Posts tagged sex
You Live Here.
We all live here.
excessive yet simple: the sarah fitz story
“In bed they are explosive, wild and totally unpredictable.”
consent in practice
Since there’s been so much on my dash over the last couple of days about what constitutes good consent, what consent practices look like, and I’ve been writing about the importance of consent in sex ed, I figured I’d put up this handout that I wrote up for the workshop I do on consent.
—
Checking in with your partner(s) should be a normal part of sexual practice. The thing that makes good sex truly great is everyone’s full presence - full sense awareness, full engagement. I am a big fan of telling partner(s) what feels good as well as what doesn’t - “Yes, more of that” or “No, I don’t like that” or “Move to the left/speed up/slow down/turn over/sit up” etc. “Yes” and “No” both come in verbal and nonverbal forms.
Don’t be afraid to speak up about both your desires and your limits both before and during sex. While we all have different levels of comfort with these sorts of things, clearly articulating what you want is, in my experience, a) pretty hot and fun and b) the best way to figure out both partners’ comfort levels and desires in a very real and visceral way.
Don’t assume anything. If you have a question, ask.
Talk about specific sexual acts you’re interested in as well as things that excite you about your partner(s) - this is a pretty standard part of flirting and foreplay, and it allows you to explore possibilities as well as limits.
Respect your partner’s limits. If someone says they’re not into something, or that they don’t want to do something today, leave it be - don’t press the point. You can come back to it at a later point if it’s something they’ve indicated they might be into in the future.
If you have not negotiated verbally and your partner is not responding to you physically, STOP and ask whether what you’re doing is ok. If your partner does not respond further, looks uncomfortable or says no, it’s not okay, STOP AND LEAVE IT BE. PERIOD. These are all signs of a lack of consent.
If one partner is unable to give consent for any reason (intoxication, unconscious, having a panic attack or some other medical situation) and/or is unresponsive AND consent has not been negotiated previously (some people are ok with being woken up with sex, for instance, and some people are not; this is something that needs to be negotiated verbally), STOP.
Yes, it’s difficult and an ego blow when a partner says no to a specific act or to sex at that particular time. Remember that you are responsible for your feelings of rejection here (they are normal and human but not your partner’s responsibility), and deal with them on your own.
Good sex is fun, exciting, and intimate. There’s no way it can be good if one or more partner(s) are uncomfortable.
Lets throw out the restrictive sex baseball metaphor and adopt the pizza metaphor!
“What’s great about pizza as a metaphor for sexuality is that eating pizza is not a structured, goal-oriented activity. Whereas in baseball, the aim is to run around the bases to home as quickly as possible, in pizza-eating, the only goal is personal fulfillment—pleasure, intimacy, relaxation, and a host of other characteristics that just can’t be measured or described by a score.”
I love this
Sex and pizza? I approve this metaphor.
Look at this and guess what it is (hint—it’s not a penguin, it’s not a banana peel, and it’s not a flower).
Have you guessed yet? Seriously, guess.
“I want to get that image out,” says Seattle artist Lynn Schirmer. She was sitting in her loft in the Tashiro Kaplan Building the other day, drinking tea. “I want everybody everywhere to know what that shape is.”
That shape is a human clitoris. If what you see when you close your eyes and picture a clitoris is merely a nubby button, then (A) you are normal, and (B) you are wrong. The nubby button is connected to a neck the size of the first joint of your thumb, and stretching from that neck are two arms that flare like a wishbone—arms that can be as long as three-and-a-half inches. The two bulbs that also extend from the center, which make the clitoris look like a penguin, were thought to belong to the vagina until recently. In the 1990s, Australian urologist Helen O’Connell “initiated the mainstream medical profession’s rediscovery” of the clitoris, Schirmer says, “and it took until just a few years ago to see it fully mapped via MRI and other noninvasive imaging technologies.” The result? The discovery that the clitoris has 10 times more erectile tissue than anatomy textbooks or the illustrations at the doctor’s office show.
From In Her Pants, by Jen Graves
I’ve got a shark-brain reproductive system and a pterodactyl clitoris, all topped off by a pretty flower vulva.
Fucking awesome.
ALL THE LADIES NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.
(Source: whattetheswyve, via ceeesaw)
sexual preferences. /impulse/ research.
some research for a piece i am choreographing.
“I want to have weird sex with weird people who like weird things, like an adult.”
Quote of the century.
(Source: brokenlegcollective)
I don’t care how much sex anyone has, how often they do it, or who they do it with. I’m much more interested in the consent, pleasure, and well-being of the participants and the people affected by it. I respect women who are asexual, celibate, monogamous, multi-partnered, or have had more partners than they can recall. I respect women who only have sex after a commitment to monogamy and those who have sex with someone within minutes of meeting them. I respect women who have transactional sex, women who have sex for love, or for any other reason. I know that all of these categories are permeable and that many women move from one to another. And I know that any of these decisions can be made from a place of personal power, choice, and authenticity, as well as from a place of coercion, shame, and disempowerment.
(via sexisnottheenemy)
Americans are creating massive public outcries in favor of birth control. Translation: Americans are creating massive public outcries in favor of sex for pleasure, sex for reasons other than procreation, sex for sex’s own sake. Americans are willing to stand up and acknowledge that they have sex because it feels good — and they are creating massive public outcries when people try to interfere with that, or try to shame them about it. I don’t think that would have been the case twenty years ago. Maybe not even ten years ago. But now, today, in 2012, Americans are willing, and proud, and passionately eager, to say out loud, ‘I use birth control. I have sex for pleasure. I don’t want to have children right now, I may never want to have children — and I still plan to have sex. And that is a good thing.’
(via sexisnottheenemy)
