Specifically, I am referring to conversations surrounding sex and relationships, conversations for which many people do not have the vocabulary.

What I want to do with the series of columns I'm calling the Hard Conversations, is talk about the things many of us find hardest to articulate. We live in a society where sex, particularly for women, the LGBTQI community and the kinky, is pathologized and swept under rugs.

I hope to address a lot of the conversations that we, as people who are having sex, should be having about sex and sexual compatibility, but aren't. Some of these things I will have covered already, but just think of this column as the "reboot," like the new Star Trek movie. I'll still be answering questions as I get them, but after a lot of soul-searching in the time since I last posted, I've decided that these issues need to be addressed a lot more frequently than they are. And, let's face it, an awful lot of people who need to have these conversations don't have the sexual vocabulary or any idea of how the framework should be constructed.

I'm hoping this series can help a few people out in this regard. Some of these conversations, most actually, will probably "take place" between two or more individuals, but there will be some that you'll need to have with yourself, at least at first.

Sex is a confusing and powerful force. It is a basic drive in all animals, and we, particularly in this culture, have worse than no instruction manual for it, we have a wrong, very wrong and damaged instruction manual.

I intend to post these, once per week, for the near future now that life has settled down significantly.

-Valerie