Maybe it seems strange for someone who makes a living writing about sex and who has been sexually active since age 17 to be sticking up for a 29-year-old virgin, but I see this as a wider issue. To me, sexual freedom means being able to make your own sexual choices for whatever reasons you like and not be shamed for them. Saying that you have the right to make your own decisions but that your reasoning is faulty is like being pro-choice but saying a woman should only have an abortion for a “good” reason. The problem is that “good” is subjective, as is “gift.” If Jones is a role model for other virgins, I don’t see why that’s a bad thing, as long as being a virgin isn’t being upheld as the only way to be “good.” At The Washington Post, Rahiel Tesfamariam laments the media’s desire to focus on black women at the extremes of celibate or promiscuous, and writes, “Our abstinence is presented as a superhuman, radical break from the norm, one made only by devout Christians — when factors such as sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy and infidelity make it a far more commonplace choice than the public realizes.” To that end, I’m glad that Jones acknowledged that being a virgin isn’t necessarily easy (in a statement ready-made for headlines, she said being a virgin has been “harder than training for the Olympics”).

New Additions

Rachel Kramer Bussel



“You have to see Derek’s cock,” Rosie whispered into my ear as soon as I sat down next to her in the booth at our local bar. He was up at the bar, and I checked out his faded jeans, the frayed denim showing off what I knew was his firm ass from afternoons around their apartment building’s communal pool.



I’d never seen it in person, but I’d heard all about it and seen a photo of it in one of Rosie’s overeager moments. They are a model couple, and her regaling me with their sexual exploits keeps my workaholic life interesting when I have the occasional dry spell.
“What do you mean?” I whispered back, smiling as she placed her hand on my knee. We have a touchy-feely friendship, one that sometimes is a little more on the touchy side. Sometimes we’re best friends who can never get enough gossip, and sometimes we’re so hot for each other that she banishes Derek from the bedroom and we toss each other around and go to town. We’ve danced around the idea of having a threesome, but so far it’s only been talk.
“Go ask him. Tell him I said to show it to you.” She raised her finely penciled-in brown eyebrows, as if daring me. I grinned back at her, because I can never resist a dare, which is how the two of us have done things like skinny-dip in multiple hotel pools, upload topless photos of each other to various websites and, once, snorted lines of coke off a B-list celebrity’s cock. It’s not that I’m normally so buttoned-up, but being around her makes me feel like we’re facing our very last day on earth and not living it to its fullest would be a crime. She’s her own kind of drug, and I know when I go out with her there’s no point in saying no. I could, of course, and she’d accept my limits, but when I get together with Rosie, I know that I don’t want to have any limits.



So I stood up, my sheer gray tank top not doing much to disguise my white bra strap. My heels were my true concession to fashion, and my skintight jeans pressing against my pussy made it feel as if I wasn’t wearing panties. The denim sliding against my wet lips made the few steps more fun than they should have been. I sauntered up to the bar just as the bartender poured three glowing blue beverages into martini glasses. “I vant to see your cock,” I said in a poor mockery of a Dracula German accent.



“You want to suck my cock?” he asked, turning around and beaming heat right at me. There’s been a spark between Derek and me since he and Rosie started dating, one we’ve never deliberately discussed, preferring instead to let its glow fuel our separate endeavors.
“I don’t know,” I said, letting my voice go soft and sex kitten. “I was just told I’m supposed to see it. What’d you do to it?”



“She didn’t tell you, huh?” he asked, tossing bills onto the bar before raising one of the glasses and bringing it to my lips. His blue eyes, framed by lush, elegant supermodel-worthy lashes, were on me, as I parted my lips and let him pour some of the liquid down my throat.



“I guess not.” I waited for him to share his secret, but he just kept pouring, and I had to swallow in a certain way so as not to let the blue dribble down my throat.



“Shall we?” he asked, grabbing my hand and leading me toward the unisex bathroom. This bar specialized in drinks that start at fifteen dollars, in red-velvet-lined banquettes that were easy to cozy up against.



I took a peek back at Rosie, who smiled at me as I entered the bathroom with Derek. This was something new for all of us, and if they were willing to go with it, so was I.

It must make Ross pout that unrelenting evidence proves abstinence programs are not only "ineffective," they actually cause higher pregnancy rates than in places where young people have info and access to birth control. Eww!



It can turn a smiley-face upside-down, if you're a Christian religious fanatic, but sometimes the truth is... proof-y.



As for women having an infantile essential nature, which desires innocence and vacuity above all other sexual traits, leading to an unparalleled state of happy brainlessness -- gosh, how do you even begin to document that, outside of scripture and tattered Catholic catechism pamphlets?



Douthat's faith is based on the tenets of unapologetic misogyny, sexism, gender determinism, and an all-around "Daddy Knows Best" approach. I'm sure you've heard how well the Catholic clergy has led in this regard.



In Christianity, men are the natural leaders, and must stand guard against their carnality. Grrr!



Women must follow man, doting on him, caring for the hearth. Women have a lot to atone for, because they're the reason human beans got tossed out of the Garden of Eden. That's where God created everything in Seven Days and there was a Magic Apple and it really tasted good... which was premature and ill-advised. To say the least

“You don’t want to gag a woman with your penis unless you have some serious issues with the way you see women.” So says Kirsten Powers, ex-girlfriend of sex-scandal star Congressman Anthony Weiner, in a piece for The Daily Beast. She is referencing his sexting relationship with a Las Vegas blackjack dealer. The transcript of their texts was posted by Radar Online, including one bit that prompted Powers’ musing: “You will gag on me before you c** with me in you” and “[I’m] thinking about gagging your hot mouth with my c***.”



This column is not about Weiner. I’m pretty over political sex scandals and am inclined to think that someone like Weiner wanted to get caught, consciously or unconsciously. The only positive thing I can say about such scandals is that they do help shed light on just how unenlightened we are about topics like monogamy and BDSM. Here we have an example of a woman making a blanket statement about something she clearly doesn’t know the first thing about, simply because it offends her.



You know the phrase, “Taken out of context, I must seem so strange?” That goes double for pulling random bits of erotic conversation, texted or otherwise, and analyzing them as if they told a whole story. Without the motivation of the person sending and receiving them, you really don’t know anything, and yet it seems that a default anti-BDSM reaction is acceptable. Our public squeamishness over the fact that some people can eroticize pain, degradation, and being ordered around, safely, consensually and pleasurably, is nothing more than a prejudice that needs to be eradicated.

And sexual guilt doesn't just go up with more conservative religions. It goes up with more religiosity, period. The more religious your upbringing is, the worse your sexual guilt is likely to be. Of people raised in very religious homes, 22.5% said they were shamed or ridiculed for masturbating (to give just one example)... compared to only 5.5% of people brought up in the least religious homes. And of people raised in very religious homes, 79.9% felt guilty about a specific sexual activity or desire... while among people raised in the least religious and most secular homes, that number drops to 26.3%. That's a huge, huge difference.



But one of the most surprising conclusions of this research? Sexual guilt from religion doesn't wreck people's sex lives forever.



Guilt According to conventional wisdom -- and I will freely admit that I held this conventional wisdom myself -- religious guilt about sex continues to torment people long after the religion itself has lost its hold. But according to the "Sex and Secularism" report, that's rarely the case. Once people let go of religion, people's positive experiences of sex, and their relative lack of guilt, happen at about the same rate as people who were never religious in the first place.



Ray was surprised by this result as well. (Surprising results -- a sign of good science!) "We did think that religion would have residual effects in people after they left," he told me, "but our data did not show this. That was a very pleasant surprise. That is not to say that some people don't continue to experience problems, but the vast majority seem to shake it off and get on with their sexual lives pretty well." So letting go of religion means a rebound to a sex life that's as satisfying, and as guilt-free, as a sex life that was never touched by religion in the first place.

Nicole Daedone pulls her long dirty-blond locks into a bun, rolls up the sleeves of her crisp white dress shirt and readies her lube. On the table in front of her there is a woman, naked only from the waist down, with her knees spread wide. The 40-something founder of OneTaste, a center dedicated to “mindful sexuality,” is about to give a live and impromptu demonstration of orgasmic meditation (“OMing” for short) in a conference room at the sophisticated Le Meridien hotel in San Francisco. She takes a long look between the volunteer’s legs and enthuses to the audience of roughly 40 women: “Oh my god, it’s beautiful. It’s an electric rose color. The swelling is already beginning.”



Before long, Daedone is hunched over and vigorously stroking the woman’s most sensitive “spot” — the “upper left quadrant” of the clitoris — with just her forefinger. The recipient moans wildly as though she is being taken over by a spirit and Daedone urges her on: “Good girl. Good, good. Reach, reach, reach, reach.” As the woman’s groans peak, Daedone lets out a throaty exhalation that sounds like it belongs in a Lamaze class. Two audience members overcome by the intensity of the performance are silently crying. The demonstration, which is part of a weekend-long women’s retreat, continues for 15 minutes.



It is both arousing and deeply bizarre.



It isn’t every weekend that I find myself watching a woman being repeatedly brought to orgasm in front of a live audience — but I hardly expected normality when I asked to sit in on the workshop.

Are they joking? Buying sex is already illegal most places — and it also exists almost everywhere. But this group is actually claiming that it must be “criminalized”? How far out of the world we live in do you have to be before you can believe that prostitution hasn’t been criminalized?

The answer? You just have to be a radical anti-sex feminist, apparently…in which case male-dominated society looks like just one big blur…at least, that’s what I, as a man, take away. Equating a law enforcement structure that can’t manage to stamp out street prostitution with men who frequent call girls and politicians who don’t pass stronger laws is only possible if men aren’t people.

What’s more, places where sex work is most illegal (Saudi Arabia and other Sharia-governed states) are without exception where it’s most dysfunctional (e.g., trafficked women). The nations that have the harshest anti-prostitution laws are the places where there are the greatest social strictures against consensual sexual encounters between men and women. Those countries are also — and this isn’t an accident — the nations where there’s the greatest difference between rich and poor, and the places where women have the lowest status. Oppressive laws disproportionately affect the poor, women, and racial, ethnic and religious minorities, no matter what they’re passed to do.

But it gets way worse. The “hooker-free Utopia” Farley wants to see take root in the U.S. is even more extreme than she’d let you know. In the case of Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, those nations have a documented constancy of homosexual rape in both social and penal circumstances, as well as anti-gay murders for anyone who isn’t “discreet” about same-sex contacts.

But the real surprise — which may be the most disturbing part, or the most honest, depending on your perspective — is what the age play stirred up in me. At 36, I don’t have any children, but I want them badly. “Baby fever” hardly begins to describe it. If I could pick up a baby at the supermarket along with my groceries, I would. And this unlikely sexual dynamic, the big baby literally calling me “mommy,” called forth powerful caretaking feelings. It was nice, for a short period of time, to be a mother, even a mock one.



Let me be clear: My maternal yearnings in and of themselves are not sexual. But my desire to comfort others does play a role in my sex life. Nurturing has been one of the ways I pride myself on providing to lovers. That might mean surprising them with dessert, sending them a list of the broken links on their website, giving an intense massage, mailing a package for them, or washing their dishes. Even when I’m in a dominant sexual role, there’s an element of caretaking involved. If I’m slapping or spanking or biting or pinching someone who gets off on me delivering pain, I am fulfilling a sexual need. It may not be the same as feeding them chicken soup, but it is still a form of taking care of them.



So while overt mommy play was new to me, combining kink and nurturing wasn’t. But this scenario brought my previous experience to a whole new level of intensity. We spun a fantasy in which I was sitting in a hotel bathtub, warm and full of bubbles, while he waited to towel me off, then gave me a foot massage. The stories we shared were far from depraved; they were gentle, tender, loving. I could see myself soaking in that tub, him washing my hair, stroking my feet, fetching food for me, sleeping at the foot of the bed. The sweetness offset the weirdness for me.

Relatively recently, I dated two men in a row with the same first name—I’ll call them both Tom for the sake of this essay. One I fell in love with, and while I’m mostly over him, I’m not there all the way. Both are guys I was friends with before dating them, and I considered the possibility that the name thing would get weird with Tom 2.0, but I’d had a crush on him, so I overlooked it. They’re fairly different in personality, but the fact that in addition to sharing a name, both Toms have similar body types and professions adds to my sense that men with this name are not my type. Not to mention the fact that after I dated Tom 1.0, I had to keep calling Tom 2.0 by his full name when telling my friends about him, lest anyone get confused.



Dating men who share a name is not the same as, say, dating one guy who’s the spitting image of another, but it’s close.

At the same time, my friend K. was just in town from England. We met in 1998, via a Sleater Kinney mailing list, and have since visited each other a handful of times. I have a comfort with her that goes very deep, and we’ve seen each other through all kinds of relationships. There’s definitely something wonderful about friends who’ve seen you at your best and worst, who know how your past informs your present. I don’t want to sound like I’m throwing my old friends under the bus for younger, cooler versions. It’s not about age or “cool” per se, but perspective. Sometimes I get stuck in a rut of how I see myself, and that comes across with old friends.



Lately I’ve been so busy working that I’ve barely had time to see my closest friends, and sometimes I feel guilty about that, and like I shouldn’t be hanging out with new friends when I haven’t even hung out with my old ones. But I don’t think it’s a competition; true, there’s limited time and we may not get to see everyone we want to, but different friendships provide different sources of support. There are friends I mostly see movies with, friends I gossip with, friends I can tell my deepest, darkest secrets to without worrying about them judging me. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, but together they form a network that, collectively, props me up.

At the same time, my friend K. was just in town from England. We met in 1998, via a Sleater Kinney mailing list, and have since visited each other a handful of times. I have a comfort with her that goes very deep, and we’ve seen each other through all kinds of relationships. There’s definitely something wonderful about friends who’ve seen you at your best and worst, who know how your past informs your present. I don’t want to sound like I’m throwing my old friends under the bus for younger, cooler versions. It’s not about age or “cool” per se, but perspective. Sometimes I get stuck in a rut of how I see myself, and that comes across with old friends.



Lately I’ve been so busy working that I’ve barely had time to see my closest friends, and sometimes I feel guilty about that, and like I shouldn’t be hanging out with new friends when I haven’t even hung out with my old ones. But I don’t think it’s a competition; true, there’s limited time and we may not get to see everyone we want to, but different friendships provide different sources of support. There are friends I mostly see movies with, friends I gossip with, friends I can tell my deepest, darkest secrets to without worrying about them judging me. One isn’t necessarily better than the other, but together they form a network that, collectively, props me up.