The reason to scrutinize religion is because religion can be terribly harmful. The example and it is not unique. The irrational fear that some religion instills around sex harms countless people. “A Christian doctor removed my clitoris when I was three years old as a ‘cure’ for masturbation, writes Renee Bergstrom”… Read more at The Guardian Read More
If we’ve felt great pain in past relationships, we probably have some strong beliefs or biased love based on those impressions. How can we go beyond our past conclusions in new circumstances? If we believe ‘this’ about women and ‘that’ about men, the real events around us we see through those beliefs like a colored lens. If we don’t understand ‘my side bias,’ we won’t know when we create our own evidence e.g. questionable matters seem proof of past conclusions. Such beliefs often continue when contrary facts prove the beliefs flawed… Read More
First Person Convicted Of “Revenge Porn” In Oregon Gets Jail Sentence “A 31-year-old Oregon man is going to jail for six months for revenge porn after he published sexual videos of an ex online. He’s the first person in the state convicted and sentenced for “revenge porn.” … Read more. Revenge porn is in part why I wrote. What we’ll do when we’re ‘turned on.’ Read More
When discussing heightened sexual states and what we’ll do when we feel turned on, let’s look at sex as something like the ocean or like weather, something both powerful and in continuous flux. Sex does not exist to serve our expectations or beliefs but is simply a part of life. If good fortune allows us the opportunity to experience harmless sexual delights, let us feel gratitude. Let’s remember for some of our human family, sexual joy is truly difficult. My heart aches for these people…. Read More
Originally published at The Huffington Post 11/09/2016 “…we must hold each other as we piece ourselves back together, as we remember who we are ― who we have always been ― and remember what we have stared down and refused to give in to before. Remember what we and those who came before us have overcome, together, for hundreds and hundreds of cold, dark years. We must, perhaps more than any time before now, be exactly who we are, not by denying our fears, but by… Read More
At the age of nine, the death of my beloved sister before she turned twenty taught me something about relationships and this lesson extends to sexual relationships, don’t miss love. What we grieve for in loss is not what the people did for us or helped us to accomplish. We grieve the irreplaceable affections we shared. Don’t miss love. This love has a value unto itself as a part of a good life and, speaking for myself, to imagine a life without such love immediately degrades… Read More
We cannot be convicted of abusing a lovers empathy with our self-created misery but we can still be guilty. Our ability to feel what we think is one of our conceptual powers. The mind does not communicate to the body in language but instead uses impulses. Those impulses cause real feeling. If we are unaware that we can generate any feeling including misery, it is likely that we impose those intense feelings on others. We not only abuse lovers empathy, we may even flatter ourselves for sharing… Read More
Enjoy the video below of Norway sex education. America on the whole, can’t deal directly with the facts of the sex as an issue. Such a video would be impossible in many states. We force children to learn about sex through ignorant friends or unrealistic pornography. If we consider how low the abortion rate is in Norway, then even the religious moralists would have good reason to support similar comprehensive sex education. Read More
By Todd Vickers We will probably face fear or prejudice, including our own, when we dare to cross the frontiers of personal and social bias to explore sexual kindness. We hold dear, protect and offer to others the freedom to have new experiences and discover what gives them sexual joy. When others are having such delights, we can embody this kindness or corrupt it. In a situation with more than one lover, the gravity of this subject increases. Our desire for truthfulness is a real merit… Read More
Our desire, our aspiration for a better life is beautiful. It makes us bold and willing to risk and with risk comes both failure and discovery, both have their own value. We can’t be to often reminded that humans learn in three ways; imitation, repetition, and discovery. Each way of learning about ourselves and the world has its own value but only one has the possibility of leading to something better beyond the limits of the past. Monkey see, monkey do makes it possible to avoid… Read More
The cheating liar may or may not believe in monogamy, but they have the merit of seeing possibilities beyond monogamy. Their desire exists beyond the boundaries of their beliefs or pretense. The cheaters lip service to monogamy becomes a degradation of sexual affection outside of monogamy. Someone who lies for the sake of having lovers tries to manage other people’s affections. A lie may produce many results far beyond what we wanted or imagined. A momentary gain may bring a terrible loss. Deceit is a… Read More
By Todd Vickers Politics and sex can exist apart but those interested in sex should heed the 2016 election results. Since we shouldn’t rely on reforms in a conservative political environment, any change becomes a social not a political responsibility. The reasoning offered here also applies to issues beyond sexuality. Before talking about conscious social change let’s take a broad overview. Any minority existing outside the status quo is stifled in a conservative environment. I’ll mention some relevant sexual issues, if you are interested in sex education, polyamory, LGBTQ, sex… Read More
If we deny opportunities to love because we can’t conceive living beyond monogamy, we may, among other things, be suffering envy. The idea that we cannot have something tempts us to say it’s ‘not worth having.’ This is often envy hiding behind a prejudice. Nobody but the person themself can confirm such envy and that takes a great deal of honesty. Life by chance offers us opportunities to love. The idea that we must sacrifice one love to love another is foolish and worse when… Read More
Sex is not merely physical pleasure, there’s a wonder, like that of a child seeing a butterfly alight on their outstretched hand, or being barefoot in a creek, with mud in our toes, holding a crayfish, fearing it might pinch. A little clumsiness may bring tears, smiles or uproarious laughter. We lost ourselves in what we were doing. By Todd Vickers This website devotes itself to progressive views about sex you won’t see anywhere else. Take a few minutes, read some articles, and share what touches you…. Read More
It’s so easy to thoughtlessly shoot off a text or email in a digital world. But we can’t see the others face, their anger, their tears or misunderstanding so we have no real sense of how we are affecting them. Our vindictiveness may tempt us to go further than we would if our empathy engaged someone in person. Moreover, it takes far more courage to speak to a persons face then to type out text. The meaning of our words change in different situations. If a man runs around a… Read More
The honesty facade is real honesty; it’s a rigorously honest description, but it also hides something that is factually true. I devoted a whole chapter to this topic in one of my earlier works. For the sake of brevity I will state the problem. Think of a child in a night terror. That child is in the throes of instinctive impulses based on a monster under the bed that he or she really conceives to exist and that terror necessarily becomes the preoccupation of others… Read More
By Todd Vickers How can we say ‘yes’ to life and not be attached to the people, things, events and outcomes. Non attachment is a vague notion that wrongly suggests that we could be attached in the first place. Even our own body changes happen outside of our control and every particle in the body is different from what it was a moment before. ‘Our’ livers, as important as they are, do not consult us about their job, much less the needed symbiotic organisms that live in our gut…. Read More
How many of our sexual beliefs result from conforming to or rebelling against arbitrary, indirect and unrelated suggestions? Things like a belief or a product that our sexuality could easily exist without. Let’s consider letting go of sexual ideals as a compass and let morality be guided by joy and love rendered harmless through reason. How much sexual discovery exists beyond the things we habitually associate with sexuality? Do we allow sexuality to be a life affirmation? Do we want sex as a delightful, living impulse? Most of us… Read More
What Desires Are Politically Important? Bertrand Russell – Nobel Lecture Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have chosen this subject for my lecture tonight because I think that most current discussions of politics and political theory take insufficient account of psychology… Read more or listen to audio of the speech at nobelprize.org Tonight I will be posting a new piece about how our sexuality becomes associated with unrelated things. Todd Vickers Read More
If we learned we should achieve something through sex, other than the instinctive joy, then we learned sex is a means to an end. Even sex to have children, is sex as a means, but harmless sex can also be an end, something that is worth doing because its good, even if nothing else comes of it. Let’s not miss that value because we’ve been taught that if sex doesn’t lead to anything else, it is worthless. The brief video infers from anthropology that our hunter gatherer ancestors must… Read More
