Category: s.e.x.

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Asexuality/Aromantic Links

Don’t know what asexuality is? Don’t understand why someone might identify as aromantic? Would like, as a sex-positive feminist, to quit dismissing asexuality as a “problem” or illness or personal shortfall?

Then do some reading.

Here’s a little piece on people who identify as aromantic, and one particular variant of that identity:

* Also related to numbers: some people identify as aromantic, i.e. experiencing no romantic attraction. And some, like me, go “hold on a second, what’s this ‘romantic attraction’ thing and where are you drawing the line between it and platonic relationships? I don’t understand! How do you tell the difference between romantic love and friendship love and …”

Of late, we’ve been calling this wtfromantic (although I still like calling it “romantic orientation of divide by cucumber” and other people may have their preferred terms) for Makes No Sense, Does Not Compute, Wrong Question. What we’ve been talking about a lot is things like relationships that don’t fit the romance/friendship binary; emotional commitment; partnership and intimacy outside of romance; etc. This has some interesting intersections with polyamory.

I have to say that I entirely grok this; it has long been a dilemma for me that there is a certain intensity and intimacy in some of my friendships which I, or others, have misinterpreted as having been more than they were — especially when it comes to rules of sexual orientation, such as the When Harry Met Sally one (which states that het men can’t ever be friends with het women). I have spent more time explaining that my closest friendships are often with straight men, or with men who are straight but who radiate some kind of queer sensibility (e.g., the kind of guys others may think are closeted or bi).

That said, a lot of relationships that survive transition seem to make their way into this category, where the relationship becomes (infamously) “like sisters” or comprising an intimacy that once was but is no longer sexual (e.g. Jennifer Boylan & her wife).

On the one hand, I find these attempts to define every possible variation on types of friendship frustrating, but other times it is quite liberating – at the very least, to know others have been up against a similar feeling of not naturally falling into the ways other practice and/or conceptualize their lives and personal attachments.

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Not Your Whipping Girl

My erotic story in Taormino’s Take Me There, which is an anthology of trans & genderqueer erotica, got slagged in a review in Original Plumbing recently, and after reading it, & reading how much the reviewer didn’t seem to get it, I feel the need to explain a few things.

First, reviewer Stephen Ira mentions, upfront, that there is an expectation that Taormino, as a cis woman, won’t get it right — which tells me at least a little something about the reviewer. Ira does redeem Taormino for pulling off an erotica anthology that is “for cis readers . . . not just a lesson in sexual allyship, but a heaping spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down”. Still, it’s worth noting his surprise that she has.

Continue reading “Not Your Whipping Girl”

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Manscaping

Honestly, I understand why people are starting to turn to ’70s porn: now everyone looks like (a) a child, (b) a plucked chicken, or (3) some kind of weird sea organism.

Robert, a 25-year-old investment manager from Massachusetts, trims his pubes with an electric razor—“the kind that barbers use for shaving heads,” he says. Just as he prefers a woman to be groomed when he performs oral sex (“the less hair, the better”), he imagines girls don’t want a bush in their mouths either.

How downright egalitarian.

Still, if genitals unframed by pubic hair are your thing, this decade’s for you.

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Dan Savage’s Family Values

I”m sure plenty have already seen Mark Oppenheimer’s NYT column about infidelity; in it, he talks a lot about Dan Savage, who I love (and whose show I was on back in January). Despite how angry people are about the transphobic way he talked about the dilemma’s of a trans person’s relationship with her wife & son, I can’t really disagree with it, either. (Although I’d add, too, that sometimes children and wives are transphobic; still, giving loved ones a little while to get used to the idea would be great, and may preserve some familiar relationships that will not sustain a very speedy transition.)

Still, that’s hardly what’s interesting to me about this column. First off, he said it a few years ago, & Savage has been sucking a  little less on trans issues. He is, in my opinion, someone who could have been an amazing ally if he weren’t shouted at every second he said something stupid (but not necessarily hateful). He is, in my opinion, one of the people we lost with the overuse of the word transphobic, a la Christine Burns.

But what’s more interesting to me is the way this article paints him as something like a conservative. Really… Dan Savage? But yes: he’s always been pro nuclear family, that’s for sure. He’s opinionated in ways only ex-Catholics can be (she says, securely seated in her glass house). But that idea that someone could be considered conservative even as they suggest that perhaps nonmonogamy should be on the table for heterosexual marriage kind of blows my mind. I don’t disagree. I think in plenty of cases, nonmonogamy makes perfect sense. I’ve been learning a lot more about it – not just from friends who practice it, but from Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up as well, and I was in a relationship during my 20s that wasn’t monogamous. But still: I sorta kinda love the idea of Savage being seen as conservative because he is advocating nonmonogamy in order to preserve marriages, because being married/partnered for life is a conservative value whether you’re gay or kinky or not.

And that’s the kind of thing that makes my feminist hackles rise.

Because Coontz – who Oppenheimer mentions and quotes – has said elsewhere that in happy marriages, both people benefit. But in unhappy marriages, men continue to benefit, but women do much, much worse in terms of their health. Even a miserable wife feeds her husband vegetables, she once cleverly concluded in her Marriage, A History. (It’s a great book, absolutely 100% worth reading.)

So the idea of preserving a marriage simply because preserving marriage is what you’re supposed to do strikes me as kind of wrong-headed and — well, sexist. It’s not like Savage will have been the first gay man to give out sexist advice unthinkingly, but it’s still a surprise.

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Pro Choice

Due to an emergency injunction, there is now one Planned Parenthood clinic that will remain open in Kansas. The plan, of course, was for there to be none.

I know there are a lot of people who think it should be that way, or who think that maybe that’s for the best. Most of us don’t like abortion. All of us, actually.I’ve never, ever met anyone who is “pro abortion”.

The deciding factor for me was that women who had money and means have always gotten abortions. It’s the poor women who can’t. Morality should not be bought so dearly. If women can get abortions quickly and easily, they get first term abortions. The more expensive and the further away the clinic, the more likely they will get 2nd term abortions. The more birth control they have access to, the more likely they won’t get pregnant.

It’s not really that hard to understand. Most of us don’t want to see second term abortions because the mother’s health is at risk and the whole conversation about when life starts gets more complicated. But you can’t force people to only get 1st term abortions if they don’t provide them with the means to do so.

Keep abortion legal and safe (which means keeping it local and inexpensive).

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What a Lineup!

Tristan Taormino edited an anthology of trans erotica called Take Me There & wow is it some list of authors:

Kate Bornstein (@KateBornstein), author and editor of many books including Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, which just won a Lambda Literary Award! 

Patrick Califia (@PatrickCalifia), world-renowned writer, activist, and sex radical, author of dozens of books including Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex

S. Bear Bergman (@SBearBergman), co-editor of Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation and author of Butch is a Noun and The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, which just went into its second printing

Ivan Coyote (@IvanCoyote), author of Missed Her and one of my personal faves, Closer to Spiderman, who is currently touring all over Canada

Julia Serano, author of Whipping Girl, currently at work on a new book

Laura Antoniou (@lantoniou), author of the groundbreaking series The Marketplace, which was the first SM erotica series featuring a transman as the romantic hero. She wrote a story especially for this book all about Chris Parker!

Helen Boyd (@helen_of_boyd), author of She’s Not the Man I Married and My Husband Betty

Sandra McDonald, author of the Lambda Literary Award winner, Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories

Rachel Kramer Bussel (@Raquelita), queen of erotica whose latest anthology is Gotta Have It: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex

Toni Amato, co-editor of Pinned Down by Pronouns and frequent Best Lesbian Erotica contributor

Gina de Vries, genderqueer femme, Paisan pervert, writer, performer, cultural worker, activist, editor of Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality

Rahne Alexander (@foucauldian_ho), musician, multimedia artist, guitarist and vocalist in the bands The Oops and The Degenerettes

Giselle Renarde (@GiselleRenarde), erotica writer and editor of Future Histories: Transgendered Sci-Fi Erotica

Alicia E. Goranson, playwright, screenwriter, and author of Supervillianz

Rachel K. Zall, poet, performing artist, activist and author of The Oxygen Catastrophe

Tobi Hill-Meyer (@Tobitastic), activist, filmmaker, writer, and Feminist Porn Award winner

Shawna Virago, singer/songwriter and activist

Andrea Zanin (@sexgeekAZ), organizer, educator, and writer

Sinclair Sexsmith (@mrsexsmith), creator of The Sugarbutch Chronicles and frequent Best Lesbian Erotica contributor

Skian McGuire, one of my favorite erotica writers ever

Arden Hill, writer and poet

Anna Watson, writer and creator of The Femme Bibliography Project

 

It comes out in October but you can pre-order it now. There’s more info in TT’s blogpost about it if you’re not yet convinced (but honestly, with a list like that, you really should be!)

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Bisexuality Survey

A group at Penn State are doing research into bisexuality and infidelity:

My name is Krysta Kolbe, I work with Dr. Cory R. Scherer, we are a research team from Penn State University who are interested in learning about how bisexuals react to infidelity. This survey is being conducted for research purposes. There is a lot of research that has been done on how heterosexual and homosexuals react to potential infidelity but practically none concerning bisexuals and we are asking your help by please sharing the survey at the link below with your bisexual associates, friends, co-workers, students, and loved ones. Participants will be asked to think about their reactions to infidelity and give some demographic information. Also understand that they will be asked to answer some questions about their attitudes and themselves. It should take no more than five minutes to complete the questionnaire. You must be 18 years of age or older to participate. Your participation in this research is confidential. Feel free to share the link below with any and all bisexual individuals who want to participate in the survey. Thank you for your help in the quest to better understand ourselves through science!

You can contact me at klk5177@psu.edu or Dr. Scherer at crs15@psu.edu with questions, complaints or concerns about this research. You can stop at any time. You do not have to answer any questions you do not want to answer.

Take the survey!

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Seriously.

Despite all the jokes about Weiner’s penis, the whole thing kind of makes me sad. Not just because he lied & used bad judgement: you can’t follow politics for 12 minutes without running into that; shoot, you can’t live 12 years without running into that. It’s more that I wish we could talk about politics instead of morality in this country. Not because morality isn’t important – it is – but the older I get, the more exhausting it is to hear the rounds of moralizing by professed Christians (who seem to forget that whole “cast the first stone” business) and by non-Christians who are mostly only critical of the guy’s logistical failings.

Sexting, I fear, falls into a gray area for most (monogamous) couples. Maybe that’s the kind of thing more people should talk about. Honestly, the whole thing just makes me a little more tired and a little more sad.

Still, it’s not like he voted against his politics. I prefer liars over hypocrites, but maybe that’s just me. That is, there’s a huge difference for me in guys who vote against civil rights for LGBTQ people who then go off seeking out anonymous same sex sex in public bathrooms. Just sayin’.

So, politicians: don’t lie. As a general rule, it’s kind of up there with don’t invade Russia in winter.