Signing an e-petition, tweeting furiously, changing your Facebook profile picture to the “I Stand with Planned Parenthood” logo—will any of this impact the Republican push to defund Planned Parenthood? Probably not. There is, however, something we all have the power to do, in order to send a real message to members of the GOP: stop having sex with them.

If you think this form of protest is ridiculous or immature, that’s your prerogative; history has my back. The idea of the politically-motivated sex strike stretches back to at least 411 BC, when the female characters in Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata refused to sleep with their husbands in order to make a stand for peace. In 2009, Kenyan women organized a weeklong sex strike to pressure their government to stop in-fighting. Women in Sudan, in Turkey, and elsewhere have also withheld their lovin’ to make a point.

In the case of a possible defunding of Planned Parenthood, a sex strike seems to me the most obvious and appropriate means of protest. There’s a direct correlation between what’s being threatened and what we individuals can do to assert our cause.

As we’ve been reminded numerous times in recent days, Planned Parenthood’s most common services are providing contraception and testing services for STDs and STIs. If Planned Parenthood were to shut down as a result of the GOP’s efforts, it will be more difficult to find reasonably priced and easily accessible reproductive care and, in turn, sex will become riskier for all.

So if it’s going to become more difficult to engage in healthy sexual activity as a result of a certain political party’s actions, isn’t it only fair that we stop sleeping with members of that political party?

Send Republicans a message. They can’t have their sex and restrict sexual health too.

Tags: budget talks, federal shutdown, government shutdown, planned parenthood, Republicans, sex

A doctoral student in economics at the University of Pennsylvania is examining teenage sex habits in the context of the laws of supply and demand, and he’s discovered something that should upend the way we talk about teen pregnancy. According to Penn’s Arts & Sciences magazine, Seth Richards has analyzed national data on the sex habits of high school students and found that, when it comes to the age at which boys and girls first have sex, boys are far more influenced by what their peers are doing and by the number of available sex partners than are girls.

Richards concludes that “boys seem to be more susceptible to these social mechanisms, whether it’s the norms among their same-gender peers or the availability of partners. To the extent that people are thinking about interventions that work through social mechanisms, they should consider specifically how they’re targeting boys.”

This is striking because our society tends to emphasize the female’s role in sexual matters. In part, this may be practical—a teenage girl who becomes pregnant often winds up more responsible for the child than the boy with whom she had sex. But the emphasis also stems from a religious perspective that exaggerates the importance of female chastity (and downplays the benefits of contraception). You don’t see many purity balls for boys.

And there is also that pervasive cultural notion that boys will be boys but girls should know better. At the American Prospect's Web site, Monica Potts describes the bizarrely-named “No Wedding, No Womb” blogger campaign, an attempt to “raise awareness about low marriage rates in the black community,” as more concerned with telling black women how to behave than improving the lives of children. Potts quotes a campaign blogger, who writes that the black community needs to practice more abstinence: “No one can be better at that than the keeper of the vagina castle, the black woman.” Yikes. I don’t even know what to do with that metaphor.

If Richards is right, it may be that all this time we’ve been directing our efforts at the wrong gender.

Photograph of kissing teenagers by KoS for Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: gender, sex, teenage pregnancy

At the reception for the Global Leaders Council for Reproductive Health in the Millenium U.N. Plaza Hotel yesterday, a dazzling area of council members--current and former presidents of various nations, U.N. officials, and our surgeon general, to name just a few--stood up in rapid succession to explain their various reasons for fighting for the right of women everywhere to control their reproductive health and child-bearing. Environmental, economic, human rights, and health benefits were cited as a result of giving women this basic power. But regardless of their reasons for being there, one council member after another cited the exact same obstacle between humanity and these basic goals: the widespread taboo against speaking honestly about human, and especially female, sexuality.

Or, more to the point, how this all-too-common skittishness is exploited by right-wing forces that don't want to see an end to millenia of female subjugation, even if that end means improved health and well-being for families, communities, and entire nations. Mary Robinson, the council chair and the former president of Ireland, explained the problem most bluntly, recalling her early experiences in the Irish Parliament, when she tried to pass a few common-sense measures liberalizing Ireland's contraception laws and found herself facing a sea of right-wing opposition. The benefits of making family-planning services available to all who wish to use them are so tremendous that the right can't argue on the merits. Instead, the tactic is to exploit people's weirdness around sex and confuse the issues at hand.

It was interesting to hear these world leaders talk about how the sex taboo is employed by the right to preserve inequalities and stymie progress, as it all happened on the eve of the Senate finally tackling Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The entire argument against allowing gays to serve openly in the military is based around sex panic--the human rights of gays and lesbians are considered less important than the possibility that some homophobes in the military are made uncomfortable being near someone whose sexuality is different than theirs. Which is why, Lauren, I disagree that Lady Gaga's comments didn't make sense. The meat stuff was weird, but the main point she made--that in a conflict between a gay person and someone in a sex panic, the gay person's rights should trump the homophobe's childishness--was absolutely right and boldly stated.

It's not every day that the former president of Ireland and Lady Gaga are out there making the same point about somewhat different issues. But that just goes to show what a great point it is, even in its simplicity: When it comes to sex, health and human rights should trump taboo and sex panic. It's a shame if people are made uncomfortable by contraception education or gays openly serving in the military, but it's time we looked the squirmy ones in the eye and said, "Grow up, already."

Tags: contraception, gay rights, international relations, sexual health

So here’s something dumb: Ten years ago, Christina Saunders, a 30-year-old Englander, decided to sack 1,000 men in order to get the confidence of Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones. You know, Samantha Jones, the fictional character, whose personality is entirely scripted. As we all know, the best way to gain personal confidence is to aspire to be exactly like famous people on TV and do as they do. (I suppose I should be grateful Saunders didn’t admire the vaginal fortitude of Kate Gosselin. Things could have gotten populous: “I wanted to be like Kate … so I birthed 1,000 babies!”)

According to the article, Saunders “ended up bedding 1,000 men” after watching a marathon of Sex and the City “during a bout of flu” at university. Important distinction here : Saunders didn’t actively sleep with 1,000 men. (Women don't prey on innocent men! Unless they're old "cougars!") Nope, young, pretty Christina just “ended up” bedding 1,000 guys on her way to a larger goal, which was having sex with 1,000 men. (I’m confused too!) But the most important lesson to take away from Saunder’s gag-reflexing story, after you’ve leered at all of her pictures, of course, is that now, a decade later, she just wants “a man to love me.” Awww. Just like the twist in Samantha’s plotline! Those sex-lovin’ women! They’re so predictable in the end! Now that Saunders has the confidence of Samantha, she just needs the story arc of Bridget Jones.

Photograph by Max Nash/AFP.

Tags: 000 dudes, 1, Samantha, sex, sex and the city

I propose a new motto for the ex-gay movement, after reading this story at Truth Wins Out: It's not gay if it's coerced. Or that seems to be the logic of the ex-gay life coach Alan Downing, who is being accused by two former clients of convincing them to strip for him and fondle their genitals in front of him on the grounds that this would somehow make them straight. The modus operandi of the ex-gay movement is to cure your homosexuality by replacing it with skin-crawling creepiness.

The creepy ex-gay dude du jour, Alan Downing, runs a Jewish ex-gay group called JONAH, short for Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality. According to the complaints offered by former clients Ben Unger and Chaim Levin, the "alternatives" to homosexuality include being watched by a creepy older dude as you strip off your clothes in front of a mirror and admire your own beautiful, youthful male body in the mirror, with a side dose of touching your own man bits. The self-loathing that would drive a man to do this to young, confused men is certainly homophobic in nature, but I can't say that I think that simply dosing yourself with homophobia somehow makes you not gay.

The ex-gay movement isn't heterosexual, but it sure is patriarchal. Sexuality is relegated to a shadowy world of coercion and repression, and sexual interaction with the wife is cast as a joyless duty aimed more at creating heirs and proving your nominal heterosexuality to your male peers. If the ex-gay movement took off in any real way, I suspect there would be even more of a quiet understanding that older closeted men can have the space to abuse younger closeted men, as long as there are wives and children installed in homes for the presentation of formal heterosexuality.

Photograph by David McNew/Getty Images News.

Tags: alan downing, ex-gay, sexual abuse, truth wins out

A group of researchers at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, thinks that Bill Clinton’s famous assertion that he “did not have sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky may be the reason so many young people today don’t consider oral sex to count as doing the deed.

The study, which was conducted in 2007 and published this month in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, surveyed 477 students enrolled in a human sexuality course at a large state university about their views on sex. What they found was that only 20 percent of those students considered oral-genital contact to be sex, compared with nearly 40 percent of a similar group of students surveyed in 1991.

In their discussion, the researchers note that “our respondents were adolescents after the Clinton-Lewinsky era, which our comparisons of data over time suggest may have been a turning point in conceptualizations of oral-genital contact.” They coin this the “Clinton-Lewinsky effect.”

The researchers consider other possible sources for the attitude shift—the increasing availability of information about sex, sex education programs that focus on prevention on traditional vaginal intercourse, and a huge rise in the amount of sexual content portrayed on TV—and provided references to other studies that documented those sources. The paragraph about the Clinton-Lewinsky effect was without a single citation in what was otherwise a well-documented article. Did the researchers pull it out of thin air?

Lack of documentation aside, I have other doubts about their conclusion. The majority of students studied in 2007 would have been born between 1985 and 1989, making them between 9 and 13 years old during the Lewinsky scandal. I was about to turn 10 when it unfolded, and I certainly didn’t realize that Bill Clinton was playing with semantics and proffering his own definition of sex. I don’t consider oral-genital contact to be sex, and I am confident that my developing worldview on sex was influenced much more by what I saw on TV and read in Seventeen than by my limited knowledge of the president’s sex life.

Their larger point is noble: that the changing definition of sex could lead more young adults to discount the risks associated with oral sex, and that we need to ensure that sex ed programs address that. Now that’s a cause Bill Clinton could get behind.

Photograph of Bill Clinton by Stephen Jaffe/Getty Images.

Tags: bill clinton, monica lewinsky, sex

Emily, I'm as disturbed as you are about Leonore Tiefer's strangely anti-sex attitudes having an oversized impact on the FDA's decision not to approve Filbanserin, a drug designed to promote women's libido. I've never been a fan of the thin strain of feminism that treats women who want hot sex as if they've been poisoned by the patriarchy, and, like you, I suspect that the (very few) women pushing this are just projecting their own issues outward.

But I'm still glad the FDA didn't approve this drug. According to the researchers, taking the drug only increased the number of satisfying sexual events 1.7 times a month, which is well below the rate of increase male partners can get through traditional, nonpharmacological means such as taking out the trash or even vacuuming something without being asked. No matter how many times you try to capture in pill form that sexy feeling you get when you're not reduced to nagging, nothing seems to work quite right. Frankly, I'm sure that for the same amount of money these pills would cost a month, one could also simply hire a housekeeper, which would not only work better than the pills, but also has the ancillary benefit of reducing dust allergies.

What bothers me in the coverage over Filbanserin is the cutesy tendency to call the drug "female Viagra." Drugs to increase libido have nothing to do with Viagra or any other erectile dysfunction drug. ED drugs address situations where the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. But most attempts at medicating female sexuality involve trying to encourage recalcitrant women to come around and give their significant others a little more sugar. Though I can see how the legend of Viagra sprung up—men suffering from impotence who feel Viagra's got their back are a lot more likely to get in the mood in the first place.

Since this is the Internet, I know I have to issue a disclaimer about those women who really do suffer from a complete loss of libido and are distressed by it. I feel for you and realize your pain goes deeper than the relationship doldrums instigated by coming home to find a mess and a man on the couch watching TV. But I'm afraid that a drug that has such a weak effect on women who are having at least some desire is unlikely to do anything for women facing an even more serious lack of desire.

Photograph by Stockbyte/Thinkstock.

Tags: fda, female viagra, libido, orgasm

Facebook has racked up 15 million users in the Muslim world, just 14 months after its Arabic-language service was launched. How did it become wildly popular so quickly? Max Fisher of the Atlantic Wire offers a civic-minded explanation. According to Fisher, Facebook has caught on particularly well in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates because the site is a treasure trove of news and information in a region where anemic newspapers feed their readers a steady diet of political propaganda and salacious crime stories. But he completely missed what is perhaps the most alluring and obvious charm of Facebook to Arab youth: sex.

I live in the Gulf state of Qatar, where, in order to maintain propriety, a date between locals can consist of two young people sitting on opposite sides of a coffee shop talking to each other discreetly on cell phones. The ability of technology to facilitate romance is one of its most striking uses in this part of the world. Qatari youth, like others in the Gulf, lead romantic lives not unlike those of protagonists in Jane Austen’s novels, and it’s no coincidence that you’ll find quite a few fans of her work here (while enthusiasm for the racier SATC2 is … tepid, to say the least). Since unchaperoned male-female interaction is frowned upon, arranged marriages are commonplace, and so is unconsummated true love. Not to mention gay rendezvous: Facebook flirting is no substitute for the sexual act, and homosexual interactions will surely remain a part of life in the Gulf, though online tête-à-tête promises to fill the emotional chasm that divides men and women lusting after one another. Facebook is the next frontier in halal dating; it allows Arab youths to flirt and form attachments without doing anything haram, like the horizontal dabke.

But it’s just the newest addition to the technological arsenal put to use by Gulf youth to circumvent the strict constraints imposed on opposite sex interaction by traditional society. “Bluetooth cruising,” wherein cars filled with young men pull up beside women’s cars and use their devices to exchange phone numbers, is especially common in Kuwait. Messaging and “poking” on Facebook are potentially more satisfying modes of interaction than furtive texts sent back and forth at a darkened stoplight. Austen’s heroines treasured love letters; Gulf women have Facebook messages that let advances escape censorious eyes. There’s something to be said for a romantic life lived through letters (albeit LOLs and WYWHs).

Tags: arab world, Facebook, sex

I've long been a critic of the concept of "sex addiction," which primarily gets tossed around in service of old-fashioned prudery and the desires of authority to control human sexuality. Of course, proponents of the concept are crafty. They use men who cheat flagrantly and engage in predatory behavior as their examples, because they know this behavior causes most people to recoil. But as this article about female "sex addicts" in the New York Times shows, the mundane reality is that "sex addiction" is the same old sex-negativity dressed in brand new self help clothes.

When the "addicts" are women, it seems that the ministries trying to break their habits get way more flagrant when it comes to teaching that any sexual behavior not strictly controlled by the church and within the bonds of marriage is "addiction." And I mean any sexual behavior, right down to thinking that guy walking down the street that isn't your husband is cute. When the "patients" are female, there's no hedging or warming them up to the idea that their sexuality isn't their own, or that it's shameful to feel sexual pleasure for its own sake. Look at one of the strategies the "therapist" uses:

For the graduation ceremony, Ms. Renaud passed out balloons and asked the group to write down the things they were giving up. Out came the bad stuff: Porn, Masturbation, Lustful Thinking, Cutting, Feeling Useless, Dad’s Bad Choices, Self-Gratification, Self-Mutilation, Unhealthy Thoughts.

Masturbation is like cutting yourself or beating yourself down? The supposed addiction counselors in this article blame masturbation on sex abuse and low self-esteem. I do agree that low self-esteem does probably explain why a lot of women are in this counseling, but that has nothing to do with masturbation. You know what's not good for low self-esteem? Battering someone and abusing them for having a normal, healthy sexuality.

Just as troubling is the assurance the counselors and counselees have that masturbation is bad for marriage. The Christian fundamentalist view of sexuality, especially female sexuality, seems to be that it's a limited resource. I think they think of sexuality as a bank account that doesn't take deposits, and that every time you withdraw some sex in the form of masturbation, lust, premarital sex, etc., then you have less to spend on sex in your marriage.

What's sad about this is that the reality is the opposite. Sexuality is more like a muscle, and if you don't use it, you lose it. One reason many women have trouble orgasming in a sexual relationship is they don't masturbate enough, and they have trouble knowing what works and what doesn't. Indeed, the research links losing your virginity later in life to experiencing more sexual dysfunction. And anecdotally, most of us can think of times when we've been so busy that we don't have time to think about sex (i.e., experiencing those lustful thoughts so condemned by Christians fundies), and so when we get home and are expected to perform, we have trouble getting aroused. Following the fundamentalist list of sex rules seems like the quickest way possible to drain a marriage of any passion, which strikes me as a bad idea if you want to hold those marriages together.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, masturbation, sex addiction

Kate Spicer of the Sunday Times has written the kind of article that used to be common but is in the process of transitioning from tediously out-of-touch to embarrassingly out-of-touch—complaining about online dating as somehow less authentic than picking men up in bars. The twist this time is to affect a skeptical pose toward the admittedly silly and unscientific algorithm sites like eHarmony that do the choosing for you, but Spicer would make a much more convincing skeptic if she didn't paint herself as someone who is crippled on the dating market by having no idea what she wants. It's too bad she takes such a hostile view to all kinds of online dating, because overall the trend seems to be a good one.

I'm old enough to remember that the old system of dating was one that involved committing first and asking questions later, which, in turn, led to an even more tedious view of love and marriage as something you had to work on continuously. When I was young, the general strategy was to date someone because of physical attraction and get deeply involved on a wave of infatuation. And then when massive differences of opinion on religion, politics, or what you want out of life came out down the line, you were expected to work tirelessly on the relationship, because, as we all know, love is hard work. Now we meet people online as often as off-line and we're getting used to learning the politics and values and expectations before we even know the first thing about sexual chemistry. And from what I can see, finding out the most obvious thing about a person—whether you find them attractive—after you find out so much more else about them works out very well for people.

Presenting people with a list of traits and ideas and asking them to judge you has had a positive effect on people, because it asks them to clarify what they want before they even start going on dates. It's far from a fool-proof system, but it does help you weed out time-wasters, as Jaclyn Friedman pointed out in this interview. A lot of red flags (such as a man's unwillingness to take female artists seriously) don't come out for months under the analog dating system. But in the digital system, you don't even have to go on a first date with that douchebag, which completely closes down the possibility that three years hence, you'll be in couples therapy talking about his issues with taking women's opinions seriously.

Which isn't to say that I think that algorithm sites are such a great idea. The sites that do the matchmaking for you do patronize the user, assuming that you're too scared to reject out-of-hand those people who you know you'll come into conflict with after reading their profiles. But, on the whole, I applaud how virtual dating has ironically made people more reality-based in what they want out of relationships, by forcing them to spell out what they want and who they are up front.

Tags: eharmony, ok cupid, online dating