I’d say almost half of all my emails relate to penis size, specifically requests from guys who want to increase their size. My usual response is that all of the available products and pills are both dishonest and dangerous. From Tuesday’s FDA news release:

“At the request of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, U.S. Marshals today seized $346,954.43 worth of FastSize Extender devices and FastSize EQM Erectile Quality Monitor devices, as well as component parts used in the manufacture of the FastSize Extender. The FastSize Extender and the FastSize EQM Erectile Quality Monitor are manufactured and distributed by FastSize, LLC of Aliso Viejo, Calif.”

“The FastSize Extender device was promoted to gain length, girth, and overall penile health improvement and to correct penile deformity caused by Peyronie’s disease. Because the devices are intended to diagnosis, cure, mitigate, treat or prevent diseases, they are subject to the regulatory authority of the FDA. The devices do not have approved applications for premarket approval for these uses.”

“During a recent inspection of the FastSize LLC manufacturing facility, inspectors noted significant deviations from cGMP regulations. Additionally, the devices are not properly listed with the FDA as required by law, and the firm failed or refused to furnish materials or information regarding the devices to federal inspectors as required under the Medical Device Reporting regulation.”

Anxiety about penis size is at once a giant cultural joke and also a serious obstacle for men to enjoying sexual pleasure. There’s a term for guys who believe their penises are too small when in fact they don’t qualify in the eyes of medicine, penile dysmorphophobia (colloquially referred to as small penis syndrome.

Thinking your penis is too small to provide you or your sexual partners any pleasure (which of course involves the misunderstanding that to feel or provide sexual pleasure you need to use a penis) is just as bad as any other kind of internalized body hatred. Which isn’t to say that guys don’t figure out ways to stop worrying about penis size. But those who do usually start by talking about it.

Reader’s Share Their Stories: How I Stopped Worrying About Penis Size

More on Penis Size:

• Who Cares Most About Penis Size?
• Five Reasons Guys Think Their Penis Is Too Small
• Penis Size: It’s Hila-racist!
• Average Penis Size

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FDA Seizes Penis Extenders

The season premiere of Mad Men ended less than an hour ago and after talking about it with the friend I watched it with (who also works in sex, and agreed that something was up with the sex worker answering that phone) I was curious about what others thought of the slap happy sex work, public sex, and the new agency which is built on at least two affairs (that we know of). So I did what one does at 11:30 at night when you want to hear what a random group of people who watch TV and are online think, I went to Twitter and searched for Mad Men and sex.

People seemed generally pleased with the amount and different kinds of sex, although many were “disappointed” that Don was paying for sex. Several people wondered why he “had to” pay for it, said he was too good looking for that, or that it made him seem less cool and powerful (and more than one offered to slap him for free). This isn’t a surprise. Most people don’t value sex work, and presume that those who pay for sex (always “others” despite the fact that we all know someone who has paid for sex, whether we know it or not) do it because they’re pathetic, powerless, and unable to have sex with a non-professional. The truth is that lots of people who pay for sex have access to sex elsewhere. I’d hazard a guess that while some people pay for sex because they’ve tried but can’t find a sexual partner who isn’t a professional, most people who pay for sex don’t do it because they have no other options.

I’m hoping that the writers will make the most of this plot line, and let Don’s sexuality reveal parts of himself to both us and him, without relying on tired anti-sex work stereotypes. The relationship between paying for sex and power, that is to say who holds the power in the client-provider interaction, is complicated, as is the question of who has the power when someone is being paid and carefully constructing a scenario where they get slapped. So far I don’t see a lot that’s revealing about the sex Don’s having. He has a highly contrived and controlled fantasy he plays out (bra must be on, woman on top, slapping in the face). It’s just like the rest of his life. In this way at least the sex seems to fit with his character.

As a sex educator I’m always on the look out for how we treat sex differently, without giving much thought to whether we should or not. In some ways sex is just another thing we do; by ourselves and with others. But we often interrogate sexual acts and intentions in ways we don’t wonder or worry about when it comes to other social interactions. When we do this in a way that opens up space for conflict and possibility, it’s a great opportunity. When we ask questions that never get past our own experience, we’re only scratching the surface. So, for example, let’s think about the other things that Don pays professionals to do. We know he pays a woman to clean and cook, he probably pays someone to do his laundry. He doesn’t pay someone to shine his shoes though, he does that himself. Why is that? Shoe shining and sex work have a few things in common. Both are jobs that get little respect and tend to be done by folks disproportionately marginalized (by race, class, gender….). Both offer opportunities where someone in a position of power is off their guard and visible to the person they are paying.

There are plenty of ways of making meaning out of Don’s sex scene. More is expected of him and riding on him at work than ever before, and the carefully constructed fantasy world he created with Betty is gone. The sex scene let’s us know that he’s paid this woman before, and he already has a fully developed and carefully constructed scene with her (bra must be on, she’s on top, progressively harder face slapping). Maybe it’s his way of relinquishing control for a moment. Maybe it’s only within a highly contrived and constructed situation that he allows himself/is able to feel something. Maybe he’s a masochist, or playing with shame (if you’re interested in creator Matthew Weiner’s explanation check out his interview in the Daily Beast).

Whatever the season brings I plan to follow Don’s lesson about sex to Peggy; “Sex doesn’t sell. You are the product. You feeling something is what sells.” Watching characters we know have sex, particularly the ones we think are hot, may be fun, but it’s what the sex makes them feel, makes us feel, that’s far more interesting.

Read more Twitter comments on Mad Men & Sex

The Daily Beast – Mad Men’s Slap-Happy Return

Go here to see the original:
Interrogating Sexual Intentions on Mad Men

So here’s a pop quiz. Which bodily fluid will people pay hundreds of dollars a year to increase, that’s not tied to fertility? it’s not sweat (celebrities and power brokers shoot up Botox just so they won’t sweat), it’s not vaginal fluids (there’s still a multi-million dollar industry shaming women into deodorizing their vaginas), it’s not spit or snot (is a parenthetical note necessary for those?). I know I blew the mystery with the headline, but I couldn’t contain myself, it’s semen.

That’s right. There is actually a whole market of products that promise to increase your semen volume completely out of the context of fertility. In theory I get this. So many guys see sex in porn before they have sex, and straight guys (who these products are almost exclusively marketed to) almost never see other guys ejaculate. And if all you know about semen you learned from porn, you might think there was something wrong with the amount you ejaculate. Enter the marketers!

Here’s some very un-market oriented information about what’s average, what’s possible, and what’s impossible when it comes to increasing semen volume. Enjoy!

Increase Semen Volume: Do Products to Increase Semen Volume Work?

See the original post here:
Increasing Semen Volume, and You

The 18th International AIDS Conference opened yesterday in Vienna. For six days over 20,000 people (scientists, activists, educators, policy makers, and the rest of us struggling to manage our lives in the face of all this help) will meet, talk, present, and debate the state of the “global fight against HIV”. Much of the work is exciting. Some of it, not so much. With so much good work to talk about I feel a bit like a Negative Nelly talking about this study, but it came across my desk, and when life hands you rotten lemons, you want to warn your friends, “hey, over there, those lemons they’re selling are really f-d up. Don’t buy your lemons there.”

The study is a report on a project called “Rewarding STI Prevention and Control in Tanzania” (and with no sense of irony, the acronym is, indeed, RESPECT), it was conducted by a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and research partners at the World Bank (who also funded the study). It hasn’t been published yet, but here’s a description from the press release I got:

Study participants were primarily 18 to 30 years old, a group considered at high risk for contracting STIs. They were randomly assigned to a no-payment control group, a low-payment group and a high-payment group. Over the year, participants in the low-payment group could get $10 every 4 months – up to $30 – if they tested negative for STIs, while those in the high-payment group could get $20 every 4 months, up to $60.

All participants were tested at the start of the study and every four months for the following year to detect a set of curable sexually transmitted infections, including chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. Individual pre-test and post-test counseling was provided to study enrollees at each testing interval, and monthly group counseling sessions were also made available to all study participants to assist them in their efforts to reduce risky sexual behaviors.

In case your wondering, they found that folks who got $60 had reduced risk of STIs, folks who got $30 had the same risk as those who got nothing. And (shocker) the poorer the people were, the more likely they were to show a change.

The premise here is not that different than the suggestion that comes up every few election cycles in response to low voter turnout; that we should have a lottery on election day and everyone who votes will be eligible to win a million dollar prize. I have no doubt that doing that would increase voter turn out. But would it do anything to increase citizen engagement? People don’t vote for many reasons. They don’t vote because they’re disenfranchised in ways both large and small throughout their lives. Why vote when every day of your life you’re told that your voice, your vote, doesn’t count because your part of a social group that doesn’t count? How would essentially bribing people into participating decrease disenfranchisement or increase civic engagement?

The same can be said for HIV and other STIs. The disparities which influence who gets HIV are not random. Who gets HIV (and who in turn gets access to prevention efforts and treatment) is linked to race, to class, to geography, to sexual identity, among a host of other factors. Giving individuals money (even a lot of it) doesn’t actually help their health, even if (as this preliminary study suggests) it impacts specific outcomes presumably tied to behavior. Let’s try to think a little outside the health economist box for a second.

The implication of this study is that people participate in risky sex because being healthy is not incentive enough to stop them. I could argue all sorts of ways that this is a faulty premise. But forget about that for a second. Think about people’s actual lives. How much do we know about what their lives are actually like? What do we know about the kinds of decisions certain people negotiate that end up in risky sexual behavior? What are the material realities of their daily lives, and what does giving them $60 a year do to affect any of the kinds of systemic marginalization and violence that result in so many people making decisions (or failing to make decisions) that negatively affect their health? And if the (unlikely) premise that people simply don’t care enough about the health turns out to be true, wouldn’t it be worthwhile to figure out why, rather then just ‘incentiveizing’ safer behavior and ignoring the fact that not caring about ones health could be a really big problem in itself?

What a controlled study in a socio-economic laboratory (which is what this amounts to) won’t show us is the impact of these kinds of payments in the community. The study authors point out that the $60 amount represents about 25% of the reported annual income of participants. Who is thinking about what it means if one member of your family is all of the sudden getting this extra payment? What does it mean for the family? What are the obligations that person has to distribute that money? What kinds of differences do those obligations make, and to whom? Of course this myopic study doesn’t attend to any of these issues.

A study like this suggests that it’s impossible to deal with poverty in a way that actually addresses systemic issues, so instead we’re going to give everyone a bit of money. Just as handing out money (and such large sums of money) to individuals is NOT an effective way to address health, it’s not going to address poverty either. It’s not even an effective way to address poverty for those individuals if all you do is give them the money for a year and then stop.

The World Bank and, I’m tempted to argue, the discipline of health economics within which this research was conceived and carried out, are implicated in both producing and continuing the health disparities that, in theory, this study is attempting to address. I can’t think of a clearer or more problematic example of Audre Lorde’s reminder about what is and isn’t possible with the master’s tools.

There are ways to address issues of systemic–not just individual–poverty, risk, and violence. Other researchers and activists are asking, and finding answers and solutions that are more robust and meaningful. A good example would be Partners in Health, an organization that that takes into account the way in which social problems are socially distributed and does it’s best to work towards sustainable change that begins with socially positioned people, not banks.

I’m honestly a little scared that this particular study is going to gain traction with the media, if not with policy makers. I can imagine talking heads arguing that paying someone $60 a year to not get HIV is a lot cheaper than paying for HIV treatment for a lifetime. I can imagine the room where such a presentation would be made, the people who would be sitting around the table, the people presenting, the people they’re all talking about. Imagining all this I have to say the very last word that comes to mind is the very first one that will appear on their power point slides: RESPECT.

Read more: Cash rewards with counseling could help prevent STIs

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Originally posted here:
Because Nothing Says R-E-S-P-E-C-T Like Using Poor People for Social Experimentation

Read this except. It’s from a great article by artist Sunny Taylor titled “The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability” which serves as an accessible and engaging introduction to disability politics:

“Of the many social movements that became visible during the sixties and seventies (civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, and environmental advocacy, among others) disability movements rarely merit a mention. It may seem glib, yet part of this willful ignorance of disability politics may stem from the simple fact that impairment is perceived as neither cool nor sexy. This lack of “cool” is a hard thing to fight, since it is hard to ever foresee disability as becoming fashionable like many movements that have been co-opted by that holy of U.S. holies, marketing. We have black-power afros on models in ads and the phenomenon of “girl power” as the latest marketization of feminism; it is next to impossible to picture a wheelchair or incontinence becoming the next hip iconography. Of course, the point is that it shouldn’t have to be. If people are sincere in their praise of equality and difference they will have to get over finding some differences “cooler” and more praiseworthy than others.”

This made me think of my own highly conflicted relationship with “cool”. I’ve worked in sex shops since I was 17, and people always think that’s cool. When people find out I write about sex, and go on TV to talk about sex they also think that’s cool. I’ve never liked this. Before I did these things no one ever called me cool. They called me other things (freak, loser, fag, wimp, girly, etc…). I know I’m the same person I was before I worked in sex, the same person I was when I served you frozen yogurt or took your money when you paid for gas at 3AM or over-microwaved your bagel with American cheese at the hockey arena snack bar. I wasn’t cool then, and I’m not cool now. Cool gets in the way.

Cool gets in the way because by definition it comes between people. Someone/something is cool in relation to other people and other things who are not. Being near someone or affiliated with someone or something that’s cool might make you cool, but only when you touch it. And cool is fleeting. Cool is nothing to build a life on, because cool is ultimately about distancing yourself from other human beings. Sex isn’t always about being with someone else, but even when it’s about being alone, at its best, sexuality connects us to each other by connecting us to human experience, both frivolous and profound.

I’m always telling people that what I do isn’t cool, even though I love what I do and can’t imagine doing anything else. And when I say it, I say it with pride. Usually people don’t get what I mean. I’ve never had a concise way of explaining myself. I think I’ll just give people this to read. As she does in her painting, Taylor gets to the heart of the matter so well.

Read More – Monthly Review: The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability (via Bethany Stevens)

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What’s Cool About Sex?

My girlfriend wants to go to a fetish party. She’s interested in exploring BDSM and I’m not against it but was raised with religion and I’m not sure how far I would go. If I start, is it hard to stop, and what if I don’t like where it leads?

A popular sex educator and television personality I once worked for used to warn people against threesomes precisely because she thought that, while they might start out fine, they would inevitably lead to people peeing on each other (her example, not mine). I always lovingly disagreed with her on this point. But she wasn’t the only person I’ve heard this theory from. It’s the theory of “gateway sex”.

Like gateway drugs (also a theory) the idea with gateway sex is that one kind of sex leads to another and before you know it you’re addicted to crack (or in this case crack-like sex). There are many holes in this theory, not least of which is, what is the sex act most like crack? [insert your anal sex joke here].

For starters, gateway sex rests on the assumption that that sexual exploration and sexual desires are uni-linear; meaning that they move in one direction and only that direction. While I can’t prove this anymore than I can prove the existence of god, based on my experience of speaking with thousands of people about their sexual desires and activities, and occasionally having sex myself, I’m going to say that sex does not always work that way.

We can be forgiven for thinking it does, because for most, but not all, of us, our first experiences with sexual exploration tend to be linear and progressive. Most people try kissing before anal sex, and hugging before play piercing. Mind you not everyone does, so we need to be careful about suggesting that we’re all one way, or there’s one “natural” way to do things. Still, our early sexual experiences, building as they do on previous ones, can feel like we’re walking down a path. The thing to know is that people can, and do, travel every which way on the path. They even leave the path, sometimes to return, sometimes to make their own, or find a small hut in the forest where they decide to build a fire and wait for others to come and roast marshmallows. You want to talk about a gateway drug, don’t get me started on marshmallows. But I’m getting sidetracked.

Another assumption that underlies the theory of gateway sex is that we build up a tolerance to sexual stimulation, like we do to drugs. While it’s true that our bodies and minds can get used to some kinds of stimulation, and we may think we need the same or more stimulation to experience the same levels of sexual pleasure, drug tolerance isn’t an accurate analogy. A drug tolerance is developed in response to one drug. Sex isn’t one drug. Sexual stimulation comes in infinite forms, and they aren’t always comparable in the way you might compare the proof of alcohol, or the purity of another drug. There isn’t a 100 proof handjob (which, of course, is not the kind of thing you tell someone whose ever given you a handjob). I might get used to using a vibrator, and get to a point where it seems like I need vibration to experience sexual pleasure. But then I might touch myself in an entirely different way, or a partner might do something to me they’ve never done before, and it may create a different kind of sexual stimulation that takes me to new heights of sexual pleasure I’ve never experienced from a vibrator. A gentle caress, in the right place at the right pace, could result in an orgasm just like a vibrator I’ve been relying on for ages. The idea that you’ll try some new sexual activity, say getting tied up and flogged, and then not be able to get pleasure in other ways, or always want to be tied up and flogged, is based on a simplistic understanding of sexual stimulation, desire, and pleasure.

Now, none of this is to say that once you try something new you can go back to “the way it was”. If you’re going to open up your sex life to new ways of being sexual, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and other stuff may come up, and then there they are, in your mind and in your relationship. So if you want your sex life to stay exactly the same and never change, then you probably shouldn’t try anything new. But if fear of losing control of your sex life is the only reason you’re stopping yourself, know that the control you experience over your sex life is not related to the kind of sex you’re having.

Finally, we need to always be aware of how morality may be guiding and influencing the way we think about sex and even the kind of sex we have. Usually when this idea of gateway sex comes up it’s because someone is starting to have a kind of sex that is less socially sanctioned. Whether that’s BDSM, swinging, exchanging sex for goods or money, exploring fetishes, or almost any kind of queer sex, the sex that you’re told to worry about is usually sex we aren’t “supposed” to have. Rarely do people warn you against getting a blow job for fear that then you’re going to be wanting blow jobs all the time. When you think about it, the idea of gateway sex seems heavily invested in not letting people try things that might feel good for fear that then they might, you know, feel good.

Read more Sexuality Q & As

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Read more from the original source:
Is There Such a Thing as Gateway Sex?

Yesterday I wrote about a recent article in The Atlantic called “The End of Men”. Having to read the whole piece was infuriating and depressing. So much so that the reading an article called “‘You Feel Like You Can’t Live Anymore’: Suicide from the Perspectives of Men Who Experience Depression” actually made me feel hopeful. I’ll explain.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia, began as an attempt to better understand how ideas and experiences of masculinity impact men living with depression. Are there aspects of being a man, given all the expectations that come with that in a world of strict gender roles, which make a person more likely to be depressed, or make it harder to deal effectively with depression? Early on in the research the authors were struck by the way interviewees, all of whom were either diagnosed with depression or self-identified as depressed, talked about suicide. Like any great researchers, they decided to follow the data, and shifted their focus to talk with men about masculinity and suicide.

The result is an academic paper that’s deeply affecting, filled as it is with stories of people who are in pain, describing what it’s like to be in pain and at the same time feel alone and helpless. The men in the study talk about the struggle to keep both depression and thoughts of suicide at bay and in their analysis of the interviews, the researchers focus on the role of masculinity in this struggle.

One of the things the researchers were interested in understanding better is what appears to be a discrepancy in the relationship between depression and suicide. Depression is widely considered a significant risk factor for suicide. Yet in North America women are at about twice the risk for depression, but a quarter the risk for suicide. How come so many fewer men are depressed, but so many more of them attempt and/or complete suicide? The researchers thought that by listening to what men have to say about suicide, they might get some insights.

What they found, after interviewing 38 men, aged 24-50, was that their experience of masculinity at times increased their risk and at other times reduced it. Sometimes, ideals of strength and being a “family man” resulted in men being less likely to think of suicide. Other times men’s perceptions of themselves as needing to be alone, capable of solving all problems on their own (which again, they link to traditional gender roles), increased their social isolation which in turn increased their risk. In other words, these men told stories that revealed the relationship between gender and suicide to be complicated. Wisely, the researchers don’t make any grand conclusions from this small qualitative study, except that gender is always there, and always important. Two quotes from their discussion characterize this approach:

“…doing gender can privilege men’s autonomy and foster excessive and impulsive behaviours which restrict their help-seeking and social connections to heighten the risk for suicide. That said, it is also clear that masculine practices (some of which are idealized) can actually mitigate suicide risk. This was evidenced by participants’ ability to counter suicide actions by pragmatically repackaging masculinity to meaningfully connect and confide in others as the conduit to effective self-management.”

“The results also expose masculinities as mediating every juncture in men’s pathways toward and away from suicide, and, divisively perhaps, we predict that masculinities feature in the ‘black box’ manifests detailing the suicides of individual men as well as the disjuncture between men’s rates of depression and suicide.”

These are important insights, and a much needed reminder to all of us that gender is always present, and we should always attended to it without assuming what it means. But as I was re-reading the article (yup, it’s that good, also it’s short) there was something that I struggled with. It was the idea of pragmatically repackaged masculinity. Partly I just grimace a bit at the neoliberal connotations of the term “packaging”. But it also makes me wonder about the options we’re opening up, or closing down, for men as we try to find ways to help them cope with depression and suicide, while attending to issues of gender socialization.

And I worry a bit about the authors lack of problematizing the binary of man/woman in the paper. By focusing on masculinities they are exposing the binary, which is more than many social scientists do, but when we don’t spend at least a little time addressing the big binary picture, I feel as if the opportunity to radically expand our options (both for helping others and for our own lives) has been missed.

Our binary construction of sex and gender–the myth that there are only two biological sexes (man/woman) and two gender options (masculine/feminine) that map neatly and fixedly onto them and there is no middle ground–might be tired, but its also tenacious. It’s so much a part of our lives that it can feel impossible to figure to imagine alternatives, but the binary doesn’t work, and whether we realize it or not, we’re all suffering (and some of us dying) because of it.

None of this is to discount the work at hand. Unlike the simplistic and fawning Atlantic article, the UBC paper contributes to a discussion of great importance in a subtle and elegant fashion. While I might want to gently nudge the researchers further, what they offer in this paper is an opportunity to start having conversations about gender, sex, life, and death, in a slightly more calm, considered, and hopefully fruitful way.

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Of Death and the Gender Binary

Recently I read, back to back, two articles about gender. Gender, like race, is one of those things that’s always present, always affecting, but usually unspoken. Both these articles dealt, in very different ways, with how gender can kill. The first was an excellent research study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, called “‘You Feel Like You Can’t Live Anymore’: Suicide from the Perspectives of Men Who Experience Depression“. The second was the much talked about article in The Atlantic simply titled “The End of Men: How Women Are Taking Control – of Everything“. The two articles offer a kind of case study of writing about gender. You might think it’s an unfair comparison; one is an academic paper written for a professional audience and the other is a magazine article written for a (sort of) general audience. That’s one way to look at it. Another is that both articles are talking about the impact of gender on aspects of human experience. Both are telling us stories about what it means to be a man and live (and die) in the world. Neither article is perfect, but where one blows the topic wide open, offering both individual and generalizable insights into the human condition, the other takes a complicated and equally important aspect of human experience and shoves it, rough-shod, into unimaginative and easily discountable retail packaging.

The Atlantic piece, written by Hanna Rosin, makes the claim that women are “winning” in a variety of social arenas. Statistics, applied scientists, and academics are cited to support the thesis. We are told that parents want girl babies more than boy babies (the first of many missed opportunities for Rosin to say something about what sex and gender might actually mean, or at the very least, who she is talking about when she talks about women and men), we are told that women are dominating “the workforce”, women are getting more graduate degrees, women are better suited to the tasks of business management, etc… The analysis couldn’t be more simplistic. From her suggestion that having more women in the workforce makes it a matriarchy, to quotes like this one: “Man has been the dominant sex since, well, the dawn of mankind. But for the first time in human history, that is changing – and with shocking speed” and this one: “geopolitics and global culture are, ultimately, Darwinian.” The Atlantic article is a perfect example of how, if you know how to research and write, once you go looking for something, you can find ways to find it everywhere. It must have taken hard work not to find the authors, academics, and researchers out there who would have gladly and patiently explained to Rosin that perhaps her understanding of “human history” and “global culture” is a little, well, mankind-y**. What emerges, thanks to that hard work, is a relatively clean story about how men are yesterday’s news, and women are the new black.

Even as they score big in attracting readers and other mainstream media attention, the thesis of stories like Rosin’s always fail. They fail because they confuse sex with gender and construct both as fixed and as predictive (e.g. man=X, woman=Y, we’re in the time of Y, so woman wins). They fail because they are unable to interrogate what these categories mean, for if they did, there would be no story.

In these stories there are men and there are women. If women (every single one of them) are winning then men (every single one of them) must be losing. And when women win, it’s because they are women (in this case they’re ‘naturally’ more flexible, enlightened, social, creative, and attentive, to pull just a few adjectives from the article). When men lose it’s because they are men (‘naturally’ heavy footed, clumsy, inflexible).

But like many of the stories we’re told (to help us fall asleep, to get us to buy things, to get us to have sex with you), this one is based on a lie. Women are not one thing. They are not all social empaths, able to juggle motherhood, a job, a relationship, and their womens weekend networking groups and many, when faced with the expectation that they are all these things, suffer dire consequences for not living up to their ‘natural’ role.

The very categories of man and woman that Rosin writes of with certainty are themselves highly suspect. Indeed , as Rosin draws on one body of research to support her thesis that women are winning and men are losing, another suggests that thinking of either sex or gender as a fixed lens through which we best understand human experience is a fool’s game.

Ultimately what I find so unsatisfying and unsettling about the Atlantic piece is right there in title, “The End of Men”. Rosin seems unaware that she is writing about gender, and that as long as we continue to tell these kinds of stories about men and women, there will be no end of either. Which is both a good and a bad thing.

Tomorrow: Of Death and the Gender Binary: Men, Depression, and Suicide (one area where journalists would surely see men as winners).

**“Mankind-y”, adj. The quality of attributing the history and experiences of a particular group of white upwardly mobile Europeans to all humans and all time.

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Continued here:
The Death of Gender?

Last week in my newsletter I linked to an article I wrote outlining some things to think about before you buy your first sex toy.

Several people emailed me directly to share their memories. Some were great, others cringe-worthy, and a few required medical attention. I always feel so lucky to have people share such funny, interesting, and private parts of their lives with me and I think about how much better we’d all be if we heard each others stories.

With that in mind, I thought I’d turn to the rest of you to share your own stories about first time sex toys. It might be cathartic, it might be fun, it’s definitely an opportunity to recommend the toy if you loved it or warn people away from it if you thought it was a dud.

Do You Remember Your First Sex Toy?

The rest is here:
Do You Remember Your First Sex Toy?

On Friday I wrote about a study in the Netherlands of swingers STI rates. Usually when I read research that involves data and statistics I have a piece of paper beside me and I write the numbers out as I read them. Numbers, after all, represent something. The experience of sitting there and reading an academic paper can be so unbelievably boring and also passive, it’s easy to take in the information without feeling or thinking too much about it. I find that re-writing the data on my own forces me to pay close attention, think carefully about what I’m doing, and even feel something about the data set. I did this with the swinger STI data. Here’s what it looked like:

chlamydia
MSM, 10.2%
straight people,  9.7%
swingers, 6.4%
sex workers, 4.2%

gonorrhea
MSM, 6.3%
sex workers, 0.8%
straight people, 0.6%
swingers, 4.3%

combined
MSM, 14.2%
straight people, 10.1%
swingers, 10.4%
sex workers, 4.8%

These numbers represent the percentage of people from each group that tested positive for chlamydia, gonorrhea, or both (MSM stands for “men who have sex with men”). This isn’t the order or form that the data were presented in the paper, but that’s part of why doing this is a good exercise. When I draw the data on a page I do it several different ways, sometimes there are doodles too. But I digress.

The point of this post is that what struck me about the data after transposing it onto my own paper was the STI rates for sex workers. Most of the media coverage of this article has noted this too. Well, sort of. The coverage has mostly talked about the sex worker rates in the context of how shocking it is that swinger rates are higher than sex workers. No one said anything about how much LOWER the sex worker rates were. Looking at these numbers we see that for this (admittedly small, and non-representative) group of people, sex workers had less than half the rate of STIs as other people coming to the clinic for testing.

Does it surprise you that sex workers had lower rates of STIs than swingers, MSM or the fourth, utterly generic, “heterosexual” category? It might. After all, the dominant narrative about sex workers is that they are fundamentally broken, and probably diseased. This is the story we read in the newspapers, the one we see on TV, the one we encounter in most online discussions, regardless of the stated sexual politics of those having the discussions. This is the story we know because we’re usually told stories about sex work from people who aren’t sex workers (although if you take the time to look, their voices are out there).

The truth is that sex workers as a group are no more homogeneous than any other group, and no more broken than actors in LA or psychiatrists in ERs. And while sex workers are at greater risk for STIs because of their work, it doesn’t always mean they’ve got them, as this particular study points out.

I don’t know enough about STI rates among sex workers so I called a good friend who has been involved for many years in sex worker rights in Canada. The first thing she told me was that looking at the numbers reminded her of something Danny Cockerline, a Canadian male sex worker and activist is often quoted as having said; “most people get STDs for free.” He also apparently said it specifically about HIV, but essentially what he meant was that people are less likely to get STIs when they’re paying for it.

She cautioned me not to generalize based on this small study. She said that it isn’t necessarily surprising that if you take a country where sex work is decriminalized, where the population as a whole have better access to sex information, education, and sexual health services, and where sex workers have access to basic human and legal rights, that you’d find sex worker STI rates were low. After all, sex workers have been among the most organized and outspoken activists and advocates for safer sex. At the same time, she reminded me, it’s unsurprising that in places where sex workers don’t have basic rights, where the population as a whole has higher rates of STIs, and where access to sex education and sexual health services are minimal, that you’d find STI rates higher among sex workers.

I spend so much of my time bitching about quantitative data that today was a nice reminder for me that like almost anything else, numbers are what we make of them. Some people see these numbers and think about how bad it must be for swingers if they’re worse off than sex workers. I see them and look at evidence of a powerful counter narrative that it’s too easy to ignore.

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Read the original:
Swingers, Sex Workers, STIs: Same Data, Different Day