NSFW Lesbosexy Sunday Is Thinking More About Sex

Welcome to NSFW Sunday!

via mosh

via mosh

+ If you want to think more about sex, How to Think More about Sex has you covered:

“Without sex, we would be dangerously invulnerable. We might believe we were not ridiculous. We wouldn’t know rejection and humiliation so intimately. We could age respectably, get used to our privileges and think we understood what was going on. We might disappear into numbers and words alone. It is sex that creates a necessary havoc in the ordinary hierarchies of power, status, money and intelligence.”

Lesbian Curves via courtneytrouble.tumblr.com

Lesbian Curves via courtneytrouble.tumblr.com

+ What is probably the world’s earliest prehistoric pornography, found at a site in the Xinjiang region of northwest China, is also the most graphic:

“Prudes shouldn’t go into archeology. The patina of antiquity may make a carved ivory phallus, Venus figurine, or vulva painting on a cave wall priceless, communicating to us from a mute, distant past. But transplant those images to the modern world and you get dildos, Playboy, and Georgia O’Keefe. Still, most prehistoric erotic art is abstract, disembodied. It doesn’t explicitly depict sex-crazed ancients screwing their brains out for fun and fertility.

But one little-known, mysterious archaeological site does. The Kangjiashimenji Petroglyphs are bas-relief carvings in a massive red-basalt outcropping in the remote Xinjiang region of northwest China. The artwork includes the earliest—and some of the most graphic—depictions of copulation in the world.”

+ One in ten people have had sex at work, according to a recent survey.

+ Dracula, and lots of other classic books, are all about sex and fart jokes.

+ Everyone in their 20s is exclusively having terrible sex, according to a study by people who seem to believe Girls is the voice of a generation:

“While Giridharadas argues that the liberty to choose has made people — primarily women — more depressed, anxious and unsatisfied, the fact is that his analysis of women is based entirely in fiction. […] Yes, young modern women suffer their share of anxiety, depression and feelings of isolation, but that doesn’t mean that anxiety, depression and isolation are strictly modern problems. A selection of women has always suffered from depression — the only difference is that now we get to call it “depression” rather than hysteria and it no longer means that we have to get our uteruses cut out or get locked in some room with trippy yellow wall paper. Bad sex isn’t new either. Up until 2009, the clitoris remained a mystery to science.”

photo by Damon Loble via 50 lbs of lust

photo by Damon Loble via 50 lbs of lust

+ “Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers” is both porn data and data porn – the author analyzed “what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and role has evolved over the last forty years.”

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+ Guernica‘s sex issue covers sex worker rights, sex and art, a dominatrix memoir, and transforming pornography for women of color:

“The question still looms about whether I consider my work to be feminist. I’m not sure I know the answer, even today. I don’t think I’ve ever walked on a video set, turned on my webcam, or worked as a dominatrix with the thought of making a political statement. I’ve set a goal to enjoy my work so that my fans will enjoy it as well. I find myself more concerned with the representation of black women’s sexuality than making a statement only about my gender. Perhaps this is because so many people fight the good fight on behalf of (white) women and so few are fighting for black women like me. For example, there are countless examples of white women’s sexualities portrayed in porn, but very limited images of African American women. And when you do see black women in porn, they are often stereotyped or demeaned.”

+ Try getting over your breakup by making yourself fall out of love:

“There are a lot of reasons why you might want to stop loving somebody, but the two main ones are that they don’t return your feelings or they treat you badly. Love may feel like it’s something beyond your control, but psychological research shows that there are actually ways to tame this wild feeling. Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher has worked with neuroscientists to produce images of people’s brains while they are in the throes of deep love for someone else. What they found was that feelings of intense love activated the brain’s nucleus accumbens, a region associated with rewards — and with out-of-control addictions. As Fisher put it to me by phone, love activates the parts of our brains that are also activated in the brains of cocaine and cigarette addicts when they anticipate getting high.”

+ A series of projects highlight all types of labia, and specifically how they are all amazing. One artist, Jamie McCartney, has even sculpted The Great Wall of Vagina:

“Vulvas and labia are as different as faces and many people, particularly women, don’t seem to know that. McCartney hopes this sculpture will help to combat the exponential rise, seen in recent years, of cosmetic labial surgeries. This new fashion for creating ‘perfect’ vaginas sets a worrying trend for future generations of women.

The Great Wall of Vagina makes for fascinating and revealing viewing which is a far cry from pornography. It is not erotic art. It is not about titillation. McCartney has pulled off an amazing trick – to deliberately make the sexual nonsexual and take you much deeper. One is able to stare without shame but in wonder and amazement at this exposé of human variety.”

+ The Hairpin‘s queer chick answered questions about gender and sexuality; kink and asexuality and rope burns; why you shouldn’t get back together unless you’ve been poisoned and the cure is in her pants; and sexually debilitating self-esteem issues:

“No one is objectively unattractive. No one is objectively attractive, either, except Naya Rivera. Attraction is relative, and it depends on more than just the way your body is shaped. It has a lot to do with being smart and funny; it has a lot to do with simple, inexplicable chemistry. And, trust, some people like nothing better than a fat girl with a flat ass — I’ve certainly never gotten complaints.

Believe — or at least tell yourself repeatedly — that the women who end up in your bed are happy to be there; believe that the women you haven’t gotten with yet would be lucky if you did.”

+ In the introduction to Best Lesbian Erotica 2013, the latest instalment in the annual anthology by Cleis Press, author Jewelle Gomez writes, “It’s no accident that lesbians have been at the forefront of that activism trying to hold on to our right to be sexually active and exploratory. We have declared outlaws for our sexual desire; or worse, told that we (as women) didn’t have any real desire.” This, she argues, is why the ongoing task of portraying queer sexual desire is so important. The contributors, who include Maggie Morton, Sid March, Zoe Amos, Andrea Dale and Kirsty Logan, rise to the challenge. From Nikki Adams‘ “Nothing if it Fades”:

“I have known heat, and the few women I’ve been with have brought me to understand hunger. But like so many things about her, Violet’s lips were different. There was yearning, but also softness and exhilaration, fear and freedom. Fingers toughed necks and shoulders, as my kisses moved from her lips to the underside of her chin. One of her hands set gently upon my breast. Her fingernail traced around my nipple, then left it to strain against my T-shirt as she drew me close. Her other hand ran through my hair as I began nibbling the soft skin beneath her ear. She moaned and held me against her even tighter. Struggling through stolen breaths, we soon found our way to bed.”

From Rachel Charman‘s “The Horse and the Hounds”:

“In my mind’s eye you are here. You watch me, as you watched me a hundred times in bed, as the thick bulb of my middle finger finds my clit; the thin, vibrant seam of me; and then the deep opening below, before moving away, teasing and tasting. I become aware of the curling smirk on my mouth, the one I didn’t know I had until you pointed it out. Jen laughs in the back of her throat. She has seen that smirk before on the face of someone she loves. I settle into the smooth rhythm of my fingertips and open my eyes to see her crawling toward me on the grainy floor.”

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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.

18 Comments

  1. The Slate article about the petroglyphs says there are male figures, female figures, and bisexual ones….(the bisexual figures have a penis but wear the female headdress). I thought Slate was supposed to be reputable enough to know what the term ‘bisexual’ means?

    • That’s just… bewildering. It’s especially bad because of the headline Slate put on it.

      At least the commenters seem to know that’s not what “bisexual” means.

    • It sounds weird/incorrect/awkward, but it’s probably just archaeology jargon, a technical term that the Slate writer should have but didn’t rework into regular terms (that would not read like an ethnographic text from 1910). I agree that it’s not the best way to describe those figures.

      Because I can’t help myself, interpreting things that are 10,000 years old (or even 5,000 years old, or even 2,000 years old) as “probably a fertility ritual, these-shaped ones are male, these-shaped ones are female, these-shaped ones are shamans…” is a silly, assumptive way to do ancient history that has way more to do with validating modern theories than about an honest appraisal of the evidence.

      But I am a classicist so that is my nerdy 2c on the porno

      • Just to be clear, I’m not defending the author’s use of “bisexual” to describe those figures; just thinking of why that might be in there. Unsurprise, archaeology and anthropology are super old boys’ clubby and are not always very uh, forward-thinking in their designations (see: an entire tradition studying the “savage” and the “primitive” and the “pre-anything”). So yeah, it’s dumb. And not least because like seriously you’re going to assign categories like “shaman” or even “male and female” to people living 10,000 years ago?

        • Totally agree with you about it being assumptive and serving to validate modern theories.

          “Does the smaller size of the copulating females signify lower rank? … were penises added to some of the female figures later, possibly signifying the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy?”

          Yeah. Because people with vaginas having sex = lowly. And people with penises = power. *Clearly.*

          • Right, and these types of assumptions really plague archaeological and ancient historical work even into much better-documented times, which is annoying! What can we say from this [super abstract] painting? There are human-shaped figures, and some have attributes ABC, some attributes XYZ, some 123; we may be able to class these figures on these grounds into categories J, K, and L. And we may be able to figure out things from the chemical composition of the dyes, and the brush strokes, and other “physical” evidence. But everything else is assumption or conjecture, from meaning of a particular figure to meaning of the whole scene.

            ARCHAEOLOGY UP IN YOUR NSFW SUNDAY

  2. I did a double-take with the “bisexual,” but if you think about it, it’s just a literal interpretation of the word: two sexes. I don’t think that “intersex” would work in this case, since we seem to be dealing with representations of people who are both sexes at once. And yes, what can we really know about what the artists thought they were doing?

  3. I went and read through a bunch of comments on the article and the author did come back to say that ‘bisexual’ is an archeological term. I still feel like given that most people who read that article will not be archeologists or people in the know about archeological jargon, and given that ‘bisexual’ is a term widely in use today to mean something completely different, and given that there are definitely people who don’t know what ‘bisexual’ in the LGBT sense means, there should have been a note explaining.

    • I’ve studied gender and sexuality in the archaeological record and in past societies somewhat extensively, and I have never heard “bisexual” used that way… It definitely needs contextualization if it’s going to be used to mean something pretty different from its contemporary definition.

      • It also needs to drop the “bi-curious” BS in it’s headline and generally stop dismissing an old culture by measuring it from a sloppy heterosexist POV.

    • Yeah, as someone in archaeology, I call bullshit. I have never heard that as a term referring to someone of both sexes. We usually tend to avoid making assumptions on cultural interpretations in the real world, but fucking pop science…

  4. That photo of Jetta is hot, she is a really awesome blogger too. Also, it’s Jetta Vegas not Vargas… just sayin’.

  5. “Dracula is about sex,” reports girl who has never heard of the Victorians. She adds, “Also did you know the Ancient Greeks were all gay? Crazy!”

    As a huge written word nerd I’m always disappointed when people take this reductionist view of literature. Maybe I’m just upset because I wrote my senior thesis on Dracula and get really uppity when people make assumptions about the book. But seriously, sometimes I wish we made kids in high school read Aristophanes so we could say “Look at this: people have been obsessed with butts and sex since literature first became a thing. This is what humans are. This is our common thread. Learn it, know it. This is humanity.” I feel like we’d all be a lot better at relating to each other.

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