Given the sexual repression that American society suffers, it's often difficult for people to find accurate, impartial information on sex and sexuality. The new National Sexuality Resource Center, which opens today, aspires to make access to such information easier.
"There is no major center where people in midlife or seniors can go and access reliable, open and honest factual information about human sexuality," Gilbert Herdt, director of the National Sexuality Resource Center, said.
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.
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, although its website has not yet been developed.
The NSRC is an outreach of San Francisco State University, where Herdt also serves as a professor of sexual studies.
SFSU's Summer Institute, a forum on sexuality that has been held for the last three years, attended by scholars, practitioners, and sexuality counselors, is considered the major outreach program of the institute.
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