Sex Positive

Last month, the Pew Research Center released a report on the online viewing habits of 1,003 Americans. Among Pew’s findings, no surprise, is that watching online videos has increased ~ as has the number of those who admit to watching adult videos, i.e. porn, which is now at 12%. (If that number seems low to you, as it apparently did to Pew, Pew notes that “this may reflect a reluctance to report the behavior among some adults.”) But where it gets more interesting is in the gender split: 25% of men admitted to watching adult videos, but only 8% of women did.

At my vintage living blog, Things Your Grandmother Knew, I’ve written about the tendency to romanticize the past, but I recently read two blog posts discussing vintage fashion in terms of “the vintage girl being the new feminist” and thought it was time to discuss the subject from a more feminist angle…

In the largest, most in-depth study to date on regret surrounding sexual activity, a team of psychology researchers found a stark contrast in remorse between men and women, potentially shedding light on the evolutionary history of human nature...

“Prior sex researchers have focused primarily on the emotion of sexual attraction in sexual decisions,” Buss says. “These studies point to the importance of a neglected mating emotion —sexual regret — which feels experientially negative but in fact can be highly functional in guiding adaptive sexual decisions.”

The Unified Theory of Vibrator Dynamics

You’d expect the story of a young woman crawling out of abject poverty and an exploitative dead-end career into a professional well-respected vocation to be heralded with praise. But this story does not end well. The woman, having spent years putting a dark past behind her, is once again punished and ultimately ridiculed — kicked back into the dirt from whence she came.

Because if you were once involved in the sex industry you can never be a teacher. In fact, that pretty much means that you are never qualified to do any work beside sex work.

It’s not the sex industry that is the problem. It’s our inability to separate it from real life and real people.

It's no secret that sexual education in China is not all that it could be. Open discussion about sex isn't just avoided at parties - it's avoided altogether. The topic is considered so uncomfortable by many Chinese parents...

Seeing that this article, Mediocre Sex – The Price Women Pay For Freedom? by Jennifer Kabbany, was published at right-wing college site The Collage Fix, I should have resisted and not given it a cl...

Being a sex-positive parent means we assume that our children will grow into autonomous, sexually active adults and we support our children’ s individual sexual identity no matter what. This support is a lifelong process where the conversations start early with age-appropriate explanations.

It has long been a mystery to me why more mainstream products that are sold to porn-watching adults are afraid to advertise on porn websites. Porn advertising is dirt cheap, and so you’d think that any brand that’s not afraid to admit its customers also like porn would be all over the porn website world with huge ad campaigns. Whiskey and cigarette advertisers used to buy endless full-page ads in PlayBoy and Hustler back in the day; why don’t they now?

Thus I was both heartened and pleased to see that one of the online food-delivery startups has not only taken to porn site advertising, they’ve blogged in detail about why they did it and how well it worked:

In the aftermath of Mumsnet's 'penis beaker gate', Rebecca Holman explores why women love sharing the intimate details of their sex lives online and why anyone cares.

A 4-Year-Old Girl Asked A Lesbian If She's A Boy. She Responded The Awesomest Way Possible.

Ash Beckham is awesome. She also happens to be gay, and she thinks it's hard for straight people coming out of the closet.

The existence of courtesans is a glaring refutation of neofeminist dogma about objectification, the eternal victimhood of whores, etc; the fact that the most celebrated, successful and highly-paid harlots of all time were often those who were educated and could match or surpass men in intellectual pursuits throws a huge spanner into the catechism that prostitution is a manifestation of male dominance over women, that our clients hate us, and so on.  Whenever possible, neofeminist historians deny that courtesans were prostitutes, pretend that accomplished women were not really courtesans, or describe them with circumlocutions like, “she chose to cohabit with several men who supported her financially.”  And when all else fails, they simply ignore them.  Fortunately neither male historians nor female ones with less parochial views feel the need to dissemble about such women, and among them Tullia d’Aragona is rightfully viewed as worthy of respect and study.

People cheat all the time. But why, exactly, do they decide to do it in the first place?

Still, there’s something thrilling to going from feeling utterly alone and unlovable to realizing that all these women with all these pictures in all these ads, you can be with any one of them, at least for one hour, and pretend. And all you need is money. It’s not a replacement for love— it pales in comparison to a real loving relationship with somebody who you are sexually compatible with, but it sure as fuck beats being alone and feeling untouchable.

Why describing romance novels as the only books by, for, and about women is problematic.

If only the ratings agency looked as closely at gender bias as it does at consensual sex, it might do some good