Culture

How things like sex, gender and relationships have been throughout, exist in and are presented by the larger world has a big impact on how they are for each of us, all on our own. Whether we’re talking about right, law and policy; specific cultural or community history, beliefs or norms; bias, inequity or privilege within the wider world – anything from our family, to our school, state or the globe, that’s what you’ll find here.

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Highlighted content

Articles and Advice in this area:

Advice
  • Susie Tang

Hi Miguel, it looks like you’re fighting some serious peer pressure. Despite all of our progress towards gender equality and rights, we still have some pretty wacked double-standards in our society. There’s the double-standard that says that women who have lots of sex are whores, and men who abstain…

Advice
  • Heather Corinna

You know, you’re not obliged to use language that you – or she – aren’t comfortable using, and which doesn’t make you or both of you feel good. What phone sex is – just like what other kinds of sex are – can differ a whole lot from couple to couple. And how any two people talk sex with each…

Article
  • Heather Corinna

Want to step up and start standing up for the issues most important to you? Here’s a few basics on how young activists can get started.

Article
  • Hanne Blank

I don’t know if you are Orthodox or not, but if you are, perhaps you’ve heard of a term called “taharat hamispocheh” (rough transliteration). These are the laws (halacha) of family purity, or so they’re called. They cover life situations involving sexuality and sexual activity.

Article
  • Audra Williams

Kate Greenaway is the Canadian director of Medical Students for Choice, a group of 7000 medical students across the US and Canada who are working towards improving school curriculums to include reproductive health training, especially abortion training.

Article
  • Heather Corinna

The Biblical sin of Sodom wasn’t homosexuality or anal sex – it was rape, greediness and poor hospitality, and the legal basis of sodomy is not about homosexuality, but about oral and anal sex, and often about homophobia.

Article
  • Heather Corinna

Hanne Blank is not a virgin. (She’s almost 37 and she’s been living with her life partner for nine years – we just thought we’d get that out of the way.) But she is a historian, a writer, and an expert on virginity, having written the first-ever history of the subject, “Virgin: The Untouched History.”

Article
  • Clare Sainsbury

This is not another article about how everyone you meet on the net is an axe murderer. The Internet can be a great way to communicate - that’s why this website is here, after all. Many people successfully find friends, girlfriends or boyfriends over the ‘net , and some of my closest friends are people I first met online.

Article
  • Heather Corinna
  • Hanne Blank

When we look in the mirror as a culture, our tendency toward hysteria always seems to hover in our communal blind spot. We’re not very good at seeing when groups with a political or social agenda are manipulating us with fear, often the unreasonable, irrational fear of the taboo.

Article
  • Audra Williams

I remember when I was seventeen, I tried on some new ideas. One of my ideas was that notions of “right” and “wrong” were false creations of society, and did not actually exist. Yeah, it didn’t make much sense back then, either.