It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
Pink Brain, Blue Brain: Do Opposites Attract?
It’s Undergraduate Week at Nursing Clio! All this week we are proud to bring you amazing work written by students […]
New York, 60 Years Later: Sexual Health and Coming of Age in The Bell Jar and Netflix’s Master of None
Master of None, the new Netflix TV show created by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang (best known for their work […]
Satan’s Fortress: Christianity, Sex, and Josh Duggar
When I was 18, I attended a large gathering of evangelical Christians, just as I had every summer through high […]
Teaching Sexuality, Gender, and Race in Middle School
“So what do you do?” We all have asked this familiar question while making small talk at a BBQ, a […]
Love, Sex, and Pink Viagra
Ever heard of Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD)? It’s a new “disease” distressing tens of thousands of (presumably straight) women. […]
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
In the United States, female circumcision (the removal of the clitoral hood) and clitoridectomy (the removal of the external nub […]
PrEP, The Pill, and the Fear of Promiscuity.
By Ian Lekus
The first I learned of PrEP, or pre-exposure prophylaxis, came from the signs and postcards around Fenway Health, Boston’s LGBT community health center. Those advertisements appeared as Fenway served as one of two U.S. research sites for PrEP, in advance of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approving Truvada in July 2012 as the first drug deemed safe and effective for reducing the risk of HIV transmission.[1] As I started learning more, I quickly discovered how its advocates frequently compare PrEP to oral contraceptives. One PrEP researcher I consulted with early on in my investigations explicitly drew the parallel to her decision to use the Pill a few years earlier. Some of the similarities jump out immediately: for example, like oral contraceptives, PrEP — a pill taken daily to prevent HIV infection — separates prevention from the act of sexual intercourse itself.
Sex as Construct, Rape as Reality, and Consent as Healing
By Jenna Tucker
I grew up in a culture obsessed with sexual ethics. As part of a group of Christian teenagers in the Midwest in the 1990’s, one thing we all knew, for certain, was that our religious and moral identities were directly linked to our relationships to sex. It was the culture that birthed virginity pledges and organized for abstinence-only sex education. I remember going to one of those Protestant mega-gatherings with youth groups from all over the country. The speaker gave us two messages that I carry with me to this day. The first was that we had to stop relying on our parents’ beliefs and develop our own relationship to God. The second was that we should not have sex and that anything that gave us sexual pleasure was sex. He was trying to head off our questions. Sex was bad, but what was sex? Could we have sex that didn’t risk pregnancy? Could we masturbate? What if we were engaged?
