November 2011

The Sexual Freedom Project: Human Trafficking

Today’s video comes to us from the Demi & Ashton Foundation (DNA Foundation) and is about human trafficking: the illegal trade of human beings for the purposes of reproductive slavery, commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, or a modern-day form of slavery. Some important facts from their website:

Today, more than twelve million people worldwide are enslaved.[1] An estimated two million children are bought and sold in the global commercial sex trade.[2] The sex slavery industry has become an increasingly important revenue source for organized crime because each young girl can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for her pimp.

While this is a problem in many countries, many Americans don’t realize that it happens here at home as well. Thousands of children are forced into domestic sex slavery each year and that the average age of entry is 13 years old.[3] The majority of American victims of commercial sexual exploitation tend to be runaway youth who live on the street, often who have left homes where they were abused or abandoned. Pimps prey on their vulnerability. These girls are our neighbors, our friends, our sisters and our daughters. [Footnotes on their site.]

The DNA Foundation website includes a comprehensive list of important organizations that are working on this issue. How much have you heard about this important subject? Has it personally affected anyone you know, a neighbor, a friend, a relative? Do you think the topic is getting the public discussion and the media attention that it needs and deserves? Do you think people may be uncomfortable talking about it? What can we do to make it okay to talk about this subject, and what can we as individuals do to stop this practice?

Let us know what you think. Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts on these topics. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.


Why Privileged Elites Cynically Oppose Erotic Freedom

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español In my last post Who Are You Calling an Anarchist? we examined the important distinction between anarchy, as a legitimate and proven approach to governmental organization, and terrorism, a deliberate technique of chaotic social disorganization, that social elites deliberately and falsely equate to the wholly legitimate practice of anarchy. Now we can examine the tools of hierarchical governmental violence directed against its citizens, recognizing that the chief of these tools, invisible to the oppressed, is sexual repression through false religions, failed ideas of government, and corrupt concepts of commerce. In short, we will show how every aspect of organized human endeavor is corrupted at its origin by the universal practice of sexual and erotic repression, revealing the results throughout all phases of human society today to be worthless superstition reinforced by ignorance and compelled by violence.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

It would take volumes to discuss the sorry history of erotic freedom in the United States, one of the most oppressive of all modern human societies. Let us examine but one chain of events in the 19th century that became the foundation of organized anti-sexism throughout the 20th to see how great social failures come to celebrated as great triumphs for freedom when, in fact, they were nothing of the sort. The historically erased heroes of this story are Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Clafin. The villains of this piece are names our warped US history celebrates as great social leaders of the 19th century—Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others deluded by visions of power which had displaced genuine human ideals in their consciousness and behavior. Although the actual disgrace occurred at the hands of men like Karl Marx and Anthony Comstock, the Americans who claimed to speak for equality but who opposed Woodhull were simply fascist butchers of reality, empowered by elites, who fought for false and appallingly limited visions of freedom and equality.

The cause of anarchy is linked closely to issues of sexual freedom, for without erotic freedom, anarchy cannot be a stable system of government. Nowhere in US history is the violent suppression of sexual freedom more evident than in the story of the brave social reformer Victoria Woodhull. The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), later identified by triumphant Marxists as their First International, was founded in 1864 as an international organization which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing socialistcommunist and anarchist political groups and trade union organizations that were based on the working class and class struggle. The leadership eventually polarized around Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, representing communists and anarchists respectively. Finally, in 1872, Marx succeeded in expelling his rival anarchists, including Woodhull, from the organization.

Victoria and her sister Tennessee were born into the Clafin family of Homer, Ohio,which included a fair number of carnival workers and professional psychics. Vicky and “Tennie” were trained by their parents in techniques of cold reading. Tennie also mastered psychic reading using techniques based on “frontier wisdom,” a persistent form of neo-paganism that pervaded otherwise nominally Christian communities, of which the early followers of Mormon Church founder Joseph Smith may have been the most notable. Vicky married and divorced an abusive drunkard named Woodhull and thus acquired her surname in history. The sisters traveled across the country plying their trade for the entertainment and seduction of the masses.

Settling in New York, they established a psychic salon and Cornelius Vanderbilt became their sponsor through Tennie’s psychoerotic healing skills. Building on their own success as Wall Street brokers, using Vanderbilt money, they led their entire community into active participation in the IWA. In fact, they became the major proponents in the United States for socialist reformation of the government. They published an extremely liberal journal for six years, advocated the legalization of prostitution, and were the first to publish the Communist Manifesto in English in the United States. They differed strongly from Marx, however, as they advocated free love and other sociosexual changes that were abhorrent to Marx, an emotionally constipated Victorian era German prude obsessed with personal power. The anarchists, led by Bakunin, were friendly to the American perspective; however, after Vicky ran for President of the United States, Marx considered this essentially confirmatory act of established government to be so abhorrent to the emerging international socialist cause that he unilaterally dismissed ALL Americans from further participation in the IWA, declaring them to be anarchists and unacceptable as supporters of the International (which they were, if you think about it). But the persecution of Vicky did not stop there.

Up to her Presidential nomination, Vicky had been arguably the leader and primary spokesperson for female rights and liberties. Vicky bitterly resented Beecher’s refusal to endorse her nomination and carried out her threat to make public his extramarital affair, which she, as a free love advocate, thought ought to be public anyway. Although these interpersonal disagreements disrupted the inner circle of emerging feminism, a few years later she was, essentially, expelled from the suffragist movement she had helped found because of her advocacy for sexual freedom. Stowe, Stanton, Anthony, and others came to believe that getting the vote for women was the important issue and that fighting for sexual freedom (which they had supported in the past) would turn public opinion against them.

Arrest of Woodhull and Clafin

Government opportunists, led by Anthony Comstock, then Postmaster General, seized the magazine and imprisoned the sisters for distributing obscene material in the mail. None would rise to their defense. Vicky was also a spiritualist leader and became entangled in a dispute with some sexually repressed bigots who joined the group and drove her from her position by distorting the meaning of her advocacy for free love. Once free of legal entanglements, the sisters moved to England and resumed their trade in lectures and publications. Vicky married a wealthy banker who supported her cause. Tennie married a Portugese nobleman, the First Viscount of Montserrat, of whom Queen Victoria created the Baron Cook. “Very good family.”

Blake’s Take on British Sexual Repression

What was it about free love that created such a major issue for this broad spectrum of individual attitudes from Karl Marx to Henry Ward Beecher to Susan B. Anthony to Anthony Comstock? The common factor is certainly not socialism or capitalism or women’s rights or social purity. Although all these legacy ideas apply to parts of the spectrum, there are too many exceptions to each classification. You can guess what my answer is—erotophobia—that deeply seated, invisible but all-pervading, blind, screaming, and insanely raging fear to embrace the one thing in your material life that can actually save you from meaninglessness and give power and value to your life experience.

Erotic experience is the simplest inspiration of awareness of transcendent love that erases all conscious objection. Personal and shared erotic experience demands trust and rejects violence. Anarchy requires that there exist no need for government violence against citizens. The balance required for successful and stable anarchy can only be maintained when society is pervaded by the atmosphere of mutual love and trust between all people.

As I have explained in an earlier post, Becoming and Being an Avatar—Uploading Salvation, it is our total rejection of the false myths foisted upon us by religion, society, government, and commerce that free us to find true salvation—freedom from indecision about the loving and true behavior that enables us to participate in the reality called the Kingdom of Heaven.

In a very real sense, universal sexual freedom similarly offers salvation to society—removal of fear and violence as the determinative factors in social development and human progress. Such freedom will, in time, empower true anarchy—the final and ideal form of human government.

The most basic way of achieving and maintaining such love and trust begins and ends with the physically erotic. Certainly people can establish matured bonds of love, trust, and affection without erotic engagement, but those who choose to begin their interpersonal engagement with this ideal, and are sincere in their approach, may look forward to enjoying the realization of the intellectual and spiritual potential that will grow from such engagement if desired.

Erotic engagement is the first real step from the purely material-physical-sensory into the domain of spirit. The joy one experiences is indeed a gift from the cosmic source that leads us onward to higher levels of inspiration. By denying the legitimacy of this first step on the “highway to heaven” the historic oppressors of society would make it virtually impossible for most people to ever engage the path of love and truth, the path of light, their own personal pursuit of happiness, which is unacceptable to the oppressors because it this is the only true path to personal and societal freedom which necessarily dilutes the power of the elite. By trapping humanity in such darkness, religions, governments, and commerce have conspired to destroy all human hope of progress by harnessing human effort for the advantage of a greedy few.

Thus we see that erotic freedom, the foundation of all freedoms, is also the most direct entry for modern humans to the pathways of love, truth, goodness, and beauty. Free love, pan-eroticism, and collective social reversion—the continuing experience of comprehensive personal joy, apart from social and economic duty—are keys to human activity celebrating truth, the active gift of love. And this unity of experience eventuates in the emergence of the brotherhood of all people, and leads to the kind of social network that eventually stabilizes the most desirable form of anarchy.

 

For-Profit Private Prisons

News of Note: Private Prison Charges Inmates $5 a Minute for Phone Calls While They Work for $1 a Day

Last year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, received $74 million of taxpayers’ money to run immigration detention centers. Their largest facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, receives $200 a night for each of the 2,000 detainees it holds, and rakes in yearly profits between $35 million and $50 million.

Prisoners held in this remote facility depend on the prison’s phones to communicate with their lawyers and loved ones. Exploiting inmates’ need, CCA charges detainees here $5 per minute to make phone calls. Yet the prison only pays inmates who work at the facility $1 a day. At that rate, it would take five days to pay for just one minute.

Most people are unaware that  private prisons exist. These entirely for profit commercial enterprises lobby elected and appointed officials to keep laws in place that call for longer and tougher sentences. Did you know the US has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world? It is not okay for America to be oblivious to the needlessly suffering this profiteering causes or how corrupt this corporate-government connection actually is.

 

Slideshow image source: abardwell

Google Sets New Industry Standard in Transgender Health Care Benefits

It’s nice to see an industry leader such as Google step out front on this important issue. Google’s stance will make it easier for other companies to follow suit and offer similar benefits, and, as a matter of competition, make it harder for other companies to refuse to do so. When employers in the same field are desperately fighting to poach top talent from each other, as they are (see the Microsoft bacon cart for more evidence of this trend), Google’s new policy sends a strong message about how they value all of their employees. It can only be a sign of better things to come in the high-tech world, and eventually across the entire corporate spectrum.

At Google, a Transgender “Gold Standard”

The updated benefits, announced internally by company officials on Friday and effective immediately, cover transitioning procedures and treatment in accordance with the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care, and include gender reassignment surgical procedures determined to be medically necessary by a doctor.

Some of the procedures covered by Google’s health care plan include genital surgery, as well as facial feminization for transgender women and pectoral implants for transgender men — surgeries that can be considered medically necessary depending on the “unique clinical situation of a given patient’s condition and life situation,” according to WPATH’s seventh version of care standards, published in September.

The article goes on to say:

Google also has more than doubled the maximum dollar amount for transgender health care benefits, from $35,000 to $75,000, the minimum amount required for a 100% rating on the Human Rights Campaign’s 2012 Corporate Equality Index, which is expected to be released in the coming weeks. The benefits are covered by the company’s existing insurance providers and apply to domestic employees, Newman said. Google is considering extending similar benefits to international employees, though it does not currently have a timeline for doing so.

Who Are You Calling an Anarchist?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe– ‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which we will have.”

—Henry David Thoreau, American Anarchist

Gunpowder Plot Conspirators

Remember, remember the 5th of November…an appropriate date to consider current events in the Occupy movement in relation to traditional concepts of minimalist governance. Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators, though opposed to the reigning government, were not anarchists. They were terrorists, who would have created chaos had they succeeded in blowing up Parliament and killing King James I in 1605. Those who benefit from the status quo encourage public fear of true anarchy by calling it “chaos,” a concept quite opposed to anarchy.

Anarchy is an approach to the organization of society without permanently established titular leadership. Mon-archy is rule by one person. Tetr-archy is rule by a group of four. An-archy is rule by no person. Many political philosophers, acting as water-carriers for depraved elites, have pretended that social chaos will be the final result of anarchic government; however, history shows that anarchy can be highly effective and anything but chaotic. Unfortunately, such successes are never celebrated by the established elites, including those who report and write history, because they disprove the fallacious principles on which command-oriented society is based. Invariably some conspiracy of challenged elites steps in and violates all principles of human decency and constitutional law to suppress such groups, as we see now happening in many Occupy locations.

Guy Fawkes was no anarchist. The purpose of the Gunpowder Plot was to bring the Roman Catholic church back into control of the English monarchy. That would have been a step backwards into rigid and brutally authoritarian control of every element of English society. Guy Fawkes is more akin to today’s false religionists of fundamentalism who today work to make the United States into a mock-christian theocracy. Fawkes was a simple terrorist, bent on creating as much chaos as possible without rational purpose or valued outcome.

How times and popular images have changed. Once a kind of post-Halloween bogeyman to be hanged and burned in effigy on the fifth night after All Hallows’ Eve, “the old guy” gradually became a more popular and sympathetic image in the public mind. Children’s books were written. The Fawkes legend grew in the direction of his being a positive rebel against the ruling elites, and now the Occupy movement uses a modern caricature of his image to represent the 99%.

At the same time the idea of social chaos was conflated in the public mind with social organization based on anarchist principles—the most basic of which is that government is precluded from using violence against its own citizens. Such would surely be a far cry from the massive ongoing, and allegedly Federally facilitated, conspiracy of urban police to terrorize citizens exercizing their right of protest.

Anarchists, not Terrorists

Anarchy is a viable and effective form of government to the extent that citizens freely embrace principles of mutual respect, freedom of expression, and social equality. Not all people are equal in intellect, knowledge, social capacity, and leadership ability. Anarchy does not attempt to suppress the contributions of such people, but integrates them into the larger fabric of society, helping good ideas succeed. But this will not work well in a world where people refuse to work together across class and social lines to address real challenges and refuse to acknowledge a social duty to provide protection to the most vulnerable.

The problem is basically lack of love between people—of mutual trust. When people refuse to love others, but mistrust them or even abuse them for personal gain or for the egotistical satisfaction of a failed self-image, there must be some means of conflict resolution. Conventionally this is done by appeal to a higher authority. Some may appeal to their idea of god; however, those who seek a defined and prompt material or legal remedy will probably appeal to human governmental power. In a functional anarchy, this appeal would come before the local, voluntary, communal “administration” governed by group wisdom. There is no need for oppressive human governmental power in a society founded on love and mutual trust as opposed to greed and mutual fear. Government as it exists today promotes government interference, itself producing litigatable or regulatable conflicts, and creating more job opportunities for those who relish imposing arbitrary groupthink nonsense on their fellow humans.

The ideal state, in which the collective community is dynamically self-governing, does not require rigid administrative, judicial, or legislative compartments. When the collective is required to react it develops any governmental structures needed using methods appropriate to specific situations. Such structures persist only until task is done. They work to find as complete as possible solutions to real problems and shun cowardly incrementalism when larger change is required. They are the antithesis in organization and function of the myriad agencies of traditional human governments, including many of the United States.

A Vision of New Harmony

This vision of a perfected human society is what is actually meant by anarchy. Anarchy has long been viewed as the ideal form of government by those who oppose coercive aspects of social regulation. Although a few anarchist societies have flourished, they have invariably been violently suppressed by all other political groups—capitalist, fascist, catholic, communist, protestant, socialist, christianist, republican, islamist, democratic, imperialist, etc., all of which depend on physical and psychological violence directed against their own constituents to maintain their power and privilege.

There is no component of our society that does not fear the rise of successful anarchy. And this is the cause of the systematic suppression of erotic freedom by elites, for erotic freedom is the key to the final expression and realization of a truly anarchic society.

In our next post, we will explore in depth how sexual freedom is becoming the true foundation of a new social system based on liberty, justice, freedom, and equality for all who will embrace love, live truth, do good, and make beauty.

 

Love Poly Style

This video comes to us from Newsweek, and is called “POLYAMORY: Making Poly Love Work.” For anyone not familiar with the term polyamory (from Greek πολύ [poly, meaning many or several] and Latin amor [love]), Wikipedia defines it as “the practice, desire, or acceptance of having more than one intimate relationship at a time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.”

From the Newsweek article:

Terisa and Matt and Vera and Larry—along with Scott, who’s also at this dinner—are not swingers, per se; they aren’t pursuing casual sex. Nor are they polygamists of the sort portrayed on HBO’s Big Love; they aren’t religious, and they don’t have multiple wives. But they do believe in “ethical nonmonogamy,” or engaging in loving, intimate relationships with more than one person—based upon the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. They are polyamorous, to use the term of art applied to multiple-partner families like theirs, and they wouldn’t want to live any other way.

More from Newsweek:

Some polyamorists are married with multiple love interests, while others practice informal group marriage. Some have group sex—and many are bisexual—while those like Greenan have a series of heterosexual, one-on-one relationships. Still others don’t identify as poly but live a recognizably poly lifestyle. Terisa describes her particular cluster as a “triad,” for the number of people involved, and a “vee” for its organization, with Terisa at the center (the point of the V) and her two primary partners, Scott and Larry (who are not intimate with each other) as the tips of each arm. Other poly vocabulary exists, too: “spice” is the plural of “spouse”; “polygeometry” is how a polyamorous group describes their connections; “polyfidelitous” refers to folks who don’t date outside their menage; and a “quad” is a four-member poly group.

What unique challenges do individuals in polyamorous relationships face from society, from religion, from the government? What do you think are the advantages of being in a polyamorous relationship? Is it something that you have ever considered or experienced? How do children factor into these challenges? What role would jealousy play, and how could it be overcome?

Let us know what you think. Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts on these topics. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.

Image by Ratatosk, used with permission.

Is Sex For Pleasure Uniquely Human?

Talk Nerdy To Me: Is Sex For Pleasure Uniquely Human?

“We have a lot of sex. In human culture, sex is so much more than a means of reproduction. Sex is emotional. Sex is communicative. Sex is fun. And when it comes down to it, for most of us, sex just feels good. We have sex for pleasure significantly more often than we have sex for reproductive purposes. Is this one of those things that makes us uniquely human?

“One indication that animals enjoy sexual activity is the act of masturbation. We’ve all seen our dogs do it. Male dogs will pretty much hump anything they can wrap their legs around. Masturbation in horses is also quite common. There’s even a seminal (no pun intended) paper on squirrel masturbation. In fact, a lot of animals go solo. Birds, walruses, sheep, turtles, elephants, bears, and many more species have been observed engaging in autoeroticism. Porcupines have even been witnessed to fashion vibrators out of sticks. Interestingly, although all of these animals have been documented to play with themselves, it is exceedingly rare that they actually get off. That is, masturbation to the point of orgasm/ejaculation appears to be a fluke outside of the human species (except maybe in squirrels).

What makes us so different that our masturbatory experiences are “goal-oriented” when other animals’ are not? And why is our masturbation frequency significantly higher than that of other species? Jesse Bering hypothesizes that it is because humans have the unique ability to form mental representations of erotic material. It may be the case that what sets us apart is our ability to write, produce, edit, and even star in our own mental porn.”

I find the differences in motivation and frequency the most interesting. With our greater capacity for thought, intuition, and imagination, our ability to enjoy sex, both alone or with partners, reaches depths beyond other animals. While we may have the upper hand, it is still important to acknowledge the similarities that we share with other species. People that believe masturbation is unnatural may not seek evidence, but the fact that other species engage in sexual activity purely for pleasure proves that we are all sexual creatures.

Image source: Mila Zinkova

A Mission Accomplished

We are pleased to report the DC TLGB Watch’s Transgender Day of Action in Washington, DC, was, and continues to be, a notable success by any standard.

Even a few days ago, when elected/appointed officials became a little nervous on rumors that street demonstrations and set of demands with deadlines were coming to their doorsteps, the Trans community leaders were offered some coordinated face-time with the Office of Mayor Vincent Gray together with the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and the US Attorney for Washington, DC (USAO), a fresh approach to replace their usual divide and conquer strategy to make these problems magically disappear. (Because we still do not have statehood in Washington, DC, our justice system is federally administered by the USAO, and this causes obstacles of its own that interfere with bringing justice and equality to the Trans community.)

So, even before the first boot hit the ground or the first demand leapt from our bullhorn, we saw a new willingness among these officials to start responding proactively on a level this crisis of anti-Trans violence and police bias warrants. But that was just the beginning.

After marching in front of the MPD with 40+ Trans victims, activists, and allies, with chants like “Hey, Hey, Ho Ho, Transphobia has got to go,” and delivering our demands in writing directly to MPD Police Chief Cathy Lanier, we read each demand out loud from the sidewalk as a media scrum pressed in to interview spokespeople in the Trans community. Minutes later, while headed over to the federal building a few blocks away that houses the USAO, to rally again and deliver our demands to the US Attorney, we were chased down in the street by a press aide from Police Chief Lanier’s office with a an official statement.

Lanier’s incredible “rebuttal” of our demands was an insult and misrepresentation of the countless hours and years community leaders have spent in meetings with her and her predecessor with little to show for it except for increasing anti-Trans violence and murder. With just a few sentences, she tried to blame the Trans community for its failure to send representatives to an unannounced, hastily organized MPD meet-and-greet last week, a sign, in her mind at least, that we were the ones not being serious about working in partnership with them to bring about change. This was at once ironic, ludicrous, and infuriating because this defensive statement was so obviously hastily prepared a few floors up simultaneous with our street demonstration, and at the same time, indisputably and so sadly demonstrates to everyone who can read how unserious and off the page she and her department have been.

We’re talking about a spike in anti-Trans murders, two in the last 4 months, rampant anti-trans violence, including attempted murders at the hands of police, and police bias and police profiling especially within DC’s highly questionable and indeed unconstitutional “Prostitution Free Zones.” What are they focused on? They want to argue with us about who came out for a coffee, a completely cynical deflection carried out in the most petty, amateurish, and self-disclosing way. The Chief cannot help but fail each time she approaches these important issues because she first must change her own very bad attitudes, and then be in a position to get serious about the gravity and urgency this shame in the nation’s capital deserves.

Today, the emails to our community are buzzing back and forth from Chief Lanier and her commanders. They are scrambling to reach out now that we have taken to direct action to bring this crisis to the attention of every American and established what their priorities must be. Maybe now they can begin to change the situation by changing themselves and understanding just how they discriminate against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and, especially, Trans people by offering public relations tricks in place of honest dialogue. At least now, they are on notice that they must turn that corner and rise to their responsibilities.

We have come together in coalition with a set of demands we all agree on and we have set dates for completion. Now it is up to the Trans community leaders to press them in high level meetings with our elected/appointed officials, telling these decision-makers that they can keep the street activists at bay only if and when real progress starts and continues. We are a strong coalition representing a dozen prominent organizations dedicated to improving life for DC Trans residents. Now, at a moment’s notice, we can put boots on the ground, again and again, until real, systemic, and sustainable change comes to Washington, DC. We will do this until the anti-Trans violence and police bias in DC comes to an end, including the harmful Prostitution Free Zones.

 

The Sexual Freedom Project: Bisexuality

For some people, bisexuality is their sexual orientation, and it’s here to stay. For some other people, coming out as bisexual is a first step to admitting that they’re gay — to friends and family, perhaps even to themselves. The men in these two videos have a lot to say about bisexuality. (Note: Some video not appropriate for certain environments.)

Did these videos make you change your opinions about bisexuality, or even reconsider them?

What’s your reaction upon learning someone is bisexual? Do you automatically think they are just confused, just as straight people think of gay people?Is it ever our place to try to influence someone else’s sexual orientation. Some believe bisexuals suffer discrimination from all sides, from both gay and straight people, so what do you think?

Let us know share your voice. Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts on these topics. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.


What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex

What Mind Reading: What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex

 “Teen birth rates are eight times higher in the U.S. than in Holland. Abortion rates are twice as high. The American AIDS rate is three times greater than that of the Dutch. What are they doing right that we’re not?…

“Coming out of the sexual revolution, the Dutch really decoupled sex from marriage, but they didn’t decouple sex from love. If the first piece is that there weren’t these immediate associations of teen sex with danger, the second is that it remained anchored in the concept of steady relationships and young people being in love….

“It seems terribly sad to me that we view teenage love as being about “just hormones” and teen boys as incapable of being in love — but then we turn around and bemoan this culture of “hooking up,” when we’ve basically given adolescents no space to actually have loving relationships….”

If embracing sexuality is proven to be so healthy in Europe, how does America justify its aversion to it? It’s quite clear that repressing sexuality does not improve relationships or encourage healthy sexuality activity. We are denying young people one of their most basic human rights, real sexual freedom.

Image source: Courtney Carmody