Welcome to NSFW Sunday!
Feature image of Lorelei Black by Alveoli Photography.
Ella Nova and Daisy Ducati via the crashpad
+ Some perks to casual sex, include feeling less inhibited, learning about yourself sexually and emotionally and getting over some of your communicative inhibitions:
“There’s less at stake emotionally with a casual partner. This is the very target at which critics aim their arrows—how can women enjoy sex without an emotional connection?!—but this lack of investment can be freeing. It’s the same relative anonymity that causes some people to blurt out their deepest secrets to their hairdresser or a taxi driver. When we’re with someone who isn’t a fixture of our daily life, our egos relax enough to let a little authenticity come through. Rather than worrying about impressing the other person, you can be more assertive.”
+ The Colored Fountain has some date ideas “for the disabled/chronically ill/mad person in your life,” including home picnics, acupuncture, indoor camping and more.
+ The Spit Magazine’s Jesse Rae West was on Questionable at Best, talking about sex positive consent parties, queer porn, sex and more.
+ Making actual relationship decisions instead of letting them sort of happen to you is better.
+ At Vice, Molly Crabapple wrote about the myth of rescuing sex workers, also discussing police profiling of trans women of color, ill-considered institutionalized ideas about sex workers, the conflation of sex work and trafficking and more:
“Prostitutes might be called victims, but they’re still arrested, still handcuffed, and still held in cages. The only difference is that they’re now in a system that doesn’t distinguish between workers and trafficked people. To the courts, anyone who’s been arrested for sex work is raw material, incapable of making his or her own choices. Those like Love, who did sex work out of financial necessity, before leaving of her own volition, might as well not exist.”
Nzurianne by Jonathan-Stafford
+ Emma Holten responded to revenge porn of her younger self with a photography project emphasizing her agency and consent:
“The pictures are an attempt at making me a sexual subject instead of an object. I am not ashamed of my body, but it is mine. Consent is key. Just as rape and sex have nothing to do with each other, pictures shared with and without consent are completely different things.”
+ Thelma Sleaze’s Kinky Queers is documentary-style queer BDSM porn that needs money to be a thing.
koochykilla rodeoh
+ A study of only seven women concluded that the liquid that results from squirting is basically pee. Hey Epiphora wrote about why it’s wrong.
+ Breakups spike two weeks before Christmas and divorce inquiries spike in January, because everyone procrastinates until given a deadline.
Bijon Hill via curvesincolor
+ Sometimes, if sex is important to everyone in a relationship, you just have to have consensual sex with your long-term partner even though in that minute you could kind of take or leave it:
” Being pro maintenance sex doesn’t obligate a person to have sex whenever their partner wants it. Proponents and practitioners of maintenance sex still get to say no. There’s a difference between indulging your partner when you’re not feeling it—when you could take it or leave it—and forcing yourself to have sex (or being guilted/pressured/forced) when you’re too exhausted, too sick, or too angry for sex.
[…] sometimes you go into sex ‘not wanting or needing it’ and then you start to enjoy it, too, i.e., not in the mood when you started but definitely in the mood before you finished. […] I would hate to think of how much great sex I would’ve missed if my feminist principles didn’t allow for maintenance sex.”
via lasnoot
+Now for the most important thing: Are you doing our Masters of Sex Cure Month Project? You should! It’s a super-fun way to get back into the sexy swing of things along with all of us:
It can be hard to set aside the time to think critically about your sex life, both with activity partners and alone. This month, Autostraddle’s Masters of Sex Cure Month Experience will help you make that time.
We’ll lay down the week’s assignments each Monday for the rest of the month. Each week will have assignments that will be for just you and some that will be more effective if you do them with an activity partner (though you can do almost everything either alone or with one or more partners! Follow your arrow.). They’ll all work together to help you feel more centred in your sex life, no matter what it looks like, and to make positive changes both during the month and after it.
La Jessica and Okami Suicide. via okidokiokami
All of the photographs on NSFW Sundays are taken from various tumblrs and do not belong to us. All are linked and credited to the best of our abilities in hopes of attracting more traffic to the tumblrs and photographers who have blessed us with this imagery. The inclusion of a photograph here should not be interpreted as an assertion of the model’s gender identity or sexual orientation. If there is a photo included here that belongs to you and you want it removed, please email bren [at] autostraddle dot com and it will be removed promptly, no questions asked.
I dunno, maintenance sex as described there is really crappy sex. I’m not sure I’d go for frequent rubbish sex over infrequent awesome sex.
I can definitely see how it would read that way, but I do find it helps a lot. Usually when I feel like having sexy things happen, it has mulled over in the back of my mind for at least an hour or so before emerging into consciousness. Every time I’ve had sex and started rather neutral about it I ended up really into it midway, once my brain had time to warm up in the course of action. So it isn’t bad sex, it’s the same quality as normal sex, just with more revving up time for whoever was just ‘ok’ with it in the beginning.
Carolyn, you goddess of kink and sex positivity, thank you.
About the maintenance sex – yes yes yes.
My experience in a relationship with infrequent sex really stressed me out. There were the obvious issues of feeling rejected, but also my partner’s reasoning really messed with my head. She only wanted to do it if conditions were “perfect,” so every time we did actually have sex I was really anxious about “messing up” and couldn’t fully enjoy myself (and this is from someone who typically comes at the drop of a hat). …not gonna lie, it sort of felt like I had made her a steak dinner one time and now she didn’t want my hamburger helper.
In relationships where I know sex is likely to happen on a fairly regular basis, I never get that kind of “performance anxiety.” I’m much more willing to try new/different things, too, because the pressure is off.
I can’t remember who said it, but this quote always seemed quite true:
“Sex may be perfectly natural, but rarely is it naturally perfect.”
Huge kudos for the disabled date tips. Very relevant to my interests.
Would love to see more writing on this topic on AS, because intersectionality!
Seconded!
I wanted to recommend this project for inclusion – Yes, we fuck! is a documentary that shows 6 stories about sex and functional diversity/disability. It is in Spanish but on their site they have clips with English subtitles. Their fundraiser is running until 28 January. It’s quite confronting in a “this is making me reexamine a bunch of assumptions I didn’t realise I had” way.
When I read the squirting study, I thought they had made a distinction between female ejaculation, which they described as producing something like a “frothy white liquid” that had certain…enzymes or whatever…and the clear byproduct of “squirting,” which contained characteristics found in urine.
This reactionary article seems to be confusing the two. The study was not denying the existence of female ejaculation.
…and why would you need more than seven subjects for this study? They’re testing a physiological process constrained by anatomy – it doesn’t seem like there’d be a lot of variation between individuals.
Yes yes yes times a million to the maintenance sex bit. I never feel pressured by my gf and if I say no it’s def no, but I never thought it was a crime to just do it because she wanted it and to make her happy, like when I could take it or leave it. Glad this article seconded this and I feel less alone and know this is actually a thing!!