Center For Sex & Culture

Education, Resources, & Community

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Upcoming CSC Events

The Art of The Flirt: How to Let 'em Know You're Interested With Ease and Confidence - Wednesday, February 10th, 2010, 8:00pm to 9:30pm
Sex & Memory: Writing from Your Own Experience - Fourth Wednesdays - Wednesday, February 24th, 2010, 5:30pm to 7:00pm
Sex & Memory: Writing from Your Own Experience - Fourth Wednesdays - Wednesday, March 24th, 2010, 5:30pm to 7:00pm

Deviants Online hosted by Sarah Dopp with special guest Ani Niow

Deviants Online


hosted by Sarah Dopp


with special guest

Ani Niow

Tuesday, February 9th, 6 – 8pm
Cost: $10-20 sliding scale, no one turned away for lack of funds


This whole thing is unfolding beautifully. Each workshop, we give personal attention to what everyone is working on. It’s useful as hell, everyone’s heads are buzzing by the time they leave, and you’ll love it.

Deviants Online explores the ever-changing “best practices” for social media: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, flickr, blogging, email, websites, and everything else.  How can we shine spotlights on what we care about without annoying our friends? What are smart ways to strengthen our relationships and broaden our networks? And how exactly do we get our (many) personal sides to co-exist with our professional life on the same Internet?

As queers, creatives, sex nerds, and other rebels, our lives depend heavily on our friends and extended communities.  Whether we’re looking for work opportunities, an audience, or an army of allies, we can all benefit from having a broader network built on trust and appreciation.

In this open-ended discussion workshop, we’ll explore what works and what doesn’t when it comes to representing ourselves online. The material will include a balanced mix of “how to think about it” and “how to do it,” and we’ll have plenty of time for questions. Whether you’ve just signed up for Facebook or have been blogging for years, you’ll leave this workshop full of ideas on what you want to try next.

Deviants Online is hosted by Sarah Dopp, social media educator and founder of http://genderfork.com.  It will also have a special guest co-facilitator, which will be announced on our website at http://www.deviantsonline.com

***Please note: Portions of this event will be recorded and posted online. If you don’t want your voice or name to be included in the recording, you can still come — we’ll give you easy ways to stay off mic.  There will also be a stretch of time in the middle of the workshop that's completely off-the-record.

For more info, visit: http://www.deviantsonline.com

 

My Sucky Valentine!

My Sucky Valentine!

Sunday, February 14, 7-10 pm

Love sex hate romance, anyone? Now in its 15th year, erotica/horror writer Thomas Roche's annual performance event My Sucky Valentine constitutes a wholesale assault on Love American Style, bringing bitter Valentine's Day rebels the literary abuse they crave! Expect sordid tales of love gone wrong, sex gone bad, romance gone to hell!

Couples, triads, singles, puppy piles, swapping couples, sex tribes, hateful love triangles, inveterate masturbators and flat-out wankers -- all are welcome, and equally doomed, at My Sucky Valentine!

Spoken word performances by:
Stephen Elliott
Charles Gatewood
Daphne Gottlieb
Carol Queen
Simon Sheppard
horehound stillpoint

Plus raffles, prizes, and of course heartache-soothing, bad-for-you, who-cares-if-I'm-going-to-seed-motherfucker-at-least-I'm-not-a-loser refreshments!

Sunday, February 14, 2010

The Center for Sex and Culture

1519 Mission Street, San Francisco

Doors 7pm, Show 8pm

$15-$25 sliding scale at the door

No one turned away for lack of funds

Reserve your seat at  < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it > !!!

 

The Art of The Flirt: How to Let 'em Know You're Interested With Ease and Confidence

The Art of The Flirt:

How to Let 'em Know You're Interested With Ease and Confidence
Feb 10, 8-9:30

$20 at the door, $12-15 if pre-purchased:

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/97897


Wish you could make breaking the ice and meeting people more fun? Looking for ways to overcome shyness? Want to unco

ver your bold, exuberant ability to connect deeply and playfully with anyone you choose? If so, this is the class for you!

Flirting is about more than delivering cheesy one-liners or batting your eyes, hoping someone notices you. In fact, most of us have more natural ability to flirt than we realize. By making your intentions known in a

playful, welcoming way, you can make new friends, pick up a hot date, and generally have more fun in life.

This highly entertaining, interactive workshop features loads of easy-to-apply tools and perspectives for making an approach, overcoming awkward moments, and connecting genuinely through the art of the flirt. You'll learn how to:

Make your move with style and class
Determine if the feeling is mutual (and what to do next)
Survive imminent awkwardness (and turn it to your advantage)
Know when to keep going... and when to dial it back
Transition from friendly conversation to something more
And much more!


Whether you're a guy or a girl, gay or straight, old or young, or none of the above, this class is sure to give you some new ways to break the ice and make your move with ease and confidence.

BIO:
Marcia Baczynski is a relationship coach and sex educator who is passionate about providing the world with better tools and skills for relating, and empowering people to use them. She is the Director of Relationship Programming for Ideal Balance, a lifestyle management company for busy professional and entrepreneurial women.  She is also well-known for being co-creator of Cuddle Party, a workshop/social event about boundaries, communication, intimacy and touch. Started in 2004, Cuddle Party events have spread globally, with over 40 facilitators in four countries. Marcia has made appearances on the Montel Williams show, Fox News, Penn & Teller's Bullsh*t, NPR, GQ, Marie Claire and Newsweek. She splits her time between San Francisco and New York.

 

Sex & Memory: Writing from Your Own Experience - Fourth Wednesdays:

Sex & Memory: Writing from Your Own Experience
A writing workshop series with Carol Queen
Fourth Wednesdays: January 27 and onward, 5:30-7pm

(before the Erotic Reading Circle)
We will treat this class as a series, but people can attend individual classes too.

Cost: $10-30 sliding scale per class.
Center for Sex and Culture
1519 Mission Street between 11th and So. Van Ness

 



Did you ever have a sexual experience and say to yourself, "I absolutely HAVE to write that down"? Whether you're documenting amazing experiences for your lover or your history for posterity, penning a soon-to-be-published memoir or hiding your secrets in a time capsule in the basement, come write and discuss getting your own sexuality and experiences into a format you can share. We'll write together, also, if the group wishes, but for the first meeting, bring either a piece of your own writing or a piece of sexual/erotic memoir written by someone else. Future classes will include memoir-writing guest authors, too. And feel free to stay around for the Erotic Reading Circle afterwards, to read or listen!

 

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Your donation ensures that we can continue to provide sex-positive educational and cultural programming

Are You A Teenager?

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Sex Ed For The Real World

Scarleteen is a fiscal sponsor of the CSC

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Best of the Bay 2009

Newsflash

Sexies Winners Announced!


The board and judges of the Sex-Positive Journalism Awards are proud to announce the winners of the 2009 Sexies. Selected from about 100 entries (not counting multiple nominations of the same piece!) submitted by both writers and readers, the winning entries cover subjects from teen pregnancy to conjugal visits, vaginal plastic surgery to prudish responses to public art. The winning articles come from all across the United States and Canada, and represent a range of genres, from news to advice columns.

What they all have in common, however, is that they succeed in embodying the Sexies criteria for sex-positive journalism far better than the vast majority of their counterparts, helping to improve the quality of dialogue around sex and create a more well-informed reading public. "Without clear-eyed, informed journalism about sexuality, the public runs the risk of seeing sex-related issues through a murky scrim of ignorance and biased attitudes. The Sexies help show the media—and the citizenry—how it can and should be done," says Carol Queen of the Center for Sex and Culture.

The first-place winners are:
Mainstream News Sources (Newspapers/National News Magazines/TV Station Print Affiliates: “Plastic Surgery Below the Belt,” Laura Fitzpatrick, Time Magazine,
News/Features (Alt-Weeklies, Monthlies): “Growing Up Glouster,” Rachel Baker, Boston Magazine
Columns: Carnal Knowledge, JoAnn Wypijewski, The Nation
Opinion: Tie: “A Poverty of Solutions,” Judith Levine, 7 Days,  and “The Great Porn Misunderstanding,” Michael Bader, Alternet
Here's the list of all the winners, with links to online versions of their stories where available, and comments from the judges. All entries were read by at least two members of the Sexies judges panel, including at least one with a journalism background.

The judges were: writer, speaker, educator and activist Carol Queen, PhD; journalist Kai Wright; journalist and 2008 Sexies winner Debbie Nathan; journalist Liza Featherstone; journalist and radio host Doug Henwood; journalist and 2008 Sexies winner Amanda Robb; sex educator and columnist for The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, Debby Herbenick, PhD, MPH; and writer, editor, and blogger Rachel Kramer Bussel. (Full bios.)

A note about the sex-themed publications category: After careful consideration by our judges, we have decided not to give awards in this category this year. The judges felt the quality of the submissions did not measure up to the work submitted last year. We started the Sexies primarily to give mainstream journalists encouragement and support for covering sexual topics in unsensationalistic honest fashion. We added this category to give some recognition to folks in the trenches who are writing for publications that devote themselves to this topic. We are immensely grateful to those writers and those publications, and yet we feel that when writing about sex is expected and not an achievement in itself, to be award-winning, a story must really push our boundaries and be risky and challenge even the assumptions of the sex-positive community. We look forward to receiving more pieces in that vein in the future. We know they're out there!

Thanks all the writers and readers who sent in entries (and apologies for the various delays). We encourage all of the writers who entered or were nominated to keep up their crucial work. Submissions for the 2010 Sexies (for articles published in 2009) are open and they will be accepted through June 2010 at www.sexies.org/submit.php.

The Sexies would also like to thank our corporate sponsors, Babeland (founding sponsor), UltraVirgo Creative, and all of our individual donors. It’s not too late to become part of that sex-positive number: www.sexies.org/support.html.