In this blog entry, I want to talk about what I think about religion and the role I believe it plays in how we understand, negotiate, talk about and deal with sexuality as a global culture. I also want to push us to think about how intersectionality as a concept may be well positioned to enable us as scholars of sexuality to identify the multiple ways this particular concept may be used to help illuminate what exactly gets constituted when religion and sexuality intersect.

This past semester (fall ’09) I took a seminar with Patricia Hill Collins. The class was an advanced theory lecture on intersectionality. We debated the merits, tenets, origins, and future of the concept. We considered how it has influenced feminist theory and praxis inside of and outside of the academy. We wrestled with the idea of it being a heuristic device or a paradigm. And, despite many scholars whose research we read over the course of the semester, where it was routinely suggested that “intersectional theory” had been employed in their research we asked, is intersectionality a theory?

We talked about what intersectionality needs to do to be...

Today marks my last day as a member of the NSRC team. For the past year and a half , working on Sexualidades Latinas has been a wonderful learning experience for me. I never imagined that I would have the opportunity to work in this field and help disseminate the groundbreaking research that the National Centers on Sexuality engage in.

I really hope that Sexualidades Latinas has helped bridge the gap between Hispanic communities and their access to sexuality related content that has been present in the past. Our goal has always been to reach out to our public and inform them of the issues that are most relevant to them.

I want to thank all of the wonderful people who have contributed to the magazine and who have helped make my job such an enjoyable experience. It was a pleasure working with such a talented team and I am very grateful to all of you for helping make my time at NSRC truly rewarding.

I look forward to crossing paths again in the future.

All the best,

Alberto

This week I’ve been thinking about alternative models for sexuality education and I started wondering about how models of education might change if we reconceived of sexuality as a fundamental human right, rather than, or in addition to ideas of sexuality as ‘natural’ or ‘constructed’. Sexuality rights discourse for me places the conversation in a social science context and shifts the focus to include issues of pleasure, birth control, and access. If sexuality and sexuality education are rights, social institutions have a responsibility to people to provide for them.

After more conversations with folks, I started pushing at those ideas, thinking about the tension between rights and privileges. If we think about sexuality and sexuality education as a right, something that all people are entitled to by virtue of their existence, where are those rights placed within the current state of social inequalities? Who are able to exercise those rights, who are unable to? How do the various intersections of identities turn rights into privileges that are given and taken away by the state or other agencies?

Thinking about privilege then, and how sexuality education can be understood as a privilege, how does that change a model of sexuality education? I think the emphasis could focus on social justice and...

This semester I took a class titled Sexuality Education and Policy, taught by Chris White of the NSRC. We read about and analyzed many issues pertaining to sexuality education. Although for some time now I’ve been aware of the political battles occurring over sex education in the United States, I never engaged the matter the way I did over the last several months. One of the first things I grappled with in the class is the fact that as a child and adolescent I learned virtually nothing formally about sexuality in the classroom context. 

The sexuality education I received in secondary school was anything but comprehensive. One hour devoted to human anatomy and reproduction in biology class constituted my “sex ed” experience. The female and male diagrams used by my teacher to point out bodily structures like sex organs and the workings of such taught me very little. Everything I learned about sex and sexuality came from conversations with friends, sexual experiences, television, movies, and porn. Growing up in my family, discussions of sex were almost totally absent. (Sometimes I wonder if being an “effeminate” boy was part of the reason why my parents avoided bringing up sex with me. Maybe they thought that if we talked about it, I would confirm to them that I liked boys. I don’t know; I guess all I can do is speculate.)

Before taking my ACT (it’s like the SAT but not as many people have heard about it) I remember looking over the sections and thinking about how easy the reading comprehension section was going to be. I had been reading since I was 4 and I had gotten pretty good at it by the time I was 17. However, I was also fortunate enough to go to a public school where my teachers had taught me how to analyze texts and critically think about their deeper meanings and relevance to greater society. Although it was important that school teach me how to read, the ability to analyze texts proved to be much more useful, both in high school, on my ACTs, and in my current state of adulthood.

So what does reading have to do with sexuality education? When examining sexuality education in schools, one must first examine why children go to school in the first place. People against comprehensive sexuality education often maintain that school is a place for learning new skills to be able to do things you didn’t know how to do before, like long division or reading. By understanding this, it is easy to understand why people support abstinence-only education since these people fear that teaching kids about sex will encourage them to have sex since they will now have the knowledge to go out and have sex with each other or, heaven forbid, themselves. However, I argue the learning about anything, whether it...

Recently my friend was telling me about playing the game of LIFE with her nephew over the Thanksgiving break.  LIFE is a Milton Bradley board game that simulates the life of white middle class Americans in pursuit of the American Dream.  Because she is a lesbian, she chose to place two pink pegs in her little plastic car, the game piece that allows a player to advance through the game, instead of a pink peg and a blue peg.  Yet, despite changing the traditional peg assignment, she still followed the same path around the board for the entire game.  

The Observation:

I recently returned to the small mountain town where I had been living for five years before my move to SF.   As is common in these small towns, all of my former partners had made the switch to other partners, weaving together an complex web of lesbian relationships.  It was difficult to return and see that really not much had changed.  People were living comfortable lives, and those who were single felt that their lives would be...

I am a huge fan of masturbation. Not only does it feel good, but it encourages people to explore their own bodies to discover what they like and what they do not like. That is why I’m super pumped that a new sexual education campaign in the Spanish region of Extremadura is working toward promoting self-pleasure in teenagers ages 14-17. With the slogan “pleasure is in your own hands”, this campaign provides information on self-exploration and how you can own your sexuality through workshops and leaflets.

As expected, there has been a huge backlash from members in the community and from all over Spain against this campaign. Some argue that the family should be the only place where conversations about sexuality take place. While the family should be a safe space to discuss sexuality, it shouldn’t be the only space. In an ideal situation, teenagers should be able to rely on their parents for unbiased and accurate information and advice on sexuality issues. In a typical situation, parents are influenced by emotions such as fear and can deny their child access to valuable information as a means of ‘protecting’ them. Sometimes sex is not even discussed at all. Also, some teenagers feel ashamed or embarrassed...

I am not a religious person. Any of you who have sat with me in a class discussing religion and sexuality might have guessed this by the pained look on my face that looks like a cross between the Joker, the Cheshire Cat, and a hernia victim. This is not to say I am anti religion, anti christian, or anti god; some of the people in my life who I love and care about the most claim a religion or christanity as a part of their identity and I would defend these people their rights to believe how they want to the death if need be, but these people who I love that claim religion or christianity also do not push their beliefs on me, nor do they agree with promoting hatred towards groups of people based on sexuality or sexual practices.

So what I am is anti ORGANIZED religion. More specifically, anti ORGANIZED, CONSERVATIVE, FUNDAMENTALIST religion. You know what I'm talking about; they claim to follow the words in the bible ("thou shalt not kill. . ."; "he who is without sin. . ."; "love one another. . ."; "do unto others. . ."; I attended vacation bible school too!), but then preach about the evils of homosexuality, the evils of masturbation, the evils of pre marital sex, the evils of short skirts and cleavage, the evils of unwed mothers, the evils of. . . you get the point (and I bet if you look not so closely, you see a theme too). They don't just preach, they shove it down your throat, they try to impose their beliefs onto others, and they...

Jezebel posted the most adorably bizarre video of a penis doing its best Teletubbie impersonation (NSFW). I immediately reposted onto my Facebook because, you know, sharing is caring. And I care enough to subject my friends to my strange sense of humor.

While I get that not everyone finds a penis playing peek-a-boo with its own foreskin as funny as I do I did not anticipate the response left by a male friend:

Surgically altering babies should be outlawed. That is an adult decision. Otherwise it’s mutilation. Period.

The issue of circumcision is always one I avoid. I do not have a penis and will not have children so I get to steer clear of this hot-button sexual values issue. But, as I repeatedly read his comment, I realized what was bothering me about it: I prefer a foreskin-free penis.

Typing that sentence makes me wince. Who am I to have a preference for cut cock? Is it shallow? Destructive to men? I try to rationalize my desire via the freedom of personal choice.

Then I realize that this choice is not as personal as I would like to believe. I live in a culture that regularly circumcises boy babies. Nearly every penis I have seen up close has been sans-foreskin. The penis in its given state looks as alien to me as the unmodified female form looks to so many guys raised in a Maxim world.

National Sexuality Resource Center is pleased to announce a fabulous new resource, the Black Youth Project Website. Here is some info about their work:

Black Youth Project Website

Our goal for the site is to generate new media information, blogs, art, conversations, webinars, data, research, policies and movements that will expand the human and social capital of young black youth, facilitating their empowerment through highlighting their voices and experiences.

We hope you’ll visit and use the site today and frequently in the future. And please let others know the BYP site . It’s truly a first-of-its kind online resource that explores the attitudes, actions and decision making of black youth by including their lives, ideas and voices.

There are a number of features on the site that we invite you to explore:

• Black Youth Blogging – daily blogs by black youth on important and controversial topics and links to black youth bloggers
• Rap Lyrics Database – the first public searchable database of rap music lyrics based on Billboard charts
• Curriculum Workshop – teachers, social workers, community activists, and artists can download and add to curriculum centered on the experiences of black youth and use data from the Black Youth Survey.
• Black Youth Create! – uploaded...