RESOURCES

Part of the reason we made this movie was to expand the scope and quality of the American discussion about sexuality, sex education, gender, and scientific inquiry. This part of our website is where we give our picks for supplemental information that may help in that expansion. We hope to grow this section so any feedback or suggestions would be helpful.

·GENERAL INFORMATION ON FEMALE SEXUALITY

The-Clitoris.com
This is an excellent website to use as a resource for accurate information on a wide variety of topics relating to female sexuality. I highly recommend you check this out.

The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality
By Shere Hite (1976)

Good news is you don't even have to buy the book. You can read it on the internet HERE at google books. Although, it is a 500-some page book, so it might be easier to actually have the book in your hands while reading, but that's up to you.

In this book 3,000 women age 14 to 78 speak for themselves in detail about their sexual experiences - both physical and emotional. Shere Hite shows how these women's physical experiences of masturbation and orgasm do not reveal a population of women with various physical capabilities for orgasm, but a population of women with one capability for orgasm who are too often confused, uninformed, ashamed, and afraid about that capability. Hite confirms that these women's physical descriptions of sexual response coincide with the detailed scientific accounts of human sexual response studied by Master's and Johnson. Then Hite describes how societal change can change the harmful misunderstandings and confusion women carry in regards to their orgasms. Even with 30 years of research and societal change between then and now, the Hite Report still stands firm as a useful, informative, and accurate look at how females experience sexual response, and how our society affects that.

·GAINING OR ENHANCING PHYSICAL SEXUAL RESPONSE

For Yourself: The Fulfillment of Female Sexuality
By Lonnie Barbach (1975)

I believe this to be the best book a woman could read if she felt she had experienced little or no orgasmic response in her life and were looking to change that. I just happened to find this at a used bookstore in Boulder, CO. It was written in 1975 by a woman who ran a class for pre-orgasmic women. (Just in case you were wondering, it’s not a class where women are sitting naked with mirrors in a circle masturbating together – it’s much more approachable than that.)

The advice in this book is compatible with accurate and realistic understandings of physical capabilities of female sexual response. It is simple, down to earth, and honest. Highly Recommended.

Human Sexual Inadequacy
by William Masters and Virginia Johnson (1970)

Masters and Johnson, the pioneers of sexual response research, eventually created an institute to help couples with sexual problems. This book is an account of their findings during 11 years of counseling. Reviewers often describe this, in so many words, as interesting but too science-y for most people to read. I think it’s quite understandable for most people, plus it’s an intriguing read. However, if you’re looking for advice on how to rid your sexual “problems,” I would only recommend this for men – mainly because it effectively eliminates some common and often damaging misconceptions regarding male sexuality and aging sexuality. Masters and Johnson (bless their hearts) have a bad habit of putting intercourse on a pedestal even though their own research would advise against it. That quirk, in my opinion, makes this book less useful for women. In fact the book I did recommend for women (For Yourself) was created in part because the author was frustrated that the Masters and Johnson therapy method described in Human Sexual Inadequacy is inadequate for women, and provides no space for single or gay women to work on their sexual problems. But…the parts that are good are good, and I would recommend reading it.

·SEXUAL EDUCATION FOR YOUNG PEOPLE

Age Appropriate Teaching Points

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Wondering what kinds of things you should be teaching your child about sex as they grow older? This link HERE is to the “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten – 12th Grade 3rd Edition,” created by the National Guidelines Taskforce (copyright 2004 by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States). Though not a government production, this is written and endorsed by a varied group of national leaders in adolescent development, heath care, and education. I guess you could say this is the closest thing we have to a national stance on sex ed, and it’s pretty good. What it does is list points that are important to teach on a variety of subjects relating to sexual education. The lists for each subject are separated out into age/maturity groups. So, for instance, it would tell you what ideas are appropriate and useful to teach to young people aged 5-8, 9-12, 13-15, 16-18 about sexual anatomy. It would do the same for love, dating, sexual identity, parenting, reproduction, sexual response, etc. This would be an excellent place to start if you’re wondering how to talk to your child.

Understanding How Adolescent Girls Experience Their Sexuality

Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality
By Deborah L. Tolman (2002)

I would recommend this book for any parent of a teenaged girl. Unfortunately, it makes you realize how unprepared for sexual feelings many girls really are. Being familiar with the concepts in this book could help you make conversations about sex with your child more consequential. We used information in this book to illustrate point in Science Sex and the Ladies, so if you’ve seen the movie, you have been introduced to the subject. However, I think the content of Dilemmas of Desire deserves a full read.

·MALE SEXUALITY

The Hite Report on Male Sexuality
By Shere Hite (1981)

I recommend this book because, like the Hite Report on Female Sexuality, this book allows men to speak for themselves. Our culture has a pretty good understanding of how male sexual response works physically, so in that way men are a lot better off than women. However, there is a lot left unsaid about how men feel about sex and how they experience sex with women. This book opens up these discussions and gives the reader invaluable insight. It’s almost 30 years old, yet it continues to be relevant. I recommend this for anyone interested in male sexuality. It’s a long book but well worth the time.

·GENDER

Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality
by Anne Fausto-Sterling (2000)

I don’t think you are having a complete discussion about gender until you have included key points within this book. This book is about sex (in the biological male/female connotation); how we define it, how we study it, and why many of our ideas about sex (M/F) distinctions are scientifically unsound. My only regret with Science Sex and the Ladies is that we had to cut all the information that came from this book to keep the focus tight. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is a little more weighty than a lot of books I’m recommending, but it is also intensely interesting, so go ahead, give it a try.

·SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

Science as Social Knowledge
By Helen Longino (1990)

I have to say, I’m a bit of a philosophy of science nerd, so this book is pretty awesome to me, but if you have any interest in the objectivity and/or bias of science, I think you will love it too. Longino makes an excellent case for maintaining objectivity through embracing and scrutinizing a vast web of culture influences, instead of trying to eliminate these cultural influences. She believes that subjective influences cannot be eliminated from scientific knowledge, so the better way is to recognize and discuss them. I have to agree, and I feel that if this philosophy had been more widely in use, there would be little need for the movie we are making. In Longino’s view, scientific knowledge should be thought of as a living dialogue as opposed to an individual creation, and I (and this movie we’re making) can get behind that.