Good News: Porn Isn’t Bad For Your Sexual Health After All

Everyone can calm down now. By Zeynep Yenisey Recently, a British National Health Service therapist suggested that access to porn is “damaging” to men’s health, particularly their sexual health, so naturally the internet freaked out, because porn is awesome and it’d be tragic if it really was unhealthy somehow. The claim came from psychosexual therapist …

The World Health Organization Proposes Dropping Transgender Identity From Its List of Mental Disorders

Transgender identity would instead be categorized under the sexual health umbrella, which could significantly impact acceptance of transgender individuals in health care and social spaces. The World Health Organization is currently considering reclassifying transgender identity in its International Classification of Diseases. Though the WHO previously labeled transgender identity as a mental disorder, a recent Lancet Psychiatry study has led the organization …

Are you getting any closer? A pocket-sized primer on female sexuality

By Clarissa Fortin Stay curious between the sheets, friends. Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality by Sarah Barmak (Coach House Books, 2016; $14.95) If it weren’t for Sarah Barmak’s Closer: Notes from the Orgasmic Frontier of Female Sexuality I might have gone for years of my life without ever finding out what my …

A handy history

Condemned, celebrated, shunned: masturbation has long been an uncomfortable fact of life. Why? by Barry Reay The anonymous author of the pamphlet Onania (1716) was very worried about masturbation. The ‘shameful vice’, the ‘solitary act of pleasure’, was something too terrible to even be described. The writer agreed with those ‘who are of the opinion, …