The Ninety Percenters
A couple of months ago, I got the following comment on the Goodreads feed for one of my blogs on pornography. The comment read: What do you say about the statistics that show upwards of 90% of pornographic actresses have suffered some form of sexual abuse? That it’s a corollary of the intense — and [...]
Pornography: Aleksander Štulhofer
In my investigation into how porn affects the sexual attitudes of young teens, I ran across the work of a terrific sex researcher from Croatia who has done some even-handed studies about porn, the latest trying to see if he could confirm the sacrosanct assumption, all but universally held by US researchers, that porn use [...]
The Decade Sex Got Good
The decade wasn’t the 1970s, if that’s what you thought I was going to say. The decade was the 1130s and the man who made sex good (or at least not bad by definition) was Peter Abelard. He was a writer and teacher in Paris, born in 1079, died in 1142 or 1144. He was [...]
The Return of the Catholic Sex Scandal
I have never been less surprised by anything in my entire life than I have been by the global revival of the Catholic sex scandal. Anyone who bought the idea that the pedophile scandal in the US Catholic Church was a US-only event caused by priests being in an unhealthy, sexually permissive atmosphere is an [...]
Happy Valentine’s Day: Gay Marriage
I like being married. I was married for 14 years and even though that didn’t work out at all (as readers of my book well know), I ended up meeting a fantastic woman following my divorce and three years and a few months after I’d become single, I got married again. (If a really bad [...]
Fun with Art: Precious
Usually, I reserve this column for my thoughts about paintings and sculptures that I run across in museums, but since it’s the very brief part of the year where good movies come out, I’m going to take a couple of columns to talk about movies I’ve seen. They say sex addicts can watch so much [...]
Creation Controversy
The British have made a film Creation about one of their greatest sons, Charles Darwin, a film that’s failed to get an American distributor because of our country’s general hostility to evolution. (Only 39% of Americans believe in it.) A friend, Jen Kirkman, commenting about the controversy on Facebook, wrote, “I never understood why religion [...]
Fun with Art: Penis Problems?
When I go to museums, I take pictures of art objects that represent or point to funny sexual hangups and then I talk about it here. I was recently at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, a museum where you can have the experience of paying more for parking than for your ticket. Fun. Great [...]
There’s Nothing More Family Friendly Than Sex:Origins of Sex Negativity
Considering how positively sex was viewed in the cultures that we came from, Classical Greece and Rome and Ancient Judaism, our culture’s relatively censorial attitude towards sexual behavior does seem odd. Much of this is glibly blamed on Puritanical attitudes, but in my reading* I have come across a much more credible explanation as follows: [...]
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