One of the difficulties that those of us who are looking to challenge the Act Like a Man Box (see my post The Performance of Masculinity for an explanation of that, if you aren’t familiar with it) is that the Box itself gets in the way. My observation is that’s because “believes in the Box” […]

I’ve been teaching workshops on male gender socialization for about 15 years or so. The foundation of my presentation is the Act Like a Man Box, which I learned about from Paul Kivel’s book, Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart. I like calling it the “Act Like a Man […]

If you need some evidence that we’re not actually in a post-racism world, here’s another bit of proof. When adolescent women show up at emergency rooms saying that they’re experiencing lower abdominal pain and/or urinary or genital symptoms, just over 26% of them test positive for gonorrhea, chlamydia, and/or trichomonas. And since many adolescents don’t […]

Debates about sex work and trafficking aren’t new, but they sure are heating up these days. As someone who has known many different sex workers of all different genders and sexual orientations in pretty much every branch of the business, while also not having ever been a sex worker myself, I find that I have […]

When Viagra was first discovered as an erection-enhancing medication, it was an accident. It was originally formulated as a blood pressure medication and during clinical trials, they discovered what else it could do. Since then, the market for erection medications has grown tremendously and the competition is stiff. (OK, that was unnecessary, but I needed to […]

This post also appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine. I was recently at the annual conference for the Western Region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality and one of the speakers mentioned a fascinating bit of research on the effects of neuroscientific explanations. It seems that when an article explains something by […]

As if being a sex worker isn’t hard enough, you can also be blamed if someone kills you. To catch you up if you’ve missed the story, a serial killer targeting sex workers and killed at least ten of them, burying their bodies  along Ocean Parkway in Long Island. This is hardly the first time […]