to me, but: “Sex isn’t just about sex.” It’s about so many other things. Sex is about your entire life. Sex is about energy, intimacy and connection. Oh, also: “Go five times slower.” That is a great sex tip!
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.
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How to Have a ‘Sexual State of the Union’
— In her new book, the sex educator Emily Morse argues that every couple should have a frank conversation — ideally, once a month.
Work, kids, health — countless factors can get in the way of good sex. But Emily Morse, a sex educator, believes one roadblock tends to loom larger than the others.
“Most of the sexual problems in our relationships have nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with communication,” Ms. Morse writes in her new book, “Smart Sex.”
Addressing intimacy isn’t always easy, she acknowledged: “Conversations around sex are not normalized at all.” But Ms. Morse’s raison d’être across her various platforms is to encourage people to talk openly about sex — to identify what they want, and to learn how to say it.
She has a long-running podcast, “Sex With Emily,” and more than 500,000 followers on Instagram, where she explores a variety of topics, from the best sex toys to confidence in the bedroom. A 2021 article in The New York Times likened Ms. Morse, who studied at the now-defunct Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, to the iconic Dr. Ruth.
In “Smart Sex,” she breaks down her rallying cry about communication into a handful of specific sex talks she believes are useful for couples to have. Among them is the “sexual state of the union” — a monthly check-in to help determine what’s working, what’s not and where things are headed next.
The Times talked to Ms. Morse about some strategies from her new book that she believes can help couples have an effective sexual state of the union, and why she thinks it is worthwhile — even if the idea makes you or your partner cringe.
1. Keep it brief.
A successful sexual state of the union shouldn’t last more than 10 minutes or so, Ms. Morse said. She believes that it can be helpful for couples to think about it as preventive care.
“You’re planting the seeds for the sex life to come,” she explained. “You’re going to learn: What worked? What didn’t work? And then how can we improve going forward?”
Ms. Morse recommends having the talk once a month (scheduled or more spontaneous, depending on the couple), though that frequency isn’t dictated by research. It’s based on her hunch that once a month feels manageable even when life is busy, and that it offers people enough time and space to do a bit of reflecting on what has been happening in their sex lives.
2. Expect it to be awkward.
Ms. Morse is adamant that good sex doesn’t just happen. Nor does talking about it somehow rob it of its “magic” — even if the resulting conversations are uncomfortable, or down right clumsy.
It can help to openly acknowledge any discomfort you might feel, she said. “In the moment, you can tell your partner: ‘Look, I know that this is new for us, but I want us to have a growth mind-set around our sexual connection,’” Ms. Morse said, noting her firm belief that vulnerability is essential for true intimacy.
“If it feels unsexy because you’re both nervous, that’s OK,” she added. “This isn’t, like, a foreplay exercise.”
3. Start by asking: ‘What would you like to see more of in our sex life?’
Or consider other options, such as: “What can I do more of to make sex satisfying for you?” Or: “May I share something I’d like more of during sex?”
“What are you enjoying about our sex life right now?” is another option, although Ms. Morse acknowledges that is probably not a great conversation starter for those in the midst of a sexual drought, for instance.
In an ideal world, couples would get in the habit of having a regular sexual state of the union early in their relationship, Ms. Morse said, though she does believe it is a muscle that can be developed with practice — whether you have been together for “10 months or 10 years,” or beyond.
But if those sorts of questions feel impossible to ask, or if your partner is utterly unwilling to answer them, that’s a sign you may benefit from sex therapy, she said.
4. Pay attention to timing, tone and turf.
Often, when you talk about sex is as important as the actual words you use, Ms. Morse says. So make sure neither of you is hungry, angry, lonely or tired, or HALT, as you set out to discuss sex, she said. Doing so makes you and your partner less likely to be reactive or defensive.
And strive for a tone that is curious, compassionate and open, she said.
“A lot of us, when we have these intense conversations, our tone gets defensive — though we don’t mean it to be,” Ms. Morse said.
She insists conversations about sex should take place outside the bedroom, which she argues should be a sanctuary for sleep and sex — and nothing else. It may help to bring it up during an outdoor stroll, she said. You and your partner can both take a few deep breaths, and do not necessarily have to hold eye contact.
“I want people to remember that the sexual state of the union is not criticism,” Ms. Morse said. “It’s an opportunity to collaborate.”
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The First In-Depth Study on ‘Blue Balls’ Reveals a Lot about Sex
— Arousal without orgasm isn’t dangerous, so why are people pressured to engage in unwanted sexual activity to avoid it?
Why is excess blood in the genitals potentially uncomfortable?
There’s a whole bunch of things that go on in the process of being turned on sexually. One of the main body-related phenomena that occurs is something called engorgement, where blood rushes to those erogenous zones. That will be responsible for things such as clitoral enlargement and penile erection.
Orgasm is almost like a quick-release valve for all of these body-related processes to come back to the regular resting state, when genitals return to their normal size and blood stops pooling in those erogenous areas. But let’s say there’s a lot of foreplay happening. It’s more like a very slow release valve where there’s no explosion to let those processes come back to that nonaroused state.
Are blue balls a legitimate phenomenon?
Yes, absolutely. Now, what does it mean to have blue balls? It could range from feeling a bit uncomfortable to feeling frustrated that this arousal response hasn’t been completed. It could be throbbing, it could be achy, but in terms of intense pain or frequent pain, that is exceptionally rare. Is it something that requires immediate medical attention? No. But the experience of that pain is absolutely real. Anyone who has genitals and is capable, physically, of that physiological sexual response can experience this ache. [This study] legitimizes this condition for all people, whether it’s blue balls or blue vulva or blue genitals. I’ve started to call it “throbbing crotch syndrome.”
Throbbing crotch syndrome is a much better name. Do the testicles and the vulva actually turn blue?
[In our study], some people reported that their genitals do take on a slightly blue tinge. But we couldn’t find any papers showing that this phenomenon leads to a bluish tinge in the genitals. There’s [no research] out there that gives solid proof that there is hypertension in the scrotal area or in the genitals. Everything that we could find around how it occurs are just ideas. There is only a survey of college students from the 1950s and a case study of a 14-year-old from 2001.
Were you surprised that 40 percent of people with a vulva reported that they experience throbbing crotch syndrome?
I was actually expecting quite a high number simply because I don’t see it as the domain of the frat boys and of people with a penis. If you think about the way the process works, it doesn’t matter what your accoutrements are. It’s not like the blood flow knows that it is going into the scrotal area. Or if no scrotal area exists, it’s not like the blood flow is going to be acting, well, nicer.
Were you expecting severe pain levels to be low—less than 7 percent in people with a penis?
I actually expected [the level of severe pain] to be higher. I’ve worked in genital pelvic pain, so I’m used to always validating [people’s experiences]. This is an acute pain condition that is typically easily resolvable, relatively infrequent and mild. It isn’t on the radar of medical professionals simply because it isn’t dangerous in any way. If the pain is chronic and extremely distressing, that’s when you need to see a medical professional to get some tests done and to have a thorough assessment. In all likelihood, something else is going on.
Scientists have been studying pain for centuries, yet this survey was the first serious inquiry into blue balls. Considering society’s love affair with penises, why do you think this topic has been overlooked?
It’s interesting, right? Usually pain related to penises is taken super seriously, whereas pain related to vulvas or other sorts of configurations of genitals is not. I was really stumped. But I think one explanation could be the narrative that blue balls happens mainly to younger men who are sexually frustrated, so it’s kind of treated like a joke and almost like a rite of passage.
It sounds like scientists haven’t studied it because it isn’t a big deal medically. Yet more than 40 percent of the survey respondents with a vagina said that they’ve felt pressured to “engage sexually due to a partner’s fear of getting blue balls/vulva.”
Yes, as did some people [3.7 percent] with a penis. In our qualitative analysis, we included a section where respondents could add comments, and many people wrote that blue balls shouldn’t be used as an excuse to sexually coerce somebody. This was one of the most prominent themes that came up in our analyses: even though people know that it shouldn’t be used as an excuse, it’s still happening.
The good news is that there are many ways for a person to resolve their uncomfortable sensations. We found from the study that you can wait it out, do distracting activities, exercise or masturbate. These are all things that don’t implicate a partner. It’s important to have masturbation as an option, but I think people are just so uncomfortable with the idea of it. Automatically, it’s like, “Oh, someone else needs to take care of this for me.” No way. You’ve got to take the problem in your own hands.
Why do you think the myth that blue balls is dangerous is so pervasive?
I think it has a lot to do with gendered scripts that people have internalized. In many cases, there’s this emphasis placed on penile pleasure in sexual situations—the patriarchy inside the bedroom. Men are seen as the sexual go-getters and as proactive; women are seen as the gatekeepers to sex and more passive. This sexual script places a huge emphasis on the performance of men and their penis. Cisgender women who are having sexual activity with cisgender men tend not to benefit from this at all. This [dynamic] is also manifested in something called the orgasm gap: men are reporting lots and lots of orgasms, whereas women who are having sex with men report the lowest frequencies of orgasm.
How does an undue focus on orgasm contribute to the pressure to engage sexually that many respondents reported feeling?
Some people really feel that they’re not having real sex unless they have an orgasm, that they are entitled to it. People talk about “achieving” orgasm, right? It sounds like you’re hiking to the top of Kilimanjaro or something. [Orgasm] is wonderful! It’s like icing on the cake! But you don’t have to have the icing on the cake because the cake itself is delicious.
We want to ensure that people have the knowledge to say no—to feel confident in their rejection of continuing an activity if it’s not something they truly want.
Are you going to do more research on throbbing crotch syndrome?
We are planning a more in-depth study where we will take more into account the genders of people’s sexual partners. [In the recent study] we only talked about bodies. We also want to take a look at the context: Are there differences [in the frequency or intensity of the phenomenon] if it’s more of a casual encounter versus an encounter with a committed partner?
It would be cool to do research on how [throbbing crotch syndrome] happens and if there are ways we can prevent it. I have some pretty cool devices in my lab, but I don’t know if it would fly with my ethics board to have people come in and masturbate to almost orgasm and then, like, scan their genitals.
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‘Between pleasure and health’
— How sex-tech firms are reinventing the vibrator
A new wave of sex toys is designed to combine orgasmic joy with relief from dryness, tension and pain
By Linda Geddes
At first glance, it could be mistaken for a chunky bracelet or hi-tech fitness tracker. But the vibrations delivered by this device will not alert you to a new message or that you have hit your daily step goal. Neither are they strictly intended for your wrist.
Welcome to the future of vibrators, designed not only for sexual pleasure, but to tackle medical problems such as vaginal dryness, or a painful and inflamed prostate gland in men.
“The current standard of care if you go to a therapist, gynaecologist or urologist, is they will insert one or two fingers to reach the painful areas and massage them to alleviate the pain,” said Soumyadip Rakshit, CEO and co-founder of sex-tech company MysteryVibe.
“We bring together the best of biomedical engineering to recreate what currently works, so people can access these therapies easily, discreetly and cost effectively.”
MysteryVibe is not the only company that is striving to alter our relationship with sex toys. A “smart vibrator” developed by the US-based startup Lioness contains sensors that measure women’s pelvic floor movements, allowing them to track how their arousal and orgasms may be changing over time or in response to stress or alcohol. An “erection ring” developed by US company FirmTech claims to enhance men’s performance while tracking the duration and turgidity of their erections and the number of nocturnal episodes they experience – an indicator of cardiovascular health.
“There are a number of different products that are now sort of skirting the line between pleasure and health,” said Dr Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual medicine specialist based in Washington DC. “These companies today are focusing on [pelvic] anatomy and physiology, and using what we know to try to enhance pleasure, joy, intimacy and fun.”
MysteryVibe’s laboratory – the only facility conducting vibrator research and development within the UK – is incongruously housed in a former dairy in a rural business park near Guildford, Surrey. The first clue that this is no standard office unit is an issue of Playboy tucked behind a magazine about technology startups. Then I spot a tray of wand-shaped mechanical devices, in various states of undress, their bright components resembling children’s Duplo blocks.
These are stripped-back Crescendo vibrators, MysteryVibe’s original product, which was designed to target and release tender areas inside the vagina and alleviate pelvic pain, for example in women whose pelvic floor muscles have been damaged as a result of childbirth.
“The simple answer to pelvic pain is physiotherapy. But most mums either are unaware of this, or don’t have the time and/or money to pay for it,” Soumyadip said.
Registered as medical devices, and marketed at scientific conferences, such products are a far cry from the oversized dildos traditionally stocked by sex shops. MysteryVibe is even funding research to back up their scientific claims. Preliminary results from a small trial involving 11 women with genito-pelvic pain or penetration disorder – where the muscles around the vagina contract whenever an attempt is made to penetrate – suggested that using the Crescendo device three times a week for 12 weeks resulted in significant improvement.
Larger randomised trials are needed. But other scientific evidence supports the use of vibrators in various female health conditions too. According to a recent review by Dr Alexandra Dubinskaya, a urologist at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, and colleagues, they can improve pelvic floor muscle function, facilitate the treatment of vulvar pain and enhance women’s sexual experiences.
“We know that vibration causes vasodilation, meaning the vessels that bring blood to the organs get wider and can bring more blood. It also promotes neuromodulation, meaning it can retrain the nerves – especially those nerves responsible for pain perception,” Dubinskaya said.
Such products are also finding favour with pelvic health physiotherapists such as Katlyn Nasseri at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, US. She said that people experience pelvic pain due to overactive muscles, stress, anxiety, conditions such as endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome, and childbirth injuries.
Trauma or inflammation can cause the pelvic floor muscles to become overly toned, resulting in pain. Nasseri likens using a vibrator to using a massage gun to relieve stiff muscles elsewhere in the body: “Vibration is great for muscles; it helps them to relax really well. The same principle applies to the muscles of the pelvis.”
MysteryVibe’s latest products, scheduled for release later this year, are a vulval vibrator for women experiencing vaginal dryness and/or low libido, and a prostate vibrator designed to be inserted into the anus to relieve pain in men with inflamed prostate glands.
“The three common things that happen to men are that the prostate becomes larger as they become older, or it gets a cancer, and the third is prostatitis – inflammation, pain or infection in the prostate gland. Of these, perhaps the most difficult to treat is prostatitis,” said Prokar Dasgupta, a professor of urology and MysteryVibe’s medical director.
“One of the treatments is regularly massaging the prostate. This allows the congealed secretions inside the prostate that are the cause of the problem to come out. Rather than a urologist doing this manually, it can be done by the patient themselves using this device.”
Men also have pelvic floor muscles and can hold tension in them, just like women, said Rubin: “This can cause symptoms such as urinary frequency or urgency, pain with ejaculation, erectile dysfunction or premature or delayed orgasm.
“In addition, the prostate is very rich with nerves and pleasure spots that can really aid in orgasm and arousal.”
MysteryVibe’s vulval vibrator is designed to sit outside the body, can be moulded to a woman’s physiological dimensions, and can even be worn during intercourse. Whether it actually counters menopause-related dryness or reduced libido is as yet unproven, but menopause expert Dr Shahzadi Harper of The Harper Clinic in London suspects it might.
“We often say use it or lose it, but when you’re feeling tired, when your hormones change, when you’ve got so many other things going on, sex can slip down the sort of priority list. This is a nice gentle way to get confidence back in your body, reignite those nerve endings and boost blood flow to the clitoris and pelvic area, which stimulates the cells that help with lubrication.”
Dr Paula Briggs, chair elect of the British Menopause Society and a consultant in sexual and reproductive health at Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust, said that a vulval vibrator could stimulate collagen-producing cells in the vaginal wall to become active again, reversing some of the thinning that occurs following menopause. Although regular sex can achieve a similar thing, “the difference with a vibrator is that the woman is in control”.
She now advises patients to experiment with a small, tapered vibrator because penetration can be difficult, and often very painful, for such women. Briggs cautioned that vibrator use alone was unlikely to combat vaginal dryness in women whose arousal issues stem from psychological causes, including physical or emotional trauma or stress.
Kate Walsh, physiotherapy lead at Liverpool Women’s Hospital, agreed. Combined with other techniques such as mindfulness and breathing exercises, a vibrator can help women to “reprogram” the way their bodies process sensation, helping to make sex pleasurable again.
“Women will come in with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos that they’ve spent money on, but if they don’t understand the context of why they’re doing this, it is unlikely to work,” she said.
“I’m not saying that someone who is struggling with pain or arousal needs to jump straight into psychosexual counselling, but they’ve got to understand that what’s feeding it isn’t always just a physical thing – the physical and psychological interact.”
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It was a pioneering trans library
— Until the Nazis burned it
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.
What did the Institute for Sexual Research do?
Housed in a gracious Berlin mansion, the Institute for Sexual Research offered medical care and education on issues like venereal disease, pregnancy and fertility. Hirschfeld, who lived in an apartment above the institute, performed the first male-to-female gender-affirming surgeries in 1930.
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.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
What Is Sexual Repression?
— Do I Have It?
Human sexuality is a combination of cultural, psychological, and biological factors. It is a way of expressing emotions and feeling connected through physical affection and pleasure. Family, society, and culture influence our perceptions and attitudes toward sex and sexuality. Sexual repression happens when someone avoids expressing their sexual feelings, thoughts, and desires.
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Everyone has different comfort levels and personal boundaries regarding sex and sexuality.
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Sexual repression may stem from religious, cultural, or societal stereotypes and expectations.
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Discussing sexual repression may be embarrassing, but without treatment, it can negatively impact your physical, emotional, and mental health.
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Effective communication with an intimate partner can help you cope while strengthening the relationship.
In this article, you’ll learn about sexual repression if it’s something you might have, and how to work through it.
What is sexual repression?
Sexual repression is one way your mind copes with difficult or painful ideas about sex and sexuality. It is a defense mechanism that causes you to push undesirable feelings, thoughts or desires out of your conscious thinking.
You might be experiencing sexual repression for a variety of reasons, including:
- Family dynamics. Growing up in a household where it was unacceptable to discuss the topic of sex might have instilled a sense of shame when talking about or participating in sexual activities.
- Cultural norms and religious beliefs. Culture and religion often have significant roles in how you view sex and sexuality. Growing up with very restrictive attitudes toward sex, being told that sex outside of marriage or sex for pleasure was shameful or amoral, you might have negative associations with sex and sexuality.
- Gender stereotypes. Traditional societal beliefs about masculinity and femininity may affect your outlook on sex and sexuality. The stereotypes that men must be dominant, aggressive, and sexual while women need to be submissive, emotional, and passive can adversely affect your views of sex and sexuality.
- Sexual orientation. Individuals who struggle with their sexual identity or orientation may experience feelings of guilt, shame, and discomfort around their sexuality. Fear of judgment, stigma, and prejudice may negatively impact your feelings toward sex and sexuality.
- Prior trauma or abuse. A history of sexual abuse or trauma can significantly impact your capacity for creating intimate relationships. Sexual intimacy may trigger anxiety, fear, or flashbacks of a previous assault.
Sexual repression symptoms
Symptoms of sexual repression are similar in men and women. You may experience the following:
- Thoughts of shame and embarrassment around sex and sexuality.
- Lack of desire or lack of ability to participate in sexual activities.
- Fear and anxiety related to sex and sexuality.
Risks associated with sexual repression
If untreated, sexual repression may cause:
- Low self-esteem
- Negative self-image
- Sexual frustration
- Emotional withdrawal
- Difficulty establishing or maintaining intimate relationships
How to cope with sexual repression
Sexuality is very individualized. You may feel pressure from your partner, friends, or the media about what “normal” sexuality is. Each individual has their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about what is pleasurable and acceptable.
- Honesty. Be open and honest with your partner about your emotions. It is easier for your partner to support you when they know what you think and feel. Communication is vital to a healthy relationship.
- Respect. Try not to pressure yourself to meet your partner’s expectations. Both partners should feel comfortable, respected, and safe in a healthy relationship.
- Rule out physical issues. It is best to consult your healthcare provider to rule out any physical issues that might be mistaken for sexual repression affecting your libido or sexual desire.
- Find a sex therapist. Some professionals specialize in treating individuals and couples with sex and sexuality. A sex therapist is a licensed mental health professional that uses psychotherapy to help work through mental and emotional issues related to sex and sexuality. Some therapists specialize in treating individuals with LBGTQ+ issues. With the increased prevalence of telemedicine, it is more convenient to connect with a qualified sex therapist who can help.
How to help your loved one
Sexual repression is a sensitive topic, and your partner may struggle with self-doubt, self-blame, and negativity. The needs and desires of both partners should be equally met. Working together, you can provide a safe space to support your loved one.
- Be patient. It may take time to work through these issues. Each individual copes and works through things at their own pace.
- Listen to your partner’s needs. Ask questions and let your partner know what you can do to help.
- Support. Offer non-judgemental support and reassurance of your love. Your loved one may be experiencing feelings of isolation and self-blame.
- Be aware of triggers. If your partner has a history of sexual trauma, respect your loved one’s boundaries and be aware of potential triggers.
- Open communication. Talk to your partner about other ways of expressing intimacy that will be comfortable for both partners.
Confronting sexual repression can be challenging, but with the support of a loving and compassionate partner, it can be easier to overcome sexual repression. Trust, respect, honesty, and open communication are essential for working through challenges and building a solid and healthy relationship.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
12 Signs You’re in a Healthy Relationship
— Communication is key, but so is kindness
Some people say that when you’re in a healthy relationship, everything just comes easy. Others will say that’s not exactly true — the best long-term relationships require a lot of hard work, dedication and determination.
While we can certainly all agree that no one relationship is perfect and that every relationship comes with its own set of unique challenges, it’s perhaps true that a healthy relationship takes all of these things combined with people who love, respect and support each other.
But how do you know if you can really trust that it’s true? When can you let your guard down and feel assured that your relationship is, in fact, healthy and headed for long-term territory? The psychology of love may be a bit complex, but it doesn’t have to be a brain-buster.
Registered psychotherapist Natacha Duke, MA, RP, has some tell-tale signs that you’re in it for the long haul, as well as some checks and balances you can do along the way to reassure this relationship is healthy and right for you.
What is a healthy relationship?
A healthy relationship at its core is centered around:
- Empathy and kindness.
- Reliability and commitment.
- Mutual respect for boundaries.
- The ability to work together as a team.
- Similar values and goals.
Having similar values and goals is perhaps the turning point for most relationships, as they fundamentally fuel almost everything else that you do.
Everyone’s needs ebb and flow, based on personal experiences. For example, it might be important for someone to have a partner who’s interested in volunteering and community service, whereas in other relationships that might not be as crucial. For the person who comes from a tight-knit family and prioritizes family gatherings around the holidays, they might be faced with some difficulty dating someone who disregards the importance of family.
“There are so many things that can go into a healthy relationship and some things are so personal to each of us,” notes Duke. “The point is that there’s a reasonable amount of reliability and that you both feel as though the other person is going to prioritize you and be true to their word every step of the way.”
The unfortunate issue is that everyone doesn’t always know they’re in a healthy relationship. That’s especially true if you’ve been caught up in problematic relationships in the past and if you’ve had a hard time recognizing red flags in one.
“Relationships can sometimes feel familiar, comfortable or better than other relationships you’ve had but that doesn’t mean it’s healthy,” states Duke. “If we have a history of problematic relationships or we don’t have a secure attachment formed in childhood, we can end up moving toward what’s familiar even though it’s not healthy. And that’s where you have to be careful.”
That requires a certain level of self-reflection before starting a new relationship. But even when you’ve been dating someone for a while, the healthiest relationships keep the door open for self-reflection, build off the mistakes you’ve each learned in the past and allow everyone to confront conflict together in a safe, constructive and helpful way.
“There are going to be times in every relationship that are going to be hard, but I think it’s how you deal with it that matters,” encourages Duke. “People in a healthy relationship should put each other at ease, have a willingness to work and grow together and be respectful of each other.”
Signs you have a healthy relationship
It’s easy to get swept up off your feet in all the twists and turns a new relationship has to offer, but once you begin building a solid foundation, these key signs reinforce a long-lasting healthy relationship:
1. R.E.S.P.E.C.T. — you both know what it means to each other
Setting up healthy boundaries isn’t always about drawing a line in the sand when things go south. Boundaries are good to put into place when we know crossing them would violate our mental, emotional and physical health or values. But they’re also good for establishing a level of respect for each other and for understanding the things you both feel are important.
“In a healthy relationship, you’re making space for each other, you’re making space for each other’s emotions, and making space to nurture and cultivate other aspects of each other’s lives,” Duke explains. “It’s also about being aware of your own personal boundaries.”
So, if your partner isn’t too keen on one of your friends, but that relationship is still important to you, it’s a good sign if your partner doesn’t try to prevent you from seeing them or isolate you from your friend group.
Healthy boundaries also exist in an intimate or sexual space, too. No one should ever feel pressured or ashamed when interacting with each other inside that space.
2. You trust one another and that trust is earned
“If you’ve worked through your relationship baggage and you’ve worked through your blind spots, hopefully, you come to a new relationship feeling more neutral about trusting someone else,” says Duke. “From there, you either come to trust this new person more and more over time, or you come to not trust them over time.”
And trust extends from the seemingly smallest things, like trusting someone with your emotions or allowing yourself to be vulnerable around them, as well as with making some big life decisions — like where to live and what you want your future family to look like — that will (hopefully) take you both into consideration and benefit all involved.
Long after the honeymoon phase has ended, a sign of a healthy relationship is knowing that you can rely on your partner without second guessing whether or not you can trust them. And there’s no real replacement for time when it comes to trust.
3. When the going gets tough, you find a way to communicate
“It’s kind of easy to have a relationship during the good times, but what really makes a relationship or bonds you as a couple is going through hard times together,” Duke says.
That means you want to find ways to express how you’re feeling, practice active listening when your partner is doing the same and work together to find solutions — even when you’re arguing.
“You don’t always have to see each other eye-to-eye, but you can always be both good and kind to each other and can always seek to understand the other person,” emphasizes Duke. “That’s what’s going to differentiate this relationship from another relationship that may not have a healthy longevity.”
4. You agree to disagree
In most cases, when there’s a conflict, you want to feel heard and understood and you want to come out of it feeling like the solution is a win-win for both of you, so there isn’t any lingering resentment from either side. But, going back to trust, it’s also good to disagree sometimes.
“If you can get through difficulties together, that builds trust, and the more you build that trust together, the stronger you become,” notes Duke.
So, even when you disagree about a problem or a solution, or even something mundane that happens during your day-to-day, finding a way to compromise is key.
5. You can also forgive each other
“If someone hasn’t had a positive or secure attachment in their childhood, they can end up holding grudges and find it difficult to forgive people,” explains Duke. “But there’s no such thing as a perfect relationship, and forgiveness is often a sign of love.”
If you have difficulty letting go or moving beyond problems that surface, or if you have a hard time with forgiveness, cognitive behavioral therapy can help identify some of the triggers that reinforce that behavior, as well as provide coping mechanisms you can try when conflict inevitably happens again down the line.
6. You’re both committed to the relationship
Perhaps one of the most common complaints in relationships is that someone is making more effort than the other. No one likes a one-sided relationship — but how do you find a way to balance everything equally, or at least be comfortable with what everyone is giving toward the relationship?
“You can always do some reality testing,” suggests Duke. “The best way to do that is to ask yourself, ‘Is this real? Is this true? Is it accurate that I’m holding more weight than the other person?’ And another way to test it is to bring your concerns to the person and talk about it and see if they’re going to put in more effort if you need them to or if nothing’s going to change.”
However it shakes out, a healthy relationship will likely ebb and flow, with one partner making up the slack for when another person can’t, and vice-versa.
7. You’re kind to each other
This certainly feels like a no-brainer, but we probably don’t think of this one as often as we should. What exactly does kindness look like in a healthy relationship?
“Kindness looks like feeling as though you’re safe, supported and a priority to the other person,” Duke illustrates. “It looks like apologizing when you’ve made a mistake. It means active listening, as much as possible, to your partner.”
That means at every turn, it’s OK to check in with yourself and curb your anger or expectations in order to make space for a level of kindness that’s rooted in mutual respect. It’s not always going to work or even be a perfect solution, but having the intention to always be kind as much as possible is a solid foundation for a healthy relationship.
“If you’ve known someone for a long time, you’re not going to be perfectly kind all the time, but I think there should be a certain amount of mutual respect and empathy toward each other, even when you’re not having a good day,” Duke continues.
8. You enjoy each other’s company and support each other’s goals
Maybe your weekly after-work routine is composed of playing video games with each other or watching your favorite shows. For the most part, your mutual interests are aligned. But when your partner suddenly plans to run a marathon, which means they’ll have to carve out time for training, you’re still supportive of those goals and you flex your time and availability when needed.
The importance of doing things together and allowing and supporting each other’s personal growth in a healthy relationship is two-fold: It allows you both to share the things you love with each other, and it gives you the space to be supportive even when something doesn’t fully align with your own individual interests.
“There are some things that are more important to some people than others,” Duke recognizes. “For some people, it’s really important for their person to be a part of their friend group. For others, that’s not very important. So, you have to find ways to compromise with each other without feeling like it’s a struggle or a sacrifice.”
9. You’re good at making decisions together
You’re not going out and buying big household items without consulting your partner first, and you make the time for your partner’s input. Sure, this isn’t always a perfect scenario, and sometimes, we can get a bit ahead of ourselves, but like with kindness, you should view the person you’re in a relationship with as your partner — a true team member you can call in for anything good, bad or ugly.
10. You don’t dodge difficulty
Speaking of the ugly, you don’t want to avoid having difficult conversations in a healthy relationship. You want to confront issues head-on (and be kind when doing so) and find ways to express your feelings even when you know you have to talk about challenges that might put on the heat and increase the pressure.
“It’s always good to be intentional and self-reflective and to be thoughtful in a conflict,” advises Duke. “We don’t enter relationships, nor do we have to, having everything figured out because we will never have everything figured out. There does need to be a certain level of self-understanding for our relationships to be able to be healthy though, and we all have hot-button issues.”
Expressing those issues in a constructive way is paramount to making sure boundaries for everyone are put in place and respected. And finding ways to mediate conflict together can be helpful in the long run.
11. You’re comfortable in who you are and independent from your partner
“To be able to look back on previous relationships and friendships and reflect on what are the things that make you mad, what tends to hurt your feelings and what causes conflicts is really important,” says Duke.
“We can bring those things to the next relationship, and when something comes up, we can really own it and say, ‘This is an issue for me, let me help you understand why this is an issue for me,’ and work through it together.”
And this doesn’t just apply to conflict management — knowing who you are as an individual and chasing after your own personal goals and dreams are just as important because this allows you to embrace a self-love perspective that will only further enhance your relationship.
12. You’re comfortable with each other even when you’re not ‘on’
Let goblin mode commence: You don’t always have to be perfect in front of your partner, and that’s especially true in the healthiest of relationships. Part of this goes back to being kind to one another, but in a different way.
Kindness can extend to allowing you and your partner to let go of responsibility sometimes in exchange for personal development. You’ll find that when you let your guard down with one another, the healthiest of relationships allow for a different level of intimacy and understanding.
“In order to enjoy a healthy relationship, we need to be prepared to be vulnerable with one another,” says Duke. “Sometimes, this might mean sharing parts of ourselves that we feel insecure about in order to see if this relationship could have the makings of something special.”
Strategies for reassuring yourself
Self-doubt is a powerful opponent, but there are some checks and balances you can put into place to reassure you that you’re in a good place in your relationship or to define exactly what needs improving.
“One thing you can continue to check in with yourself about over time is whether or not your trust towards this person is growing,” says Duke. “Is there something you’re not getting that you need? Is there something you’re not doing that your partner needs?”
Having the occasional, even informal, discussion about how each of you is feeling in a relationship is a great tool to carry things forward, even if it’s early in a relationship. By doing so, you can make sure you’re both on the same page and working toward the same goals.
“If it’s on your mind, even if it’s something good, don’t be afraid to bring it up,” reinforces Duke. “We tend to not communicate as much as we need, and you can rarely over-communicate when it comes to how you’re feeling. Checking in with yourself and the other person to make sure you continue to have similar goals and similar values is as equally important as anything else.”
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
As a disabled person, kink can feel empowering, subversive and even therapeutic
By Evan Johnson
You may not expect me, as a disabled person, to be interested in the world of leather and rope.
But, as an advocate for sex positivity, I’m here to tell you disabled people can be asexual or hypersexual, vanilla or kinky — and everything in between.
Disabled people experience the same full spectrum of desire
People are interested in kinks and fetishes — which can be broadly defined as all non-conventional acts of intimacy between consenting adults, often with a sexual connotation but not always — for a variety of reasons.
For me, I’ve found kinks provide a therapeutic effect that I can’t seem to find elsewhere. I feel connected to my body and empowered.
Sexual freedom and empowerment are positive forces for anyone, but especially in those who are desexualised and infantilised — as is so often the case with the disabled community.
As a disabled kinkster, I subvert expectations and embody roles you may not expect from someone like me, which I find powerful.
Being unapologetically myself in my identities as a kinky disabled person is radical, and an act of self-love.
As a more dominant person, I find flipping the script of “the weak disabled person who needs help and saving” to be important.
Being in the dominant position of more mobility and less pain by comparison to a partner is empowering, as I am not in this position in daily life.
And, of course, this goes for submission too. It can be empowering to be experiencing pain and mobility restriction consensually, rather than your “normal ongoing symptoms”.
I like to think of kink as a tool for pain management. If you’re so focused on receiving a different type of pain elsewhere on your body, or giving that to someone else, it’s like your “regular pains” become background noise, as researchers have explored.
Embracing the somatic experiences of letting go, being vulnerable and trusting in your body can feel healing — especially when you don’t feel so connected to your physical body.
The unexpected benefits I’ve found
It’s important to note that there’s a clear distinction between mutually consensual kink, and objectifying people without their consent.
Fetishisation of disabled people is a real issue that can be destructive for the disability community – and as with all sex acts, it’s important fetishes are only acted upon with the enthusiastic consent of those involved. (Also, kinks aren’t for everyone. And if they’re not your thing, that’s perfectly fine!)
But, personally, I’ve found kink can also be a whole-body somatic experience. Pleasure does not have to be limited to the genitals. This may be particularly important to those with certain disabilities where sensation and other factors may be altered.
I’ve also found a sense of community through kink, learning firsthand that online or in-person communities can be a great source of information, advice and friendships.
I would not be where I am today — as a proud, disabled, sex positivity advocate — if it weren’t for the amazing people I’ve met in local Adelaide leather and fetish groups.
Communicate thoroughly, and other golden rules
For those curious about exploring the world of kinks, a good starting point is to read or watch content around consent and what you’re interested in, with a focus on safety and harm reduction.
A golden rule is: remember to start gently and communicate thoroughly with all involved.
Living with disability often means we must go about things in different ways — and luckily, there’s a wide variety of aids and toys that can help you engage in what interests you.
From positioning aids like sex swings and wedges, to long-handled toys and hands-free devices, there are infinite ways to ensure that no matter what your ability is, you can still have sex that is meaningful to you.
Ultimately, living with disability doesn’t have to define who you are and what you can be interested in.
Whether kinks interest you or not, I hope your experience of sexuality is empowering and a pleasurable experience for you.
You deserve it — no matter what your abilities are.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
What Is Gender-Affirming Care?
By Mira Miller
- Gender-affirming generally refers to the medical, psychological, and social support provided to individuals who are transgender, non-binary, or gender expansive. to help align their gender identity with their outward appearance and improve their overall well-being.
- This type of care can include socially transitioning by changing one’s name, pronouns or way of presenting; puberty blockers; gender-affirming hormone therapy; and gender-affirming surgeries.
- At least 30 states have introduced or are considering laws that restrict access to gender-affirming care.
Gender-affirming care has been the subject of much debate in legislatures around the country in recent months, leading to countless misconceptions and myths about what it actually entails and who it’s for.< According to a report from The Williams Institute, 30 states had introduced or were considering laws to restrict access to gender-affirming care as of March 2023. The result is 146,300 transgender youth who have lost or are at risk of losing access to gender-affirming care. Several bans proposed in 2023 would also limit access to care for those up to age 26.
While misinformation on the subject abounds, it’s important to get the facts straight: Gender-affirming care is considered safe, effective, and medically necessary by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Endocrine Society.
“Gender-affirming care is considered life-saving,” said Rebecca Minor, MSW, LICSW, a gender specialist and therapist who provides gender-affirming care. “It plays a crucial role in improving the mental health, well-being, and overall quality of life for transgender, non-binary, and gender diverse individuals.”
What Does Gender-Affirming Care Involve?
Gender-affirming care refers to medical, psychological, and social support provided to individuals who are transgender, non-binary, or gender expansive, Minor explained. The goal of gender-affirming care is to assist individuals in aligning their sense of self with their outward appearance and to improve their overall well-being.
“Gender-affirming care means different things for different people,” Uri Belkind, MD, a pediatric medicine specialist who works in adolescent medicine at the New York-based LGBTQ+ health center Callen-Lorde, told Verywell. “It is not a specific process, but rather a collection of tools from which we can select to better fit the individual’s goals and needs.”
One aspect of gender-affirming care requires no medical intervention but instead involves transitioning socially. This may include changing one’s name and pronouns, and dressing or presenting in a way that affirms their gender identity, according to Sean Arayasirikul, PhD, an associate professor in residence of health, society, and behavior at the University of California, Irvine.
Beyond socially transitioning, there are three general medical options available when it comes to gender-affirming care, Belkind said, adding that some people may want or need all of them, while some may find happiness and well-being with only some. These include puberty blockers, gender-affirming hormone therapy, and gender-affirming procedures.
Puberty blockers are for younger patients who are entering puberty and are finding the changes their bodies are going through to be distressing. To access this kind of care, these patients must have shown insistent, persistent, and consistent identification with a gender that is different than their sex assigned at birth.
“This allows us to temporarily ‘pause’ these changes while the young person, with support from their family, further explores their needs and gains a better understanding of what is possible, medically speaking, and what it entails,” Belkind said.
Gender-affirming hormone therapy, on the other hand, refers to the process of using either estrogen or testosterone to promote certain physical changes and to inhibit others, Belkind said.
Gender-affirming procedures, both surgical and non-surgical, change certain physical characteristics that may not otherwise be modified with the use of hormone therapy. Belkind said these may include chest masculinization, facial feminization, permanent hair removal or hair grafting, and genital surgeries such as vaginoplasty or phalloplasty.
“One common misconception is that gender-affirming procedures are regulated only for trans and gender expansive people and that these procedures are experimental, lacking solid medical evidence,” Arayasirikul said.
In reality, cisgender people—or people who are not trans—also choose to undergo gender-affirming procedures to affirm their identity, Arayasirikul explained. This may include a breast augmentation, a mastectomy for gynecomastia, a hair transplant, a rhinoplasty, liposuction, facial fillers, or hormone therapy.
“These procedures and so many more are part of the health care of cisgender people,” Arayasirikul said. “Yet this same care is actively being criminalized for trans and gender-expansive people solely because they are different.”
Can People of All Ages Receive Gender-Affirming Care?
In states where gender-affirming care is not criminalized, trans youth can access puberty blockers to delay the onset of puberty and cross-sex hormones to develop their bodies in ways that align with their gender identity.
“Typically, gender-affirming surgeries are utilized by adults, not children,” Arayasirikul said.
And yet, much of the uproar surrounding gender-affirming care in the U.S. has been surrounding the subject of children undergoing surgery.
According to Belkind, some patients choose to start puberty blockers once puberty begins, while other patients may only begin to seek medical advice after puberty or much later into adulthood.
“It is important to note that, for children who strongly identify with a gender identity that is different from their sex assigned at birth, there are no medical interventions needed before puberty begins and only then do we consider the use of puberty blockers, if needed,” Belkind said.
Medical interventions always happen after a thorough evaluation of the patient’s needs, Belkind added.
Why Gender-Affirming Care Is Necessary
Gender-affirming care helps to reduce gender dysphoria, which is the distress an individual may experience when their gender identity does not align with their assigned sex at birth, Minor said.< “Gender-affirming care, such as hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgeries, can help alleviate gender dysphoria by allowing individuals to align their physical appearance with their gender identity” she said. “This reduction in distress and discomfort can have a significant positive impact on mental health and overall well-being.” Trans and gender-diverse individuals often face higher rates of mental health challenges, including depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.1 Gender-affirming care, combined with mental health support, can help reduce these risks by providing individuals with the tools, resources, and interventions needed to alleviate distress and promote a positive self-image, Minor said.
According to one recent study, providing trans and non-binary youths aged 13 to 20 years with gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones, lowered their risk of developing moderate or severe depression by 60% and lowered suicidality by 73% over a 12-month follow-up.2
Another study found that gender-affirming surgeries were associated with a 42% reduction in psychological distress and a 44% reduction in suicidal ideation when compared with transgender and gender-diverse people who had not had gender-affirming surgery but wanted it.3
“Gender-affirming care allows individuals to express their gender identity authentically, promoting self-acceptance and improved self-esteem,” Minor said. “By aligning their physical appearance, social interactions, and personal identity, individuals can develop a stronger sense of identity and self-worth, leading to improved mental health outcomes.”
Additionally, gender-affirming care often includes support groups, peer networks, and counseling services that provide a safe and inclusive environment for individuals to connect, share experiences, and receive emotional support, Minor said. These social support systems, she said, are critical in combating feelings of isolation and promoting healthy relationships.
This kind of care can help combat the societal discrimination, stigma, and marginalization transgender and gender-diverse individuals often face. Minor said gender-affirming care can empower individuals to assert their rights, advocate for themselves, and challenge discriminatory practices.
“By affirming their gender identity, individuals can experience improved resilience, reduced psychological distress, and increased social acceptance,” she said.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
Are You Ready to Have ‘The Big Sex Talk’ With Your Teen?
— How to ensure the young adults in your life have the sexual health information they need.
As a parent, your child’s physical and emotional safety is likely your highest priority. While sexual health is a huge component of this, many parents don’t know how to support their teen’s sexual well-being. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and oftentimes parents don’t feel as if they have the proper support to talk to their teens about sexual health. Enter “The Big Sex Talk,” or simply “The Talk.”
For many parents and caregivers, navigating topics such as puberty, sex and romantic relationships represents an intimidating and overwhelming element of parenting.
No matter where the hesitation lies, there are experts and research that’ll help you support your teen to make informed and healthy decisions about sexual health.
Why is it so important to have “The Talk” anyway?
Young people need accurate information about sex, whether oral, anal or vaginal sex, in order to make safe, healthy and informed decisions.
Extensive research indicates young people who do not have accurate information about their sexual health are more likely to experiment with sex at younger ages than ones who do.
Even some information is better than none. When teens are able to talk with a parent or caregiver about safer sex, they are less likely to have unprotected sex.
There is a wealth of research that shows talking to your teen about sex and healthy relationships is one of the most important elements to help them make informed and healthy decisions.
However, there is an overwhelming amount of misinformation about sexuality on the internet, particularly on social media. This is something both Gabrielle S. Evans, MPH, CHES, a sexuality educator and researcher based in Houston, and Clarissa Herman, a Minnesota-based social, emotional, and sexual health educator for emerging teenagers, are well aware of.
“Talking to your teen about sex is important because without receiving information from you, it’s likely that they’ll encounter false and unsafe information about sex on social media, which can lead to making decisions that they do not understand the outcome of,” Herman explained.
“Add this to the fact that sex education in school has decreased since the 1990s, and we have a major problem,” she added. “It’s really important to talk to your teen about what is healthy, what is normal, what is safe. And what is going to happen when they don’t have good reliable sources for that information in their schools like they used to, or from their care providers? Their main source is social media.”
In addition, having conversations with your teen about sexual contact shows them you are a trusted person they can come to, Evans noted.
“Research has been telling us for decades that teens prefer to get information about sex from their parents and other trusted adults in their lives,” said Erica M. Butler, M.Ed., founder of Happ E. SexTalk, LLC in Columbus, Ohio, and creator of HAPPERMATIONS, sex-positive affirmation cards for toddlers. “The disconnect is that parents don’t know how to talk about it (or don’t want to) and teens definitely don’t know how to bring it up without feeling like they’ll get in trouble.”
How do you prepare to have ‘The Talk?’
If you’re at a loss for words, you’re not alone. Talking about sex can prove challenging, uncomfortable and overwhelming. When many parents today recall if they received accurate and adequate information about sex and healthy relationships from their own parents as a teen, the overwhelming response is: no.
It can be hard to know how to handle these conversations when you have no personal experience with your own parents or caregivers. And it can also be difficult if your own discomfort about sex is because it was ignored or not treated respectfully in your household growing up.
We asked experts how parents can best prepare to have “The Talk” with their teens:
1. Start with yourself
“I always tell parents to start with themselves,” said Rosalia Rivera, a consent educator and child sexual abuse prevention specialist in Canada. “I encourage them to reflect and journal on their own beliefs, values and ideas about sex and relationships.”
Butler said parents need to think back to their years as a teen and how topics connected to sex were addressed in their family.
“Did they feel supported or like they could ask questions openly? How did that make them feel and how would they want to change that for their teen?” Butler said. “The more we can unlearn our own shame and guilt through our experiences, the better equipped we’ll be to have these conversations with our kids.”
2. Do the research
“Parents and caregivers can prepare themselves for this conversation by first making sure the information they provide is accurate,” Evans said.
Having accurate information, as well as age-appropriate information, is crucial, and there are a number of ways you can ensure this.
Herman recommends starting with an internet search.
“A parent or caregiver can prepare themselves for this conversation by doing the ‘poking around’ on the internet that their teenager can’t do,” Herman said. “Teenagers don’t know how to sift through good information or bad information. So a parent or caregiver can hop [online] and do this for them.”
3. Find additional resources
In addition to finding accurate, age-appropriate information on the internet, there are several organizations and adolescent sexual health professionals who have resources designed specifically to help parents and caregivers talk with their teens about sex.
Sex Positive Families, for example, offers workshops on puberty and other sexuality topics. They also have an entire library of resources that can be filtered by topic, age and type.
Amaze.org is another popular organization that provides parents with the tools and evidence-informed information they need to have conversations about sex with their teens.
Additionally, there are sexuality professionals such as Herman, Rivera and Butler, or Nadine Thornhill, Ed.D., for example, who are all specialized in helping caregivers support their teens with accurate information about sex and relationships.
4. Be willing to say ‘I don’t know’
While having accurate information to share with your teen is important, you don’t need to know everything. Before you try to learn about adolescent sexual health, remember it’s OK, and fairly important to admit when you don’t have the answer.
“Be OK with not knowing the answer to their question,” Butler said. “It’s impossible to know everything and remember you didn’t get great sex ed while growing up either, so there’s a lot we don’t know.”
Herman also stressed how important this is. If your teen asks you a question you don’t know the answer to, or you’re unsure how to explain it best, she said, “It’s OK to say, ‘I don’t know but I want to find out together.'”
5. Remember, ‘The Talk’ isn’t just one talk
While many caregivers would be relieved if just one conversation about sex and healthy relationships was enough, that’s not the case. Preparing your teen to make informed, healthy and safe decisions about sexuality and relationships takes more than a single conversation.
“People like myself who specialize in adolescent sexual health education, are really trying to move away from the entire concept of having ‘The Talk’ because having one talk is going to be uncomfortable, awkward, really weird and maybe not effective depending on the relationship they have with their kid,” Herman said.
“[Your teen] might get so dysregulated that they have to check out of the conversation. And you get so uncomfortable that nothing really happens. So people like myself, who are specialized in adolescent sex education, are really encouraging parents to start conversations early, have them often, keep them brief and keep them casual.”
For example, Herman said, you can have a brief and casual conversation by noticing something on TV or in a magazine and saying “What do you think about that?”
“Maybe you see a picture on social media of somebody wearing period underwear and you ask your kids ‘Hey, do you know about period underwear?’ or ‘What do you know about periods so far?’ and you talk for five minutes and then you move on,” Herman said.
6. Understanding ‘The Talk’ isn’t solely about sex
In addition to having more than one “talk,” it’s vital to remember these conversations aren’t just about sex. Parents and caregivers often think “The Talk” means teaching your teen strictly about STDs/STIs and pregnancy.
While these topics are important, they are small elements of what it means to provide your teen with adequate and accurate information to make healthy decisions about sex and relationships.
When parents and caregivers believe conversations are limited to just STDs/STIs and pregnancy, it can make the conversation feel even more intimidating and uncomfortable.
Prepare your teen with the information they need, which includes talking about topics such as rejection, how to understand your body boundaries and communicate them, learning what safe and unsafe touch is, puberty, breakups and internet safety.
7. Learn to stay calm
Giving your teen the information they need to succeed and create safe, healthy relationships and sexual experiences isn’t just about the facts you share, it’s also about how you share them.
“The No. 1 strategy I would recommend for a parent or caregiver preparing to have this conversation is to make sure that they themselves go into the conversation calm and regulated,” Herman said. “People are very sensitive, and kids especially are really sensitive to the energy you’re putting out.
“If you’re stressed out, if you’re radiating anger or fear, or defensiveness, they’re going to pick up on that. They’re going to start responding to that even before anyone has exchanged any words. So, do what you need to do to make sure that your body and your brain and your breath are calm before you go into that conversation.”
Go for a walk, practice deep breathing or call a friend and vent, Herman recommended. Taking an honest look at your own attitudes about sexuality, as Rivera and Butler mentioned, will help with this, too.
If you enter the conversation with your own discomfort about periods because you haven’t processed how periods were talked about in your household growing up, your teen will hear that in whatever you decide to tell them.
Take the time to journal, talk to a friend, or work with a coach or therapist. The goal is to enter conversations with your teen in a way that’s not defensive or guarded. Your script should be regulated, but allow for curious teens to ask whatever questions they have.
In fact, for some parents, it can be a relief to know the most important thing isn’t always knowing the facts or having the answer, but bringing a non-judgmental and open attitude to the conversation.
While topics like sex and relationships can be an intimidating and overwhelming element of parenting, start by taking a look at the feelings that arise for you as you’re finding the resources and information you need to feel prepared.
Your teen needs accurate information about sex and an open, non-judgmental attitude in order to make informed, safe and healthy sexual decisions. You may end up enjoying how close this process allows you to become with your teen, especially as they start to share other aspects of their lives, hoping for your input.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
When the Sex Is Good
— Ways to Avoid Unsatisfying Sex
It’s time we all elevated our sex lives to the next level.
By Ally Sweeten
You’re about to have a sexual encounter. All the elements seem to be in place, and you have high hopes. But in its aftermath, you may be forced to face an unfortunate reality.
The sex simply wasn’t very good.
Shuffling away and feeling unsatisfied or perhaps put off entirely, you can’t help but wonder how things could have gone wrong. You want to get to when the sex is good.
It’s 2023 and sex is everywhere—in advice columns, social media and woven into every aspect of our daily lives. There’s a good chance you’ll find overt or covert sexual tones in almost anything and everything. Yet despite this vast pool of information at our fingertips, people continue to have “bad” sex.
How is it possible?
Attitudes about sex over time
Over the years, societal perspectives on quality sex have undergone major generational shifts. What would have been acceptable to our grandparents may not be the case today, as society has shifted its priorities.
“Outdated beliefs would have looked at sex as a marital obligation, which does not consider pleasure and assumes sex to be more of a perfunctory role. This also continues patriarchal beliefs, which are changing,” said Lauren Muratore, an accredited sexologist and the director of Integrated Sex+Relationship Therapy in Melbourne, Australia. “A good sexual experience is also slowly shedding the social, religious, gender and media constructs that influence how people feel about their sexuality.”
She added that there is currently momentum provided by a sex-positive movement in which people are ultimately given the ability to have sex in a consenting, safe, healthy, pleasurable way whenever they feel like it. That consent education is a major shift in itself.
“What pleasure looks like can change each sexual experience; therefore, assuming consent regardless of how long you have known someone is not helpful,” she said. “Consent is sexy and having a voice to communicate sexual pleasure brings greater satisfaction.”
People need to create a safe place where all topics around sex can be exchanged positively and respectfully, according to Rebecca Alvarez Story, a sexologist and CEO/co-founder of the sexual wellness and intimate products website Bloomi.
“It’s crucial to ask for and obtain consent from your partner(s) in any sexual relationship or encounter,” she said. “Your body and sexuality belong only to you and no one else.”
Furthermore, she noted that the focus is shifting from orgasming to the giving and receiving of intimate moments and pleasure, without the pressure of reaching a climax. She believes there’s no such thing as “bad” sex because problems can be fixed with mutual communication and understanding.
Plus, there may be extenuating circumstances making sex insufficient, which have nothing to do with the actual act, such as stress, prior experiences, and cultural or religious conditioning.
“As such, ‘bad’ sex can be all situations where individuals aren’t receiving emotional or physical satisfaction, where one partner is selfish, and where there is no connection or compatibility between partners,” she explained.
Conversely, Muratore cautioned against seeing “good” sex as a one-size-fits-all approach. The spectrum of sexuality, including asexuality, is relevant.
‘Good’ and ‘bad’ sex today
Our access to sexual content has exploded, but it’s not enough to completely eradicate unsatisfying sex. A survey carried out in 2021 by OnePoll revealed 1 in 5 Americans have experienced more than 10 awful sexual encounters, and 2 in 5 have gone as far as to stop in the middle because the experience was so unpleasant. Established couples weren’t immune, either: half admitted their current partner was the worst sexual partner they’d had.
The quantity of information is part of the problem. It can be so overwhelming that people opt out of reading at all, said Debbie Rivers, a relationship coach in Australia. Instead, they learn from porn, which Rivers said is far from realistic and can warp their views on sex, particularly for men.
“Reading information is quite different from experiencing it, and people often don’t know what they don’t know, especially if they have never experienced what good sex actually is,” she said.
Acknowledging gender disparities is important, as well, as sexual encounters vary for each.
“Often, we think that people see and experience the world as we do, and that isn’t true here,” Rivers explained. “We project how we are onto other people.”
Story pointed to the changing goals of sex.
“Nowadays, sex is seen as a critical element of broader wellness and well-being, and essential for a person’s mental, emotional and physical health,” she said.
Rivers and Story agreed that the pros of a healthy sex life can:
- Improve connections to others and lead to more intimate relationships
- Improve self-confidence and willingness to try new sexual activities
- Increase romantic gestures (gifts, dates, vacations, displays of affection and telling each other “I love you”)
- Improve your immune system and lower blood pressure
- Reduce stress, anxiety and depression
With all those benefits, finding out why you aren’t enjoying sex is worth investigating. One way to do this is through masturbation and self-exploration.
Taking the time to become familiar with your body provides a no-pressure atmosphere to discover likes and dislikes, which you can then relay to your partner. Further, self-pleasure can lead to higher self-esteem and increased libido, Story said.
Talk dirty to me
Experts noted that the process of transforming “bad” sex into “good” sex relies on interpersonal communication with your partner. The degree to which couples are comfortable sharing is subjective, and it’s never OK to assume your partner is agreeable to divulging information.
For example, Rivers wondered how you might feel if you discovered your partner was telling their friends how bad you were in bed. The odds are your reaction might be less than stellar.
“The one person that you should be talking to is your partner, as they are the only ones with the ability to change the situation. Sometimes, it can be easier to be naked than to be emotionally vulnerable,” she said.
Discuss your values and boundaries and avoid comparing yourself to others.
“Every couple has a different sex life with a different meaning, a different script and a different frequency,” Muratore explained. “Once you start comparing yourself to those around you, people often feel inadequate and it sets up false expectations for your own relationship. If you want to share how you feel, speak to a friend who can listen to your feelings with empathy, without expectations that they’ll solve your problems.”
If you feel sexually unfulfilled, speak up. Muratore, Rivers and Story all recommended waiting for the right time—namely, not before, during or after sex—to bring up the topic.
Be open and build trust slowly. Focus on the positives, such as what you like, want more of or want to try. This will allow your partner to be more receptive to hearing you out. Avoid absolutes—”you always” or “you never”—and accusations. Use “I” statements instead of “you” statements.
Rivers also suggested giving a blame-free lighthearted sex review the following day.
The most important thing to remember is that it takes two to tango. After a sexual encounter, both of you should walk away feeling sexually gratified, so take the time to learn your partner’s likes and preferences, too.
“Sex is an important aspect of a relationship,” Muratore said. “However, each person’s sex needs to be considered.”
Story noted that it’s never too late to start having open conversations about sex with your partner.
“By sharing fantasies, likes, dislikes and expectations, you can learn about each other and create the best possible experience for all,” she said.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
Let’s talk about sex
— And about asexuality, too
5 books explore why we don’t have to tolerate ‘bad sex,’ and what it means to have loving connections with no sex at all
By Julie Kliegman
Sex therapist Ruth Westheimer once said, when asked about the possibility of a “sex recession”: “Here is an activity that is free, here … is an activity that makes people happy, and what’s the matter with all of you not to engage in it?” Like Dr. Ruth’s dozens of books, most literature on the topic presumes that sexual attraction and desire do, in fact, exist in everyone, that sex is therefore a critical part of everyone’s life, and that there must be something wrong with people who don’t have it. Self-help resources like “The Joy of Sex,” mountains of Cosmopolitan tips and even the work of popular queer writers like Dan Savage focus on how to parlay that attraction and desire into satisfying, meaningful sex. There is something of a Freudian quality at play: the pervasive idea that sex is a critical part of fostering intimacy and personal attachment.
But for many, that’s not reality. “It’s almost like there’s a slow-moving unorganized sex strike of people who can’t find good partners or don’t desire relationships and are just opting out instead,” one 28-year-old tells Maria Yagoda in “Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop” (St. Martin’s, $27). Yagoda’s fresh book is the latest entry in a subgenre that seeks to illuminate why people may not be enjoying the sex they’re having or, in some cases, why they might be choosing not to have sex at all.
In “Laid and Confused,” Yagoda chronicles her quest to understand why she and Americans writ large have historically consented to unsatisfying sex. It excels as creative reportage, as Yagoda — who briefly quotes me in her book as a source on asexuality — gamely chats with sex therapists and sex toy creators alike. She keeps an open mind about improvement in her own life and offers tips to readers who may be in the same boat.
Editor and sex columnist Nona Willis Aronowitz explores similar themes in her 2022 book, “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution” (Plume, $28), a multigenerational memoir and manifesto that weaves together her own thoughts and feelings around sex and romance with those of her late mother, the feminist writer Ellen Willis. Specifically, Aronowitz recounts her marriage and divorce, including her reluctance to break up with her husband (in part) on the basis of what she considered bad sex.
The books of Yagoda and Aronowitz both veer far away from what is more traditionally considered “sex writing.” And three more books, all by asexual authors and published since the start of the pandemic — “Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex” by Angela Chen (Beacon, $26.95), “Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture” by Sherronda J. Brown (North Atlantic, $17.95, paperback) and “Sounds Fake but Okay: An Asexual and Aromantic Perspective on Love, Relationships, Sex, and Pretty Much Anything Else” by Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca (Jessica Kingsley, $19.95, paperback) — show that when it comes to consensual, partnered sex, voicing displeasure is slowly becoming more accepted.
In “Ace,” Chen, an acquaintance of mine in ace — short for “asexual” — circles, dives into what life is like for people who do not experience sexual attraction, but also how asexuality can be used as a framework for reevaluating all types of platonic and romantic relationships, as well as one’s sense of self. In a particularly compelling chapter, she challenges the way most people, consciously or not, arrange their lives around a hierarchy in which romantic and sexual relationships, especially marriages, are valued above all else, emotionally and legally.
Asexuality (albeit often known by other names) is not a new orientation by any stretch — in fact, evidence of people’s lack of sexual attraction goes back centuries. But in the digital era, asexuality has gained more recognition, in part because of Julie Sondra Decker’s 2014 book, “The Invisible Orientation: An Introduction to Asexuality” (Skyhorse, $16.99, paperback). Chen, Brown, Costello and Kaszyca all build off Decker’s resource to present a more nuanced way of thinking about sex. The proliferation of these and similar books is also a long-overdue acknowledgment by the publishing world that topics related to asexuality and the deprioritization of sex will interest asexual and allosexual readers alike.
As Brown’s title, “Refusing Compulsory Sexuality,” indicates, questioning and ultimately casting aside “compulsory sexuality” is a huge theme of their work. The term is a riff on “compulsory heterosexuality,” the idea that societal norms force a politically constructed heterosexuality on everyone from birth — those who identify as straight and those who know they don’t fit that bill. “Asexuality exists as a refusal of compulsory sexuality, in defiance of cisheteropatriarchal mandates, and as an opportunity to deeply interrogate how sexual scripts connect with and inform conceptions of gender and race,” Brown writes. Their book pays particular attention to the way Black people are cast aside or maligned in conversations about (a)sexuality, and how the very idea of sexuality in the West is interlaced with anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Most public leaders of the asexual movement are White, but there’s room aplenty within the aspec lens (aspec is short for “asexual spectrum”) to broaden our understanding of who can be ace (anyone) and who in the community faces the most oppression (Black people, especially those who are gender-nonconforming).
As Costello and Kaszyca, creators of a podcast called “Sounds Fake but Okay,” write in their conversational book of the same name, the aspec lens is in part about “decentering the romantic-sexual relationship in our broader conversations about human connection.” It considers the flaws of putting romantic and sexual attraction at the top of our collective and personal hierarchies of needs, even at the expense of biological and chosen family, platonic friendships, and self-care. The aspec lens, Costello and Kaszyca warn, can make everything seem tinged with hopelessness, but it also offers a way to see our surroundings as they can be: beyond what was dictated in sex education classes, modeled by family members or portrayed in pop culture.
By questioning why we go through the motions of sex we don’t find rewarding, we can start to demystify the grip that compulsory sexuality has over our lives. Whether or not the readers who pick up these titles are asexual, there’s a lot to be learned about the merits of taking a step back from sex to reevaluate its place on a societal — and, in many cases, a personal — pedestal.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!
The rise of voluntary celibacy
— ‘Most of the sex I’ve had, I wish I hadn’t bothered’
More and more people are choosing to go without sex. And, in many cases, they’ve never been happier
By Emine Saner
Caitlin didn’t set out to become celibate – at least not in the beginning. Three years ago, she was coming out of an abusive relationship and wasn’t ready to meet someone else. Then Covid happened, and the lockdowns made it impossible anyway. “I thought during that time I needed space to heal and reflect on what I’d been through,” she says. Towards the end of 2020, the 23-year-old artist started therapy. “I realised if I was going to be sexually active, I needed someone who would understand my past, and where I was coming from. I don’t want to be with someone unless I know it’s committed, and I’m not in a rush to find that.”
She had been on dating apps, but found it hard to meet men who wanted a relationship, rather than just sex. “I found they would stop talking to me if I made it known I wasn’t going to hook up with them on the first date. I found a lot of men would put on a bit of an act to appear as if they wanted a relationship, then as soon as you took sex off the table while getting to know them, they disappeared. It’s tricky when a lot of dating is around hook-up culture, which I’m not interested in.”
Caitlin’s celibacy, three years in now, became intentional. She hasn’t missed sex itself, she says, and certainly not casual sex, although sometimes, “seeing people in relationships and having healthy sex lives, can make me go: ‘Why don’t I have that?’” But it has had unintentional benefits. “It’s taught me more about what I enjoy in sex, which I wasn’t expecting. I thought it was going to put me at a disadvantage, but I feel a lot more confident in my own sexuality.” While sex with someone else is out, masturbation is still in, and she says her libido has increased. “I think because exploring different things without dealing with another person has allowed me to find what I enjoy.” It has also made her more relaxed about finding a relationship (or not). “I’ve got other things to focus on. It’s if someone fits into my life rather than me needing to make room for them.”
On TikTok, voluntary or intentional celibacy has become a trend – the #celibacy hashtag has had more than 195m views – with those who practise it claiming it has improved their focus, mental health and energy. In January, it was reported that there was a 90% increase in Google searches for celibacy that month.
“This coincides with a long‑term trend among people today, in general, having less sex with fewer partners,” says Dr Justin Lehmiller, a Kinsey Institute research fellow and host of the Sex and Psychology podcast. “Humans are increasingly less sexually active, with some forgoing sex altogether.” Study after study of sexual behaviour, in different countries, show this. The last National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) in Britain found that 16% of men and 22% of women aged 16 to 74 were sexually inactive, and for most of them, it wasn’t a problem. While the authors noted the documented wellbeing benefits of a satisfying sex life, of those who had previously had sexual experience, the majority were not dissatisfied with their situation (around a third of men, and a quarter of women reported they were dissatisfied, although age had an effect, with younger people more dissatisfied than older people). The Natsal data is more than 10 years old, though, and its authors noted in a 2019 paper on the sexually inactive how little is known about them.
The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior in the US found that between 2009 and 2018 there was a rise in adolescents reporting no sexual activity (partnered and alone), from 28.8% to 44.2% of young men and from 49.5% to 74% of young women. In one interview, the study’s authors raised several possible contributing factors, including gaming and social media taking time and precedence, more awareness of asexuality as an identity, a decline in alcohol use, an increase in “rough sex” practices such as choking that may be frightening or off-putting to many, and lower incomes.
Voluntary celibacy in the US, where Lehmiller is based, seems to have more links to religion than it does in the UK. Furthermore, he says, “in this #MeToo and post-Roe era [with the rollback of reproductive rights] we find ourselves in, the perceived risks associated with sex are higher, particularly for women. And, when you factor in the orgasm gap and the fact that women’s pleasure still isn’t on a par with men’s, some women are asking themselves whether sex is even worth it. If you see it as a high-risk, low-reward kind of thing, you might decide you’re better off without it.”
He suggests that celibacy, for some, may be part of “the growing trend towards delayed adulthood. Individuals might see sex and relationships as distractions, or as not having much point until they’ve found stability in other life circumstances.” The pressures of studying, establishing a career or saving for a home may take priority. While voluntary celibacy seems less popular among non‑religious heterosexual men, some have talked online about intentional celibacy providing more focus for their careers, with sex being a distraction.
For those who are dating, apps have changed the way many people find partners, but as Lehmiller points out, online dating is an arena “where there’s a lot of toxic behaviour, brutal rejection and feelings of intense competition for mates. It can make sex and relationships feel like a high-stress, high-stakes thing. Some people may find that taking a pause from that is good for their mental health.”
While celibacy is for many a positive personal choice, it can also be viewed as the result of, or a reaction against, a messed-up sexual culture, just as some of the second wave feminists chose political lesbianism decades ago. Last year, the “femcel”, or “female involuntary celibate”, went mainstream. “They feel the same sense of ‘humiliation and exclusion’ that ‘incels’ do,” as a piece in the Atlantic put it, “but they react to those feelings differently.”
Unlike the notorious misogynistic incels who blame women for not wanting to have sex with them, femcels posting in online groups tend to blame their celibacy on the soul-destroying sexual landscape and a society that, for all its hollow talk of “body positivity”, is still obsessed with looks and beauty conventions.
Louise Perry, author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, says that many young heterosexual women “now feel as if they have to run the gauntlet of hook-up culture if they want to have any kind of sexual relationship. I think a lot of them, quite fairly, would rather not have any sexual relationship at all.” The influence and availability of pornography, she adds, “has had a really destructive effect on sexual culture.” She says surveys show that “most women don’t get that much out of casual sex. The problem is, because our sexual culture is so oriented towards a more masculine style of sexuality, a lot of young women in particular don’t feel as if they are able to demand commitment from their partners. Increasing numbers are opting out of the sexual culture altogether.”
It’s naive, she says, to think you can simply choose to avoid pornography and casual sex if you’re sexually active, “because the nature of sex in general, and social relationships, is that they’re networked – you have sex with people who have sex with other people, who watch porn. Even if you choose not to do that, other people do it, and it changes the culture. I think that, particularly in young people, who are super-sensitive to what other people think about them, the default setting now is to have pornified, casual sex.” For some people, opting out might feel like their only option.
Not that voluntary celibacy has just been invented. Stephen gave up sex more than 20 years ago, when he had just turned 40. “I’d become disillusioned with the gay scene, and too much casual sex with strangers. While I was in my 20s it could be fun, but most of the time, when I had sex with someone I’d just met, I was always hoping it was going to be more than just the one night. I was hoping for a relationship.” The last time he had sex, he contracted syphilis, which was the final straw.
A year or so ago, now in his early 60s, Stephen thought he might make another attempt at a sex life. “I gave Grindr a go, and that was quite an eye-opener.” The dating scene had changed in his decades of celibacy, with apps making casual hook-ups even easier, and he says he was alarmed by the number of people who wanted to have sex while taking drugs. He went on three dates with different men. “We did a bit of touching and kissing, but when it came to going any further, each time I said: ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ Now I’ve put myself back on the shelf. Most of the sex I’ve ever had, I wish I hadn’t bothered. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be and it just seems so much effort for something that’s over quickly. Looking back, it’s all very disappointing.”
He has missed intimacy, but companionship and affection have come from friends and his dogs. He is still open to being in a relationship, he says, and hasn’t lost his sex drive, but he thinks he is unlikely to meet someone now. “I’d need to have sex with someone I’ve known, even just for a few weeks, or a few days, instead of with someone whose name you can’t quite remember. An intimate but non-sexual relationship might be the best for me. It would be nice to lie in bed with someone, be an old married couple from the start.”
Celibacy, says Ammanda Major, head of clinical practice for Relate, “works when it works, and it doesn’t work when it doesn’t work. A lot of this comes down to: is this something that you feel is important to you, and you’re doing it for you? Or is it something that you feel is imposed on you, for reasons that might be very difficult? Like you’ve had a period without a partner, or you’ve gone through a period of ill health, whether mental or physical.” If it hasn’t been a positive choice, she says, it could “cause people to feel potentially unloved and uncared for”.
It can also raise problems, unsurprisingly, in relationships where one partner wants to follow a celibate lifestyle, but the other doesn’t. In that situation, you have to be willing to have a potentially difficult conversation about what it means for your relationship. Our society puts a lot of emphasis on sex, “but it’s not for everyone”, she says. “Celibacy can be a conscious decision, or it may be something that you just gently morph into and that also feels OK for you.” Major suggests asking yourself what celibacy brings to your life. “Are you cutting yourself off from sex, or are you cutting yourself off from intimacy? Are they the same for you? Can you be intimate while being celibate?”
It can certainly have benefits in a variety of situations, she says. “It’s not unusual for people after the breakup of a relationship, or periods of a lot of sexual activity, to take a step back and think: ‘I need to do some self-care, which involves taking myself out of this sexual arena at the moment. I will engage with it again at some point, but this is time to think about what I want to do next.’ Which may be to maintain celibacy, or it may be to engage with an intimate partner or several partners.”
Without her period of intentional celibacy a few years ago, after a breakup, Kelly Jenner believes she wouldn’t have changed her relationship patterns for the better. “I went for men who were very unavailable,” she says. “Now I’m in the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had – I’ve got clear boundaries, we have healthy conversations, whereas I never had that before I did intentional celibacy.” Now a breakup recovery coach, Jenner often recommends a period of celibacy to others. How long it lasts is less important, she thinks, than the intention; simply a sexless period between partners doesn’t necessarily come with the same benefits. “The intention changes your whole mindset around dating.”
For Hope Flynn, 31, head of content for iPlaySafe, a home-testing STI kit and app, her eight-month stretch of celibacy – she had been having sex about three times a week, so it was intentional rather than a mere dry spell – was about resetting her attitudes to sex. “I really enjoy sex, but I started to notice I was using it in the wrong way,” she says. She was going through a difficult time – she was trying to launch a business and had experienced a couple of bereavements – and would seek no-strings sex as a distraction and for comfort.
“It wasn’t really doing anything for me, other than making me feel as if I was making wrong decisions. I had to put the brakes on it for a few months, and focus on myself and making myself feel better.” It was sometimes difficult, she says. “It was lonely at times, and I felt like I was being my own fun police, but it was needed.”
Earlier this year, she had another period of abstention – this time from pornography and masturbation, because she felt that had got out of control. “I wanted to have a better relationship with porn, and use my own imagination a bit more.” Both sexual breaks helped her focus on other areas of her life by removing sex as a distraction, and it made her appreciate sex more when she started being intimate again. “When I was having sex so regularly, it just becomes something that you do, but it was nice to have that break and make it special again.”
Some names have been changed
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