I remember exactly when I first understood what “rape culture” meant. I was nineteen and a sophomore in college. I was talking with a woman I knew about gender and sexual politics, and I just wasn’t getting it. She was describing what it was like for her to move through the world as a woman, […]

In some of the (mostly online) discussions I’ve seen around BDSM & kink, there’s a sticking point that seems to come up over and over. What does it mean when people say that they get turned on by “pushing boundaries”? I think this is worth unpacking because there are at least two different meanings to […]

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 […]

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 […]

I recently had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at Netroots Nation on the topic of sexuality and some of its connections to issues of social justice. The other speakers were amazing and the audience was a lot of fun. I just wish we’d had more time to talk with each other- the rest […]

I recently participated in a facebook thread about this tumblr post on the topic of sex work, which in turn, was sparked by this tumblr post. The discussion I was in included a back-and-forth between me and someone who wants to abolish sex work by criminalizing the purchasing of sex, but not the selling of […]

It’s not just the women in my life who amaze me. The men in my life are some of the most inspiring people imaginable. The men in my life are strong. Not in the “I have to be stronger than anything the universe throws at me” kind of way. These men are strong enough to […]