The first time I know that I am fat and that is bad is when I am ten. That is the year I become a lifetime member of Weight Watchers. My mom says I asked to go on a diet. I don’t remember what precipitated this request, but I am sure she’s right. I weigh 135 pounds at the first weigh in. When I find that first weigh in card ten years and 150 pounds later, I cry. I was my adult … [Read more...]
Abuse Happens Everywhere: 8 Questions To Ask About Respecting BDSM Boundaries
I came of age during a moment when lesbian feminist culture was booming -– music festivals, women’s bookstores and lesbian feminist political projects were cropping up everywhere. And one of the most damaging and fallacious assumptions of that era was that women were inherently non-violent, that lesbian relationships offered a haven from abuse, that simply because our … [Read more...]
6 Ways To Talk About STIs (Without Being a Jerk)
Whenever the topic of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) comes up, I secretly get excited and panicked at the same time. I get excited because, as a person with herpes, and specifically as a writer with herpes, I spend a lot of time considering the complexities of what it means to live in a shared body with a virus, particularly one on which society has imposed a code of … [Read more...]
Communication, Humor, and Experimentation: 10 Tips for Disabled Sex
I was a pretty typical teenager when it came to sex. I wanted it and wanted to know more about it. When the classes I took in school failed to tell me how sex happens for folks with disabilities, I turned to the resource kids in the '90s turned to for everything: Google. The results were terrifying. Most sites told me that good sex probably wasn’t possible and others were … [Read more...]
My Queer Sex-Positive Life: Unlearning the Gendered Sexual Shame That Kept Me Disempowered
This article was originally published by Jamila Reddy under its original title "Sex-Positivity Means Unlearning Shame" and is republished with permission. When I was five years old, my parents gave my sister and me a book called Where Did I Come From. Published in 1973, the book featured illustrations and explanations of how babies are made. On the front and back covers … [Read more...]
Becoming My Own Best Friend: Finding Self-Love and Healing Through Celibacy
The first time I decided to stop having sex was the summer of 2013. I was 22 and had just begun working through recent body-related traumas with my new therapist. I knew I had been engaging in reckless sexual behavior for over a year, and this was the first time I had really called myself out on it. I had let myself believe I was simply engaging in sex positivity, bodily … [Read more...]
10 Ways To Raise Radically Sex-Positive Kids
One of my key jobs as a parent is to raise kids who love themselves and their sexuality. My own childhood was filled with silences and horrible caveats about sex. My mother told me repeatedly that she would ‘snap my spine’ if I had sex outside of monogamous marriage. And that sex ‘was not all that it what was cracked up to be.’ The only other ‘education’ I … [Read more...]
“You Are Not Alone”: Uncovering the Dark Secret of Black Women and Sexual Abuse
Rape was not explained to me. No one sat me down and told me what it was. When I was a young girl, I heard a news story about a rape in Central Park—the park my school took us to for physical education and recess, so I paid attention. The victim’s face was slashed during the attack—cut with a broken bottle, I think. So for the longest time, I used to think that being raped … [Read more...]
5 Things People Get Wrong About Desire
Content note: This article includes (non-detailed) references to fantasizing about sexual violence The not-so-funny paradox about sex in our lives is that we are swamped by it but honest, intimate conversation about our desires is hard to come by. Sex sells it all, from toothpaste to car insurance. We are advice-d to death about it via endless columns in glossy magazines. … [Read more...]
Fat Black Queer Femmes Are the Fetishized Backbones of Our Communities — But Who Takes Care of Us?
This article was originally published on Rest for Resistance as "Labor, Chaotic Desire & Belonging: On Blackness, Femininity, and Queerness" and is republished with permission. This is for the queer fat Black femmes. As children, we learn that we never occupy just one, but all, of our identities. Not a fat girl or a Black girl, but a fat Black girl. In elementary school, … [Read more...]
10 Ways to Support Sex-Positive Kids
One of my key jobs as a parent is to raise kids who love themselves and their sexuality. My own childhood was filled with silences and horrible caveats about sex. My mother told me repeatedly that she would ‘snap my spine’ if I had sex outside of monogamous marriage. And that sex ‘was not all that it what was cracked up to be.’ (A lot of violent cracking … [Read more...]
Honoring the Summer Fling: 4 Ways Temporary Love Can Be Revolutionary
Social convention would have us all believe that the only love or intimacy of substance is the lifelong, at first sight, years of commitment kind. And, if we can’t find that or if the love we do find doesn’t last, then we’ve somehow failed. But! That’s not true. Not all people are in search for a long term relationship or commitment, or even marriage. And a … [Read more...]
Sex and Gender are Actually the Same Thing (But Bear With Me)
This article originally appeared in Androgeneity and is reprinted by permission from the writer. As you read the title, you may be overcome with indignation that this article is going to be a gender-essentialist rant. You’ll be relieved to know that it’s quite the opposite. My intent in writing this is to point out some serious misconceptions perpetuated in ‘trans 101’ … [Read more...]
Treating My Friends Like Lovers: The Politics of Desirability
Frequently when desirability gets brought up as a point of conversation, it gets interpreted as boiled down to an individual experience or merely about the frequency with which culturally ugly folks have sex, or the access to sex partners we have which is certainly a part of the conversation but it is not the conversation. This becomes an easy way for folks to shut the … [Read more...]
