Feature of Jayogen and Mia Li in Crash Pad Series episode 215. All of the photographs in this NSFW Sunday come from CrashPadSeries.com. The inclusion of a photograph here should not be interpreted as an assertion of the models’ gender identities or sexual orientations. If you are 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!

Jayogen and Mia Li in Crash Pad Series episode 215

+ The best way to get your sex toy past the TSA is, if they ask what that thing in your bag is, to say “that’s my sex toy” and stare them dead in the eyes with a face like stone until they feel embarassed for holding up your massive dildo in front of the line, while you, not embarrassed at all, feel like you could melt the patriarchy with your gaze, not that that’s ever happened to me. Here are some additional tips:

“The trick to traveling your Rabbit is clarity. Bag your toy in a Ziploc, take the batteries out, and label the bag as a ‘SEX TOY USED FOR FUCKING NOT MURDERING CIVILIANS.’ If you check your vibrator, put it in an inside compartment of your bag, because zippers on outside pockets have a habit of breaking. According to one TSA agent I spoke to, your bag will only be searched “if the equipment’s alarms [go off] on certain things, like books/magazines/iPads/laptops/large amounts of liquids.’ A silicone dildo might set off the density alarm, so that’s where the labelling comes in handy. Lithium batteries have to be stored in your carry-on, because a faulty lithium battery can ignite the jet fuel, as the baggage and fuel compartments are very close together.

If you take your vibrator in your carry-on, the same basic rules apply. Bag the toy (because if the bag is searched, you don’t want stranger-hands on Mr. Buzzy), take out the batteries, and be ready to identify your sex toy as such. If you do get pulled aside, you can always ask for the search to be conducted behind a privacy screen.”

Carson and Ray in Crash Pad Series episode 50

+ Lots of people with vulvas groom their pubic hair (and have since before the 1980s even!). This history of pubic hair chronicles art without pubic hair from 35,000 BCE through ancient Greece and Rome and the Renaissance to today:

“Art historian Ellen Oredsson theorizes removing hair from the female form was a way of making people more comfortable with the naked body.

‘Hairlessness was part of making the nudity acceptable. By removing markers of ‘realistic’ bodies, including hair, the nude could be safely situated in an unreal fantasy world and was then considered suitable for public consumption,’ she explains.”

Eden Alexander and Chelsea Poe in Crash Pad Series episode 225

+ If you did one bad thing that time and your partner can’t get past it and brings it up in every single argument, maybe your relationship doesn’t feel secure:

“New research confirms what many people endure daily in their relationships: When something bad that you did in the past illogically feels recent to your partner, they’re more likely to think about it, or bring it up, during fights—even if it’s out of context. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t healthy for a relationship.

This, researchers have decreed, is called ‘kitchen thinking,’ in reference to the popular idiom about kitchen sinks, ‘since partners throw everything but the kitchen sink into the argument.’ Some people are more likely to partake in this insidious recollection than others; in their report, ‘When Slights Beget Slights: Attachment Anxiety, Subjective Time, and Intrusion of the Relational Past in the Present,’ researchers relay the findings of four different studies that they designed, namely that people who are secure in their relationships are less likely to engage in ‘kitchen thinking.'”

Valentine and Ember in Crash Pad Series episode 188

+ There are a lot of being a bottom in BDSM and writing, notes Nicole Guappone at the Rumpus:

“As a writer and a bottom, I find my strength through choice. I choose to be vulnerable, to let myself be so on my own terms. I make myself vulnerable when I share my writing and when I try those new toys. Through negotiated, temporary, outward vulnerability, I achieve a sense of control and power, both of myself and of my environment—whether that’s in the workshop or in the bedroom or in the dungeon. I put my naked self on the line. I am most in control of myself when I open myself to pain, when I am willing to accept pain and discomfort, be it figuratively or literally.”

J-Bird and Rose Waters in Crash Pad Series episode 118

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