* How long until some kid in a gym tells another kid “You play good…for a straight guy”?

* So the NBA has caught up with the military. Now gays can openly shoot in both places.

* * *

In his interview with Sports Illustrated, Collins described why he came out: so he could be true to himself, stop lying to everyone, and live more authentically. That’s what practically every gay person says when she/he comes out.

And that’s what almost every straight person says when she/he comes out—as someone who’s into S/M, or watches porn, or has been faking orgasms, or goes to strip clubs, or would like a finger in their butt during sex, or whatever. Bisexual people say it when they come out, too.

Gays and lesbians aren’t the only people who come out. In a society so ambivalent about sex as ours, virtually everyone needs to come out. In America, just knowing what you want in bed is radical. Every year, a huge number of people ask my advice about “how do I tell my partner what I want sexually?” No one ever asks, “how do I tell my partner how I like my eggs cooked?”or “How do I tell my partner what kind of music I like?”

* So Jason Collins is the first pro to come out in a major sport. We’ll probably hear about the first in baseball, football, and hockey. Will we hear about the second? The third? How many gay athletes will have to come out before it’s no longer newsworthy?

* Yo, Religious Right: at least gays aren’t having abortions.

* Some people now have several reasons they can hate the guy—because he’s Black or because he’s gay. It’s great to be pro-choice, isn’t it?

* Of course, there’s no affirmative action on the athletic field, court, or diamond. If the guy doesn’t rebound or defend, he’ll get benched. Which, of course, is as it should be.

* Let’s see, gay characters on TV, gays getting married, gay politicians, gay ballplayers…it’s getting so that an American has to stay in their house just to avoid contact with the real world. Ah, that helps explain people home-schooling their kids.

* Almost every guy in the NBA has or has had a gay teammate. Soon everyone will know exactly who those teammates are. The real progress will be when people forget who those teammates are.

* * *

The day the Religious Right fears is coming ever closer: When sexual choices are considered private, not public. And when people are no longer judged on those private choices, but rather on their public behavior. Soon enough, religious fundamentalists will be the only ones who obsess about sexual categories. The rest of us won’t be gay, or straight, or kinky, or asexual. We’ll just be people.

The celebration tactfully omitted any mention of the three catastrophes of Bush’s presidency—the counterproductive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the financial meltdown that handed the economy to Bush’s friends in the energy industry and Wall Street.

Ironically, today’s celebration focused on two of Bush’s supposed policy triumphs—the No Child Left Behind Act, and his fight against HIV/AIDS in Africa. These two supposed triumphs (educators and public health officials more often call them ineffective) mirror and mock two destructive outcomes of Bush’s domestic policies. His policies on sex education harmed tens of millions of children, and his policies on sexual health encouraged the spread of STDs (including HIV/AIDS) in the U.S.

As detailed in my book America’s War On Sex, here’s how President George W. Bush tried to ruin sex:

* Sex Education: Over a billion dollars was spent to promote abstinence-only sex ed. This program taught—literally— that condoms don’t work, sex is dangerous if you’re not married, and that teens who have sex are morally, emotionally, and psychologically deficient. The result was predictable: young people disdaining condoms, and a rush toward oral sex (“not real sex”) at younger ages.

* The War on Porn: Bush’s various Attorneys General were obsessed with prosecuting those who created and distributed movies showing adults having sex. The Justice Department used the Patriot Act to circumvent normal constitutional limits in these investigations, and RICO statutes to destroy anyone found guilty. The government even succeeded in busting the producers of pornographic texts—no photos, just words—something that hadn’t been done in four decades.

* Sponsoring Religion & Religious Values: In addition to championing religiously-based sex ed programs, the Bush Administration created and funded the Department of Faith-based Programs. This neatly funneled tens of millions of dollars to Bush’s supporters in the Christian Right, who were allowed to discriminate in hiring, firing, and program eligibility while using taxpayer funds.

This will actually be one of Bush’s most permanently damaging policies, as no president will ever be able to dismantle a program that directly benefits religious institutions. President Obama, of course, expanded this disgusting giveaway, further eroding the integrity of the First Amendment.

* Censoring & Punishing Broadcasters: Remember Janet Jackson’s nipple? Cher, Bono, and Nicole Richie using satanic syllables on live TV? Over $100 million was ultimately spent in the attempt to prevent Americans from seeing or hearing images or words so dangerous that the Constitution needed to be suspended. To pursue this pointless obsession, Bush empowered groups like the Parents Television Council and Morality in Media, giving these childish hysterics a seat at the policy table. To this day, they are attempting to control what words and pictures Americans are allowed to see and hear on their TVs.

* Destroying Reproductive Rights: Bush personally found contraception for unmarried people distasteful, and tried to eliminate legal abortion. On his watch, hundreds of state laws restricting abortion and contraception were crafted and passed. Bush spent years delaying the availability of Emergency Contraception—a modern medical miracle—as well as Gardasil, a drug that can save thousands of lives by preventing the spread of the type of HPV that can lead to cervical cancer.

* *

So what did Bush accomplish? More sexual confusion, ignorance, guilt, and shame; more unwanted pregnancies and dangerous illegal abortions; more fundamentalist religious values imposed on the rest of the population; and the largest explosion of access to pornography the world has ever known—with a network of federally-funded snitches entrapping more and more adults fantasizing in adult chatrooms.

Happy library and museum, Mr. Bush. Some of us won’t let you rewrite history without a fight.

Sexuality is a complex biological, psychological, and social phenomenon. Since it involves our bodies, our experience is mediated in our brain—which tells us how something “feels.” With the exception of extreme pain, most physical experiences are ambiguous—we can interpret them as pleasant or unpleasant, soothing or challenging. We generally interpret sensation rapidly and without conscious thought.

Thus, our biography—what we’ve done, where we’ve been, who we’ve been told we are, what we believe—has a tremendous influence on what our body actually experiences.

Depending on how we have grown up, loved, been loved, and struggled, our body interprets various kinds of sensory input (touch, smell, etc.) as, variously, sexy, scary, fun, confusing, gentle, pleasant, painful, teasing, overwhelming, exciting, or threatening. Or some combination of these.

To make things more complicated, culture has a voice in the way we interpret our body’s experience. Society attaches (mostly arbitrary) meanings to various physical experiences—such as womanly, aggressive, insulting, spiritual, intimate, perverse, and “real sex.”

So by the time we get into bed with a partner—whether a life partner, a one-night stand, or someone in-between—there are a lot of factors influencing our subjective experience of whatever happens. Sexually, friction is not just friction, just one body rubbing against another body. Every sensation is interpreted before we know how it “feels.”

Understanding the way our biography (i.e., psychological and cultural influences) mediates our biological and sensory inputs during sex is the key to understanding our sexual experience—including our function and dysfunction, desire and frustration, anxiety and pleasure. Of course, it’s impossible to do this literally.

What can be done—by trained clinicians working with motivated people—is examining and understanding the silhouette cast by this internal, continual, lightning-quick process. This can be seen as the set of erotic narratives that individuals tell themselves, both consciously and unconsciously. These are stories—in effect, instructions—that people use to understand and describe their sexual experience. Some of these narratives are conscious (“I’m the smart but unattractive sister”). Others are unconscious (“If I give people what they want they will abandon me”).

By exploring these, client and therapist can see the processes by which the client takes their raw physical experience and transforms it into meaningful (positive, negative, or mixed) erotic interactions. If someone is dissatisfied with the kinds of sexual interactions they’re having, working backwards to identify and see their narratives will help them understand how they create these unsatisfying situations in the first place. This can make deep change possible.

Conscious or unconscious, common erotic narratives include:
* “I’m not sexually desirable; I’m lucky to have any partner at all.”
* “I’m only valuable for my sexuality.”
* “Although I’m a man, my sexuality isn’t very manly.”
* “Sexually, I should do practically anything my partner wants.”
* “Sex is really for making babies, not for mere pleasure.”

Changing narratives like these isn’t simple, but it can be done. When people do so, they interpret their sexual experiences differently. They then change their sexual decision-making. Increased desire and satisfaction, and more reliable, adult function is a typical result.

Truly, sex is more than an activity–it’s an idea.

Today they’re warning us about the increasing social acceptance of same-gender sex, non-monogamy, and S/M.

And they’re right. We’re approaching the end of normal sex.

Socially-defined “normal sex,” in contrast to socially-defined “abnormal sex.” With a clear bright line between them.

Historically, “normal sex” has always been about defining and imposing boundaries. Various sexual activities, thoughts, and ideas were demonized, even criminalized. Most people really did fear, condemn, and stay away from whatever forms of eroticism they learned were abnormal. The adventurous—Oscar Wilde, Marquis de Sade, Margaret Sanger, Hester Prynne—were punished.

Much of this was about controlling procreation. Some of it was about ignorance toward female pleasure, and hostility toward female enthusiasm. Some of it was about dividing the body into clean and dirty areas, hence clean and dirty activities. Some of it was about managing virginity, which was valuable family property.

Beyond all this, a key reason religion and repressive government have always wanted to control sexuality is because it’s a place where people can experience profound autonomy. Since the beginning of time, even the poorest, least intelligent, least attractive people have been able to feel powerful during sex. Even when you have absolutely no power over the important circumstances of your life, you can, if not instructed against it, still do and imagine whatever you want in bed. What powerful social institution would NOT want to control this bottomless well of personal power?

Therapists find that when people become empowered around their sexuality, they often keep growing: “If I can be uninhibited in bed, where else can I express myself? If I can make up my own rules in bed, why not in my relationship, my family, my community, or even with my God?”

So defining and patrolling normal sex is an important political tool. Every religion and every government knows that.

And although politically our country is deep into a 21st century Dark Ages—abortion virtually criminalized, sex offender registries now used as throwaway gulags, pornography relentlessly demonized as causing violence and addiction—in bed, fortunately, Americans are increasingly out of control. Utah homemakers reading 50 Shades of Grey. Men and women waxing pubic hair. Everyone under 40 trying anal sex at least once. Straight college students self-identifying as queer. From Wal-Marts to Amazon, vibrators unbuckling the Bible Belt.

So is this, in fact, the end of the world?

Depending on what your world’s based on, the answer is yes. Those who say that “morality” is about restricting sexual expression rather than living by a humanistic code of ethics are clearly on the wrong side of history. Virtually all Americans have sex by age 21, and they’re not going back. Most people who have genital sex have oral sex, and over a third have tried (or still do) anal sex. Virtually all American Catholics use “artificial” birth control. And this is clearly a Golden Age for both sex toys and swing clubs in every one of our 50 states.

Oh sure, millions of today’s politically conservative young people loudly demand that politicians continue to criminalize alternative sexualities, but many of them privately do those very things. The really religious ones (often home-schooled) talk about virginity until marriage, the unreliability of condoms, the horrors of commercial sex, masturbation as infidelity, and strict heterosexuality in thought, deed, and fantasy.

Until, of course, they get drunk, those blissful few hours when they love strip clubs, premarital blowjobs, and watching girls make out with girls.

They’ll support a narrow, punitive vision of normal sex once again when they sober up. But for the rest of us, no matter how ordinary our sex lives are, the days of normal sex are just about over.

And it’s about time.

That’s great for progressives. But…

Wanting equal rights for your son is a poor reason to support equal rights for a class of people. It reflects exactly the kind of tribalism that’s preventing most of the Arab world and Africa from ever creating secular democracies. In Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, “voting” is simple: Sunnis vote for Sunnis, Shia for Shia, Kurds for Kurds, etc.. This isn’t voting, its tribal warfare brought indoors.

There are still no civic institutions knitting together the “countries” of Iraq or Afghanistan, or of Syria, Lebanon, Albania, Rwanda, Azerbaijan, and other places where ethnicity and family history are more important than national identity.

Senator Portman sees public policy as a way of comforting HIS family, not of nourishing the American people. His statements this week showed no recognition of any actual principle of fairness. He acknowledges that his past opposition to civil rights for gay people is rooted in his faith tradition—itself a bizarre (if too-common) abdication of his legislative responsibility. He now says that he sees gay couples’ desire to marry as a tribute to marriage rather than a threat (recalling the old fear that giving Blacks civil rights would endanger the rights of Whites). He also says his new position is rooted in the Biblical value of compassion.

But as inappropriate as it is to reference his nouveau interpretation of the Bible for a legislative position, he isn’t extending this “compassion” to any other Americans in any other situations.

So this is a mind that has NOT opened. Because as Portman himself said, he’s “had a change of heart based upon a personal experience”—not social science, not Constitutional analysis, not a desire to extend America’s sweet promises to all its inhabitants.

In order to implement this Biblical “compassion” among the rest of his eleven million non-gay constituents, does Portman require a daughter who needs an abortion, a son who marries outside his race, a grandchild with a mental illness, an elderly parent who can’t afford medical care? For the good of the nation, should we hope that Portman’s brother is swept up in an FBI sting while enjoying age-play fantasies in an adult chat room?

Our government confers dozens of civil rights on everyone who marries. Thus, all adults should be eligible to marry, or the government should stop privileging married people and simply go out of the marriage business.

And so I’m glad to have Portman’s support for extending the option of marriage to non-heterosexual Americans. But this support is just a kinder, gentler version of political opportunism. Instead of voting in a way that lines his pocket, he’s now voting to enrich his son’s life. Other gay men and women will benefit. But anyone else who needs “compassion”—or as I call it, civil rights—will have to wait until the next development in Portman’s private life.

Last year’s winners were Dr. Larry Magid, Internet Child Safety Advocate; Dr. Debby Herbenick, Sex Researcher and Author; best-seller Sex At Dawn, by Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá; and the global forum Sexuality Policy Watch.

This year’s winners are:

Darrel Ray, Fundamentalist-Turned-Atheist Sex Educator

A psychologist for over 30 years, Dr. Darrel W. Ray is the author of four books including The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture and Sex and God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality.

Ray grew up in a highly religious Kansas family—a preacher grandpa, preacher cousins, and parents who later became missionaries. Sexual repression and its consequences were a key reason that Ray saw the light of atheism. Ever since, he’s been helping others overcome the oppressive effects of religion.

Recognizing the tremendous difficulties many people have in escaping their religious families, communities, and even livelihoods, Ray founded Recovering From Religion, which now has meetings across the U.S.

Ray recently founded the Secular Therapist Project, which pairs secular mental health professionals with adults needing their services. In many communities, secular therapists or would-be patients (or both) are in the closet, often unaware of the others’ existence. This growing registry, which charges no fees, even helps clergy who wish to talk with someone about leaving their faith or profession. Therapists are encouraged to register with the project here—leveraging Darrel Ray’s Sexual Intelligence across the country.

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

FIRE is devoted to protecting the rights of college and high school students to express themselves on and off campus. This is critical, says Executive Director Greg Lukianoff, because if students learn that free expression is dangerous or prohibited, they won’t notice—or care—when their free speech rights are later limited as adults. In his new book Unlearning Liberty, Lukianoff persuasively argues that the polarization of today’s politics is partly due to colleges actively suppressing robust intellectual debate—under the guise that someone’s feelings might get hurt.

FIRE promotes Sexual Intelligence most effectively when it is publicizing or challenging vague, undemocratic speech and behavior codes at colleges across the country. Such codes are a dangerous attempt to control adults’ consensual dating behavior, and the expression of ideas about gender, sexual orientation, and sexual activity.

Examples of policies FIRE has challenged or publicized:

* Pasadena City College’s last-minute intervention to bar the public from a school event featuring a porn actor;
* UCSB’s student government’s demand that school officials pressure Facebook to take down two student Facebook pages describing the school’s sexual culture;
* University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill disciplining a student for violating its speech code for publicly criticizing the university’s handling of her allegations that a fellow student raped her.
* SUNY Brockport’s campus policy listed the following as examples of punishable “harassment”: “calling someone an ‘old bag’”; “jokes making fun of any protected group”; and even merely “discussing sexual activities.”

Discourse on American campuses is now being restricted to that which the most sensitive or least tolerant student can bear. FIRE is working hard to fix that.

Scarleteen

The Scarleteen website has too many colors, too many fonts, bad puns, and references to social media I’ve never heard of. So it’s perfect for its audience—teens and early ’20s who want sexual information.

Since 2006 Scarleteen’s site has received a billion hits. What do visitors get?

* Hundreds of articles, factsheets, and Q/A on sexual health and relationships. The content is written by adults and teens/young people.
* Interactive message boards, a text/SMS service, and an active presence on Facebook and Twitter—written by staff, volunteers, and young adult users.
* Referrals to other services such as STI testing, contraception, pre-natal and abortion care, and crisis care.

Since Corinna founded it in 1998, Scarleteen has provided young people with accurate information along with social justice activism and a fierce commitment to a diversity-oriented, non-pathology model of sexuality. The U.S. has 1.5 million home-schooled students and 6 million high school-age youth no longer in school. Scarleteen is a crucial part of their sex education.

We are proud to join organizations such as UNICEF, Planned Parenthood, and The Boston Women’s Health Collective in recognizing Scarleteen and Heather Corinna for raising the Sexual Intelligence of the world’s young people.

Australian Sex Party

Along with natural beauty and great weather, the Australian Sex Party is one of Australia’s treasures. While a political party called The American Sex Party would have trouble being taken seriously, consider if you’d vote for a party whose platform included:

* an end to internet censorship and an increase in internet privacy;
* government investigation of child sex abuse in religious institutions;
* ending tax exemptions for religious institutions;
* decriminalizing assisted suicide for the terminally ill;
* legal protections for sex workers;
* legal protections for those engaged in consensual S/M.

The Sex Party is expertly guided by their primary candidate, Fiona Patten. This tireless businesswoman has gathered enough libertarians, progressives, business owners, and sexual enthusiasts to make ASP the country’s most important minor party. Whether or not Patten wins the next election, her public statements and the Party’s position papers are raising her country’s level of Sexual Intelligence.

If it’s “gay porn,” then we would be surprised to find straight people looking at it. If it’s porn featuring same-gender sex, however, then we’d be surprised if there weren’t straight people watching it.

It’s the latter, of course. Adults find all sorts of fantasies and images sexy—and they don’t necessarily have anything to do with their real-life desires. That is, enjoying scenes of two men having oral sex doesn’t make a man gay. Similarly, enjoying looking at fictional scenes of sexual coercion (or fantasizing being raped) doesn’t mean a person wants that in real life.

To put it another way, what arouses us is only a small part of our sexual orientation. If you want to know if someone’s gay, straight, or bi, ask them who they have sex with (and who they want to have sex with in real life), not what videos they like to watch.

The question came up in a professional conversation the other day, when an inexperienced therapist asked why some straight men were attracted to websites featuring pre-operative transsexuals (typically advertised as “tranny” or “she-male”)—that is, images of people with women’s breasts and a penis.

Why wouldn’t they? Talk about having your cake and eating it too! Most straight men enjoy women’s breasts, and most straight men are fascinated with penises. This porn allows the viewer to enjoy both at the same time. And the arithmetical possibilities—whether the performer is onscreen with one other person or several—are increased geometrically. Fellatio, anyone? Domination-submission-domination-submission anyone?

That’s why I discourage my straight patients from using the expression “gay fantasy,” and discourage my gay patients from saying “straight fantasy” (unless they’re fantasies ABOUT being gay or straight, which is a different matter). These expressions actually cloud things, because they suggest that the enjoyment of cross-orientation fantasies needs explanation. An investigation can be valuable, of course, especially if people have trouble thinking about or acknowledging their interests or curiosity. Sometimes the content of a favorite fantasy is a metaphor or an indirect expression of interest. A same-gender fantasy may excite a straight person because of, say, power dynamics. A mixed-gender fantasy may excite a gay person because of, say, a sense of belonging.

It turns out that sexuality is more complicated than gay-or-straight. In 1948 Alfred Kinsey presented data showing that “the world is not simply divided “into sheep and goats,” and presented his 7-point Kinsey Scale of sexual orientation. These days, expressions like GLBTQQI remind us that a person’s sexual orientation is a movie, not a photograph—behavior can change over time. Curiosity and experimentation can take us in unexpected (even, sometimes, boring!) directions. In that sense, we’re all “queer,” and potentially or actually “questioning.”

Ultimately, it’s more important to enjoy our fantasies than to understand or decode them. Most of us enjoy mainstream entertainment—such as violent video games, syrupy romance novels, detailed historical documentaries, or utopian science fiction films—without wondering what our preferences for these things “mean.” We all know perfectly gentle people who enjoy the brutal weekly mayhem on CSI or Bones or whatever the latest adrenalin-pumper is. We may criticize their taste, but we don’t need to fear their violent impulses.

Unless, of course, we try to change the channel.

The notion that certain institutions can simply opt out of the country’s laws because of some “moral objection” is dangerous—particularly when a small group of wealthy religions has seized the power to define which moral objections are allowed this privilege. If YOU find it morally objectionable that you have to pay and promote women the same as men, you still have to do it. If YOU find it morally objectionable that your taxes support a war in Afghanistan, you still have to pay them. And if YOU have a loved one on Death Row, you can’t get their sentence changed simply because you find capital punishment morally objectionable.

The idea that a multi-billion dollar, multi-national religious corporation gets to select which laws it will follow is ludicrous.

The health care law doesn’t force anyone to use birth control—but to hear the protests, you’d think President Obama was personally putting condoms into boxes of Wheaties, and birth control pills into fonts of holy water.

The original 2010 law exempted the thousands of corporations operating churches and other houses of worship. But now religious charities, universities, and hospitals are loudly objecting as well.

The Catholic Church is the single biggest operator of hospitals in this country; you probably live near one. The Church operates thousands of schools, including colleges in or near your city. Employees of these many institutions should have the same rights as all other Americans. We should expect that these institutions play by the same rules as their competitors, customers, and neighbors.

Nothing in the health care law interferes with an organization’s ability to teach that contraception is wrong. The Church’s opposition to this regulation is a frank acknowledgement that Catholics reject this teaching (95% of American Catholic women use Church-prohibited birth control). The Church wouldn’t fight this law nearly so much if it knew that the faithful were, well, more faithful.

When President George W. Bush developed the notion of funding “faith-based” organizations as a way of funneling billions of tax dollars to his Religious Right supporters (while exempting them from normal administrative oversight or anti-discrimination law), some of us howled that this created a slippery slope. When President Obama continued and even expanded this anti-democratic practice, we howled some more. In today’s faith-based challenge to Obamacare (and in the Administration’s pathetic, conciliatory response), we have slid even further.

It’s a dangerous double-dip: first, organized religion gets enormous tax breaks, so non-believers are forced to financially support their proselytizing and their attacks on secular democracy. Then they demand exemptions from the laws of the country, further undermining its secular nature. The predictable outcome is expanded recruitment through their tax-supported network of madrassas, um, parochial schools, massive home-schooling program, and other institutions.

Organized religion continues to carve out a parallel state within the country: separate rules for taxes, zoning, expression, education, hiring discrimination, and now health care coverage.

And they often use a sexuality-related issue to do it. Our culture’s deep ambivalence and shame about sex makes sexuality an ideal vehicle to undermine secular democracy and the separation of church and state. You notice that churches don’t talk much about wanting their buses to be exempt from safety inspections. But they talk a lot about wanting to shape our laws regarding sexuality.

When its special exemptions are challenged, the church cries religious discrimination. They mis-read the Constitution: it prevents the government from dictating what people believe or how they worship. But it does not require the government to distort the country’s economic, political, and health care system to avoid offending religious sensibilities.

Meanwhile, the church’s blatant attack on Americans’ rights to sexual expression and sexual privacy continues full throttle. Having all but destroyed the option of legal abortion for most American women, it is taking full aim at contraception, the morning-after pill, and STD prevention such as the HPV vaccine. States are withdrawing support for birth control clinics and peer counseling on college campuses.

Organized religion is working overtime to drag this country back to a time when non-marital sex was shameful, hidden, and punished with unwanted pregnancy. It’s bad enough that it wants to do that with its own believers, who are welcome to any private superstition they like. But it’s aggressively doing that to the rest of America as well, and our government is doing far too little to resist it.

What I notice is that this guy was in love with someone he never met, devastated by her supposed death, and everybody thinks that’s perfectly reasonable.

Get out the horse and buggy and ‘scuse me if I sound like an old curmudgeon, but this is one of the problems with today’s young people: high school and college kids don’t date. Many don’t actually date in their 20s, either. Instead, they show up at clubs. They hope they run into someone at a party. They don’t make plans. They tweet “Hey, ‘sup?” on Saturday night and wait for a tweet from someone, somewhere.

In short, they don’t look forward to being alone together. This is developmentally reasonable—for 10-year-olds.

According to the New York Times, many students and young adults have never been on a conventional date. They haven’t experienced the excitement, the disappointment, the longing, the courage, the insecurity, the loneliness, or the triumph of connection that late-20th-century courtship customs (imperfect as they are) require or bring. Young people are thus deprived of the growth such experiences offer.

It appears that many young men and women don’t entirely recognize each other as fellow beings. They’re just not that curious about each other, and so they don’t see face-to-face, personal communication as a wonderful opportunity. Rather than being a familiar, foundational activity, face-to-face talking is an intrusion into what really matters—checking your iPhone.

And that’s what I’m here to complain about: we’ve stopped teaching our children how to communicate face-to-face with other human beings. We take children too young to have fully learned how to participate in relationships, give them the most advanced technology for impersonal, asynchronous “communication” in the history of the world, and let them use these devices at the dinner table, while being driven to school, and any other time they have to interface with adults—people who might actually help them learn something about relationships. And kids naturally use them with each other, too—an average of 93 times per day.

What happens? When the time comes, they have little idea how to date, court, or create one-on-one, face-to-face relationships. They haven’t learned how to ask a real person real questions—watching that person’s face as they listen to the answer. They’ve never experienced the risk of reaching out to take someone’s hand—and watched that person’s face as they agreed or declined.

If we don’t teach children to relate, don’t demand that they engage, and give them the means for endless solitary entertainment, they cannot and will not learn to relate in a deep way.

For dozens of centuries, people have had their marriages arranged for them, and they’ve managed just fine. But they never thought they were in love, and they weren’t pursuing the grail of “intimacy,” which people today claim they desire. In contrast, today’s young people (eventually) want to fall in love, and say they (eventually) want intimacy. You need to skills for that. And today’s young people simply aren’t learning those skills. It’s easy to have sex. It’s way harder to have a relationship in which you have sex.

Now don’t blame porn. While it’s true that some men expect women to be porn stars, and some women are trying to compete with porn actresses, that’s not the point. If porn now provides a template for the non-relationships that young men (and increasingly young women) value, we have to ask why such a template looks attractive. The answer is that they have nothing more intimate to compare it to. Young people aren’t learning to embrace anyone—because they’re not learning to want to embrace anyone.

So moms and dads, don’t give your kids smartphones and unlimited digital access until they’re at least 40 years old.

OK, here’s Plan B: demand that your kids learn how to interact with actual people. I’m afraid you’ll have to be some of those actual people. Those phones your kids use are your phones, not theirs, so establish phone-free hours in their lives (including between bed-time and breakfast, when millions of childhood text messages are exchanged).

Was Manti Te’o in on the live/dead girlfriend hoax? I honestly don’t care. But we’re all participating in a much crueler swindle—depriving our kids of the need to see the human face, hear the human voice, and sense the human heart while communicating. That has to be part of learning to love an actual human.

They often describe themselves as having ED or erectile dysfunction. I say, “So, you don’t get erect when you want to. Let’s call it that.” Conceptualizing their situation as ED is frequently part of the problem. They think their penis is suffering some pathology; more often, the pathology is in their expectations.

By calling the problem what it is—“you don’t get erect when you want to”—we continually focus on the two-sided nature of the problem:
* the penis—“you don’t get erect”
* the expectation—“when you want to”

So, rather than “fixing” their “ED,” I ask these men lots and lots of questions—increasingly personal and detailed as the hour proceeds. More than half the time, we discover that their uncooperative penis is actually behaving in an understandable, fairly reasonable way. For some men, that single hour changes everything, and they need not return. More commonly, we meet for a series of sessions in which we discuss sexuality, gender, personal history, and whatever else seems relevant—always in detail, always clarifying what something means to this particular individual.

Occasionally Viagra (or its cousins, Cialis and Levitra) looks like a good approach. But many of these men have already tried it. Some are currently using it.

Sometimes Viagra is part of the problem—it reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with their penis, which the Viagra is supposed to fix. But if there isn’t a problem with the penis, Viagra can’t fix it.

In America, you need a physician’s prescription to get Viagra. (You can use the internet, of course, but you have no idea what you’re getting.) Unfortunately, doctors don’t necessarily have the time to find out why someone might not be getting erect when he wants to. That is, a doc may not be able to help a guy find out that he doesn’t have ED—that his penis is simply responding reasonably to one or more situations that undermine erection.

Assuming he’s physically healthy, why might a man have trouble getting erect when he wants to? Here are just some of the reasons:

* He isn’t being touched the way he likes (or touched at all)
* He isn’t sober when starting sex
* He’s angry at his partner
* His partner is angry at him
* He isn’t attracted to his partner (for whatever the reason)
* His partner isn’t really interested (and may have perfectly good reasons for this)
* He believes he has to have intercourse until his partner climaxes (which his partner may or may not demand)
* He fears the tears or argument that almost always ensues after he doesn’t get erect
* He’s in physical pain, or fears triggering physical pain
* He doesn’t expect to enjoy the sex he usually has

Under conditions like these, a healthy penis will have difficulty becoming or staying erect. That’s not a dysfunction, any more than a car has a dysfunction when it won’t run on Gatorade instead of gasoline.

Of course, I don’t see a random sample of men with erection problems. Many concerned men see a physician first, who may diagnose diabetes, cardiovascular problems, medication-related issues, even depression. Or after ruling out such physical factors, the doc may send the patient to me.

I also see a lot of men who’d rather go to a sex therapist than a physician. Or who figure that they’re unhappy about sex, so they should see a sex therapist.

Still, I shake my head at the number of men who go to a doc, complain about their erections, and leave the doc’s office 10 minutes later with a prescription for Viagra. The doc didn’t have time to ask “Does your partner want more sex? Do you like the way your partner kisses? Do you two know how to enjoy sex without intercourse?” Viagra can’t fix any of these.

Eight weeks later, problem still not solved, these guys call me.

Of course the problem’s not solved; the problem isn’t their penis. That’s when we start with “So, you don’t get erect when you want to. Let’s call it that.”

There’s an important place for Viagra in modern medicine. But for too many men and too many couples, it isn’t part of the solution. It’s part of the problem.