Welcome to NSFW Sunday!
Feature image via andrewclifton.tumblr.com.
via womenofcolor
+ The best way to feel confident in bed is to spend more time in it alone:
“One thing you can do right now is get super into masturbating. Make appreciating your body and satisfying yourself physically a priority. Go full-on Narcissus-at-the-pool with loving yourself, and make sure your confidence in your beauty and sexual allure is rooted in your own body. This might involve massaging yourself in a warm bath strewn with rose petals, or taking brightly lit photos of yourself on the kitchen floor with the handle of a saucepan in your butthole, or (most likely) some other activity. If you aren’t already the main expert on your own unique sexual tastes, go forth, experiment, and make it so.”
Rain Dove by Nomi Ellenson
+ If you wonder whether you need therapy to get over your ex, you probably do, because let’s be real pretty much everyone could use some therapy:
“Everyone on earth has had some shit, relatively speaking, that they could stand to chat about with an impartial person. I grew up thinking that therapy was for people who could not really deal with their own problems. Now I realize that everyone is walking around patched together from the bullshit of existing just like that bathroom scene in Predator 2. […]
No I don’t think it really cures anything, but it gives you a language with which to understand your own bullshit, and a strength with which to accept that whatever your problems are yours to carry and that’s OK and you’ll get through it. One of the best things therapy helped me understand was that everyone has a story of pain they are hauling around. Everyone is dealing with some kind of shit. It’s not just me, and I don’t have a unique special kind of pain. I only have my story. That doesn’t make it any less worth talking about or any less valid. It just helps you understand that nobody is doing this right, really, and in that sense we are all doing it right.”
Tracy recommends, if you can’t go to therapy, reading internet advice columns, so here is a shameless plug for ours.
+ At Bitch, Erica Thomas critiqued a recent news story that conflates non-monogamy and cheating, noting that a certain way of being dismissive of non-monogamy can seem defeatist at best:
“Open relationships certainly do take work, but dismissing the possibility of non-monogamy for ‘most people’ feels pedantic to me. Most people are jealous. But jealousy can be a way to talk about important issues: Why do we get jealous? Why are we insecure? How do our cultural ideas of what ‘successful’ relationships look like contribute to our insecurities? Isn’t it a bit defeatist to say that someone is too jealous or insecure to make something work? It’s possible to reframe jealousy as a tool for self-understanding.”
via drawnwithcurves
+ Red wine — enough that you notice, not enough for dubious consent or coordination — is allegedly the best booze for sex.
+ At Oh Joy Sex Toy, Erika Moen reviewed the Transformer.
via rodeoh
+ Being in a kinky relationship if you’ve always wanted to be isn’t going to magically fix everything in your life.
+ Positive LGBT sex education is still not as common as it could be.
+ Here are some things about vaginas.
via altblackgirls
+ Sex work doesn’t need to be “empowering” to be legitimate:
“Porn is one of the least marginalised jobs within the sex industry, but it still suffers from the same fallacy as every other discussion about sex work – the idea that it is only a legitimate choice if it is ‘empowering’. We don’t hold other industries to this standard. Fewer than 8 per cent of the top-grossing films in 2014 were directed by women and Hollywood movies perpetuate just as many toxic narratives about sex and relationships as porn, and yet we are not asking ‘can film empower women?'”
Bijon Hill via womenofcolor
+ Twitter is working against revenge porn with updated guidelines that require consent from people appearing in “intimate photos or videos”:
“The new private information clause added to its rules states: “You may not post intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject’s consent.” It has added the same clause under its “threats and abuse” guidelines. Twitter’s rules already ban the publishing of credit card, address or national identity information.
Users reporting content shared without their consent will be required to verify their identity and prove their lack of consent.
Those who breach the site’s rules will have their accounts suspended.”
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’m surprised the Twitter clause wasn’t there already. Isn’t it illegal to post that kind of stuff without consent anyway?
And yes to red wine being great for sex! At least, when I get busy right after the second glass. Otherwise I just fall asleep.
The part that bothers me is the “prove their lack of consent.” Isn’t saying “hey, this is me in that photo, could you please remove this; I don’t want it here” proof of non-consent? Or are they expect a contract stating that when those pictures were taken that they would never be posted in any social media.
New idea: assume that if someone wanted a sexually explicit photograph of them on twitter, they would have posted it themself.
Oh whoops. I basically just said the same thing you did without seeing your comment. But yeah, I totally agree with you!
I often find myself espousing that “porn can be empowering” narrative just to get the idea through some people’s heads that porn, stripping and sex work are jobs just like any other. And deserve as much respect. (I then always get asked if I myself am a stripper or sex worker… ]as though arguing for the rights of a marginalized people precludes being one of those marginalized people). Anyways, the “empowering” narrative seems to be more like a baby step for getting people to see sex workers, pornographers and strippers as humans capable of making informed consensual decisions. It seems beyond a lot of people’s grasp to see that the film industry, the STEM industry, and corporate America are exploiting and degrading women as much if not far more than porn. #endrant
I kind of hate myself for using the phrase “corporate america,” but there you have it.
I feel this is the epitome of YDY on so many levels. Damn.
How do you prove your lack of consent in the porn situation? Or any situation for that matter. Like, I get how someone could disprove your lack of consent if there’s video of you agreeing to it or you’ve signed something. But if no conversation ever took place, how do you prove that? That wording sounds troubling and scary. It should be up to the person who posted the video to prove that there was consent, not vice versa.
That bothered me too. I’m not even sure why “proving” anything would be necessary – if you can be ID’d as the person in the photo / video and you assert that you want it taken down right now, that in itself is pretty clearly demonstrating your lack of consent.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Consent should be ongoing so unless you signed some sort of contract stating the content could be used on social media, then they should take it down even if you agreed to it at some point. I guess they ask for proof that there was no consent so they know whether or not to suspend the account of the other person, but I still say it should be up to them to prove that they weren’t being a massive scumbag by posting it and not up to the victim. And even if the person can prove that they had permission to post it and there’s no reason to suspend their account, the content should still be removed.
Does anyone else find masturbating to be incredibly boring? I feel like I often see things about how it’s so great and empowering and important and if you don’t do it there’s something wrong with you/you’re repressed/etc and I just think it’s….dull. Is that weird?
Whether or not you enjoy masturbating and/or want to engage in it is 100% totally and completely up to you and does not mean you’re weird/repressed/wrong for feeling that way. YDY, after all (or in this case, you most certainly do not have to *do* you).
IF, however, you want to masturbate but you really just find it legitimately boring, there are many, many ways to help make it more exciting (some of which you can find in the autostraddle archives).
Yes!!!! This is totally me. Masturbating is hard work and eh not all that exciting for me personally. I can go a while without having sex (a week or two with my partner) or way longer if I was single with no desire to touch myself. If you want to do so then YDY but YES, some of us find it incredibly repetitive and boring. Since I have a partner she can do all that fun stuff and if I was single I can pretty much live without it. Anyway like I said YDY but just wanted to tell you you aren’t alone!
As currently-single (and not really getting the sex while I WASN’T single), I’ve gotten used to the no-sex thing, without it being much of an issue for me (or perhaps I’m just not doing it right) . Part of it, too, might just be that masturbation doesn’t get at the root of what I want/need — I haven’t yet figured out how to kiss myself, hold my hand, or snuggle with myself in front of Netflix. :-(
Oh Goober, you are so right! My exgf taught me how to kiss!! And mean it!! She made my brain go fuzzy, and my body melt. Kissing and cuddling and caressing are the sexiest, loviest! Until I realized I am female and loved by a female, I had never felt real love and real sex. I wish I had understood way sooner!
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