I’ve been studying, talking about, and teaching workshops about shame for several years and one of the issues that comes up over and over is whether shame is always bad or not. I’ve been looking for ways to talk about this, since I think that shame does serve some purposes and can help us grow […]

There’s some new research about women’s experiences of receiving anal play, and it’s worth taking a look at. About 2000 heterosexual women who experienced anal intercourse at least twice in the previous year were asked about the level and frequency of pain. Almost half (48.8%) had to discontinue the experience because of pain or discomfort, […]

There’s been an important shift in several different communities and scenes lately. In the kink world, in atheism circles, among feminist folks and their allies, in pagan communities, I’ve been seeing more people than ever before talking about the effects of sexual coercion, assault, harassment, unwanted attention, and other related topics. Of course, none of […]

There are a lot of reasons our sexual desires and interests don’t always match up with those of our partners. Changing tastes, medical or mental health challenges, busy work schedules, stress and juggling different demands, and simply having different libidos can make it hard to find a common ground. In both my personal life and […]

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 […]

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 […]