Birth Control for Breakfast

I have taken to watching Rachael Ray in the mornings while I have my breakfast. The only reason for this is because I have a bit of an addiction to TV and she seems to be the only watchable thing on. I like her. She's fun and harmless and sometimes really funny.

This morning, the first thing on the show was a bit on how to choose the right birth control. And, surprise! It wasn't all that bad! The first thing the guest doctor said was that women need to realize that the only contraception option that protects against STI's is condoms. So, for a lot of women, condoms are an important choice - even if they are also using another method. Yeah! She also said that she and her husband of 14 years use condoms as their primary method. Yeah! Score one for the lovely and much maligned condom - saver of lives and preventer of unwanted little ones!

The whole thing was actually very good - she covered several different methods including two which are not hormonal: diaphragms and condoms. It's nice to hear someone talk about methods that don't screw with your body chemistry. They are very effective, inexpensive, and virtually free of side effects, and yet, we hardly ever hear about them when contraception is discussed in the media. Pills always seem to be the answer - and if not pills, some other method of getting hormones into your body.

The one thing I would have liked to see was more discussion about side effects. The doctor very briefly touched on the fact that hormonal contraceptives have side effects - with a fleeting mention of low libido. Women really need to know that these drugs (yes, virginia, they are drugs) have a lot of side effects that are very common and some of them are very serious. It's extremely important to talk to your doctor about whether you smoke, what other drugs you take, and if you have a history of heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, or migraines before you decide to take the pill or use the ring or patch. They never tell us that hormonal contraceptives can make you batshit crazy, or that they can kill your sex drive, or all of the other even more serious things that can happen. It's up to us to ask those questions and to run back to our doctors and demand answers if those things happen.

But, in the meantime, score one for Rachael Ray for a passable piece on sexual health. I thought it was kind of funny that after the birth control segment, she was going to show her audience how to make stuffed hot dogs. Too bad I missed that.

Sometimes Desire doesn't come before Arousal

I love Dan Savage. I adore him. So when I got my iPhone and discovered I could download his podcasts, I was over the moon. I spent an entire drive to and from Calgary listening to SavageLove podcasts. Awesome! He had one question that I wanted to call in and respond to though. A woman was calling because she was taking meds for a serious problem with depression and found that it had destroyed her sex drive. This is a pretty common problem for people who takes SSRI's like Paxil and other drugs in that family. I've lived through this myself and suffered a severe lack of sex drive due to other circumstances too.

Dan and the doctor who was his guest were very sympathetic to her and gave her great advice about dealing with the drugs. But they didn't deal with the sex drive issue. No one ever does. They just look at whether you can reduce or change the drugs and hope for some relief. But often, that doesn't change anything. And for many people, getting off the drugs completely is not an option. So what do you do?

Here's something that I have discovered that perhaps many people know but no one ever talks about. Desire doesn't always precede arousal. We are taught that the way people have sex is that they feel desire (ie. something turns them on), then excitement and sensation starts (ie. they start getting down to it), and then the excitement builds and they have an orgasm. Even those who criticized Master's and Johnson's sexual response model still concluded that sex usually start with desire. But actually, it doesn't have to.

Sometimes sex starts with willingness instead of desire. Sometimes it starts with just wanting to give a partner something or just wanting to want to have sex. Then, when you get going and get hands and lips, fingers and tongues involved, the desire kicks in. Our bodies are wonderful and they will usually respond no matter where our head is at. So if you want to do it, let your body take the lead. Quite often, it will get you there.

We're so conditioned through everything we see and hear to think that great sex starts with being so turned on you just have to have it. You know, those movie scenes of people ripping each others clothes off in elevators? Well, it would be nice if we could all have elevator clothes-ripping sex - but for a lot of us, it's not like that. And if you're not feeling like ripping your partner's clothes off, it doesn't mean you're not going to enjoy sex. It starts will being interested and willing and then allowing yourself to get into it once it's started. It's like the jump-rope games you used to play as a kid. You may not be the one that starts turning to the rope, but once it gets going, you can jump in and really enjoy the game!

Women are not supposed to do this. Goddess-bless all the wonderful feminists that fought for us to have the right to say no to sex when we didn't want it.....but I think it's gone too far the other way. Now we think that if we are not 100% into it, if the desire isn't totally there, we shouldn't say yes - or that if we do it's bad or inferior sex. It really doesn't have to be. You can say yes for all kinds of reasons, not just because you're so turned on you can't help yourself. And if the willingness is there, it could end up being great sex. If you are suffering from a total lack of sex drive, this may be exactly what you need to do in order to have any satisfying sex at all. It sucks that you never feel horny anymore. But you don't have to be horny to have a good time. It just takes a change in the mindset.

New Year's Resolutions for the New Decade

Everybody makes New Year's resolutions - I've certainly made a few this year. But have you ever made a resolution about sex? Sex is something that we often think of as only a small part of our life - sort of an add-on. We think about what it wants when it comes to our careers, our finances, our relationships, our families, our health, even our weight and our wardrobe - but do we ever focus specifically on what we want for our sex lives? Maybe it's time we did! Here are my New Year's sex resolutions for women:

- we resolve to spend more time thinking about what we really want and need when it comes to sex, than about what others need from us
- we resolve to allow ourselves to be sexual people and to reflect that in all aspects of our lives
- we resolve to stop trying to look and act the way we think we should and start acting and looking the way we want to
- we resolve to love all aspects of our unique sexuality, even the ones that we might wish we could change
- we resolve to ask for what we want and to say no to things we don't want
- we resolve to be proud of and open about our sexuality in front of young women in order to teach them that female sexuality is not a shameful thing
- we resolve to teach our daughters that sex for pleasure is a good thing!
- we resolve to tell our daughters the truth about sex, STI's and contraception and not attempt to scare them into not having sex
- we resolve to stop feeling guilty about enjoying masturbation
- we resolve to love and respect every woman's sexual expression, even if it's very different from our own
- we resolve to allow ourselves to search for and to have good, satisfying sex, whatever that might mean for us

I hope these resolutions resonate for men as well - as they too are often victims of the destructive and confusing values our society holds around sex.

Here's to a happy, healthy, sexy New Year for all of us!

Sex toys on Oprah, What's Next?

Unfortunately, I missed the Oprah show a few weeks ago where she featured different types of toys and talked about porn. Bummer. I did however, get a chance to read the summary of the show on her site. Hooray! She finally recommended some good toys - not just the typical Laura Bermann crap. She has the We Vibe, Layaspot, and the Fukuoku all pictured and mentioned. Great toys! I don't know if there was anything else discussed, but those are excellent starters. Perhaps she had someone who actually knows about toys producing and advising on this episode. The excerpts from the women who own the G Boutique in Chicago sounded like they certainly knew their stuff. It's a new era in attitudes about sexuality when good quality toys and what they can actually do to benefit your sex life and life as a whole are discussed on the most popular talk show in North America.

There was also a segment on about porn and how the porn industry has changed to include a growing women's market. So nice to see that she interviewed Violet Blue and acknowledged that yes Oprah, some women do like porn, and that's okay! She also interviewed Jenna Jamieson, one of the biggest porn stars in the world. Thankfully, it seems that the interview was about how she created her business and made her choices in the industry rather than simply berating her for being a sexual object (unlike some shows I've seen). Although I don't necessarily love some of the images Jenna puts in her movies, and I'm not a fan of the type of mainstream porn she makes, I do defend her right to do it and applaud her for taking control of her own career and her own life. I think we need to respect the choice of women to be involved in the sex industry, or to not, and to watch porn and erotica, or to not.

Of course, some viewers out there don't agree. In reading the comments about the show, I saw two distinct sides that were almost equal in comments. One that praised the show for being honest about women's sexual desires and one that decried Oprah for saying that porn could be beneficial. Many posters claimed that porn had ruined their marriages and should be identified as the evil that it is. With all respect to women who've been hurt by partners that cheated on them, porn did not and never does destroy marriages. It's the person who's using the porn and how they use it that destroys the marriage. Getting rid of the porn will not solve the problem - it's merely the symptom of a relationship and perhaps a personal problem that runs much deeper.

I'm excited to see sex toys and pornography discussed on mainstream TV in an open way and acknowledges all of the good things that are out there in the sex industry. I think big TV shows like this that are seen by so many can encourage women who are curious but hesitant to realize that exploring your sexuality is normal and healthy.

Are TV Doctors Getting Better?

I was home last week, writhing in pain from a back injury, so I figured watching TV was the best way to kill 10 hours of lying motionless on the floor. I saw the Dr. Oz's show was on and he was talking about women and sex so of course, I flipped to that channel. I'm not a huge fan of Dr. Oz. I'm generally not a huge fan of anyone that's made their fame on Oprah. I find him to be arrogant, with his sparkling clean scrubs that he wears to prove to us that yes, in fact, he is a doctor, and his obvious belief that he is an expert on every area of medicine, including sexual health. The basis of this segment was that new statistics have come out showing that teenagers are having more sex and having sex earlier. They didn't bother to explain what these statistics are and where they came from - they never do. It seems that one of these alarmist studies comes out every year. I was sure I was in for another show about how 'these girls just need to learn to have more respect for themselves' and 'parents have to be aware of what their kids are doing!'. But I was pleasantly surprised. Dr. Oz had Dr. Laura Bermann on the show. I've taken a lot of shots at Bermann, but if given enough time to really communicate, she actually has a great attitude about sex. So instead of just crazy alarmist talk, the show was about how to really educate your kids about sex. Imagine that! They talked about explaining the risks of STI's in a real, non-sensationalized view, and prevention strategies that include more than just abstinence. The part that I loved the best was when Bermann suggested that parents take their pre-adolescent girls to get the HPV vaccine. Dr. Oz interjected and said he wouldn't do that. I thought he was going to say that he wouldn't do it because it has too many side-effects or because it would send his daughter the message that having sex is okay. But no. He said that he wouldn't simply take his daughter to have the vaccine because he would want to talk to her, explain what it was about, and have her make the decision as to whether she wanted to have it or not. I almost fell off my chair (well, if I had been able to sit in a chair at the time, I would have fallen off of it). We rarely get to hear famous TV personalities talk about allowing teens and pre-teens to make their own decisions around sexuality. It was beautiful. So props to Dr. Oz. for that. It's a small thing. But at least it's something.

I also watched a bit of 'The Doctors'. I hate this show. I just flat out hate it. Have a look at my previous post on this show for more on that. But again, the show descriptor said they were talking about women and sexual satisfaction so I had to check it out. The little 'news' bit that they were talking about was the study that claimed to show that women with a smaller distance between their clitoris and vaginal opening experience more orgasms during sex (they never elaborated on the word 'sex' but obviously they meant 'penis in vagina' sex). No props to the producers for research because this study actually came out in early 2008. We're not exactly talking cutting-edge news here. But there was one little ray of light in this whole discussion. The female doctor, (yes, in a cast of five, there is only one woman) Dr. Lisa Masterson, took over on this discussion and said that the point is not really to figure out if you have the right or wrong body, but how to work with the body you have and make sex happy for you. Wow! What an idea! She used the word 'sex-positive' about 20 times. I'm not completely sure she knows what it means but it was nice to hear that word on television. It seemed that what she meant to say by using that word was that the emphasis does not need to be on a particular act or a particular goal but on enjoying sex in and of itself - and enjoying any particular type of sex you have rather than trying to make yourself enjoy the type that everyone says is the right type. Indeed, that's a big part of being sex-positive. What a change to hear that as the bottom line, on a show full of medical doctors. Then they switched to a segment on surgeries to make your butt look smaller. Oh well, you win some, you lose some.