Susan Ekberg Stiritz

Teaching Men's Anal Pleasure: Challenging Gender Norms with “Prostage” Education

To help students critique sex/gender norms, sexuality educators should address mens anal pleasure. Mens anal receptivity blurs accepted binaries like male/female, masculine/feminine, and straight/queer. By suppressing mens receptivity, the taboo against mens anal pleasure helps legitimize hegemonic sex/gender beliefs—and the sexism, homophobia, and male dominance they encourage. Conversely, by deconstructing mens anal taboo and creating a new language of anal pleasure—“prostage” (pro-STAHJ)—educators can help students challenge restrictive gender norms. We base this argument on an anonymous, online, mixed methods survey we conducted with 228 undergraduate men, as well as existing literature on mens anal sexuality.

Relaxing the straight male anus: Decreasing homohysteria around anal eroticism:

This study examines the practice and perception of receptive anal eroticism among 170 heterosexual undergraduate men in a US university. We analyze the social stigmas on men’s anal pleasure through the concept of homohysteria, which describes a cultural myth that the wrongdoing of gender casts homosexual suspicion onto heterosexual men. For men’s anal eroticism, this means that only gay, emasculated or gender deviant men are thought to enjoy anal pleasure. We suggest, however, that decreasing homohysteria has begun to erode this cultural ‘ban’ on anal stimulation for straight men. Our data finds self-identified straight university-aged men questioning cultural narratives that conflate anal receptivity with homosexuality and emasculation. We also show that 24 percent of our respondents have, at least once, received anal pleasure. These results suggest that cultural taboos around men’s anal pleasure may be shifting for younger men and the boundaries of straight identity expanding. We call for further research to clarify how anal erotic norms are shifting among men of different racial, geographic, socioeconomic, and age demographics, and to determine how these shifts may foster more pluralistic and inclusive views of gender and sexuality.

Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women's Not Coming

Cultural cliteracy denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris. This paper elaborates three ways to enlarge understandings of the clitoris. The first looks at the clitoris as a target of male aggression, a significant and persistent theme in Western history. The second describes an expanded anatomy of the clitoris, one which makes it as large and significant as the penis. The third connects consciousness of clitoral facts with empowerment beyond genital satisfaction and demonstrates that cultural cliteracy can improve readings of womens texts. To conclude, cultural cliteracy is shown to fuel growth, creativity, and individuation and to help women find and express personal power. This claim implies that integrating better understandings of and attitudes towards the clitoris into other academic and professional discourses could help women come into their own.

New directions in sex therapy: innovations and alternatives

Peggy Kleinplatz’s second edition of New directions in sex therapy: Innovations and alternatives takes off from where her first edition left off. Issues raised as problematic in 2001 reappear in 2012 as having reached crisis proportion. A ‘‘then’’ and ‘‘now’’ format structures the book’s introduction. The chapter lists tendencies problematic in 2001 as now threatening sex therapy’s efficacy. Some of these include medicalizing sexuality, using performance standards to evaluate ‘‘adequate’’ sexual functioning, failing to integrate goals of sex therapy with those of transformative psychotherapy, excluding social change from sex therapy’s goals and ignoring intersectional perspectives. Adding to these troubling developments, Kleinplatz reports progressive fragmentation of the field of sex therapy and growing divergence in practitioners’ attitudes, which can only confuse potential therapists and clients. She is concerned that the field has little coherence, with some practitioners pursuing developmental and relationship goals, while others set performance goals, often dependent upon erection-enhancing drugs. She worries over the polarization of practitioners’ perspectives: some arrogantly presume ‘‘we have all the answers’’ while others lack confidence ‘‘we have anything distinctive or worthwhile to offer’’ (p. xix). According to Kleinplatz, these are signs of a profession in trouble. In 2001, Kleinplatz claimed sexual ‘‘dysfunction’’ was a product of social rather than individual pathology and called for sex therapists ‘‘to advocate social change’’. In her 2012 edition, she more emphatically warns:

Going Wild: Law and Literature and Sex

This paper explores four works of contemporary fiction to illuminate formal and informal regulation of sex. The paper’s co-authors frame analysis with the story of their creation of a transdisciplinary course, entitled “Regulating Sex: Historical and Cultural Encounters,” in which students mined literature for social critique, became immersed in the study of law and its limits, and developed increased sensitivity to power, its uses, and abuses. The paper demonstrates the value theoretically and pedagogically of third-wave feminisms, wild zones, and contact zones as analytic constructs and contends that including sex and sexualities in conversations transforms personal experience, education, society, and culture, including law.

The Joy of Sex Bureaucracy

This essay responds to The Sex Bureaucracy, in which Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk condemn regulations of sexual conduct they see metastasizing on college campuses, pursuant to Title IX’s mandate for equal educational opportunities in institutions receiving federal funds. We focus on the authors’ most trenchant critique, which slams efforts to teach sexual health principles and practices on the ground that, in doing so, universities are “regulating sex itself” and interfering with “ordinary sex.” By placing recent sexual health and violence prevention measures in historical and cultural context, we challenge the authors’ assumption that, absent such instruction, sex occurs naturally and unproblematically on college campuses. In addition, contrary to the authors’ negative assessment, we highlight the value and promise of some of the newer developments they contest. We understand such interventions as a form of sex education, which we call “higher sex education,” given both the campus loci and the advancements apparent when compared to many more familiar sex curricula. We show, in context, why such instruction belongs in higher educational institutions and how it has the potential to transform campus sexual cultures and enhance students’ sexual unfolding — preparing them for healthier and more pleasurable sexual futures. We conclude by noting ways in which higher sex education might improve as it continues to evolve.