Welcome to NSFW Sunday!
Feature image via andrewclifton.tumblr.com.
+ The best way to feel confident in bed is to spend more time in it alone:
“One thing you can do right now is get super into masturbating. Make appreciating your body and satisfying yourself physically a priority. Go full-on Narcissus-at-the-pool with loving yourself, and make sure your confidence in your beauty and sexual allure is rooted in your own body. This might involve massaging yourself in a warm bath strewn with rose petals, or taking brightly lit photos of yourself on the kitchen floor with the handle of a saucepan in your butthole, or (most likely) some other activity. If you aren’t already the main expert on your own unique sexual tastes, go forth, experiment, and make it so.”
+ If you wonder whether you need therapy to get over your ex, you probably do, because let’s be real pretty much everyone could use some therapy:
“Everyone on earth has had some shit, relatively speaking, that they could stand to chat about with an impartial person. I grew up thinking that therapy was for people who could not really deal with their own problems. Now I realize that everyone is walking around patched together from the bullshit of existing just like that bathroom scene in Predator 2. […]
No I don’t think it really cures anything, but it gives you a language with which to understand your own bullshit, and a strength with which to accept that whatever your problems are yours to carry and that’s OK and you’ll get through it. One of the best things therapy helped me understand was that everyone has a story of pain they are hauling around. Everyone is dealing with some kind of shit. It’s not just me, and I don’t have a unique special kind of pain. I only have my story. That doesn’t make it any less worth talking about or any less valid. It just helps you understand that nobody is doing this right, really, and in that sense we are all doing it right.”
Tracy recommends, if you can’t go to therapy, reading internet advice columns, so here is a shameless plug for ours.
+ At Bitch, Erica Thomas critiqued a recent news story that conflates non-monogamy and cheating, noting that a certain way of being dismissive of non-monogamy can seem defeatist at best:
“Open relationships certainly do take work, but dismissing the possibility of non-monogamy for ‘most people’ feels pedantic to me. Most people are jealous. But jealousy can be a way to talk about important issues: Why do we get jealous? Why are we insecure? How do our cultural ideas of what ‘successful’ relationships look like contribute to our insecurities? Isn’t it a bit defeatist to say that someone is too jealous or insecure to make something work? It’s possible to reframe jealousy as a tool for self-understanding.”
+ Red wine — enough that you notice, not enough for dubious consent or coordination — is allegedly the best booze for sex.
+ At Oh Joy Sex Toy, Erika Moen reviewed the Transformer.
+ Being in a kinky relationship if you’ve always wanted to be isn’t going to magically fix everything in your life.
+ Positive LGBT sex education is still not as common as it could be.
+ Here are some things about vaginas.
+ Sex work doesn’t need to be “empowering” to be legitimate:
“Porn is one of the least marginalised jobs within the sex industry, but it still suffers from the same fallacy as every other discussion about sex work – the idea that it is only a legitimate choice if it is ‘empowering’. We don’t hold other industries to this standard. Fewer than 8 per cent of the top-grossing films in 2014 were directed by women and Hollywood movies perpetuate just as many toxic narratives about sex and relationships as porn, and yet we are not asking ‘can film empower women?’”
+ Twitter is working against revenge porn with updated guidelines that require consent from people appearing in “intimate photos or videos”:
“The new private information clause added to its rules states: “You may not post intimate photos or videos that were taken or distributed without the subject’s consent.” It has added the same clause under its “threats and abuse” guidelines. Twitter’s rules already ban the publishing of credit card, address or national identity information.
Users reporting content shared without their consent will be required to verify their identity and prove their lack of consent.
Those who breach the site’s rules will have their accounts suspended.”
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.
