Cory Silverberg's Blog, page 3
March 6, 2014
Choosing to Have Sex Again
Last week I met a stranger who quickly became not a stranger as we started talking about sex. When this no-longer-stranger-but-not-quite-friend found out what I did for a living they asked me if I could explain the difference between celibacy, chastity, and abstinence.
I came up with some vaguely satisfying response but in the process I realized that I didn't really know. I could think of plenty of examples of people using the words interchangeably. So why use one over the other?
I went to wo...
March 2, 2014
Sex On and In Film
I can't speak to what happened off stage and after the telecast, but from the vantage point of my couch, it wasn't a great night for sex at the Oscars.
From the perspective of a sexual explorer the Hollywood film to see in 2013 was Spike Jonze's Her. It offered an interesting, complicated, and fun exploration of sexual desire while challenging some of the basic ideas we have about sexuality (that monogamy is compulsory, that you need a body for sex, that in order to show us sex you have to sh...
February 28, 2014
Weekend Sex Readings
It's a mixed bag this week, some good, some not so good, some fantasy, some reality.
This Magazine talks dating, sex, and disability
FastCo Labs describes the Cucumber, the Dildo, his Sock, and their condom
And an Atlantic journalist gets confused by masks
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February 25, 2014
National Condom Month (or Week) Roundup
There are a lot of reasons why people who would benefit from using condoms don't. Certainly for some people it's a lack of knowledge. For a lot of others it isn't. As I was reminded recently by the powerful liturgy for a burning condom our relationship to condoms is far from simple. Getting people to use condoms isn't just a matter of convincing them that they should.
I'm not sure that the official campaign for national condom month (or week, it seems to be both) offers much in the way of com...
February 18, 2014
Janet Mock on Redefining Realness
Writer and advocate Janet Mock's first book, Redefining Realness My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, made the New York Times bestseller list last week, nine days after being released. It's a reflection of the community building and public advocacy work Mock has been engaging in since before 2011, when a profile about her ran in Marie Claire magazine, it's a reflection of her education and experience as a journalist and media producer (as is frequently mentioned Mock wor...
February 14, 2014
Challenging the Sex Addiction Narrative
Two papers released this month, one in the Archives of Sexual Behavior and the other in Current Sexual Health Reports, offer specific and comprehensive challenges to the narrative of sex addiction that remains unsupported by the APA but big business for media outlets looking for eye-grabbing headlines, as well as the clinics and clinicians who trade in its promotion and practice.
The first paper, titled Transgression as Addiction: Religiosity and Moral Disapproval as Predictors of Perceived A...
February 13, 2014
HIV Organizations Ask the CDC Refine Language and Methods Regarding Risk
There's a saying about how difficult it is to make change in government. It's apparently like trying to turn a cruise ship around. You have to plan way in advance, it's slow, and it takes a lot of coordination.
In early January a group of HIV service, research, and advocacy organizations wrote an open letter to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in response to their latest report on HIV risk among US gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men.
One of the CDC's functi...
February 10, 2014
Gender, Desire, and the Impoverishment of Heterosexual Privilege in the New York Times
When I first read through this weekend's cover story in the New York Times Magazine, Sexless but Equal, I was annoyed and thought, oh I'm going to have to write some sort of response to this. But about an hour later I had forgotten all about it, which may be exactly right.
The piece was the same sort of bland admixture of heteronormative anxiety (that moment when you realize that compulsory monogamy isn't really consensual), sociobiological nonsense (men who clean up around the house are emas...
February 6, 2014
Sex Question of the Week: Gentle Plunging
This week's sex question has been sitting in my inbox for a while. Sometimes in order to answer a question I want to explain some things around the question before zeroing in on it. In the case of this self-identified 30-something cis-woman, who shared a lot and has a talent for describing what's happening for her, first I wanted to explore the idea of heteronormative sex, then we needed to debunk some misinformation about hymens, and finally, today, we come to her question.
The title might m...
January 29, 2014
First On, First Off: The Problem of Sexual Initiation
I just came back from teaching at an institute for sex educators and therapists where there was a focus on developmental aspects of sexuality and sexual pleasure. In this case developmental is just a fancy word for thinking about the lifespan and not only thinking about people at one age and one time in their lives.
Because life is hard and keeping things straight is a struggle for most of us we do tend to think about sexuality in the context of a particular time and place. We don't see the a...
