Tuesday, April 3, 2007

The State of Sex Ed… for Kids

filed under: State of Sex Ed by Lux Nightmare | 1 Comment

Through a news story out of Australia, I learned about a brand new book (put out by Family Planning Queensland) that’s intended to teach young children about, well, their bodies and themselves: Everyone’s Got a Bottom.

From what I can tell (the website doesn’t have extensive information) the book is something along the lines of the Everyone Poops of sex education, which amuses me to no end. Personally, I have some very fond memories of my first sex education book (given to me at the age of five).

Did you get a book about sex (or where babies come from, rather) when you were a kid? What was it? Would you recommend it to the world at large?

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Safer Sex, Coming To a Bus Shelter Near You

filed under: Design for Sex, State of Sex Ed, Smart. Safe. Sex. by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

Sexerati is a bleeding (Pan Am-esque) heart, you know. While visiting the offices of Better World Advertising yesterday in downtown San Francisco, we couldn’t help but be struck by how much hotter and smarter public health campaigns around safer sex are — and more effective — when introduced by the likes of the Healthy Penis.

Better World is also behind the indie-cred-filled ‘Buck Syphllis’ campaign (just look at that t-shirt), and the controversial ‘Homoboy’ posters that, while promoting HIV prevention for men of color who have sex with men, were also criticized for their portrayal of bottoms as “bitches.” Riding the line of honest community engagement that doesn’t pander or patronize and in-your-face messaging worthy of framing in your bedroom is a tough one, and we’re glad to have such great designers (oh, for their bank of Cinema Displays) and sexual health and rights activists on the cause.

Follow along on our tour in the Sexerati Flickr pool. (And heck yeah, add your own images of smart sexual health messaging to the pool, pls!)

Thursday, March 8, 2007

We Are The Sex Media: Back to School Edition

filed under: State of Sex Ed, We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | 3 Comments

Of all the ways one could attempt to recapture one’s college days, keeping up on undergraduate student newspapers’ sex coverage is right up there (either that, or discussing post-coitally where Baudrillard meets Buffy, take your pick). If this is where the future of American sex is being played out extra-curricularly, we take it as a good sign that sometimes, campus sex journalism is as heartfelt and clumsy as dorm room sex itself.

This week in college sex:

Harvard. My first true loves (sex, politics, alt.culture, and Cambridge) all converge at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and red-brick lust. The Crimson’s Alwa A. Cooper delivers a complex feature on the oft-messy collisions of feminism and sexual liberation, covering Facebook-cruising, freshman dorm condom dispensers, and dominatrix guest lecturers.

Swarthmore. The only Swarthmore girl I ever got with involved a well-worn copy of Barthes’ Mythologies and an even more well-worn library couch. In a splendidly, even sexilly written bit of commentary, sophomore Josh Cohen of the Phoenix weighs in on “hookup culture.” It says something that even though I agree with only about 20% of his argument, he’s earned a full A in sex culture critique in my book. Snip:

I don’t want to absolve myself of the responsibility for hollering, “Take it off!” I’m only suggesting that if we want to talk about sex we should a) ignore all writers who aren’t having as much sex as we are and b) start by taking a leap of faith in one another…

Duke. Oh, Duke. Home of the most notorious campus-based (fine, I’ll say it for liability’s sake, alleged) assault on a sex worker in recent years, whose Chronicle is home to “retired sex kitten” columnist Shadee Malaklou, questioning, with a nuance not usually spared for the investigation, whether or not being “free” to have sex “like men” actually yields women better sex.

(Ed.: Lucky for me? My college paper has no online archive back to my attendance, but it used to be if you googled “naughty professor” you could find one of my editorials, no, really.)