Scrutinized words: man, woman, boy, girl

“Man”, “woman”, “boy”, and “girl” are scrutinized words on this website. You're allowed to use them, but if you do, they will be marked like this: man, woman, boy, girl, men, women, boys, girls.

I encourage you to use gender-neutral alternatives, like “adult”, “child”, or just “person”, as I do. When I'm specifying someone's gender on purpose, I do it explicitly, as in “male person”.

Womyn and wymyn¹ are also included for completeness, because I've seen people use them on the Internet. I wanted to include “guy” in the list, but “guy” also means a lot of other things.

Why?

Because they lump together a lot of different concepts, and lumping those concepts together is sometimes harmful to people.

Now I'm going to take a step back and explain that. The trouble is, it's not easy to do that. So I'm going to take another five steps back and [...]

This is a child-friendly website

Ahem. This will be a policy of my website. I intend to make my website appropriate for all ages of viewers, or at least, all ages that are likely to be able to use a web browser. That implies a lot of different things, so I'm making this post to outline the most important ones.

#1. Words like “fuck” and “shit”¹ are totally acceptable here, because nothing's worse for children than censorship.

This is hardly the most important rule, but it's a good one to set the tone of this post. Being child-friendly means treating children with respect. It means treating them as independent human beings. When an adult tells you not to say certain words, that adult is not respecting you. Ze is saying that zir own opinion is more important than your freedom to say what you feel like saying.

This can take subtler forms, too. Some adults try to [...]

Sex

(This post will contain straightforward descriptions of sexual stuff. If you think that's obscene, now is the time for you to stop reading... and reconsider your sense of morality.)

In this post, I'm going to talk about what sex is, as in “to have sex” or “to be sexually active”. Like a lot of other things I've talked about, our society thinks this is really important, but can't agree on what it means!

Society is full of myths and lies about sex – about what it means to have sex, about when you should have sex, about who should be having sex, about how many people you should have sex with, and so forth. In fact, there are so many myths and lies that I can't possibly address them all in one post. There are the traditional, Puritanical lies, like “You should never do anything sexual except with your spouse in a heterosexual marriage”. Lots of people disagree with that now, you say? Well, yes. But plenty of them have their own myths and lies, like “You should always have sex by your third date”¹. No matter who you ask, someone is going to tell you how they think you should live your life.

All these myths cause a lot of problems. But there are too many problems for me to discuss one at a time. If I pointed out any three of them individually, I'd feel guilty for not pointing out all the rest.² So I'm going to throw that all out and start over from the beginning.

What the fuck is sex, anyway?

Humans are strange creatures with strange feelings. I could [...]