An artifact of Venus lying in a display cabinet, with her organs exposed

Venus Revisited

“Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Girls and Sex (But Really Need to Ask)”: Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

Finding a Voice: Agency and Trans Issues

hairy legs on the left and one hairless legs on the right, questioning which are from man and which are from woman

Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Do Opposites Attract?

New York, 60 Years Later: Sexual Health and Coming of Age in The Bell Jar and Netflix’s Master of None

Man holding sign that reads: "God gave them up until vile affections"

Satan’s Fortress: Christianity, Sex, and Josh Duggar

Picture of a classroom with light yellow war

Teaching Sexuality, Gender, and Race in Middle School

Sprout Pharmaceuticals logo with orange pill

Love, Sex, and Pink Viagra

Vagina Dialogues

By Elizabeth Reis

Students at Mt. Holyoke College are protesting the annual performance of Eve Ensler’s feminist classic, The Vagina Monologues. Their gripe with the play is that by focusing on vaginas, the play perpetuates “vagina essentialism,” suggesting that ALL women have vaginas and that ALL people with vaginas are women. Transgender and intersex people have taught us that this seemingly simple “truth” is actually not true. There are women who have penises and there are men who have vaginas. Not to mention women born without vaginas! Hence, these Mt. Holyoke critics imply, the play contributes to the erasure of difference by presenting a “narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman,” and shouldn’t be produced on college campuses.

Female Circumcision, Clitoridectomy, and American Culture