A Reading List on Birth Control Activist Margaret Sanger

Just last week, Terrible Virtue, a fictional portrait of birth control activist Margaret Sanger by Ellen Feldman, was published by Harper. Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, devoted her life to legalizing birth control, and improving its availability to all women. Who Was Margaret Sanger? Born in 1879, Sanger first became interested in the idea of legalizing and improving… Read more »

Family worries

I had a parent ask me last week how I would approach a new sexual partner. She was getting at her concern for her daughter, who is single and sexually active, and whether her daughter would actually be able to ask about her partner’s STI status – or whether any sex at all was just… Read more »

Safer sex is all well and good when it happens to someone else

Yep, that is the approach that most people take. Safer sex adds teeny tiny additional points to talk about and consider to a sexual connection. We have come, in the US, to see sex as something that we deserve to have hassle- and worry-free. I’m sure that it’s all the media stories – movies, music, TV, even advertisements!… Read more »

Crocodile dung

I love history, the kind of history that offers meaningful, engaging, contextualizing information about something relevant to my current life and culture. I hate the kind of history that has devolved into a list of facts and names that I can’t connect to. I’m glad that there are people out there who enjoy that kind… Read more »

Talking across a divide

Young people are often more able to talk about safe sex and sexual decisions with their friends than they are their partners. This makes sense for a lot of reasons. Friend groupings tend to segregate by sex from middle through late childhood, as conversations about sex and sexuality start to become more frequent within friend… Read more »

The things I know

My friends and family are trivia geeks of all flavors. From Star Trek to baseball, they do love the details. Trivial Pursuit was one of the most often games played in my house when I was young. I’ll admit to being a sex trivia geek. So a game called Sex Ed Trivia? Sign me up!… Read more »

Play those ivories and bones

I love, love, love the critical thinking and connections that happen during this game. It’s basically the same game as the classic version, but it asks that the game players make connections between ties based on contraceptive information rather than matching numbers. These kinds of real-world putting-together-of-pieces is fantastic. It’s all about the connections, both in… Read more »

A game for the new teacher

I was flipping through Game On!, deciding which lesson to write about today, and came across Name that Contraceptive! I’m a sucker for exciting titles, and this one roped me in with that exciting exclamation mark! And so here we are, learning about this particular lesson together. Name that Contraceptive! by Martha S. Rosenthal, PhD… Read more »