Here’s a little bit of a fun interview running in The GA Voice. You can read the whole interview here.

Author and sex expert Diana Cage visits Charis Books & More in Atlanta on Friday, May 11, at 7:30 p.m. to read from and sign her new book, “Mind-Blowing Sex” A Woman’s Guide.” Cage’s other books include “Girl Meets Girl: A Dating Survival Guide,” “Box Lunch: The Layperson’s Guide to Cunnilingus,” “Bottoms Up: Writing About Sex,” and the groundbreaking “On Our Backs Guide to Lesbian Sex.”

She took a few minutes our of her busy schedule to talk to GA Voice about what exactly “mind-blowing” sex is, the research she put into it (her girlfriend didn’t mind) and the importance of supporting Charis, the Southeast’s oldest feminist bookstore.

How did you come up with the title of your book? How do you define “mind-blowing” sex?

The book is a mix of humor, feminist social commentary, and realistic, smart sex advice, which is a combo that for some reason doesn’t happen all that often! No one ever thinks to mix social critique in with the sexy stuff, but I think it works really well. Our sexuality
is a product of the culture we live in, we have to examine both at the same time if we want to get anywhere.

Honestly though, finding a name that made sense was really a chore! Part of the issue is that all sex book names sound the same after a while. The whole genre has been tainted by meaningless magazine cover copy, so it’s difficult to talk about sex without resorting to hyperbole. We finally landed on “Mind-Blowing Sex: A Woman’s Guide” because I think you need to have your mind blown a little to have great sex. “Mind-Blowing Sex” is sex that expands the way we see sex, ourselves, and our lovers. I like to think the title is a double entendre that you wont really get until you’ve read the book.

Read the rest at thegavoice.com

From the April issue of Curve Magazine, you can also find it online here.

There’s a reason why Diana Cage’s new book isn’t called Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex. With her name on the cover, however, you might think it should be. Since she’s a former editor of the legendary lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs, and the author of essential lesbian reads such as Girl Meets Girl: A Dating Survival Guide and Box Lunch: The Layperson’s Guide to Cunnilingus, it only makes sense that Cage’s latest book would be about sex for girl-loving girls. Instead, this famously one-step-ahead sexpert says that for all “female-bodied people” solving the problem of sexual desire begins by taking sexual and gender identity out of the equation altogether.

During the three years that The Diana Cage Show aired on Sirius XM, Cage, already well into her career as an expert on lesbian sexuality, came to a new realization. “Previously,” she says, “I had always traveled in an urban lesbian world—my dating pool was always urban and lesbian. Suddenly [on the radio show], I’m talking to all kinds of lesbians—those from the Midwest, truckers—all kinds of different people. And what I realized is that what we wanted from sex and didn’t know about sex was the same.”

Read the rest at Curvemag.com

A book tour maybe sounds a little too official but I suppose that’s what this is, right? Please come hang out and talk with me about sex, feminism, dismantling the patriarchy through female sexual empowerment,  fisting, you know… fun stuff. And if you come to any of these readings, please say hi! Also Shewired.com is currently running an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Mind Blowing Sex. Check it out here

So here are some dates:

May 2: Bluestockings, NYC

May 11: Charis Books, Atlanta

May 17: KGB Bar, NYC

July 10: Good Vibrations (Valencia location), San Francisco

July 17: Center for Sex and Culture, San Francisco

July 25: Powells Books, Portland

Look what UPS just brought me! I can’t believe the book I was so busy writing last summer is actually a book now. My very smart pal and Feminist Press publicist Elizabeth Koke thought it would be a great idea to throw Two Whole Cakes blogger and xoJane editor Lesley Kinzel and I together to have a little conversation. So that’s what’s happening April 17th at the Barnes and Noble in NY’s Upper West Side.

Details: Authors Diana Cage (Mind-Blowing Sex) and Lesley Kinzel (Two Whole Cakes) join us for a frank conversation about body politics and the expectations, challenges and unique pleasures of being a modern woman.

“Unique pleasures of being a modern woman.” I wonder who wrote that description? I don’t know Lesley in person but I’ve read her blog for ages and from what I can tell she’s a smart-ass rad fatty with an axe to grind. And I’m a smart-ass angry feminist sex hound with an axe to grind. Unique pleasures of being a modern woman, exactly.

Crazy fun. I’m flying to Indiana Friday morning to meet Em’s new nephew Oliver. Isn’t Oliver just the cutest name ever? Yes, I think so too. Then Saturday morning we’re driving five hours from Indiana to University of Michigan to celebrate David Halperin’s birthday then driving back to Indiana the next morning so I can give a talk and appear on a panel at Indiana University’s School of Journalism.  Details for the IU talk are:

The School of Journalism will sponsor a media panel on gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender coverage at 6 p.m. April 10 in the Ernie Pyle Hall auditorium. “Equal Time: Gays, media and the myth of equality” will be free and open to the public.

Zak Szymanski is organizing the event, which will address LGBT portrayal in the media. Speakers include: me, obvs. Also, Amos Mac, founder/publisher of the transgender quarterly magazine, Original Plumbing; and Trevor Hoppe, Ph.D. candidate in the joint program in Sociology and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, whose writing on HIV/AIDS often is cited in publications. His new collection of essays is Beyond Masculinity: Queer Men on Gender and Politics, due this summer.

I’m very excited to say that Mind Blowing Sex comes out April 3rd. The publisher is Seal Press. You can pre-order it here. Contact me if you would like to review it!

This is a book about sex. It’s also a book about women, our bodies, how we use them, how they work, and why sometimes they don’t work the way we’d like them to. It’s a book about sexuality, eroticism, pornography, desire, arousal, and satiation. Included in this book is only the tiniest bit of science, because I’m not a scientist. I’m a bit of a sexologist, if a sexologist is a person who studies sex. Truthfully, I’m more like a sexual adventurer, a sex writer, thinker, critic, and philosopher. Mostly I get called a sexpert, but I’m not sure anyone is ever an expert at sex.

This book is also about love, to a certain degree, in that love of oneself is a necessary component of sexual ecstasy.

Together we’re going to take a tour of our bodies and our sexuality. Sexual shame often prevents us from really getting a good look at ourselves. There is plenty of talk about the wrongs of sex, the bad parts of sex, and very little information about empowering sex. Constant negative feedback about female sexuality affects our ability to explore our desire. Our sexuality is demeaned, trivialized, controlled. We’re divided into MILFs, Cougars, and Lolitas, when we aren’t kittens, Barbies and porn queens. So much meaning is attached to us and our bodies by everyone else; there’s barely any room left for our own opinions. The female body is public domain. Our own bodies are used to sell us things so often, that sometimes we forget we own them. Continue reading →

That’s what they always said on Pride day in my hometown, San Francisco. Summer weather in San Francisco is awful, but the last Sunday in June is always glorious.

My girlfriend and everyone I know is in New York today, marching down 5th avenue with a couple thousand other lesbians. I’m at home in Philly working on the book. It’s 88 degrees in our apartment, the a/c has been tripping the breaker so I’ve foregone it in favor of the fan. I’m wearing my working-at-home attire, a thrifted black slip and stringy hair, the attire of work-at-home femmes everywhere.

The maintenance guy came by to see if he could figure out the circuit issue. He was gracious, hardly commenting on the small research library on female orgasm that’s spread across our living room floor. He brought his daughter–she was maybe 10 or 12, sporting a cast on her arm, presumably a sports injury? She had an air of masculinity that said budding lesbian. Oh I know, I know! I shouldn’t speculate about the sexuality of adolescents! Her voice, though, it was deeper than his. What else is it though, that makes a twelve-year-old girl sports curious? Her walk, the way she carried herself, a little budding butch. At twelve I carried a purse, wore eyeshadow, wielded a curling iron. Where the hell does gender come from, anyway? Continue reading →

I’m finally getting close to being finished with a new book, A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Ecstasy. It will be published by Seal Press in January of next year.

I was teaching and commuting between Philly and Brooklyn too much last semester to finish writing it when I should have. Now I’m stuck in the house all summer writing when everyone else is out playing in the sun. Remind me to never have a book due at the end of the summer again.

Anyway, currently I’m writing about orgasms. Here’s the thing. For women, sexual arousal is complex and just as tied to our mental state as a physical one. One reason pharmaceutical companies have yet to come up with a satisfying female-centric substitute for Viagra has much to do with the way we experience the state of being “turned on.” In men, unless something is wrong, arousal leads to erection. Popular pharmaceutical treatments for erectile dysfunction work by relaxing the smooth muscle tissue that surrounds major arteries in the penis. This in turn allows more blood to flow to the penis, creating a firm erection. Erections provide visual feedback, a man looks down, sees that he has a hard on, and thinks “I want to have sex.” Continue reading →