If you live outside of Toronto, you’ve probably never heard of Adam Giambrone.  If you live in Toronto, he’s probably all you’ve heard about for the last few days.

I’m sick to death of looking at this guy’s face.

Quick recap: Adam Giambrone is the chairman of the Toronto Transit Commission (Toronto’s public transit system), and until yesterday he was running to be the next mayor of Toronto.  Following accusations that he had an affair, Giambrone apologized in a Toronto Star article earlier this week for having an “inappropriate relationship with a young woman” (he slept with a twenty-year old college student) while he was in a long-term relationship.  He later admitted to having several affairs with various women, and yesterday he dropped his campaign for mayor.  One candidate has now said that he thinks Giambrone should step down from the TTC as well, since he is clearly distracted.  (The National Post has a more in-depth recap)

Quite frankly, I doubt Giambrone would have been voted mayor anyway, since the TTC’s getting such bad press these days, but that’s not the issue here.  I want to know when someone’s sex life started having such a huge influence on their professional life. Read more »

No drug ever got me as high
as being sixteen and having everyone
look at me.

It’s comforting
to have someone know you
and love you for who you are, inside,
but it’s painful to watch yourself become
too familiar, a song you used to worship
until it got so overplayed.

Some days I long to put aside
the cultivated convictions of my tasteful twenties,
paint my face in toxic colour,
waste time on my hair, vote
for consumerism with my dollars
and chase cheap thrills,
instant gratification.  Pretend
the world is still as simple
as it was in high school.

A teenage girl modeling her first “grown-up” outfit;
thank God we don’t live in the 1800s.

My sexuality and self of sense has evolved an enormous amount in the past decade, and I cherish that, but sometimes I miss how exciting and carefree things used to be.  I’ve been in a happy, long-term relationship for almost nine years now, but I’ve always struggled a little with the idea of committing my body and my sexuality to one person.  Sometimes I miss when it was just mine and I could do whatever I wanted with it.

What do you miss about your sexuality or life as it was in high school?  What do you appreciate about the way it’s evolved?

Shayla Duval

I was asked to do a piece on finding and keeping a man, and while I don’t profess to be any relationship expert, I have gleamed a thing or two from my own relationship and from watching other people’s. This post is written mainly for an audience of women interested in dating men, but there’s also a lot of stuff that applies to relationships in general and I definitely welcome feedback from people outside of the target audience (especially straight men – do you think I’m being fair to you in my advice?).

Without further ado, here are five tips that I think really contribute to the creation and maintenance of a strong relationship:

1. Be good friends

If your image of an ideal relationship is based on anything you’ve seen in a mainstream chick-flick, do yourself a favour and catapult that image out of your head right now. You know how we girls complain that porn gives men unrealistic expectations of women? Well chick-flicks are the female porn: they tell us that out there waiting for all of us is a perfect, one-dimensional, “normal” man – and such a creature just doesn’t exist.

Read more »

Wallpaper of the girls from Soul Calibur

My husband is a great big enormous video game nerd. No, he’s a way bigger video game nerd than your guy. My husband constructed his own DDR pad when he was nineteen. My husband wired an actual electric drum kit so you can play Rock Band with it. Did your guy ever do that?

(I swear I have a point. I’m getting there.)

Needless to say, he basically sends flowers and candy grams to any video game company that makes a game I actually want to play with him. And hey, I’m not anti-video games or anything, I just don’t often find games that are appealing to me.

Actually, I don’t often find games that are appealing to girls in general.

With the exception of casual games like Bejeweled and Peggle, RPGs (which tend to be heavily story-based), and music games (which tend not to have plots or characters at all) there aren’t really a lot of video games that accurately portray women, or that women can relate to. For the most part, we can put games in three categories: games with male main characters (marketed to guys); games with female main characters as one-dimensional sex objects (marketed to guys); and games that are specifically marketed “for girls.”

Read more »

I was talking to my new husband about children and sexual education when the topic of masturbation came up.  We both agree that we want to be very open and informative with our children about many things, including sex, but masturbation was a little fuzzier.

Both of our parents gave us the “You can talk to us about anything” line as kids.  I took it literally and asked a million questions, and Andrew never wondered much about sex as a kid and found himself a little behind his peers in terms of sexual knowledge when he got a bit older.  Neither of us thought to ask about masturbation, and neither of us actually tried it until we were in our mid/late teens and had already had our first orgasms with each other.

Turns out we weren’t the only kids who were clueless about solo sex.  I asked my friends to anonymously send me their first-time masturbation stories (apparently they’re as open about sex as I am — only one person submitted anonymously) and none of them were informed about masturbation by their parents when they were kids either.

“When I was ten or eleven I started looking at online porn. That was in the age of dial up and an image used to take a minute or two to load. Because of the long load times and the inconvenience of having to use the family computer, I kept a stack of printed photos stashed in my room. For a while I was doing it because it gave me a hard on, but I didn’t understand how it was all supposed to end.” – Archie*

“The first time I heard the term ‘masturbation’ was in 1994. I’d just picked up Green Day’s ‘Dookie’ and heard the song ‘Longview’ for the first time — the line in question was ‘when masturbation’s lost its fun you’re fucking breaking’. I realized I had no idea what the term meant, so like a good nerd I went to the old dictionary to find out. Reading the definition didn’t really do a lot to answer my questions. I could have asked my parents, because they’d always been open with me regarding all things sexual (in the interest of giving me a proper education, god bless ‘em), but I was uncomfortable doing so, because I was ten and sort of realizing my parents didn’t match my estimation of ‘cool’.” – Reggie

Read more »

I recently wrote a poem about my upcoming marriage, wherein I remarked: I can’t help/doubting that one piece of paper/representing a faith we don’t hold/and a law we sometimes break/will change our lives/when it won’t even change my last name. 

 The next day, I got a comment (from someone I don’t know) that managed to jolt me out of sleepiness and into brain activity at 7:30 a.m.  Anyone interested can read the full comment on my blog, but here’s an excerpt:

 So why the rush to get married then? I suppose that’s the natural question to ask. Aside from loving someone so much that you want to spend forever (or something like that) with them. I want to know what a feminist, future sex columnist sees in this failing institution.

 So now, without further ado (and with Shannon’s okay), I’m going to eat my words about Carrie Bradshaw and post a total relationship piece on a sex blog.

Read more »

“You can’t handle the truth!”

Last week, I said something to my fiancé that I probably shouldn’t have said.  Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was hurtful. 

I’ve been very spoiled in my relationship with him, because he’s the kind of logical, self-assured guy who’s always been able to handle any cruel or unpleasant truths I’ve thrown at him – and I mean harsh things like “you need to stop eating shit because you’re going to get fat and I won’t want to have sex with you anymore.”  I mean, yeah, it’s the truth, but it’s still probably not the kind of thing you should (or can, in many cases) say to someone you love.

 The main question I’m getting to here is an age-old one: in relationships, is honesty always the best policy, or are there certain times where it’s better to lie or say nothing? Read more »

Within minutes of stepping out my front door
I feel strangers’ eyes and licks of rain
against my legs
and wish I’d worn a longer dress.

Shoulders like earrings
and elbows like a belt,
I pass windy alleyways,
heavily garbed mothers and daughters,
greasy men smoking in front of bars.
I tug at my dress and wonder if it
hasn’t shrunk
in insidious increments
over six years.

Shayla Duval

The moral authority has always been pushing for people to wait until marriage to have sex, and I have to admit there are some good reasons to hold off: you minimize the STD risk, cut out the pregnancy risk and you know your first time will be with someone you (presumably) love and are committed to.

 Despite all of these persuasive points, I still maintain my own belief: anyone who cares about having a fulfilling sex life within their marriage should not wait until marriage to have sex.

 Marriage, for me, is about compatibility.  It’s about finding someone you can love and accept just as they are.  But how can you promise to love and honour someone if you choose to ignore a whole big chunk of their innate being until you after bind yourself to them? Read more »

I’ll admit it: during the run of Sex and the City I was just as addicted to it as any other 17-year-old girl my age.  If you’re in the mood for good girly trash, what’s not to like? It’s all runway fashion, hot men and Samantha’s raunchy sexual conquests.  There is, however, one glaring problem that’s always irked me and I’ve never had the proper opportunity to vent about it until now.

Is it just me, or is Carrie Bradshaw, like, the worst sex columnist of all time?

Aside from being a little close-minded in her personal life ¾ remember the episode where she said she thought bisexuality was “just a stopover on the way to Gaytown”?  How about the one where she grimaced when talking about uncircumcised penises?  The one where she basically outed her golden shower-loving politician boyfriend because he was a jerk to her?  ¾ she never actually writes about any of the things that make for a legitimate sex column.

Read more »

My future mother-in-law, who routinely
uses phrases like jeepers and holy cow, flips
leisurely through penis enlargement ads,
oiled men with bulging leather briefs
and barely-legal girls with starred nipples
on the back pages of the NOW Magazine
on my kitchen table.  She says, “Oh, gosh,
I never realized we had such a market for this
sort of thing in Toronto.”

She’s a biology teacher; I’m an adult.
We don’t have to be weird about sex, right?
Conversationally, I point out
the she-male and fetish sections,
my favourite sex columnist
on the back page

and spend the next two hours praying
like the Catholic school girl I was
when I started dating her son,
          Please, Dan Savage, please just this week
          don’t take letters from felchers, fisters, furries,
          or people who eat ice cubes of semen.

Shayla Duval