I spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about porn. I find our cultural relationship to it fascinating, partly because it sheds light on some facets of our attitudes towards sex that are hard to see otherwise. In the interest of full disclosure, I work for a company that sells sexually explicit movies […]

I’ve been having conversations about the meaning of BDSM for a long, long time. Part of that is that I’ve been doing various things that generally fall in the kink category since I was about 19. Part of that is that sex educators have these sorts of talks with a lot of different people. Part […]

I received this message through my contact page and since it’s the kind of question a lot of people have, I thought I’d turn it into a blog post. I am 31, married, and working as expatriate away from my husband. Not only that I have an extremely high libido but also I am using […]

There are lots of things we can do to make the world a better place. We can reduce our consumption of irreplaceable resources, we can develop our capacity to bring compassion to our relationships, we can support people in crisis or need- there’s plenty to be done. And there’s one thing that I think has […]

Some new headlines about the Robert Pickton case are making the rounds. It seems that Jim Brown, one of the police officers involved in the investigation of the serial killer, had some photos on Fetlife, a social network for the BDSM world. The images of him holding a leash that’s connected to a collared woman […]

Hugo Schwyzer’s latest post on Jezebel, ‘I Suck’: How Guys Use Self-Deprecation Against You, makes a strong case that a lot of men use self-deprecation to avoid stepping up and manipulate women into soothing their shame and anxiety. I think he’s partly right that it’s often a defense mechanism that many men use to dodge […]

I recently found myself in yet another conversation with a longtime kinky player who made a disparaging comment about vanilla sex. If you’re not familiar with the term, it pretty much means anything sexual that isn’t BDSM, and it’s often used dismissively, as if sex that doesn’t include leather, whips, or pain is boring. Although […]