Sex and Cancer--Why We Need This Book

Dr. Saketh Guntupalli and Maryann Karinch have given us a gift. And this may be a gift that you want to give to yourself or to a friend who is dealing with cancer or who is the caregiver of a partner with cancer.

I've written about "Sex and Cancer" before but I wanted to share it again and to also show this brief Youtube video of Dr. Guntupalli talking about why he wrote this book. He leads with the sad but true story that is more common than we realize about how lives are saved but relationships lost because no one talks about sex.

It's a crime.

As a cancer caregiver--and newlywed wife--I had to fight fiercely to save both John's life and the marriage.

And thank goodness I got mad--the result was crazy, sexy advocacy and this blog and a lot of community education. I was determined that no couple would feel as alone as we did the first time we asked, "So what about sex?" and the oncologist said "Have a nice day" and walked out of the room.

I think today I'd be more bold and follow him down the hall and say, "Hey, buddy, I asked you about sex not suicide.:)))

So years later, hundreds of blog posts, many talks and workshops and panels later, here's the book I wish I'd had back then.

Give a click below to listen to this short Youtube video with Dr. Saketh Guntupalli:

https://youtu.be/Fniygu7ZIGIhttps://youtu.be/Fniygu7ZIGI

Cancer and Sex

So, the silence around sex and cancer was the impetus to this very blog. No one would talk to us. Not a doc or a nurse or a PA...finally a friend got some out of town resources for us, but by then I was so mad, and I started provoking everyone, and I wrote a very mean post about cancer resources folks who think relationships live on the "C" word:  cuddle.

Now there is a little bit more info and I dig for every bit of it and bring it to you right here.

So here is todays offering--a new book, "Sex and Cancer" by Dr. Saketh R. Guntupalli and Maryann Karinch. The link below is to an article in today's New York Times section called Living with Cancer--and Susan Gubar (we love her) writes about the new book.

Take a look, and please share this with family
 and friends who are living in CancerLand--You might save a relationship and a life:

https://nyti.ms/2FMqqPP

Love --and Bonk!--in the Time of Cancer

This blog began because of sex. Sexual frustration actually. No, not with my partner but my absolute frustration with the medical community—oncology specifically, re: Sex.

When John’s cancer treatment began no one would talk to us about sex. They talked about drugs, food, even made recommendations for footwear, but no sex talk. I tried: I asked, I joked, I tried euphemism, and I tried being very direct. Nope, no sex talky.  All the caregiver literature used the “C” word though. Cuddle. Ugh. It was just so insulting, discouraging and frustrating.

So, I did what I always do when something really makes me mad: I started writing. At first I vented, then I educated. I got all the answers that no one would give me, and I shared them and then I kept writing.

This blog has become about cancer and couples, and relationships, and caregiving, and resources and research, and advocacy. But today it is—again—about sex. And some research and a resource that I think will make you say, “Wowsa!” and will make you laugh.

Over the last few years I have been writing my new book, “Never Leave Your Dead,” about military trauma so I have been reading everything about veterans. That led me to the amazing science writer, Mary Roach. I loved her new book "Grunt" about what happens to bodies in battle, But then I also found Roach’s older book, “Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex."

So I started reading and I started laughing, and I started saying “Holy Crap!” so often I woke John up several times. In “Bonk!” Roach takes us through the stories of sexual research—not just the conclusions (clitoral versus vaginal orgasms; penis size; what impotence really is…) but also through exactly how that research is conducted.

I can truly promise that you will learn more about sex that you ever wanted to know—and you’ll learn some really good stuff too. 

And you will laugh.  Roach is a hysterically funny writer. Even when she is dead serious—like when she is writing about penises and corpses—her commentary and asides will make you choke.

And laughter after all, you know, is the very best medicine.

*****

(And yes, my new book is, "Never Leave Your Dead" published by Central Recovery Press.)

A Confluence of Books on Desire

In one of those magical confluences the library has delivered to me a flood of words and ideas about women and desire. I often put books on my library list months ahead of their publication date and then delight when they appear and “surprise” me.

Yesterday I picked up my stash at the library and sitting back to back were two new books about women’s desire. The amazing thing is that one of them is a deeply personal and poetic book by a woman about her very specific (read blushing) desire for a specific man and his deeply specific body. The other is a book by a man that covers new research about “the science of women’s desire.”

Is one approach better or more true? I think not. We can be moved by—and learn from—both.

The “can’t put it down” book is called, “Unmastered: A Book on Desire. Most Difficult to Tell.” By Katherine Angel. Though no reviewer calls it this, her book is a long poem—or short poems—or statements from moments of desire. It is almost as if she holds words in her mouth during sex and then conveys them to the page before too much rationale thought can intrude. She is a super smarty and includes wonderful ideas and excerpts from Virginia Wolfe and Susan Sontag (OK, she had me at Wolfe, “Killing the Angel in the House” on how women subvert their intelligence and animal desire to make men more comfortable.)

I am sure that if enough people read “Unmastered” there will be debate and Angel bashing. I suspect controversy because what she writes includes language about a desire to be hit/hurt. Not that it happens but she lets us see/hear her mind during sex. And she writes so admiringly of his penis. We are so rarely “allowed” to do that anymore I wanted to applaud.

The second book is called, “What Do Women Want?” by Daniel Bergner. He too is presenting somewhat controversial information but in a researchy kind of way. His first provocative idea is that women may be less monogamous than men—though we have always thought otherwise. And –here he comes close to Angel’s rough ideas—“Are political gains—no means no—detrimental in the bedroom?”

Well, that’s going to make anxious public discussion and more likely great private girlfriend talk. And maybe these two books together are going to raise boy/girl issues: is it OK for Angel to say she likes to be held down and “forced” (is it force is you want it and ask for it?) and what does it mean when a male writer/researcher says that maybe No doesn’t always mean No?

“What do women want?” was, of course the famous question posed to Freud and we know where that led. Few people will admit that the true answer to that question is: A perfect black pencil skirt. But then, if we tell the truth, we know that a perfect black pencil skirt that just skims the knee and hugs the ass just so is, after all, ultimately about sex and desire.