Changing the Way People, Politics & the Media Look at Sex

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(very funny) Movie Review: A Dirty Shame

by on ·Sex & Culture, Sexual Intelligence Blog

I just saw the stupidest—and funniest—sex film of the decade. John Waters made A Dirty Shame in 2004. Perhaps you’ve seen one of his 11 other films—Hairspray (made into a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 2003), the brilliant Cecil B. Demented, Pink Flamingos (one of 6 that he made with the cross-dressing, 300-pound actor Divine), or his first, Mondo Trasho (best movie title of the century, no?). A Dirty Shame stars Tracy Ullman, our era’s classic comedienne (think Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy, Lucille Ball, Rosalind Russell) and pop singer Chris Isaak (our era’s um, Chris Isaak) as Sylvia & Vaughn Stickles,…

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Can Pam Anderson Make Fur Non-Kosher?

by on ·Sex & Religion, Sexual Intelligence Blog

Former super-babe Pamela Lee Anderson is in Israel to be a judge on their version of Dancing with the Stars. While there, she plans to use her “powers of seduction” on ultra-Orthodox Jewish lawmakers to get them to ban fur. Fur is a big issue for these guys because of the 200-year-old Eastern European tradition of wearing fur-trimmed hats (“streimel”) that many ultra-Orthodox follow. Good luck, little shiksa. Since they’re not married to you, these guys won’t shake your hand; many won’t even look at you. Listen to you? I doubt it. There are Orthodox Jews right here in San…

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Is There Such A Thing As Kinky Sex?

by on ·Making Sex Better, Sexual Intelligence Blog

Last week I keynoted the annual conference of CARAS (Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities). I presented “Clinical, cultural, and personal narratives about alternative sexualities.” My goal was to examine the common ways people think about “alternative” (or “kinky”) sexuality—and how that affects everyone, no matter what kind of sex they’re into. The general attitude about kinky sex and its practitioners among the media, civic organizations, and medical-psychological professions is pretty negative. They accept or even promote horrible misinformation (“Perverts want to recruit teens into their lifestyle”). They use glamorous but bizarre cases to condemn ordinary choices (“S/M scene…

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Making “Men” and “Women” One-Dimensional

by on ·Making Sex Better, Sexual Intelligence Blog

Every week or two some magazine wants to interview me about sex. Twenty years ago, when I was young(er) and hungry, I usually said yes. Now I usually say no. Today I said yes to a well-known national magazine. You see it in every supermarket and airport, with a good-looking busty model on the cover. Let’s call the publication “Young Women Interested in Sex.” (YWIS) The article they called me about is “75 things about men—in 1 sentence each.” The staff writer, a respectful, pleasant woman about 26, hoped I would answer about a dozen questions. By the end of…

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Celebrating a Special Freedom on July 4

by on ·Sex & Culture, Sexual Intelligence Blog

Today, Independence Day, let’s take a moment to celebrate one of our culture’s most basic freedoms: the freedom of unrelated men and women to mix in public spaces, virtually without limits. Since most Americans are brought up with this as a fact of life, it’s hard to remember that this is a very modern, very limited social experiment. Less than two centuries ago, unstructured male-female adult interactions were still very, very rare almost anywhere on Earth. America and Western Europe had some choreographed male-female interaction in the upper classes, and city life required a small amount for some workers and…

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