News
Sexual Health
Check Out Lo’s Org: The Butterfly Academy!

A few years ago, a series of big events occurred, one right after the other, that profoundly shifted my career goals: That perfect storm made it painfully clear that we as a country and a culture are not where we need to be in the sex-education department. Sure, adults need sex ed too, but maybe […]

News
8 Things You Should Know About Consent on College Campuses

A 2017 article written by Sarah Marcantonio, then a student at Emerson University in Boston Consent (noun): Permission, approval or agreement. Here’s my definition of sexual consent: two (or more) people actively, explicitly and consciously agreeing to have sexual interactions throughout those interactions, with no party having any reservations at any point. I was taught, […]

News
The Harsh Reality of Religion-Driven Sex Ed in America

Pantsuit Nation, the private Facebook group of around 4 million members, was originally created as online camaraderie for Hillary Clinton supporters in the 2016 election but has since morphed into a sort of support group for progressives facing trying times under the Trump administration. The following is a recent post to the group from a midwestern parent who gave us […]

News
Teaching Kids They Can’t Say “No”?

Utah excels at socializing male supremacy and female acquiescence. While students at Kanesville Elementary in West Haven, UT, were not required to take part in the Valentine’s Day sixth-grade dance, those participating would be asked to fill out a dance card with the names of students with whom they wanted to dance — anyone whose […]

News
What the Dutch Can Teach Us About Sex

photo via flickr And no, we’re not talking about the relative appeal of sex in clogs. We have long sung the praises of Holland’s approach to sex — and, in particular, its approach to sex & pregnancy education. Because Holland has results that we can all agree are worth aspiring to (even bat-shit-crazy Michele Bachmann): […]

Sexual Health
Happy Intersex Awareness Day!

One of my kids has red hair. So when I discovered the upper estimate of the population born with intersex traits is 1.7% — similar to the number of red-haired people in the world — it really hit home how common intersexuality is. You certainly know — or at the very least have met — […]

News
Kavanaugh Is a Teachable Moment

These days, you hear a lot of parents bemoan the fact that they can’t have the news on, for fear their kids might hear something sexually inappropriate. That “America’s Dad” Bill Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted 60 women. That the Catholic Church has been a child-rape factory and cover-up machine for decades.  That our own […]

News
When It Comes to Restrictions on Reproductive Rights, WOMEN Are the Problem

In the United States, it took 131 years for women to get the right to vote, 133 years to get our first female Senator, 192 years to get a woman on the Supreme Court, and we’re still waiting — a whopping 229 years — for our first female president. Like much of the world, our country has a […]

Research
Yoga and Mindfulness Can Improve Sex

Okay, so we know we’re fond of saying that our sex advice requires neither a yoga mat nor a devotion to ’90s Sting. It’s not that we have anything against yogis, we just think that the ability to wrap one’s legs around one’s head isn’t necessarily the answer to everyone’s sex problems. That said, we […]

Toys
A New, Innovative Way to Deal with Painful Sex: The Ohnut

Emily Sauer is the founder of Ohnut, an intimate health wearable for painful intercourse that allows you to customize the depth of penetration (think of a “donut” made for decreasing pain and thus increasing pleasure). We asked her a few questions about it (see below). It’s a super cool product for a widespread but under-acknowledged problem. […]

News
How to Write a Breakup Letter…According to Donald Trump

President Donald Trump just broke up with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. After some smack talk from both sides, Trump canceled their much ballyhooed nuclear arms summit scheduled for June 12th, 2018 in a letter made public by the White House. The breakup letter is a master class in passive aggressive bitterness that could only […]

News
The Difference Between Kink and Abuse

Are there no decent men in the world? NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was supposed to be one of the good ones, a champion of the #MeToo Movement who was going after alleged serial sexual assaulter and rapist, Harvey Weinstein. But then The New Yorker (which might seriously need to consider changing its name to “To […]

News
The Incel Rebellion

Longtime EMandLO.com reader Dave on the Incel Rebellion: On April 23rd, 2018, a lone male drove a delivery style van down a crowded Toronto sidewalk, killing 10 people and seriously injuring dozens of others. First thoughts from the media and the general public were that this might have been a terrorist attack, based (sadly) upon […]

Celebrities
A Tale of Two Dates: 15 Lessons from the Aziz Ansari Case

To read the Tweets and comments on the Babe.net story about one woman’s horrible night with actor & comedian Aziz Ansari (read it here if you haven’t already), you’d assume there were only two possible, mutually exclusive conclusions to draw: either you believe that Ansari is a sexual assaulter who’s career should be over OR […]

News
When Is It Okay to Ban Books from Prisons?

We were amused when we received a letter from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections informing us, as the founders of our imprint Better Half Books, that our beginner’s guide to kink, “150 Shades of Play,” had been denied to all their inmates: We had so many questions! Had a loved one brought an inmate a […]

Pop Culture
Twitter’s Best Reactions to Trump’s “My Button Is Bigger” Nuclear Threat

Writing the title of this post just created the most unsettling cognitive dissonance: on the one hand President Trump‘s recent tweet boasting about the size of his nuclear button is pure, laughable, infantile, sexual insecurity; on the other it’s a casual threat to the lives of millions of real people living on this planet, indeed […]