Cory Silverberg's Blog, page 8

Opening Conversations at the Close of World Breastfeeding Week

In 1991 the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action was formed as a way of responding to a World Health Organization document, the Innocenti Declaration on the protection, promotion, and support of breastfeeding.

Each year they mark the first week of August as World Breastfeeding Week. I can only assume that these campaigns, which are conceptualized as being for an international audience, are created by enormous committees, which usually means that they end up being so generic as to be unreco...

New Research Offers Evolutionary Tales of Monogamy

If you didn't catch any of the headlines this week about new evolutionary theories explaining monogamy, here's a summary.

Two papers were published trying to explain monogamy in mammals. They found different explanations.

One paper, which analyzed data from 2,545 species of mammals, proposes that monogamy evolves in males as a response to their inability to prevent other males from mating with females, the result of how the females decide to set up camp and live far apart from one another. Th...

Summer Reading: Sex Work Memoirs

I thought I'd wait until I was all the way through the second issue of Prose & Lore before writing about it, but I feel a little like one of those research projects where they decide they have to stop in the middle and give everyone the intervention because it's so damn good.

Prose & Lore: Memoir Stories About Sex Work is a bi-annual journal that collects personal stories by sex workers about sex work, in all it's varied, complicated, and often messy forms. It's a project of the Re...

Getting Out of the "Friend Zone"

How distressed do you need to be before you ask for help?

Most of us, if we can take a moment to reflect, can find things in our lives that feel heavy and difficult and unfair compared to other people we know. And most of us can also find parts of our lives that feel easier, luckier, and more privileged than others. So how "bad off" do you have to be before reaching out?

The answer isn't just about you. The way our culture and our communities influence us means that some of us are made to fee...

Crowd Funding Sex Education

I'm not sure if it has to do with my family background, but there's something about evoking "the crowd" that makes me uncomfortable. Crowd funding, crowd sourcing, the wisdom of the crowd. It may sound sexy and new, but historically, when people become crowds it doesn't turn out too well for some of us.

And still, I love being a part of crowd funding projects. I have backed over 60 projects on various sites and I published my first kid's book through the generosity of thousands of backers on...

Fact Checking the Facts of Life

As I travel the country training sex educators I have lately found myself making a new pitch to them. Our job is not to teach the facts of life. I say this partly because I think the most important thing a sex educator does is to help people think and communicate about sexuality, and that task needs to come before teaching about the "facts" of reproduction, contraception, and sexually transmitted infections. But I also say it because the facts (or "facts") keep changing.

In fact, I'd say that...

Digging Deeper Into Sexuality, Disability, and Surrogacy

Last week I suggested that while the New York Times piece on disability and sexual surrogacy in France was full of ableism and condescension worth challenging, it also introduced us to people and ideas worth engaging. I probably started more on the side of critique and could have acknowledged just a bit more of how important and valuable an article it was.

Instead of just saying that, this week I wanted to share a few of the ideas presented in the article that I've been mulling over since fir...

Is Sexual Surrogacy Legal in the U.S.?

The recent article in the New York Times about sexual surrogacy in France included just a little bit about legal issues. Surrogacy is clearly legal in some countries. Israel, for example, has probably the most active surrogate community in the world. Sex surrogacy may be covered by insurance companies when working with a surrogate is recommended following an accident.

In the United States the legal status of the practice of sex surrogacy is much more vague. A few months ago I interviewed surr...

Sex, Disability, and the Price of Admission to The New York Times

Having a perspective that is never represented in public is a tough position to be in. Especially when what you see is something about how silly or wrongheaded things are and how they could be made much more fair, more just, if only everyone could start seeing things from multiple perspectives, including yours, rather than through the narrow lens served up 24/7 by schools, the media, our governments, and our insular and homogenous communities.

For years you might try to ignore or deny what yo...

The Original (and New) Magic Wand

I bought my first Hitachi Magic Wand on December 23, 1995. I still have the receipt, pinned to the bulletin board above my desk. I keep it there in the spirit that I imagine store owner tape up the first dollar they made. It's part of my origin story both as a sex educator and as a sexual person.

I was giddy as a schoolgirl walking into Good Vibrations for the first time that Monday afternoon. I had been working in sex stores for almost 10 years and Good Vibrations, which at the time was a w...