The sex shop Feelmore510 is located on the corner of Oakland's Telegraph and 17th streets, across from an Obama campaign office, in between a pawn shop and the oldest African-American owned shoe store in town. The neighborhood is in transition, a place with old roots and a lot of new blooms – most businesses on this stretch of Telegraph opened within the last five years. Feelmore510 will celebrate its one-year anniversary Sun/12 when owner Nenna Joiner helps host Town Love, a new party at Hibiscus' Rock Steady. Read more »

Scenes from [SSEX BBOX], the global sexuality documentary project whose long-awaited first episode will premiere at the Center of Sex and Culture on Mon/30:

One. A protest in Berlin, where a presentation is being made on the 16th century physical punishments that religious institutions imposed on sexually “immoral” people. 

Two. A conversation between two transgendered men living in Brazil. Read more »

All Guardian photos by Caitlin Donohue unless otherwise noted

“We gotta get 500 girls through here in two hours.” 

Pre porn star-strutting, the faces on the red carpet before the AVN Awards 2012 were grim. Vegas raged around us journalists, the Hard Rock Hotel – site of the awards ceremony, countless before-during-after-parties, and annual fan expo – awash in men trying to appear nonchalant and tired women in heels. We had many rivers to cross and many starlets to question before the awards ceremony would begin.Read more »

What will be the San Francisco-in-the-aughtteens equivalent of the creation of Good Vibrations in the Mission District in 1977? Let's hope some fresh new sexuality invention is fomenting that will be rocking our beds in three decades with the robustness that Good Vibes has shown. From that initial single location, the well-lit place for women to shop for vibrators has expanded to encompass not only six brick-and-mortar shops (five in the Bay Area, one in Massachusetts) -- but also a robust online business that has taken the original founders' dreams of teaching America how to have safer, better sex and made it a reality. In 2007, the one-time worker-owned co-op turned corporation was sold to GVA-TWN, a Cleveland, Ohio sex toy company. 

But the engineers behind the Good Vibes brand say it hasn't stopped growing. Last week, on the occasion of the brand's new branch opening (on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland Jan. 28, details below) the Guardian conducted email interviews with the company's chief operating officer Jackie Strano and staff sexologist Carol Queen. The woman waxed pleasurably -- dammit, now everything is sounding dirty -- on the company's possible digital education programs of the future, Carol Queen shared her views on a future with a Good Vibes location in every American city, plus we reveal what the hell a SESA is, and how it can help improve your orgasms. Read more »