sex education

Men and Women Aren't *Exactly* the Same... But We're Not *That* Different Either

Posted by figleaf on Sat, 2009-01-10 14:15

Dr. Kate, who’s recently moved to her own blog, Gynotalk, posts a reader’s question

So, here’s a twist: I (the girl) orgasm super easily, while my boyfriend does not—in fact, he’s only come during sex with me once, and that was the first time in his life (he’s almost 30). He can come if I go down on him (although I am the first girl he has been able to with and he didn’t for the first few months of our relationship) and it took him a while to even come when I used my hand. He thinks something is physically wrong with him

Read the quote in context here.

I don’t actually mind her answer but I do have some reservations about it.

I don’t think that your boyfriend’s issues are physical ones – a circumcision (good or bad) shouldn’t affect his ability to orgasm (though yes, it can affect his surface sensitivity) – for most men, it’s primarily a pressure/friction issue, not a skin-touch issue, like for women. And the fact that he can come “pretty regularly” in ANY way, means that his “plumbing” is fine. So that’s the good news, since most physical problems don’t have easy answers.

But what I think is happening is that he has some mental difficulty with intimacy and sex – if he can regularly come through masturbation, but has a harder time with a partner, then something larger is going on.

It’s entirely possible that something larger is going on with the correspondent and her partner, but maybe it’s just because I’m old enough to remember advice in sex manuals from the 60s**

But check out the results if you run that post through Regender.com’s very-clever gender-switching engine (which among other things replaces “Dr. Kate” with “Dr. Karl”)

Dr. Karl,

So, here’s a twist: I (the boy) orgasm super easily, while my girlfriend does not—in fact, she’s only come during sex with me once, and that was the first time in her life (she’s almost 30). She can come if I go down on her (although I am the first boy she has been able to with and she didn’t for the first few months of our relationship) and it took her a while to even come when I used my hand. ...

I’m sure the problem is compounded by other stuff. She’s less self-conscious about this than she used to be, but if in 10 years of having sex YOU weren’t able to orgasm, it would just be like the biggest, most embarrassing elephant in the room, right? I can’t help but think that there’s something more I could do. I really, really want her to be able to come again, and now it’s all I think about! Before she did, I didn’t think much of it because she had said she wouldn’t be able to and I just went with that. But then she did, and it was amazing for both of us, and now it’s like my hopes are up.

Wishing for Coming

Dear Wishing,

I don’t think that your girlfriend’s issues are physical ones … for most women, it’s primarily a pressure/friction issue, not a skin-touch issue, like for men. And the fact that she can come “pretty regularly” in ANY way, means that hers “plumbing” is fine. So that’s the good news, since most physical problems don’t have easy answers.

But what I think is happening is that she has some mental difficulty with intimacy and sex – if she can regularly come through masturbation, but has a harder time with a partner, then something larger is going on. Kudos to you for being so caring and concerned about her pleasure, and clearly she feels more comfortable with you than with previous partners.

Regender-ized version from here.

Probably not the advice one would offer were the roles reversed!

I’m saying this not in a “what about the men” sort of way but because while the bell-curve distribution of orgasmic success for men tends to lie to the left of the graph for women it’s still a bell-shaped curve.

Speaking for myself I’m pretty sure I’m sexually perfectly healthy but I didn’t figure out how to have orgasms from fellatio till well into my 30s (not enough pressure where I needed it, and generally not enough pelvic-muscle involvement to make up for it.) And when I briefly took a prescription anti-depressant I still thoroughly enjoyed sex but was barely able to have an orgasm manually, let alone during any kind of sex with a partner.

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that cliches about expected male functionality can be as perilous as the ones about women were 30 years ago. (Cool by the way, that Wishing doesn’t feel out of place that she comes super easily. In earlier times women often would preface something like that with “I’m like a man that way because I…”)

[** By the way, see Holly’s post for why I might remember so much about sex manuals from the 60s! And while I’m at it see also Lynn Gazzis-Sax’s take on the extent of gender differences in “Men are from Baltimore, Women are from Philadelphia.” Oh, and finally, see also Anastasia’s take on the return of orgasms after discontinuing use of anti-depressants. —fl]


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Failure of Abstinence-Only Education Evidently Not Due to Poor Teaching...

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2008-12-30 23:13

Via Phil Plait of the (well, except for this I guess) entirely non-sex Bad Astronomy on the latest debunking study about “abstinence only” sex education.

“Taking a [virginity] pledge doesn’t seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior,” said Janet E. Rosenbaum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose report appears in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics. “But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking.”

See his remarks, and follow the links here.

Lots of people have remarked on this study — for the most part limiting themselves to predictable, progressive forehead thumping and “duh”-ing that there should ever be any question. And to be honest my own forehead’s a bit sore… though the keyboard marks are already starting to fade.

What I haven’t seen pointed out so far, an even more damning indictment of abstinence-only education, is that they can’t fall back on educational-incompetence dodge (a.k.a. “abstinence-only education can’t be wrong, it can only taught wrong.“) Because, not to put too fine a point on it, they’re hitting all their other objectives! However unhelpful or actively counterproductive it might be to their actual health or well-being students who go as far as taking the approved “abstinence pledges” are “correctly” skeptical of condoms. They’re about 10% less likely to use them than matched peers who didn’t drink the abstinence-only Kool Aid…

... but no less likely to not have sex period.

Conclusion? It ain’t how they’re teaching it that’s leading to failure of students to actually be abstinent: for better or worse they’re teaching everything else they teach just fine. It’s just that, evidently, even using the best methodology money ($175 million just last year!) can buy you just can’t teach people to abstain from sex.


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(Not-so) Happy Golden Days of Yore

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2008-12-18 14:18

Anna N. of Jezebel says

If you’re still using Alex Comfort’s 1972 The Joy of Sex as your guide to such topics as “frigidity,” having sex on horseback, and “tactful ways to take a woman’s virginity,” it’s time to update.

British sexologist Susan Quilliam has revised the famous book, putting more focus where you need it most: the clit. In words oddly reminiscent of Obama’s “McCain doesn’t get it” speech, Quilliam says Comfort gave short shrift to the all-important bit of female anatomy “not because he was anti-clitoris, but because he just didn’t know.” Also included now are sections on Internet porn, vulvar care, and a technique called the “Venus butterfly.” [NY Times]

Read the quote in context here.

What’s really scary to contemplate is Comfort was actually fairly state-of-the-art on the clit for 1972! He only started writing the thing a year or two after Masters and Johnson announced their research that it’s all about the clit. And only maybe ten years after “helpful” American gynecologists finally stopped cauterizing** or cutting them out of women who couldn’t stop playing with them(!!!!)

During a trial to shut down a theater for showing the Linda Lovelace movie “Deep Throat” a New York City prosecutor said, with his bare face hanging out, “The movie says it’s perfectly normal to have a clitoral orgasm and THAT IS WRONG.”

Y’ever wonder why old 2nd-wave feminists seem really cranky compared to 3rd-wavers? 3rd-wavers are all too young to remember just how jarringly bad it used to be! It was bad!

The original book is impossibly old-fashioned now in large part because… people back then read it, tried some of the then utterly-unheard-of stuff in it, and took it from there. Some of it’s laugh-out-loud now but compared to everything else available to the general public back then it was light-years ahead.

[** Yes, that J.H. Kellogg. —fl]


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Self-Interest in the Public Interest: Trojan Ranks Colleges By Commitment to Student Sexual Health

Posted by figleaf on Wed, 2008-12-17 18:25

Ellen Friedrichs of gURL Sex-Ed Blog points to a nice convergence between corporate self-interest and public health:

When I was in grad school, I was pretty amazed by how many sexual health services were available to students. We had peer counselors, a health center that freely gave out condoms, did on-site HIV testing and offered workshops covering everything from breast health to how to have an orgasm.

It was a far cry from my undergrad experience, where if there were any sexual health services I sure didn’t know about them.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed the huge disparity in sexual health at different schools. The makers of Trojan condoms also identified this issue and, in light of what they call a “sexual health crisis,” decided to survey 140 schools and rank them on their sexual health.

She said it here.

Yeah, Trojan has involved itself in ranking schools by sex-health services because they have a direct interest in selling more condoms. But then every year U.S. New and World Reports ranks colleges because they have a direct interest in selling… oh wait! More magazines. Which might explain why Trojan’s list is actually helpful while U.S. News’s list, um, isn’t.

Anyway, the top ten places to go to school and stay healthy would be…

1. Stanford University
2. Columbia University
3. Cornell University
4. University of Iowa
5. University of Denver
6. University of Connecticut
7. West Virginia University
8. University of South Carolina-Columbia
9. University of Georgia
10. University of Wyoming

While the worst would be…

130. Marquette University
131. Utah Valley State College
132. Brigham Young University
133. University of Toledo
134. Baylor University
135. Louisiana Tech University
136. University of Notre Dame
137. Providence College
138. St. John’s University-New York
139. DePaul University

Hmm… looks like you can go to Stanford for an education and sexual health, or BYU for… basketball, I guess.


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An Opportunity to Talk About What Sex Means

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2008-12-12 07:28

From kazanit of Voices of American Sexuality (for instance)

From the creators of “Dick in a Box” comes another hit music video: “Jizz in my Pants”. It might not be the most positive approach to premature ejaculation, but at least it gets people talking (or singing) about it.

Read the quote in context here.

So. Funny about men and attitudes about premature ejaculation, especially in the first-encounter/random-hookup contexts presented in the video. . I mean… an orgasm’s an orgasm, right? And “there’s no such thing as bad sex,” right? And men care only about getting their rocks off so… what’s the problem here?

It’s… almost as though… men were interested in… something besides getting their rocks off.

That’s not necessarily a good thing. For instance on the downside it’s pretty clear from the context of the videos that any enjoyment the gentlemen “jizzing in their pants” experienced from their spontaneous orgasms are overcome** by their greater concern about social loss of face. Ok, and the discomfort of sticky pants. But on the upside there’s the implicit acknowledgment that “even” for men sex means more than orgasms. And even though the context of the video implies it’s all about Teh Hookup there’s often a lot of anxiety around sexual prowess standing in for desirability, where desirability is kind of key to the establishment of, you know, relationships. (Again however superficial the video implies the depicted relationships might be.)

If I was running a high-school or college-level sex-ed class I’d use that video not to introduce a section on premature ejaculation (too obvious… and probably a little too triggering for those who chronically experience it) but to begin a discussion of what people want out of sex compared to what we just assume they do.

[** Oh dear, that pun was unintended as well. —fl]


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Consolidating Common Ground For Prevention-First Policies

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2008-11-06 18:36

Emily Douglass of RHRealityCheck.org offers a suggestion to anti-choice firebrand Jill Stanek who acknowledges that with an Obama administration making judiciary appointments, not to mention anti-choice amendments failing even in conservative-bastion states like South Dakota, “the holy grail for pro-lifers is now gone.”

...if anti-choicers really do let Roe out of their sights in favor of other projects that actually will reduce instances of unintended pregnancy, there’s an enormous amount of progress people who oppose abortion rights can make alongside those of us who are pro-choice. Medically accurate comprehensive sexuality education, which gives teens the tools to prevent pregnancies? Access to contraception, including emergency contraception, proven to reduce the rate of abortion? A host of prominent pro-life voices have supported Obama’s position on these policy issues, staking out a more productive ground for people who oppose legal abortion than slinging accusations like “barbarian” and “murder” (which also feature in Stanek’s post). No one needs to give up his or her beliefs — but now there’s room for a distinction between private beliefs and public policy.

She makes these recommendations here.

Yup. Another welcome result of the most recent election was the death of the Atwater/Gingrich/Rove/Grover-Norquist “50% plus 1” legislative strategy that called for pushing measures far enough into right-wing territory that no Democrat had the stomach to vote for it. Among other things the strategy was intended to make Democratic irrelevant and therefore depriving them of lobbyist contributions. Another was to amend even critical legislation with intolerable riders so that votes against, say, mom’s apple pie (oh, and, say, a complex, hard to explain procedural amendment that would deauthorize, say, mine safety inspections) that could then be used to beat up “do-nothing” Democrats in subsequent elections.

Since some issues, such as queasiness about the whole issue of reproductive health**, were broadly supported by moderate and conservative Democrats it was sometimes necessary to push things to absolute extremes in order to forestall Democratic votes. Thus we wound up with intractable support for totally irresponsible fruitcake ideas like abstinence-only education and even-preventing-conception-is-abortion “conscience” regulations for pharmacists that were encouraged or pushed not because nominally conservative leaders necessarily believed it but because a 50% plus 1 strategy demanded it.

Ironically after this election lost support from virtually everyone but the kind of low-information types like Stanek who actually believed the shit they’d been shoveled.

Thus… it sure looks like… the end of the Repubican’s K-Street Project mentality (and, incidentally, of the corresponding mentality of their Democratic counterparts like Mark Penn who tied their anchors to the otherwise thoroughly admirable Senator Clinton and, consequently, sank her in the primaries… just as they helped sink her party in 2000 and 2004.)

Which leaves…? The possibility that without the failed all-or-nothing strategies of the previous administration people with very different preferences can work together to reduce not the supply of abortion services but the need for them. Emily Douglass’s list is an excellent and generally perfectly acceptable place to start.

[** Aside: Human/sex trafficking was another such casualty to this kind of Mayberry Machiavellianism. Since the issue actually originated among liberal Democrats like (then first-lady) Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Paul Wellstone they had to basically hijack to the point it ignored everything but routine domestic prostitution before moderates finally began to balk. —fl]


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Failure, Unfortunately, is Not Impossible

Posted by figleaf on Mon, 2008-10-27 20:10

June Carbone, guest-blogging at Feminist Law Professors says

After dramatic successes in the nineties, teen births are rising and rising most, not for those who like the Palins have the resources to support their grandchildren, but for those families who cannot support the children they already have.

The figures had been heartening. Teen pregnancy and birth rates fell dramatically during the nineties. Between 1991 and 2005, overall teen pregnancies declined by thirty-four percent. The most promising news was the decline in teen births to the most vulnerable mothers. African-Americans experienced the steepest drops with a 42 percent decline among adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19 between 1991 and 2002, and an even greater decline (an astonishing 52%) among African American girls in the 15 to 17-year-old age group.

Abortions also fell during the same period, and commentators of the right (abstinence promotion) and left (contraception) competed to claim credit. The results are now in. John Santelli, in the American Journal of Public Health, reported that 86% of the drop in teen pregnancies were the result of more effective contraception; 14% from greater abstinence.

...

This progress, however, has not been maintained. Teen births have begun to edge back up.

Read the quote in context here.

Gee, do you think the 2005 law altering federal Medicaid subsidies that doubled and tripled contraceptive prices to student and low-income clinics is helping to decrease or accelerate this trend?

It’s very nice to have confirmation that sex education works. And to have confirmation that comprehensive sex-ed covering not abstinence, yes, but (evidently far more importantly effective) use of contraception works better than abstinence-only.

It’s not so great that we’ve started falling down on the job not only in sex education and, probably more important, availability of and encouragement to use contraception, but also in matters of boundary setting, establishment of self-worth, interpersonal negotiation, and personal responsibility for all parties. I mean, remember, while women alone become pregnant it takes a woman and a man to get pregnant. Therefore every unplanned, unwanted pregnancy isn’t a single failure (as virtually all abstinence-only and too many comprehensive programs tend to emphasis) it’s a double failure.

Make that a triple failure: by failing to take the matter seriously we adults are failing our children as well.


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Dangerous Temptations: Ostrich Syndrome

Posted by figleaf on Thu, 2008-09-18 16:46

A from France, of A Changing Life left a comment on this post about partisan attacks on teaching kindergardeners about boundaries and how to avoid predators. It got me thinking.

I suppose they are the same people who don’t want to contemplate their children becoming sexual beings and so don’t teach them how to deal with that, emotionally or practically. The ostrich syndrome.

She said it here.

Pretty cool term, I think, because it captures my suspicion that what motivates a lot of people to shy away from sex ed isn’t so much morality as anxiety. The other day I heard local sex education activist Amy Lang talking… and balking!... about dealing with her own children. As I’ve balked with mine. So I totally get that it’s not easy for everybody. But!

Well, first of all, ostriches don’t actually put their heads in the sand when they see lions coming (see “fittest, survival of;” see also “land speed, ostrich”) but second of all, if they did it wouldn’t, um, protect them or their offspring.

Point being that even if we don’t want to go there we’re not serving out own children with the Ostrich Syndrome. Not by balking about information appropriate for kindergardeners, nor by balking at what elementary and middle-schoolers need to know as their bodies begin to develop, nor by balking at what high-schoolers need either.


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WTF? McCain Campaign Trolls Waaay Out Of Line

Posted by figleaf on Tue, 2008-09-09 23:24

Mark Kleiman of The Reality-Based Community says of a particularly egregious campaign advertisement by the Dirty Reds


Barack Obama sponsored a law in Illinois designed to teach schoolchildren, all the way down to kingergarten age, to protect themselves from sexual predators. I’m not sure whether McCain’s attack on that bill is designed to win the votes of the pedophiles or attract campaign contributions from the kiddie-porn industry. But no doubt that man of honor is proud of it, just as he’s proud of his entire sleazy, lying campaign. Feh.

It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls — a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement. “Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why.”

Looks as if Obama is ready to take the gloves off. “Downright perverse.” Exactly.

If this makes you as angry as it makes me, remember the first rule of politics: “Don’t get mad, get even.” Write a check to the campaign, and get a dozen of your friends to do the same. Donating on line takes less than a minute.

I’ve nicked the whole post from here, but it’s worth repeating.

Fine with me if the guy wants to lie about everything else but I can’t stand by while he lies about this. It’s too important a lie to let slip. Little kids need to know so that people like, oh, say, John McCain’s child molester buddies can’t prey on them. Senator Obama had the wisdom to see what needed to be done and experience to help make that legislation happen. Senator McCain? Evidently not.

Without being as specific as Kleiman was in his post I just seconds ago made a campaign contribution on website of the candidate with the judgment to know right from wrong instead of the liar. I promise that otherwise I wouldn’t have done so. You may wish to do the same. (And Kleiman’s right, it took less than a minute.)

And yes, I know it’s supposed to be ironic for the author of a website called Real Adult Sex to have to lecture a U.S. Senator and nominee for the Presidency of the United States of America on morality, honor, decency, or public safety but there you have it. Shame on him!

#%!@~)($


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Sex In the Country a.k.a. Mayhem-berry RFD

Posted by figleaf on Fri, 2008-05-30 00:00


Photo by Flickr user exakta. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Emily Anthes of Slate Magazine’s “Medical Examiner” column says

Sex and the City, which, as it’s hard not to know by now, comes to the big screen this weekend, rarely ventured beyond the island of Manhattan in its six years on television. When the women did find themselves elsewhere, they weren’t usually happy about it. This was especially the case in Season 4, when Carrie’s boyfriend, Aidan, hamstrings her into a trek to his rustic cabin upstate. Carrie, in turn, pressures Samantha into tagging along, and urban-misfit misadventures ensue—until Samantha spots a hunky, half-naked farmer and seduces him out of his overalls. And thus the show discovers what researchers have been documenting over the last decade or more: It’s the country, rather than the city, where more of the sex is.

Read the rest of the article here.

Anthes goes on to list a range of reasons why out-lying kids tend to wind up having more, earlier, and less safety-aware sex and drug-related activities. I’d like to point out what was, in my experience, a very big reason: very often the parents who move out to the suburbs or exurbs to “get away from the danger of the city” nevertheless commute to the city, leaving their, especially teenaged, children unattended for very long periods between when school gets out and the parents (finally) get home.

It’s certainly the case that when I was a teenager with a motorcycle I spent a lot of 1970s after-high-school afternoons visiting friends who lived out in the county for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Oh, and alcohol too. Depending on circumstances parents sometimes weren’t home till suppertime. That was (almost) always long enough to come down, sober up, and/or get dressed without raising suspicions.

Thirty years later and on the other side of the country a good friend’s niece died while she and her methed-up friends were rat-racing back from some kind of party even further out in the Seattle exurbs and drove the car they were in under the wheels of a logging truck. The irony, of course, was that her parents never let her go “into that Seattle” for fear of all the immorality and violence!

Again, I’m not saying Anthes other reasons aren’t valid, in fact they’re great. I’m just saying the list is incomplete without accounting for a) early high-school release times and b) extended commutes by custodial adults.


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