Can We Talk About Sex? Please?

A review of Jennifer Hirsch’s and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus

------------- A decade ago, I was a resident adviser in a residential college at a highly selective university. My colleagues and I used to roll our eyes at the highly legalistic "affirmative consent" model of sexual education that we were asked to teach first-year students. Focused on the idea that sexual ...
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Can We Talk About Sex? Please?

What’s Missing In Naomi Wolf’s ‘Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love’

The moment at which I genuinely threw the book across the room was thirty pages from the end.

In 2013, when I heard Naomi Wolf give a talk about the Ph.D. research she was then pursuing at Oxford, my first reaction was panic. Twenty-three years old, I had recently completed what is still the most intense, all-consuming experience of my life: researching and writing a 75,000-word undergraduate ...
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The 1970s Gay Sex Scandal That Enthralled Britons Is Back

What the Thorpe affair reveals about the history of elite men seeking sex and relationships with other men

When British Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe was acquitted of conspiracy to murder on June 22, 1979, the press had a field day. Thorpe allegedly paid to have his lover of fifteen years -- the horse groom and sometime model Norman Scott -- assassinated. The outing of a popular, charismatic ...
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The 1970s Gay Sex Scandal That Enthralled Britons Is Back