Organization Review: The Foundation for Sex Positive Culture

The Foundation for Sex-Positive Culture is one of my favorite organizations that I came across while doing research for this blog. The Foundation is located in Seattle, Washington and was founded in 2007, and their mission is to “promote the many ways sex is beneficial through education, outreach, the arts, advocacy, and research programs that serve the public.” I think this is really important because there are so many sex-negative views that are perpetuated in our society that it is crucial that organizations such as this one promote sex-positive views through multiple mediums in order to reach as many people as possible.

The foundation hosts a very wide variety of regular monthly events. These events include things such as erotic massage, yoga, nude drawing classes, erotic writing classes, erotic hypnosis, and support and social groups for just about every type of kink one can imagine. Alongside these events, the foundation also offers workshops on sex techniques every month. One of the aspects of this organization that I found particularly interesting is that it has huge library of over 10,000 books all relating to sex-positivity, called the Pacific Northwest Library for Sex Positive Culture. The biggest event they hold is the internationally recognized Seattle Erotic Art Festival, which was founded in 2002.

The Foundation was born out of its sister organization, called the Center for Sex Positive Culture, which was founded in 1999. The Center, unlike the Foundation, is membership based, meaning that people need to be a member of the organization in order to attend the more than 100 events that are put on every month; however, the website states that any Foundation events that are hosted at the Center are open to everyone regardless of membership status. As of right now more than 14,000 people are members of the Center, and many more are involved with the Foundation.

Both of these organizations, aside from hosting their own events, also participate in national conferences on sexuality, radio talk shows, forums at colleges and universities, and Seattle festivities, such as Pride and Capitol Hill Block Party. They also are both run by an executive board of several members, but operate primarily on volunteer efforts and donations since they are nonprofit organizations.

Looking at their website I was struck by the wide diversity of sexualities that the foundation incorporates into its events and workshops, and this really made me aware of just how diverse human sexuality really is. It is so fantastic that organizations such as this exist so that virtually everyone can find positive information and resources to help them freely explore and embrace their sexuality.

Works Referenced

About the Foundation for Sex Positive Culture: http://thefspc.org/about/

About the Center for Sex Positive Culture: http://thefspc.org/center/

Resources

Organizations:

Center for Sex-Positive Culture: http://www.sexpositiveculture.org/

Planned Parenthood: http://www.plannedparenthood.org/

The Foundation for Sex-Positive Culture: http://thefspc.org/

The Pride Foundation: http://www.pridefoundation.org/

The Kinsey Institute: http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/

Coalition for Positive Sexuality: http://www.positive.org/Home/index.html

Books:

The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, By: Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt

Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, By: Inga Muscio

Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture, By: Carol Queen

I Love Female Orgasm: An Extraordinary Orgasm Guide, By: Dorian Solot

Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving, By: Betty Dodson

Outside Event: Dialogues on Gender

A few weeks ago I attended an event called “Dialogues on Gender”, in which a group of about 25 people gathered to discuss the issues surrounding gender in our society. As a Women Studies major, this is something that is often talked about in my classes, and therefore I feel very comfortable discussing things such as the social construction of gender and the issues surrounding the dualistic view of gender in our society. Because of this I went into this event expecting to hear everyone else discussing these topics in much the same way as I have been learning about them, but this wasn’t the case at all. The majority of the people who attended the event had never critically analyzed gender, and had never heard many of the terms pertaining to gender that I now assume everyone is familiar with. It was really interesting to hear people talk about gender and gender roles without using a Women Studies lens because it allowed me to see how my education has altered my perceptions of these topics.

During this discussion one of the things we talked about was the difference between sex, gender identity, and gender expression. After having the definitions of these terms drilled into me over and over I was really surprised when people would offer up completely different, and in my opinion incorrect, definitions of them. And I was even more surprised when people would argue with the explanation for these terms that I gave based on what I have been learning in my classes. The definitions that I have been taught make complete sense to me, so I had a hard time understanding why others in the group found fault with them.

One really interesting part of this event was that there were several men there from different parts of the world – Africa, India, and the Middle East (I’m not sure exactly which country) – and the ways in which each of them discussed gender reflected the differing perspectives of each of their cultures. For instance, the man from Africa shared that in his family it was always his father that took on the role of the emotional caregiver, rather than his mother. Another example is that the Indian man who was there stated that he feels that men should communicate with women differently (more formally) than they would with other men in order to be certain that nothing sexual is implied when speaking to a person of the opposite sex. I’m familiar with the ways in which gender is viewed in the United States, so it was interesting to learn about some subtle differences in gender roles, perceptions, and expectations in other countries.

At one point we were discussing raising children in a more gender neutral way and one of the American men, who seemed to fit into the stereotype of a frat boy pretty well, was really bothered by this. He kept stating that there’s nothing wrong with men being masculine and women being feminine, despite the fact that multiple people in the group tried to explain to him that we weren’t saying that there is anything wrong with this. Since these ideas, that men are masculine and women are feminine, are so prevalent in our society I found it really interesting to see this reflected in his reaction to the notion of trying to breakdown these gender roles and expectations. I believe that these gender roles are enforced by homophobia. The gender roles for men are designed to create a masculine persona, and, since gay men are stereotypically seen as feminine, men are required to conform to these roles and put up this masculine front in order to assert their heterosexuality, because nothing could be worse than being perceived as gay. The same goes for women – if women don’t conform to traditional female gender roles and present themselves in a feminine manner then they are often perceived as lesbians; therefore, women will conform to these roles simply to assert their heterosexuality – this phenomenon is often called “lesbian baiting.”

Now, how does this relate to sex-positive feminism? Well, first off, society’s views of sexuality are very gendered – men are expected to take the active, dominant sexual role and want sex all the time, while women are expected to take the passive, submissive sexual role and never desire sex, but at the same time they’re supposed to be sexually available to men. This double bind of women being expected to both remain chaste and pure, but also be sexually available to men is often called the virgin/whore dichotomy. As Judith Lorber states in her essay, The Social Construction of Gender, “Emergent sexuality is shaped by heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and sadomasochistic patterns that are gendered – different for girls and boys, and for women and men – so that sexual statuses reflect gender statuses” (Lorber 7). And as Kate Millet discusses in her book, Sexual Politics, because of the power imbalance between genders, there is also a power imbalance in sexuality, and “trying to achieve sexual equality” when women and men are not equal in other aspects of life is difficult (Freedman 263). Both of these quotes demonstrate that sexuality is shaped by gender and that sexual roles and statuses reflect the power dynamics of gender differences.

As gender roles, perceptions, and expectations change, sexual roles, perceptions, and expectations for both men and women also change, as is demonstrated throughout the chapter on Sexualities, Identities, and Self-Determinism in No Turning Back. For this reason I found this event very interesting because in learning about how different people and cultures view gender, I was able to gain in sight into how they might also view sexuality.

Works Cited

Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine, 2002. Print.

Lorber, Judith. “Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender.” Paradoxes of Gender. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994. N. pag. Print.

Image Source: http://rainbowbruises.deviantart.com/art/A-Comic-About-Gender-294271029

Original Art

Note: this is a poem that I wrote during a 10 minute free-write so please don’t judge it too harshly – I realize that it’s not pretty. I’m not a poetry person, so I don’t know how to fix it, but I kinda like it so I thought I would include it here.

 

FREE

For those of us who do not quite fit

We are not this

We are not that

We are something in-between, outside

An other

Not sure who we are or what we want

Having no role models by which to mold ourselves.

We wander among the thises and the thats

Trying to shove ourselves into the mold of one or the other

Never comfortable, never right, never us.

Until we find the other others

We are not alone

We find that we can be whomever we choose

No longer obligated to be a this or a that

We are free

Free to be.

 

To me this represents that way that many people feel about their sexuality. We all see very specific models of what sexuality is supposed to look like for both heterosexual and homosexual people, but there are very rarely models for people who fall somewhere in between or even outside of this binary. Because of this the people who don’t quite fit into to either box of hetero or homosexuality often try to shove themselves into one of these boxes, because that is all that they know how to do. However, once people start talking about sexuality they discover that not everyone actually fits into these boxes and that people’s experiences with sexuality are actually very diverse. Once they realize this they feel freer to actually be who they want to be and express their true sexuality because they are no longer afraid that it is deviant or wrong.

Current News: Good Vibes Sex Summit

The Panelists and Keynote Speakers

Recently I read an article about the 2012 Good Vibrations Sex Summit in San Francisco on October 27th (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vanessa-pinto/good-vibrations-summit-20_b_2052834.html). Good Vibrations is a sex-positive, women-owned, women-oriented sex toy company in San Francisco and this was the first summit that they hosted, although they have hosted numerous other events during their 35 years of business. The speakers at the summit ranged from sexologist, Dr. Carol Queen, to Maggie Mayhem, a sex educator and porn star, to Yoseñio V. Lewis, a transman who educates people about the difficulties that trans* people face in regards to healthcare, and many more.

One of the things I liked most about the summit was the discussion on the media and its role in creating sex stereotypes. It is often talked about how the media can influence people’s perceptions of body image, but it’s less often discussed how the media can influence people’s ideas about sexuality and ways to have sex. Another thing that I enjoyed about the summit was that it was inclusive of multiple identities. From what I can learn from the article, there was a majority of white, middle-class, heterosexual speakers, but it did include a few people of color and LGBTQ individuals. These different intersections of identities can greatly impact one’s perception of an issue, and therefore it is extremely important that the summit included these diverse viewpoints in order to give a more inclusive look at the topic of sex-positivity.

These sex positive summits are extremely important because they bring in experts on sex-positivity from all over, as well as a crowd of people who are both knowledgeable about and interested in this topic. What this does is create a dialogue about the issues that were addressed between the speakers and the people who attended, and this dialogue can then be carried on after the summit is over, fostering more sex-positive conversations and knowledge all over.

Image Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/9/prweb9878385.htm

Film Review: The Vagina Monologues

The Vagina Monologues is one of my new favorite things. A play written by Eve Ensler that has been staged internationally and turned into an HBO film, The Vagina Monologues praises vaginas. It brings up topics such as sex, love, lust, rape, menstruation, masturbation, pubic hair, birth, orgasm, and virtually every other topic that could possibly be related to the vagina.

I think that one of the most important messages of the Vagina Monologues is that a woman’s vagina is a very beautiful and empowering part of her body, and she should love and respect it. These monologues also have the important purpose of simply normalizing the idea of talking about a one’s vagina openly. The more that things like this are talked about, the more comfortable people are talking about them.

The monologues really demonstrate the importance of women learning that their vaginas are beautiful and a source of empowerment and pleasure. When a woman grows up believing that her vagina is disgusting, ugly, smelly and something to be ashamed of she cannot have healthy, happy, and pleasurable sexual experiences. For instance, one of the stories that was told was about a woman who had grown up with a sense of shame about her vagina, and due to this she didn’t experience her first orgasm until she was 72 years old – an experience that brought her to tears. Another wonderful example of this was the story of a woman who had tried to ignore her vagina her whole life because she thought it was ugly, until she met a man named Bob. Bob loved vaginas, and when he and this woman had sex for the first time Bob spent hours simply looking at her vagina, telling her how beautiful it was. This was the first time she truly loved her vagina.

Anne Koedt, in her essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”, states that women have “been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men”, and she also disputes Freud’s idea that women experience orgasms vaginally instead of clitorally (Freedman 263). The work of women like Koedt helped to educate women and men about the facts about female sexuality, thus making women more able to claim and gain pleasure from their own sexuality.

Works Cited

Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine, 2002. Print.

Image Source: http://www.goldstar.com/events/santa-rosa-ca/the-vagina-monologues

The Sexy, Sex-Positive life of a Stimulating Sexologist

Carol Queen is a writer, speaker, educator, activist, feminist performance artist, sexologist, bisexual, and self-acclaimed whore.

Queen completed her undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Oregon in 1985. During the time that she was in Eugene she did a lot of work with the LGBT community. She helped found GAYouth, one of the first groups for lesbian and gay youth in the nation, worked as the director of the Gay and Lesbian student union at UofO, and was a member on the committee of Eugene Citizens for Human Rights during the Briggs Initiative/Anita Bryant years. Three years after graduating, in 1988, she worked as the director of education at the AIDS education and support project in Eugene.

Once she had completed her work in Eugene she returned to her hometown of San Francisco, California to obtain her doctorate in sexology from the Institute of Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. While she was working toward her doctorate she spent plenty of time outside of the classroom broadening her education by working at the Private Pleasures (peep-show) booth of the Lusty Lady Theater. In her book, Real Live Nude Girl, Queen states that she wanted this job because “I love to hear about different people’s sexual turn-ons. I revel in all our various stories and experiences. I’m a sexual anthropologist at heart…” (Queen 51). Aside from working as a peep-show girl, Queen has explored just about every other area of sex and sexuality possible – She attended, and later hosted, Jack-and-Jill-Off parties (safe-sex parties) and S/M parties; she has taken part in public “sex rituals” with Annie Sprinkle; worked as a call girl; and performed in explicit movies.

One of the things that Queen is most well known for is her work as a sex-educator. She is an owner and worker at Good Vibrations, a woman-focused retailer that sells high-quality, sex-positive products along with sex-positive and accurate information about sex. At Good Vibrations she directs Continuing Education for the staff, as well as offering educational workshops for customers. Along with her partner, Dr. Robert Lawrence, she organized the Center for Sex and Culture, which is a non-profit sexuality education center. She and Dr. Lawrence put on educational events and Carol Queen Workshops through the center, as well as travel around the U.S. to attend and speak at various sexuality conferences. Queen also commonly uses her own body and sexuality to educate others. She has allowed numerous doctors to perform pelvic exams on her in order to train them how to do it properly, and she has also created explicit educational videos of herself, that range from showing women how to properly use a vibrator to demonstrating safe and pleasurable anal penetration.

In her career as a writer she has written erotica, explicit memoirs, essays, analyses, reviews, as well as several books (See below). She also been the author of several columns including a sex and relationship advice column for Good Vibrations, an opinion column in the Spectator Magazine, and has previously written a column for Playboy Online.

To sum it all up, using the words of Inga Muscio: “Carol Queen fucking rules”.

Publications by Carol Queen:

– 5 Minute Erotica

– Best Bisexual Erotica

– Best Bisexual Erotica Volume 2

– The Leather Daddy and the Femme

– Sex Spoken Here: Stories from the Good Vibrations Erotic Reading Circle

– PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality

– Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture

– Switch Hitters: Lesbians Write Gay Male Erotica and Gay Men Write Lesbian Erotica

– Exhibitionism for the Shy

– Everything You Know About Sex is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to the Extremes of Human Sexuality (and everything in between)

– Best American Sex Writing 2005

Resources:

Muscio, Inga. Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. New York: Seal, 2002. Print.

Queen, Carol. “Meet Carol Queen.” CarolQueen.com. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.carolqueen.com/pages/queen.htm&gt;.

Queen, Carol. Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture. Pittsburgh: Cleis, 1997.

Image Source: http://www.weblo.com/celebrity/available/Carol_Queen/708060/

Breaking the Silence on Sexuality

In my opinion, sex-positivity is about breaking down the taboo around the discussion of sexuality. In order to do this we must, as the brilliant Audre Lorde says, ensure “that we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own” (Lorde 43). In other words, we mustn’t allow ourselves to use the idea that we can’t relate to people who are different from us as an excuse to avoid talking to and learning from and about others with whom we have no obvious commonalities. In order to apply this theory to sexuality we would need to openly discuss our own sexuality with others, regardless of whether or not we believe that their sexuality is similar to ours. If we are unable to discuss our true experiences and desires then people will be led to believe that everyone else is adhering to the heteronormative paradigm of sexuality, thus causing them to feel that there is something wrong with their own sexuality if it does not fit into this model. However, if we are able to openly discuss this then we will truly be able to come to an understanding of the diversity of human sexuality and liberate ourselves from the idea that there is a “normal” way to experience sexuality. Just like the song Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls says, “the less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine”, meaning that the less we try to find and fit in with the “right way” of doing something the happier and freer we will be.

Works Cited

Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” I Am Your Sister: Collected and  Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

History of Sex-Positive Feminism

It is not exactly clear where or when exactly sex-positivity started. Some argue that it began with Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s, or around the 1950s with Alfred Kinsey, or in the 1970s as part of the “free love” movement (Rad). I personally believe that the beginning of the sex-positive movement had a lot to do with the reaction to anti-pornography feminism in the early 1980s, a time commonly referred to as the “feminist sex wars”. Anti-pornography feminists saw pornography as a tool of patriarchy used to promote male dominance over, control of, and violence against women. This view came out of the lesbian separatist feminist movement, which had as one of its key concepts the notion that “patriarchal sexual relations are based on male power backed by force” (Willis 464). Due to their negative view of pornography many of these feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, advocated “the use of censorship and other forms of state repression in order to contain sexual violence against women” (Glick 22). However, not all feminists at this time felt this way. Sex-positive feminists hold the view that there is nothing wrong with any sort of sexual activity between consenting adults, and that sexual freedom is essential to women’s liberation. Therefore, they are opposed to any sort of legal or social efforts to control sexuality, including the censorship of pornography (Sex-Positive Feminism).

Several key contemporary sex-positive feminists are Carol Queen, Tristan Taormino, Betty Dodson, Susie Bright, Nina Hartley, Inga Muscio, Candida Royalle, Gayle Rubin, Annie Sprinkle, Diana Cage, and Ellen Willis. These women, as well as countless others, engage in sex-positivism activism in numerous ways, ranging from directing and acting in pornography specifically for women, writing books and articles that focus on women’s sexual pleasure, teaching sex-positive education seminars, etc. (Sex-Positive Feminism).

There are numerous definitions for sex-positivity today, but my favorite definition is by Carol Queen (and, yes I know that I included this definition in an earlier post, but it’s so perfect I had to use it again). It states that sex-positivity is “the cultural philosophy that understands sexuality as a potentially positive force in one’s life, and it can, of course, be contrasted with sex-negativity, which sees sex as problematic, disruptive, dangerous. Sex-positivity allows for and in fact celebrates sexual diversity, differing desires and relationships structures, and individual choices based on consent” (Queen).

Works Cited

Glick, Elisa. “Sex Positive: Feminism, Queer Theory, and the Politics of Transgression.” Feminist Review 64 (2000): n. pag. JSTOR. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1395699&gt;.

Queen, Carol and Comella, Lynn. (2008). The Necessary Revolution: Sex-Positive Feminism in the Post-Barnard Era. The Communication Review 11(3):274–291. doi:10.1080/10714420802306783.

Rad, Laura. “Sex-Positive…What Is That?” Strong, Sexy, and Stylish. N.p., 15 Feb. 2012. Web. 10 Nov. 2012. <http://www.strongsexystylish.com/2012/02/sex-positivewhat-is-that.html&gt;.

“Sex-Positive Feminism.” Wikipedia. N.p., 25 Oct. 2012. Web. 10 Nov. 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-positive_feminism&gt;.

Willis, Ellen. “Feminism, Morality, and Pornography.” In Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompsen, 460-467. New York City: Monthly Review, 1983.