NSFW Lesbosexy Sunday Is Totally F*cking Natural
Ryan Yates
Ryan Yates was the NSFW Editor (2013–2018) and Literary Editor for Autostraddle.com, with bylines in Nylon, Refinery29, The Toast, Bitch, The Daily Beast, Jezebel, and elsewhere. They live in Los Angeles and also on twitter and instagram.
Ryan has written 1142 articles for us.
“the container is a prison”
I think I’ve run into more than one person trapped in there. Ana Valens did an article about how shitty pornhub is a few weeks ago, I mean color me surprised.
Possibly replated picture of some old friends
I miss those parties so much
I read that excellent essay by Andrea Zanin last week. It made me think of how naming things lets us see them, but only within the boundaries of what we think those words mean. If I call something play, or if I call something abuse, or if I call something love, then my relationship to the other becomes framed by my belief as to what that means.
It’s no wonder that names/ naming are considered to hold so much power across so many/ all societies.
Yes yes yes to everything Annabel said in that article; astrology gives you information and helps you make choices and better understand yourself and other people, but any two people can end up together!
‘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 or deal with ethically’.
And:
‘Power unacknowledged is power uncontrolled. Power feared is power denied. Power denied is power abused. And yes, that’ s true on both sides of the slash’. (This is directly from Andrea Zanin’ s article)
As written this is about kinky/ BDSM scenes, but for me this is a revelation regarding what I deal with and study, namely transmisigyny in scenes. Why do these people act as they do, i.e. the transmisogynists, and all the others who stand idly by while trans women are excluded, ridiculed, subjected to micro- ( and not so ‘micro’) aggressions, invalidated as women? While their mouths are full of social justice lingo and evocations of ‘the community’?
I think that Andrea Zanin provides an instrument for detecting and identifying, among other things, exclusion processes based on identity markers, trans women are of course not the only category subjected to power relations of this kind. The formula might be somewhat like this:
The more you self- identify with a scene, the easier it is for you to deny the real- world power you wield and the real- world power others, and the scene, wield over you, namely to yourself.
Some may find this disturbing. I find it enlightening.
The idea that a Google survey of 20 queer women and NB people is a coherent and meaningful representation of the sexual experiences of rural queer women is absurd. That’s like walking into a bar in Chicago and making an inference about every bar in an urban centre in North America. If you’re going to write an entire article about this actually real phenomenon, bring a higher caliber of research and diligence. Unimpressed.