For more than a century there has been tension between the ideas that our sexuality is essential, and the idea that we have the potential to act out a far greater range of sexual desires and identities than we do in practice.
Australians are surprisingly bad at thinking about the place of religion in society.
AAP/Tracey Nearmy
Australia has an apparent conflict between religious freedom and sexual anti-discrimination legislation. It is particularly prominent in three areas: marriage, education, and social service provision.
Activists attend Uganda’s first gay pride parade at the Entebbe Botanical Gardens in Kampala, Uganda, in August 2012.
Rachel Adams/EPA
Science shows that thinking about sexuality in a binary fashion of hetero/homosexual is no longer accurate. Rather, evidence shows that there is a diversity of human sexuality and sexual orientations.
Sexual orientation is more complicated than X and Y chromosome. Epigenetics has a greater role to play.
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Attitudes and laws about homosexuality are not purely a colonial import. Since independence, other factors, including right-wing evangelism, have driven anti-LGBTI attitudes.
Criminalisation does little to change behaviour, while actively contributing to increased stigma.
KieferPix/Shutterstock
Homosexuality remains illegal in 38 of 55 African nations. This is concerning from ethical and human rights perspectives. It’s also a serious public health risk.
Policymakers and the outcomes they produce can play a powerful role in shaping public opinion on questions of same-sex rights.
AAP/Alan Porritt
Transgender is a relatively new word. So when an academic seeks to create a transgender historical archive, complications abound.
A page from a 1934 sex education manual that, like many of its era, managed to be less about sex than about policing racial boundaries.
RPH West, Facts about Ourselves for Growing Boys and Girls (Public Health Department of the City of Johannesburg and the South African Red Cross Society, 1934). Wits Historical Papers, South African Institute of Race Relations Collection, AD 843 RJ/NA 18.
In South Africa’s segregated pre-apartheid state, even sex education was racialised. Christian missionaries had very different lessons for black and white children.
The BDSM-themed movie, Fifty Shades of Grey, is the number one movie in Australia. Its success means that a lot of people are titillated by the idea of sex beyond “vanilla sex.” Controversy about BDSM…
Fifty Shades of Grey creates a minefield on the issues at play in consensual acts of violence.
Universal Pictures
Christian Grey knows exactly his hard limits in sadomasochism and he may also know a thing or two about his legal limits. The Dominant character Grey in the fantasy fiction Fifty Shades of Grey is bent…
We can’t talk about “consensual” BDSM without considering the levels of violence against women.
Universal Pictures
This Valentine’s Day, why not ditch the roses and celebrate by watching some sexual violence? That’s a more honest marketing pitch for the Fifty Shades of Grey film. It’s astonishing that, in 2015, sexual…
Baby boomer women are dressing differently and rejecting a look they associated with their mothers.
Pedro Ribeiro Simões/Flickr
It doesn’t matter how old you are, you can still look fabulous. This message is sold to us by magazines, newspapers, the cosmetics industry, fashion labels and dating agencies. Think of the recent movie…
Why is it that women can retain their heterosexuality if they kiss, but if men do the same they’re labeled gay?
David Shankbone/Wikimedia Commons
If women can kiss women and still be straight, what about men? Some scholars have argued that female sexual desires tend to be fluid and receptive, while men’s desires – regardless of whether men are gay…
Baby Boomer women are challenging ideas around what it means to grow old.
Cesar Vargas/Flickr
Older people, and particularly older women, are often thought of as being asexual or sexually undesirable. Although the particular age this is believed to happen varies somewhat in the popular imagination…
Professor of Media and Communication and Associate Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making + Society, Swinburne University of Technology