Cory Silverberg's Blog, page 15

Spooky Sex

If you live in the US the looming election is probably filling your heart with enough fear for a dozen Halloweens (no matter who you're voting for). But some kinds of fear can immobilize us, and other kinds of fear make us want to move.

There is an uncanny connection between sexy and scary, and when we're in the heat of either, the line can sure get blurry. If it's out of our control, fear and sex don't go well together. But when we're getting scared with someone we want to get scared with,...

Apparitional Anal Beads, Devilish Dildos, and Vampiric Vibrators

I may be partial to well lit and overly friendly sex shops but I know that others prefer a little edge, a little danger, and frankly a little dirt, in their sex toy shopping experience.

To each their own, I say. But I simply can't recommend anyone purchase the products on this years list of spooky sex toys. Some are bad ideas, some are dangerously made, and others are ghoulish by their very existence. You won't find any links to purchase, but each entry has a photo and brief description of t...

Sex Q & A: Seeing and Being Sexy, When You're Blind

A few weeks ago I received an email question from an About.com reader. Like many of the questions I get the email was long and in it the 26-year old female writer shared a lot about her life. One of the frustrating parts of sharing these emails publicly on About.com is that I have to edit them down to ensure anonymity and it can feel like I'm turning every writer into a kind of token representative.

I'm particularly aware of this when the person writing in is someone who already gets tokenize...

Robert Francoeur (October 18, 1931 - October 15, 2012)

Bob Francouer died this morning. Bob was trained as a philosopher, a biologist, and embryologist, and a Roman Catholic priest, and he brought all of that knowledge and passion for understanding the world around him to the field of sexology for more than forty years.

He authored twenty-two books (from The Scent of Eros: Mysteries of Odor in Human Sexuality to Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human Reproduction). He co-authored and edited many more, and perhaps most notably was the general edi...

Sexual Surrogacy and the Projected Image

This Friday the movie "The Sessions" (which screened at Sundance under the title "The Surrogate") opens in theaters. It's based on an article the journalist and poet Mark O'Brien wrote called "On Seeing a Surrogate". The article documented his experience seeing a sexual surrogate and it was amazingly frank and complicated piece of non-fiction.

I haven't seen the film yet. I was initially skeptical given Hollywood's track record at representing disability, and I've been annoyed by the marketin...

Spontaneous Sex

One of the biggest lies we're told about sex is that real sex, great sex, must be spontaneous. The idea is that if you are in a good sexual relationship there will be so much free flowing lust that one of you will always be swept away by desire and spontaneously initiate wild sex. The flip side of this idea is that if you don't have a lot of spontaneous sex you're probably on your way to a boring, sexless relationship. Neither of these stereotypes are accurate.

In order to understand what's w...

Breast Cancer, When Sex Tips Won't Do

You probably know that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. You may know nothing else about it, but the power of pink marketing isn't really about critical thinking, it's about getting a single, simple message out there.

That's kind of what sex tips do too. Sex tips usually don't encourage people to think through sex for themselves, or to acknowledge the ways that sexuality is tied up with our whole lives. Usually a sex tip giver is saying: try this, it'll be great.

Sometimes I write se...

It's Histories, Plural: October is LGBT History Month

October is Lesbian, Gay., Bisexual, and Transgender History Month (or sometimes it's GLBT History Month, or if you're in the UK it is LGBT History Month, but it's in February).

Regardless, of the order of the letters or when it happens, it is important to first learn about, and then remember our histories. Mind you the histories we are offered up always focus on a few, include some, and ignore others who nonetheless identified as LGBT or queer. Below are a few of the big ticket sites celebra...

New Research: Sex in the Brain, Gender in the Mind

I'm still making my way through these two studies, but given all the posts on sex and gender over the past few weeks I thought it was kind of kismet and worth sharing.

I came across the first study, titled "Male Microchimerism in the Human Female Brain" in a press release that announced "Men on the mind: Study finds male DNA in women's brains".

The headline is a bit misleading, at least the first part. No one was thinking about men. Rather the researchers looked at the brains of 59 women, who...

New Resource for Parents and Educators on Gender Independent Children

The topic of children and gender expression seems to be coming up more and more often in the media these days. Usually the subject is framed as a controversy (as in, is it okay to paint your son's toenails pink or do parents have the right not to disclose their babies sex or gender). The topic isn't new, of course.

Children and youth have always explored and experimented with gender expression. It is an entirely expected part of child development. What may have changed is that after years of...