Monica Shores's Posts

How to Have “Sex Talks”–Plural–With Kids

What’s the right age for parents to talk to kids about sex? Is it overstepping boundaries to have that talk with a child of another gender? Sex educator Heather Corinna, founder of top-ranked sex-advice site Scarleteen, shared her feminist advice for parents on that diciest of subjects: “the sex talk.” This is part 2 of [...]

Heather Corinna Goes Beyond “The Sex Talk”

Heather Corinna is the founder of Scarleteen, the highest ranked website  for sex education and sexuality advice, and author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College. Heather spoke with Ms. about the current, not-so-evolved state of sex ed in the United States and which messages about teen [...]

TSA Gets Grabby

Since the recent unveiling of the Transportation Security Administration’s “enhanced” security measures, there’s been nothing but bad press for airport security—and with good reason. Pilots and security experts have criticized the inefficiency and ineffectualness of the system. Congressman Ted Poe has called the new body scanners a violation of the Fourth Amendment. While there’s still a debate over [...]

Will “New Atheism” Make Room For Women?

If you’ve been following the rise of so-called “New Atheism” movement, you may have noticed that it sure looks a lot like old religion. The individuals most commonly associated with contemporary atheism—Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger—are all male, white and, well, kinda old (69, 61, 68 and 75). Sam Harris, another [...]

Still Much Ado About Craigslist

Though Craigslist’s Adult Services section is offline for good, the debate about its role in trafficking continues. Most recently, Michelle Goldberg weighed in on The Daily Beast with an article that uncritically embraces claims about what the closure of Adult Services will do for underage girls. In doing so, she inadvertently confirms many of the [...]

Yoga’s Feminist Awakening

The online yoga community is still feeling the aftershocks of a recent debate about the use of women’s bodies in asana-related advertising, and the conversation is far from finished. It all started when the grand dame of U.S. yoga and Yoga Journal co-founder Judith Hanson Lasater wrote a letter expressing her unhappiness with the increasing [...]

How To Respect Sex Workers

Most women have strong feelings about the sex industry, be they for or against. (And many, of course, remain undecided.) When dealing with such an emotionally volatile topic, it’s easy to inadvertently silence or even insult sex workers themselves. (As a participant in sex worker activism for the past four years, I’ve seen that in [...]