"But the exercise of erotic capacity, intelligence, curiosity, or creativity all require pretexts that are unnecessary for other pleasures, such as the enjoyment of food, fiction, or astronomy."
– Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Note for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (via aequinoctium)
Posted 19 hours ago

Safe Sex | John Boland

Afterwards, from one
or both of you,
will come a whispered
Are you OK?
as if you had just
been in an accident
and were checking
to see who’d survived.

Posted 5 days ago
"Just as young people need scientifically accurate sex education to keep them safe, so we need accurate relationship education to keep us sane. In order to move forward constructively, we need a multiplicity of relationship models to inspire and reassure us. We need trans couples on TV, we need non-monogamy champions, we need people married 40-plus years like my parents, and we need Stevie Nicks who, at 62, is purposefully single so that she can “always be free”."

Jessica Mack, Women can be independent and intimate | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk (via grrrlstudies)

-

Could not love this any harder.

(via yvonen)

Posted 2 weeks ago
"Maybe to know sex fully
one has to risk being destroyed by it."
– Sharon Olds
Posted 1 month ago

“People who divide the fuckable world into those they care about (and can’t open up to sexually) and those they don’t care about (and can open up to sexually but won’t date) wind up having awesome sex with people they don’t know and lousy sex with people they marry. That’s not a good strategy for anyone interested in a successful—and sexually fulfilling—long-term relationship…

…Be uninhibited with your hookups while treating them like people you might actually see again, and insist on being treated that way in return. Don’t hook up with people who treat you like shit; don’t treat the people you hook up with like shit. Even if you know you’re not going to see someone again—maybe they’re not someone you would date, or circumstances are such that you couldn’t date them even if you wanted to (business trip, European vacation, spring break, etc.)—treat your hookups with kindness, respect, and gratitude…

…[S]ome people treat hookups like shit—only after they’ve come, natch—because they want their hookups to understand that they’re not interested in a relationship. That’s not just assholery, assholes, it’s completely unnecessary assholery. If someone was kind enough to suck your dick or fuck your brains out—if someone hooked up with your ass—a little kindness and consideration isn’t too much to ask. If you’re worried that your hookup might misinterpret “kindness and consideration” for “I want to be with you forever,” tell them—gently and directly—that you’re not interested in a relationship.”

(via this week’s Savage Love)

Posted 1 month ago
"Yes, we live in a sexist culture, in which women have no good choices when it comes to our bodies. We live in a sexist culture in which women are valued primarily as sexual objects, and at the same time are shamed for our sexuality. It seems to me that we have two choices as to how to respond to this. We can try to navigate the narrow, essentially impossible shoals of these contradictory expectations, and try to find that perfect, socially acceptable line between slut and prude.

Or we can say, “Fuck it. There is no way I can win — so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want. I’m going to wear overalls, or I’m going to wear high heels. I’m going to have sex with twenty strangers in a night, or I’m not going to have sex with anyone. I’m going to dress conservatively and professionally in public at all times, or I’m going to sell naked pictures of myself on the Internet if I bloody well feel like it.”

And in saying, “I can’t win, so I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to do,” we can create the beginnings of a victory. We can create the beginnings of a world where we really can win. We can create the beginnings of a world where we’re a little more free than the women who came before us… and where the women who come after us are a little more free than we are. We probably can’t create a perfect world, where women’s bodies aren’t commodified in the slightest (not in this generation, anyway). But we can create a better world: a world where women’s bodies and minds belong less to the patriarchy, and more to ourselves."

Greta Christina (What I May Do With My Naked Body: A Reply to Azar Majedi About the #NudePhotoRevolutionaries Calendar)

YES. This is why my fashion motto is ‘give no fucks.’

(via butwewereokay)

(via butwewereokay)

Posted 1 month ago
"As an independent sex prostitute (something that offers me a lot of privilege, as does being white, educated, and middle class) I get to decide whom to see, so during my sessions, we tend to explore queer sexuality. My sexuality, mind; most of my clients are straight men, or at least thought they were when we started! […] I expect them to challenge their assumptions of what makes male and female, what is appropriate and what isn’t. We discuss and explore power: who has it, and how, and why. I enjoy demonstrating that penetration is not a male act, or even something only men enjoy. I enjoy discussing sex, and gender and class. I like to help men in positions of power rethink femininity and feminism. My work is intellectually stimulating and challenging, and it uses my brainpower more than any other job I’ve had."
Posted 1 month ago
"There is no ‘natural’ human sexuality. This is not to say that our sexual feelings are ‘unnatural’ but that whatever feelings and activities our society interprets as sexual are channeled from birth into socially acceptable forms of expression."
– Ruth Hubbard, The Social Construction Of Sexuality  (via sociologique)

(via fyeahsociology)

Posted 1 month ago
"To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread."
– James Baldwin (forever)

(Source: jonubian, via theanimalnamesofplants)

Posted 1 month ago