As a longtime sex coach in my mid-50s, I find myself in a constant state of speaking truth to power when it comes to sex and aging. How is hot sex after 50 different from hot sex after 40? Or 20? How is it different from hot sex in the aftermath of divorce? Or during the hottest love affair of our lives? The point is: hot sex matters. It generates and releases energy. It … [Read more...]
Abuse Happens Everywhere: 8 Questions To Ask About Respecting BDSM Boundaries
I came of age during a moment when lesbian feminist culture was booming -– music festivals, women’s bookstores and lesbian feminist political projects were cropping up everywhere. And one of the most damaging and fallacious assumptions of that era was that women were inherently non-violent, that lesbian relationships offered a haven from abuse, that simply because our … [Read more...]
9 Reasons Why Acting in Solidarity for Racial Justice Is Preferable to “Allyship”
There is almost nothing more dangerous in the lives and livelihoods of Black men and women than a well-intentioned white woman with no political framework for her interactions across race. White women’s well-being, our ‘safety,’ is constantly deployed to justify white supremacist violence, especially police violence. Our casual conversations with Black and brown people on the … [Read more...]
10 Ways To Raise Radically Sex-Positive Kids
One of my key jobs as a parent is to raise kids who love themselves and their sexuality. My own childhood was filled with silences and horrible caveats about sex. My mother told me repeatedly that she would ‘snap my spine’ if I had sex outside of monogamous marriage. And that sex ‘was not all that it what was cracked up to be.’ The only other ‘education’ I … [Read more...]
5 Things People Get Wrong About Desire
Content note: This article includes (non-detailed) references to fantasizing about sexual violence The not-so-funny paradox about sex in our lives is that we are swamped by it but honest, intimate conversation about our desires is hard to come by. Sex sells it all, from toothpaste to car insurance. We are advice-d to death about it via endless columns in glossy magazines. … [Read more...]
5 Reasons To Celebrate Interdependence Day
The myth of independence is one of the foundational and corrosive myths of American life. On July 4th, 1776, when the US declared “independence” from its colonizer, it did so on the backs of the Indigenous people whose lands they’d stolen and the African people whose enslavement and labor would build the US into the ‘prosperous’ ‘superpower’ that forms the cornerstone of the … [Read more...]
10 Ways to Support Sex-Positive Kids
One of my key jobs as a parent is to raise kids who love themselves and their sexuality. My own childhood was filled with silences and horrible caveats about sex. My mother told me repeatedly that she would ‘snap my spine’ if I had sex outside of monogamous marriage. And that sex ‘was not all that it what was cracked up to be.’ (A lot of violent cracking … [Read more...]
7 Ways to Support Someone Who is Struggling with Their Gender Identity
Don’t assume you ‘know’ what their authentic gender is. Don’t assume you know what they are going through. Don’t assume anything. Listen. Listen. Listen. Open yourself. Hear. Hear. Hear. Every person’s gender journey is distinctly theirs; there are no cookie-cutter ten steps to success. Who is this person? What matters to them? How do they talk about their gender? … [Read more...]
