Caitlyn Becker moderates a group including Marketplace series author Laura Antoniou erotica writer Ella Boureau, JuicyPinkBox’s Jincey Lumpkin and AfterEllen’s Trish Bendix (with a shout out to Susie Bright).
Tagged as:
bdsm,
Blue is the Warmest Color,
lesbians,
movies,
sex
- ‘A Queer and Pleasant Danger’ by Kate Bornstein | Lambda Literary – In A Queer and Pleasant Danger Bornstein offers a raw exploration of her gender journey, including candid explorations of her lifelong eating disorders and their relationship to her conception of self and gender. Bornstein gives us the opportunity to see behind the scenes and into the early gender outlaw days of one of the most brilliant gender theorists and performance artists of our time. We watch as she grapples with coming out as a lesbian, learning how to work cute as an embodiment of gender, and find power in the body she transforms. Bornstein brings us into her early activist days, including a trip to the trial of Brandon Tina’s murders, visiting the house where Tina died, as well as to the stage of her first queer performance work.
- When Children See Internet Pornography – NYTimes.com – There is no set script, and no predictable moment for the conversation. It can happen at as early an age as 6 or 7, when a child may not yet understand the basic mechanics of sex. It is typically set off by a child’s accidental wanderings online or the deliberate searches of a curious teenager on a smartphone, laptop, tablet or one of the other devices that have made it nearly impossible to grow up without encountering sexually explicit material. Even a quick Twitter or Facebook search reveals that older students report seeing pornography on others’ laptops or phones in class, usually with an “OMG” attached.
- Sexuality and Other Female (Film) Troubles – NYTimes.com – “I wanted to make a Merchant-Ivory movie with vibrators,” Ms. Wexler, 42, said sitting in an office in Midtown Manhattan, her long brown hair bouncing every time she let out a booming laugh. “And in doing that, strangely, we’ve shone a light. Can you believe we’re still arguing about these same topics 100 years later — women’s rights over their own body? If a woman is behind the camera, these issues can be explored more than they have in the past.”
- Sex Ed for Grown Folks — Indiegogo – Support The Garden, a DC based sexual education resource . The money raised here will help create space for people of all ages and walks of life to find the resources they need to ask the questions they might not know how to ask. Space for queer, trans, straight, gay, bi, poly, pomosexual, unsure, in between, on the edge, and in the closet people to come and figure it all out. Take a class. Buy that toy you’ve been eyeing online but needed to feel first. Seek the resources and find the therapists, coaches and body workers who won’t judge you for who are or how you live. Come to The Garden, ask the questions, get educated and find your pleasure.
- Facebook and poly privacy « Polyamory Weekly – Is it OK to list my relationship status as “open” on Facebook if my girlfriend isn’t out publicly?
- Library ban on best-seller sparks Florida censorship debate – USATODAY.com – Instead, the Brevard library chose recently to close the book on British author E.L. James’ “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Cathy Schweinsberg, library services director, decided after reading the novel to pull from circulation the system’s 19 copies of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the first installment in a trilogy.
- For Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Abuse Cases, a Prosecutor Uses Different Rules – NYTimes.com – Mr. Hynes has won election six times as district attorney thanks in part to support from ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who lead growing communities in neighborhoods like Borough Park and Crown Heights. But in recent years, as allegations of child sexual abuse have shaken the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, victims’ rights groups have expressed concern that he is not vigorously pursuing these cases because of his deep ties to the rabbis.
Tagged as:
50ShadesofGrey,
abuse,
censorship,
children,
corruption,
facebook,
funding,
kate,
Kate+Bornstein,
libraries,
media,
movies,
online,
pornography,
relationships,
sex,
sex+education,
sexuality,
social+,
social+networks,
was,
washington,
women
- Fun in Getting Taken Out of Context | Feministe
I often avoid writing about this stuff because it devolves into a downward spiral of stupid. “This proves that women want to be dominated!” “No, as long as someone finds it erotic, it’s ok and we have no right to look at this in the context of a misogynist culture!” “BDSM is freaky and for perverts!” “No, people who practice BDSM are always responsible and it’s never abusive!” etc etc etc.
- Romance, Arousal, and Condescension | Blog | Smart Bitches, Trashy Books | Romance Novel Reviews | All of the Romance, None of the Bullshit.
I think the real temptation and curiosity for those people and many, many others was that many women were saying “This is great for my sex life. This is great for my marriage.” Better sex? Who is saying no to that?!…I certainly wouldn’t, though 50 Shades did not crank my engine the way it has for so many other women. But I remain stunned by the fact that yet again we’re repeating the same assumptions, and answering with the same assertions. We cannot examine female arousal without demeaning condescension. And that is a shame. I wish it were possible to speak candidly about what books turned women on, and why. It would be fascinating to see what those books have in common, and why some work and some don’t.
- The Soapbox: Actually, Katie Roiphe, Feminists Are Not Perplexed About Submissive Sex | Jessica Wakeman | The Frisky
Free will is very much present in submissive sex, which, let’s not forget, is acting out a fantasy. In fact, if it is done right, the very act of negotiating a dominant/submissive play session is a choice and is about as far from abuse as possible. Longtime partners and kinkier BDSM folks may play with total, I-place-myself-completely-in-your-hands submission (The Story of O comes to mind), but for the rest of us this “surrender” is beautifully negotiated, even planned. That is because most partners — the responsible ones — approach each other as equals. Equal dignity, equal respect, equal attempts at pleasure. Dominance and submission does not mean some animals are more equal than others. Sexual subjugation in the realm of sexual fantasy does not erase outside-the-bedroom equality — unless, of course, one wants it to, but that, too, will be negotiated.
Tagged as:
bdsm,
consent,
erotica,
feminism,
media,
Novels,
pornography,
romance,
sex,
submission
- L.A.’s porn Mistake | Lorelei Lee (Salon.com) – What performers like Hartley and I are equally opposed to is being condescended to by hypocritical zealots like Weinstein and Lubben who are obviously motivated by a concern for something other than our health and safety. Who have, in fact, shown a “blatant disregard” for the health and safety of industry workers by making it more difficult for us to use the protections we already have in place when their actions led to the closure of AIM.
- Making a Fist of It: The Law and Obscenity | Freedom in a Puritan age – On Friday 6 January 2012, a historic case came to a conclusion in Courtroom 7 of Southwark Crown Court. Michael Peacock was unanimously acquitted, after a four-day trial that saw the outdated obscenity law of England and Wales in the dock…Peacock had been charged under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for allegedly distributing ‘obscene’ ‘gay’ DVDs, which featured fisting, urolagnia (‘watersports’) and BDSM.
- Ask Tristan: Sex Toys and the Law • Pucker Up – [Ed. note: For this question, I turned it over to my legal expert, Davis from Sexquire.] So what does all of this litigation mean to sex shop clerks? First, unless you are in Alabama, you have no reason to fear being arrested on obscenity charges for providing sex education about or selling these products as other than novelties.
- Porn Star Activist Jiz Lee Talks About When and How Sex Workers Can Give Consent – San Francisco Art – The Exhibitionist – The ethics of consent is becoming a hot, vital topic of discussion in alternative sexuality communities. While talking about consent is something that never quite goes away, especially in BDSM communities, a lot of the dialogue doesn’t stray much beyond making sure that everyone is over 18 and knows his or her safeword. A few months ago, local activist bad-asses Maggie Mayhem and Kitty Stryker talked to us about their attempts to speak openly about abuse in BDSM and build “consent culture.” As they prepare to take those ideas on a cross-country tour, plenty of other people are continuing the conversation here in the Bay Area.
- Kate Bornstein reading excerpt from her new book, “A Queer and Pleasant Danger”
- The Case of Loving v. Bigotry – Slide Show – NYTimes.com – “In 1958, Richard & Mildred Loving were arrested in a nighttime raid in their bedroom by the sheriff of Caroline County, Va. Their crime: being married to each other. The Lovings…were ordered by a judge to leave Virginia for 25 years. The International Center of Photography is mounting a show of Grey Villet’s photographs of the couple in 1965 (January 20-May 6, 2012).
- Eric Holder Expands FBI’s Narrow, Outdated Definition Of Rape– MANCHESTER, N.H. — U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has revised the way the FBI defines rape, the first update to the federal definition in nearly a century.The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report has defined rape as the “carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” This definition was narrower than the one used by many police departments around the country, and women’s rights advocates said it led to the under-counting of thousands of sexual assaults each year.
- Rape definition broadened to include men | CNN – The crime of rape will now be defined as “penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim,” the Justice Department said.
Tagged as:
Beyond+Visibility,
britain,
consent,
crime,
health,
Jiz,
jiz+lee,
Kate+Bornstein,
kink,
legal,
legis,
legisl,
legislation,
loving+virginia,
marriage,
memoir,
obscenity,
porno,
pornography,
racism,
rape,
sex,
Sexquire,
sextoys,
supreme,
supreme+court,
transgender
- Sexual Obituaries 2011 (Cory Silverberg) – People who choose to work around sexuality and gender often don’t get the acknowledgment from the mainstream media or from society as a whole that they would if their work was in another field. Every year, I feel this absence when I read the lists of famous people who died. Since 2006, I’ve tried to change that by sharing some of the sex and gender activists, educators, artists, and outlaws we lost in the year that is ending. Here is a list of sexual losses in 2011.
- Director Dee Rees And Star Adepero Oduye Talk Coming Out & Coming Of Age In ‘Pariah’ | indieWIRE – Pariah is the story of Alike (Oduye), a black lesbian teenager living in Fort Greene and navigating between the aggressive gay nightclub scene preferred by her butch best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) and a closeted life at home, where her tightly wound mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) tries to dress her in pink cardigans and quizzes her about who she’s taking to the school dance.
- Bondage Sex And The Liberation Of Culture – ErosBlog: The Sex Blog – For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape.
- 2011 Top Ten Sex Questions (Cory Silverberg) – 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…These ten questions are from the 105 Sex Questions that I’ve answered on the About.com site.
- Navigating Love and Autism – NYTimes.com– Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back. [via Violet Blue]
- When Will a Gay Pro Athlete Finally Come Out? — New York Magazine – “Something has happened in the last year,” says Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports, an advocate for and chronicler of gay sports issues for more than a decade. “It’s almost like homophobia is no longer considered cool in sports.”
- Australian Passport Gender Options: ‘Transgender’ Will Be Included | HuffPo – Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender people, the government said Thursday.
Tagged as:
activism,
African-American,
culture,
harassment,
health,
history,
lesbian,
movies,
politics,
sex,
sexuality,
sports,
statistics,
transgender,
women
