Cory Silverberg's Blog, page 16

What Do I Call Gender?

Language is always changing, evolving and the forces that shape which words we use, when, and why, are overlapping and complicated. Some of our language comes from growing up within a group, surrounded by people who in some way are like us, are "our people", and learning from them what to say if you want this, what to call that, and what words to use to describe those people over there. And any time we join a new group we acquire new language.

The words we use matter. I don't think there are...

What Do You Find Sexually Disgusting?

I guess I'm a little behind the times, but I've just learned that disgust is having a scientific moment. There are a growing number of researchers, particularly evolutionary psychologists, who are trying to prove their theory that disgust is an evolutionary response. Some call themselves disgustologists.

This came to my attention last week when I read a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE titled "Feelings of Disgust and Disgust-Induced Avoidance Weaken following Induced Sexual Arou...

Sex, Gender, and Weeding

Next month I'm going to be participating in a two day workshop on gender expression and creativity in kids. There are about sixty people attending and most of us will take 15 minutes to share our work or perspective, and blissfully spend the rest of the time listening and learning.

I'm going to spend my 15 minutes talking about how sex education mostly fails to include kids who are actively exploring their gender identity, which I would argue was most of us, before we learned the hard way tha...

Sex Q & A: Why Does Sex With My Boyfriend Hurt?

Yesterday I got an email from someone who said they were confused, frustrated, and in pain. It sounded to me as if they were experiences a lot of different kinds of pain, but the one they focused on was physical pain. I did my best to outline some of the many reasons why sex might hurt, but what struck me most was the last thing they wrote, which was "Every time I read people talk about sex in such a positive way I want to cry because I can't experience it!"

Even if we acknowledge publicly th...

It's World Sexual Health Day (Who Knew)

I feel terrible, I just learned this morning that today is World Sexual Health Day. I'm a sex educator and I should know these things. I'm also someone who is forever looking for things to feel bad about, so maybe I "knew" but then "forgot" only so I could know again. Sexual health is, after all, a very confusing, and often neuroses-inducing concept.

No matter, this is the third year that the World Association for Sexual Health has marked September 4th as a day of awareness raising about the...

Excellent New Documentary Explores HIV in the Southern US

In a recent LA Times Op-Ed, filmmaker and journalist Lisa Biagiotti writes:

More than 30 years into the AIDS epidemic, a combination of safe-sex education and a new generation of pharmaceuticals has left many Americans convinced that HIV/AIDS is a problem that has been, if not solved, at least addressed. But that's certainly not true in the American South, which accounts for nearly 50% of all new HIV infections in the United States.

From the opening sequence of her haunting and beautiful do...

Put Down the Knife and Back Away Thoughtfully

A new study from researchers at the University of Puerto Rico offers some much needed data and several clearly worded challenges regarding the current push to circumcise men as a prevention strategy for STIs and HIV.

You might recall that research back in 2005 and again in 2008 with men in Uganda, South Africa, and Kenya found that circumcising adult men reduced their chances of acquiring HIV (and other STIs). Apparently the findings were so dramatic that that they actually stopped one of the...

Pubic Hair or Rights, Which Is Worth Fighting For?

Last week a few news outlets picked up a blog post written by a physician titled "The war on pubic hair must end." The post seems to be old, and I'm not sure what brought it to the media's attention, but there's something in the response to it that feels misguided.

The post itself is clear enough, a doctor is wondering why so many people want to remove hair from their bodies, particularly pubic hair. She suggests that there are good reasons to keep your hair down there, like reducing the chan...

The Need to Always Make More of Oral Sex

There was something odd about the headline of an article (which was otherwise remarkably not sensationalistic) in USA Today about teens and oral sex. The headline reads:

More teens have oral sex earlier than vaginal intercourse

What does it mean? Are more teens having oral sex BEFORE they have vaginal intercourse? Or are more teens having oral sex earlier compared to teens of yesteryear? But when was that? It's possible that it is just a poorly written headline, but I suspect instead that it...

Representation, But Not Like They Think

I was sent a link to an article in Salon the other day. The tile of the article was "Trans, but not like you think". Because it came from Salon I was wary, and the headline to me read as a response catering to myopic editors who imagine that the "trans story" is old, it's been told a million times, no one cares. The general implication here that things need to be new and different to get people to keep people clicking might well be born out by Google statistics. But the specific implcation of...