Sexual healing

Surgeon General David Satcher issues a clear-eyed report on sex -- and perhaps signs his own political death warrant in the process.

By Jennifer Foote Sweeney

Topics:Sex Education

Praise the Lord and pass the contraception!

One can almost hear the lusty cry echoing from the smoky trenches as a dispatch is rushed past volleys of haughty rhetoric and threats of damnation to those of us cowering at home. The document, sent from the highest medical official of the land, is titled “The Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Promote Sexual Health and Responsible Sexual Behavior” — a name so evocative of dedication, urgency and honor that it makes one’s heart swell. We reflexively imagine the embattled Dr. David Satcher in a candlelit tent pitched on the banks of the Potomac, scribbling hundreds of words with obsessive diligence. Not a moment to lose.

Indeed, our bearded and bespectacled hero is at this moment locked into the crosshairs of conservative bayonets. He has rejected their sacred belief that appropriate sex education must not mention sex. And the most inflamed among them might possibly be Satcher’s own commander in chief, George W. Bush, who is reported by at least one senior official to have little confidence in Satcher, whose report angers him greatly. (Bush’s confidence, it seems, is in his own approach of withholding information, employed so effectively with his own children and the issue of alcohol.)

It is likely that Satcher will be ordered to fold his tent and limp home, but I pray that he does not leave before the parents of this nation have an opportunity to noisily praise his courageous acts. I read the “Call to Action” with a genuine rush of patriotic feeling, the kind of pride that comes when a government official of enormous influence takes a huge risk to make a case for “human beings,” acknowledging without proviso or exception that “sexuality is a fundamental part of human life.”

He has written a document that demands we respect not just science and truth but the plight and beliefs of the “economically disadvantaged, racial and ethnic minorities, persons with different sexual identities, disabled persons and adolescents.” Our crisis, reports Satcher with no apparent piety, is in the suffering of so many Americans, not in their shameful loss of morality or goodness.

“I have to deal with reality,” Satcher told reporters.

And we are grateful. There are few places where the faith-based platitudes of the Bush administration are more bizarre and dreamy than in its promotion of abstinence-only “sex education” programs, which rely on the outrageous premise that if you withhold information about contraception and emotionally batter adolescents with vague threats about the importance of marriage — an institution they have watched go up in flames — young people will cease to be interested in sex.

As he said, he has to deal with reality. And this ain’t the first time. Satcher created a work group to deal with issues of promoting responsible sexual behavior and sexual health two years ago. He planned to release his report in the fall. The nine-month delay in its publication caused scientists and health professionals familiar with its contents to panic, believing that, with the arrival of the Bush administration, the report would be indefinitely delayed or edited into pablum by abstinence-only crusaders with new access to the White House.

Satcher will only say that this was “the most controversial and sensitive” issue he has dealt with in his time in office. But he is nothing less than explicit in the first pages of the report when he articulates a litany of sadness, supported by research, that makes the necessity of the report and its honesty all too clear:

Sexually transmitted diseases affect nearly 12 million Americans each year; nearly 800,000 cases of AIDS, nearly two-thirds of which involved sexual transmission, have been reported since 1981; an estimated 900,000 Americans are living with HIV.

An estimated 1.3 million induced abortions occurred in 1996; nearly one-half of pregnancies in this country are unintended; an estimated 22 percent of women and 2 percent of men have been victims of rape; and an estimated 104,000 children are victims of sexual abuse each year.

Hardly the case for a moratorium on the discussion of sexuality and contraception. Rather, says Satcher, it is “a call to begin a mature and thoughtful discussion about sexuality.”

As expected, in Satcher’s evenhanded consideration of all points of view, he has placed a few spoonfuls of rhetorical sugar in the report to help public and private proponents of abstinence-only sex education get this strong medicine down. But in many, even most, cases these buzzwords and phrases are modified, minimized or nullified by strong language and the repeated suggestion that little or no evidence exists to support them.

For instance, he says that “few would disagree” that “sexual abstinence until engaged in a committed and mutually monogamous relationship is an important component in any sexuality education program.” But Satcher repeatedly makes the case for thorough, school-based sex education, including the dissemination of accurate information about birth control.

Satcher also discusses the strengthening of families, “whatever their structure,” by encouraging stable, enduring relationships, “particularly marriage.” At the same time, he indicates that “human sexuality has come to serve many functions in addition to reproduction,” and states that one might benefit from staying abstinent not until marriage, but until involved in a committed relationship.

It is possible, while reading certain passages of the report, to be haunted by aural hallucinations of sex-positive whiners screeching and moaning as they spy words like “marriage” and “mutually monogamous relationship” and “abstinence” in the report.

I would ask these well-meaning perfectionists to repeat Satcher’s mantra: “I have to deal with reality.” And then read the report.

It is a pity that the whole thing can’t be reprinted here. But you can get it easily enough at the surgeon general’s Web site. In the meantime, it behooves me to mention certain amazing statements, if only because their simple eloquence is very uplifting:

“We need to appreciate the diversity of our culture, engage in mature, thoughtful and respectful discussion, be informed by the science that is available to us, and invest in continued research.”

“Sexual health is not limited to the absence of disease or dysfunction, nor is its importance confined to just the reproductive years … It includes freedom from sexual abuse and discrimination and the ability of individuals to integrate their sexuality into their lives, derive pleasure from it, and to reproduce if they so choose.”

“We cannot afford the consequences of continued or selective silence.”

“Sexual orientation is usually determined by adolescence, if not earlier, and there is no valid scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.”

“Close, warm parent-child relationships are associated with both postponement of sexual intercourse and more consistent contraceptive use by sexually active adolescents … However, parental control can be associated with negative effects if it is excessive or coercive.”

Simply being affiliated with a religion does not appear to have great effect on sexual behavior.”

These are not fighting words; they are the succinct utterances of the 16th surgeon general of the United States, backed by the research and review of dozens and dozens of researchers, academics and health professionals who cite more than 100 scientific sources for their statements.

Infuriating as it may be to blinkered partisans who believe that sexual health is a political issue, the report is devoid of advocacy but full of urgency and concern. It is that rare governmental text that acknowledges, in real time and with no nonsense, the fears and wishes of its citizenry. It manages to respect parents without picking political favorites, address adolescents without condescending blather and view all sexual humans without judgment.

If David Satcher is removed from his post, it will be our duty to take up the battle, demanding, with this report as our primary weapon, that his vision be followed. As he points out in the cover letter of this report: “Doing nothing is unacceptable.”

: Jennifer Foote Sweeney, CMT, formerly a Salon editor, is a massage therapist in northern California, practicing on staff at the Institutes for Health and Healing in San Francisco and Larkspur, and on the campuses of the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley. More Jennifer Foote Sweeney

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Solving America’s teen sex problem

The Dutch have dramatically reduced adolescent pregnancies, abortions and STDs. What do they know that we don't?

By Thomas Rogers

A detail from the cover of "Not Under My Roof"

Topics:Sex, Sex Education, Parenting

When 16-year-old Natalie first started dating her boyfriend, her mother did something that would mortify most American parents: She took her to the doctor’s office to get her contraceptives. Her mother wasn’t weirded out by the fact that her teen daughter was about to have sex — in fact, she fully supported it. She merely wanted to make sure that she was doing it safely, and responsibly. A couple of months later, when it finally happened, her parents were totally accepting. As her father put it, “sixteen is a beautiful age” to lose your virginity.

If that seems like an unfamiliar attitude toward sex and parenting, it might have something to do with the fact that Natalie’s parents aren’t American — they’re Dutch. They are one of dozens of Dutch families interviewed by Amy T. Schalet, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, in her new book, “Not Under My Roof.” Schalet’s book compares the sexual attitudes of American and Dutch parents and her findings are nothing short of staggering: Whereas most American parents panic about the idea of allowing their kids to have sex with other kids under their roof, for many Dutch parents, it’s not only fine — it’s responsible parenting.

As Schalet’s extensively researched, fascinating work shows, the Netherlands’ radically different approach to sex and child-rearing has managed to radically decrease levels of teen pregnancy, abortion and sexual infections. It has fostered closer relationships between teenagers and their parents, and helped make teenagers’ first times far more pleasurable. “Not Under My Roof” is a startling wake-up call about America’s largely misguided attitudes toward sex and growing up.

Salon spoke to Schalet over the phone about the sexual revolution, America’s “slut” problem and how the new generation is changing our attitudes toward sex.

As you point out in the book, the statistical differences between American and Dutch teens when it comes to sex is pretty staggering.

Yes. The pregnancy rate is about four times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands and abortion rates are about twice as high. HIV rates are about three times higher. Growing up in the Netherlands, I didn’t actually know of any teenagers who became pregnant as teens. Whenever I say that to Americans they’re always very surprised.

But as you point out in the book, it’s not because American adolescents are having way more sex — it’s because the culture around sex is so different, and it’s especially ironic because people think America was so utterly transformed by the sexual revolution. Why didn’t those cultural changes filter down to the way we think about teens and sex?

That’s the million-dollar question. When the sexual revolution did happen [in the Netherlands], contraception was made very widely and easily available, including to teenagers so the teenage pregnancy rate really dropped. In the Netherlands, there’s the belief that young people are capable of recognizing when they’re ready and self-regulating as opposed to the notion that they have raging hormones that are out of control. There’s the belief that young people can fall in love and that their sexuality is anchored in relationships so it becomes easier to accept and normalize relationships from about 16 to 17 onwards. And finally there’s been an attempt on the part of Dutch parents and the authorities to say, “This is happening, and we need to keep it from being secretive. We need to be able to keep control and be able to recommend that young people use contraception and see who they’re becoming involved with.”

That seems counterintuitive to many Americans because they associate “sexual freedom” with things going totally awry. In the U.S., there was a strong counterreaction to the changes of the 1960s and ’70s. The religious right organized, and sexuality, especially teen sexuality, became a political issue. But regular people also feel the same way and think that teen sexuality is out of control. In the U.S. there’s a belief that, when it comes to sex, girls and boys are engaged in a battle instead of a relationship and there’s resistance to the idea that boys and girls can both feel both love and lust. It’s partly the result of the American emphasis on individualism that suggests that to become an adult, you have to first separate from your family and become completely self-reliant before you’ve earned the right to engage in sex. That makes it harder for parents to then integrate it into the family in the way Dutch parents have.

As you mention in the book, in America we tend to separate sex and love — and don’t believe that teenagers are able to associate the two. Why do you think that is?

To me that’s always very fascinating. When I did interviews in the U.S., I was really struck when parents would say, “Well, teenagers think they’re in love” and they would hold up their hands with quotation marks. The U.S. is very strongly tied to the model of marriage. We don’t want 15- or 16- or 17-year-olds to marry but we don’t think a relationship is love unless it’s the one and only, the person you’re going to marry forever. It’s also tied to individualism, because if you believe that intimate relationships are threatening to young people’s developments, and that you have to do things on your own first and then settle down, then everything you do before settling down is not going to be about love. And yet, young people do form relationships that are very important to them. They look different from adult relationships but they’re real relationships a lot of the time.

As you point out in the book, there’s an emphasis in the Netherlands on making sure that a teenager’s first time isn’t just safe — but actually fun and pleasurable. That seems too alien to the way we learn about losing your virginity.

I think that’s right. It is so difficult in the American context to say that a first sexual experience should be positive and pleasurable and one that one feels ready for personally, physically and emotionally. In the chapter about the Dutch parents, a father tells his daughter that she should never do it unless she has the desire for it. He acknowledges that his daughter might actually want it, and that is a very difficult thing in the U.S. context for a lot of parents to do, especially for girls.

It’s fascinating that the “slut” label, as you point out in the book, doesn’t exist in the same way in the Netherlands as it does here. Here a lot of girls get called a slut simply for having a desire for sex.

It exists, but even in the way it exists it’s much milder, and it’s really not about sex per se, it’s about the number of partners and especially the frequency or speed with which one would go from one to another. So if a young woman is in a relationship and she wants it and she enjoys it, that’s fine. I find this to be one of the most fascinating aspects of American culture that that remains so unspeakable.

In pop culture, being a slut is considered either despicable or something to aggressively celebrate (i.e., the recent SlutWalks). But there isn’t much in between, especially for adolescent women, that just treats female sexuality as normal and healthy.

I didn’t see the first episode of [the new TV show] “Suburgatory,” but the premise is that the father finds condoms in the drawer of his daughter and so they move to the suburbs to avoid sex. The girl is 16 or 17, and so there’s this idea that a father fulfills his parental duty by removing sex altogether. Of course he doesn’t succeed, and she ends up making out in the locker room or wherever. But I agree there are very few pop cultural models of young women having positive sexual experiences that are not in some way a cause of drama.

Many of the American parents in the book have a kind of hilarious double standard. They are fine with their kids having sex outside of their home, but as soon as it happens inside their house they freak out.

I don’t want to spoof it too much even though it does look silly. There’s really no narrative for American parents to draw on to understand a positive sexual development on the part of their children and how they’re supposed to relate to it. So the not-under-my-roof idea is the dominant understanding of what you do when you’re a responsible adult. So you do get situations where the mother knows her 17-year-old daughter’s boyfriend and that she’s on the pill but even though the mom knows she has sex with her boyfriend, the daughter is not allowed to be home with the door closed when the boyfriend is in her room.

What do you think can be done to American sexual education to change this?

I support comprehensive sex education. [laughs] I’m laughing because that’s the line everybody says, but I think that it’s important both in and of itself that young people learn about sexuality, contraception, relationships. I think there’s an absence of language about relationships [in sex ed] and that it should be integrated more into schools. Sex education, when done well, can help parents open up the conversation at home. In the U.S. this narrative gets created of “sex ed vs. the parents” as opposed to those two working in complementary fashion. Only half of American girls have had a conversation about contraception with their parents. In the Dutch case, one of the girls learns about the pill at school during what is called “relationship lessons” — yes, that’s really what it’s called — and she comes home and her mother explains that she also uses the pill.

In a lot of public health campaigns and even with clinicians there’s such an emphasis on the risk, risk, risk, risk, without an emphasis on this is what you can do, this is how you can exert agency. Where exactly do you go to get contraception, and condoms? But I do see a lot of parents who want to be doing things differently. I speak mainly to professionals but they also respond as parents, and they’re really looking for a better way of recognizing that young people have real emotions, and to stay connected to teenagers during their adolescent developmental phase.

It’s really hard not to think that things are so much better in the Netherlands after reading the book. It almost seems utopian.

It’s not utopian. There is such an emphasis on relationships that sometimes the differences in power between girls and boys do not get as much attention as they perhaps deserve. Part of what goes on in the Dutch families is a system of control. It can be cozy, but it also can be a little claustrophobic. I think some of the American models of being able to deal with cultural difference within a society are a good thing, and I like to think that cultures can learn from each other.

American culture does seem to be changing, though, in its attitudes toward marriage. Gay marriage is becoming more common and accepted, and straight people are staying single longer.

I definitely think that the acceptance of gay marriage is a very positive development. I also see a shift among youth, away from the kind of narrow definitions of what is intimacy or acceptable intimacy. I think there’s a whole new generation of people that’s not saddled with the old antagonisms that came out of the 1960s. When I teach classes at the University of Massachussetts, students say, “We are the generation that will change things in the U.S. just like they changed in the Netherlands.” There’s a real interest among young parents in handling sexuality better than it was in their family. We need to figure out how to stop falling back on the marriage-only model and we need a model for a good relationship that isn’t necessarily for life but that still involves mutual respect, and honesty, and mutual obligation as well as enjoyment and pleasure.

: Thomas Rogers is Salon's deputy arts editor. More Thomas Rogers

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A sex guide for today’s girls

In an age of Pussycat Dolls and porn, Jaclyn Friedman wants to help young women find an authentic sexual identity

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Jaclyn Friedman (Credit: Mandy Lussier)

Topics:Sex, Love and Sex, Sex Education, Feminism

Jaclyn Friedman is the sex educator of many parents’ nightmares. She’s also just the teacher young women need.

The 39-year-old activist has written about looking for hookups on Craigslist’s Casual Encounters, expounded on the challenges of “fucking while feminist” and passionately advocated for the “Slut Walk” movement. But regardless of whatever parental discomfort her raunchy CV may inspire, she’s written just the sex-advice book that teenage girls – and plenty of their elders — desperately need right now: “What You Really, Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety.”

Too many books in this genre promise certain drive-your-man-wild tricks, or they take a side in the politicized debate over hookup culture. Friedman instead has one thing on her agenda: Getting girls to explore and embrace their own authentic sexual identities without shame, fear or guilt. Instead of arguing for empowerment through one-night stands or, conversely, abstinence, she leaves it up to young women to decide what it is that’s best for them. But she also offers guidance along the way, urging them to critically examine the social pressures and media messages that have shaped their understandings of sexiness, sexual fulfillment and love.

The book is filled with writing exercises that prompt readers to reflect on everything from body image to sexual assault. It’s essentially a guide to writing one’s own personal sexual manifesto. This is a rare thing in a culture filled with generic, passive models of female sexuality – from pop offerings like the Pussycat Dolls to hardcore porn stars. A heartbreaking example of just how sorely this is needed came last week when the “sex tape” of a 14-year-old girl in Baltimore, Md., went viral — her boyfriend allegedly threatened to leave her unless she filmed it.

I spoke to Friedman by phone about her own sexual mission statement, how to help women protect themselves without “blaming the victim” and why she’s still struggling with criticisms of Slut Walk.

In the book you recommend that women write a sexual mission statement. What’s yours?

Wow, well I don’t have it in front of me verbatim, but it’s basically to maximize pleasure and connection and minimize harm and risk. I mean, there’s like an asterisk on every word there, but, yeah, my sexual mission statement is that sex is a wonderful and marvelous thing and the more we can do to pull away the risks and bad things and maximize the good stuff, the better.

You write in the book that you’ve learned that being wanted isn’t the same as wanting. I’ve often heard female desire described as the want to be wanted. Obviously that’s too simplistic, but I wonder if there is some element of biological truth that actually stands separate from the whole mess of socialization and cultural messaging.

I think it’s impossible to suggest that we can separate nature from nurture when it comes to sexuality. So I don’t think that question is knowable and I don’t think it’s useful, because each individual person is gong to fall somewhere else on the spectrum. The variation among individuals within the gender is always going to be much wider than the variation between genders. So I don’t think coming to any conclusions about something that’s biologically true for all women about sex is useful.

It’s awfully hard to know where the cultural messaging starts and where the “real you” begins.

Well, like I said in the book, it’s actually impossible to know that. There is no real you that’s separate from all the ways that we as individuals have been influenced as we’ve grown up and gone through the world. The idea of some sort of sexual blank slate that you can get back down to and start from is a really harmful idea, because it’s impossible to achieve.

The idea is to figure out what are the ways you have been influenced, which one of those influences are bringing you pleasure and happiness, and which one of those are hurting you or keeping you from experiencing pleasure and connection.

I know so many young women who identify as feminist and feel very conflicted about some of what really does do it for them because they feel like it’s politically incorrect.

That makes me so sad! No one speaks for feminism writ large, but my feminism says that any one sex act is no more empowering than the next. There’s nothing inherently degrading about any sex act. It’s all about how both people involved are approaching it. On the flip side, there’s nothing inherently empowering about any sex act. I think people sometimes misunderstand my work and think I’m advocating that everyone go out and have casual sex, as though that would be empowering for everyone. What I want is to help women create a sexuality for themselves that is centered around what works for them.

This discussion about active and passive female desire makes me think of Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs.” I wonder, how do we give young women feedback on the sorts of “Girls Gone Wild” antics that she writes about and express that there may be truer, more authentic and more rewarding forms of sexual expression without casting value judgments or invalidating their process of experimentation?

The last part of that question is the most important, I think, which is about experimentation. It’s a really great question, and it’s one of the core questions that the book is trying to answer. The reality is that we have to trust women, we even have to trust young women. Instead of telling women, “This is a productive way to express your sexuality and this is a degrading way to express your sexuality,” we have to equip women with the tools to assess risk and reward, and then let women make their own choices.

At the same time, you might believe this is really doing it for you right now, then learn more about yourself as you go, and then you’re forever on a “Girls Gone Wild” film, or what have you, and you’ve signed all your rights away without understanding them, and you only were paid with a T-shirt. That’s why I always think the focus should be on the people exploiting female sexuality, and sexualizing women. We shouldn’t tell young women, “You only think you want that, but we know better.” Who knows? Maybe we’re right when we think that, maybe we’re wrong about this particular young woman. What we want to do is work toward a world where she’s protected from exploitation while she experiments. That’s why I blame Joe Francis, and not the young women who participate. Which is where Ariel Levy and I part ways.

As such a strong supporter of Slut Walk, what did you make of criticisms of it?

It seems there are two different schools of criticism, one that is pretty legitimate and that I’m seriously still grappling with, which is about the ways in which the origins of the walk and the ways that its been put into practice can be exclusionary to women of color. That’s a complicated and serious issue that I don’t have an answer to.

At the end of the day, though, it got a lot of great coverage. I spoke at the Boston Slut Walk and was interviewed and what did I see? I saw the Boston Herald, a notoriously conservative newspaper, Yahoo News and Time magazine publishing all these pieces that really understood what was happening. They said, “These women are marching like this because they don’t want to be blamed for rape, regardless of what they’re wearing.” I feel like if the Boston Herald got the message, then the message was not that unclear.

Speaking of victim-blaming, it seems difficult to dispense advice on how women can be safe while also not giving the impression that it’s all women’s responsibility. How do you strike that balance?

It comes back to that issue of teaching women how to assess risk for themselves, instead of setting up rules based on mythology like “don’t walk around wearing skirts.” There’s no evidence whatsoever that what a woman is wearing increases or decreases her chances of being assaulted. What we know from actual research is that sexual predators pick victims that seem like they won’t fight back. It’s not about them being turned on. So I think all of that advice often comes from people who are well-meaning but it’s just not factually supported. So I think we need to give women advice on how to find real information.

Let’s talk about your essay “My Sluthood, Myself.” One thing that really resonated powerfully for me is your emphasis on the importance of getting support from other women. Why is that so important and why is that support so hard to come by?

It’s hard to come by because we are taught to divide and conquer and we’re taught that out of fear, right? We’re taught that if we’re “good girls,” bad things won’t happen to us. So we have developed a social structure in which we distance ourselves from bad girls. It gives a false feeling of being safer. That insidious fear based on falsehood is very dangerous. In the book, over and over again, I talk about the terrible trio which are shame, blame and fear. They’re a tool used not only to keep us separated from our own sexuality and our own sexual pleasure but also from each other.

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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Is porn ruining our love lives?

It's destroying Cindy Gallop's romps with men raised on smut. Now she's calling for sexual re-education

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Cindy Gallop, creator of "Make Love Not Porn" (Credit: Ioulex)

Topics:Sex, Sex Education, Love and Sex

Cindy Gallop has intimate experience with how porn is changing sex. That isn’t because she’s a member of the so-called porn generation — but because she sleeps with younger men who are.

The 51-year-old isn’t afraid to admit it, either — in fact, it was her opener when giving a TED Talk two years ago about her business venture, the website Make Love Not Porn. A video of the successful British entrepreneur, with her angular blond bob, tight leather pants and stilettos, giving the raunchy four-minute speech at the venerable conference quickly went viral. The popularity of the clip wasn’t just a result of her cheeky frankness, but because she articulated something about our modern sexual experience that is either talked about in a moralizing manner or not at all — that the proliferation of porn is profoundly changing the way that we have sex.

With little concern for the tame, academic tone of the conference, she began calling out pornographic myths — like that all women enjoy being on the receiving end of the adult industry’s celebrated “money shot.” “There’s an entire generation growing up that believes what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex,” she said, adding that this miseducation is only exacerbated by our “puritanical double-standards culture where people believe that a teen abstinence campaign will actually work, where parents are too embarrassed to have conversations about sex with their children and where educational institutions are terrified of being politically incorrect if they pick up those conversations.”

This week, the topic of porn’s impact was raised again in response to a survey reporting that young Italian men reported performance problems related to excessive porn viewing. [Ed. note: Some have called the survey's merit into question. See NSFW analysis here.] So, I decided to give Gallop a call — at her all-black Manhattan “bachelorette pad,” which was formerly the men’s locker room at the historic YMCA — to talk about smut-induced erectile dysfunction, the sex talks parents should be having with their kids and what she really means by “make love not porn.”

What are your thoughts about this survey’s claims about porn’s effect on young men?

When I talk about “Make Love Not Porn,” I always have to explain that the impact of porn as default, stand-in sex education is actually much more fundamental and insidiously ingrained than a lot of people have ever thought. So, in that context, this report doesn’t surprise me at all, because I observe in my own personal experience a number of things playing out that are very much in line with what the report talks about.

Can you elaborate a bit for those who haven’t seen your TED talk or read the e-book version of it?

I’m 51, I’m old enough to remember back in the day when the guys I slept with were extremely keen that I came, that I came first, that I came at least once, if not several times. These days, I don’t come and it’s not even remarked upon. Bear in mind that I date utterly lovely younger men – but this is simply what has been imprinted on them. Because 99.9 percent of all mainstream porn is made by men for men, the entire raison d’être of every single mainstream porn film is to get the man off. As a result, an entire generation of guys and girls is growing up believing that the be-all and end-all of sex is to get the man off.

It always amuses me when people talk about “watching porn” as if it’s like watching any other form of entertainment — because no one’s “watching” porn, they’re wanking. If you are watching several hours of porn per day and night and you are wanking consistently all the way through that, then men can get so sensitized to the way that they bring themselves off that they can no longer [come with a woman]. This is something that I’d observed myself and had corroborated by Dr. Ian Kerner, who runs the website “Good In Bed.” He calls this “idiosyncratic masturbatory syndrome” — a number of his patients struggle with the fact that they can’t come through normal intercourse.

It’s funny that porn is geared toward men, it’s made for them, and yet it can have this negative impact on them.

Yes, let me also say, “Make Love Not Porn” is a gender-equal proposition, because what is being imprinted on men is also being imprinted on women. I talk to 20-something guys who say to me, “My girlfriends are doing everything they see in porn and it’s getting in the way of the real connection.” Girls go into the experience having no idea how to really get fulfillment for themselves, having an enormously difficult time articulating that and believing that their focus has to be to get the man off otherwise they’re not good in bed.

The reason I say that what I’m combating is not porn but a lack of dialogue around it is because if you boiled my entire message down to one thing it would be purely and simply: Talk about it. We all get enormously vulnerable when we get naked. Sexual egos are very fragile and people find it bizarrely difficult to talk about sex with the people they’re having it with while they’re actually having it — because you’re terrified of hurting another person’s feelings or derailing the entire episode. At the same time, you do want to please your partner, so you seize the cues from anyplace you can and if the only cues you have are from porn, then those are the ones you’ll take.

Somewhere I read that you consider yourself not anti-porn but anti-bad porn. Is that right?

Well, I’m pro-porn generally. I don’t judge what is good and bad porn. The issue I’m tackling is not porn, it’s the complete lack of an open, healthy dialogue in our society around sex and porn. Most parents are way too embarrassed to teach their children about sex. Now, back in the day that meant having a conversation about the birds and the bees, about the sheer logistics of what happens. Today, the conversation a parent should have with their children is even less likely to happen, because today the conversation would have to be: “So, darling, I know you’re already online and I know you’ve probably already accessed a whole bunch of Internet porn sites. What I need to say to you is that, actually, a lot of women don’t like being choked and spat on and tied up and gang banged.” No parent is ever going to have that conversation. The need to create an open healthy dialogue around this is even greater now.

This makes me think of the attempts, especially in the U.K., to protect children from pornography (which I’ve written about here). It’s funny, we’re not very willing to talk about sex, but we’re also attempting to censor this default resource for information on sex.

It’s such a wrongheaded move, Tracy, because the answer is not censorship. I completely concur that children should not be seeing these things, but anyone who sets out to try and protect children, block them and censor porn is on a hiding to nothing. The biological chemistry of human sexual desire has outlived all attempts to censor and repress it and always will. If anybody really wants to, the way to address this is to be open and healthy and talk about it — with children, with adults and in the media generally.

We’re seeped in porn and yet we’re not willing to talk about it. How do we begin that conversation?

Well, clearly, what I’m planning on doing is absolutely designed to stimulate that in a very interesting way. I believe in order at all to be effective you have to make the dialogue around this socially acceptable and socially sharable. I believe you have to take all of the dynamics that are out there in social media and apply them to sex, and that’s what I’m planning to do. Everything we’re talking about and everything this latest survey reports on is so endemic that we really have to tackle it in ways that are designed to be equally endemic within popular culture.

With “Make Love Not Porn,” I’m tackling the single biggest impact technology is currently having on the most fundamental aspect of human behavior, which is our sexuality. It actually informs everything about how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about other people, our relationships, our lives and our happiness.

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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A sex ed exam — for adults

D.C. is introducing standardized tests about s-e-x in public schools. Can you pass our version for grown-ups?

By Tracy Clark-Flory

(Credit: iStockphoto/alexskopje)

Topics:Sex, Sex Education

Last week, news broke that Washington, D.C., will require kids in public schools to complete a standardized sex ed test — the first of its kind in the nation. The announcement sparked controversy, per the usual, as well as bad jokes about “extra credit requirements.” Meanwhile, I was left wondering in all seriousness how many adults could actually pass just such an exam.

So, I decided to call upon some experts in the fields of sex research and education to help devise a multiple-choice exam for grown-ups, one that incorporates the key knowledge they find most lacking in the real world — but without being a total snooze. After all, you’re busy adults, and some of you no doubt find it difficult enough to make time for actual sex. I hope this will be less a realization of your lingering college exam nightmares than a fun challenge and, by gosh, a learning experience.

Before we begin, allow me to introduce you to my co-quizmistress, Debby Herbenick. She’s a sex educator at the Kinsey Institute and associate director of the Center for Sexual Health Promotion, and she was generous enough to let me pilfer questions from her books “Because It Feels Good” and the upcoming “Read My Lips: A Complete Guide to the Vagina and Vulva.” Carol Queen, Good Vibrations’ staff sexologist, and Heather Corinna, creator of the teen sex advice website Scarleteen, also offered some input from the sex-ed trenches. Thank you’s all around.

Now, (stylus) pencils out!

1) A paraphilia is:

a. A fetish for parachuting
b. An incurable sexually transmitted infection
c. A clinical category of sexual disorders
d. A word I just made up to sound smart

2) Abstinence-only education:

a. Delays first intercourse
b. Reduces rates of teen pregnancy
c. Reduces rates of STIs
d. All of the above
e. None of the above — and yet Congress has spent over $1.5 billion on it

3) What is the average duration of heterosexual intercourse?

a. Less than a minute
b. 13 minutes
c. 8 minutes
d. 25 minutes

4) Roughly how many women can orgasm from vaginal penetration alone?

a. 10 percent
b. 20 percent
c. 60 percent
d. All of them, they just haven’t met Mr. Right

5) Non-human animals have been observed doing all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Group sex
b. Same-sex sexual behavior
c. Making dildo-like objects
d. Oral sex
e. “Except” nothing — they’ve done all of the above and then some. Uncivilized animals.

6) What infection is NOT included in most STI screenings?

a. Chlamydia
b. Gonorrhea
c. Herpes
d. HIV

7) How many men have faked orgasm?

a. 10 percent
b. 25 percent
c. 40 percent
d. None — dudes can’t fake it and don’t have to

A woman may experience orgasm as a result of sensory information from which of the following nerves:

a. Pudendal nerve
b. Pelvic nerve
c. Hypogastric nerve
d. Vagus nerve
e. All of the above

9) Which is generally the most pleasure-prone part of a man’s penis?

a. The underside of the glans
b. The top side of the penile shaft
c. The head
d. It’s all the same

10) Which of the following is true about marital satisfaction?

a. It generally decreases after you have a baby together
b. It all goes to hell after the baby’s born
c. It is usually not affected after a couple has a baby together

11) What percent of married adults are largely satisfied with their sexual partner?

a. 54 percent
b. 64 percent
c. 94 percent
d. 0 percent. Married couples don’t have sex

12) Which of the following can reduce the effectiveness of oral contraceptives?

a. Female orgasms
b. Antibiotics
c. Antidepressants
d. All of the above

13) Stop reading, Mom. Approximately what percent of heterosexual women and men in the U.S. have had anal sex?

a. 10 percent
b. 15 percent
c. Trick question! Only gay men have anal sex
d. 25 percent

14) How long does it usually take for symptoms of HIV to appear?

a. Two weeks
b. Six months
c. Two years
d. Over a decade

15) How many women and men feel preoccupied with their sexual performance?

a. 5 percent of women, 10 percent of men
b. 15 percent of women, 15 percent of men
c. 30 percent of women, 50 percent of men
d. 0 percent of women (all they have to do is lie there), 0 percent of men (what’s there to worry about?)

16) A person who has oral herpes (cold sores) can pass the herpes virus to a partner while performing oral sex on them.

a. True
b. False

17) Among young, healthy men who have difficulties getting or keeping an erection, the cause is most often related to:

a. Erectile dysfunction
b. Performance anxiety
c. Peyronie’s disease
d. Phimosis

18) Approximately what percent of couples have experienced sexual problems?

a. 10 to 20 percent
b. 32 to 40 percent
c. 57 to 70 percent
d. 78 to 95 percent

19) Which of the following lubricants can be used safely with latex condoms:

a. Silicone-based lubricants
b. Water-based lubricants
c. Oil-based lubricants
d. All of the above
e. A and B only

20) How many U.S. states grant same-sex marriage licenses?

a. 6
b. 4
c. 10
d. None

21) What is a “gender identity”?

a. It dictates whom a person is sexually attracted to
b. It is a person’s inner sense of maleness and/or femaleness
c. It is your biological sex
d. All of the above

22) Roughly how many men and women have never masturbated?

a. 2 percent of men and 25 percent of women
b. 10 percent of men and 20 percent of women
c. 1 percent of men and 15 percent of women
d. 5 percent of men and 11 percent of women

23) Which is the fastest-growing group of people with HIV in the U.S.?

a. Homosexuals
b. Men who have sex with men
c. African-American women
d. Gay Caucasian men

24) What is the most-visited porn site on the Internet?

a. LiveJasmin.com
b. YouPorn.com
c. XTube.com
d. Spankwire.com

25) Which acts as an abortifacient?

a. Plan B
b. RU-486
c. IUDs
d. All of the above

26) The HPV vaccine can reduce the risk of:

a. Genital warts
b. Cervical cancer
c. Anal cancer
d. All of the above

27) A woman’s virginity can be proven by:

a. An intact hymen
b. Bleeding during first intercourse
c. Both A and B
d. Nothing — it can’t be proven with physical evidence

Pencils down! Now, for the answer key:

1) c; 2) e; 3) c; 4) b; 5) e; 6) c; 7) b; e; 9) a; 10) a; 11) c; 12) b; 13) a; 14) d; 15) c; 16) a; 17) b; 18) d; 19) e; 20) a; 21) b; 22) d; 23) c; 24) a; 25) b; 26) d; 27) d

If you scored between:

18 and 27, you go to the head of the class. Email me and I just might send you a Certificate of Sexual Proficiency.

8 and 17, you’re probably Canadian.

Zero and seven, you likely landed on this page by Googling “free porn” — sorry to disappoint. (See: The answers to Question 24 above.)

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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The world’s sex ed toys

Inspired by China's anatomically correct dolls, we've rounded up tools used around the globe for "the talk"

By Tracy Clark-Flory

Topics:Sex Education, Love and Sex, Children, Sex

I was confused to find that a Huffington Post article about anatomically correct dolls used to teach sex ed to kindergartners in China came with the warning: “POTENTIALLY UNSETTLING PHOTOS BELOW.” My goodness! I wondered: What kind of sick lesson plan for 5-year-olds would require an all-caps warning for an adult audience? I had the same reaction a while back when I caught a CNN segment about similar dollies being used to teach little ones in Indonesia about the birds and the bees. It was preceded by the warning: “This report includes graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised.”

: Tracy Clark-Flory is a staff writer at Salon. Follow @tracyclarkflory on Twitter. More Tracy Clark-Flory

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A sex ed exam — for adults

D.C. is introducing standardized tests about s-e-x in public schools. Can you pass our version for grown-ups?

The world’s sex ed toys

Inspired by China's anatomically correct dolls, we've rounded up tools used around the globe for "the talk"

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