Letter From Your Editors

Hello Autostraddle Plus Members!

Welcome to the second edition of the Insider Newsletter, brought to you by the Senior Staff of Autostraddle.com, your #1 source for tips on cheese mongering and animal husbandry. We’re so excited to share this special space with you today and hope you’ve got your Ovaltine ready because this sucker is worth your prolonged attention.

It’s been a very hectic month around here because in addition to launching A+ and everybody taking turns being out of town, we’ve been dealing with this gorgeous pile of writer applications — nearly 200 of them, in fact. While in Big Bear, we narrowed the field down to 17 potential Contributing Editors and a spreadsheet of writers we wanna see work from in a different capacity. Contacting the writers in the latter category will take months, but for the former we had the BRILLIANT idea to conduct a trial/training period that involved 17 humans pitching, revising, publishing and talking to us about stories more or less constantly for three weeks!

It was an exciting time, full of drama and intrigue. At last we have taken on five new contributing editors (you’ll meet two of them in this week’s Insider) and the rest will be contributing in some capacity to Autostraddle going forward. We’ll be getting in touch with other applicants we wanna see more from over the next two months. In the meantime, we’re going to be talking about Eggs Benedict more or less constantly.

Now, for some A+ Updates. We really wanna thank all of y’all from the bottom of our beating hearts for your supportive messages in our A+ Priority Box and enthusiastic comments on the A+ launch post. We were completely unprepared for that backlash, and still feel that the anti-A+ arguments stem from from a fundamental misunderstanding of the program or a lack of awareness about the publishing industry or Autostraddle’s specific financial situation overall. Thank you for “getting it,” y’all. Thank you for believing that writers deserve to get paid to write and for helping us keep this website free for everybody who needs it. Just this past week, Buzzfeed raised another $50 million dollars to support its robust content platform and Bustle pulled in another $10 million — these are the sites competing with us for traffic and readers every day. In lieu of venture capitalists, we are very blessed to have y’all adventure capitalists right here with us today on this shiny stage of gold and glory. It’s crazy that we’ve managed to become the most popular lesbian & queer lady website in the world despite our limited resources, so thank you, thank you, thank you.

A lot of you have asked about how many members we’ve obtained! We gamely hit our first-day goal of 200 new members, which was awesome. Our goal is to have 1,000 members by the end of the year in order to maintain our current structure and we’re currently at 445 paid members — 60% Silver Members, 20% Bronze Members and 20% Gold Members. We hope the podcast and other A+ content coming up will entice new members, as well as just seeing lots of activity and conversation on the A+ posts that do go up. In related news, Rachel and Laneia got raises this month and have committed to writing more, so pat yourself on the back for that! (Did you notice that Laneia is hosting the Also.Also.Also now, because she is!) Going forward, aside from ensuring we can pay the monthly expenses we’ve already committed to, we’re really hoping to funnel more funding towards the QTPOC Speakeasy so they can do more great work like this.

A+ content so far has been delightful. This month, we published two Interviews With Your Exes — Maddie interviewed her ex Fiona, and Riese interviewed her ex Autostraddle co-founder Alex Vega, who once knocked over her lamp. We also debuted the first issue and second issue of the A+ Bee, Laneia had some food-related sex she wanted to talk about and Crystal shared her secrets in The Cheesecake Diaries. Alex has been shipping out stickers, and the t-shirts for Gold members are going to the printer this week!

Unfortunately we had a massive technical problem with the first A+ podcast recording that we did in Big Bear, and weeks of salvaging attempts have proved fruitless, but Intern Grace is recording a new podcast this week and hopefully we’ll have another update for you soon! We thank you for bearing with us during this time of growth and change, and we really like your pants. If you’re wearing pants. YOU DO YOU.

Love,

Riese / Laneia / Rachel / Yvonne

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Top 10 Most Popular Posts from July 2014

These posts were hella popular last month!

1. 25 Pictures of Lesbian Sex According to Stock Photography, by Riese & Laneia

This post is quickly becoming one of our most popular posts of all time — it cracked open some kind of magical google rule where now googling “lesbian” or “sex pictures” brings thousands of people a day to this post, which never would’ve even existed if we hadn’t been super short on content the day it went up — which was the day before Rachel, Yvonne, Alex and Grace went up to Big Bear — and I hadn’t ventured into shutterstock’s lesbian archives that weekend in order to find a less racy feature photograph for the NSFW Sunday (feature photos need to be a certain size to feed properly onto Facebook, and you can’t search by size on tumblr).

Riese: i have a thing that i’m making about lesbian sex stock photography but i feel like my captions aren’t funny enough
Rachel: maybe wait a few hours and then drink some whiskey and then go back to them
[…]
Rachel: do we have anything else that can go up today
will lesbian stock images be ready do you think riese
Riese: i think so but laneia is gonna have to help me think of funny captions because i can’t for all of them
Laneia: I CAN DO THIS
Rachel: it’s so hard to get anything done, all i wanna do is plan affectionate slumber party pranks to play on grace

2. It’s Time For White Feminists to Stop Talking About Solidarity and Start Acting, by Kesiena Boom

3. White Gay Man Publishes Epically Stupid Response to “Stop Stealing Black Female Culture,” by Yvonne Marquez

Alternate headline ideas floated in editorial meeting:

• White Gay Man Very Hurt That He Can’t Steal Black Female Culture
• White Gay Man Very Hurt His Obsession With Black Female Culture Not Mutual
• White Gay Man Very Upset His Beyonce Halloween Costume Plan Was Ruined
• White Gay Man Really Offended You Didn’t Like His Whitney Houston Drag Performance
• White Gay Man Defends His Right To Call Himself a Sistah
• White Gay Man Tells Black Women He Can Help Them If They Could Be A Little Bit Nicer To Him
• White Gay Man Feels It’s Really Important He Be Able to Snap His Fingers In Front of Your Face in a Z Shape

4. Burger King’s “Proud Whopper” Isn’t Anything For Gays To Be Proud Of, by Riese Bernard

5. You Need Help: What’s the Deal With Scissoring? by Ali Osworth, illustrated by Intern Liz

6. You Need Help: She Is Going Down for 15+ Minutes, by Riese Bernard

7. Unashamed to Be Fat: Wear the Shorts, It’s F*cking Hot Outside, by Elicia Sanchez

8. Never Shop at Hobby Lobby Again: A List of Alt Craft Stores, Both Chain and Indie, by Sarah Hansen

9. Supermodel Andreja Pejic Comes Out as A Trans Woman!, by Mey Rude

10. The Disappearing Act: Fighting Disordered Eating as a Masculine-of-Center Woman, by Ali Osworth

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Nine Important Excerpts From Editorial Conversations

Riese: my fibro is raging today for some reason
Rachel: my back pain is still here
none of us are doing great today
except probably yvonne because she is strong and powerful
Yvonne: find strength in knowing we will crush the patriarchy together
Rachel: thank you yvonne i actually feel like 200% better now
i’m going to needlepoint that onto a quilt

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Laneia: really looking forward to the day we publish “how to have lesbian anal sex”
Rachel: i feel about that article about the way that i imagine lesbian anal sex feels
kind of confused but also excited
Laneia: “this would be so much easier if i was drunk”
Rachel: “this isn’t really how i imagined spending my time, but here we are”

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Grace: can the tegan and sara song on the canada playlist be “superstar”
Riese: this is like when i asked rachel if there was any condition in which it was okay to put a dave matthews band song on a playlist
and she said “honestly, no.”
that’s how i feel about superstar
Rachel: that’s what makes this a good workplace
the transparency

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Rachel: my strength of will to not respond to wet blanket commenters with mean gifs is so low right now
Riese: is there a gif for “wow you must be a lot of fun at parties”
Rachel: i feel like i would want a gif that somehow communicates “wow that must be so hard for you”

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Stef: i don’t know if there is a non trite way to end this essay
i feel like i’m at the end of an episode of full house, trying to sum up all the lessons we learned today
it is my least favourite part of this thing
trying to sum up the lessons of the day
Riese: that was probably bob saget’s least favorite part too

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Lizz: It occurred to me today that the phrase “living on” and “living off” mean the same thing. I’m baffled.
“I’ve been living off grilled cheese sandwiches for weeks” /  “I’ve been living on grilled cheese sandwiches for weeks”
“You’re living off my money” / “You’re living on my money”
Please consult.
Hansen: To live off of something is a means of survival, to live on something is to depend on something for sustenance.
So you’d live on grilled cheese but live off of someone else’s money.
But who the fuck cares, you do you.
Rachel: Your choice of example phrases are a little alarming, lizz. i can mail you some annie’s frozen enchiladas
Laura: Maybe Lizz is living off of dreams of grilled cheese, on someone else’s dime.
I hope someone takes you to brunch.

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Cleo: is pam from true blood on the best bosses list?
Laura: haha, idk about Pam from true blood. hypnotizing your employees to steal and take credit for their ideas is not ideal boss behavior.
Riese: i don’t think pam’s exactly a model boss. but i would still like to have sex with her.
Rachel: that’s really my ideal performance review right there

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Rachel: can anyone think of a punny title for this food list that has to do with no-bake recipes, so a pun about not baking things
all i could think of was “wake and (not) bake” which i don’t think works
Riese: i think it works
Laneia: i swear to christ all i’m coming up with is sylvia plath jokes
so i hate myself
Rachel: laneia i could not love anything more than i love you
maybe i can fit a subtextual sylvia plath reference
Riese: what if i stuck my head in the oven
and took a selfie
Rachel: i would put it in my wallet as my picture of you
Laneia: it would wind up on jezebel for sure

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Audrey: Is today “national smarmy white dudes do fucked up “ally” shit and then dismiss any criticism as angry whining day”? Because that is a stupid holiday.
Carmen: guys my Rebel Girls articles are being passed around in women’s studies classes, which tangentially has led me to a conversation with YET ANOTHER WHITE DUDE on why i didn’t provide authors / reading recs for radfems. so there’s that.
Rachel: National White Dudes: Sshhhhhhhh Day
Carmen: can we declare a new day of silence tomorrow
Day of White Dude Silence
DoWDS

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Riese: who is gonna recap pretty little liars now though
Rachel: i wish we could have like a People’s Couch video that was just yvonne and riese watching PLL together
Laneia: oh dear god
yes
Yvonne: lol where they could just watch our reactions? is that how that happens?
Rachel: i am imagining people syncing it with the episode as they watch, just so like i can see your faces when ali and emily make out
Grace: do you want me to do it
Riese: WOT !!!!??!!!!!!
DO YOU WANT TO COME OVER TO THE DARK SIDE, GRACE
DO YOU WANT YOUR ENTIRE LIFE TO BE CONSUMED BY RECAPPING A TELEVISION SHOW
Grace: yeah
Riese: OMG
Grace: is this the moment
Yvonne: young padawan becomes a jedi
Riese: ENTER THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS
Rachel: is someone playing music for this, like a soundtrack
Riese: i’m playing “Eye of the Tiger” in my head
Grace: i’m still listening to jenny lewis
so.

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Meet Some New Contributors!

Get to know some of our newest faces.

Robin Yang, Contributing Editor

Twitter: @robinyang
Tumblr: coffeesomemore
Instagram: robonyong

Robin Yang is a gay Chinese-American lady who grew up in small town North Carolina and currently works as a web designer and media strategist. Her essay Eight Ways I’ve Been Made To Feel About My Asian Eyes blew your heart away.

If you could only use one emoji for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Fireworks: versatile AND unambiguous.

What is your favorite kind of sandwich?
Fancy grilled cheese! Muenster and goat cheese, pesto, avocado, spinach, tomato, scallions and an egg over easy, with a side o’ sriracha.

Describe the worst date you’ve ever been on.
I went on an OK Cupid date in Allston (keepin it shitty) at this girl’s house party, and it turned out that half the people at the party were also people she’d invited from OKC, and she wasn’t really present the entire time. All of us online folk ended up ditching and going to a bar down the street. I woke up with a terrible hangover. None of us heard from her again.

What’s your favorite sex toy?
Haven’t had the capital to invest in many sex toys, but I have a good time with a turquoise Mistress dildo.

What’s your #1 turn-on?
A good sense of humor and a well-deployed garter belt.

What’s your #1 turn-off?
An incompatible sense of humor and too much tongue (or too little!)

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Nina Guzman, Writer

Twitter: @ninakguzman
Tumblr: thefemme-nist
Blog: femme-nist

Nina was born in Puerto Rico and currently lives in Georgia with her phantom corgi named potato. She’s been writing “Rhymes With Witches” column for seven months, in which she dissects “our love for the fictional mean girls that make it hurt so good” sociologically, personally and aesthetically. Highlights have included Kimberly Joyce from Pretty Persuasion and Paris Geller of Gilmore Girls. Nina’s first piece for Autostraddle was about being outed by Netflix!

If you could only use one emoji for the rest of your life, what would it be?
I know everyone is going to say this but, I mean, the smiley poop, duh!

What is your favorite kind of sandwich?
Anything with Nutella, and just Nutella

Describe the worst date you’ve ever been on.
Oh God that would take an entire post, which it did!

What’s your favorite sex toy?
This is such a boring answer but I don’t have one! Maybe now that I’m single I’ll do some experimenting. Please send me suggestions!

What’s your #1 turn-on?
I’m really into smarties. John Waters said it best, and I quote: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them”

What’s your #1 turn-off?
“I’m not a feminist. but….” :/

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Mari Brighe, Contributing Editor

Facebook: amara.brighe
Twitter: MarniTheTNF
Website: transnerdfeminist

Mari is a “queer-lady scientist and educator” from Detroit, Michigan who wrote for The Transadvocate before joining us at Autostraddle. She made her mark early on with her response piece to The New Yorker’s unbalanced history of the tensions between trans-exclusionary radical feminists and trans women.

If you could only use one emoji for the rest of your life, what would it be?
face in sunglasses (It’s just so versatile!)

What is your favorite kind of sandwich?
French Dip. Especially if the beef is rare and the au jus is good.

Describe the worst date you’ve ever been on.
I met a woman on OkCupid at one point who, after a few messages, informed me that her full-time job was as a professional Dominatrix. That, in and of itself, wasn’t really a big deal for me. What WAS a deal breaker for me was that our second date was dinner at her house — prepared and served by her cadre of live-in male slaves (that she had not yet mentioned). One of them was offered to me as a footstool while I was eating. It was perhaps one of the strangest and most awkward meals I’ve ever eaten.

What’s your favorite sex toy?
A reliable bullet vibrator.

What’s your #1 turn-on?
Words! Being eloquent and a lover of words is a huge turn on, as is really well-written erotica, or the right dirty thing whispered in my ear.

What’s your #1 turn-off?
The phrase: “I think you’re really attractive, so do you want to have a threesome with me and my boyfriend?”

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Djuan Trent, Contributor

instagram: djuantrent
facebook: djuantrent
twitter: @djuantrent
Tumblr: djuantrent
Website: website

If you could only use one emoji for the rest of your life, what would it be?
It would definitely be the crying emoji. This is such a good question because it’s almost like, what wordless expression would I want to share with others for the rest of my life? I love a good laugh as do most of my friends. So, for the rest of my life, if I could only choose one…it would have to be this one. Just looking at it makes you want to go and find something to laugh at. It’s a total keeper. Crying.

What is your favorite kind of sandwich?
Any kind of breakfast sandwich because I love breakfast. I could eat breakfast all day and night.

Describe the worst date you’ve ever been on.
I don’t know that I’ve ever been on a “worst date,” per se, but I do have a worst experience I can share! I’d been dating this girl off and on for a few months and my friends (who were eager to meet her) were hosting a game night (with Jell-O shots / wine / vodka / hookah), so I brought her. We had a blast. Game night became Slumber Party night and in true slumber party fashion, ended the evening with “Never Have I Ever.”

Apparently my friends are very experienced, so the game was kinda dull — no fingers going down, no shots taken — so for my turn, I made a statement I knew we’d all likely experienced that got everybody’s fingers down. We laughed at the simplicity of it but before we’d even swallowed our Jell-O shots, the girl I was dating started going off on me, eventually telling everyone all our sexual business. GAWD. I was so embarrassed. I tried to make a joke out of it, but she continued with her rant. My friends were experiencing second-hand embarrassment. By the time she settled down she’d already killed the vibe, so we all went to bed. We shared a couch — actually, she slept on the couch and I squeezed into the space at the end between her feet and the couch arm.

Suddenly, she gets up, hops off the couch, pulls her pants down and prepares to pop a squat on the coffee table! As soon as I realized what was about to happen, I fought with her to let me walk her to the bathroom. After that, she tried being sexy with me in all her sleep-walking drunken glory. I refused. Then she went completely limp and fell forward onto me, landing us both in the living room closet. My friends pretended like they were sleeping but totally saw the whole thing.

The next morning she acted like nothing had happened, just brushed her stinky teeth and took her halfway-drunk self to work. My friends and I can look back on it and laugh now, but for about a week, we were all scratching our heads.

What’s your #1 turn-on?
HUMOR!!! Hands down! I like someone I can laugh with and just be my silly self. I am extremely silly and I looooove to laugh! If we can share memes, vines, YouTube vids, and whatever else…I can get down with that. One of the worst and most awkward feelings is sharing something that you think is hilarious and they other party is not amused in anyway or they take it too seriously. Womp, womp… If you wanna be my lover, you gotta know how to laugh with me…no exceptions!

What’s your #1 turn-off?
I hate to feel as though I’m being controlled or caged in. Anyone who knows me, knows that I am all about freedom. I don’t like for someone to stay on my chain all day and night — I’m not a dog. Let me be free because I’m going to let you be free. Being controlling and overbearing is the quickest way to turn me all of the way off and push me far away. I hate it.

“i believe rachel was in the process of sending that email to cee when a pregnant woman was shooting heroin on our homepage and now she’s fixing that.”
– status update from Laneia regarding when Rachel was gonna email Cee, July 14th 2014

Six Story Ideas That Maybe Weren’t Serious But Maybe Were

Sometimes we just throw ideas out there! I don’t know, are these ideas any good? It’s hard to tell.

 

Stef:
an autostraddle newspaper for people who hate the concept of a+ called the AUTOSTRADDLE ANGRY HORNET
in which we discuss things that are guaranteed to always be free and fair, like life
and angrily criticize everything that is questionably problematic

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Rachel, to Grace:
if you ever felt like it, i think it would be really funny actually to do like “top 5 looks from the target boys back-to-school-catalog” and like describe where you would wear them

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Riese:
i wish we could do a month of trivia posts
we could call it Not-So-Trivial Pursuit

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Riese:
i love raspberries
they are so good right now
this is the best time of the year
can i do 50 pictures of raspberries
top ten raspberry-related situations
yes
Laneia: please do that
the top 10
Riese: #1 is gonna be “raspberries”

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Laneia: wish i could read a mcsweeny’s-style article on the children of kidz bop, either while they’re still part of kidz bop or after they’ve grown up.

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Laneia: just googled “how to make a teenage boy happy” and the results were not for me
“son” is really the keyword there
Rachel: we should have an insider series called “things we googled”
Yvonne Marquez: oh man
Rachel: because yesterday i hit a new personal low with “how to get your cat to stop peeing everywhere”

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Flashback: 2011, When Little Grace Ellis Responded to Riese’s “the first human to send me these two Glee screencaps I need can be my personal intern” post on tumblr

 

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We’re Super Busy and Important

Sometimes the people who work here do cool shit! This month, Brittani shot a pilot and Riese went to BlogHer and now they’re gonna tell you all about it!

Brittani: “Words With Girls”

If you haven’t heard, Words With Girls: The Pilot is in motion. The pilot was purchased as part of Issa Rae Productions’ Color Creative Initiative. Basically Issa Rae, creator of Awkward Black Girl, has been frustrated by the typical pilot process. How long it takes, how much of your vision is ripped away from you, how many people there are to please, and how many conflicting notes you get. Not to mention there’s not always a guarantee that even after all the notes, all the time you put in, and how much of your vision you have sacrificed for the project they’ll even make the pilot. It’s for these reasons and more that she created this initiative in hopes of proving to the studios that the way things are aren’t necessarily how things should stay.

We shot the 26-page script from July 9th-14th in Los Angeles with a super nice and talented crew. Fortunately, not only did the EPs and Director respect my agency towards hiring a diverse crew, they had the same vision. Amongst the DP, Line Producers, Executive Producers, Director, 1st Assistant Director, 2nd Assistant Director, Costume Department, Make-Up Department, Set Designer, and Editor there was not a single straight white male, multiple queer identified people, and only three of these people are even dudes. Even most of the PA’s were women! It was by far the smoothest running set I’ve ever been on and I genuinely enjoyed the people I was working with so much. Turns out when there are women heading the departments, the men they hire aren’t dipshits! Who’d have thunk it!

We were able to find a spectacularly talented cast. I won’t get into all of the details regarding my new found understanding for difficulty in casting queer characters but I will say that the whole system is
pretty fucked and the epidemic of unauthentically portrayed queer roles is not as simple a problem as it seems. With that said, our cast is dope as fuck. It includes me, Corbin Reid, Alex Sturman, Hayley Huntley, Drew Tarver, Sujata Day, and Will Hines.

Last Friday we locked picture on the pilot and are moving on to color correction, scoring and musical selections and the audio mix. And then it’s done! I don’t have any exact dates to look out for but one of the great parts about the initiative is that they’re not going to lock the pilot away for no one to ever see. It’s going online! This year even! So please stay on the lookout for anything and everything and the best way to do that is via my social media situations. This is definitely one of the best things that’s ever happened to me and I’m happy to be able to share this experience with you and hope y’all will support this endeavor. Until next time, I’ll be here. Trying to fuck shit up.

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Riese: BlogHer 2014

I was invited to BlogHer 2014 in San Jose this year to lead a full-day workshop called “Path to a Media Company” with Danielle Smith of Extraordinary Mommy and I said yes because: 1. I like staying in hotels for free, 2. Olivia Pope and Tig Notaro were gonna be there, 3. It’s nice to get out of town and talk to people sometimes! 90% of BlogHer attendees are mommy bloggers who get upset if you call them “mommy bloggers” and the speakers/presenters pretty much run the gamut, but do tend to include a lot of moms. I think this year’s theme was the aggressively promoted hashtag “#selfiebration.” We participated IRONICALLY.

It took me a few years to realize that what I get out of conferences isn’t what most chaps do. For example, networking requires a lot of Xanax and a girl can only respond to so many follow-up emails, so I tend to avoid that stuff. I get wildly pumped about attending panels but every time I do, I’m like, “I ALREADY KNOW ALL THIS STUFF, I’M A GENIUS.” What conferences do consistently provide, however, is opportunities for extensive bonding and productive conversing with people I normally only see on the internet, like my Lesbian Mom Friends Vikki and Deborah, who sadly didn’t attend BlogHer this year.

I brought along my activity partner Abby and we spent a lot of quality time with Dannielle Owens-Reid (we’ve panelled before) of Everyone is Gay, her traveling companion Julia, and my co-presenter Straight Mom Friend Danielle Smith. We had to give the Danielles code names to enable clear conversation.

On Wednesday afternoon, Danielle Mom and I drank wine in my hotel room and polished our fancy PowerPoint Presentation while I gave her advice on how to deal with this awful commenter who doesn’t think babies should be allowed on planes. (My advice: “Stop responding to him right now!!!!”)

The workshop on Thursday went pretty damn well. I told everybody that I was in love with all of you and that’s what Keeps Me Going When Times Are Tough. If you’d been there you would’ve felt very loved. I also told everybody that Danielle Mom and I were in love, but I feel like nobody believed me. I think there were only two other lesbians in the room besides Abby, so my jokey reference to hating men didn’t land too well, but lots of people told me afterwards that I should do more public speaking so I guess I did okay. Topics discussed in our workshop included: how we got started, our revenue streams, working with a team, media companies vs. small businesses, etc. The attendees had lots of questions about YouTube.

The next three days were spent enjoying lovely San Jose and attending keynotes (Tig Notaro’s lesbian jokes didn’t get the laughs they deserved either, ftr) and eating. We also raided the exhibition hall for free shit from corporations, like Glade Plug-Ins and ice cream. This year’s haul was much less than my 2011 haul because now that companies have discovered hashtags and instagram they won’t give you free shit anymore unless you basically record an advertisement for them.

This is what I took home from BlogHer 2011:

This is what I took home from BlogHer 2014:

This was a real American tragedy. Anyhow, we also had a delightful meal at The Blackbird Cafe, lunched in Japantown, and briefly attended a large flea market in the boiling hot San Jose sun. Also, there was a Queerosphere Blogher party and a gay guy handed us his perfectly-behaved puppy (in a pink outfit w/pink toenails) to hold while he mingled and it felt like actual magic. We were the belles of the ball.

In conclusion, Kerry Washington is even more beautiful in person and I wish BlogHer and events like it weren’t so aggressively apolitical. Even Kerry Washington and Morra Aarons-Mele were careful to emphasize the importance of political participation on “both sides of the aisle.” Y’all ONE SIDE OF THE AISLE IS WAY WORSE FOR WOMEN THAN THE OTHER SIDE. CAN WE JUST BE REAL.

“If I never type the word problematic again, I will die the happiest bastard on the planet.”
– Kate Severance, July 2014

Some Answers To Some Things You’ve Been Asking Us

Do you have burning questions about what the fuck is going on around here, Doris? Ask us — just use the A+ priority contact form in your sidebar. Today Riese will be answering your questions personally.

I’m sure people have already asked you about this, probably manymanymany times, but… would it be possible to make it so that we can edit or delete our comments?
Cee is aware that we desire this feature and will get to it as soon as she can.

Hi! I still haven’t gotten my A+ sticker for signing up, when are y’all mailing those out?
Alex has been mailing them out every day for about three weeks, you should have yours by now, but if you don’t, try emailing bren@autostraddle.com to see if it got returned to sender like in the song “Return to Sender.”

I just noticed this thing so I’m using it. Re-camps are happening soon right. My wife is betting I won’t have a pic. So a lot of pride is on the line guys. 
Can I be real with you for a second, Doris? A-Camp Co-Director Marni and I were together for over three years and we broke up righhhttt after A-Camp, which’s why I just couldn’t face the recamps (or much of anything, really) just then. But now things are much better, and Chelsey’s hard at work assembling the information and then it’ll take me another ~40 hours or so to edit/organize/illustrate from there. Normally we have to rush to get them up before the next camp registration opens, but we’ve got a bit more room this time. It’ll happen eventually!

What if Kristin and Dannielle from Everyoneisgay.com came to A-Camp. What then.
THEN YOU WOULD BE REALLY HAPPY, DORIS! Right? Is that the big idea here. I feel like that’s the big idea. But ANYHOW Doris, anything is possible, even that very thing, and when Robin and Marni and I start planning the next camp, we’ll talk about it!

Okay I realised today at work when thinking about All the Things that it would be hella cute if you staff folk did a video about what love is, just like in OITNB! It would be the cutest thing EVER.
Oh that IS a cute idea, Doris!! Maybe for a holiday we could do it.

Please can riese do the recaps for orange is the new black forever, pleeeeeeaaaaassseeeee? I know I got you with those last five e’s.
Aww! You’re so right, those last five eeeees almost changed both of our lives forever. BUT recapping an hour-long show with no commercials takes about 2.5 days for me, so I can’t commit to it every week. However, I’m on schedule to recap the finale. Did you read Mal Blum’s recap of Episode 207? Mal Blum is the cutest, y’all.

What happened to Lily’s College Lesbianage?
Well Doris, Lily graduated from college. Yup. She put that cap and gown right on and just waltzed into adulthood, and then she wrote about it for us right here.

Hello! Quick question about International Autostraddle Summer Brunch. Do you know when you’re going to post your big ol’ roundup of the entire worldwide brunch situation?
TODAY.

Will there be any more “In Your Box Office?”
Probably not, Doris, which makes me sad as well, but Julie and Brandy have a SHOW on Bravo now where they sit on the couch and bitch about television and if you liked IYBO, you would REALLY like their show. It’s called The People’s Couch.

Hey guys, will there be a Hot 100 this year?
Nope.

What is Autostraddle’s official stand on the dinosaurs mass extinction event? Was it an angry menstruating volcano, a large asteroid mishaps, or what?
I wasn’t sure about how to answer this one, so I surveyed the team:

Lizz: All the dinosaurs one day just rolled their eyes and were like “Ugh. I can’t even.”

Stef: they were like, “if oitnb season 3 doesn’t start soon i will LITERALLY die” and then they literally died, so.

Mey: They all turned gay and evolved into birds, because as everyone knows, birds are just gay dinosaurs

Bren: I can’t speak for the fate of ALL dinosaurs, but clearly brontosauruses and their ilk went to brunch at a restaurant with no vegan options and died of malnutrition.

Are there going to be any more Butch Please articles? They are by far my favorite articles to read on this site or any site ever.
Some things in this world burn as brightly as they do because they are inherently fleeting — a certain level of emotional intimacy, for example, is rarely sustainable, and this was the case for Kate. She just burned out on all of it. But she’s still writing other wonderful things!

Why aren’t the calendars happening anymore?
Well, there’s still hope we could come up with something by the end of the year, but basically it’s an issue of time and expense. If we don’t do one this year, there will be one next year! Our photographer/stylist team just needed a break. This tends to be the case for a lot of our more ambitious projects this year.

What I want, more than anything (maybe) is Autostraddle to set up some sort of pen pal thing. I love to write letters and it would be great to receive mail from queers around the world! Just a thought. I love this website SO much, etc.
Maybe this is an A+ thing we could do down the road? When Laura did this a few years back it took her MONTHS to coordinate, MONTHS! It was SO MUCH. Basically coordinating pen pals is a massive community-building project that wouldn’t generate traffic or revenue (much like organizing meet-up weeks) which is totally fine (because we love you) but it does mean that there’s no money to pay someone to coordinate it (and it’s not something any of our paid employees have time for). So those are the reasons why I think we could do this within A+ but not on a larger scale. We’ll revisit this idea after we get podcasts rolling!

The ad that’s appearing at the bottom of everything on Autostraddle today, the one that’a a picture of a cat with a dangling ball of string but no words to go with it? Totally didn’t realize it was an ad and was wondering why the same cat was in every article. A bit misleading.
I understand your frustration. We too had difficulty coping with the situation and also had no idea what the hell was happening. Here’s how that conversation went, before the problem magically fixed itself:

[….]

“If you went to his house and shaved his head then glued that hair to his face then tied him to the nearest electric pole and covered him in honey and put a Nickelback song on repeat and just left him there? That wouldn’t be too much.”
– Laneia, regarding how much harassment would be “too much” when it comes to conservative blogger Robert Stacey McCain (the guy who thinks Carmen Rios is recruiting innocent women into lesbiansim via Women’s Studies and keeps writing shit about us)

Mini-Interview With An Editor: Ali Osworth, Geekery

What do you do in your job?
At Autostraddle, I edit the Geekery section — so sometimes I have a hand in directing regulars (like Drawn to Comics or Notes From A Queer Engineer), sometimes I lend my mad editing skillz to contributing editors’ pieces if they fall into my category. And I also approve pitches that have to do with Science, Technology and Otherwise Nerdy Things. I put together Saturday Morning Cartoons and I write Queer Your Tech (most of the time). But! Because I, like all of us, contain multitudes, I also write for a bunch of other sections. I pitch ideas to the Senior Editors, Carolyn (for the sex and relationship advice) and Hansen (for Liquor in the ______). When I describe my job in one sentence or less, I basically say “I love working for Autostraddle because if I give a good enough reason, probably they’ll let me write it.” And as such, I’ve been able to write toward things I want to know more about. I’ve learned a lot writing things for y’all.

What is your vision for the section?
Basically, I want a space for us all to be nerdy without mansplaining or the assumption that we’re not real geeks. That fake geek girl shit DRIVES ME BANANAS. I want our webcomics to be queer, I want our analysis to be feminist and I want our discussion to be devoid of straight, cis non-allies. Who’s with me?

What would be your dream pitch?
Oh sweet lesbian Jesus, someone pitch me a recurring video game review column. Please someone do it. And then keep doing it — I get a lot of one off pitches for video games, and almost always they fall through. And twice I’ve had someone ready to do regular game review and BOTH TIMES they wound up not doing it. PLEASE SOMEONE PITCH THIS FOR ME. Ooooh, or I also love getting pitches that are way beyond my capabilities, tech-wise. Sally’s “Build Your Own Computer” mini-series and Chloe’s beginner Python post were both pitches I lost my ish over.

What’s the hardest part?
I’m not very good at email. Like, I’ll read email. And I’ll compose a whole response. And then I’ll just…forget to do it. So for me it’s email. And y’all, I get a lot of email. More email than someone who’s not good at email should ever have. Plus, for a tech editor, I spend a good deal of time trying to be online less. It’s actually not my favorite part about technology, being online. Sometimes the internet is too loud and I want to read quietly on my Kindle and listen to the technology of a nice, old grandfather clock.

Favorite online writer/editor / or like your hero?
If you make me pick one, I’m just gonna pick our whole staff as one collective being — I love us so much. That’s why I work here.

What do you wish people understood about your job?
Subject Editor is a volunteer position, and one I’m currently balancing between my regular freelance work, editing a literary publication, editing another literary publication and getting my MFA. Sometimes I feel really bad if I have to pass on something that would otherwise be wonderful for the Geekery section because I don’t have enough hours in the day to work with the author in a meaningful way. In these moments, I imagine that I can feel the hatred of the pitch-er coming through the screen as I let the email slip into the ether. I wish that person knew how much it kills me and I wish they could virtu-hate me a little less. And I wish that maybe they could forgive me and pitch again another time.

Favorite snack to eat while working?
Oh, I can’t eat and work at the same time. If I get a snack, I’m stopping and watching Orphan Black or Dr. Who or Sherlock or any number of things that are pointedly not writing or editing. So, uhhhhh — water? I guess? I actually drink a lot of water. I have a Camelbak constantly at my side.

What would be the song that a montage of you doing your job would be set to?
Well it’s not a song but it’s an audio file. At this very moment, it’s the Jim Dale version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I bet no one is surprised.

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Your Monthly Infographic About You

We did an Autostraddle reader survey this summer and found out a lot of shit about you. Here’s one of those things.

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August Retro-Reading

Some posts from previous Augusts Riese thinks you might truly enjoy.

8 Steps Every Girl Can Take To Get A Girl To Sleep Over (2010), by Laneia & Riese with doodles by Taylor and  Stef – Laneia and I wrote this article on my bed like a month before it got published. Laneia recalls that putting this article together involved the following procedure: “we LITERALLY just looked around your house/room and took notes of how you lived.”

OKCupid: We Read Your Profile (2011), by Laneia – This was just so cute, how all of y’all were proclaiming your love for Autostraddle right there in your dating profiles! That’s when we knew the cult commune would work for sure.

When I Knew I Was Gay #1 – What Would Happen If One Woman Told The Truth About Her Life (2009), by Riese & Laneia – This is a seminal Autostraddle post because it’s the first time Laneia wrote about having kids on the internet. Alex and I were the only ones who knew what’d be revealed when it went up, and Laneia was nervous but I knew everybody would love it and I was right, they did.

In “Gay-Friendly” Philippines, Lesbians Still Forced To Keep It In The Closet (2009), by Katrina – Remember when Katrina Casino was sitting on my bed eating tofu pesto talking to me about the revisions I suggested for what would become this super amazing essay because I do, I remember it well.

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15 Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex Positions From The Brains of Babes

Cosmopolitan offered up 28 Mind-Blowing Sex Positions this past month and they were mostly awful. So we started talking about putting together one of our own, which I’m pretty sure is still happening. Some ideas were better than others. Here are just some of the really special ideas floated by our homosexy staff during a brainstorming session for that list:

• Face buried deep in an ass
• 3,000 miles away and crying over your iPhones
• From behind while in an open child’s pose
• Scissoring while still in the dreamy infatuation station, thus being transported to Love Island through a portal, aka “Portaling”
• Furiously typing away while your partner sleeps
• “I know we wanted to have sex tonight but let’s just hold hands and fall asleep by 9:30pm”
• Attempting to do it quietly in a squeaky twin bed
• “Too horny to wait ’til we go home, maybe horny enough to have sex in this rank-nasty bar bathroom”
• Watching The Fosters on separate couches
• Attempting to do it quietly in a squeaky twin bed while you can clearly hear Mal Blum having a conversation with AB Chao in the adjacent cabin
• Getting high and cuddling while you look at property for sale in rural Tennessee
• Really quietly in her parents spare bedroom during family visit because you haven’t seen her in months and waiting simply isn’t an option
• Awkwardly while a friend watches during a poorly conceived spontaneous threesome
• “I heard orgasms are good for cramps but I can’t really move around while my uterus is seizing so painfully so I’m just gonna lay back and let you do your thing, thanks”
• “Sure, I’ll let you play with my boobs while you masturbate”

 

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Five Posts Rachel Can’t Believe You Motherf*ckers Didn’t Read Last Month

Science Will Not Save Us: Medicine, Research Ethics, and My Transgender Body, by Anna Lauren Hoffman
This is one of the more “academic” pieces of writing I’ve read anywhere since I graduated from my master’s program a few months ago, and while I thought I never wanted to read things that discussed “ontology” again I am super glad I read this because it is FASCINATING and helped me think about bodies and how we understand them in a new way. If you are a person who has a body, I suspect you will feel similarly!

Bonnaroo 2014: A Photo Diary from the Guts of a Real Person, by Laneia
I love you and that’s why I’m going to be really honest with you right now: if you saw that this was on our website and didn’t read it and then comment on it you are a goddamn idiot. You will look back on your past idiot self with a mix of frustration and compassion for the wide-eyed little idiot you were, who had never seen a picture of Laneia’s inflatable turkey leg or felt her hippie bullshit feelings in your heart.

Fool’s Journey: Radical Tarot Reader Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasina Is Anything But Cranky, by Beth
I don’t care if you don’t care about tarot or if you think Autostraddle publishing stuff on tarot is some woo-woo bullshit; this is super interesting! Leah is a really special person who is really open and vulnerable here, and there’s a lot to think about about how listening and storytelling and alternate ways of understanding ourselves ties into radical politics and activist work. ALSO you’ll get to see a picture of Leah with a bottle of champagne and a knife and a dildo, but that’s really just gravy.

Fenway Report: Trans People Continue To Experience More Discrimination, Poorer Health, by Kelli Dunham
I know that you know that trans people face a lot of risks and threats to their physical health, and for this reason you may have scrolled past this particular story. Well STOP RIGHT THERE, COWGIRL. If we’re going to figure out how to make a world without those risks and poor health outcomes, we will probably need to know why they happen, and Kelli has a lot of really solid breakdowns and interview insight about why this is where we’re at, and everyone needs to understand that, including you!

15 Trailblazing Women and How They Made the Internet, by Robin Yang
If you have, in the past 6-12 months, clicked on a slideshow of 15 celebrities with short haircuts in order to do reconnaissance for your next ALH — and you have — then you can click on this. Did you know that Lynn Conway, a trans woman working for IBM in the 1960s, invented fundamental aspects of computer chip design that continue to inform computers built today, despite being fired for coming out as trans? No, you didn’t, because you didn’t click on this. REMEDY THAT ERROR. (See what I did there. Error.)

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Riese and Laneia’s Nail Polish Picks Of The Month

Laneia: Enuf is E-nuf, by essie

This is my favorite color for when I want to seem approachable and friendly, even when I’m kind of not: E-nuf is E-nuf (wtf is this name even about) by Essie. It’s a coral situation described by Essie as “a no-nonsense subdued creamy coral that says it all.” What does it say? It all. It says it all. For me it says, “Hey, family member or elementary school faculty, don’t worry. Despite my resting bitch face and vaguely threatening combination of floral jumpers and graphic tees, I’m just like you! I’m safe. You like me.”

Did you ever have that friend whose mother was an Avon representative? Those women had more free lipstick samples than the average person could go through in 80 years. A favorite pastime of Avon representatives (circa 1992, anyway) was to tell you your color season — warm or cool, spring or winter, etc — and it was through this deep analysis as an 11 year old pre-woman that I learned I was apparently a Soft Autumn (I had to call my mom to look through a long-ago repurposed Schwann’s frozen chicken strip box in the attic to find my notebook from 5th grade to confirm this). According to the internet, and my own eyeballs when I wear this nail color, a “subdued creamy coral” is pretty perfect for my skin tone! I end up looking/feeling awake and happy — yep, just because of my nail color — so I can go on fighting the patriarchy one more goddamn day.

Riese: Strut Your Stuff, by essie

For eight years, I wore black nail polish. All day every day, with some exceptions: a few photo shoots requiring clear nails, a temp job at a bank requiring a professional look and the month when my girlfriend was having a psychotic break and said my nail polish reminded her of Satan.

Black nail polish was my way of saying to the world “I hate you, don’t talk to me.” In 2007 my psychiatrist noticed my nails and asked me if I was goth, using the same tone of voice he’d employed to ask if I was bisexual. “Yeah,” I told him. “Me and Lindsay Lohan. Thus the studded dog collar and the Hot Topic platform boots. And the attitude.” This led to an extensive exchange in which I eventually was forced to provide definitions for Hot Topic, goth, and the difference between “Seth Cohen Emo” and “pop punk emo.”

Anyhow, after my breakup in June I changed a lot of things about how I live and one of those things was my nail polish colors! Although I often put red or purple or pink on my toes, my fingers prefer to be a bit more gender-neutral, and thus I dove headfirst into a palette I suspect was subconsciously inspired by James Taylor’s assertion that “deep greens and blues are the colors I choose.” I started with butler please and mojito madness and now I’m pretty devoted to Strut Your Stuff, and not just ’cause I wish it was called “slut your stuff.” It’s sort of turquoise, which reminds me of being twelve years old in 1993, with my whole goshdarn life ahead of me.

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Carolyn’s Recommended Sex Toys Of The Month

In which our NSFW Editor Carolyn has advice on getting off. 

Lately I’ve been really enamoured of glass toys, which are hard and lovely and play well with silicone lube, and which you can run under cool water to chill if the idea of putting anything warm near or in your body is almost repulsive because it’s just too hot out. Plus, Babeland is offering 15% off all glass sex toys this month with the promo code GMWD15.

I’ve been especially enamoured of Fucking Sculptures, a small Berkley-based company that makes soda lime dildos. They come in three sizes, they reflect light beautifully, and they feel awesome — dense and unforgiving, like all glass toys, but with textures that are fun to grip and shapes that are unique.

Like all handmade glass toys, fucking sculptures are unique, which might mean you end up with a toy that is perfect for your body, and might not. You can see them in person at a few shops if you’re worried about that, or online if you’re not.

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Is Marriage The New U-Hauling?

These past few years as same-sex marriage becomes legal in more places, we’re noticing more and more lesbian couples getting engaged pretty early into their relationships (defined as “within a year of when you first became girlfriends.”) We’d like to write about that. So, if you’re one of these couples or know somebody who is and have a minute to take this survey for us, that’d be super-helpful! Also, if any female-identified humans you know got hitched within a year or less of getting together and have since split up or divorced and you think they’d wanna talk about it to us, have them email riese@autostraddle.com.

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The Hardest Part Of Working Here Is Telling People We Work Here

Laneia: is everything a lifestyle blog? does everyone have one
Yvonne: what does that mean?
Laneia: isn’t my blog a lifestyle blog in that it’s about my lifestyle
all of these celebrities w/ their lifestyle blogs!
i’ve gotten like 5 press releases this week
Grace: i call autostraddle a “lifestyle blog” when i’m describing it to someone i know won’t understand what it actually is
Yvonne: i say “news and culture website” to strangers
Laneia: i say news and culture too!
Yvonne: and they’re like “oh which one” and then i have to say “queer and feminist”
Rachel: i usually just sort of say “website… for women? also by women. news? pop culture?”
i don’t have a good elevator pitch/cover story
Grace: yeah, mostly it’s a result of being tired of explaining it to straight people
Laneia: especially older straight people. megan wants me to have a go-to explanation so i’ll stop falling all over myself when her family/friends ask me where i work
Yvonne: that’s a good idea. that’s why i don’t like coming home because extended family ask questions
Rachel: i think that when i say “women’s website” around conservative friends/family they just assume i mean makeup or something and the conversation moves on
Yvonne: in my case, it’s like they’re trying to be nice and want to read something and i’m like “no you don’t want to read this”
like to an old mexican uncle
like my cousins my age could read it
Laneia: also having to say “autostraddle” to a middle aged white guy is enough to kill me
Rachel: yes
Yvonne: omg. yes.
Laneia: we should give it a codename when we’re talking to straight men, like freebleeders.org
Rachel: manhaters anonymous
Laneia: “girl power tools to kill your husbands with dot com”
eve was framed dot com
Rachel: lilith4president.net
Laneia: “right but like, the number 4, president dot net. yes.”
Rachel: ThumbRingEnthusiasts.biz
Laneia: omg i should just say i write a mommy blog. i bet they wouldn’t ask any questions about that.
Rachel: no, no one would
i had to explain to my own actual mommy what a mommy blog was
that was confusing
Laneia: “it’s for moms so they can finally feel important and not so sad all the time. they do giveaways for kitchenaid mixers.”
Rachel: “it’s what you did for twenty years without any recognition or support, but like a brand?”
Laneia: oh that is so sad

[….]

Riese: hey i’m back! and i just read back to your conversation before i got back and wanted to add that when people ask me what i do, i say i’m the CEO of an online media company
if they dig any deeper then i say “it’s the most popular lesbian website in the world” so that before they can judge me, they will feel in awe and fear of my power
Laneia: this is why nobody fucks with you

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XOXO,

Team Autostraddle