I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be empowered. It’s a question that frequently comes up in discussions about sexuality, sexism, porn, choice, and sex-positivity. I recently ran across this post on the topic by Jennifer Kesler which points out some of the ways in which this word is misunderstood and […]

A post on HuffPo Women from a few months ago is making the rounds again. Author Yashar Ali’s article A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not “Crazy” makes some excellent points on the ways that some men use accusations of craziness to control women: My friend Anna (all names changed to protect […]

One of my favorite sex nerds, Dr. Debby Herbenick, recently retweeted something that I’ve been thinking about for a while: true. “@hotaction: Everyone should spend some time looking at photos of naked old people because that’s what the future looks like.” — Dr. Debby Herbenick (@mysexprofessor) December 18, 2011 Today is the 20th anniversary of […]

This post first appeared on the Good Vibrations Magazine. I don’t recall when I first heard about AIDS.I was 11 when the first cases were documented by the CDC in 1981, but it took a while before the news percolated down to me. I remember being 12 or 13 and the panic that hit everywhere. […]

Back in the day, before we had this thing called the internet, options for getting information out to the world were much more limited. There was the media of course, but when it came to spreading info about HIV & AIDS, the newspapers and TV messages usually fell into two camps: panic or silence. Neither […]

Wow. This is exactly what I wrote about in The Performance of Masculinity. (click on the image to see it full size) This lovely “report” was created by Pat Lynch, a high school guidance counselor and football coach from Wyoming, and given to the football team. It seems that his way of dealing with boys […]

I recently attended a lecture by Robert Jensen, noted radical feminist,  anti-pornography activist, and one of the producers of The Price of Pleasure, an anti-porn film that I’ve written about here and here. I went because I wanted to see what he was like in person. I’ve read some of his work, and I figured […]