Sexing the blog

If you’ve read my stories, you’ll know what some of them are about. That’s right, full on lesbian smut. Erotica with a capital E, baby!

Where did I learn all that good stuff, you might ask? Well, I was a HIV/AIDS awareness educator in my Uni years. Part of learning to talk about HIV is to be well versed about sex, sexual identity, reproductive health, sociology, medicines and the law. You can’t talk about HIV without referring to sex, and you can’t talk about sex without being sensitive to cultural context.

Training to be a sex educator didn’t faze me at all as I was very well read on female sexuality by then. It is a topic I never get tired of discussing. I’ve since expanded my reading beyond female sexuality as anatomy based only. Sexuality, in the wider range of practice, is a feminist issue in the sense that every person has a fundamental right to express theirs in an informed, consensual way. As a lesbian (hah!), I am intensely interested in women’s bodies and I enjoy waxing on about them.

But time and again, I am reminded just how little women understand their sexuality and their ownership over it. This is a chronic grievance that cannot be overcome until men and women are educated about their bodies, by facts and not mumbo jumbo.

-This post was inspired by these articles:

The Joy of Sex revised and updated by its first female editor, Susan Quilliam, will be released in January 2009. The bit about sex on a motorcycle is still there.

Oral sex is on the rise. I mean, Hello, gays and lesbians were there first. We know it’s good.

More women than men have sex in Australian prisons, a surprise finding by Dr Juliet Richters of the University of New South Wales.

“We found that 36 per cent of women are having sex or sexual contact in prison, which really is quite a lot of sex,” said lead researcher Juliet Richters, a public health specialist at the University of NSW.

She said this was probably because there were fewer taboos around sex among women, and also because almost a third of female prisoners identify themselves as lesbian or bisexual.

Does this shade of orange look good on me?

And finally, a lengthy review of Dishonourable Passions by William Eskridge. Margot Canaday writes about Eskridge’s historical analysis of sodomy law in America. The responses behind legal reforms can be entertaining as well as illuminating.