Feature image of Maxine Azula and Mistress Lita Lecherous in Crash Pad episode 284. All of the photographs in this NSFW Sunday are from the Crash Pad. The inclusion of a visual here should not be interpreted as an assertion of the model’s gender identity or sexual 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!
“Pleasure has always been policed, in some way or another, in cultures across the world. That’s because pleasure is, in a way, a source of resistance,” writes Julie Peters in Want, excerpted at the Establishment, later continuing:
“Women have inherited quite a history of sexual shame, terror, and torture from our ancestral grandmothers, even if we have no history of it in our own lives. It’s no wonder feeling sexual pleasure is so fraught in our time—not only have we not always felt the right to experience pleasure in the ways that work for us (thanks Freud!), but we have echoes of intergenerational trauma from a history of being tortured, murdered, and violated, at worst, and silenced, at best.
For these reasons and more, feeling pleasure isn’t just a little thing we should try to make more time for in our busy lives because it’s fun. It’s a radical act of resistance against a history of suppression and pain. Taking pleasure, whether by enjoying great sex, going dancing, eating good food, or simply having a hot cup of tea on a cool day, is an act of self-determination and choice. Our pleasure is a tool of resistance against our own oppression and suppression. Our pleasure matters.”
At Oh Joy Sex Toy, Ryan Estrada and Kim Hyun Sook interviewed Eun Hasun on how Korean courts reacted when she pranked her homophobic harassers.
5D porn is here. So is porn parody Game of Bones 2: Winter Came Everywhere. You’re welcome.
In case you need it: how to get out of your own head.
Here’s how to clean your sex toys.
“If you take away the neon spandex and a pristine studio and replace it with black lingerie and a whiff of BDSM, shibari rope bondage looks a lot like yoga,” writes Tracey Duncan on trying bondage as a way to cope with anxiety and a first time self-tying (note: try it with bondage rope, not with yarn):
“I was halfway to a panic attack and I knew I had to get my brain and body back into the present moment. I wrapped yarn around each of my ankles and tied them together. At first, it was kind of frustrating. It looked so graceful and effortless in the videos, but my hands didn’t know what to do. I had to wrap and re-wrap the yarn to get it to lay just so.
Once my ankles were bound together, I leaned back and looked. Pretty. But I started to panic. […] I was trapped, in my family’s home and in my body. What if I couldn’t get out of the knots?
I breathed slowly and fully, the way I’ve taught myself to do when I’m anxious. I carefully backtracked. The yarn untangled. I could escape. What had been constrictive bondage fell away, yarn ends tickling my toes.”
Scarleteen, an inclusive sex ed resource, turned 20! At Bitch, Mariella Mosthof writes:
“Scarleteen exists because people needed a service and Corinna, a self-described reluctant leader, provided it. They, too, were a sexually precocious child who began racking up positive sexual experiences in adolescence, and they envisioned Scarleteen as a destination for similarly precocious teens. As young people began receiving better access to good sex ed, Corinna reasoned, the site would grow more radical and progressive. But what they found was that, with the rise of purity culture and abstinence-only sex ed, the site’s readership began skewing older and less experienced. By the early 2000s, Scarleteen’s chief demographic had become young adults 18–24, often from deeply religious backgrounds, who were steeped in fear- and shame-based ideas about sex and looking for remedial content.”