The feature image (of Double Domme Doomsday Part 1) and all of the photographs in this NSFW Sunday are from fetish site Mondo Fetiche. The inclusion of a visual here is not an assertion of a model’s gender or 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!
In a piece for Real Life on dating app theory, Christina Ungermann writes of dating apps as third spaces, neither work nor home but social and intended for interaction:
“You can’t walk through an app, but you can traverse its flattened infrastructure, perusing the various options it presents you with and presenting yourself in kind. The attraction of the cleanly sensual millennial aesthetic cannot be overstated in this regard, making the bitter pill of networking, not to mention ‘networked intimacy,’ sweeter to swallow. Though intimacy on the apps is generally unearned, this disposability can be chalked up to the nature of experimentation. One markets the sexual self primarily to reify one’s own desires, hazy as they may be. The proliferation of the question ‘what are you looking for on here?’ is indicative of its answer: most people don’t really know. At least on the apps, there’s the possibility of finding out. It’s not the failure to match that keeps users on the hook; it’s the abundance of matches, brimming with untold possibilities. The algorithm itself seduces you, even as the matches begin to feel like random occurrences.”
Ungermann’s conclusion in that piece is that “intimacy and the divine goal of being known are already inherently fraught concepts when one is marketing one’s ‘self’ on any kind of platform. Dating apps further complicate these romantic aspirations. To make one’s intimate self visible to the countless stream of others is to revoke the ideal of privacy upon which romance rests.” I couldn’t help but think of that when reading Megan Reynolds’s recent plea to stop trying to make your love go viral, written in response to that woman on twitter who essentially live-tweeted flying across the country to confess her feelings for someone who went on to reject her, and similar instances of love plastered across the internet: “I am not besmirching anyone’s love and how they choose to express it, but I am asking that these types of private moments, as sweet as they are, between couples and the like remain private.” If the romantic ideal is intimate privacy, what does it mean to publicly perform romance, compared to simply being romantic in public? Where do the lines of privacy begin and end? When is a public declaration of love part of the experience of love within a broader community and when is it monetization? Capitalism and love are incompatible, after all.
Anyway! Here’s what Venus in Cancer this month means for your love life.
“Is pandemic-induced virtual dating here to stay?”
Skip the kink at pride discourse and go right to (fully virtual) kink pride, happening now and through this week.
Check out these erotic films if you want. (May I also recommend Mango Kiss?)
Here’s how to rekindle a fling after you ghosted someone:
“Look, this person is probably pretty pissed at you. You left them high and dry with no explanation. If you’re going to try to resurrect an old chat thread or entice them onto a date, expect resistance and a lot of questions. You need to know your own motivation for reappearing in their DMs so you can convincingly relay it to them.
Maybe you really did miss them. Maybe they did just get super hot. Maybe you ghosted them because you rekindled things with your old partner, then broke up and found yourself single again. Maybe the well of Bumble matches in your area ran dry. At least be honest with yourself, man.”
