Feature image of La Muxer Diosa and Zoie Blackheart in Crash Pad Series episode 281. All of the photographs in this NSFW Sunday are from the Crash Pad. The inclusion of a visual here should not be interpreted as an assertion of the model’s gender identity or sexual orientation. If you’re a photographer or model and think your work would be a good fit for NSFW Sunday, please email carolyn at autostraddle dot com.
Welcome to NSFW Sunday!
It’s hard for queer women and nonbinary people to have casual sex in small towns and rural areas, writes Hannah Brashers at Allure, and one of the reasons involves conditioning around desire:
“Regardless of the fact that girls are conditioned differently than boys, a 2015 study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior indicates that women — queer and straight alike — may desire casual sex just as much as men.
Of the 22 queer women and nonbinary people who responded to my Google survey, 81.8 percent indicated that they currently were into or had gone through periods in which they actively sought out casual hookups. ‘We’re taught not to talk about our desires because that’s not appropriate subject matter,” Chingy says. “But our desires are totally fucking natural.’”
“Just because it makes you uncomfortable, just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s inherently more dangerous than what you do.” D/s is not abuse, kink and sexuality expert Andrea Zanin correctly argues, and part of that is the tendency to see whatever “you” do as “right” and whatever “someone else” does as “not okay”:
“[I]t seems like over the decades of kink’s further mainstreaming, what’s happened is that kink hobbyists have drastically multiplied, and perhaps because of those numbers, many of them now see themselves as safer, saner and more consensual than full-timers because of what they perceive as built-in healthy limits on what they do. (I feel like there’s a kink community parallel with polynormativity here, but I’m too tired to flesh it out this very second.) The rest of us, this odd minority that insists on eschewing bite-size scenes in favour of a power-flavoured life, must therefore be super extreme and dangerous and possibly unhinged.
I would counter-propose: Sometimes, the supposedly healthy limits of scene-based kink actually prevent you from talking about what may be an ongoing thread of power between people, or within yourself and your desires. Sometimes, rather than providing a safe framework, a scene provides a shield against your acknowledgement of real-life power dynamics you’re too uncomfortable to name and deal with ethically. Sometimes, power is real, but because you’re so invested in calling it play, you can’t even look at it in all its truth—and therefore you cannot possibly do it responsibly. Sometimes, the container is actually a prison.”
Who pays on a queer first date?
Sometimes it’s hard to make eye contact during sex.
A chlamydia vaccine could be on the way.
Astrological compatibility is a scam, says astrologer:
“You can look at the chart of the Sagittarius you’ve been circling on a dating app or the Libra you’ve been shamelessly flirting with and still not know if you’re going to live happily ever after, if they’ll give you the orgasm of your life, or if they’ll ghost you and send you crying to your therapist. ‘Yes, all of the signs belong to an element and signs that share the same elements are going to have this affinity to each other, but that does not translate into real life or a relationship,’ [astrologer Annabel] Gat tells Bitch. ‘People can be compatible with anyone. So compatibility isn’t about the right sign with the right sign; it’s really about the right person being with the right person at that time in their life.’”
