Cory Silverberg's Blog, page 5

Sexy Stocking Stuffer Gift Guide 2013

I can't promise that all of these ten sexual tokens each under $25 will be the right gift for someone on your list this year - not everyone will enjoy the "prick pin cushion" and not everyone can handle the magnetic nipple balls - but I hope there's at least one thing here that will inspire you add a little eroticism in whatever gift giving you've got to do this month.

And remember, if you have to shop, your independent sex shop could sure use your support! It might be a few dollars more, bu...

Holiday Sex Toy Gift Guide 2013

It's that time of year, when you should be thinking of ways to insert a little sexual pleasure into what for many is a lot of stress and anxiety.

This year's picks feature high tech materials and unique sensations - from touch and motion sensitive controls to oscillating panels to "rumble technology" - along with an old classic made new again.

But my best suggestion (or wish) for the holidays is that you consider shopping independent. Even the best indie sex shops are losing out to the mammo...

Is He Gay?

Over the years I've received a few dozen emails from women in heterosexual marriages who are worried that their spouse is gay. It's a question that came up even more often when I worked in sex shops. At least once a week a woman would come in, sometimes with a friend, and in the process of helping her choose something to use with her male partner the question of his "true" sexual orientation would come up. Sometimes the friend would be the one to raise it, other times the customer would sort...

Sex and Disability: What's In a Name?

December the 3rd is the day the UN designates as International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Because disability is such a big beautiful part of my life, a part that's misunderstood by so many non-disabled people, I'm happy for any excuse to talk about, explore, and celebrate disability culture, politics, art, activism, and more. But I've always felt uncomfortable with the name. At first I thought it was the name alone. The "International Day of Persons with Disabilities" feels like it und...

Weekend Reading - File Under Nothing Is Simple

It was a busy week which meant I was only able to half read most of what came across my desk, but the first thing I'm getting to this weekend is three articles all about the same thing, all of which offer a slightly different perspective on something we tend to think of as black and white: unprotected sex and HIV.

On Wednesday I read this piece in the New York Times that painted a very specific, if fuzzy, picture about a rise in unprotected sex among gay men in the US:

New York Times: Rise in...

The Future of Condoms Is Nano

In March the Gates Foundation issued a challenge: design a better condom, specifically one that people would be more likely to use. Last week they announced the 11 proposals that will each receive $100,000 to further develop the idea as well as the opportunity to resubmit for an addition $1 million grant to bring their concept to market.

You can see a summary of all eleven winning proposals here and NPR has a nice write up highlighting some of the projects here.

Most of the proposals focus on...

New Sex Research Confuses Casual Sex with Causal Sex

It should be clear to anyone who has read more than a few posts on this blog that my attitude toward quantitative social science sex research is pretty pessimistic. Well some would call it pessimistic. I would call it realistic. So much of this research is bad. Not just boring-take-all-the-magic-out-of-life bad, but painfully-simplistic-transparently-misleading-unimaginably-reductive bad. And it goes from bad to worse when researchers, who must at this point know better, take their bad resear...

How to Lose Your Virginity

This is not the beginning of a story about my virginity. I first met Therese Shechter in a hotel room. We were in San Francisco both attending a sexual health conference. She was in my hotel room to talk about virginity. Not with me, but with my friend and colleague Heather Corinna, the founder of Scarleteen, someone who has more than a few things to say on the topic.

Shechter is the director of How to Lose Your Virginity, a documentary having its US premiere Sunday evening in New York, and...

Lie, Be a Bully, Drink and Drive, and Use Racist Language, But Don't Talk About Oral Sex!

If you're online or listen to the news practically anyway you've probably heard something about Rob Ford the mayor of my hometown, Toronto. It wasn't international news way back when but you should know that Ford was a problem long before there was so much documentation of his drug use.

In fact it's depressing to many Torontonians that a guy who has been bad for such a great city for so long because of who he is, will be going down as a bad mayor because of a drug problem.

Still, the public l...

More Research on Social Challenges to Bisexuality

At the American Public Health Association's annual meeting yesterday in Boston health researcher Mackey Friedman presented the results of new research he conducted with colleagues at Indiana University about attitudes toward bisexuality.

Research into the health disparities that people who self-identify as bisexual experience is scant, but what we have is powerful and disturbing. Bisexuals are at greater risk for a host of bad news (what is more politely referred to as "negative health outcom...