Welcome to NSFW Lesbosexy Sunday!
via sapphoria.tumblr.com
+ According to multiple new surveys by individual companies, a lot of people think basically anything, including Facebook, sleep, and bacon, is better than sex:
“The truth is that Americans on the whole are not devaluing sex, despite headlines to the contrary. For the most part, these surveys — which tend to be thoroughly unscientific and rely on minute samples — find that a minority of folks would give up sex for X, Y or Z. And yet that minority makes for a great, grabby news hook, especially when the sex-trumping variable is a newfangled piece of technology. These surveys powerfully feed into our fears over the way that technology is changing our world, especially the ways we relate to one another. At the same time, they validate those of us who have felt the pull of virtual, over real-world, intimacy. (And most of us have probably spent some time on both sides of that line.)”
via vanitylovescurves.tumblr.com
+ Sleeping with someone on the first date: it might lead to marriage.
“Obviously this is some antiquated shit, but it’s clinging to our modern dating scene with all its might. I know a number of liberal feminists who wouldn’t dream of having sex on the first date (or even the second or third) because of the message it would send. As though sex somehow devalues you as a person. It taints the entirety of the date that came before. It makes a long-term relationship impossible. Lust can never become love. Well, bullshit, says this study. Love and lust aren’t so far apart as traditionalists would have us believe.”
via flickr.com/photos/rodeoh
+ As Carmen discussed in this week’s Also Also Also, Brazen: Trans Women Safer Sex Guide, by Morgan M. Page, is available for free online as a pdf. It talks about talking about your trans status, negotiating safe sex, having safe sex, talking to doctors, post-surgery sex, and STIs.
“Let’s face it: trans folks love words. We’re creating new words and meanings to describe our identities, our bodies, and our lives all the time. And that’s awesome! But it also makes it hard to be super inclusive of everyone all the time. In writing this guide, we’re going to try to keep things simple, and use the broadest language possible, but no matter what words we use, we’re going to end up leaving someone or some word out. We’re really sorry if we’ve used any language that doesn’t include you or doesn’t feel like the most comfortable for you and your body. Feel free to cross words out that you don’t like, and write in new ones!”
via flickr.com/photos/baimoshui
+ The Wirecutter has an intensive review of the best beginner vibrator. It is purple and $10.
+ The ten sexiest women in Indie Rock.
via vanitylovescurves.tumblr.com
+ This erotic hand signalling chart is a naughty Surrealist adaptation of the American Sign Language manual alphabet, which might be convenient if you want to tell someone you want to deflower, lesbianise, or ensnare her.
via Brain Pickings
+ Women like porn. So why do people keep insisting otherwise? Brook Magnanti explains:
“Participants ranked the films in order of how aroused they felt watching them. The heterosexual women in the study ranked male-male films the lowest, followed by female-female in the middle, and finally female-male films the highest. But when the genital arousal data were compared to these rankings, something interesting emerged.
It turned out that the physical data told a completely different story. Subjects claimed male-male porn interested them the least, but looking at the physical response, male-male and female-female films ranked similarly – both high. On paper, straight women ranked heterosexual pairings the most arousing, but their response while watching these films was actually lower than the other films.
Straight women were getting more physically turned on watching homosexual pairings, even films with no women in them at all, than they were by straight scenes. […]
These kinds of results paint a picture of real responses that are at odds with the stereotypes, and for that they deserve wider recognition.“
+ It’s a very heteronormative article/story, but still an interesting read: Fat Sex – How One Women Let Herself Feel Pleasure:
Slowly, Alice started posing questions more to the point. Have you ever had sex with a large woman? Have you ever had sex with a, um, fat woman? Have you ever had sex with a … really fat woman? Did you like it? Some did, some didn’t, but no matter what their response, the worst that happened was a blank screen. As it turns out, many of them liked fat women, because they have big breasts, and big asses, and places to squeeze, and put things.
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just inadvertently applied the erotic hand signal #s to monica’s 7 erogenous zones from friends and the results are… kinda violent. but trade erotic #12 for monica’s #7 and It Gets Better.
The article on arousal was interesting, but is somewhat incomplete it seems to me. “Physically turned on” is not the same thing as being actually aroused. Not to be a downer, but I read a piece about the studies done on female arousal a few years ago (which I’m sorry to say, I’ve now forgotten the author and title of) that made a case that most of the research done was One, too dominated by male scientists and Two, missing and/or ignoring the importance of the mind in sexual arousal.
The point she made was that increase in blood flow is one thing, being turned on is another. Our bodies do all kinds of things without conscious input from us and she suggested that women may have evolved to get lubricated easily when anything of a sexual nature was displayed, because of the thousands of years when their bodies were not their own. Basically as a defense against horrible things like tears and infections (I love reading history, but eventually the barbarity and rape gets too much and I have to stop for awhile) and the mechanism remains to this day. That doesn’t mean that they are really turned on though. It’s a biological function like anything else, but special meaning has been attached to it by society.
This is what leads women who have been raped but who’s body betrayed them in some fashion, to stay silent out of shame. Male dominated science just loved the idea that women get “turned on” by everything and used these studies to dismiss women’s sexual self identities as non existent. We’ve all come across the Hollywood cliche that women will sleep with anyone when they’re drunk and it’s also been used to write off lesbianism, because there’s still nothing more threatening to many men than a woman who doesn’t need them sexually.
So it’s very complex and hard to piece together, especially since people come in such a variety, but I think in the end the easiest and most obvious thing to do is to take women’s word for it about what attracts them. Sure, people lie to themselves sometimes, but there’s no way to know for sure and it’s certainly no one else’s place to decide.
I actually agree with your idea that physical arousal cannot be correlated with real sexual interest. But the question remains – why were subjects more physically aroused by homosexual imagery than heterosexual? At worst, they should have provoked equal reactions.
Thoughts?
I’m not sure, but it may simply be the novelty of the experience. If you’re being shown something you wouldn’t normally watch, and not only that, but you know people are recording the results, it might affect the way you respond.
My blood pressure is fine, but every time I go to the doctor it’s high the first time they test it. That’s one of the difficulties of science in general, it’s almost impossible to test something without in some way affecting the results you end up with.
This is really interesting to me. I was wondering a lot of the same things. I feel like terms needed to be better defined and it needed to be pointed out that what we think of as physical arousal can be way less meaningful than we think.
this is really interesting, thank you erin
Thanks Riese. I don’t write a lot of long posts or essays (shocker I know) but I read it again and noticed that in writing about an article I’d read and trying to express my own views, I ended up screwing up my tenses a bit. Are we going to be able to edit comments after the site update? I’m also someone who’s always had a larger vocabulary than my ability to spell but I really hate typos.
The link to the sex on the first date article doesn’t work…
Looks like there’s a stray double quote somewhere in the tag.
Fixed it! Thanks Michelle and Seph!
Cunnilinguate is my new favourite word.
<3 our Rodeoh
That photo of the woman with the strippy rainbow socks?
Awesome, hot and a very good start to my Monday.