http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/excerpt-dirty-secrets-kerry-cohen/story?id=14577601

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/author-urges-parents-break-silence-sex-talk-teens-14580082

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kerry-cohen/sex-education-tips_b_923837.html

Last week, New York required sex education for grades 6 or 7, and then again in grades 9 or 10. Astoundingly, this is news, and not just news but groundbreaking news, because somehow, regardless of everything we know about sex education, regardless of everything we know about how little abstinence education works, we still shudder at the thought of our teenagers learning about sex. We also still have one out of every four girls 14-19infected with an STD. We still have one in two black girls that age with a STD. We still have 750,000 teenage pregnancies reported every year, 82% of them unplanned. And, we still have innumerable amounts of girls who don’t know how to feel about sex at all, who still get shamed for their sexual desire, who wind up having sex when they didn’t really want to, or don’t have sex when they’d really like to.

So, while I applaud New York, which is doing the right thing based on all the statistics (and plain old common sense), more than that I have some suggestions for the sex ed teachers, since they’re going to be barraged by angry, Puritan, head-in-the-sand antagonists anyway, to include in the curriculum.*

1. Talk about desire

How would you answer this question from your daughter: “How will I know when I’m ready to have sex?” The answer is, of course, individual to each girl, but very few mothers, educators, and therapists think to include some attention to a girl’s sexual desire as part of their answer. The bottom line about girls and healthy sexuality is that this must be part of how we talk to girls about sex. Usually, we hand down to them the same useless, often harmful myths. We tell them that sex will get in the way of their happiness and growth. We tell them they must be in love. We tell them that good sex happens only when you are in love. None of those aphorisms is true — not one. Sex and sexual feelings are essential to our happiness. Sex does not make sense only when you are in love. And sex with someone you aren’t in love with can be just as good as sex with someone you do love. Add desire — the acknowledgment that girls have sexual desire — into the answer, and everything can change. Everything becomes more — true.

For one, we can encourage girls to learn to trust their bodies and what their bodies’ tell them. We can also tell them that just because they want it sexually doesn’t mean it will be worth it or any good. We can tell them that sex with someone who wants you to enjoy yourself is a hundred times better than sex with someone who doesn’t care about your experience, and sex with someone you love and who cares about your experience might be even better.

2. Talk about Outercourse

Another assumption we make as a culture is that to fulfill sexual feelings, people must have intercourse. This is absolutely untrue. Sex therapists use the term outercourse to describe the numerous acts that create sensual and sexual pleasure but do not include penetration. Think hand jobs. Think second and third base. Think phone sex. For teens who are experiencing that hormone rush but aren’t ready to expose themselves to possible pregnancies and STDs, outercourse is perfect.

More than that, outercourse allows a teenager to explore and test intimacy, which is essential for building the self-confidence girls need to be both powerful and self-protected in the world of relationships. One sex therapist notes that communication is enhanced during outercourse. Because the sexual sensations can be less intense, there is more opportunity for closeness, for talking, and for full consent from both parties. And, let’s face it, the likelihood of a girl having an orgasm via outercourse is much better than during intercourse. Boys, too, benefit. Boys receive plenty of cultural pressure to have as much sex as they can, even when they aren’t ready to do so emotionally, so outercourse is a more gentle introduction into the world of sexual feelings and intimacy. In case I need to clarify, I believe it makes sense to include outercourse in sex education.

3. Talk about Masturbation

It also makes sense to include masturbation in a sex-education curriculum as a healthy, satisfying way to fulfill sexual desire, especially since a greater proportion of girls between fourteen and seventeen years old report solo masturbation than any other sexual activity. Adolescents have sexual desire. More so, they are in the process of learning about their sexual desire. What better way for adolescents to learn than to explore on their own? Likewise, what better way to help them explore their sexual desire without putting themselves at risk for STDs, pregnancy, and all the emotional ramifications of sex with other people? I’m not the surgeon general and won’t get asked to resign for saying so. But conservatives would be outraged. Why? Because they are stuck in the old, rigid ways of thinking about teenagers — particularly teenage girls — and of believing that any teenage sex is inexplicably, unfoundedly immoral. They are determined to hold on to their beloved abstinence education, which has done not one thing for the state of sexual behavior in our culture, except encourage extremely detrimental shame.

4. Talk about Emotions

In our cultural landscape, sex and sexual feelings are too often removed from emotions, and yet for most people, they are intricately entwined. When we don’t talk about the ways teenagers might feel about having sex or sexual activity, we ignore an essential part of sex education, one that can make all the difference when kids decide to engage in those activities. They need to examine their expectations about sexual activity — what they hope for when they engage in this way. Such a discussion also provides space for teens to discuss how peers and their parents receive their behaviors and whether they are prepared for the repercussions of various sexual acts.
* This list is taken from my forthcoming book Dirty Little Secrets: Breaking the Silence on Teenage Girls and Promiscuity (Sourcebooks, September 1, 2011)

Every season a new romantic comedy makes millions of dollars in Hollywood. Most recently, Friends With Benefits came on the scene, grossing more than 24 million, with Justin Timberlake playing the leading man who winds up falling in love after agreed-upon no-strings sex with Mila Kunitz (I liked it way better the first time, by the way, back when it was called About Last Night, starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, and was more so about how sex is much easier than a relationship.) This narrative, where a boy has sex (or kisses, or sees, or dances with) a girl and then finds he’s in love with her has been around for ages. Consider almost any romantic comedy – Pretty Woman or The Proposal – or any fairy tale – Tangled or Beauty and The Beast – and the story is always the same. A boy is taken with a girl because of her beauty, often combined with a quirky trait, and that’s it. He’s done for. It is her and only her for the rest of his life.

So what? you might think. It’s certainly not news that most romantic comedies are not high art. They are often mind-numbing entertainment and nothing more. But I would argue that they are actually somewhat harmful. Too often I hear women talk about their disappointment with the ways in which their real lives lack this sort of romance. Surely, they tell me, there is something wrong with them, something wrong with their lives, because they don’t have love stories like this. They have relationships and everything goes to hell. They have sex and the guy never calls again. The things that happen are never ever like the romance narratives that have permeated our cultural consciousness. And because of this, they assume there is something wrong with them. They do what we call catastrophic thinking: if no one has ever loved me like that, I am not worth loving. I am not lovable.

Not surprisingly, real life is messier. Men fall in love with you but then realize they’ve changed. Men fall in love with you, then you come down off your pedestal and they fall out. Men have sex with you because they want to get laid but they’re just not that into you. Some of them don’t like you at all. Or men like you fine but they’re in no mood to have a relationship right now.

Also, though, men do fall in love with you after many years. Or you find yourself in love in unexpected situations. Love happens. There is no doubt about that. But how it happens is so completely individual that we couldn’t possibly put guidelines around its development. Love can look so many different ways. We know this, or at least I think we know this, and yet almost every time we see love on the big Hollywood screen, it follows the exact same arc.

If you look at the few romantic comedies that do actually break the mold, you can see what I mean: Harold and Maude, Love Actually, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind…these movies suggest that love doesn’t follow any predictable path, that it shows up in unexpected forms, and that “happily ever after” is somewhat impossible. Instead, you go through hell together, you come out the other side, and romance is actually built in this intensely personal, intensely individual way.

I wish more girls and women understood that the romance model they get handed in the movieplex is just fantasy and not a worthwhile goal. Real love, love worth having pretty much never follows that same-old story arc.

I have two new – and very different – books coming out in September. You can learn about them here on my website and pre-order them as follows:

For Dirty Little Secrets, you can pre-order here.

For Seeing Ezra, you can pre-order here.

Also, like their pages on Facebook!

I’m on the faculty of the Red Earth low-residency MFA at Oklahoma City University, and we are actively recruiting applications. If you’d like to work with me, please get your application in asap as each faculty member gets only five students per year. Also, for its inaugural year Red Earth is offering a $1,000 reduction in tuition. There are scholarships available as well! Once my tenure starts at Red Earth I won’t be teaching much anywhere else. Here’s the link to the program. http://www.okcu.edu/english/redearthmfa/

February 23, 7pm

Canvas Art Bar

Rough Copy Magazine Reading Series

April 30, 3pm

Pierce County Library, Tacoma

My Baby Rides the Short Bus reading

I teach memoir writing online at Gotham Writers’ Workshop, UCLA Extension, and Basement Writing Workshop and have classes starting in January at all schools. Check out these links for more details.

http://basementwritingworkshop.com/memoirwritingclass.php

www.writingclasses.com

http://www2.uclaextension.edu/writers/

Also know that I recently joined the faculty of Oklahoma City University’s new Red Earth Low-Residency MFA Program. To get more details, go here:

http://www.okcu.edu/english/redearthmfa/

Here’s the ad – workshop is sponsored through the Basement Writing Workshop.

Kerry Cohen, author of Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity, three young adult novels, and numerous essays featured in The NYT “Modern Love” series, The Washington Post, Brevity, The Writer, and other anthologies and journals, will be hosting a 10-week private nonfiction workshop group in her home. Work may include memoir, personal essays, or other types of creative nonfiction. The intention is to bring strong writers – no more than six – together under an established writer’s guidance to help writers take their work to the next level, and to build a small community of professionals who can continue on their group together beyond those ten weeks.

Potential participants must apply by sending a 3-5 page sample of writing to kerry@kerry-cohen.com. They will hear from Kerry within two weeks of their application. Please include clear contact information. Once six writers have been accepted, we will set a date to begin. Workshops will be in the early evening, once per week. Cost is $250 for the ten weeks.

Sounds like something you’d find in porn classifieds, but in fact, I want you with no sexual intent. My publicist for Dirty Little Secrets has interest from a few BIG national shows (I can’t say which ones yet, unless you email me!) who will want to showcase a few girls, along with me. For now, I simply need a couple willing to be interviewed by me face-to-face. Those two or three teens need to be semi-local to Portland. Others, though, can be from far and wide. I simply need to get a couple of you on board.

If you are interested, email me at kerry@kerry-cohen.com with a little bit about you, your loose girl issues, and why you want to do this. I’ll get back to you pronto with more info if I think you’re a fit!

My lovely publishers for Dirty Little Secrets bought the DVD for the episode, and now you can see my section on the show on you tube. Honestly, I still cringe watching it. I just wish I’d said anything worthwhile.

Kerry Cohen on Dr Phil