My close friend and colleague Cydelle Berlin is the Director/Producer of NiteStar, an amazing theatre production that brings positive sex information to kids as young as 10 in elementary school through college. This fabulous Party/Benefit celebrates 21 years of talking, dancing and singing about smarter sex choices for kids that even includes masturbation!

NiteStar is the only program of its kind that uses original theatre, music and dance with a focuses on adolescent sexuality. They have reached more than 2 million people with their non-traditional and highly entertaining shows. They also have follow up behavior-based workshops using their unique methodology.

Join us June 9th from 6 to 10.
Landmark on the Park
4th Universalist Society
160 CPW at 76th Street

My friend Alan Kishbaugh sent this to me. Although I make an effort to accept other's beliefs when it comes to religion, like most Americans I want a division of church and state.

I'm sorry to say that as hard as I try, I find it extremely difficult to understand how people today see the Bible as "the word of God." He's not my god, nor a large proportion of other Americans. A lot of church going folks have managed to deal with their version of a more modern God successfully. The problem is with the evangelicals that believe in the Bible literally like Bush Jr. In my worst nightmare, I could not have imagined a more dangerous president. Like Alan said, Bush Jr. was a bigger nut case than we knew." Now the pitiful Republicans want to blame Obama for the mess we're in.

The revelation this month in GQ Magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush's Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

While I appreciate this woman's honesty and respect her feelings, her blog entry is a perfect example of a woman with a limited sexual script. Or call it "sex style." She was fortunate to get as far as she did on monogamous marital sex.

It's sad to hear anyone longing for something that is really quite available, if not in the flesh, in our minds at least. Nothing like a cyber affair to spice up your selfloving or delving into the darkest recesses of our minds for better masturbation fantasies with an array of fabulous sextoys.

I've spent my career separating partnersex from solosex from threewaysex from groupsex. They all have their time and place. I want to tell her to buy a massage. Consider one with "full release" or how about an escort service? Or any young man who delivers or fixes inside or outside the house. And why do so many women turn to other women for sexual pleasures when partnersex leaves a marriage? In the end, I felt her testimony represents so many women in the world who were raised to be dependent on one man for all of their sexual needs.

David Steinberg has given us a great view of Seattle's Erotic Art Festival, one of the most progressive cities I've visited. The DVD of me lecturing with slides of my art was filmed in Seattle where the food is fabulous and the people are very aware, they think "green" and keep a clean city. Yeah. I could do some some real nice sex art in the near future as soon as our website gets settled (to the right is a piece from my art collection to debut on the site later in June). I told Carlin this week in Phoenix that I could see me sitting at my drawing board in my nineties creating some visually hot shit!!! Oops, there I go with my potty mouth again. Creating some hot images:

It's a sad truth, and something hard for me as an erotically patriotic San Franciscan to admit, but the most significant and exciting fine art erotic event in the U.S., year after year, takes place not in San Francisco but in Seattle, home of the Seattle Erotic Art Festival (SEAF). SEAF just had its seventh annual erotic fine art exhibit and celebration, April 30-May 3, proudly proclaimed to the public at the 30,000-square-foot Seattle Center Exhibition Hall, once home to the World's Fair.

Talk about an inspiration. This woman has inspired me to get my own facebook page - but maybe not.

A 103-year-old woman has become Britain's oldest user of Twitter - after she got bored of Facebook. Ivy Bean, who lives in a care home in Bradford, has 4,800 friends on Facebook, reports The Sun.

But she now prefers Twitter and recently posted: "I'm enjoying Twitter and having my photo taken - and I'm looking forward to Deal Or No Deal." Ivy's enthusiasm is spreading among her friends at Hillside Manor care home in Bradford.

Truthout's piece on child beauty pageants brought back a painful memory from childhood.  Mother was nearly perfect except the time she entered me in a beauty contest when I was five. I wore a two piece bathing suit with a BIG bow on top of my Shirley Temple sausage curls. Mother rehearsed me to walk up to the front of the stage, put my hand on my hip and say, "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?"

I was the sweet little girl on the Good Ship Lollypop combined with Mae West, the most brazen outspoken sexual woman of her time. On the day of the contest I was running a fever but determined to follow through.

This piece by David Steinberg on the truth about kink.com reminded my of my investigation into the world of BDSM back in the eighties.  It taught me about the conscious exchange of power between couples who embraced the roles of top and bottom. Until that decade, my feminist ideal was love and sex between equals. In my support group of lesbian and bisexual women, I discovered there really was no such thing as equals. The closest I got was taking turns to decide who was running the show.

Most people today still hold the unsophisticated view that BDSM is a form torture! Not true. Torture is closer to romantic love or being married without any clear stated boundaries or agreements. I know because I've done both:

If you were to take seriously Matt Smith's inflammatory SF Weekly article on kink.com ("Whipped and Gagged -- Is Government Spending Obscene?"), you would think that all sorts of nefarious things are going on at the huge old armory at 14th and Mission that is kink.com's home. 

We learn from history that we don't learn from history. As a follow up to the Frost/Nixon movie, this article "Democrats' Battered Wife Syndrome" is a must read. In the seventies I had a pen pal who was a retired CIA agent. He told me about the drug sales and arms dealing the Republicans were doing. He was getting ready to write a book exposing this when suddenly I never heard from him again. Yup, the Dems are battered wives who, like the photo above, are willing to kiss and make up in the hope that all will get better. NOT!

"In recent years, the Washington political dynamic has often resembled an abusive marriage, in which the bullying husband (the Republicans) slaps the wife and kids around, and the battered wife (the Democrats) makes excuses and hides the ugly bruises from outsiders to keep the family together." [cont'd]

Carol and Robert who created the Center for Sex and Culture (CSC ) in San Francisco are the folks behind the Masturbate-a-Thon on May 2. I also consider them to be among my closet and bestest Darling friends.

While I'm all for self-pleasuring, jacking off, spanking the monkey, self-loving, or whatever else you want to call it, I have never attended a Masturbate-a-Thon. Yes, I've been invited numerous times but I have reservations about turning my favorite kind of sex into a competive sport. So fuck me and the horse I rode in on in. Everyone in the SF area is invited and I'll let you know all about it when it's over. Horray, Horray for the month of May. The Masturbate-a-Thon begins on the second day!

Finally, Oprah has the courage to discuss masturbation, the most prevalent sexual activity today among teens, young adults, married couples and seniors.

In 1987 when my book "Sex for One" came out, my publicist wanted to get me on Oprah. On her third try, she was told that she could stop calling because Oprah didn't approve of masturbation as a legitimate sexual activity. Not long ago masturbation was talked about on her show by referring to it as "Self Cultivation." Still, I was not impressed, but recently Laura Berman came right out with the word and even supported the use of vibrators for young girls.

Three Cheers for Oprah and Laura!!!

Dossie and I met back in the early seventies when I was bicoastal living in San Francisco part time. Our commune on Castro Steet rotated betweeen four to five people who were committed singles. As long as we lived together we agreed to avoid sexually pairing off. Dossie came to a few our communal sex parties. I remember her as a beautiful tiny faun with a mop of curly hair who loved sex. l'm glad to see her book coming out again. The information is pertenent for everyone who realizes that the limitations of monogamy doesn't work for everyone.

An underground hit for years in sexually experimental circles, Dossie Easton's and Janet W. Hardy's The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships and Other Adventures makes the case that we should all enjoy an occasional threesome, foursome, and moresome with friends and strangers. "We believe it's OK to have sex with anybody you love," Easton and Hardy write, "and we believe in loving everybody."

"Many people find their partner advertising unbeknownst to them; people set up anonymous dates and it turns out to be their spouse who answered the ad."

The review in Alternet by Cynthia Fuchs with the revealing title, "Screwing Their Brains Out": Plato's Retreat and the Rise of Swinging showed how little she and most other people know today about the Swinging Seventies. First off, adult group sex took many forms and none of them were anything like Woodstock that was about music, youth and pot. A few young couples got naked and enjoyed having sex together but it was NOT consenting adult couples having sex in a group setting.

Too many uptight folks today want to make group sex out to be some kind of social sickness or that only pathetic people took part in it. But what's been going on under the Bush admin and the Religious Right is today's real sickness with the repression of sexual expression that damages our youth with misinformation.

It's okay by me that my last name was left out of the film and her article. During my extensive interview, I told the film makers I went to Plato's only once and didn't much like it. My favorite sex parties were by invitation only with a core group of my friends. That way the mix of people was by design more like a successful dinner party. But I have no gripe with the suburban out-of-shape married couples who got to have some sexual fun at Plato's. I have always been a democratic fuck and some of these people were hotter than the so-called "pretty people" who were brittle and way too self-conscious to let go and enjoy recreational sex.

Shame on the religious right for causing this unnecessary suffering with their virginity, purity and anti-sex misinformation. While I believe in the freedom of speech, I'd still like to shut these idiots up permanently. As if young girls don't have enough to wade through just trying figure out all the changes going on in their bodies as they enter their teen years. They need to STFU and end their propaganda so girls can enter puberty with appropriate sex information and a sense of security.

Think you know the meaning of virginity? You'll be surprised to find out what Jessica Valenti discovered. In her new book The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women, the founder and executive editor of Feministing.com takes on the virginity movement, and argues that it's high time we disassociate female morality and sexuality. Recently, Anastasia Kousakis sat down with Valenti to discuss the book, the myths, and what's going on at those Purity Balls.

Every morning when I first get up, I immediately go to the computer and bring up our website. Each time, I'm utterly amazed at the speed and ease of the internet. Thanks to Ted Nelson, the brilliant creator of this medium, I am instantly in touch with the whole wide world. Maybe it's my age, but I never cease to marvel at the potential of this kind of communication.

Today, I accidentally ended up on a page that had viewer responses to my article on male circumcision. As I reread them, I again realized how many thoughtful people had shared their ideas and feelings on the subject, including a few men who called me out on some of my statements. And get this, I agree with what many of my critics said. Yes, I made some brash statements with no data to back them up but I wrote that essay after I'd just watched the video clip showing a baby being circumcised. It actually sickened me as I observed this infants suffering while two adult males, one a doctor and the other his father, simply stood by and allowed this to happen to a helpless baby that was put into restraints. Still in an emotional state, I typed out my response to this unnecessary procedure.

The NY Times article about SeekingArrangements.com, a website that hooks up Sugar Babies with Sugar Mommies and Sugar Daddies, showed up just after I posted my essay “The Business of Sex.” I knew I was going to like the author, Ruth Padawer with the heading: “Heterosexual relationships have long involved economic transactions.” No kidding! She could have added "Homosexual relationships" to the mix.

It brought to mind my original 1972 feminist manifesto titled “Liberating Masturbation” that I turned into Ms. Magazine when I was asked to write an article. The opening sentence stated: “Among the many issues involved in the liberation of women, the two major fronts in my own personal liberation have been economics and sexuality. Ultimately they are not separable – not as long as the female genitals have economic value instead of sexual value for women.” Over the next twenty years, I reworded and rehashed that concept endlessly. It was like I'd been given a Zen koan as I tried to fathom, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" My rational mind knew that personally speaking; I had to earn my own money in order to be sexually independent. Whenever I was financially dependent on a lover or my husband, I was unable to speak the whole truth about my sexual desires or share my sexual thoughts.