New Center Promises to Tell All About Sex
Excerpt By Adam Tanner, Reuters Health

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A typical 17-year-old American probably has a lot of ideas on how to gather information about sex. But where does an older person turn?

A new center in San Francisco opening on Thursday is promising to act as an impartial clearinghouse of information on the finer and not-so-fine points of sex for all ages.

The goal is nothing less than to "make America safe for sexuality," Gilbert Herdt, director of the new National Sexuality Resource Center, said in an interview on Wednesday.

"There is no major center where people in midlife or seniors can go and access reliable, open and honest factual information about human sexuality," he said.

"We all believe that no matter how old you are you can still learn," he said. "For a lot of people in the United States, pleasure is a word they have never, ever uttered in the context of sexuality."

The Internet, home videos, books, magazines and ever-more sex-obsessed television programming offer sexual information, but Herdt says much of it is misleading and incomplete.

"If you think about what exists in the world of sexuality today, it is a hodgepodge," said Herdt, 54, a professor of sexual studies at San Francisco State University who started his career as an anthropologist researching New Guinea.

Sex educators need to fight common misconceptions, he said.

"That all older women have no sexual life, that would be a stereotype, that any person before the age of puberty has no sexual feelings, thoughts, fantasies, desires," he said.

"It would also include the idea that if you refrain from sexual intercourse altogether, then you are entirely safe from getting a disease."

FROM MELANESIA TO STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO

Herdt is the author of several books on sexuality including, "Children of Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian Teens Are Leading a New Way Out of the Closet" and "Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia."

Funded by more than half a million dollars from the Ford Foundation, the new Sexuality Resource Center is in the Mission district, one of San Francisco's roughest areas. It anticipates helping most visitors online rather than in person.

For example, Herdt plans forums on topical issues such as growing old with AIDS or whether some women need a drug like Viagra to pep up their sex lives. "Right now there is a very interesting, actually to me fascinating, huge controversy going on about female sexual dysfunction," Herdt said.

"The scientists see this from two different angles. One, it is bogus science, it doesn't exist, it is phony ... an invention of the pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs."

"On the other side there is a group of dedicated, very established and respected researchers, women and men, who firmly believe that sexual dysfunction in females is an inherent widespread problem that needs medical and social attention."

The bottom line on female dysfunction? Stay tuned to the group's free Web site nsrc.sfsu.edu as the debate rages.

Reference Source 89

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