We All Touch Ourselves: Fancy Feast on Beauty, Pleasure and Sexual...
We all touch ourselves in different ways. I could tell customers that, with my sex educator hat on, and it could mean that although there are some common themes around erogenous zones and patterns of...
View ArticleLove and Looking: On What We (Don’t) See Together
“What one sees with one’s own eyes is mixed up with the question of what someone else sees.” —Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us From Seeing Published in 1993, “E Unibus Pluram,”...
View ArticleMissouri library buys extra copies of “Bang Like a Porn Star” for “research.”
The St. Charles County library system recently bought additional copies of a challenged book, Bang Like a Porn Star: Sex Tips from the Pros, because “committee members need more copies to conduct a...
View Article17th-Century Dildo Shopping with the Ladies: On the Contested Terrain of...
Set out in search of the history of women’s relationship with sex and you will—with a bit of luck—find a very amusing engraving from the seventeenth century lurking in the shallows of the internet. It...
View ArticleFrancine Prose on the Unfinished Sexual Revolution of the 1970s
In that era of so-called sexual liberation, it was illegal in Massachusetts to prescribe birth control to an unmarried woman. In college, I’d lied to get the pill. I’d made sure the doctor in Boston...
View ArticleHow Judy Blume’s Deenie Helped Destigmatize Masturbation
“I rubbed and rubbed until I got that good feeling.” * Like many adolescents, Deenie has a secret. Or maybe “secret” isn’t the right word. Deenie has a private ritual, something she does when she...
View ArticleThe (Unwanted) Sex Lives of Married Women: Eight Books About Complicated Desire
The most violating sex I ever had happened in the one place where even today, after seven years of #MeToo-fueled inquiries, few would ever look: in my marriage. I didn’t always loathe having sex with...
View ArticleA sex-work-positive reading list, inspired by Anora .
Something’s happening with sex and work this season, culturally-speaking. On screen, Sean Baker’s Anora, a loving profile of an escort on the come-up, is gathering Oscar buzz. On the page, Sally...
View ArticleWhy We Need More Queer Sex in Climate Fiction; Or, on Rereading Rachel Carson
Almost one hundred years ago, a young English major named Rachel Carson signed up for an intro-level biology class to fulfill her science requirements at the Pennsylvania College for Women in...
View ArticleSex, Love and Longing in 1970s Gay New York: Edmund White on His Past Lovers
Throughout the 1970s I was in love with Keith McDermott, ten years younger than me. When I first met him, I was living in a third-floor walk-up studio on Horatio Street in the West Village. He was...
View Article