Feature image by misty pittman via stocksnap.io.
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.
Welcome to NSFW Sunday!
shot by letsmackskins
+ Kai Cheng Thom writes about having her sexuality denied by healthcare providers and partners, the challenge of finding information on trans sexuality, the failure of sex education, how rejecting trans women’s sexuality comes from rejecting any women’s sexuality and more:
“When it comes to the mystery of trans women’s sexuality, here’s what I’ve learned: We fuck in all kinds of ways, some of which you may have to look up on the internet. We fuck all kinds of people, for all kinds of reasons. Fucking us doesn’t necessarily make you gay/straight/lesbian/bisexual, and it doesn’t make you a fetishist either. It may make you nervous, sad, embarrassed, ashamed, terrified, anticipatory, curious, delighted, wondrous, awestruck. It definitely makes you human. Just like us.
Then, of course, there are the orgasms: apparently not so impossible to achieve after all. While sex certainly doesn’t need to focus on orgasm as the be-all and end-all goal, many trans women (like yours truly) are certainly interested in having them in one way or another.
And the thing is — we deserve orgasms. Hormonal and postsurgical side effects shouldn’t change that. For one thing, some trans women don’t want or need hormones or surgery. Those who do should have access to accurate, sex-positive information about how to adjust to — how to love — our changing bodies.”
via cloud lines
+ You’re not going to sleep very well the first night you sleep over at someone’s house:
“It’s called the first-night effect and experts have known about it for decades. Recently, a team from Brown University tested it out by having 11 people stay in their sleep lab for a few nights. The plucky subjects slept inside a medical scanner made bearable with blankets and pillows.
The participants took longer to fall asleep and got less deep sleep on the first night than on the second. Brain scans found that a specific part of the left hemisphere was more active than the right during a phase of deep sleep called slow-wave; there was no difference in activity during other sleep phases. During the second night, there were no significant differences between the hemispheres.”
+ And actually, even if you’ve been sleeping in the same house with the same person(s) for ages, you still might not sleep well.
by photographer freak the mighty
+ Heteronormativity still rules vibrator design:
“At Lelo, “We’ve found that the best way to engage with different sexual, gender, and relationship dynamics is to remove all of them from our creative process as much as realistically possible,” said Thomson. While perhaps that holds true for the design and manufacturing process, Lelo’s marketing is rigidly heteronormative. For example, one of the brand’s couple’s toys, Ida, is packaged with a “user guide” that includes (admittedly very tasteful and sexy) illustrations of a straight couple in various positions. The toy itself could function in a number of different positions and orifices, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the marketing material. Such user guides are crucial points of entry for first-time consumers, and though I’m sure many seasoned queer couples have already co-opted the Ida for their own pleasure, I wonder how many more people were dissuaded.”
+ And “male ideas about sex still impact the way female pleasure products are marketed, packaged, and sold.” Most sex toy engineers (and marketers) are men, so their ideas are still all over sex toys. Even in women-created toys, everyone has biases:
“‘Regardless of the gender split on your team, you need to assume that you have biases,’ Lieberman said. ‘Starting from a place of ‘I don’t have biases’ is never helpful.’ It’s not necessarily the gender of an engineer that matters, it’s that engineer’s ability to consider perspectives outside their own. The problem is that, in the United States, the white men who dominate the tech industry happen to be the least prepared to pull that off.”
+ At Oh Joy Sex Toy, Sarah Winifred Searle writes about body positivity, writing: “I discovered the body positive community, and it flooded my feeds with candid shots of people sharing traits that meant they’d never identify as conventionally attractive. The more I surrounded myself with them, the more beautiful I found their uniqueness and, in turn, began to see beauty in my own.”
+ Some advice on coming out to your healthcare provider as poly, kinky, queer or a sex worker.
+ Further speculation on what you’ve always suspected: people who live in tiny houses can’t have sex.
+ What are apps that give you relationship advice even like?
+ There are no Feminist Porn Awards this year.
+ Eighteen stories of coming out as bisexual cover friends and family who don’t get it, friends and family who do get it, confidence boosts and more.
+ No sense of shame about not paying for ethical pornography? Text PornHub an emoji and it’ll send you a link to related porn.
via twocherrypies
+ Why get meditative when you can get kinky?:
“[T]he brain responds to the pain presented through certain forms of BDSM by decreasing blood flow to an area of the brain associated with executive control, working memory and other high-level functions. ‘Part of the reason these SM activities may be so extreme, at some level, is that they’re particularly effective at causing the brain to change its distribution of blood flow,’ [researcher James Ambler] told Live Science. According to researchers, the phenomenon ‘can lead to a feeling of floating, peacefulness, time distortion and a feeling of living ‘in the here and now.” […]
What’s interesting is that the decrease in brain functioning isn’t specific to BDSM play. According to the journal Yale Scientific, during meditation, researchers have noticed a “deactivation of the part of the brain known as the default mode network (DMN), a region involved in self-referential processing, including daydreaming.” Others have noted that this decrease in activity allows people to keep anxiety at bay and strengthens the ability to modulate emotional response—all of which would seem helpful for people looking to abandon their “normal state” of conciousness.”
Fleur of England at Anya Lust via the lingerie addict
+ Utah is having conniptions over porn, declaring it a “public health crisis,” thanks to baseless evidence from radical feminist and anti-porn activist Gail Dines:
Over and over, according to Hamblin, Dines’s dire claims are based on shaky evidence. ‘While Dines and others cite many correlations between pornography consumption and negative health outcomes, the causal relationship is rarely explicit,’ he writes. ‘Making that leap is especially tenuous when studies rely on subjects recalling and reporting information about taboo behaviors and thoughts, a notoriously unreliable approach.’ And even setting aside individual study results, it’s an uphill battle to claim, in 2016, that porn constitutes a public-health crisis: rape and violent crime have been in decline for years, during the exact same period the availability of porn exploded.”
via queer fuckery
+ From the Autostraddle Lesbian Sex Archives: Sometimes you fall in love with a girl and it explodes your life:
“I know it doesn’t necessarily feel good right now. No one can give you a promise about when this will stop feeling hard and scary and weird. But I can pretty much promise you that you’ll look back on this time as when everything started to change for the better, and be really proud of yourself. You were able to leave an unhealthy situation, be honest with yourself about what you want, and start building a better life for yourself. You are so brave and should be so proud of yourself! In five years, future-you is gonna build a time machine just so they can send past-you an Edible Arrangement.”
As several commenters on the Toast article pointed out, the biggest issue about tiny houses isn’t sex. It’s the fact that you can’t ever have Mexican food. One fart and your tiny house turns into a tiny gas chamber. THERE IS NO ESCAPE.
How am I supposed to grade papers when I can dream about these photos instead?!
That piece about trans women’s sexuality was really powerful. Being cis, I didn’t have a good grasp of how misogyny affects trans women’s sexuality. But she’s absolutely right: there’s still a stigma associated with women (cis AND trans) who value their sexuality. Our bodies and our orgasms are seen as an unimportant afterthought. This strengthens my solidarity even more with my trans sisters in the fight against sexism and femme-phobia.
The article on coming coming out to your healthcare provider was awesome. I was recently at my new doc, and wasn’t sure how to do it. She sort of saved me the trouble by asking if I was sexually active with anyone. Currently I’m not, but then she asked “Men?” *shakes head* “Women?” It’s then I’m rendered speechless b/c I’ve NEVER been asked both before! I said no, but thanked her for asking after saying that I was with both in the past. It’s nice to know she didn’t assume things.
Also, since I have an odd sense of humor, I really want to use the title of this article as a pick up line. “Hey girl, I wanna eat you like an edible arrangement…” Think it would work?
That’s awesome!
Also you should probably definitely do that. And then report back.
it would probably work on me… especially if you actually made/got me an edible arrangement or any fruit-shapes/fruit-on-sticks/fruit-with-chocolate situation….