#we need to talk more about safe sex and less about abstinence only or shaming people who have casual sex PLEASE

[fxmmeangel]

twitter keeps showing me posts about how people who take prep are whores?? and like getting aids/hiv is some morally reprehensible act that means you’re awful?? what is wrong with yall 😻

[foreficfandom]

Mystic Messenger - First Time With MC (Lemon)

(Author’s notes: These scenarios do NOT assume a gender for MC, but do write the boys penetrating the reader.)

– Zen –

This isn’t his first rodeo, but he’s not exactly experienced; he’s had, like, one-and-a-half relationships before you. It’s been years since he’s had partnered sex.

And he’s never had sex-ed, either, so his knowledge of the Nasty is kinda lacking. He thinks he can re-use condoms as long as he keeps it on, he believes coconut oil can be used with latex, he thinks birth control pills act as a spermicide, and so on.

You and him initiate sex pretty early on in the relationship, perhaps merely a few days after the RFA party. He’s very romantic about it, too, planning a whole day in advance with rose petals on the bed and scented candles dotting his room. But in the middle of making out, you ask if he’s clean, and he pulls back, confused. “... I think? I mean, I haven’t been with anybody in years, so ...���

Turns out he’s never been tested for STDs. He’s almost offended when you bring it up, like you’re insinuating he’s been cheating on you. You have to explain that getting tested is just what everyone does before having sex with someone for the first time. 

So ... he’s not tested. “Can we ... still do it?” He’s blushing like crazy now, embarrassed he’s so behind on the know-how when he’s the one who wanted this in the first place. 

Partnered sex can still be relatively safe even when an individual’s not been tested, so long as you use lots of protection. But depending on who you are, you might say no, just to be 100% safe. Either way, Zen’s disappointed - not in you, no way, but in himself. God, he’s been looking forward to this night for so long, and he fucked it up by being stupid. He stews in his thoughts silently for a while, and you can tell he’s feeling down so you cuddle him close to have a good long chat about sex, relationships, and communication. Afterwards, he feels much less insecure. The two of you take the rose petals and candles to the bathroom to enjoy your first romantic bath together, instead.

Two days later, he bounces back from the clinic with a negative on every test imaginable. It’s finally time to dig in, and go ham he does, passionately wrapping you into his arms while thrusting deep and slow, trying to have as much skin contact at all times. Oh, god, he loves you, and he’ll spend the whole night proving it.

(Except he definitely couldn’t last the whole night. Your first time having sex was a mere two turns before he clonked out. He’s still embarrassed about that.)

– Yoosung –

It’s his first time having sex, and he’s really nervous. He wants it, wants you badly, but oh my god what if he messes up? What if he farts? Or scratches you in the face? Or he thrusts weird and hurts you and you start bleeding or something?? Dear lord help him

He considers proposing sex like, eight different times. He’s always chickened out, just kissing you on the doorstep before saying goodbye, or letting you leave his dorm without offering to stay the night. It doesn’t help that his dorm is tiny, he’s got a twin bed barely big enough for him. And anybody passing by the door would hear what’s going on inside clear as day. Take his word on that.

He had spent several hours worth on his laptop, doing research on ‘how to have sex for the first time’. He’s got his list of positions to try, how to minimize pain and discomfort, etc, all memorized.. He eventually goes out to get condoms and lube, making sure to use the self-checkout. 

You and him are hanging out in his dorm after a date, and he wasn’t even planning to suck it up and ask you, but you saw the condoms in the shopping bag he forgot to stow away, and you asked him gently, “do you want to be intimate with me, Yoosung?”

He blushes like crazy, you could swear you saw steam lines radiating from his face. But you take his hand in encouragement and he nods eagerly, looking anywhere else but your eyes. “I - I really want this, MC. I’ve been thinking about this for so long ...”

You can tell he’s nervous. The two of you sit on his bed and talk explicitly about what he wants, how you should proceed, what lines to avoid, and lots of other important details. A safeword is confirmed; ‘server maintenance’. He feels much more confident. 

The two of you begin by just kissing on his bed, he slowly dares to feel up your shirt and eventually the clothes come off bit by bit. His body is lean and soft, and he’s loud, too. Just nipping at his pillowy tummy makes him cry out. 

You give him oral, and he’s twisting around, grabbing at pillows and sheets like he’s tumbling down a cliff. He comes without warning and collapses, wrung out and overwhelmed with pleasure. 

Some cuddling afterwards, and then he’s hard again and kissing at your neck. He asks you to ride him, and when you do, he’s sobbing without shame and grabbing hard at your hips.

Some time afterwards, when you and Yoosung are trying to cuddle on his bed without either of you toppling off, he remembers just how loud he’s been and dreads facing anybody in the building tomorrow. You just laugh and tuck him into the bedsheets.

– Jaehee –

She shyly shows off a beautiful new set of lingerie as her way of asking to ‘take the relationship to the next level’. And she’s a real bombshell in it. It’s sometimes easy to forget that Jaehee’s got a bod underneath her suit/cafe uniform.

Unlike certain younger boys, Jaehee didn’t feel the need to agonize over this night over a period of several months. This is a natural progression for her. Once things feel ready between the two of you, it’s natural that the question eventually comes up.

She first shows you her new lingerie in its original packaging, and waits to hear your ‘yes’. Then, it’s time to hop into the bathtub for a long soak and thorough wash before putting it on.

She also gets new toys. Entire shopping bags and shipping boxes filled with insertables, vibrators, pumps, impacts, (and also the supplies needed to maintain them). She didn’t come out and show you these all at once, she’d probably die of embarrassment if she did. But she had them all unwrapped, clean, tested, and ready to use in a discreet box.

You and she actually end up making out on the couch rather than the bedroom. She’s sitting in your lap dressed in her lingerie, you’re fully clothed, and things get so heated the two of you decide to go at it right there.

She’s surprisingly wild. She keeps as much of her lingerie on as possible, even while you’re knuckle deep or pelvis-to-pelvis. The floor is eventually lined with toys as one is used after the other. And she loves taking the initiative with a gentle but firm hand, directing the positions one after the other, or deciding what toy to be used where, and for how long.

A round on the couch, and Jaehee cools down long enough to freak out about staining the upholstery, so she ushers you into the bedroom while she busts out the Lysol. 

After she cleans up, she joins you on the bed for some belated cuddling, and perhaps a second round. Or three.

And it’s actually in the middle of the day, not during the night, so the two of you are completely worn out by dinnertime. Food is takeout, and there’s a lot of it because you need to replenish all that energy.  

Jaehee doesn’t get blushy until you feed her a bite of dessert. It’s cute how confident she is when it comes to sex, but shy about small acts of intimacy. 

– Jumin –

He’s not a virgin, (not that it’s any of your business, Luciel), he had sex with a random girl back in college just to see what the fuss was about, and nothing else since then.

Jumin’s a conservative guy. “Liberalism can only flourish with a good foundation of conservatism.” He believes unmarried couples shouldn’t live together. Of course he’s not gonna be fond of having sex before tying the knot.

It’s not like he rushed the engagement for that reason, but if he was perfectly honest, he did wake up in a cold sweat at 3am when he remembered that this meant the two of you would be intimate very soon. 

Jumin’s got that reputation for being some d/s sex-mad sadist daddy, but that’s not the full picture. You might be able to get him into that specific mood after the two of you establish your relationship more. But for the first few times, it’s all vanilla.

It takes a long while before the wedding actually happens. And, no, Jumin’s not gonna really want to have sex for that entire period. Sure, he’s excited about it, but it’s not a driving, burning need. You, on the other hand, might say differently. 

So if you don’t want to wait four to five months, you’re gonna have to breach the topic yourself. And he’ll be torn - on one hand, he rationally realizes that it’s completely harmless to have consensual sex without martial ties. But he also believes in that supposed virtue of being abstinent until marriage. He also liked the romance of waiting. It’d make the moment more special for him.

Either way, he’s excited. The bed’s furnished with fresh sheets, the lights are dimmed, and there’s five dozen roses in crystal vases throughout the bedroom. 

It’ll start with wine while sitting on the bed - if you don’t drink, you have a glass of something you prefer while he’s sipping on some $12,000 vintage - and he drills a hole in your face with his loving gaze while singing your virtues. He wants you naked before he is, so after some kissing you’ll be nude on the sheets while he finally takes his clothes off.

Jumin has no idea what sex is ‘supposed’ to look like, which is both good and bad - you can tell him to do anything, and he’s not gonna worry about feeling awkward or stupid. But he also needs to be told to do anything. 

If you want him to go faster, or use more tongue, you have to tell him. He’s not gonna take the initiative. If you want him to switch positions, you need to describe exactly how you want to position yourselves. It’s a mixed blessing.

The first round goes quite a while because Jumin was taking it slow. There’s a second round where he gets more adventurous, and maybe a third round depending on how you feel. 

The next morning, the chef’s been hired to prepare a special breakfast, and you can tell that they know. Jumin doesn’t care. He just smiles all day.

– Saeyoung –

He actually was a virgin, which was kinda a surprise. His agent job never require any sort of sex-related work, thank god, and it’s not like he ever earned the attention of anybody else before this point. 

If an agency job had enough time to have sex while in the field, then that meant the job was going down the dumps fast. And whenever Agent 707 was involved, a job never nosedived that far.

It’s (semi) canon that Saeyoung asked to be intimate during the after-ending, while on the search for his brother. It was the night before all your plans would come to fruition, and he didn’t know he would come back alive. “I want to leave evidence on you that I existed.”

But it’s ALSO canon that in Saeyoung’s ‘dark chocolate’ Valentine’s Day ending, he asks to ‘take the relationship to the next level’. Which implies that the two of you haven’t had sex yet. 

So what’s the dealio? Basically, Saeyoung wanted to have sex with you that night in the cabin, and after some kissing, you realized that you (1) didn’t have protection, (2) neither of you have been tested recently, and (3) your current emotional states weren’t ideal for sex, especially since Saeyoung was a virgin. He left a lot of hickies on your neck instead, and the two of you held each other close the whole night. 

By the time Valentine’s Day rolled around, it had been two months since Saeran was rescued and Saeyoung was feeling a lot happier. You made it to the end of the scavenger hunt to find an amorous redhead that was ~prepared~ this time. An entire shopping bag full of prophylactics, lube, band-aids, water bottles, and everything. 

He managed to fake a confident persona up until he undressed you fully, then he found himself blushing like crazy when you undressed him in turn. Damn, he really was hiding muscles underneath that hoodie. His arms were woven cable, and underneath his pudge you could feel shapely abs. 

He asked to be on top, you complied, rolling over and allowing him to explore your body with his hands and mouth. It took three tries to enter you, because without his glasses, you were a bit of a blurry blob. But once he was in, he went at it. Maybe even a bit too enthusiastic for the first few thrusts, he was just running on some animalistic instinct he didn’t know he had. 

Two minutes later, he was blindsided by a surprise orgasm. Embarrassed, he rolled off of you and buried his face into the sheets. You had to stroke his hair soothingly for ten minutes before he would look you in the face. 

Saeyoung’s first evening of sex had one ‘disastrous’ first try, then a much better second run, and then after dinner there was a third ... and also .5 a prance while in the shower.  

– Saeran –

You’re his first sexual partner, but more than that, today also marks a big step in his self-confidence. He’s cashing in his newfound tolerance for his body and constitution. Saeran spent most of his life hating his ‘weak’ health and thinking anybody’d be repulsed by him. He wouldn’t have sex if he didn’t believe differently. 

So it’s probably several months - perhaps years - into your relationship that he even brings up having sex. Even though he may be ready, he’s still nervous and shy and unsure about how to proceed. 

Before the big night, he spends several minutes in front of the mirror, looking at his body. He’s gained weight and a new color to his skin thanks to his healthier lifestyle, and there’s this confidence to his posture that wasn’t there before. A sparkle in his eye. It’s incredible how far he’s come from hating every inch of himself. He smiles.

He prepares one of his Patented Saeran’s Romantic Dinners, complete with candlelight and ambient music. The two of you have done this several times before, but this time there’s an electricity in the air ‘cause of what’s to come. You notice that the food has no garlic, or other strong smells. Saeran’s more cunning than he looks. 

As dessert finishes up, he gets more quiet, until the conversation dies down and there’s nothing for it; he takes a deep breath and says, “....Sh-shall we go to bed?” Like this hasn’t been planned weeks in advance. The two of you walk hand-in-hand to the bedroom, where there’s even more candles and another stereo playing soft music, and you picture Saeran putting together a ‘having sex for the first time’ playlist.

You begin by kissing Saeran lying beneath you, but he stops you with a hand on your shoulder and asks to switch positions, because he doesn’t like the feeling of you hovering over him. It’s another mark of his progress that he asks for adjustments. 

Things progress slowly. Saeran feels out what makes him feel anxious, and what makes him feel good. The two of you end up side-by-side as he takes you, facing each other with your legs wrapped around his waist. Very intimate. Very sweet. He loves threading his fingers through your hair, and he mewls every time you fondle his ears. 

His health is still shaky, so he only has the stamina for one round before he needs to rest. He all but demands you inch as close as possible so he falls asleep holding you tight. When he wakes up the next morning, he’s got a 1000-watt smile. 

– Jihyun –

Out of the entire wacky cast of Mystic Messenger boys, Jihyun’s the only actual experienced one. You don’t have to tell him that a single pack of five condoms is waaayy too little, you don’t have to explain what dental dams are, or worry about him using oil-based lube on accident, and he’s the only one who actually showers thoroughly beforehand. 

It begins with your typical night of cuddling-and-kissing, then Jihyun says he’s clean and he’s got a bedside cabinet full of supplies. He gently holds your hand and asks, ‘”if you’d like …? We could … if you’re comfortable. If you’d have me.” He’s blushing, but he’s confident. 

Of course, even if you’re experienced, the first time with anybody is gonna be awkward. And Jihyun’s a surprisingly big guy to maneuver. There’s a lot of accidental elbowing, bonking of the heads, kneeling on sensitive bits, and little scrapes. His long limbs seemingly end up everywhere on the bed, and it’s like you’re playing twister. 

Mistakes just make him laugh. You trip over his outstretched forearm and face plant into his shoulder, and he just chuckles and pulls you into another kiss. 

He’s just so soft and loving. ‘Cause to Jihyun, it’s about ~making love~. He wants to go slow, looking into your eyes, cradling your head and burying his face into the crook of your neck. 

Tries to get you off first, either through oral or otherwise. He’s not a big fan of any positions that turn you away from him, it’s just too rough and aggressive. He’d rather carry you on his shoulders before he prefers doggy style. 

Checks in with you constantly, asks what you like and where you like to be touched. Tries to get you to literally guide his hands. In turn, he asks you to please, touch his legs, his thighs ... yes, kiss me there - 

For your first time, he’d rather have a one-two long sessions than multiple quick ones. He believes sex is one of the most intimate methods of non-verbal communication, and the longer you go in one sitting, the more is passed between the two of you. 

He’s never used toys in his life. If you decide to pull one out for your first time, he’s gonna blush like crazy and actually decline. He wants the first night to be 'organic’. And he’s so driven towards that romantic face-to-face lovemaking, he won’t go too hard or fast, even if you’re begging him. 

After the sex, he wraps you up in a cozy blanket before fetching some hot tea and fresh fruit. Then there’s several minutes spent reviewing how things went, what things worked well, or how they can improved. He catalogues it all for later. 

He rarely wants to fall asleep right after sex, so you might pass out peacefully, but he’s gonna stay awake, just gazing at you for a while. 

[floatingbook]

The place of lesbians in women’s liberation and lesbophobia (2/2)

- Reading: Tales of the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay (part 1 here)

On organising a women-only dance event as part of the GLF, and asking their “heterosexual sisters of the women’s movement” to attend, out of fear of failure of the event:

“We asked them to come to the dance as an act of support. Many of the women I knew from of Redstockings and Rat [Rat Subterranean News, a radical bi-monthly that had begun publishing in fall  1969, taken over by militant feminists in 1970] agreed to come. Just under the surface of solidarity, however, lurked tensions. When I mistakenly asked one woman twice, she accused me of trying to transform her into a lesbian.

Some of the women I asked refused to attend. Many of them objected to the very notion of dances for the same reasons I did. A few feminists had additional objections as well. One woman, writing for Rat, expressed a “ fear of breaking down this political, nearly formal relationship with my sisters and sisters I would meet.” Her phobia about “dancing with sisters because it means ‘sexual’” was one I encountered often. It might have been difficult for straight women to appreciate just how political a women’s dance was. In New York State it was illegal for two people of the same sex to dance together. Just by dancing, we were challenging as system that refused to let us be ourselves.“ p. 127-128

And here lesbophobia lurks. There is a palpable fear emanating from the straight women Karla Jay’s writes about, the fear of being seen as a lesbian. What would be so terrible in being mistaken for a lesbian by other women? Nothing, unless you hold—and you know the society you live in holds—a terrible view of lesbians, as disgusting and despicable creature, as sex-crazed deviant women. Lesbians are just women who happen to be only attracted to other women. Nothing to fear here.

“Lesbians whose only involvement was withe the Women’s Liberation Movement were generally no better off than those of us connected with the Gay Liberation Front. Most heterosexual feminists were no better at hearing us than gay men were. Conservative elements of the women’s movement were openly hostile to lesbians. For instance, Betty Friedan had branded us a “lavender menace.” Lesbians, she believed, would blight the reputation of the National Organization for Women [NOW] if its members were labeled “man-haters” and “a bunch of dykes.” The very threat of such an appellation led NOW to deny the number of lesbians in its ranks. Lesbophobia was so virulent that NOW omitted the name of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis from the list of sponsors for the First Congress to Unite Women, a conference that NOW organized in November 1969 as a forum for New York area feminists.” p. 137

How hypocritical do you have to be to accept financial donation but refuse to name the benefactors? As I have previously touched upon, the reason for this hostility was mostly a question of appearance in the eyes of men and the mainstream media. The reputation of the women’s liberation movement had to be safe-guarded, lest women participating be described as lesbians, that supreme insult. What a shame that would have been, if these respectable heterosexual women were put in the same basket as lesbians. This performative lesbophobia is but an attempt at appeasing the dominant males, to make sure that even if women are campaigning for a little betterment of their existence, for a little relief from their oppression, men are still not too displeased with them. It’s an attempt to diminish the backlash. But how much are these heterosexual women loosing by compromising in such a way? Haven’t they already lost? By being afraid of what the public and especially the men will think if they are associated with lesbians, have they not immediately failed at liberating women? Because lesbians are women too. As long as one woman is in chain, we are not free, even if this woman is a lesbian.

Rita Mae Brown decried the leadership of NOW as “consciously [oppressing] other women on the question of sexual preference…. Lesbian is the one word that can cause the Executive Committee a collective heart attack. This issue is dismissed as unimportant, too dangerous to contemplate, divisive or whatever excuse could be dredged up from their repression.” (p. 138)

“I some ways the stage was already set for a massive lesbian rebellion. Not all feminist groups, of course, were as homophobic as NOW, and a number of radical women were quietly experimenting with lesbianism. Redstockings’ “prowoman line” publicly supported all women, including lesbians, even if many straight women privately considered our concerns less weighty than those of women who had to do battle every day in the master’s bed. Ti-Grace Atkinson, who had broken from NOW in October 1969 and founded The Feminists, may have been the most pro-lesbian. The Feminists was the only group to limit the number of married women in its ranks. Ti-Grace preached abstinence (the Republicans today would adore her) but accepted lesbianism as an alternative form of sexuality, at least until the revolution had equalized power relations between the sexes. In Amazon Odyssey, a collection of her writings published in 1974, Ti-Grace wrote that “lesbianism has been a kind of code word for female resistance. Lesbianism is, in many ways, symbolic of feminism as a political movement.” She admired lesbianism as a “full commitment” to other women that surpassed the part-time involvement of the women who were married or living with a boyfriend. Of course, some heterosexual women, including Ti-Grace, were fully devoted to feminism, even though they had never engaged in lesbian sex.” p. 138

In a way, it is a relief to learn that some straight women were supportive of lesbian voices. But there also comes the worry that straight women are merely supporting a version of lesbianism that they find palatable and useful to further their own interests. Ti-Grace Atkinson said that “lesbianism has been a kind of code word for female resistance. Lesbianism is, in many ways, symbolic of feminism as a political movement.” but lesbianism is nothing more than female exclusive attraction to women. Nothing political about it, nothing rebellion, nothing of resistance to men. It’s a state of being, and denaturating it as something in relation to men is not helping lesbians. As if we were only lesbians because we hate men, as if we were only lesbians because we want to fight patriarchy. This kind of reasoning opens the door wide for political lesbianism, which is an insult to lesbians.

“But this provisional acceptance was an exception in a movement that was apologetic, dismissive or even downright derisive about the presence of lesbians in its midst. Calls for attention to lesbian issues were attacked as divisive. […] [J]ust as many of the GLF [Gay Liberation Front] women believed that our liberation was intrinsically linked to that of gay men, lesbian/feminists felt a pressing need for the women’s movement to recognize our oppression. As Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love later wrote in their 1972 book Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: “For Lesbians, Women’s Liberation is not an intellectual or emotional luxury but a personal imperative. Living without the approval or support of men, Lesbians desperately need women’s rights. For Lesbians, independence and responsibility for self are lifelong realities and not merely interim needs between support by father and support by husband”.” p. 138-139

Despite lesbians having a strong stake in women’s liberation, because we cannot really compromise with our oppressor or be satisfied with the status quo, lesbians’ voices and expectations are dismissed by mainstream feminism. Again, we might be accused of not having any interest in women’s liberation (because we are not married to men) or of not knowing what we are talking about (because lesbians live in a vacuum and are never oppressed by men), when we could bring some detachment and clarity on the subject of men.

The Lavender Menace action took place in response to mainstream women’s liberation movement completely disregarding lesbian voices. However, it doesn’t seem to have changed much. A few workshops were organised, but things soon returned to the previous normal.

“Although it seems like a long time ago, mainstream feminists still remember the Lavender Menace action. In 1987 I was invited to an awards ceremony […] Afterward, in the lobby, I found myself standing next to Betty Friedan. I was certain that she wouldn’t recognise me—it had been more than a decade since she had last seen me. But she hadn’t changed much, so perhaps I looked more like my old self than I thought. Betty scowled at me. She shifted her drink to her left hand and crooked a gnarled finger in my direction.

“You! You!” she squealed. “You caused me so much trouble!”

I laughed, even though I didn’t think she intended to be funny. “No Betty,” I replied, “you caused yourself trouble. Get over it.” And I walked away.” p. 145-146

Lesbians are not the enemy. We too want women to live free from oppression by men. We just happen to have different experiences than those of straight women. This makes our inputs all the more valuable because they might shed light on some previous blind spots. And remember, lesbians are women too. We also have a stake in women’s liberation, and we deserve to live free of oppression.

First part here.

[hellomynameisbisexual]

So You're Feeling a Little Bicurious. We're Here to Help!

8 expert tips for exploring your sexuality.

BY ZACHARY ZANE OCT 18, 2019

After years of wondering if I could ever be intimate with another man, I decided to hook up with a dude my freshman year of college. I figured this "bicurious" thing clearly isn't a phase, since I'd been thinking about it for a few years. The only way I could know for sure if I was actually gay or bi was if tested the waters.

So I did. Alas, I got so drunk in order to have the courage to hook up with another man that I ended up puking midway through our encounter. After the experience, I could not tell you if I was gay or bi. Overall, the experience was "meh," like any really sloppy, drunken hookup regardless of gender.

The thing is, I went about hooking up with a guy all wrong. I had expectations about what I should feel, still struggled with internalized homophobia, and didn't realize that sexuality is a spectrum. I think that's why I felt even more confused after hooking up with a guy.

Still, I'm glad I did explore, and it did eventually lead me to embracing my sexuality, though it took another five years. Nevertheless, there were definitely things I could have done to better prepare myself for exploring sexually with other men. Things I learned years after the fact. Now, with the help of two sexuality experts, I'm going to impart what I wish I knew and had done before (and after) hooking up with my first guy.

1. Start with porn.

You don’t need to jump headfirst into penetrative sex with a man. Porn is a great way to explore your desires in a manner that’s accessible and private.

“As a starting point for acting out sexual fantasies, many people turn to pornography because it offers a ‘safe’ way to explore, especially if you’re a little afraid of acting it out or don’t know how to go about it,” says Dr. Justin Lehmiller, research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and author Tell Me What You Want.

For bicurious men specifically, Lehmiller notes there are plenty of pornos out there which feature bicurious themes. “So that’s probably the easiest starting point for getting a sense of what you do and don’t like,” he says.

2. Move to apps and chat rooms.

"Apps and chat rooms using sexting and video chats are great ways to explore how you feel about engaging sexually with men before jumping into the deep end and scheduling your first hook-up," says Jor-El Caraballo, a licensed mental health professional who works largely with LGBTQ+ clients. It allows you the opportunity to engage with other men sexually without doing anything IRL. (Grindr and Scruff are two good apps to use.)

3. Have a bisexual MMF threesome.

If after watching some bi/gay porn and talking to some dudes on apps/chat rooms, you’re thinking to yourself, alright, I think I could potentially be into this, it might be time to consider having a threesome with a woman and another man. In Lehmiller’s research on sexual fantasies, he’s found that a lot of bicurious guys report fantasies about mixed-gender threesomes. “I think the appeal of this scenario is that it seems less intimidating than hooking up with just another guy,” he says. “A lot of bicurious guys worry about what it means for their sexuality if they experiment with another guy, so being able to explore that with a woman present might make it less intimidating.”

4. Work on reducing internalized shame.

Exploring bi-curiosity isn't just getting out there and doing it with another guy. “It's important for men to understand that we live in sex-phobic and homophobic culture that helps shape what we see as possible for ourselves and our desires,” says Jor-El. This means that we first have to explore how much of our reluctance might be attributed to cultural attitudes and how much of it is solely our responsibility. “Naming that societal homo- and bi-phobia first is an important step,” he says.

5. Educate yourself.

One of the biggest ways to reduce internalized shame and to better understand how your sexuality might not be binary or stagnant (meaning, specifically, that you're not always exclusively gay or straight) is to educate yourself about sexuality. Alas, sex education leaves quite a few things to be desired here in the United States (and abroad, too). Instead of discussing how we come to form our sexual identity, some sex-ed classes never get beyond condoms on cucumbers—or teach abstinence-only curriculum.

"Because we live in a culture that has [negative] perspectives on bisexuality and same-sex attraction, it's important to gain exposure to alternative perspectives," Jor-El says. There are two books in particular Jor-El tends to recommend to his clients. The first is Brene Brown's Daring Greatly, which tackles shame resilience. The second is sexologist Dr. Chris Donaghue's book Sex Outside the Lines: Authentic Sexuality in a Sexually Dysfunctional Culture.

6. Recognize you might not have a big “aha” moment.

When I got to college, I decided I was going to finally explore my same-sex attractions that had been gnawing at me for the past few years. Without going into too many details (you can read about my full experience here), I left that first encounter feeling even more unsure of my sexual identity. I thought I was going to have this big “aha” moment. I’d kiss his lips and immediately realize, “Woah… I’m gay. I’ve never felt like this when I've been with women.” Or it would become crystal clear I definitely wasn’t into men. Neither happened. In fact, I came to the conclusion after the experience that I was straight, and it took me another five years of hooking up with men to embrace the fact that I am bisexual.

7. Talk to a therapist.

As always, it can be helpful to explore this in the safe space of therapy. "With a LGBTQ+ affirming therapist, you can talk through aspects of your sexuality that seem daunting or frightening to deal with on your own," Joe-El says. "This space will give you the security of a confidential and non-judgmental space where you can make your own decisions about what works best for you without outside pressure."

Personally, seeing a therapist was the most helpful thing when it came to exploring and eventually embracing my same-sex attractions. By the end of my third session, I began calling myself bisexual.

8. You can try it, not like it, and you're still straight.

There's this notion that if you so much as kiss a man once, you must be gay or bisexual. This makes it particularly scary and seemingly "binding" when you explore. You fear that if you experiment, and don't like it, people will wrongfully assume you're closeted. You fear that rumors surrounding your sexuality will haunt you for the rest of your life, but here's the truth about experimenting: If you come to the conclusion after hooking up with a guy that you're straight, then you are just as straight as a dude who's never experimented. One sexual act does not define your entire identity. Period.

Now if you're someone like me, who comes to realize, oh yeah, I really can get down hooking up with other men, then welcome to the club, my dude. Your world is about to get a hell of a lot more fun.

[sexedforbiguys]

Dating and sex during COVID – Sex Ed for Bi Guys

Original image source

Published January 8, 2020.

This is the SFW version of this post. You can view the sexually explicit version here on Pillowfort.

Based on my conversations on r/BisexualMen and our Discord, many of bi+ and bicurious men date and explore their sexuality despite the pandemic. Many – not all – public health guidelines are the equivalent of abstinence-only sex education, shaming people who follow anything other than the strictest of practices, providing no information for those who take risks on how to minimize those risks nonetheless, and dismissing costs and risks of being deprived of intimate human contact. Here are tools to decide what risk level you’re comfortable with if you choose to date or have sex during COVID-19, and to reduce risks that comes with activities you choose to undertake.

It’s tempting to judge or shame people for making decisions that are risky during a pandemic but if shaming worked, we would have stopped HIV dead in its tracks in the 1980s. Shaming people is bad public health policy that leads to worse outcomes, while meeting people where they’re at has been proven to work time and time again.

The science and best practices on the pandemic evolve constantly, and I am not a healthcare professional. It’s possible information in this guide will become outdated. Keep tabs on the current situation with the virus and on the most up-to-date public health recommendations in your area for minimizing pandemic risk.

The obvious

When there is community transmission in your area, it’s safest to not meet anyone indoors besides your own household and to follow to the letter public health guidelines. Your safest sex partner is yourself, followed by someone from your household. Any kind of prolonged, close physical contact with someone from outside your bubble is risky. There can be legal consequences also to breaking public health ordinances.

Risk

Risk is relative and it’s a spectrum. It has different dimensions too: you can act safer on some dimensions to somewhat offset risks you take in other dimensions. Yet safety has costs. When people take risks, it’s often because they have decided the cost of safety in that instance – boredom, loneliness, touch starvation, sexual frustration, deteriorating mental health, etc. – was higher than risks. People make these calculations all the time. Stay informed to make enlightened decisions about what risks there are to your health and that of others, and how they can be reduced. Then choose what risks you are willing to take and which you aren’t.

Men having sex with other men more often during the pandemic and increased substance use are linked. Think of getting mental health support if you’re using to cope, especially when the result is taking risks you wouldn’t take otherwise. You deserve support, even when your behaviour involves higher risk. Continue your usual STI prevention methods too, like condoms, PrEP, regular testing or other prevention tactics you use, even if you f**k less often. My friend works in a STI clinic and they are swamped despite the COVID pandemic.

Talk with people you plan to meet

How do you each protect yourselves from COVID? How many people are in your respective bubbles? How many people do you each see outside of that bubble? Under what conditions? Were you tested for COVID in the last few days? What risk level is acceptable for each of you? How fast or how slowly do you want to take things? In what ways do you want to be in contact for now?

Talk with people in your bubble

COVID can infect people you share spaces with. So tell these people you are thinking of dating or maybe even having sexual encounters, explain how you are planning to reduce risks, and agree with them on what risks are acceptable and what safety practices they want you to take when you do this. It is possible they won’t be comfortable with anything other than online contact, or masked, physically distanced outdoor meetings. Also, maybe it’s not possible for you to share details of your romantic and sexual life with folks in your bubble: maybe you’re closeted, for example. Sadly, their safety is on the line when it comes to this. Whatever decisions you make, weigh the risks you take keeping in mind you are exposing them to these risks also, and that they trust you too keep your bubble as safe as possible.

Tactics for minimizing risk

Knowledge. Read more complete documents than this post on safer sex during COVID and look for more up-to-date information. Check news and public health websites to know what community transmission rates are in your area, along with current public health guidelines and ordinances. The higher community transmission rates are, the more risk-aware you need to be. Learn where and how to get tested as well.

Original image source

Number of partners. Having a single dating or sex partner that you integrate in your bubble is safer than seeing a new person every week, and it makes intimate physical contact less risky. Also, group sex is very risky when it’s with people from outside your bubble, so discuss with participants what other tactics you can use to reduce COVID risk.

Physical distance. Many contacts can happen from a distance. You can message dates and partners. You can video chat. You can meet and keep a 2-meter distance. When sex is involved, you can sext each other, trade nudes and videos, roleplay fantasies or have a domination/submission relationship over chat if you’re all into that, put on a live cam show for each other, etc. These activities are safe from COVID (be mindful of privacy and leaked chats, pics or vids). In the same room, you could decide to keep at least a two-meter distance, and put on a sexy show for each other as well. If you eliminate physical distance, you will have to rely on other tactics.

Original image source

Environment. Outdoors is far safer than indoors. A small room is riskier than a large room. A space with poor ventilation is riskier than a well-ventilated space. Many people meet outdoors physically distanced for the first few dates before deciding if they want more intimacy. I would never advise you to break the law or more importantly, to neglect safeguarding unwilling people from witnessing your sexual activities but technically, sex outdoors is safer than sex indoors...

Barriers. A mask covering your mouth and nose makes a difference, even if you’re physically right next to each other or f**king. Unless you have access to N95 respirators https://www.menshealth.com/health/a34247889/n95-vs-kn95-masks-covid/ and know how to use them properly, your mask protects others from your own breath and saliva, and their mask protects you from theirs, but not the other way around. So everyone having their mask on is safer than some people taking off their masks. If you’ve ever wanted to roleplay those masked post-apocalyptic or riot sex fantasies, now has never been a better time! Also, anonymous sex carries other risks than COVID, but glory holes are an effective barrier.

Original image source

Washing. Wash your hands before and after touching each other. Same with your bodies when mouths and hands have been roaming on them.

Sex acts and positioning. The closer your faces are to each other, even masked, the riskier the proximity is. So some positions for sexual intimacy are less risky. Kissing is the riskiest. If you’re not having sex, but would like less risky physical contact that still has some intimacy, sitting back-to-back while holding hands and talking about intimate stuff is an option. Semen and feces can contain the COVID virus, but it’s unknown if vaginal or anal sex can transmit it – wearing condoms along with keeping semen out of your mouth and your mouth off buttholes could help (on top of reducing STI and unplanned pregnancy risk). Oral sex and sex positions that keep your faces away from each other (doggy style or 69, anyone?) are less risky. BDSM practices that involve masks, doing thing to someone’s back or behind, or any practice where faces can stay away from one another, can carry less risk also.

Testing, vaccination and immunity. Getting tested for COVID in the days before a physical meeting helps, but it’s not fool-proof. As vaccination is rolling out, get the vaccine as soon as you become eligible for it. Science on how well or how long people are immune to COVID after an infection has uncertainty, but recent findings are encouraging. Dating and sex among people who have recently recovered could be a risk-reduction tactic.

For many bisexual, pansexual and polysexual men discovering their own sexuality and coming to term with their orientation, COVID put a stop to any exploration they had been dreaming of. You deserve the tools you need to protect your health, no matter your decisions. A healthcare practitioner that you trust with not being judgmental is an invaluable source of advice too. I hope you find the right balance between meeting your needs for companionship, love, touch, intimacy, and sex, and staying safe during this pandemic.

***

Check out all Sex Ed for Bi Guys posts here, including articles such as Hook-up and dating apps, Dating men, women, and nonbinary folks, and Safer oral sex (with latex or not).

Come see us on r/BisexualMen on Reddit; we are a supportive community for bisexual, bicurious, pansexual, and polysexual men (cis, trans, and nonbinary), as well as for men questioning their sexual orientation. We also have a a Discord server with a whole bunch of chatrooms. Come join us!

Tip me or become a monthly supporter on Ko-fi if this post has helped you and you can afford it!

All images are borrowed from the internet and are in the post because I like them. If you are the copyright owner or a person in the image, contact me: I’ll gladly credit you, or remove the image at your request.

[cameoamalthea]

Why is NSFW 18 +

This post is focused on U.S. law, policy and culture. This post does not constitute legal advice. This blog does not offer legal advice. And a lot of this is my own personal opinion. 

Let’s get something straight, America was founded by puritans and if conservative lawmakers could outright ban porn, they would.

However, the 1st amendment gives U.S. citizen a right to free speech and freedom of speech and expression is another important American value.

The Supreme Court has ruled that laws cannot “reduce the adult population...to reading only what is fit for children.” (source). Because adults have a right to freedom of speech.

However, minors do not have the same rights as adults.  “The Government may, however, regulate the content of constitutionally protected speech in order to promote a compelling interest if it chooses the least restrictive means to further the articulated interest. We have recognized that there is a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors. This interest extends to shielding minors from the influence of literature that is not obscene by adult standards. Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U.S. 629, 639 -640 (1968); New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747, 756 -757 (1982). (source).

That’s why the government can restrict what you’re allowed to look at until you turn 18. You just don’t have as many rights as adults. Your parents, and the government can decide what’s best for you.

Of course, the age of consent varies and is 16 in most states. Which begs the question if an individual can consent to sex then why aren’t minors allowed to view pornography?

Simply viewing a video of other people having sex carries none of these that having sex does, so if you can have sex, why can’t you watch porn?

(I suggest using the xkit read more on dash function or reading on mobile)

First, age of consent is different than age of majority. Until you’re 18 you aren’t legally an adult and you have less rights than an adult. The U.S. is one of the few countries that hasn’t ratified the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child. Instead, the U.S. believes parents have a fundamental right to control how their children are raised and the Government can also have a say (such as mandating public Education until a certain age).The Government has an interest in controlling what minors are allowed to do, and in theory makes laws to protect minors.

Second, it’s important to understand that in the U.S. Age of Consent is, unfortunately, is not always about protecting minors or serving their best interests. It’s about controlling them or protecting them making poor choices, rather than empowering them to make good choices and protecting them from exploitation.

In the U.S. minors are often treated as their parents property. This contributes to the sexual exploitation of minors (which I condemn in this post, and needs to be wildly unequivocally condemned) because our society doesn’t always think of protecting minors as vulnerable people rather than malleable objects and culturally too many people seem to not understand why minors are vulnerable to exploitation and why exploiting them is wrong. The unfortunate prevalence of child marriage in some parts of the US (also discussed in the post I linked) is a symptom of this.

In the U.S. there are some States where a minor can’t get an abortion without parental consent or court order (and that’s dangerous as there are parents who might punish a teenager for getting pregnant or force them into marriage). Even in more liberal states, like California the age of consent is 18 and it is criminal for teens to have sex. Sex between two teens (like two 16 year olds) or teens and young adults with three year apart in age (a 17 year old and a 20 year year old) is a misdemeanor. If a 15 year old is dating a 17 year old and the 17 year old turns 18, then that would be a felony. Teenagers can be punished for having sex other teenagers, with classmates and peers, even teens their own age (though less severely). The rationale behind the law isn’t protecting teenagers, it’s discouraging teenage pregnancy by punishing boys who have sex with girls.

Often, age of consent laws and statutory rape laws in the U.S. are about preventing a girl from doing something that would bring shame on her family. So at once you have teens punished for having consensual sex with other teens and parents pushing a pregnant 11 year old girls to marry her adult rapist so she won’t have a baby out of wedlock (both these things happened in Florida, age of consent has an exception for marriage with parental consent - it’s sickening).

In theory age of consent laws are supposed to be about when, in the State’s view, a person is old enough to want and desire sex and be capable of knowingly consent to it. In practice, age of consent laws are the age where the state figures teens are going to have sex and the state should let them (or at least not punish them).

Side Note: Personally, I’d support a system more like Germany’s where teenagers are allowed to consent to sex instead of being characterized as children (because teens are having sex whether they should be or not, abstinence preaching isn’t effective and teens should have a right to their own bodies and relationships), but exploitation and abuse of teenagers is illegal. Teens are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. Focus laws on protecting them from predators, not controlling their behavior. Put the power in their own hands, and extend protection until age 21 to prevent older predators from targeting barely legal teens (whether they’re legal at 16 or 18, protect them).

Ok, so why not let teens have porn? Teens wouldn’t get pregnant by watching porn. And in some states teens can have sex at 16, but not have porn until they’re 18. Porn is safer than sex.

American culture is puritanical and not in favor of sex out of wedlock. Even in states where lawmakers acknowledge that teens have sex at 16 (on average, most people have sex by 17) and decided not to criminalize their relationships, it’s not that they want teens to have sex, it’s just they don’t want to use police power to stop them.  

There’s a fear porn will encourage sex. While media doesn’t change behavior (violent video games don’t make you violent, porn doesn’t change how you view women), the fear is if we don’t treat sex like a forbidden sin only for married people the culture might change to accept sex outside of wedlock. (I mean, look at California, giving teens free contraceptives would prevent teen pregnancy as effectively, if not more so, than arresting teens for sleeping together, but the law goes with deterring sex. Studies show abstinence only education doesn’t work, but in many states it’s pushed).

“Sex is dirty and wrong.” It’s part of sex negative puritan culture. Sure, at the same time traditional values links masculinity with men being able get women and encourages women to be ‘sexy’ and do things boys will like, the fact remains sex outside of marriage is taboo. Women are supposed to be pure. A man who is a player has managed to steal a precious guarded resource. A woman who  is a slut has lost her worth because she didn’t guard herself. These are the sexist heterosexist norms, and they don’t really frame sex as a consensual thing that people choose to do.

Since our culture isn’t in favor of sex or porn, the government sees it as harmful, just like alcohol and cigarettes. As an adult, you’re free to make your own choices, even bad choices like smoking. That’s freedom. As a minor, you aren’t free yet.

The fact is, especially with the internet, plenty of minors start watching porn as young as 12 because that’s when they hit puberty and want to look at it. Just like plenty of teens experiment with underage drinking. Although a 12 year old boy looking at boobies isn’t as harmful as drinking and a 16 year old watching porn instead of having sex would certainly be safer, it’s still something the government can restrict.

And really, it is safer to wait until you’re over 18 because venturing into 18+ spaces. Because again, minors are at risk vulnerable and at risk for sexual exploitation. Especially for girls and women, venturing into adult spaces means risk of sexual harassment and potentially falling victims to predators who would seek to prey on the inexperienced.

This can still happen once you’re over 18, as I found out when I started exploring things at 18 (the only place I found safe was y!gal - a yaoi website - because anywhere that had content straight guys could enjoy was full of really creepy straight guys). But at 18, you also have more support. You have access to sex education and can freely talk about things with other adults. Adults can’t really talk to minors about sex or sexuality because there’s too much risk that predators would use that as an opportunity to target and manipulate minors. At 18, especially if you’re in college, you can learn about sex and question porn and sexual morality.

If society and the law let minors access porn and go to sex shops or workshops in places where minors can legally have sex at 16, it would probably be seen encouraging minors to have sex, which moral authorities would see as corrupting the youth. The general culture says you shouldn’t be having sex, so even in states that don’t criminally discourage it, they don’t encourage it.

Furthermore, media is made by adults. Porn is made by adults for other adults (at least officially, I’m pretty sure plenty of bad porn fics is written by 13 year olds). So if you’re watching porn, you’re not watching media that’s meant for your understanding or maturity level. 

You don’t really have the opportunity to learn about sex outside of watching porn (other than by doing it, but that doesn’t teach you what sex is supposed to be) or to talk about it. Porn isn’t realistic, and the thought is minors are less equipped than adults to be able to tell if something is a good idea or not. And how can you know what’s realistic or healthy if no one can talk to you about sex because all you get is ‘sex is bad, don’t do it until you’re married and then it will be good, somehow’.

In the U.S. the drinking age is 21. That’s one of the highest drinking ages in the world. Underage drinking happens, especially at Universities where you have a mixed peer group of under drinking age and of drinking age students. While the risks of alcohol don’t change between 20 and 21, it’s safer to drink legally because you’re allowed to drink in restaurants and with your parents and with other people who have experience drinking and can help you learn how to drink safely, as opposed to chugging beer illegally at 18 because you don’t know what you’re doing and can’t do it openly.

The fact people under 18 can’t view porn or go into sex shop shops or go into NSFW spaces online or IRL makes doing it illegally more dangerous.

At the same time, I don’t know if I’d support lowering the age you can view porn. Your body is your own and plenty of teens want sex and choose to have sex. I don’t think we should punish a 16 or even a 14 or 15  year old who wants to have sex (it happens) instead we should protect them from abuse and exploitation and help them make safe choices. The right to control over your own body, what you do with it, who you love and want to be with seems fundamental. The right to watch a video...not so much. Especially when allowing 16 year olds into NSFW spaces might put them at greater risk of mingling with much older people who might be predatory.

Then again, in Europe, plenty of countries let people under 18 have porn, but they also have better sex education. Before America changes law and policy about  whether or not minors can view porn, we need to make more basic changes like having decent sex education and banning child marriage for the love of God.

@tadpoledancer - And I know that at 16, being 18 seems like forever and waiting to go one websites or read fics might seem unfair. However, it’s really not that long to wait. Once you’re 18, you can do whatever you want, and hopefully you’ll go to college or university and find so much to discover about yourself. Stay safe. Maybe stick to pg 13 or R rated things or what you can find on Netflix or the library? (the dirtiest thing I watched in High School was probably HBO’s Queer as Folk censored for reruns on Logo, but it was still fun).

@daenon - thoughts? 

[free-essays]

AP English III - Essay

Sex, Stigma, and Students

This society is surrounded by myths about sex, and about people’s very own bodies. From girls who start menstruating at 9 and boys growing facial hair at 10. to the teens and adults who do not know the ins and outs of birth control; every person deserves to know vital information about their body. Sex education needs to be built upon, enriched, and improved for three reasons: there are far too many harmful myths about sex, people who do not conform to heterosexual standards are left in the dust, and non-abstinence programs have been shown to be more effective.

Sex education, how detailed and at what age, has always been a hot topic. Where did it all begin? Support for this movement started in the 1800s, emphasizing upon risk-reductive habits to help prevent cholera and syphilis. Groups hopped on this bandwagon, making it necessary in the national curriculum before puberty. The trend continued into the 1900s when the first birth control clinic was opened, and even more groups joined the league of sex education: such as the U.S Public Health Service, U.S government, American Medical Association, and so forth. The Birth Control Federation became Planned Parenthood in 1942, and there was a nationwide program in family life education. Despite these movements in favor of ‘sex ed’, in 1975, 20 states voted to restrict or abolish sexuality education. In the 80’s an act to start promoting abstinence before marriage was passed. Abstinence has always been a huge portion of teaching, even today, although in 2008 a total of 25 states has rejected funding for abstinence-only programs (Advocatesforyouth.org).

The first reason that sex education needs to be empowered rather than overlooked is that this first world society is littered with harmful myths about sex, and about the body. Just to name a few, a female’s first time is not supposed to hurt, hymens do not really tear so there should be no blood. The only time any of that happens is likely when the female is not actually aroused and this myth of “cherry popping” adds onto the trope of men’s needs coming first; especially in a sexual environment. There are also many people who believe, or likely were not taught otherwise, that oral sex cannot get a person pregnant, and this can lead some people to believe the best way to be safe is to actually throw up after sex (Newsome). Many people also think that porn is an activity only the male population partakes in, yet a study found that one out of three women watches it at least once a week (WITW). Many females feel ostracized and immoral for doing taking part in an activity that most people of both genders do, and it should be normalized instead of being laced with current double standards. Another extremely common misbelief is that to be amazing at sex, a man must have a penis length far above average, and often this causes insecurity among the males with this body part; along with stress and anxiety if they are average, below average, or not a whopping 12 inches. Aesthetics aside, four to five inches does what it needs to in sex, considering a female’s actual vaginal length is only four to five inches when aroused. The list goes on and on; there are countless myths about sex that continue to stigmatize most of the population, and really just instill shame in exploring teenagers. A school’s sex ed needs to debunk these common, but wrong beliefs with dignity and understanding.

According to a National Health Survey, around, “2.3 percent of US citizens identify as gay or bisexual” (Somashekhar). That might seem a touch small when it is taken into account that less than 50 percent of teens today identify as heterosexual (Brathwaite). Considering only half of the middle schoolers and high schoolers today say they are straight, we need to start addressing sexuality in sexual education classes. An innumerable amount of coming-out stories involve the words, “I thought I was broken,” or “I thought something was wrong with me”. That should never be the case; that a teen goes through schooling thinking that he or she is alone, broken, too young to make these decisions. It is simple, whether or not all of the public supports the LGBT+ group, different genders and sexualities do exist and the youth should not suffer because of this. Explaining early that people can identify differently and love anyone they want would save so many people large amounts of heartbreak and confusion as a teenager. Even if schools only had to cover the basics: being gay, bisexual, straight, or asexual. Asexuality is one that is often brushed off, considered to be some sort false identity made up for purposes like attention. In fact, most people do not even know that it exists, but regardless it does and there are in fact people who do not feel sexual attraction. Sex Ed needs to reassure those students that abstinence is okay, having sex is okay, but also just not feeling sexual attraction is okay. Heteronormative teachings leave several groups of teens in the dust, feeling outcast.

Not only is sex education supposed to be there to teach us that differences are to be embraced and to debunk myths, it also should not be abstinence-only based, and there are more than enough statistics to prove it. National data shows that more comprehensive sex education teaching is actually more effective at lowering teen pregnancy than only teaching abstinence. This makes sense; that if teens are going to have sex, then they’re going to do so no matter how many times a burly gym teacher says, “abstinence is the only way you can be TOTALLY safe!”, but if teens are taught how to have sex responsibly, then it is safer for all parties involved. In fact, “47 percent of high school teens have reported being sexually active in 2013” (Mcgee). That is half of high school students, so no one can say that it is not important enough. Teaching abstinence only is like saying “You want to learn how to be a safer swimmer? Just don’t swim!” This mentality is not beneficial to teens, and the data proves this. Regardless of whether the students would rather stay abstinent or not, the fact is that the teachings associated with it are often twisted and misleading, “Representative Henry A. Waxman released  a report showing that over 80 percent of federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs use curricula that distort information about the effectiveness of contraceptives, misrepresent the risks of abortion, blur religion and science, treat stereotypes about girls and boys as scientific fact, and contain basic scientific errors”(“Top Five Reasons”). Even if not having sex until marriage is the path some want to take, it should be because they have been well educated in an unbiased and truthful way. This is further backed by the fact that only 19 states actually call for teaching that is medically accurate (Karimi). Less than half of this country’s teens could be getting properly informed about their bodies, and how to protect them. Looking at the map below, it highlights just how skewed this abstinence-based system is. In these states, they assume that telling the students not to have sex will be enough, without a single lesson on any sort of birth control methods. (Klein) It is obvious that relying only on the teachings of abstinence is not only irresponsible, but it works only based on a select few moral beliefs. In fact, the data of the passage written by Karimi says that “comprehensive learning was 50 percent more effective than teaching abstinence.” That is no coincidence.

One main point that opposers usually throw out is that “Kids and teens are too young!” Usually, they think that until a student is in high school or late middle school can they be exposed to the mature concepts involving their own body. They also generally believe that sexual discussions in detail are too inappropriate for preteens and teenagers. Along with and often fueled by these morals comes common misconceptions on how sex education would be handled in a younger environment, which is shown in “Start Proper Sex Education Early”: with parents assuming that it would start in kindergarten, and expose their children to porn, and teach them how to masturbate. In the same article, more parents have called early sex ed “disgusting” and that “[sex ed] rapes their children of innocence”. In teaching sex early, it would likely be taught in simple terms; certainly nothing that would be inappropriate to show at any age of audience. Even so, when is it ‘too young’ to learn about the bodily functions that start anywhere from nine to 14? Sex should be talked about openly, rather than made oppressive and taboo. Many girls get embarrassed and shamed for talking about their periods, but why? It is a natural bodily occurrence that should be embraced with a person’s femininity. Males should be exposed and well-versed in this too, considering it affects half the human population every month. Many teens do not come to their parents with questions and concerns because they wait too long to have a real, honest discussion with them about sex (if ever at all). Parent’s should start early and are open with their children about the most necessary function of survival of humans, sex, and the important themes within that such as menstruation, it would leave less room for this shame to talk about it.

Another huge argument on the other side is that topics like sex are material that parents need to teach their children themselves. This is an educational step that some parents think is personal, and they do not want their children learning information that they do not think that they should. A parent, though their intentions could be morally right, can often be biased; and they should not get to decide what is and is not relevant for their child. That is not to say that a parent cannot be the first to teach their kid; if they start having these discussions earlier, as stated in the refutation above, then they would get to have that personal conversation with their child regardless. Another reason why it should not just be left to the parents to teach is that just like most people are lost in these sexual myths, often adults and even said parents are too. They can be, and probably are, just as easily misled as anyone else, so who knows if what they are teaching their kids is even correct? Although in some states teachers can be just as choosy with what they teach as parents, it is at least done in a more open and stress-free environment. Often teens feel embarrassed to ask their parents questions, and sweat over the dreaded “sex talk”, but in a classroom with peers that are in that same boat; there are much less pressure and shame. Anyone of any age can be biased, easily swayed, or uneducated in some fields of knowledge, and even more likely the parents, thinking they know best for their children. Considering that simple understanding; unless they are a doctor, or so well knowledged that they could write a textbook on sexual education, it is probably best left to the teachers to educate the masses on how to stay safe sexually.

Although sex education has come far, there is still so much on the horizon that the necessary teachings should strive for. Sex education should be expanded upon, and well refined. Students should be corrected about toxic myths, should be taught about differences in sexuality, and should be taught more than just, “you can have safe sex by not having any at all”. Once people start being open about sex, is the moment that many of the stigmas and confusion plaguing it can be eliminated.

Works Cited

"A SELECTIVE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES."

Advocatesforyouth.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

Brathwaite, Les Fabian. "Less Than 50% of Teens Identify as Straight, Says New Study." Out

Magazine. N.p., 11 Mar. 2016. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

Castner, Nick. "Start Proper Sex Education Early." University Wire, 12 Jan 2016, SIRS Issues

Researcher, http://sks.sirs.com.

Karimi, Honeiah. “We Need to Talk about Sex.” University Wire, 2014. SIRS Issues

Researcher, http://sks.sirs.com"

Klein, Rebecca. "These Maps Show Where Kids In America Get Terrifying Sex Ed." The

Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 8 Apr. 2014. Web. 19 Jan. 2017.

McGee, Brice. “Teaching Abstinence Only is Not Working.” University Wire, 26 Aug 2015, SIRS

Issues Researcher, http://sks.sirs.com

"National Data Shows Comprehensive Sex Education Better at Reducing Teen Pregnancy than

Abstinence-Only Programs." SIECUS. SIECUS, Mar. 2008. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

Newsome, Teresa. "7 Totally Gross Sex Myths Debunked Once And For All." Bustle. Bustle, 08

Oct. 2015. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

Somashekhar, Sandhya. "Health Survey Gives Government Its First Large-scale Data on Gay,

Bisexual Population." The Washington Post. WP Company, 15 July 2014. Web. 17 Jan.

2017.

"Top Five Reasons to Abandon Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs."

Advocatesforyouth.org. Advocates For Youth, n.d. Web. 18 Jan. 2017.

WITW, Staff. "Study Finds That 1 out of 3 Women Watch Porn at Least Once a Week."

NYTLive. New York Times, 22 Oct. 2015. Web. 17 Jan. 2017.

[sexedforthelastinbed-blog]

Pansexuality

Pansexuality is generally known to be sexual attraction to people regardless of gender identity. Unlike bisexuality, pansexuality is not limited to only male and female, rather it includes people who are non-binary and non gender conforming. In Western culture, many people find it difficult to identify the difference between bisexuality and pansexuality and disregard pansexuality as a sexual orientation altogether (Mustanski, 2015). Pansexuality is a relatively new term, gaining recognition around the mid 90s. Pansexuality, like many other sexual orientations that are not heterosexual, lacks any representation in sex education. In the following interview, a young woman who identifies herself as pansexual is asked questions, some general and some pansexual specific, about her experience with sex education. The interview is meant to get a look at whether or not pansexuality is well represented in sex education and whether the interviewee felt like she learned valuable information. 

Pinky:

1. At what age did you take sex ed?

It wasn’t addressed at all until my senior year of high school. I took a health class, not “sex ed”, and even then it was heavily dependent on abstinence only education. There was definitely, like, a culture of shame around people who do have sex. There were other classes that did mention it, like anatomy. She said we could ask questions during the unit but it was more about anatomy. 

2. What were your major takeaways from sex ed? Did you feel like your sexual identity was being represented? 

I did not feel like my sexual identity was being represented. I come from a really homophobic area. My major takeaways were probably just, sex isn’t something you can talk about or ask about. My health teacher said that girls who say that they’re pregnant after one time having sex are liars. He had issues with fertility and so he projected that on others. He told us it was almost impossible to become pregnant after one time having sex. He told us that obviously, if you were pregnant, you must be having sex more than once. 

3. Did you feel like your sexuality influenced how you took in the information? 

I feel like a little bit, it did, yeah. Just because I felt like it was very heterosexual, like hyper-hetersexual. Gay sex was never mentioned, at all, ever. It kinda left people to figure out stuff on their own, it was very binary definitions of female and male as well. 

4. Did you feel like your sex ed class influenced how you perceived your own sexuality? 

It made me feel less comfortable with males, just because I saw that it was, like, males were active and dominant. If you have sex, you’re letting it happen and sometimes you should be letting it happen. If that’s what the guy wants, you owe it to him. It made me uncomfortable with pursuing heterosexual relationships, because I felt like there was a power imbalance, sexually. 

5. Was there anything about sex ed or your own sexuality that you had to learn outside of an actual sex ed class?

All of it. My mom’s a doctor and she and I have a good relationship so anytime I’d have a question, she’d be willing to answer it. It could be awkward, but she’d do it. Also, textbooks. I learned some from my anatomy textbook. The internet was my biggest source though, especially for gay shit. I don’t know what I would have done without the internet. 

6. How did stereotypes and preconcieved ideas about sex ed play into your education?

I guess I kinda had these preconceived notions of what relationships were supposed to be like. Also, like, what the sexual dynamic in relationships should be like. Males were in an active role, and females were in a passive role. If females were trying to be active, then they were just bossy bitches. Especially because I grew up in a very religious community. I was also taught that two females or two males having sex was unnatural and perverted. 

7. How much do you know about contraceptives? 

I feel like I know a pretty fair amount because I take birth control and my mom, like, had taught me all about different contraceptives and how to be safe. 

8. How was sex perceived in your household and do you think that race/class/religion had anything to do with it? 

I think that religion had the biggest impact. My mom is a very supportive and understanding person but she still thinks that sex will take away a part of your soul. Especially for women, it’s always implied also that this is, like, heterosexual sex. I think that’s why sometimes I’m more comfortable having sex with women because I don’t have this idea of, like, the penetration that allegedly takes away a part of me. 

9. What would you add, if anything, to sex ed in the future so that more people would be knowledgable about sex and sexual orientations, esp. your own?

So much, well, I feel like kids are gonna have sex no matter what so it’s really crucial to educate them on how to do it safely. Also how to get contraceptives. If my mom wasn’t a doctor, I would never know how to get birth control. Also, how to say no. Like, consent really needs to be a bigger topic. How to be safe, safe and enjoy it. Communication is a big thing. And then also, like, sex isn’t always a penis and a vagina and if it is, then that doesn’t always mean girl and boy. 

10. How did you discover that you were pansexual? Did sex ed play a role in that?

I knew that I was queer probably when I was around 12 years old I think. I went through a lot of different labels before I decided that pansexual fit me best. Sex ed did not play any role in that. I’ve always been able to be attracted to someone regardless of their gender or without even knowing their gender. 

11. What is your view on bisexuality versus pansexuality? Did this distinction ever play into your identification as a pansexual person? 

I think that it did play into my identification as a pansexual person. To me, I’d always heard that bisexual meant that you were attracted to both men and women. Now, I’m being exposed to the fact that different people define it differently. Some people define it as being attracted to all genders, which is pretty similar to pansexual. So, I think it’s a personal thing. I just think I identify best with pansexual because bisexual, to me, feels very binary and I feel like that doesn’t really fit me because it erases my attraction to non-binary people and, you know, gender non-conforming people. 

12. What might you change, if anything, about sex ed to have it include more about pansexuality?

Just addressing that there are sexualities other than heterosexual. I think, sexualities all across the spectrum need to be taught because I feel like people need to know that it’s okay to be attracted to no one, it’s okay to be attracted to all genders. There would’ve been such an added degree of comfort with who I was growing up if I’d grown up knowing that there are these labels that exist. 

Sweetheart:

At what age did you take sex ed?  

9th grade, so 14

What were your major takeaways from sex ed? 

I learned not to have sex, and the condom will always fit.  I also learned what Pina Colada lube taste like. 

Did you feel like your sexuality influenced how you took in the information? 

Yes, they only talked about heterosexual sex and relationships. One teacher even said “I won’t even talk about sex with the same people because he did not believe in it.

How did you discover that you were pansexual? Did sex ed play a role in that? 

I discovered that I liked girls, then I discovered that gender didn’t really matter. I would pursue anyone who caught my eye.

What is your view on bisexuality versus pansexuality? Did this distinction ever play into your identification as a pansexual person? 

Pan includes non-binary, and thats the distinction for me and thats the big difference.

[kristablogs]

Sex during a pandemic can be risky. Here’s how to do it safely.

Having sex with people outside your social distancing circle can be made safer by showering before and after, avoiding contact with other bodily fluids (including kissing), and wearing a mask during sex. (Pexels/)

Social distancing in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 has radically changed the way we live. But that doesn’t stop people from needing each other, in every sense of the word. This has healthcare practitioners considering how to talk to patients about an entirely new kind of safe sex.

In a commentary published in early May in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, a group of doctors at Harvard Medical School highlighted the need to talk to patients about sex during COVID-19. “Given the important role of sexuality in most people’s lives, health care providers... should consider counseling patients on this topic whenever possible,” they write. “Facilitating brief conversations and referrals to relevant resources can help patients maintain sexual wellness amid the pandemic.”

The physicians included suggested best practices such as prioritizing masturbation and engaging in online sexual behaviors. Sex with others, even people in your quarantine bubble, creates risk for infection, they write.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The desire to be close to others and to engage in sexual behavior is common during stressful times like the period we are in. While social distancing best practices, set by the CDC, recommends staying at least six feet away from people who aren’t part of your household, that’s just not always possible. And shaming people for breaking social distancing rules isn’t the answer in every context. “Messaging around sex being dangerous may have insidious psychological effects at a time when people are especially susceptible to mental health difficulties,” the researchers write.

“History has taught us that abstinence-only recommendations do not work, and they result in poor health outcomes,” lead author Jack Turban, a Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist, told Popular Science by email. “Physicians must meet patients where they are and offer risk reduction strategies that will minimize their risk as much as possible.”

New York City jumped on the sex talk early in the pandemic, releasing a PDF of guidance for the public. Most of their suggestions line up with those the doctors suggest in the new commentary, although there are a few distinctions, specifically around when people have sex with others outside their bubble. The New York guidance advises people to limit the number of partners they have sex with and to “talk about COVID-19 risk factors, just as you would discuss PrEP, condoms, and other safer sex topics.” But the Harvard team also suggests that hookups outside the bubble can be made safer by showering before and after, avoiding contact with other bodily fluids (including kissing), and wearing a mask during sex.

Those recommendations could change over time. “We are constantly learning more about how this virus is transmitted, what protection positive antibody tests may imply, and how to best counsel patients,” writes Alex Keuroghlian, a co-author who directs the National LGBT Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute and Massachusetts General, in an email interview.

And adding higher levels of screening into the mix could help people make the right choices, says Amy Nunn, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Health Institute. “I think that we should move towards universal screening,” she says. “If you look at the countries that have stamped this out, that’s what they have done.” Screening would make having sexual partners outside your bubble much less risky, she says.

During her career, Nunn has done numerous studies on HIV prevention and says there are many lessons to be learned from the past 30 years of HIV research about risk communication and stigma reduction in relation to COVID-19. Letting people know they have options to make sex less risky has the potential to reduce harm. There’s already a lot of stigma around sexual health, especially for young people and marginalized groups, that stands in the way of them getting proper preventive care. Add the stresses of a pandemic on top of that and care suffers, says Carmen Logie, a professor of social work at the University of Toronto who is studying potential stigma surrounding COVID-19.

And that’s not just true for specific sexual encounters. “We’re going to see limited access to clinics, to abortion, to many other things that were already stigmatized,” Logie says. That’s another reason why it’s important for care providers to help people figure out the best sexual options for their patients right now.

[scootoaster]

Sex during a pandemic can be risky. Here’s how to do it safely.

Having sex with people outside your social distancing circle can be made safer by showering before and after, avoiding contact with other bodily fluids (including kissing), and wearing a mask during sex. (Pexels/)

Social distancing in order to slow the spread of COVID-19 has radically changed the way we live. But that doesn’t stop people from needing each other, in every sense of the word. This has healthcare practitioners considering how to talk to patients about an entirely new kind of safe sex.

In a commentary published in early May in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, a group of doctors at Harvard Medical School highlighted the need to talk to patients about sex during COVID-19. “Given the important role of sexuality in most people’s lives, health care providers... should consider counseling patients on this topic whenever possible,” they write. “Facilitating brief conversations and referrals to relevant resources can help patients maintain sexual wellness amid the pandemic.”

The physicians included suggested best practices such as prioritizing masturbation and engaging in online sexual behaviors. Sex with others, even people in your quarantine bubble, creates risk for infection, they write.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. The desire to be close to others and to engage in sexual behavior is common during stressful times like the period we are in. While social distancing best practices, set by the CDC, recommends staying at least six feet away from people who aren’t part of your household, that’s just not always possible. And shaming people for breaking social distancing rules isn’t the answer in every context. “Messaging around sex being dangerous may have insidious psychological effects at a time when people are especially susceptible to mental health difficulties,” the researchers write.

“History has taught us that abstinence-only recommendations do not work, and they result in poor health outcomes,” lead author Jack Turban, a Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist, told Popular Science by email. “Physicians must meet patients where they are and offer risk reduction strategies that will minimize their risk as much as possible.”

New York City jumped on the sex talk early in the pandemic, releasing a PDF of guidance for the public. Most of their suggestions line up with those the doctors suggest in the new commentary, although there are a few distinctions, specifically around when people have sex with others outside their bubble. The New York guidance advises people to limit the number of partners they have sex with and to “talk about COVID-19 risk factors, just as you would discuss PrEP, condoms, and other safer sex topics.” But the Harvard team also suggests that hookups outside the bubble can be made safer by showering before and after, avoiding contact with other bodily fluids (including kissing), and wearing a mask during sex.

Those recommendations could change over time. “We are constantly learning more about how this virus is transmitted, what protection positive antibody tests may imply, and how to best counsel patients,” writes Alex Keuroghlian, a co-author who directs the National LGBT Health Education Center at the Fenway Institute and Massachusetts General, in an email interview.

And adding higher levels of screening into the mix could help people make the right choices, says Amy Nunn, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Health Institute. “I think that we should move towards universal screening,” she says. “If you look at the countries that have stamped this out, that’s what they have done.” Screening would make having sexual partners outside your bubble much less risky, she says.

During her career, Nunn has done numerous studies on HIV prevention and says there are many lessons to be learned from the past 30 years of HIV research about risk communication and stigma reduction in relation to COVID-19. Letting people know they have options to make sex less risky has the potential to reduce harm. There’s already a lot of stigma around sexual health, especially for young people and marginalized groups, that stands in the way of them getting proper preventive care. Add the stresses of a pandemic on top of that and care suffers, says Carmen Logie, a professor of social work at the University of Toronto who is studying potential stigma surrounding COVID-19.

And that’s not just true for specific sexual encounters. “We’re going to see limited access to clinics, to abortion, to many other things that were already stigmatized,” Logie says. That’s another reason why it’s important for care providers to help people figure out the best sexual options for their patients right now.

[privatesourcebook-blog]

Q Plus: Interview 8

Can you describe to the best of your ability your orientation?

Um, so I consider myself to be both a trans guy and a pansexual. So, I’m a dude. Not really what I was assigned at birth, but whatever. And if I like the person, I like them. It doesn’t matter what gender. If I like it I like it.

What was your sex education experience like. Can you explain it?

So I had a kind of unique sex ed experience. I went through the typical North Carolinian experience of, you know, “abstinence only. You have sex, you’ll get pregnant and die,” kind of thing. But I lucked out. My parents when they got the letter home in middle school that I was going to be going through abstinence only sex ed, they were like “no no no no no,” and they sat me down. And it was so embarrassing at the time but they explained how to use condoms, how all of that worked, the pill, they explained why pulling out doesn’t work. All that. I was very embarrassed but it worked. So I guess it’s worth it. Then in high school they also did the split off thing which was so annoying. It’s like “what happened in the other room? What’s such a big secret that we can’t—I want to know both.” You know? But [I] couldn’t control that. That’s my experience with it.

Did you look into sex education on your own outside of school?

I looked into it all the time. I don’t like not knowing things. So it was like “oh a topic that y’all aren’t telling me about. Looks like I’ll use the internet.” This handy thing that was invented, you know. So there were many nights where I just sat on my phone looking for things. Any question I had, I looked up. But even the questions I thought of didn’t cover the questions I later realized I needed to learn. Such as with dental dams. I hadn’t even thought of anal sex before. It was about senior year of high school is when I figured out that was a thing. So...

If your sex education was more inclusive do you think your self exploration would have been easier?

Definitely. If my sex ed had been more inclusive. I probably would’ve figured out both the whole trans and pan thing much sooner. Because I didn’t understand where either of those feelings were coming from. And there were times where I confused them. I was like, “oh maybe I’m just a lesbian and I just like girls.” But no, it turns out it’s a lot of things going on. Um, but yeah, definitely influenced that.

What information regarding inclusive sex education are you wanting to know now or wished you had known in the past?

The number one thing I wished I had learned was about consent. Because we talked about none of that. It was all: penis and vagina, man finishes, done. It was no further questioning. And it didn’t talk about consent. It didn’t talk about how to make both people in the sexual encounter have an orgasm. It was all: fuck, done. Nothing else. And that’s not okay because the main reason that people have sex is that it’s enjoyable. I mean... And then the fact that we were shown STD’s and that was it. And if it was more inclusive I would’ve known about anal sex before. It wouldn’t have been this big surprise in high school. “Oh people do that?!” The education system failed.

Jean’s return on the topic...

Yeah, I didn’t like how in my highschool when they did split us up it was split between male and female and I only got to learn about the female reproductive system. I know how a vagina, a vulva, and a uterus works... I know nothing about how a penis works. I mean, not nothing, but comparatively it’s like I don’t. I wasn’t taught it. But what is the point of telling only half of the population how one thing works. Because then you end up with straight guys who don’t know what a clit is. Or people who don’t know the difference between a vulva and a vagina. So many people interchange those two words. And people, they don’t know what they are talking about, if at all. It’s really disappointing just how much it’s failed. How much sex ed has failed people because it’s not adequate. It doesn’t cover safe sex. Usually in North Carolina not only is it abstinence only, it’s abstinence only until marriage. Which is also putting religious undertones on that. And I saw nothing that included anything other than cis, straight sex. Which, having sex when you are gay is totally different. When you are trans it’s especially different. There’s so many more layers to it. If I had known why I was so uncomfortable originally with it... ‘Cause I was taught penis and vagina that’s the only way to do it, and even then you shouldn’t do it because you’ll get pregnant and die. You’ll get chlamydia. If I hadn’t looked into it on my own I would’ve never realized why I was so uncomfortable with all of it. Because there were all these pieces that were missing. I knew what a dental dam was because my mother and father told me. I knew a lot more than my peers, but even then I didn’t have the background to feel comfortable up until my senior year of high school. And even now there’s still things that I don’t know that I’m still learning. And that’s a shame. I should know how to be safe doing something I enjoy. And there is also the issue that people don’t understand how the female orgasm works in comparison to the male orgasm. They know how that one works because it’s usually one and done. But they don’t realize there is different ways for different people to get different things done. And it’s just very centralized around the idea of penis and vagina sex where the male climax is the end goal. And it’s not done in a way that is inclusive of trans people or of same gender loving people. It is almost always a cis man and a cis woman having vaginal sex. And I remember someone in my class trying to tell me that she couldn’t get an STD from oral sex. That is a blatant lie. And it is such a shame that this kind of thing gets no attention because this is why the rates of STD’s and teen pregnancy are the way they are. If we had better education there would be less disease, less teen pregnancy. Education is the best way, and providing access to birth control and STD prevention is the number one way to keep that from happening. I could go on a political rant there but that’s not this. Um, but, I really dislike it. I also dislike that we had all these conversations and never once the topic of consent was brought up. Or foreplay. Or lubricant. Those are all very important things with sex that’s not taught in sex ed because, I don’t know, they just assume you’re gonna. And I know there’s a lot of people that had pain during sex and didn’t realize it wasn’t okay until they got older and were like, “oh my god.” Something wasn’t right. They either hadn’t had enough foreplay or was just someone who was naturally dry or needs lubricant every time. And that’s not taught. And so, a lot of people—and I shudder to think of how many people are going through this and not realizing that there’s an alternative. And it’s even more emphasized with queer people. I know a lot of gay men even who will be like, “no I don’t need lube.” You always need lube for anal! Oh my god! They make anal specific lubes! Aah! But, I had to teach my roommate. He’s twenty-five, six years older than I am, and I had to teach him what a dental dam was. And that just kind of hurts, that—he is older than me, he should know more than me—and I had to bring one out and give a demo. I was like “this is what this is, this is how you use it.” And it feels like as someone who identifies as LGBT, I face more pressure to learn it myself, when it could just be taught. Here is the safe way for all bodies.

[ellenlucasonlinedatingblog]

Welcome to Impurity Culture: Emily Joy and Hannah Boning on Sex and Relationships Education for Evangelicals and Exvangelicals

Heather Corinna

Meet Emily Joy and Hannah Boning, the columnists behind Impurity Culture, a new biweekly feature on Scarleteen.

Over at @impurityculture on Twitter, Emily Joy and Hannah Boning have started using the medium to provide bite-sized remedial sex and relationships education for evangelicals, exvangelicals and others whose understanding of both has been poisoned by purity culture. Over the years, we’ve done a lot of work with many users struggling from the same place, so we were excited to see what Hannah and Emily were doing.

We’ve invited them to come over to Scarleteen and work with us, and are thrilled to be rolling out a bi-weekly column from them starting next month. I thought I’d get this started by giving our readers a chance to get to know them and the work they want to do in the world.

Let’s start at the beginning: how do you define purity culture? And what kind of personal impact has it had on each of you?

Hannah: Purity culture is a set of beliefs that places an emphasis on sexual purity and teaches that sex is allowed only within a monogamous marriage. It’s usually based in evangelical or fundamental Christian beliefs and emcompasses a whole range of restrictions and rules on sex and sexuality. It’s mostly a list of what isn’t acceptable — instead of what is — and it puts the threatening language and concept of “sin” on anything considered unacceptable. This results in a lot of sexual shame and pain for a lot of people, such as deeply internalized guilt for being queer, being unable to enjoy sex and thinking you’re broken or a million other things.

Emily: My super-short definition for purity culture is as follows: abstinence until heterosexual, monogamous marriage — or else. Your mileage will vary on what exactly constitutes the “or else,” depending on the particulars of your faith community. Sometimes it’s “or else God will be mad at you” or “or else no one will ever want to marry you” or “or else you’ll have a terrible sex life” or even “or else you’ll go to hell!” But there’s always an “or else.” There’s always some kind of threat. Secondary characteristics of purity culture often include an emphasis on male leadership, modesty in clothing for women, and eschewing common ways of dating. Combined, these things and more coalesce to create an environment ripe for sexual dysfunction, shame, and abuse.

Hannah: Emily and I both grew up in purity culture, and both have had to deal with the challenges of discovering our queerness and learning how to be sex positive when we’ve been taught to essentially distrust and hate our sexual desires.

Emily: When I was 13 years old my parents sat me down, gave me a purity ring, and pressured my impressionable adolescent self into promising that I wouldn’t even kiss until I got married (to a man, of course). This along with the rest of the church’s teachings on sexuality set me up for years of heartbreak, repression, and dysfunctional relationships that I’m still recovering from now as an adult, even though I’ve been married for three and a half years and have had very positive sexual experiences. I’ve seen my family fall apart, my friends’ relationships and marriages end in shambles — hell, I didn’t even know I was queer until after I got married — all because of consequences that can be traced directly back to purity culture. This is work that matters to me at a deep soul level, and I am trying to excavate my own trauma and chase my own healing as I help others do the same.

Purity culture does so much harm to so many people. Who do you think purity culture hurts the most, or who has the toughest challenges getting out from under it?

Emily: I don’t know if you can objectively say who purity culture hurts “the most,” especially given the severity of it can vary so greatly by family and by faith community. I think it’s possible to identify compounding factors that can increase trauma, though — such as growing up in purity culture as a woman, a queer person, a person of color, a person with a disability, etc. For example, the reality is that purity culture was created to protect white womanhood and white reproductivity, so especially when it comes to instances of sexual abuse, women of color are abused at a higher rate, but believed less often. They’re also often sexualized in a way that white women are not. Purity culture compounds and validates these inequities. Queer people, men and women and non-binary individuals, are often completely erased from the purity culture narrative, relegated to an appendix about changing your sexuality at the end of the most popular dating books if mentioned at all.

People often ask about whether purity culture hurts men, too. I believe it does. I have a lot of male friends who grew up in purity culture and have struggled to have healthy relationships because the ways that they were taught men were “supposed to be” in romantic relationships with women were so dysfunctional and unnatural. They also believed they were monsters for having normal sexual urges or looking at porn, which is really sad. I think different people are hurt differently, but unlearning the negative messages you received, whatever they happen to be, is extremely important work no matter what.

What do you think surviving and recovering from purity culture, and relearning basic ideas about sexuality and intimacy, asks of people? What do you think people working through impacts of this need?

Emily: I like the language of rehabilitation because I think it allows us to think of the journey out of purity culture as one of healing. Purity culture is a disease most of us inherited by no choice of our own, and that some of us “chose” — but I deeply question what it means to freely “choose” something in a context that says everything else is sin and will send you to hell.

I think we need to first and foremost be gentle with ourselves. The head, the heart and the body operate separately in this process, because we’ve been taught to parse them all out and compartmentalize them. I think the journey out of purity culture is the journey of bringing those three aspects of the self into greater coherence, and that’s a process. At first, you might mentally understand that having sex before marriage won’t send you to hell, but being actually able to have sex, or have sex without feeling guilty about it after, might be elusive. That’s okay. Give yourself time and understand that brainwashing on the level of the American purity industrial complex doesn’t go away overnight. Also, we need to compare notes. We need community! We need others who are on this journey so that we know we’re not alone and so that we have a safe space to ask questions and get feedback from people who aren’t going to look at us like we’re recently-arrived Martians. I also think for those who can afford it, a quality therapist is an invaluable resource here. The reality is that the teachings about relationships found in purity culture are, by and large, the exact opposite of healthy relationship advice. So having professional help to untangle that can give you a great head start.

Hannah: I love Emily’s language of being gentle with yourself. Purity culture is a form of trauma, and it has a physical impact. As Emily said, the physical healing from purity culture can be harder than the mental healing. There’s a lot of vulnerability and risk in learning how to trust your body, and it takes time. You have to be patient with yourself in that process, and having a community around you who can remind you to be patient and gentle with yourself is so important.

What do you think can be done to heal our culture from all this? And how can quality sex ed help?

Hannah: Sex ed usually doesn’t even exist within evangelical or fundamental religious environments. I went to public school, so I took sex ed in school and I got the basics. A lot of people don’t even get that. You aren’t taught things like language about body parts or how to have safe sex or how to have queer sex or what sex should feel like. If you don’t have that knowledge, it’s pretty impossible to take ownership of your body and your sexual experiences. I’ve heard so many stories from friends who have dutifully waited until marriage to have sex, and then endure painful sex because they don’t know that sex shouldn’t be painful. Emily and I both had to teach ourselves sex ed — we both had to google what the clitoris was in our twenties. How do we have good sex and know what we want if we don’t even have the terminology to talk about our bodies? Sex education is a first step towards being able to take control of your sexuality.

Emily: Every single study out there proves that abstinence-only sex education does not work. It doesn’t stop people from having sex outside of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage (as if that were somehow a healthy goal), and it often leads to young people having riskier and less-protected sex when they do become sexually active than they would have been without having been exposed to abstinence ideas or ideals. The states with the highest emphasis on abstinence-only sex education have the highest teen birth rates. And that’s if you get any sex ed at all, which if you were homeschooled like me, you didn’t.

One of the main answers is to do away with purity culture in general, and abstinence-only education in particular. Take the whole thing and dump it all in the trash. Don’t even keep a little bit. Replace abstinence-only with mandatory, comprehensive, age-appropriate, sex-positive, consent-based, LGBTQIA+-affirming sex education for all. Is that going to happen? Not in most of our schools, and certainly not in very many of our religious communities. So right now, it’s up to individuals and organizations that care to do the work, and it’s up to people to take control of their bodies and their sexualities as they can. Empowerment starts with education. The more of us that do this work publicly, openly and without shame, the better. I hope that leads to a culture shift, but that’s the work of generations, not of one lifetime.

Who else is doing some of this work?

Hannah and Emily: @seelolago who tweets at @noshamemov and her website No Shame Movement is an absolutely invaluable resource (and gives the important perspective of a woman of color) when it comes to undoing the shame of purity culture. Jamie Lee Finch (@jamieleefinch and http://www.jamieleefinch.com/) is also doing great work at the intersection of purity culture and embodiment, and explains her work as being “a relationship coach between people and their bodies,” which I love. As Impurity Culture we think of ourselves as specializing specifically in the sex ed department of purity culture recovery — actively empowering people with the real-life knowledge to replace the false facts about sex and sexuality that are such an integral part of purity culture.

Who else isn't doing the work but you should or could be?

Hannah: In general, I feel like churches aren’t doing this work. Sex is still a bit of a taboo topic in religious contexts, but even the “progressive” churches aren’t always talking about sex. There’s a lot of people who have deep trauma from the purity culture teachings they received in the church. A lot of these people leave the church entirely, and a lot stay, and churches need to learn how to help the people who stay and develop better ways to talk about sexuality for future generations.

Emily: Yeah, I think “progressive” and “liberal” churches could be doing a lot better job. If you’re styling yourself as a community for spiritual formation guess what? That includes talking about sexuality in a healthy and sex-positive way. It’s not enough to just not actively traumatize people (and sometimes “progressive” churches don’t even manage that). I do want to give a shoutout to the Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ and their Our Whole Lives (OWL) sex ed curriculum, which is nothing short of amazing. I was just perusing their textbook for 18-35 year-olds this weekend and I was floored at how comprehensive, affirming, and sex-positive it was.

Can you also talk about this a little bit as specifically feminist work?

Emily: It seems in a lot of cases, even so-called “secular” or non-religious news media outlets, that this foundational idea of purity culture, abstinence until heterosexual marriage, is sort of sacrosanct. It feels like objecting to it, even from a feminist standpoint, isn’t something you do in polite company, because it’s viewed as an untouchable religious belief and an integral part of so many of the various religious institutions that make up what we collectively call The Church in the United States. This is intensely feminist work. As much as we might wish optimistically that all girls and children of all genders are growing up in households and communities that affirm their sexualities and provide a supportive structure from which they can make their own age-appropriate sexual decisions, that is simply not the case. And until that is the case, this must be part of the agenda of feminism. When you explain purity culture plainly, it does feel antiquated and outdated — like it should be obsolete in the year 2018. But it’s not. And we can’t forget that there are still new victims of purity culture being created every day.

Hannah: This feels like such important feminist work. To me, feminism is about advocating for equality and autonomy for all folks of all genders, and your feminism should also be working against inequality in any form. As Emily mentioned earlier, purity culture has roots in protecting whiteness and has a deep investment in heterosexuality, so any work that’s attempting to dismantle purity culture needs to be working against racism and homophobia as well. Emily and I are both white, able-bodied, cisgender women, so we both have a lot of privilege and also can only speak to certain experiences of purity culture. We tend to focus mostly on how purity culture affects women, because that’s our experience. Purity culture is all about patriarchy and sexism, and so we see the work of Impurity Culture as attempting to dismantle patriarchal ideas about sex and sexuality. Purity culture teaches that a woman’s body doesn’t belong to her, that it’s the property of her husband and she should keep it pure for him until marriage. We hope to empower women with this work, to help them claim autonomy and ownership over their own bodies, and to allow women to make their own choices about their sexual lives.

Emily Joy Allison-Hearn is a bisexual married polyamorous poet and yoga teacher who also happens to have a degree in theology and apologetics from Moody Bible Institute. Emily works and writes at the intersection of faith, sexuality and religious trauma, and her passion is to help people break free from purity culture and empower them to embrace sex-positivity in their everyday lives. She tweets too much at @emilyjoypoetry and her other work can be found at www.emilyjoypoetry.com.

Hannah Boning is a queer theologi from MeetPositives SM Feed 4 https://ift.tt/2N102UT via IFTTT

[travisandersondatingblog]

The Future of Sex Education

While much of the world fights over the right way to teach young people about sex, a growing number of sex educators and entrepreneurs are seeing some success in making it entertaining, inclusive, and as much about pleasure as health and science.

From Youtubers to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and now even adult entertainment companies, there is a growing digital library of information to help answer almost any question about sex and sexuality. Some forums, such as the subreddit r/sex, which now has nearly 800,000 members, have become safe-havens for people to anonymously ask questions with less fear of judgment.

“I grew up in Hong Kong…schools here are not obligated to have a specific learning experience called ‘sex education,’” says Chow Pok Him, a student who never speaks to his parents about sex. Chow learned more accurate information from the collective experience of other Reddit users than he did from his instructors at school, he says, including about the proper way to use a condom.

“When the topic does get discussed [in school], the discussion focuses mostly on the mechanics of reproduction rather than sex itself,” he says. Instructors are noticeably uncomfortable, and students feel embarrassed to ask questions because “people still employ the old way of thinking in which they associate sex with negativity,” that it is “disgusting, immoral or ‘loose.’”

Him’s experience is a familiar one in many parts of the world. The United Nations’ most recent report on global sexuality education, published in 2015, said that while an increasing number of governments have expressed interest in increasing comprehensive sex ed “there remains a significant gap between the numerous global and regional policies in place and the actual implementation on the ground.”

In the U.S., fewer than half of states require sex education, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that supports reproductive health and abortion rights. Rising rates of STIs, particularly among young people under 25, and research by Guttmacher and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, suggest abstinence-only sex education does little to stop teens from being sexually active, or to prevent the spread of STIs and unwanted pregnancy. But in some states, sex education cannot be taught unless it stresses abstinence before marriage. Earlier this year, a bill proposed in one of those states, Utah, to allow parents to opt-in to comprehensive sex ed for their children, was killed.

Shannon Boodram, a clinical sexologist and Youtuber who likes to call herself the “Wal-Mart greeter of sex-ed,” says her own lack of sex education while growing up in Canada was part of the reason she decided to pursue sexology. “I went to a Catholic school, and I was called ‘lewd’ a lot at home…a lot of my natural expression for sexuality was suppressed a lot and shamed,” she said.

Meanwhile, sex education at her school stressed abstinence and taught students about sex as if “the only reason you would have sex is if you’re trying to self-sabotage,” for example to get a sexually-transmitted disease or an unwanted pregnancy, she said. “Aren’t we forgetting pleasure, intimacy, connection, the positive feelings?”

The lack of information led to what Boodram calls a “textbook, really bad teen sex life that left me feeling very low about myself.” She took matters into her own hands. “I’d spent the entire summer in the library just reading books because I’d had such a shitty teen sex life,” she said. Later, she authored the book “Laid: Young People’s Experiences with Sex in an Easy-Access Culture,” and started a Youtube channel that now has more than a quarter million subscribers.

Youtube has become perhaps the most popular platform for alternatives sources of sex ed. In addition to Boodram, it was a springboard for sex educators like Dr. Lindsey Doe, Laci Green, and others who collectively have millions of followers.

Doe, a doctor of human sexuality and a practicing clinical sexologist, is the host of Sexplanations, a channel with more than 360,000 subscribers. Her most popular video is one about “How to make toy vaginas,” which has been viewed more than 5 million times. Other popular videos include what she calls sex “edutainment” about anal sex, oral sex, and masturbation, all with a non-judgmentally straight face and what can only be described as a “nice teacher” voice.

Her expression and delivery, coupled with the occasional funny costume, can be very effective in neutralizing subject matter that is prone to make people giggle, while also adding a touch of deadpan humor. In one tutorial, viewed over a million times, Doe explains exactly how a tampon works and demonstrates insertion by wearing a pair of underwear outside her pants, with a vulva printed on it.

Some channels are also finding niches in providing educational content for younger children, or young people who may not get access to sex education that includes information about their sexuality or gender identity. Channels like Queer Kid Stuff, co-hosted by Lindsay Amer and her “best friend Teddy,” aim to fill those gaps with age-appropriate videos about LGBTQ+ issues, including difficult-to-explain subjects like homophobia.

Meanwhile, a number of startups are looking to take sex education further. For Goodness Sake, LLC’s, OMGYES, for example, uses scientific research, videos and simulations to coach both women and men 18 and over to achieve sexual pleasure for themselves, or their partners.

Even adult entertainment companies want to help. Pornhub, the biggest site for streaming pornography, which generated 23 billion visits last year, launched a site called the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center with articles and Q&As covering some basics about sexual anatomy, STIs and reproductive health.

Still, leaving sex education to the Internet has its dangers. There is as much, if not more, misinformation as there is good information, which can be harmful to young people who don’t have adults in their lives to talk to openly about sex.

A visit to any open, anonymous forum reveals many messages from young people asking questions about their sexual health, including questions about diagnosing STIs or reproductive health issues. They say they’re afraid that if they go to the doctor, their parents will find out they’re sexually active. Many ask if their doctors or parents can run physical tests to determine if they have masturbated, or if they have ever had sex.

Andrea Barrica, founder and CEO of sexual wellness education startup O.school, says her platform provides a safe place for educators to teach about everything from trauma to cultural shame around pleasure, for users who are 18 and older. But while doing outreach on college campuses, Barrica says she is discovering that a lack of comprehensive, and inclusive, sex education leaves people in need of sex education well beyond adolescence. “I have gone to Ivy League schools and had people not understand their basic anatomy, or who’ve never seen their genitalia,” she says. “We assume that because the Internet, [young people] have access to so much information, but it’s just not getting to them.”

Sexplanations tries to help parents get comfortable with the idea of talking to their kids about sex, with a section with 22 videos about adolescent sexual health. Planned Parenthood also has a site with resources for parents about how to answer questions about sex starting as early as preschool.

There are tons of sites with great and accurate information regarding sex ed and sexual health. STDcheck.com strives to be one of these online resources, especially in terms of sexually transmitted infections.

The post The Future of Sex Education appeared first on STD Exposed - Sexual Health Blog.

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[ongames]

This Groundbreaking Online School Is About To Revolutionize Sex Ed

Sex Heroes is an ongoing HuffPost Q&A series by Voices Editorial Director Noah Michelson that explores the lives and experiences of individuals who are challenging, and thereby changing, mainstream culture’s understanding of sex and sexuality. 

Try googling “sexual education in America” and then sit back and wait for the depression to wash over you as you read headlines like “Sex-Ed In America Is Even Worse Than You Thought” and “These Maps Show Where Kids In America Get Terrifying Sex Ed.” From woefully inadequate abstinence-only curriculums to programs that neglect to discuss consent or queer sex ― much less pleasure ― it’s no small feat to locate informative, accessible classes in this country that realistically prepare individuals for sexual encounters.  

Andrea Barrica wants to change all of that.

The 27-year-old queer Filipina-American technology entrepreneur is preparing to launch O.school, a groundbreaking shame-free online platform for pleasure education, this fall.

The school will offer courses, led by instructors from communities around the country, to help participants “un-learn” elements of problematic sex ed they may have previously encountered. The classes will also be dedicated to investigating and championing sexual issues specifically facing queer people and people of color, addressing sexual trauma, and celebrating female sexuality and pleasure.

I recently spoke with Barrica to learn more about her plan to bring her pleasure-based sex ed to the masses, how she intends to reach victims of toxic masculinity, and more. 

HuffPost: Where did the idea for O.school come from? Andrea Barrica: I knew that I wanted to build something that affected people around something that was highly stigmatized. It was very clear to me that people are getting their sexual perspectives and beliefs and ideas from porn ― and I’m very pro-porn, I know it can be a good thing ― and I thought, “There must be other places on the internet where people learn about [sex].” It was really shocking to me that there really aren’t any safe spaces on the internet to learn about it — especially if you’re queer, especially if you’re a person of color, especially if you’re a woman. So I thought, what if there was a place online that you could go to unlearn shame and learn about sex and pleasure ― and not just how to put a condom on a banana. I’m talking about [teaching things like] “how can I get more pleasure?” and “how do I learn about all of these really amazing ways to connect with people sexually?”

And then I started to learn about all of the barriers to doing that and I found there are three main barriers. One is that there are no safe spaces on the internet ― period. The second is sexual trauma — there’s so much shame in trauma. And lastly, there’s so much stigma around anything that is vulva-based. I was going into spaces and I was told “that’s too much.” So trying to teach people about their vulvas or about the structure of their clitoris — that’s been hidden for a long time. 

Why do you think sex ed is so awful in America? $2 billion is spent on abstinence-only sex ed and where you’re born dictates what sex ed you get. That’s just wrong. That’s fucked up. It’s not fair that if you grow up in Oklahoma versus San Francisco versus somewhere in Florida, you’re going to have drastically different sex ed experiences. Secondly, you can’t learn about sex on the internet because if you search for these terms, you’re just going to get porn. There’s nothing wrong with porn but learning about sex from porn is like learning how to drive from “The Fast and the Furious” movies. [Porn] is entertainment and because we don’t talk about [sex] at home, because we don’t talk about it at school, the most accessible source of education is coming from the entertainment industry. That’s what this is about — there’s a big gap. It’s like [your sex ed choice is either] science books or porn and there’s nothing in the middle. So we wanted to create a place where anyone could go to learn about sex. It seems really simple and it seems like it should exist but because of trolling, abuse and harassment on the internet, it really doesn’t.

Do you think that sex ed should be mandatory?  I think basic sex ed about bodies should be mandatory. I think everyone should learn about what their bodies can do. I mean, we don’t even get consent training in the abstinence-only classes. I think the reason why O.school is so needed is because of that sex ed. The way I look at it is that half of O.school is like “unlearning content.” There are a lot of people in this country who would have been better off getting no sex ed. I count myself as one of them. I learned about the purity of virginity in Catholic school. I literally would have been better off without learning any of the things I learned about sex from [Catholic school]. So much of what we do and the services that we provide and the content that we put in the live streaming context are around people unlearning and processing all of the emotions that they got from state-mandated and paid-for sex ed.

Talk to me about the actual nuts and bolts of O.school. How does it work?We are a shame-free, live-streaming platform for pleasure education and we’re centering women and gender-diverse people. It’s a place to help people unlearn shame and own their desire and the mission is to help millions of people work through their struggles with body and religious shame and to help them heal from sexual trauma, develop skill sets to help them communicate what they want or don’t want, discover a new interest in an LGBTQ-friendly, kink-friendly intersectional space. The nuts and bolts is that it’s closed — if we just made it a public platform, we would have to have the same platform as others in the tech space: Twitter, YouTube, you name it ― and you’re going to get abused, harassed and trolled. That’s why we’re an invite-only platform right now. You have to get an invite code. It’s not because we want to be exclusive — it’s quite the opposite. I think what people are learning is that the internet is a place. It’s just like another place. And if you had an offline place, you’d have to keep that safe. We are a unique tech company in that we prioritize safety and security and privacy over just super fast growth at any other cost. Everyone’s like, “Why aren’t you getting to a million views?” Not like we have any problems with that — we have an immense demand ― but for us, creating a space that feels safe, we are creating most of our technology to support that. 

There’s nothing wrong with porn but learning about sex from porn is like learning how to drive from “The Fast and the Furious” movies.

Once you’ve been admitted, how is the curriculum distributed? We’re still in beta but most of the live streams are offered and you can watch them but we’re going to roll out a membership model but there will always be a portion of the streams that are free to the public. Another thing that’s really important about our product: we are partnering with existing educators. We are not inventing anything new in pleasure-focused, intersectional sex ed. I think that’s why we have so many women of color, so many trans people, so many queer people. People who come from these marginalized communities are sick and tired, so we’re disrupting [the old method of approaching sex education]. That’s really key to our mission — when you’re seeing live streams, you’re seeing them from these communities. We have “Afrosexology” in St. Louis — it’s all these [instructors and educators] who have already been doing the work, they just have zero online presence and zero tools to do it online [until now].

I’m queer and understand the importance of having sex ed that centers around queer people, women, people of color, etc. At the same time, I think part of what we need to do is also address the cis, white, straight men who have learned all of these toxic things and need to unlearn them as well. What do we do about these men? How do we get them to be part of this movement as well? Because, at least to me, it seems like without them being de-educated and then properly re-educated, we can only make so much progress, right? Absolutely. We are open to straight, cis men. We have content on the platform for straight, cis men to address toxic masculinity. The key here is that we’re centering around gender diverse people to bring those people in but if we just left it open to the public, it would challenge our safety. We’re for anyone who didn’t get the pleasure education they deserved and that includes trauma education, which, again, cis men being the victims of sexual assault is something we care about. We’re really focused on this segment of people because these products don’t get sold to them but we agree that toxic masculinity is a massive, massive problem. My team is mostly led by queer women of color and in that vein, we also believe that we’ve got to start where we know the problem the best. I’m a queer woman of color, I’m partnered with another queer woman of color and we have a team that knows this specific problem. We think that one of the problems is also that cis white men are the main purchasers of porn — they’re the market. All the money that basically has been made in porn is from this group of people. In that way, you’re totally right, but we’re just trying to fill a need that’s really immediate but we have plans and already have content for [cis straight men].

Our country has a really long and terrible history when it comes to (not) championing sex and sexuality and pleasure but it seems like right now, especially in this political climate, things are even more dire. Talk to me about O.school emerging right now — in 2017 — with the current administration and everything that comes with it in terms of women’s rights and queer rights and women’s and queer health.

Right — reproductive rights are under attack. I see a lot of people on the defensive and I see O.school as being on the offensive. There are so many amazing organizations that are fighting for basic reproductive rights but they’re fighting because there are active forces coming at them and this is my stance: It doesn’t matter what your political or cultural or religious backgrounds are — shame and trauma are universal. Everybody has something they’re ashamed about. Everyone has something about their body that they have a hang up about. For me personally, I think this is the perfect time to go on the offense against shame because I want O.school to be a place for everyone - including people who haven’t gotten the education to be trans inclusive or whatever else. The only way we’re going to reach them is if we build a product that can really help people wherever they are.  

Activism is hard — fascism is designed to exhaust us and if we can fuel the resistance with orgasms, that’s the best way I can help the resistance. I want to heal people from shame, heal people from trauma and give them the energy they need to fight for whatever cause they want to fight for in their lives. That’s my thought on “why now?” It’s 2017 and I still meet people who don’t realize that consent should be the rule. There are still people being shamed for asking to use condoms. There are still people who are so paralyzed from body shame that labiaplasty — the procedure to alter or remove labia — is the fastest growing procedure in some places. We’re still living in a place where a lot of women tell me that they didn’t know that they could masturbate — they didn’t know that they could have pleasure! They’re having sex and they don’t have any expectation for pleasure. It’s 2017 and some of my friends who are 70 year old women are like, “We feel like we already did this.” That’s one of the biggest misconceptions that I find — people think this generation is so sexually liberated but we’re not at all. 

10 years from now, what do you want O.school to have accomplished? In 10 years, if we have a world where people feel less shame about their bodies, about their sexuality, and feel like there are places where they can talk about sex on the internet, that will be enough of a success for me to feel great.

O.school will launch in Fall 2017. To join the waitlist, please head here.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Is there a sex hero you think deserves to be covered on The Huffington Post? Send an email to Noah Michelson.

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This Groundbreaking Online School Is About To Revolutionize Sex Ed published first on http://ift.tt/2lnpciY

[cameoamalthea]

More on Sin

I don’t think that sexuality is a ‘sin’ but I can’t deny that lust is certainly listed as a Deadly sin. 

A bit about my own religious up bringing and thoughts.

I was baptized Catholic and spent my child hood Church hopping with my mother who enjoyed the welcome of new choices and being saved and brought in so much that she left the church to join another right afterwards. I also attended community church on Wednesdays and for event s with my best friend. The community church was a black church and they had a school bus that went around the different projects picking up poor kids and bringing them into the church to sing and have fun community events. I was probably the only white girl there, but I never felt out of place, all children were welcome. 

My mother, for her part, fluctuated between being very Christian and very pagan and just very drunk or high and doing her best to be devil himself. She’d shame me sometimes ‘honor thy mother and father’, mixing in religious notions with her standard emotional abuse, but often her emotional abuse was just calling me a cunt and telling me I was bad, and how sorry I’d be if she died and how grateful I should be she wasn’t selling me since I was old enough (I was 12 - 14 during this for reference).

She also tried to get me into partying and having sex when she got heavily into drugs. She wasn’t going to be a mother anymore, and I think she’d have liked me to be her friend and companion and partner in crime. She offered me drugs. Left me alone with teenage boys who were around my age, but far less innocent than me. She wanted me to get into sex (maybe she thought I’d offer to turn tricks for her then). 

At the time I got more into being Catholic. I prayed the Rosary. When I woke up in the middle of the night, paralyzed with fear that I was alone and my that someone could be on top of me and touching me, I prayed for Jesus and for Mary to stand by my bed. I recited the prayers as if I had a Rosary then and took to holding one for comfort, alongside an X-men action figure. I liked Rogue, I related to Rogue.

I related to Rogue because I knew what it was like to be a freak and to be untouchable. In middle school, in the south, someone spread a rumor that I was a lesbian. I’d always been bullied. I was poor, and just enough on the autistic spectrum to not understand how to be normal or make friends or to understand when I was being bullied but not enough to be offered any protection or instruction on how to survive. With middle school came being called a lesbian and no one wanting to be near me. When the school made a holocaust museum they had visitors take a badges when you went into the maze of card board box exhibits. A crowd of kids forced me to wear a pink triangle as a joke.

In High School, in another state after I was sent to live with an aunt and uncle at 14,  I got very into vocally accepting gay people, consuming gay media and in college I got into gay activism long before coming out as bi myself. 

When I came to live with my guardians I wanted to go to Church, Catholic church, but none of them went to church except my uncle’s mother and Grammy was Southern Baptist. I went off and on with her for a few years, but in 2004 rejected the church when they said we should pray for George Bush to win a second term. 

I spent free time reading Anne Rice and writing about my own vampires and thinking about gay vampires, about bi vampires. My wish fulfillment character was a beautiful teenage boy who became a vampire and dated whoever he wanted and did whatever he wanted and it was sexy because boy’s couldn’t be sluts, and if you were all ready a vampire lesser sins probably didn’t matter.

In Middle School we’d had sex ed that consisted of telling us if we ever had sex with anyone we’d be worthless and talking about how great it would be to save ourselves as a gift for our husband’s on our wedding night. “I saved this for you’.

I had idea what to do about my period blood that soaked through everything or the smell when I was wearing pads as long as possible rather than ask my mother to buy me anything or how to clean the stains. They taught nothing of this, but they taught me how much my virginity meant and they made it sound so good to be pure.

With nothing in my life safe or clean or under control and the constant threats both from my mother and the cartel she owed money too when she somehow ‘lost’ the money she was supposed to give them for dealing’ the idea that even I had worth and could have this honor to protect and cherish, and that this valuable thing couldn’t be stolen sounded amazing. 

I didn’t judge others, but was personally conservative. I would be a virgin until my wedding night. I wouldn’t do anything ‘bad’ or ‘sinful’. I thought judging gay people was wrong, and I joined the United Church of Christ because they were accepting, but I held myself to a high standard that saw my virginity as something precious to guard.

It wasn’t hard either. I didn’t want sex. I’d later come to understand that I’m sex repulsed. On my wedding night I came to understand that my insides were all torn up and I’d need surgery to fix that, and I was vindicated that when I said I couldn’t wear tampons because they’d get caught and tangled my aunt should have believed me. That the pain was real and it was a problem. 

Puzzle pieces fit together, evidence pointing towards sexual abuse when I was a kid. I didn’t want to be shaped by that. I wanted to have and enjoy sex. I wanted to be with men and women. I’d promised to be abstinent until marriage, they made me sign a contract in middle school, but I didn’t promise I’d be monogamous afterwards, that wasn’t in the contract.

I could understand why adultery was wrong. That’s breaking a promise and lying. But I didn’t see anything wrong in doing something if everyone concerned is informed and agreed. I wanted to try sex to see if maybe there was a circumstance where I wouldn’t feel so ‘wrong’ about it. 

Still sometimes the guilt came. The thought that I should repent and confess and try to be good and pure again. 

On paper I believed in sexual liberation. That gay people should have the right to be gay. That women should be able to do what they want, just as men did, without the double standard.

 I’d always hated the double standard as a teen where so much fan service was for the male-gaze but it didn’t exist for women, hardly at all anyway, except on shows meant for gay men.

I loved Queer as Folk in High School and I wished I could be that and I wished I could be Jack Harkness on Doctor Who. I wished for sexuality free from shame or guilt, to not care what others thought. Then I found anime and yaoi and things drawn for the female gaze and for the first time I felt empowered in my own sexuality. Ioved Ouran High School Host Club, that fantasy of boys performing for the girls and it being ok for the girls to publicly adore them or even like forbidden things. The twins were my favorites.

And in High School this didn’t feel like sin, it was just watching or reading or thinking. I’m sure if I were a teen now I’d be assured it was bad, that I was fetishizing gay men and supporting fetishizing men, which is homophobic (even though Ouran is about boys choosing to perform for girls, the way in real life society expects girls to perform for boys). I’m glad I’m older now, and that I had that then.

And I’m glad that I reject the notion that sexual or romantic desire is in and of itself evil and sinful, at least consciously. But still there’s a part of me that wonders how I can say I’m a Christian and seek to distinguish between lust and sexuality.

I suppose I’ll look to other sins. Drunkenness is decried in the Bible, but Jesus provided wine for a wedding and drank it, Gluttony is a sin but Jesus provided a feast for the wedding too. So perhaps Lust is like that. Bad in excess, when it leads to actions that harm others. 

[yes-dal456]

This Groundbreaking Online School Is About To Revolutionize Sex Ed

Sex Heroes is an ongoing HuffPost Q&A series by Voices Editorial Director Noah Michelson that explores the lives and experiences of individuals who are challenging, and thereby changing, mainstream culture’s understanding of sex and sexuality. 

Try googling “sexual education in America” and then sit back and wait for the depression to wash over you as you read headlines like “Sex-Ed In America Is Even Worse Than You Thought” and “These Maps Show Where Kids In America Get Terrifying Sex Ed.” From woefully inadequate abstinence-only curriculums to programs that neglect to discuss consent or queer sex ― much less pleasure ― it’s no small feat to locate informative, accessible classes in this country that realistically prepare individuals for sexual encounters.  

Andrea Barrica wants to change all of that.

The 27-year-old queer Filipina-American technology entrepreneur is preparing to launch O.school, a groundbreaking shame-free online platform for pleasure education, this fall.

The school will offer courses, led by instructors from communities around the country, to help participants “un-learn” elements of problematic sex ed they may have previously encountered. The classes will also be dedicated to investigating and championing sexual issues specifically facing queer people and people of color, addressing sexual trauma, and celebrating female sexuality and pleasure.

I recently spoke with Barrica to learn more about her plan to bring her pleasure-based sex ed to the masses, how she intends to reach victims of toxic masculinity, and more. 

HuffPost: Where did the idea for O.school come from? Andrea Barrica: I knew that I wanted to build something that affected people around something that was highly stigmatized. It was very clear to me that people are getting their sexual perspectives and beliefs and ideas from porn ― and I’m very pro-porn, I know it can be a good thing ― and I thought, “There must be other places on the internet where people learn about [sex].” It was really shocking to me that there really aren’t any safe spaces on the internet to learn about it — especially if you’re queer, especially if you’re a person of color, especially if you’re a woman. So I thought, what if there was a place online that you could go to unlearn shame and learn about sex and pleasure ― and not just how to put a condom on a banana. I’m talking about [teaching things like] “how can I get more pleasure?” and “how do I learn about all of these really amazing ways to connect with people sexually?”

And then I started to learn about all of the barriers to doing that and I found there are three main barriers. One is that there are no safe spaces on the internet ― period. The second is sexual trauma — there’s so much shame in trauma. And lastly, there’s so much stigma around anything that is vulva-based. I was going into spaces and I was told “that’s too much.” So trying to teach people about their vulvas or about the structure of their clitoris — that’s been hidden for a long time. 

Why do you think sex ed is so awful in America? $2 billion is spent on abstinence-only sex ed and where you’re born dictates what sex ed you get. That’s just wrong. That’s fucked up. It’s not fair that if you grow up in Oklahoma versus San Francisco versus somewhere in Florida, you’re going to have drastically different sex ed experiences. Secondly, you can’t learn about sex on the internet because if you search for these terms, you’re just going to get porn. There’s nothing wrong with porn but learning about sex from porn is like learning how to drive from “The Fast and the Furious” movies. [Porn] is entertainment and because we don’t talk about [sex] at home, because we don’t talk about it at school, the most accessible source of education is coming from the entertainment industry. That’s what this is about — there’s a big gap. It’s like [your sex ed choice is either] science books or porn and there’s nothing in the middle. So we wanted to create a place where anyone could go to learn about sex. It seems really simple and it seems like it should exist but because of trolling, abuse and harassment on the internet, it really doesn’t.

Do you think that sex ed should be mandatory?  I think basic sex ed about bodies should be mandatory. I think everyone should learn about what their bodies can do. I mean, we don’t even get consent training in the abstinence-only classes. I think the reason why O.school is so needed is because of that sex ed. The way I look at it is that half of O.school is like “unlearning content.” There are a lot of people in this country who would have been better off getting no sex ed. I count myself as one of them. I learned about the purity of virginity in Catholic school. I literally would have been better off without learning any of the things I learned about sex from [Catholic school]. So much of what we do and the services that we provide and the content that we put in the live streaming context are around people unlearning and processing all of the emotions that they got from state-mandated and paid-for sex ed.

Talk to me about the actual nuts and bolts of O.school. How does it work?We are a shame-free, live-streaming platform for pleasure education and we’re centering women and gender-diverse people. It’s a place to help people unlearn shame and own their desire and the mission is to help millions of people work through their struggles with body and religious shame and to help them heal from sexual trauma, develop skill sets to help them communicate what they want or don’t want, discover a new interest in an LGBTQ-friendly, kink-friendly intersectional space. The nuts and bolts is that it’s closed — if we just made it a public platform, we would have to have the same platform as others in the tech space: Twitter, YouTube, you name it ― and you’re going to get abused, harassed and trolled. That’s why we’re an invite-only platform right now. You have to get an invite code. It’s not because we want to be exclusive — it’s quite the opposite. I think what people are learning is that the internet is a place. It’s just like another place. And if you had an offline place, you’d have to keep that safe. We are a unique tech company in that we prioritize safety and security and privacy over just super fast growth at any other cost. Everyone’s like, “Why aren’t you getting to a million views?” Not like we have any problems with that — we have an immense demand ― but for us, creating a space that feels safe, we are creating most of our technology to support that. 

There’s nothing wrong with porn but learning about sex from porn is like learning how to drive from “The Fast and the Furious” movies.

Once you’ve been admitted, how is the curriculum distributed? We’re still in beta but most of the live streams are offered and you can watch them but we’re going to roll out a membership model but there will always be a portion of the streams that are free to the public. And then for advanced streams or if you want to keep going and watch more, there will be a membership model. It will be paid — we’re not selling data, we’re not going to be ad-supported. That’s not the future of what I believe the internet is going to be like because I believe that people are wising up to the fact that when you don’t pay for a product, you are the product. I think people are starting to care about that and so that’s never going to match our mission and values. However, we are going to help empower the educated. That’s another that’s really important about our product: we are partnering with existing educators. We are not inventing anything new in pleasure-focused, intersectional sex ed. I think that’s why we have so many women of color, so many trans people, so many queer people. People who come from these marginalized communities are sick and tired, so we’re disrupting [the old method of approaching sex education]. That’s really key to our mission — when you’re seeing live streams, you’re seeing them from these communities. We have “Afrosexology” in St. Louis — it’s all these [instructors and educators] who have already been doing the work, they just have zero online presence and zero tools to do it online [until now].

I’m queer and understand the importance of having sex ed that centers around queer people, women, people of color, etc. At the same time, I think part of what we need to do is also address the cis, white, straight men who have learned all of these toxic things and need to unlearn them as well. What do we do about these men? How do we get them to be part of this movement as well? Because, at least to me, it seems like without them being de-educated and then properly re-educated, we can only make so much progress, right? Absolutely. We are open to straight, cis men. We have content on the platform for straight, cis men to address toxic masculinity. The key here is that we’re centering around gender diverse people to bring those people in but if we just left it open to the public, it would challenge our safety. We’re for anyone who didn’t get the pleasure education they deserved and that includes trauma education, which, again, cis men being the victims of sexual assault is something we care about. We’re really focused on this segment of people because these products don’t get sold to them but we agree that toxic masculinity is a massive, massive problem. My team is mostly led by queer women of color and in that vein, we also believe that we’ve got to start where we know the problem the best. I’m a queer woman of color, I’m partnered with another queer woman of color and we have a team that knows this specific problem. We think that one of the problems is also that cis white men are the main purchasers of porn — they’re the market. All the money that basically has been made in porn is from this group of people. In that way, you’re totally right, but we’re just trying to fill a need that’s really immediate but we have plans and already have content for [cis straight men].

Our country has a really long and terrible history when it comes to (not) championing sex and sexuality and pleasure but it seems like right now, especially in this political climate, things are even more dire. Talk to me about O.school emerging right now — in 2017 — with the current administration and everything that comes with it in terms of women’s rights and queer rights and women’s and queer health.

Right — reproductive rights are under attack. I see a lot of people on the defensive and I see O.school as being on the offensive. There are so many amazing organizations that are fighting for basic reproductive rights but they’re fighting because there are active forces coming at them and this is my stance: It doesn’t matter what your political or cultural or religious backgrounds are — shame and trauma are universal. Everybody has something they’re ashamed about. Everyone has something about their body that they have a hang up about. For me personally, I think this is the perfect time to go on the offense against shame because I want O.school to be a place for everyone - including people who haven’t gotten the education to be trans inclusive or whatever else. The only way we’re going to reach them is if we build a product that can really help people wherever they are.  

Activism is hard — fascism is designed to exhaust us and if we can fuel the resistance with orgasms, that’s the best way I can help the resistance. I want to heal people from shame, heal people from trauma and give them the energy they need to fight for whatever cause they want to fight for in their lives. That’s my thought on “why now?” It’s 2017 and I still meet people who don’t realize that consent should be the rule. There are still people being shamed for asking to use condoms. There are still people who are so paralyzed from body shame that labiaplasty — the procedure to alter or remove labia — is the fastest growing procedure in some places. We’re still living in a place where a lot of women tell me that they didn’t know that they could masturbate — they didn’t know that they could have pleasure! They’re having sex and they don’t have any expectation for pleasure. It’s 2017 and some of my friends who are 70 year old women are like, “We feel like we already did this.” That’s one of the biggest misconceptions that I find — people think this generation is so sexually liberated but we’re not at all. 

10 years from now, what do you want O.school to have accomplished? In 10 years, if we have a world where people feel less shame about their bodies, about their sexuality, and feel like there are places where they can talk about sex on the internet, that will be enough of a success for me to feel great.

O.school will launch in Fall 2017. To join the waitlist, please head here.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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