I'm making one New Year's resolution. I get many great questions by email and I don't have time to respond to them all. This is something I feel bad about. My resolution for this year is to not only reply to a few more questions each week, but to try and publish at least one response a week. And as a sub-resolution I'm going to try and feel less bad about the whole thing. I think I have a good chance of achieving one of these goals.

This week's question comes from a 53 year old who is feeling pressure about ejaculation. Actually he isn't feeling the pressure like he used to, and that's his question.

Read on: Help for Low Pressure Ejaculation

Read More: Your Sex Questions, Answered

This is the sixth year that I've compiled a (very incomplete) list of people we lost in 2011 whose life and work touched others, and in some ways contributed to our overall understanding of sexuality and gender. It's become a kind of mournful ritual for me. As people pass away I mourn their loss, but I also begin to put them on a list. I start thinking about it in mid-November and begin work in earnest in December. There are no criteria to who is on this list. My approach is neither scientific nor journalistic. I turn to friends and colleagues, I consult Wikipedia, and I use newspaper obituaries least of all (since most of the people who I want to remember aren't considered important enough to warrant a public obituary, and the paid obits don't offer much information).

As soon as I started doing this I was surprised by something. It seemed to me that there were a lot of people each year who killed themselves. More than I would expect. I quickly realized this was a function of how I compile the list. Suicides aren't reported in the newspaper as news, and even in obituaries, someone who killed themselves is more often described as having "died suddenly." But when you learn about people dying from someone who had a personal connection to them, you often get more of the story than you might reading a blurb in the newspaper.

This seems particularly important for those of us who choose to spend our lives talking about or working around issues of sexuality and gender. All of us have an experience of silence and shame. And most of us know that in the silence more shame can grown, more pain can be felt, and the risks for violence (at our own or someone elses hands) increase.

And so it feels to me as if the people we are remembering here would probably want us to know more, not less. That they might even prefer that we remember the complicated, messy, and dark parts of their lives and experience, and not only the Kodak moments.

So I've tried to share some of that here, with a little bit about each person we've lost and links to allow you to read more about who they were, and why they will be missed.

Read More: Sexual Losses 2011

Previously: Sexual Losses 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010

Often when people find out just how many people I talk to and correspond with about their sex lives every year they want to know what the most common question I get asked is. They usually also want to know what's the strangest thing I've been asked. I never have an answer to that second question. It's one of those deny-the-premise questions. After more than twenty years of talking to people about sex I just don't think about sex the way I used to or the way it seems to me a lot of people do. One way that difference manifests itself is in this idea of regular and strange. That's not an axis that has any useful meaning for me when it comes to sex.

But the first question is one I can answer. I don't dig into my statistics all that often, but once a year I like to see which questions and answers were the most popular. This year's list is below. Six of the ten questions on this list were also the most popular last year (which probably says as much about the way search engines co-construct information and knowledge sharing as it does anything else). But of those six, only the top question is in the same spot as last year, indicating at least some movement in what folks are interested in reading about.

These ten questions are from the 105 Sex Questions that I've answered on the About.com site. If you have a question and you can't find it on the site feel free to email me. I won't always have a satisfying answer, but I promise to try.

1. How Do I Find My PC Muscle?

2. Dealing with a Penis That's Too Big

3. Can You Alter the Taste of Your Vagina?

4. Do Penis Pumps Permanently Enlarge Your Penis?

5. How Can I Tell If He's Ready to Come?

6. How Long Does Sex Last?

7. How Can I Tell If I Had an Orgasm?

8. How Do I Measure Up?

9. How Much Masturbation Is Too Much?

10. Does Anal Sex Always Hurt?

I know plenty of people who spend this time of year trying to avoid the holidays. I know even more who both love and hate the holidays. I don't know anyone who isn't impacted in some way by the avalanche of messages we receive from practically ever corner of society that this time is special, or different in some way.

Avoidance may work for some, but I think it should only be part of any strategy. Another part should be action. Plan for things that will make you feel better, ground you, and help you get through the holidays. It might just be going to see a movie on your own one night. Or if you're mostly alone then maybe it's making plans to check in with someone for lunch or on the phone.

Sex has something to offer here as well. You don't need a partner to have sex, and if you think the idea of sex as release or as a coping mechanism is fundamentally pathological, think again. It may be what the media and Hollywood wants you to think, but most sex educators would agree that healthy sexual expression can serve many purposes. Surviving the holidays is one of them.

Read more - Christmas Sex Survival Guide 2011