Feature image of @@anthem_annie via rodeoh.
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!
@itsmeshortea and @nikia_deshawn via rodeoh
+ If you’re looking for a quick glance at almost all of the issues surrounding contemporary porn, check out the New Yorker‘s review of Shira Tarrant’s The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs to Know, which covers tube sites and MindGeek’s near-monopoly, sex work as work work, the porn wars past and present, Measure B, queer and feminist porn, ethical porn, a litany of sexual practices and more:
“Since the “porn wars” of the seventies and eighties, when feminists campaigned against the expanding pornography industry (and other feminists sided with Hustler to defend it), talking about pornography in terms of mere facts has seemed impossible. The atmosphere of controversy makes it hard to avoid moral positions. Even to suspend judgment may be to take sides. […]
[E]ven as the Internet has made pornography ubiquitous, the industry itself, at least as Tarrant describes it, is in severe decline. […]
Whether you see porn as just another sector disrupted by the Internet or as a still powerful engine of profit-driven exploitation depends on a thornier set of debates that shape how pornography is understood. To talk about porn purely in terms of costs and incentives is not, as Tarrant suggests, neutral. Even to stress the work involved is a political move.”
+ Getting sober can improve your sex life, writes Gigi Engle from personal experience:
“I have always been a big stimulation nipple girl, but I didn’t know how much until I stopped drinking. I can basically come from having my nipples sucked now.
I feel sexual charges in parts of my body I didn’t even know were possible. It turns out I’m very into anal stimulation. I did not know that until I stopped drinking long enough to listen to my asshole.
When you’re not deadening your senses with liquor, incredible things are possible sexually. Your synapses fire on all levels, and that makes for some seriously intense sex.”
@ittybittykaceface and @godsavecarolynjean shot by @kathrynlouiseh in Seattle, WA.
+ Sometimes you just have to have a secret relationship. (Because you’re closeted or dealing with biphobia or homophobia or living with your parents and all of the above, not because it’s secret from a partner, okay?) At Rookie, Krista Burton has advice on using queer erasure to your advantage as best you can until you don’t have to any more.
+ A dominatrix reviewed some chatbots and the result is amazing. (Slack gets three out of five ballgags.)
via curves in color
+ Submissive Playground, an online course about submission from Sinclair Sexsmith (Autostraddle‘s View From The Top columnist), is now open for registration!
+ At Oh Joy Sex Toy, Erika Moen reviewed the Leo, a mid-range Vixen but not VixSkin dildo that she calls “a ‘Special Occasion’ dildo for when I’m really needing a good hard fucking that I’ll still be feeling in the morning, y’know?”
via switch teams
+ Why not match your next sex toy to your Halloween costume?
“Many intelligent, well-informed self-described feminists believe sex work should never be decriminalized. In fact, the decriminalization of sex work is perhaps the single most divisive subject within feminism today.
This divide is the result of a moral blind spot on the part of anti-sex work feminists or ‘antis.’ They conflate all sex work unconditionally with rape, trafficking, and patriarchal exploitation. Ultimately, this is based on a (very un-feminist) distrust of the loud and powerful testimony of sex workers themselves, who, as individuals and organizations, have called over and over again for decriminalization to keep us safe from violence, stigma, and exploitation.
I think this comes from an inability of the antis to put themselves in the sparkly 6-inch heels of a sex worker. They can’t imagine what it would be like to wear nothing but a G-string and undulate onstage to a Prince song. They don’t understand the catharsis of a consensual sadomasochistic whipping. And they can’t comprehend how sexual and emotional intimacy can be employed strategically as labor. Just because a challenging job isn’t the right choice for you doesn’t mean it can’t be the right choice for someone else.”
I’m embarrassed to ask this, but does anyone know what the object hanging off the torso of the character in Erika Moen’s comic is? Is it some kind of body mod I’ve never heard of? A medical device? This has been bothering me for days!
Jo, I think it is a medical port, which is implanted when someone is in and out of the hospital a lot. Sometimes used for cancer patients. I could be wrong though
It’s a feeding tube. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percutaneous_endoscopic_gastrostomy
(I have… issues… with some of Erika Moen’s stuff but her commitment to genuinely diverse bodies including disabled people is pretty rad :)
Thank you!
There’s soooo much to talk about here but I’m too distracted by this weeks photos, omg <3
Agreed! The pictures this week are very good just like the links.
Leo was a favorite toy of my ex-gf and I.
Mm. That Seattle picture. That lit a fire. :D
like I spent a good ten minutes contemplating that pic and considering waking sleeping girlfriend and I know damn well that wouldn’t end with anything except a grumpy girl.
Considering where I live, I just want to know where they shot it so I can go re-create it. ;)
goddamn this country and its distance from everywhere
We’ll always have AS.
ew, erica moen
I don’t think I’ve ever been irritated at a 17th century person for being dead and not being able to make a sculpture of a 21st photograph of a person before.
Hate on Baroque painting and architecture all ya want Renaissance fanpeople but I defy you to say Bernini wasn’t a master sculptor.
In other words I really like the 2nd and 4th pictures on an artistic level in addition to liking them at boyshorts level.
She has been known to make excellent commentary comics on certain issues other members of the community don’t touch on, but many of her lesser-known comics are trans-fetishizing, and she tends to use slurs to refer to her audience (sl*t and d*ke for example).
I don’t know her work well enough to comment on the transphobic and/or racist issues that other people have mentioned, but surely her use of the words you mention here should be considered reclaiming rather than using slurs, no? (Unless she herself doesn’t identify as either a slut or a dyke, in which case no.)
the racism mostly http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=vq62hi&s=5#.V-hmT8lnAWk
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=3465p9l&s=5#.V-hmU8lnAWk
I did not know the full story of transphobia as elaborated in these comments, and have a big scowl on my face because I’ve learned a lot from Oh Joy, Sex Toy and am disappointed to hear about the non-apology… but am I totally misunderstanding when I say that I don’t think the statements on the comics you linked are ones the author believes in and seem to be commenting on racism her parents perpetuated as a way of distancing herself from them? What am I missing?
I hope this doesn’t come across as shitty, I don’t know enough about her work to put this in context and I should just google it myself instead of asking for someone to explain to me!
I haven’t heard nor do I know anything about the other complaints, but the transphobia is clear and a deal-breaker for me. Wish it was for AS too.
Were those made by her? I agree those are awful, but I’m not seeing where her name is?
In Dar, an earlier work of hers, she admitted a fetishized view of transmen. So yeah there’s comic page of her fetishized view at the time. She made a statement of apology in some anthology of her work (I remember reading it), not a “sorry I drew something offended you over-sensitive people”, but a “that was insulting, sorry my young dumb self didn’t realise that and drew this” type of statement.
Never a big giant statement of regret or apology directed to the trans community posted somewhere everybody could see.
Which is what she should have done.
She also insisted on keeping the offending comics posted because she “wants to preserve the completeness of the work” or some bullshit like that. So her “apology” was not only half-assed, but her art also matters more to her than people’s feelings and identities.
As far as I’m concerned, she’s an unrepentant transphobic jerk. :P
These partial apologies that are swept under the rug are a joke and should not be tolerated by people anymore.
On the other hand, deleting the comic would be rewriting history. I think it’s worth reading the apology and making your own conclusions. It reads to me like the trans people in her life were consulted about it though.
http://www.darcomic.com/2009/02/17/transmen/
Keeping the comic after a half-assed apology and then saying its specifically for “keeping the six year run of DAR whole”. It’s not about keeping it up as a reminder or an apology. It’s about the completeness of her work. That is absolutely the shittiest reason I can imagine.
The apology never once addresses specific issues nor does she explicitly apologize for fetishizing.
No apology and keeping her work work for the sake of it, despite the offense it caused? Tell me, what if it wasn’t a trans issue? What if she had deliberately used racial speech and fetishized people of color? Would people still ignore it then? Would she get the pass everyone has given her? Or would she be forced to take it down because of the outrage? Deleting the comic is not re-writing history. She CANNOT ERASE WHAT SHE DID. But she can sure as hell take down trash that CONTINUES to reinforce wrong ideas.
When she actually takes it down, apologizes publicly instead of on the one obscure strip, then she’ll prove trans people and trans issues matter. Until then, IMO, she’s full of shit.
If she’d properly apologized and deleted the offensive content there’d be no controversy today. :P