“In order for monogamy to work, it has to be ‘dirty.’” Those are the words of Rabbi Irwin Kula, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life. “If the forbidden is what is exciting, we have to work hard to bring the taboo into our most intimate relationships,&[...]
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Fearless Storyteller (And Most Banned Children’s Author) Turns 72
Judy Blume’s children and young adult novels have covered everything from racism to menstruation to religion and sex. Her dedication to writing about difficult issues for the younger set has resulted in her fair share of controversy. She is one of the most challenged children’s authors o[...]
Schools Pull Anne Frank’s Diary From Curricula Because of “Vagina” Passage
“There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it,” wrote Anne Frank in her famous diary. “The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!” This, acc[...]
Southern California Schools Take Back Dictionary
A couple of days ago we reported on a Riverside County district that had banned the dictionary because of the graphic manner that it defines oral sex (“the ora stimulation of genitals”). According to the Huffington Post, a committee of parents, teachers and administrators decided this we[...]
Southern California Schools Ban Dictionary
I wish this was a joke or a statement about how the three people who hit on me at the coffee shop this morning seemed to only use monosyllabic words and so liberally sprinkled the word “like” in statements that nothing they said made too much sense. It’s not. Some schools have in f[...]
Joshua Ferris: We Don’t Really Have Anybody Writing Boldly About Sex
Vanity Fair‘s Claire Howorth talks with Joshua Ferris, lit darling and author of the acclaimed Then We Came to the End and the new The Unnamed. VF: Do you think your generation of writers is conflicted about sex? Or feels awkward writing about it? The Unnamed contains two pretty notable sex sc[...]
Crowdsourced Sex: Coming & Crying
“It’s not the business of all sex writers everywhere to solve the world’s sex problems.” Written by tech and sex writer and sex educator Melissa Gira Grant, this statement would become the premise of the book Coming & Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed[...]
January 21st, 2010 - 6:00 AM § in Books
The World’s Ultimate Libertine Gets Jealous?
Yes. I was in college when The Sexual Life of Catherine M. came out. That, for me, was the perfect time to indulge in the auto-biographical account of the French critic’s orgies and anonymous sex days. That book and I enjoy a somewhat adversarial relationship now due to its detached, blatantly[...]
What’s Too Kinky?
The zeroes flew by, didn’t they? We’re here to give you a recap of books that caught our eyes, captured our hearts and made us think during the noughties. by Angela Koh According to Judy Dutton’s How We Do It, 60 percent of adults fantasize about kinky sex. Why would we rather smell a [...]
What It Feels Like For A Girl(friend)
The zeroes flew by, didn’t they? We’re here to give you a recap of books that caught our eyes, captured our hearts and made us think during the noughties. Thirty-four years ago, a young, unknown graduate student tackled the myth that most women should be able to orgasm through vaginal in[...]