I’m Dr. June Reinisch, and I am the International Chair – one of two – of the meeting of the First International Congress on Lifespan Sexuality Education. I’m the Director Emerita of the Kinsey Institute, I’m one of the Directors of the Museum of Sex, I’m the Executive Director of the Health and Science Advisory Board of LoveandHealth.info.

What is the subject matter of your presentation?
Well, my plenary session was on sexual myths, and the elimination of them from our knowledge base. And I basically focused on such things as masturbation – that is, that there are many myths about masturbation – but one of them that I talked about was the fact that many people believe that masturbation is bad for your health. And in fact the scientific data says the opposite – that masturbation is good for you! In fact, it’s very good for older people, it actually can keep their genitals and their urinary tract healthy if they don’t have regular partnered sex. Masturbation works just as well, in fact it lowers infection rates and it will keep the genitals working, so that in case they lose their partner, and they want to get a new one, and they do get a new one, they can have a good sex life again. In terms of young people, it teaches them about their bodies and about their sexual organs and how they work, and it teaches them what they like and what they do like sexually, so that when they do get a partner, they will make better sex partners. It makes them a better partner in partnered sex, it makes them know how to enjoy sex and how to tell their partners what they enjoy in sex.

Another myth that we talked about was fantasy. People have lots of fears that if they have a fantasy it means that’s what they really want to do sexually. And the fact is that if that fantasy is something that they do find frightening, or scary, or something that they know they wouldn’t want to do in real life, if it involves some violence or some unusual act, it turns out that they very rarely want to actually do it in real life. You have to remember that when it’s a fantasy, you’re the director, you’re the producer, and you’re all the actors in that fantasy. Fantasies serve the purpose of arousal in sexuality. They’re there for the purpose of helping you to be more aroused, and for making sex more exciting. So really, in nearly all cases, people do not need to be afraid of their sexual fantasies, but just to enjoy them. So we don’t have to be scared that what the Freudians thought was true, that is, that if you thought about it you wanted to do it. So if you’re a heterosexual and you have a fantasy about same-sex interactions, that does not mean that you want to be a homosexual. And if you’re a homosexual and you have fantasies about opposite-sex or other-sex interactions, it doesn’t mean that you secretly want to be a heterosexual. So that’s another fantasy that we dealt with.

Another myth that we talked about had to do with homosexuality. Some people believe that homosexuality is a new phenomenon. But in fact, homosexuality has been written about since before the time of Christ. It was written about in the Bible, it was written about the Kama Sutra, many hundreds of years ago. There is nothing new about homosexuality – it is a natural alternative in human behavior, and people who are homosexual are just as healthy and normal as people who are heterosexual. So it’s something that people are concerned about, but in fact the problems with it usually come from outside, from the culture and the society, rather than inside the individual, so that was another set of myths that we dealt with.