Coming Winter 2025...
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Securing Sexuality equips therapists and clinicians with the latest information about tech ethics, privacy, cybersecurity, and cybersexuality, providing practical tools to navigate the myriad ways in which their lives and the lives of their clients are lived online.
What does safe sex mean in a digital age? From dating apps and digital consent to deepfakes, AI companions, and online surveillance, this compelling volume examines how intimacy is evolving—and what we risk losing along the way. It provides mental health professionals with tools they need to help their clients safely explore a variety of intimate scenarios across a wide range of apps, websites, and technologies. Award-winning sex therapist Stefani Goerlich discusses hot topics in technology, and each chapter ends with an accessible lesson on a specific aspect of technology by leading cybersecurity expert, J. Wolfgang Goerlich. Enriched with practical tools and interviews by industry specialists, this book helps therapists mitigate risks while guiding clients through the process of making personal choices in this domain. This book is a vital resource for marriage and family therapists, sex therapists, counselors, scholars, and curious readers who want to understand how technology is reshaping our most intimate spaces. |
What the Experts are saying:
“Timely and non-alarmist, Securing Sexuality demystifies the complex intersection of intimacy, technology, and personal safety. Blending sex therapy, cybersecurity, and cultural insight, Goerlich and Wolf offer a much-needed roadmap for understanding and developing our own personal risk framework—empowering us to reclaim and protect our digital identity in an increasingly connected world. Essential for clinicians, technologists, and anyone navigating modern relationships, this book will equip you to become a safer, more informed digital sexual citizen.”
⁃ Simon Dubé, PhD, Research Fellow, Kinsey Institute, Affiliate Professor, UQAM Department of Sexology
This book is an approachable and sex-positive survey of the areas in which sex and technology have overlapped over recent years. At a time when support workers are overwhelmed and lawmakers are pushing for increasingly puritanical solutions policing sexuality online, it is refreshing to read a book as pragmatic, human-centered, and candid as this one.
- Eva Galperin, Director of Cybersecurity, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Most cybersecurity advice treats human sexual behavior like it’s irrelevant or a terms-of-service violation, and most sex education pretends technology is optional instead of a major part of intimate relationships. Stefani and Wolfgang Goerlich finally connect the two sides of human behavior around computers and show that this dichotomy is not only false, but dangerous to the most vulnerable people in society. I’m so grateful to them for having connected the right to digital privacy with a useful strategy to achieve it. These are the tools you need to enable you to use tech as a whole person while preserving your dignity and agency. Bravo."
- Tarah Wheeler, Founder & CEO, Red Queen Dynamics
One hacker + one sex therapist = a deeper dive than you can imagine into the ways sex tech has snaked its way through our lives. In my field it's common to recognize that "anything that can be used for sexual purposes, will"--and Stefani and Wolfgang Goerlich illustrate that with the most thorough journey imaginable, from the caves to tomorrow, with deep dives into the history (and current tech and social implications) of all kinds of sexual issues that, one way or another, are relevant to almost everybody. Think finding community, dating, toys, entertainment, privacy, censorship, and more. Every page offers insight into our past and peepholes into the future.
Look, I know Artificial Intelligence is all over the news (and everything else) these days. But before you succumb, read this book- and partake of deeply informed info from a duo and a community that specializes in fierce and fearless human intelligence. As Wolf and Stefani conclude, "The complex problems covered in this book demand interdisciplinary thinking": just what one hacker + one sex therapist can deliver. Sharing the planet with these two gives me hope.
- - Carol Queen PhD, Sexologist and Curator of the Good Vibes Antique Vibrator Museum, San Francisco