Sex

The answer to Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?” increasingly seems to be: Not even women know.

Last week, actress Meredith Baxter, best known as über-mom Elyse Keaton on the 1980’s sitcom “Family Ties,” came out on “The Today Show,” telling Matt Lauer that after three marriages and five children (now all adults) she finally realized she was a lesbian after she fell in love with a woman. In a statement that I’ve heard from other women who’ve discovered their true sexuality in mid-life, Baxter said that being with her partner, Nancy Locke, made the difficulties she’d always experienced with men suddenly become clear. “I thought I was just a bad picker,” she told Lauer in explaining how she’d made sense of her failed heterosexual relationships.

And indeed she was. For 30-plus years, she was picking partners of the entirely wrong gender.

via You Might Be A Lesbian — And Not Know It! – Silkstone – Open Salon.

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Swedish sex educators rechristen religious fundamentalists’ favorite female body partBy Kate Harding”The mythical status of the hymen has caused far too much harm for far too long,” begins a press release from RFSU, the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education. Indeed it has. Broadsheet has written before about the Artificial Virginity Hymen — a kit that helps a woman fake bleeding when she has intercourse — and hymenoplasty, in which the hymen is sewn up, so that any man still ignorant enough to believe a hymen can only be broken during sex and that a woman will always bleed the first time will be reassured that he is participating in a deflowering. The popularity of virginity faking highlights the devastating consequences of “the mythical status of the hymen,” especially among religious fundamentalists. As Tracy Clark-Flory said in the former post, “If a woman in the Middle East fails to bleed on her wedding night, she can face shame, abuse and even death” — and as Carol Lloyd said in the latter, “lest we get too high on our horse equestrian sport being another common hymen-ripping recreation we should invoke our own recent cults of the virgin — most notably thousands of Christian youth pledging to become ‘Reborn Virgins’ and then pretending that they never took the oath.” The importance of an intact hymen is a cross-cultural crock.

via Broadsheet – Salon.com.

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David Brooks laments how young people these days are relying on cellphones for courtship

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Oh, David Brooks. Once again, the cantankerous columnist has pulled out a relic from a bygone era — back when women stayed at home and first ladies covered their biceps — to show young people today how it used to be in the good old days. The au courant subjects of his scorn this week: Cellphones, text messages and (insert heavy air quotes) “hooking up.” The trigger for this rant: New York magazine’s recent analysis of 141 week-long sex diaries posted over the last couple years on its blog Daily Intel.

Of all the magazine’s sordid findings about New Yorkers‘ sex lives — or, more accurately, the sex lives of the self-selected group of people who volunteered to share their stories with the world — the part Brooks finds “most interesting” is “the way cellphones have influenced courtship.” One might wonder: Really, the role of cellphones is the most interesting thing about a series that’s featured everyone from a “polyamorous paralegal” to a “trader who will fly for sex”? In fairness, though, technology does play a significant role in the magazine’s exegesis, particularly because it makes communication much easier. Writer Wesley Yang explains that everyone has someone on their back burner and everyone’s on someone else’s back burner — because no one wants to find themselves without romantic options. Except some are overwhelmed by having too many options and fear they’ll make the wrong decision — so they often don’t and instead send out late-night mass texts in search of someone, anyone who will bite, so to speak. This all makes it easier to project an image of being cool, calm and totally uninvested.

via Sex – Salon.com.

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THE TERM “SEXUAL REVOLUTION” has become such a cliché in recent decades that it is hard to imagine that it ever had a tangible meaning. And yet, the transformation of global sexual mores that picked up steam in the 1960s really did transform society in ways we are still trying to understand. But how did it get started? Despite the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud and the prophets of free love, this social and cultural earthquake frequently had humble beginnings. In Central Europe, for example, the true sexual revolution was touched off by the teenage sex advice column of Dr. Sommer, which is marking its fortieth anniversary this month.

When Europe was “moral”

Today it is difficult to conceive that the hedonistic Europe consistently denounced by the American Right – who delight in pointing their fingers at the excesses of the likes of Roman Polanski or at the “green” brothels of Berlin – was once as straight-laced as the Oral Roberts University campus, at least when it came to childrearing. The German weekly youth magazine Bravo from the Kindler & Schiermeyer publishing company in Munich was no exception to the squeaky clean image the post-war Federal Republic was endeavoring to present to the world. Founded in 1956, the original Bravo revolved almost solely around the world of pop stars and entertainment (the first issue displayed Marilyn Monroe on the cover). A lackluster romance advice column was added in 1962, but otherwise the magazine maintained its overall wholesomeness throughout the Beatles era. But all of that changed in October of 1969, when the publishers added a new column, “What Moves You: A Consultation with Dr. Jochen Sommer,” which tackled youthful readers’ sex questions head-on.

via A sexual revolution: Dr. Sommer’s advice column turns forty – Alan Nothnagle – Open Salon.

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