Love, Sex, and Family

November 13, 2012

When My Husband Came Out as a Woman

(This post was originally published at Good Vibrations Online Magazine.)

June 30, 2007

My husband came out to me as a woman this summer, three days after our five-year wedding anniversary. We were supposed to have our first date with a babysitter that night, but she bailed on us. Instead, we went out as a family for an afternoon drink at the local pub, fresh from the pool where I spent pretty much every day this summer with our four-year-old daughter.

It was a damn good wedding anniversary. I think we were both feeling that our marriage had arrived at its strongest ever. He gave me a delicate diamond ring; my own, my style, as opposed to the hand-me-down I got from his mom when we married. And he read me the vows that afternoon in the sun at the pub's deck over beers; the vows he never got around to writing five years before. It was precious.

The Sexual Chronicles of a French Family {featured trailer}

My apologies for my absence this past month; I've been busy with events in conjunction with the launch of my new book After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters (Zer0 Books, October 2012). I returned from Europe only last week where the official launch party took place at Berlin Porn Film Festival, the leading international film festival for progressive artistic sex film. I attended the entire five-day festival and saw an amazing array of films.

Regretters {featured trailer}

Regretters is the amazing widely prize-awarded Swedish documentary featuring the candid conversation between two men who both decided to change their sex only to later regret it. This is a hugely soulful and powerful film for anyone—straight, trans, or queer—who cares about navigating gender and identity in our sadly gender claustrophobic culture.

Regretters Trailer from Atmo on Vimeo.

Walk Like a Slut

I took my then three-year-old daughter to SlutWalk last year because I want her to grow up knowing nobody has the right to tell her avoiding rape is her responsibility. Or that she needs to police her look and behavior but a boy does not. As another mother said, she brought her six-year-old daughter because "she wanted her daughter to know that nobody has a right to her body." Her body is hers and no one has the right to do anything to it that she doesn't want.

Heading to the walk, I told my daughter SlutWalk is about celebrating girls and women. She said we should celebrate boys too.

Indeed. We need to foster a culture where boys and girls respect and trust each other. Where girls' and boys' fears and insecurities about sexuality—including when it comes to their own budding bodies as well as those of the opposite sex—are addressed. Through positive sex education that equips both girls and boys to approach sex with knowledge, respect and integrity.

Boys who "can't help themselves" are boys who've been shamed into wrongly thinking this is in fact so.

Survival Tips for Trans Youth {featured resource}

Young people living outside of gender norms are everywhere. Whether in the process of transitioning from male to female or vice versa; identifying outside boxes; or gender-nonconforming, the spectrum of gender identities is more visible than ever before.

Serious legal and other obstacles abound, however, and these can be especially daunting for young people who are transgender or gender-nonconforming (TGNC). The challenges of changing one’s name, finding access to hormones or enduring police brutality, for instance, demand a distinctly adult set of skills and can take their toll on a young person. Survival Tips for Trans Youth (Lambda Legal)

Lambda Legal is an amazing resource working towards a world without discrimination and inequality. They make the case for equality in the nation’s courts, and through education and policy work. Their work touches on nearly every aspect of life for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and people living with HIV of all ages.

Lambda also offers extensive information via their publications including a blog, magazine, tool kits, articles and more. Survival Tips for Trans Youth is an informative four-page legal guide for trans people and their advocates published online at Lambda where you can download it for free (PDF-file).

(Photo from Survival Tips for Trans Youth)

September 24, 2012

Sugar on Love, Sex, and Life {featured book}

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar is, despite the cheesy title, an incredibly poetic and powerful collection of personal and profound little essays. Written by Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, which was also published this past year (in fact, the two books have spent several simultaneous weeks on the New York Times bestseller list recently), these meditations on love, life, family, relationship, and sex are in fact columns published at The Rumpus written in response to readers' letters.

Strayed responds to a diverse variety of questions and concerns, which include dating after divorce, not wanting to settle, cheating, dealing with affairs, healing from child sex abuse, overcoming miscarriage, navigating high school dating dramas, dealing with one's partner's sexual past and fetishes, communicating about sex and our real sexual selves, second thoughts, coming out gay, being transgender, getting over an ex in a time of Facebook and Twitter, what happily after really means, and more.

Strayed's work is well-worth the read. I first picked up her memoir Wild because I so loved Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water featuring one woman's journey from loss and hurt to empowerment and peace through the rugged path of alcohol, drugs, and a lot of sex, and the two books seemed like they might have some things in common.

50 Shades of Obsessing with Spanking

The current Fifty Shades of Grey mania has apparently gotten more women into spanking lately. Sex-toy shops gleefully report an increase in sale of bondage toys; even hardware stores are reporting an influx of new customers — mostly women — shopping for rope.

People are drawn to bondage for all sorts of reasons. In our stressed out culture, surrendering control can appear highly appealing. Others might be drawn to it because a blindfold and intenser sensations can help them focus. Some may be drawn to it as a path of psychological transformation. And to some it may be a fetish that stems from childhood experiences of abuse.

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Why We Must Oppose the Minnesota Marriage Amendment {featured contributor}

By Stacey L. Klempnauer

Stacey L. Klempnauer

This November Minnesotans will vote on the marriage amendment. We will vote on whether or not marriage should be strictly between a man and a woman, and whether we should amend our state constitution to say that a marriage cannot be between two people of the same sex. I will be voting “No” and I want to share with you my reasons why.

First, I am very concerned about the message we are sending to our children. If this amendment passes, we are saying that lesbians and gays are second class citizens, not worthy of the same rights as those of us who are not gay. This message does not serve anyone in a useful way. It’s a message that promotes bullying – an issue that schools are currently battling, poor self-esteem in anyone who is deemed different, and fear in those who already feel marginalized and alone. And unfortunately, we have only to look at Anoka Hennepin Schools to see that an unaccepting attitude can also have an enormous impact on teen suicide.

Free to Be You and Me vs. Gender Claustrophobia

I've been thinking a lot about gender claustrophobia lately and this week in particular. And not just gender claustrophobia as in me, a woman, feeling choked by stereotypical notions of what it means to be a "man" or a "woman," but in terms of how the multitude of labels for various gender identities out there can feel choking and confining too.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I first came across the term gender claustrophobia in the context not of "straight" people but among queer people who felt constrained by all the limited understandings of "homosexual," even within their own communities. I've always felt freer in queer communities, but the fact that within those too there's gender claustrophobia: well, that really struck me. It hit right home.

Clearing Space for Children To Explore Gender {featured resource}

In We Can Give Them Words: Clearing Space for Children To Explore Gender, Anna Cook of The Feminist Librarian offers her own positive advice and an overview over further resources for parents to normalize gender, sex, and sexuality variance for their children. Excerpt: "Don’t conflate gender expression with sexual preference. Our culture does this constantly, whether in the assumption that princess boys will grow up to be gay or that women who are butch sleep exclusively with lipstick lesbians. [...]

Sexuality in the adult sense is something we grow into. It’s a process. And presuming adult sexual preferences for a child — whether it’s teasing them about a playground “boyfriend” or assuming their gender non-conformity will lead to same-sex desire — is unfairly boxing them into predetermined categories. [...]

Talking Sexual Fluidity with My Preschooler

I've had an ongoing discussion about her body and sexuality with my daughter before she could verbally talk. Most recently, that conversation has broadened to address the wide range of sexual fluidity among people. The "new" normal is that there is no "normal," as Dr. Peggy Drexler points out. People experience a wide range of gender identity and sexual orientation, and expressions of gender and desire vary.

Yet, people have an urge to label; to fix into neat categories. I get that "labels can be a good way to build community and find yourself, but they can become a problem if someone feels restricted or constrained by them," as the blogger of "monochrome in the 1960s" puts it. I've always felt constricted by them. When I was doing research on gender and sexuality in Norway a few years back, I came across the term gender claustrophobia. And not just among women and men feeling pigeonholed as "cisgender" or "straight" — walking manifestations of a heteronormative culture — but among queer women and men who felt constrained by limited understandings of lesbian and gay, even within their communities.

We Are Family: Sex and Developmental Disabilities

This past weekend, I took my four-year-old to a Summer Fun Day Picnic at Laura Baker Services Association (LBSA), a local school and home of many children and adults with developmental disabilities where my husband works as the family support services director and volunteer coordinator. This past spring, we offered a workshop to his colleagues on sex and developmental disabilities, and we've been asked to organize another one this fall, specifically to share curriculum and ideas with staff on how to teach clients about their bodies and sexuality.

In fact, I don't have too much experience interacting with people with developmental disabilities, but I believe firmly in their sexual rights. Sadly, all too many stereotypes linger around people with developmental disabilities, denying them ownership of their bodies and a healthy relationship with their sexuality. As is commonly reported in research on this topic, the fact that individuals who have developmental disabilities are also sexual beings is often overlooked by those who care for them, including guardians, support staff and even healthcare professionals.

This Is My Body {featured video}

Watch this and be empowered and inspired. The video and its resources speak for themselves.

This Is My Body from Jason Stefaniak on Vimeo.

This Is My Body Facebook Page.

Story on This Is My Body from Ms. Magazine blog via Care2.

July 18, 2012

After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters {featured book}

Since pre-ordering at Amazon US and Amazon UK is now available for my book After Pornified: How Women Are Transforming Pornography & Why It Really Matters, a note about it here seems appropriate. After Pornified — where female pornmakers lead the way, empowering women to claim their bodies and sex against a pornified culture — seeks to empower and inspire women, and men, to own and explore their bodies and sexualities against pornified media, erotic clichés, and claustrophobic gender stereotypes.

Zer0 Books — the Culture, Society, and Politics imprint of John Hunt Publishing — is my publisher. I am proud to be a part of their team of authors whose discourse is "intellectual without being academic, popular without being populist." The Guardian ran a feature on Zer0 Books this past winter, describing Zer0 Books as "One of the most exciting radical presses at the moment. ... Zer0 titles are commissioned, edited and published quickly — and that energy and velocity carries through to the writing itself. Zer0 writers share an ability to write passionately, avoiding the clunky prose of academia and generating new lines of inquiry rather than just regurgitating critical clichés."— This seems like a good fit for me.

From the publisher's page:
Porn brings up a lot of negative images in our sexualized, pornified culture. But today a growing number of women are radically changing porn to authentically capture with respect and realism the sexual lives of women and men, empowering and inspiring the viewer to claim her sexuality against a pornified culture, and creating a real counterweight to pornified media and porn as it’s been known. Porn affects us. Today, women are leading the way to make those effects positive. After Pornified lets you see how.

Magic Mike: A Frolicking Celebration of Male Sexuality

Salon staff writer Tracy Clark-Flory accuses Steven Soderbergh's new movie "Magic Mike" for "devaluing women’s sexuality and desire" while turning male stripping into an "unsexy" "parodic" thing: "goofball, absurd and sometimes repulsive." On the contrary, I would argue that "Magic Mike" — marketed as a stripper rom com — offers us a frolicking celebration of male sexuality enjoyed both by the male strippers and their female audiences.

As a university student in Seattle, I joined a few of my male friends at a female strip club. What saddened me the most, was the lack of joy in both the women's performance and among the male audience. Sure, my friends were laughing, yet not for joy but derision. Derision at the other guys who'd slink into their seats, and derision at the detached, formulaic performance by the female strippers.

Woman Fights Right Not to Cover Up at Pool {featured news}

Jodi Jaecks

Public nudity is allowed in Seattle but this woman — Jodi Jaecks who has undergone bilateral mastectomy and who describes herself as an androgynous lesbian woman — was told to cover up at a city pool.

Apparently, Seattle Parks and Recreation officials felt that the exposed scars would upset the "family friendly" environment they seek for their pools. I wonder what they think would be most unsettling: the scars as reminders of cancer or the scars as reminders of the breasts that once were.

Not only is wearing a post-mastectomy swimsuit uncomfortable for Jaecks, she also stresses that baring her scars is important because it was the photo of a mother who had undergone a mastectomy lying freely on a beach with her children that first inspired her to get a mastectomy, rather than a less-invasive procedure. A drastic decision, it ultimately freed her from fear of more frequent surgeries, mammogram checks and possible cancer resurgence.

The Fluidity of Male Sexual Desire {featured read}

The fluidity of female sexual desire is given increasing attention whereas male sexual desire is typically dismissed as either straight or gay. Gender studies professor, writer and blogger Hugo Schwyzer takes this to task in a recent post at The Good Men Project, rightly arguing that "We accept that women’s sexuality is remarkably fluid. That’s a good thing, as that recognition opens up a whole world of possibility. But the flip side is the continued insistence that male sexuality is static, simple, and comes in only two distinct flavors: gay or straight.

That thinking doesn’t just sell bisexual guys short. It reinforces the toxic myth that men can never have inner lives as rich, complex, and surprising as women so evidently do."

Sharing his own bisexual experiences, Hugo's post is a compelling read. I highly recommend it.

The Good Men Project: Mythbusting Bisexual Men

A few highlights:

New Cultural Trends of Becoming or Not a Mother {featured reads}

Two recent articles on new cultural trends regarding motherhood struck my attention. The first was a news feature reporting on so called "choice moms:" women who in the end opt for single motherhood while hoping to find a co-parent/spouse later on. The article explains this trend in terms of men taking longer to mature and women not wanting to settle for less or miss out on their chance of motherhood.

The second is a personal essay by a single woman in the last year of her thirties faced with the very real possibility of not becoming a mom. Reflecting on the cultural and peer pressures of becoming a mom and joining the motherhood party — as also recounted in a recent New York Times Motherlode post — she makes a compelling plea that we recognize the party of those who do not become moms too: