Whenever the topic of doctors and sex comes up, I usually argue that more doctors need to talk to their patients about sex. In particular I tend to think that having at least a few questions about sex on any intake form is a good thing.

A recent study, which notably included in depth interviews where the researchers had a chance to actually listen to the experiences of young Australian women, points out that there may be times when more sex talk is actually counter productive when it comes to protecting patient health.

The study, published in the BioMed Central open access journal BMC Infectious Diseases suggests that young women do not like talking about sex with their family doctors, and may be inclined to lie about the number of sexual partners they have if asked.

These findings are particularly important given the context of the research, which was looking into the introduction of routine Chlamydia screening into general medical practice. Currently a doctor will determine if Chlamydia screening is necessary based on a sexual history and an assessment that the patient is “high risk”. Of course the problem is that if patients lie about their sexual activities many young women who should be screened may not be. The young women interviewed favored Chlamydia screening based on age, where all young women of a certain age would be screened regardless of whether they report high risk behaviors or not.

Read more – BMC Infectious Diseases: Take the Sex Out of STI Screening! Views of Young Women on Implementing Chlamydia Screening in General Practice

Related – Talking With Your Doctor About Sex

_{Photo credit: George Marks/Getty Images}

One might think that the most important element of any sex book is the information it contains. Not so. With thousands of sex books in print, and dozens (could it be hundreds…it feels like hundreds) more coming out each year it’s not the actual tips or techniques a book offers that will truly distinguish it; it’s the approach and tone of the author.

Regina Lynn, the long time sex columnist for Wired.com, author of The Sexual Revolution 2.0, and the newly hired sex newscaster for Playboy Radio, has a new book out which proves my point perfectly.

Sexier Sex: Lessons from the Brave New Sexual Frontier is a sweet, reassuring, and incredibly practical compendium of ways to spice up your sex life. The book is divided into eight parts with each section offering easy to follow answers to common and not so common sexual interests, including:

• How to Make Erotic Art with Cell Phones
• How to Delete Your Ex
• How to Have Cybersex
• How to Use Technology to Have More Time for Sex

But as great as her advice is, it’s Lynn’s philosophical orientation to sex, and the tone of the book which kept me glued to my seat (that was until I had to get up to try one of her suggestions). Sexier Sex is free of any hipster or sex-know-it-all attitude, it focuses on sex as a form of play, and it’s incredibly considerate of the fact that we don’t all have sex the same way.

After reading my way from “How to Buy Lingerie for Your Body Type” to “How to Cope When Your Video Sex Session Goes Public” I tracked down the author for a little tech sex Q & A.

Having just researched thousands of sex tips can you share your favorite from the book?

The best advice in the book is to use these lessons as inspiration and to let your imagination guide you. I've covered a wide range of things you can do, alone and with partners, but if I had tried to create an exhaustive list of every single possibility, I'd still be writing it. Sexier Sex is a practical handbook with actual sexy things you can do right now -- but it's also a gateway to expanding your sexual horizons in all directions.

You promise to show "women how to find greater sexual pleasure, intimacy, and adventure through creative use of modern technology". What if I'm useless with technology and/or not sure about being a woman?

If you can search for something on Google or make a call on a cell phone, you're tech-savvy enough for most of the lessons in this book. And if you're thinking that you'd like to become more comfortable with modern technology, what could be more fun than doing so in the context of learning how to be more romantic, playful and daring?

I aimed the book at women because I think women are more likely to turn to books to learn these sorts of things, and bring the new knowledge into their relationships with men.

I've never actually thought much about whether I'm writing for any particular gender, so it was interesting to see how it changed my writing from time to time, knowing that my publisher specializes in books by and for women. My Sex Drive column is published by a men's magazine -- do I usually write "for men"? I honestly don't know. But adults of any gender can get a lot out of Sexier Sex; the principles apply to everyone.

How did your writing change?

My Wired News editors get nervous if I start talking about 'relationships,' but I can say 'social networking' or 'social media' or 'web 2.0' to mean the same thing. But in the book, why, I could accept that people (including men!) have relationships, I could write about the full range of what sex means, from playful romp to Deep Meaningful Affirmation of Love and Commitment. No matter where you identify yourself genderwise, those are universal themes -- but a tech-culture publication like Wired.com doesn't want to stray too far into 'women's magazine' territory. It's all semantics, and rather hilarious when you think about it.

In this book and your wildly popular Sex Drive column for Wired.com you always seem to be able to write about sex and technology without losing the goofy, fumbling, human element. What's your advice to people who worry that technology will get in the way of their sex lives instead of adding to it?

Tech is just stuff. If you experiment with it and find it doesn't work for you, its feelings won't be hurt when you stop using it. I think if the tech is getting in the way, that's a Sign you need to heed. Certainly playing with technology can give you some insight into your true desires -- which can be uncomfortable at times. But it's not about keeping up with the Gateses or forcing yourself to use your mobile phone in bed because you think you're supposed to. It's about approaching sexuality with your imagination wide open and finding additional ways to bring joy to yourself and others, whatever that means for you.

What do you think is the most common misperception about sex and technology?

That sex-tech is new and automatically bad. Our fear of how people combine sex and tech is out of balance with the actual dangers. Humans have always invented technologies for sexual purposes and yet somehow we've managed to keep on connecting with one another, loving and lusting and mating and breaking each other's hearts.

Sexier Sex shows you some new steps in an old dance. None of our technologies today or tomorrow will ever replace human touch. (Except for a small percentage of people who want it to; and who are we to deny them that option?)

I think we've already integrated some technologies into our relationships so well that we've forgotten that just five years ago they were "technologies" and therefore scary. Not long ago, text messages were the boogieman out to destroy the last remnants of romance. Now we hardly bat an eye about texting but get nervous that our partners will prefer deep meaningful relationships with sex robots over dealing with us and all the normal human drama we represent. No sooner will we realize that sex robots are as important to modern relationships as washing machines and robot vacuums than we'll find something else to panic about -- perhaps zero gravity alien dancers streaming their erotic webcams from space.

Have you ever compared notes with an offline sex columnist? I'm wondering if the sex questions of tech savvy people are any different than those of luddites.

Tech savvy people tend to be more open to incorporating toys into sex, like vibrators and text messaging. They also tend to write me after they've done a lot of online research of their own. However, sex is sex, and the questions I get are fairly universal questions, albeit sometimes with a new slant: the affair might be in Second Life rather than at the office, or a person might have come out in a chat room and be asking for advice on how to do so to his family. Mostly, in the 1000s of people I've talked to over the years, it comes down to the One Big Concern: Am I normal?

_{Cover image courtesy of Seal Press}

The folks at monochrome who brought us Arse Elektronika 2007 are back, asking the question on everyone’s mind: Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep? Check out their call for presenters, performers, and collaborators:

...this year's conference focuses on Science and Social Fiction. The genre of the "fantastic" is especially well suited to the investigation of the touchy area of sexuality and pornography: actual and assumed developments are frequently depicted positively and approvingly, but just as often with dystopian admonishment.

In order to intelligently contextualize the abundance of queries that are involved here, this year's conference will be structured around three day-long discussion panels, each devoted to a specific theme.

The themes are Narration, Technology and Politics. On the site they say the deadline is May 2, but I’ve heard from one of the organizers that the final deadline is May 12.

Having heard so many good things about last years conference I can’t wait to see what comes out of this one. It’s rare to find an event that strives to engage sexuality in academic, artistic, and pornographic ways all at once. With the recent success of Sex2.0 and the announcement of a second Arse Elektronika, I’d say things are looking up.

Read more – Arse Elektronika

_{Image courtesy of monochrom}

Thirteen years ago, with nothing more than a few photocopied pamphlets, a marketing idea, and a whole lotta moxie, a coalition of feminist sex stores began celebrating May as National Masturbation Month. The centerpiece of the month, what we might call the tent pole event, is the masturbate-a-thon, a charity fundraiser that has raised thousands of dollars for worthy sexual health and sex rights organizations.

Most of the sex stores have dropped the event, but there are at least two masturbate-a-thon’s still going strong; one in Portland and one in San Francisco.

I haven’t been hit up to sponsor anyone (yet) but to do my part and celebrate the other great thing about May (besides the weather) I’ll be featuring masturbation content all month and try my hand at tackling some of the big philosophical masturbation questions of our time.

Read more - Five Questions about the Masturbate-a-Thon

Remember a few years back when there was a sudden flurry of media attention paid to a libido boosting nasal spray (the one New York magazine called “the first real, honest-to-God, horny-making, body-shaking, equal-opportunity aphrodisiac”)? And then last year the company that was developing the spray had its stock price plummet after the FDA said it had “serious concerns” about side effects. Remember when I said that New York Magazine’s “sex issue” probably wasn’t the best place to get information about sexual pharmacology? Well today I’m offering some preventative warning.

This time it’s a different drug, but same goal, and same method of deliver; the nasal spray. (as an aside, did some pharma marketing whiz stumble across data about boomers romanticizing cocaine? What’s with all these libido boosters you can snort?)

A study published this month in the Annals of Internal Medicine set out to measure how effective testosterone treatment is in improving sexual satisfaction among premenopausal women. The 16 week study took a group of 261 women between the ages of 35 and 46 and administered different amounts of testosterone (low, intermediate, and high doses) to three groups and a placebo to a fourth group. Among the findings, all the women, including those that got the placebo had an increase in self-reported “satisfactory sexual events” but the group that got the intermediate dose of testosterone showed a “significant” increase in satisfactory events (overall the increase represented 0.8 more sexually satisfying events per month).

Just as interesting as the study itself (which as the authors and journal editors point out, is too small to offer any generalizable information, and because of the strong placebo effect raises as many questions as it answers) is an editorial commentary by Rosemary Basson. Basson has been very involved in recent discussions and debates about how best to define sexual dysfunctions experienced by women, and she offers a helpful review of the newest research on testosterone and sexual desire. In her analysis the results of this study are “ambiguous” and using testosterone as therapy to treat female sexual dissatisfaction is “premature”. She reminds us of the lack of long term safety data, the concerns about a link between higher androgen levels and breast cancer and cardiovascular disease, and finally of the importance and efficacy of other types of treatment for sexual dissatisfaction:

I advise primary physicians to assess women’s sexual concerns in detail, then address mental health and relationship issues and any sexual dysfunction in the partner. Then, if necessary, schedule further follow-up to treat the issues by conventional therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, sex therapy, psychotherapy, and mindfulness techniques. The patient should understand the lack of long-term safety data if she is considering investigational testosterone

I hope that journalists who are always wowed by the PR magic that claims testosterone as the hormone of desire will take note of Basson’s commentary, and not just get excited about another dream of desire in a spray bottle.

_Sources:

1. Davis S, Papalia MA, Norman RJ, O’Neill S, Redelman M, Williamson M, et al. “Safety and Efficacy of a Testosterone Metered-dose Transdermal Spray for Treating Decreased Sexual Satisfaction in Premenopausal Women. A Randomized Trial” Annals of Internal Medicine Vol. 148 (2008): 569-577.
2. Basson, R. “Testosterone Supplementation to Improve Women’s Sexual Satisfaction: Complexities and Unknowns” Annals of Internal Medicine Vol. 148 (2008): 620-621.

According to a Reuters report, after Republican Tennessee Rep. John Duncan reviewed testimony from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, the U.S. Institute of Medicine, the American Psychological Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists all pointing to the failures of abstinence-only education to protect the sexual health of youth, he responded that,

it seems "rather elitist" that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. "I don't think it's something we should abandon," he said of abstinence-only funding.

It immediately made me think of the way The Daily Show has been dealing with is-Obama-elitist farce. And more seriously it’s painful to hear this stuff coming from the mouths of people we elected to represent us. If they think they know best, or parents in general know best, how do they explain the dismal STD rates, and the fact that the U.S. has the highest rates of unplanned pregnancies among Western countries?

Also the idea that parents somehow naturally know the right thing to do when it comes to sex education is a fiction. Why is there a multi-million dollar industry catering to educating parents on everything from toilet training to dealing with aggressive behavior? How come parents need help with everything other than talking about sex?

I understand that these politicians, just like almost all adults, just don’t want to think about their kids being sexual. And I understand that promoting abstinence only education allows them to bury their heads so deep in the sand that they can’t hear or see a thing. The problem is that our kids are paying the price now, and we all pay the price eventually.

p.s. if you’re an ostrich fan, my apologies for perpetuating the myth. I couldn’t find a picture of a politician with blinders on, so this had to do.

Read more - Reuters: Experts say sex abstinence program doesn't work

Previously - National Study Shows Comprehensive Sex Ed. More Effective ; Abstinence-only programs don’t help, but do they hurt? ; Is Sex Ed. Enough? ; What's Behind the Drop in Teen Pregnancy in the U.S.?

_{Photo credit: Digital Zoo/Getty Images}

TV is by its very nature a reductive medium. The best TV producers know this and consider it a challenge to rise to; how to make something complicated, thoughtful and even beautiful despite the ways executives want programming to look and the ways audiences expect it to passively wash over them. The worst producers know it too, but instead of creatively working through the medium, they rely on the effects of sound bytes and constructed images to avoid dealing with complication in their narratives, conflict that can’t be easily resolved or pesky things like journalistic integrity.

So it’s interesting to hear from people who agree to be interviewed for television because they are interested in the former kind of television but end up featured in the latter kind. Such was the situation for debauchette, who agreed to be interviewed for the Diane Sawyer anti-sex work diatribe 20/20 Special Report: Prostitution in America. As it turns out debauchette’s parents saw the show and despite production attempts to hide her identity they recognized her. Her post is a little bit about the show, a little bit about her parents, and all about her. Like many great blog posts it comes across as honest, messy, and not in any way meant to spoon feed her readers. Here’s one of my favorite parts where she is talking about how she feels about a note her mother sent her about the show:

In some ways, I feel the way I felt when I was sitting across from Sawyer. I feel like I can only sigh, because I doubt I can begin to penetrate the many layers of misunderstandings and preconceptions, let alone that relentless working assumption that a woman’s value as a human being decreases as she gains sexual experience. (Sawyer asked me about preserving the ’sanctity’ of my body, as though sex without the imprimatur of love were inherently degrading.). I’m glad my mother didn’t lash out in anger or patent disgust — what’s come across in her note is some mix of restraint, confusion, and extreme discomfort. That deserves some kudos, even if I still feel miles away from having a real conversation with her about this, which, unsurprisingly, is exactly how I felt when I sat down with Diane Sawyer. We just don’t see eye to eye.

The insight and honesty in the post stand in such stark contrast to the 20/20 show. It also makes evident the kind of richness of experience and depth of content TV producers could mine if they took the time to actually let people speak for themselves.

Read the entire post here - Debauchette - Boom

Premiere Magazine has a nice summary of the best known cases of porn actors who have tried to transition into non-sex performing in mainstream films. The article coincides with the release of Zombie Strippers starring Jenna Jameson, which is getting amused and supportive if not glowing reviews.

I'm still waiting for an article documenting the history of movie directors who have transitioned from porn to mainstream, a career trajectory that both more common and more successful than it is for actors.

Read more - Premiere: From Porn To Mainstream: Can Jenna Pull It Off?

Related - Real Sex in Mainstream Movies ; Best Movie Sex Scenes ; Masturbation in the Movies

_{Photo credit: Steve Wisbauer/Getty Images}

I loved this unexpected Bloomberg News article about the growing debate in Denmark over sex work. First it was surprisingly non-hysterical given that it’s written for an American audience. And second, without much melodrama or pity, it used disability and sex as a way into the subject. From the article:

When a male resident at Kildegaarden nursing home in Denmark made an indecent sexual proposal to a member of the staff, the home's director, Inger Marie Kristensen, told a nurse to telephone for a prostitute.

"There was a considerable change in his demeanor after the escort girl had paid him a visit,'' Kristensen said in an interview. "We do this for our clients just as we offer them other services that they need as human beings.''

Kildegaarden, located 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Copenhagen in Skanderborg, has about 100 residents, including victims of Alzheimer's disease and strokes. Nurses arranged visits by call girls three times in the past three years.

In 1999 Denmark decriminalized sex work although it’s hard to know exactly what this means for sex workers working in Denmark today. At least two sources I found stated that sex work can’t be your sole source of income and two more from inside Denmark said that it is still a bit of a “grey area” (note: if you’re a sex worker in Denmark reading this, please feel free to enlighten us in the comments section below).

The rest of the article focuses on a growing debate about sex work. The government is apparently increasing its funding in order to “get women out of the sex trade industry” and public opinion cited in the article is changing:

…a December 2006 opinion poll by newspaper Politiken showed forty- two percent of 1,180 said prostitution was unacceptable compared with 25 percent four years earlier. A majority of 54 percent approved of prostitution, compared with 66 percent in 2002.

On the one hand the government’s predicament does seem a bit puzzling; supporting sex work through a funded nursing home on the one hand and fighting it through a public campaign on the other. But don’t governments do contradictory stuff like this all the time? And one has to wonder how much of the increase in funding to get women out of sex work is going to public awareness campaigns aimed at non-sex workers designed to alter the public perception about sex work.

Because I’m as interested in disability as I am sex work my first response to the article had nothing to do with this debate. It struck me that the male resident mentioned in the opening could probably benefit from some support and education around sexual boundaries and not just a trip to a sex worker. I wondered if sex workers were being used as a way for staff to avoid having to deal with the larger social/sexual issues and lives of their clients. I’m all for supporting adults with disabilities in accessing the services everyone else can access, but this doesn’t mean that sex workers should be used as a way for staff to avoid dealing with sexual health education and boundary issues at their facilities. Hopefully this is exactly how they dealt with it at the nursing home. Because the story wasn’t in the end about the details of their call-a-sex-worker program we never really find out much more about it. Maybe she’ll do a follow up.

Read more - Call Girls at Nursing Home Fuel Debate in Denmark

Previously – Access Sex ; Sex Work and Disability ; Adult Film Offers a Good Opportunity to Talk About Sex and Disability ; International Day for Persons with Disabilities: The Sex Edition

Related – Sex & Disability

Writing about sexual anatomy is one of my least favorite parts of writing about sex. Each time I sit down, as I did a few days ago, and begin to write something about the way the foreskin works or what the urethra looks like I get a shiver down my spine. It’s not that I don’t love human genitalia. I mean it might be more accurate to say I have love for genitals than to say I love genitals directly. Either way, I’m not squeamish or conflicted about these body parts. My point is not that I don’t like my own, my loved ones, or complete stranger genitals. The point is that I don’t like writing about them.

After all, what do I really know about your genitals? Aside from the most mundane large scale generalizations, what can I really say about your genitals that won’t clash with your own experience of them? This is a problem for anyone writing about the body (above or below the waist) but its one we don’t talk about much.

Consider our bodies. It’s true that most of us have two eyes, two ears, a nose, etc… But some of us don’t. And some of us have two eyes, but only see out of one of them. Some of us have big noses, and some have little noses. Some of us have taken the body we were born with and changed it, either intentionally or unintentionally. While the parts may look and feel vaguely the same for many people, our experience of our bodies, and our personal history with our bodies is entirely unique. Forget what you see on TV, read in magazines, and even a lot of what you’ve been taught in school. Those other bodies don’t matter (also, they usually aren’t real). Ultimately your body is the only one that matters when what you want is to learn more about your body.

Back to your genitals. What happens when I sit down to tell you something about your genitals? My intentions are good. I want you to get to know your body, I want you to be able to identify potential signs of illness or disease, and I want to encourage you to look at your body in new ways. But as soon as I start to describe the way your genitals look or feel, and they don’tlook or feel that way to you, it’s easy for you to think there’s something wrong. Something wrong with your genitals and something wrong with you. And then I become part of your genital problem, not part of the genital solution (which is not to be confused with “a solution you put on your genitals,” for that, see our STD Guide).

And this is why I don’t like writing about genitals. I don’t want to be part of the problem, and I don’t want to feel like I’m trying to tell you something about your genitals. Because if I haven’t seen them (and I probably haven’t) what can I really say about them?

After much hand wringing (genital anatomy tip: when learning about your own body a "hand wringing" motion is not the most productive) I’ve come up with a two-step plan. First I can offer a general genital tour. These are some overall things that people with male genitals and people with female genitals might expect to find on and in their bodies. As I do this I can remind you that you might not have all of these things and they might not look, feel or work the same way I describe them. But it’s more of a lay of the land than a guided tour. Secondly, I can offer you a way to take your own guided tour of your sexual anatomy, one where you’re the guide, the crowd and the amusement park all rolled into one. Doing it this way is more work for you, but I think it puts the onus and the expertise in the right place.

Read more:

• About Sexual Anatomy and Response
• Mapping Out Your Sexual Body
• Write Your Own Sexual History