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Sex & Culture

Candye Kane Obituary: Blues + Sex = Red-Hot Mama

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I started publishing Sexual Intelligence monthly in 2000, which included an annual Awards issue. The following year my pal Betty Dodson introduced me to an enormous, vibrant, and very talented blues singer named Candye Kane. I loved her music, she loved my books, and we became friends. I went to many of her Bay Area shows; when I did, she’d invariably introduce me to the crowd as her favorite sex therapist, always as a preamble to one of her many songs about sexuality. In 2005 Candye Kane was honored with a Sexual Intelligence Award. Last week she died of cancer,…

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The Need For the Sexual “Other”

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It seems like most human beings need an “Other” through which they demonize aspects of sexuality they fear, obsess about, or feel guilty about. That Other may be considered slightly less than fully human; more or less out of control; immoral, uncaring about the consequences of his/her/its actions; dangerous, either in its coercive power or (just as often) its seductive power; ultimately, Not Like Us. For much of history that Other has been homosexuality. But at various times, the Sexual Other has been Too-Sexual Woman; Masturbating Child; Adulterer; Perverted Child Molester; Pornographer; Compulsive Rapist (recently updated to Campus Rapist and…

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Michelle, Her Breasts, & the Male Gaze

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I have a close friend in Santa Cruz, a therapist named Michelle, with whom I have lunch once a month. It’s usually pretty glorious, with several conversations going on at once—professional, personal, political, and mmm-this-bagel-is-perfect-isn’t-it. Yesterday we talked about women’s breasts. We were talking about breasts as symbols of sexuality—whether their owner wants that or not. We reminisced back to junior high school—when Michelle (in California) already had adult-sized breasts, and I (in New York) just gawked at such things wherever they were, whenever I could. Like a large number of early-teen boys, I was so overwhelmed by how amazing…

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Oral Sex: You Said A Mouthful

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Before the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, there was a joke popular in New York nightclubs. What do eggs benedict and a blowjob have in common? They’re two enjoyable things you don’t get at home. Yes, kids, there was a time when oral sex was exotic, primarily the province of prostitutes and gay people. Well, times have changed. In the 1994 “Sex in America” national study, Ed Laumann and colleagues 3,432 American adults. They found that about a quarter of their sample had had oral sex in the past year. Today, depending on the study, it appears that over half…

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Sex is Constructed—By You

by on ·Sex & Culture, Sexual Intelligence Blog

What is sex? There are as many answers as there are people. Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton’s famous testimony about “sexual relations” made “what is sex” a daily topic of conversation (look it up, kids, under Monica Lewinsky and some-blow-jobs-require-you-to-shut-your-mouth). Couples who see me for therapy have been arguing the question longer than that, and […]

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Not Just Another Vegas Convention

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Last week I spoke at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas. It wasn’t exactly an afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But porn lovers (and porn stars, porn producers, porn distributors, and porn photographers) are people too, and there had to be something interesting to see there, so I accepted their invitation. Besides, I have a book coming out in September called His Porn, Her Pain, and I want to get some advance support from people in the industry. I spoke on “Has the internet really changed anything about sexuality?” My answer, of course, is “not really”—the human…

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