Feature image of La Muxer Diosa and Zoie Blackheart in Crash Pad Series episode 281. 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!
Venus Selenite in Crash Pad Series episode 292
It’s hard for queer women and nonbinary people to have casual sex in small towns and rural areas, writes Hannah Brashers at Allure, and one of the reasons involves conditioning around desire:
“Regardless of the fact that girls are conditioned differently than boys, a 2015 study published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior indicates that women — queer and straight alike — may desire casual sex just as much as men.
Of the 22 queer women and nonbinary people who responded to my Google survey, 81.8 percent indicated that they currently were into or had gone through periods in which they actively sought out casual hookups. ‘We’re taught not to talk about our desires because that’s not appropriate subject matter,” Chingy says. “But our desires are totally fucking natural.'”
Cinnamon Maxxine and Kissy Burgundy in Crash Pad Series episode 288
“Just because it makes you uncomfortable, just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s inherently more dangerous than what you do.” D/s is not abuse, kink and sexuality expert Andrea Zanin correctly argues, and part of that is the tendency to see whatever “you” do as “right” and whatever “someone else” does as “not okay”:
“[I]t seems like over the decades of kink’s further mainstreaming, what’s happened is that kink hobbyists have drastically multiplied, and perhaps because of those numbers, many of them now see themselves as safer, saner and more consensual than full-timers because of what they perceive as built-in healthy limits on what they do. (I feel like there’s a kink community parallel with polynormativity here, but I’m too tired to flesh it out this very second.) The rest of us, this odd minority that insists on eschewing bite-size scenes in favour of a power-flavoured life, must therefore be super extreme and dangerous and possibly unhinged.
I would counter-propose: Sometimes, the supposedly healthy limits of scene-based kink actually prevent you from talking about what may be an ongoing thread of power between people, or within yourself and your desires. Sometimes, rather than providing a safe framework, a scene provides a shield against your acknowledgement of real-life power dynamics you’re too uncomfortable to name and deal with ethically. Sometimes, power is real, but because you’re so invested in calling it play, you can’t even look at it in all its truth—and therefore you cannot possibly do it responsibly. Sometimes, the container is actually a prison.”
Bambi Belle and Denali Winter in Crash Pad Series episode 280
Who pays on a queer first date?
Sometimes it’s hard to make eye contact during sex.
A chlamydia vaccine could be on the way.
Daisy Ducati and Ella Nova in Crash Pad Series episode 186
Astrological compatibility is a scam, says astrologer:
“You can look at the chart of the Sagittarius you’ve been circling on a dating app or the Libra you’ve been shamelessly flirting with and still not know if you’re going to live happily ever after, if they’ll give you the orgasm of your life, or if they’ll ghost you and send you crying to your therapist. ‘Yes, all of the signs belong to an element and signs that share the same elements are going to have this affinity to each other, but that does not translate into real life or a relationship,’ [astrologer Annabel] Gat tells Bitch. ‘People can be compatible with anyone. So compatibility isn’t about the right sign with the right sign; it’s really about the right person being with the right person at that time in their life.'”
“the container is a prison”
I think I’ve run into more than one person trapped in there. Ana Valens did an article about how shitty pornhub is a few weeks ago, I mean color me surprised.
Possibly replated picture of some old friends
I miss those parties so much
I read that excellent essay by Andrea Zanin last week. It made me think of how naming things lets us see them, but only within the boundaries of what we think those words mean. If I call something play, or if I call something abuse, or if I call something love, then my relationship to the other becomes framed by my belief as to what that means.
It’s no wonder that names/ naming are considered to hold so much power across so many/ all societies.
Yes yes yes to everything Annabel said in that article; astrology gives you information and helps you make choices and better understand yourself and other people, but any two people can end up together!
‘Sometimes, rather than providing a safe framework, a scene provides a shield against your acknowledgement of real- life power dynamics you’ re too uncomfortable to name or deal with ethically’.
And:
‘Power unacknowledged is power uncontrolled. Power feared is power denied. Power denied is power abused. And yes, that’ s true on both sides of the slash’. (This is directly from Andrea Zanin’ s article)
As written this is about kinky/ BDSM scenes, but for me this is a revelation regarding what I deal with and study, namely transmisigyny in scenes. Why do these people act as they do, i.e. the transmisogynists, and all the others who stand idly by while trans women are excluded, ridiculed, subjected to micro- ( and not so ‘micro’) aggressions, invalidated as women? While their mouths are full of social justice lingo and evocations of ‘the community’?
I think that Andrea Zanin provides an instrument for detecting and identifying, among other things, exclusion processes based on identity markers, trans women are of course not the only category subjected to power relations of this kind. The formula might be somewhat like this:
The more you self- identify with a scene, the easier it is for you to deny the real- world power you wield and the real- world power others, and the scene, wield over you, namely to yourself.
Some may find this disturbing. I find it enlightening.
The idea that a Google survey of 20 queer women and NB people is a coherent and meaningful representation of the sexual experiences of rural queer women is absurd. That’s like walking into a bar in Chicago and making an inference about every bar in an urban centre in North America. If you’re going to write an entire article about this actually real phenomenon, bring a higher caliber of research and diligence. Unimpressed.