Dr. Willie Parker, who is trained as a gynecologist and OBGYN, is a hero for the pro-choice movement because he’s honest about the undiscussed aspects of getting (or not getting) an abortion. Watch how he gives a consultation.
That last statement about regret is so important, because so many people don’t understand what it is or what causes it. Anti-choicers exploit this by manipulating pregnant people and creating doubt, which only increases the likelihood of regret, no matter what decision the pregnant person makes. You know what is best for you, even if it takes some time to figure it out.
“hookup culture is bad” okay thats a fair take lets see your reasoning though
“because you never have romance or intimacy and only have sex” okay so youre just a piece of shit okay i see goodnight
how come you guys can get your heads around romance without sex but cant get it around sex without romance? why is one inherently toxic? why do you see one as pure and one as unholy? is it, perhaps, sex negativity? the thing you claim not to hold?
i actually wonder when being comfortable with expressing your sexuality has become synonymous with not respecting yourself. how does being openly sexual makes you lose self-respect in someone else’s eyes? unlearn whatever bullshit you’ve been taught. sex isn’t dirty. being open about sex isn’t a whore behavior. sex is human and normal, and it’s only as pure or dirty as you make it out to be.
there are a lot of things you can be ashamed of in this world, but embracing your sexuality isn’t one of them. i promise you.
This made Me laugh out loud. It’s not just about the orgasms, you know. It’s about the joking around, the laughter, the smiles. That’s such an important part of life. And a sense of humour that’s compatible with someone else’s is as precious as sexual compatibility.
The problem with growing up in a society like ours is that no matter how hard we try, how much we grow, how liberal we try to be, there will always be those little voices in our heads saying horrible things about ourselves and others. In a land where rich white men profit off of hatred and negativity, somewhere alone the way it plants this deep inside our heads too. A little Donald Trump, or Nigel Farage, or Tony Abbott live in all our heads, saying horrible untruths, and by God, they’re near impossible to pick back out.
Hi. I’m Jess, I’m 23 years old, I like in London and I’m an English Literature graduate. And I’m an ism-aholic. But I’m working on it.
I don’t know when I first started to notice the judgements my brain passed out - maybe at Uni, when I had the good luck to find and befriend some very diverse and wonderfully liberal people, or when I joined Tumblr, or maybe even before that. But at some point along the way I realised that no matter how liberal and accepting I thought I was, I still judge people in an instant, allow my perceptions to tar my interactions with people, and allow outdated and damaging societal structures and values to affect my daily life.
Of course, just realising wasn’t enough. Noticing the racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, classist, ableist… hell, everything-ist thoughts in my head didn’t stop them appearing, not by any means. It’ll be a lifelong struggle. But I challenge them each and every time they come up, and try to challenge others too. Because I’m part of the problem, and I’m going to try to be one of the people to tackle it. One day at a time!
That’s why campaigns like Brook’s ‘Sex:Positive’ are so amazing. They’re enlisting young people to help tackle a problem deeply ingrained and dear to their hearts, and mine. By talking about the judgemental and negative attitudes around sex and sexuality, and spreading examples of sex positivity, they are digging at the roots of the tiny Donald Trumps living in our brains. That’s fantastic, and I’m so happy I get to be a part of it.
I suppose I should probably start by explaining what I mean by “Pro-choice = pro-life”, before you condemn me as an uneducated idiot. Pro-choice is the school of thought that says that the decision to have, or not have, an abortion is the decision of the individual pregnant woman in question, and pro-life is the idea that any fertilised egg counts as a human life and to have an abortion is equivalent to murder.
“So how can you say they are the same thing?” I hear you say. By removing a woman’s right to choose, you are often condemning her to a life she does not want. I am by no means suggesting that a woman who continues with an unplanned or unwanted pregnancy will despise her child, because often she won’t. But she will live a life that she did not want, which isn’t exactly pro-life, is it? So maybe we can start to use pro-life to mean pro-female life, a stance which seeks to value women’s lives and choices.
We are lucky in the UK to live in a country where attitudes to abortion are comparatively modern. It is legal and free for a woman to have an abortion (yay). This doesn’t mean that everyone is pro-choice, and there are still plenty of barriers to this choice (you can read more about this here), but compared to the 74 countries (yes, 74!) where abortion is illegal, except in extreme circumstances, we are pretty lucky.
These countries are:
RED COUNTRIES ON THE MAP: ABORTION ILLEGAL IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES OR PERMITTED ONLY TO SAVE A WOMAN’S LIFE.
South America:Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Gustamala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nigaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Venezuela,
Middle East and North Africa:Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabi
Asia and Pacific:Pakistan, South Korea, Thailand
Europe:Poland
El Salvador has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world, partially due to the fact that 67% of sexual violence victims are under the age of 17. The men who commit these crimes can be sentenced to 6-10 years in prison. The victims who choose to seek out illegal abortions to liberate themselves from some of the consequences of these crimes could be sentenced to up to 50 years in prison, five times the punishment of the man who forced her into the situation, if new legislation is passed.
Before you stop me and say “but she chose to get rid of her baby, she could have just kept it, so she’s just as bad”, many of these women are too young to care for a baby and/or not in a position where they could financially care for a baby. Few women, few people, would choose to bring a child into a world where they know that that child will go to bed hungry every night, won’t have clean water to drink, and will never have the chance to go to school, if they knew there was another way.
By introducing these increased penalties, not only women who choose to have abortions, but also the innocent victims of obstetric emergencies, will be punished. Women have already been imprisoned for allegedly attempting to have abortions, when actually their babies were still-born. Perhaps one of the most painful experiences a woman could have, topped off with a jail sentence. As if she hadn’t suffered enough?
If you’d like to try to block this new legislation in El Salvador, and support a woman’s right to choose, please sign this petition, and show you’re pro-(female) life.
the relationship between the kink and queer communities is beautiful and they have done so much good together. i’m very thankful for all the kinksters and queers, present and past, who have worked to make our world a safer place.
so i’ve been on a comic reading binge lately and recently read alan moore’s “lost girls” (which if you have never heard of it is basically the kind of Problematic Queer Porn antis would tell you to kill yourself for writing, starring fairy tale characters in all their E for Explicit glory) and it wasn’t really to my tastes but because i’d heard it was regarded as a controversial work, i wanted to read over some reviews of it and see what other people’s opinions were and i found this review by Arthur Graham in particular that i read and loved and found extremely relevant to the kind of shit we constantly talk about in fandom discourse.
i’m not going to copy/paste the whole thing because it’s long but three parts that stand out are:
“Any furor that might erupt over Lost Girls is down to the fact that it has pictures,” argues Moore. “After all, far more violent and brutal pornographic prose novels, like those by the Marquis de Sade, are still in print, and no one is currently trying to prosecute them in court.” And though Lost Girls did manage to overcome its initial legal difficulties, it was still refused by several book sellers on the grounds that its visual content was too offensive. This tendency to censor images more strictly than words has been a characteristic of our culture ever since Moses supposedly stepped down from Mt. Sinai with the Second Commandment, which, when taken literally, seems to prohibit images of any kind. In the realm of the sexual image, however, censorship has been even more virulent.
As one example Moore cites William Blake, whose well-meaning followers, upon his death, “completely excised all of the erotic work that he’d done, because they didn’t want people to get the wrong idea of him.” Illustrating the tendency towards self-censorship, Moore reminds us that even Aubrey Beardsley, one of the finest British artists of the late Victorian era, requested on his deathbed that his beautiful illustrations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata be committed to the flames, along with his many other “obscene” works. In both cases, however, the motivating force behind the censorship was essentially the same: moral pressures of the time simply did not foster a very high tolerance for sex or sexual imagery. And, according to Moore:
the moral pressures of [Beardsley’s] time, looked back on from a more enlightened future, were simply wrong. The moral pressures of his time were what destroyed Oscar Wilde and everybody and every publication that Oscar Wilde had been associated with. I can see why Beardsley was nervous, but he shouldn’t have been, because he’d done nothing wrong. And if that applies to 1820, it certainly applies today.
The prohibitions against sex and sexual imagery, though certainly relaxed two centuries later, nevertheless continue to contribute to the denigration of pornography as inherently dirty, shameful, and generally undeserving of the status accorded to most other forms of art and literature. In response to this, Moore asks, “Why must these often very tender pieces of artwork be damned, consigned to this grubby under-the-counter genre, where there is a miasma hanging over the very word? That is another reason for stubbornly calling [Lost Girls] ‘pornography’, because I wanted to reclaim the word.”
and:
It may be hard to find a single image in all three volumes of Lost Girls that isn’t being used to explore deeper sexual themes and issues, but for the reader who finds sex and sexuality inherently offensive, this may not be enough to affect a pardon. “If we couldn’t offend anybody,” jokes Moore, “then how could it be a transgressive work of pornography? We would have been rightly accused of having done something that was a literary work, which dodged the real issues that it set out to address.”
However, before judging the book’s content or presentation, it is important to remember that the authors aren’t necessarily condoning or advocating all or even any of the sex acts they portray, any more so than the writer of a murder mystery is necessarily advocating the act of murder. “As a work of pornography,” Moore explains, “Lost Girls follows a basic tenet of the genre, which is the thrill of vicariously experiencing something taboo or transgressive.” He continues:
We don’t seem to have much of a problem in distinguishing between fact and fantasy except for when it comes to sex, and I’m not entirely sure why that is, why we make a special case for sexuality. It’s okay to show murders in most of our great art, it’s perfectly okay to show how life can be ended, but there is something suspect in showing the ways in which life can be begun, or just showing people enjoying themselves.
and third:
“The sexual imagination, which is the biggest part of sexuality, is not well served in our culture,” explains Moore, “and I really don’t understand why that should be.” It is this lack of sexual imagination, according to Moore, that limits the ways in which we’re allowed to view, think about, and practice sex. However, if the millennia of erotic art between the Venus of Villendorf and Lost Girls is any indication, “Pornography has always been with us and always will be with us, and nothing’s going to change that. The only question is, ‘Is it going to be good pornography or is it going to be bad pornography?’ And given that most pornography today is very bad indeed, it’s probably about time that people make a serious effort to reclaim this despised genre.”
If bad pornography limits and constricts sex into a very narrow, ultimately hollow commodity, then good pornography should enlarge and challenge our ideas concerning sex and sexuality, finally doing justice to the rich sexual universe we live in. By refusing to cater exclusively to any one sex, gender, or orientation, by refusing to portray the sex act as separate from the deepest self, and by refusing the bounds of physical reality their puritanical reign over the limitless sexual imagination, Lost Girls has done precisely this. Even if it breaks a thousand taboos along the way, so be it: as a work of pure fiction, it could break every sexual taboo known to man and never hurt a thing.
you can read the full review here(TW for NSFW images and topics in the review, keeping in mind that it’s for a piece of NSFW media).
the general gist of it being that there is a difference between fiction and reality and fiction is a safe and healthy place to explore one’s fantasies and take one’s imagination to wherever it can possibly go without harming anyone because that is what what fiction is for.
also,nota point by the reviewer but by myself: if an author as talented and well respected as alan moore can write thiskind story with thiskind of content without it defining his worth as either a writer or a human being and without it ruining his reputation or his life, then all of you fic writers and fanartists and smaller original content creators out there who create work with similar themes certainly don’t deserve to be treated any differently. despite current fandom climate, please don’t believe otherwise.
As a person who has always had an unusual interest in sex and sexuality, and a high sex drive to match…I’ve often felt othered by my peers and culturally pressured to suppress that aspect of myself.
In fact, the stigmatization is so bad it took me almost 30 years to notice that all the words we have to talk about highly sexual people are exclusively for disordered sexuality. This led me to work on creating an identity and flag for people like me, who are highly sexual, but not in a way that negatively impacts life.
Flag Meaning
Green represents consent, communication and respect. It takes up the most space, and is in the center because consent is the foundation of healthy sexuality.
Purple represents sensuality, intimacy and vulnerability
Warm pink represents raw sexual power, and carnality
Black represents support for safe, sane kink exploration
FAQ
What is extrasexual and what is supersexual? The terms can be used interchangeably. A supersexual or extrasexual person is someone who is highly sexual, but not in a way that is causing them distress or damaging their life. This is contrasted with hypersexuality, which is a term meant for people who have a disordered relationship with their high sex drive. It may be easiest to think of extrasexuality and supersexuality as the opposite of asexuality.
Isn’t that just ‘horny’? While it’s true that extrasexual and supersexual people are often horny, the word horny is not an identity, it’s a feeling. As such, people of all identities, (even some ace people) can feel horny. Extrasexuality and supersexuality are terms exclusively for people with a much higher than average sex drive or interest in sex/sexuality.
Why do these identities need to exist? First, to combat stigma. The stigmatization of sex and the people who are passionate about sex in our culture is often so pervasive that it’s invisible. It’s easier to bring attention and respect to these issues if we have terms that people can take seriously. Second, to create community. It’s useful to have terms and a flag to rally under, so people who have suffered in similar ways can connect and offer each other the kind of support you can only get from people who understand your experience directly.
Are extrasexual and supersexual ‘queer’? Are we doing LGBTQIAES+ now??? No. Though many queer people are also extrasexual/supersexual, having a high sex drive alone is not enough to warrant inclusion under those labels. While extrasexual and supersexual people experience stigma and shame for who they are, that shame is not rooted in homophobia. The communities can support one another effectively as allies.
What ways are extrasexual/supersexual people stigmatized? To begin with, many of the world’s largest religions mandate modesty, chastity and sexual purity. Women in particular are considered heathens or sinners for engaging in perfectly consensually and safe sex, especially outside of marriage. All throughout human history women have been stoned to death, burned alive and otherwise killed in the name of sexual purity. Even today, many women feel extreme shame about their own bodies, and guilt for enjoying sex.
Men are often expected to be extrasexual, even when they are not. They’re pressure to pursue sex in unhealthy and coersive ways in order to establish social standing. As a result, men who are extrasexual may be rewarded if they are considered conventionally attractive and socially intelligent in their social circles. For extrasexual men who are not considered conventionally attractive, or live with nuerodivergency like autism however, are likely to be considered inherently predatory if they even mention sex.
Sexuality has also been legally controlled in a myriad of ways, from the criminalization of sex work, to decency laws controlling what types of bodies can even appear in porn.
Aren’t overly sexual people dangerous? Anyone, regardless of their personal relationship with sex can violate consent. Consent is especially important when it comes to the topic of sex and sexuality because bodies are highly personal to us. While sex has the potential to be a very intimate and bonding experience, it’s that same vulnerability that can create risk. Many people have had experiences where their bodies were not respected, and as a result have been hurt or now live with trauma. Being extrasexual/supersexual is NEVER an excuse not to respect consent. That’s why the color green, representing consent, is in the center of the extrasexual/supersexual pride flag, and also takes up the most space. It’s the absolute foundation of a strong community that prioritizes reducing harm.
Sadly, it’s the stigmatization of sex that has led people to feel afraid to have the open dialogues that are required for creating a strong consent culture. It’s led people to feel ashamed to seek help when something has happened to them. https://www.consent.academy/book.html is an invaluable resource on how we can work together to build a consent culture that works for everyone, supersexual/extrasexual or otherwise.
I wouldn’t define queerness that way either, to be fair. Interested in your thoughts on that point.
I really don’t feel there’s anything queer about supersexuality. Though I guess I’m struggling with how to express ‘why’ in a way that isnt reductive of queerness as a whole.
I’d guess that the vast majority of megasexual people would be cisgender, heterosexual, heteromanic people with no historical ties to queer liberation. Maybe thats all?
“Female sexuality” is about the sexual pleasure of women, it is about the pleasure that our vulvas/clits/vaginas can proportionate, it is about our satisfaction, our bodies, our orgasms.Stop using “female sexuality” and “performing to men” as interchangeble things, lingerie is not female sexuality, porn with poor women being put to fake pleasure is not female sexuality, revealing outfits is not female sexuality, high heels and make up is not female sexuality.Erase this idea that female sexuality is utterly and naturally connected to performing things for men’s sexual approval, delete it
Female sexuality is about the pleasure of the female.Read it, absorb it, make a little note about it if necessary but never subject women’s sexuality to servitude to males ever again
[Also: how many people would be interested in a NSFW/ 18+ side-blog? I want to keep this one rated G, but sex-positivity and body image problems can be especially difficult for trans people to navigate. Let me know in the replies?]
Hi anon!
(Sorry I didn’t answer the ask directly, I want to keep this blog safe for minors to combat the stigma that being trans is an 18+ subject! So I’m trying this method for replies- lol - hopefully I’ll figure out a better system soon.
Anyway, the censored words are strap-on and fucked, sorry if it feels like I’m making this weird, I’m all for sex-positivity, but like I said I’m trying to keep the main blog rated G.)
Anon, enjoying “bottoming” does not make you a gay man! What defines your sexuality is your sex partners, not the sexual acts.
For example: plenty of lesbians like to be on the receiving end and that doesn’t make them straight. Straight men that like being fingered/pegged by their gf aren’t gay. Straight women who don’t like penetration aren’t automatically gay. Gay men who don’t like bottoming/anal aren’t straight. People like what they like in bed, that defines their kinks/fetishes, not their sexuality.
Also: being attracted to dominant women is a super common straight dude thing? You might enjoy bottoming, you might be enjoying your gf topping, ideally both, but either or might be enough to get off. Honestly, if you don’t have bottom dysphoria, or can manage your bottom dysphoria to the extent that you feel comfortable having penetrative sex, good for you! The human body is capable of amazing things, and if you can take advantage of those G-spot orgasms, then you’re a lucky guy!
We NEED to put sex and magic back on the pride flag right now
I’m fed up of people being like yea we need magic but not the sex one, sex positivity is vital to the lgbtq+ community it is not invalidating to asexual people to celebrate gay sex as something that is positive and beautiful and natural. We should be celebrating all the aspects of our community and this can include both asexuals and sex positivity
I feel like most of the aro posts on my blog are about how being aro doesn’t inherently exclude you from the possibility of finding a partner— because I’m an aro who would quite like a partner someday— but I really want to emphasise that:
It is okay if you personally don’t want a partner.
And this still applies if you’re allosexual.
Some of the worst arophobia I have seen on this site has been from people who seem to think that it suddenly becomes okay and acceptable to slut-shame people so long as they’re aromantic.
“Aromantic people are just straight men who want to have sex with women and then dump them!”
“If the ‘a’ includes aromantics then frat boys are lgbt!”
“Aromantic? Don’t you mean sociopath?” (This is also, obviously, ableist, btw. Having a mental disorder doesn’t preclude you from being a good person if you want to be.)
Look, it’s not 1856. You shouldn’t have to declare your undying love for somebody and get permission from a vicar before you’re allowed to sleep with them. While sex can be a way for people to become closer as a couple or show their love for their partner, it can also just be like a fun activity that you do because you’re horny. And while I feel like a lot of people on this site claim to agree with that statement, some of them really seem to have trouble understanding that it doesn’t magically stop being true because you’re aro.
Aros can have multiple partners.
Aros can have casual friends with benefits situations that aren’t anywhere near as intense/committed as qprs.
Aros can have random hookups.
Whatever you do in bed, it is literally nobody’s business except you and any people you currently happen to be in bed with. So long as everybody involved is consenting, being safe and having a good time, you’re not doing anything wrong.
And this still applies if you are a heterosexual, cisgender man.
Your attraction is not inherently predatory, misogynistic or objectifying just because it isn’t accompanied by romantic feelings. You don’t owe people mushy feelings and a relationship just because you had sex with them. If you go into a sexual encounter with someone making it clear that it’s just going to be about sex, and then they start getting upset with you for not providing more, then that’s not your fault.
Don’t feel obliged to do things that aren’t natural to you just because alloros try and guilt you into it.
And for everyone else:
If your sex positivity doesn’t include aromantics, then it’s not true sex positivity.
Last year, I was invited to write the forward to Christine Delphy’s Close To Home, recently published by Verso Press. Delphy’s essays look at the material economic conditions that underlie and perpetuate gender inequality, and I have thought of her work often over the past year: during the intra-left debates during the Democratic primaries, the casting of Hillary Clinton as a “bourgeois woman” (and therefore the enemy - Delphy’s whole chapter on bourgeois women is on point and kind of hilarious, if you’re the kind of person who finds hilarity in arguments between Marxists, feminists, and Marxist feminists), and post-US election as well.
I am sharing this information with you because feminist org Continuum is running a giveaway of the book today (until EOD Thursday 11/17, American EST), to coincide with the Radicals & Revolutionaries Lab webinar I’ll be doing with them on Friday, November 25th at 12pm US EST, 9am PST, and 5pm GMT. (That’s 4am Saturday east coast Australian time - eep. And sorry.)
Continuum was one of the first groups I discovered when I moved to New York two and a half years ago, and they have been core to my sense of community in the city, introducing me to many of the fiercest and most inspiring people I know here.
Over the summer, Continuum launched their monthly Radicals & Revolutionaries Lab webinar, which has served as food for my soul, featuring up-close and in-depth conversations with people like Alicia Garza from Black Lives Matter, Ai-jen Poo from the National Domestic Workers Alliance, feminist hip hop artist Shanthony Exum, and leaders from the Doula Project and Drunk Feminist Films.
I’m so excited to be able to share the work I’m doing around The Sex Myth at R&R Lab next week, and would love to see as many of you there as possible.
“Sex positivity” can be a confusing name because it sounds like it means “sex is always great and everyone should have it”. I think a lot of people get misled by that.
It’s the antithesis of “sex negativity”, which is the idea that sex is uniquely powerful and dangerous and morally laden among all human behaviours. That there’s a special moral virtue in being ignorant about sex, a virtue that you lose when you learn about or have it. That you can be kind to someone, cruel to them, save their life, or kill them, but that won’t change who you are nearly so much as if you have sex with them. It’s the idea that outside of very specific moral boundaries, sex is fundamentally immoral and degrading, no matter how its participants feel about it. That it’s fundamentally wrong to feel sexual desire, to entertain sexual fantasies, to seek sexual pleasure, or to reach orgasm, unless you’re in one of the very limited set of moral parameters that make that okay. Those parameters are usually things like whether the people involved are married or in a committed relationship, whether they’re the right sex/gender, whether it’s for the right motivation (some people think “only for procreation” and others think “never for money”) and whether the sex act is one society approves of.
And there’s a very specific set of societal expectations: Of course everybody WANTS sex, that’s what’s healthy and normal, and unless you’re very weird or very special, of course you will try as hard as you can to enter a relationship like marriage where sex is allowable so you CAN have it. Once you do that, you basically owe it to the person you’re married to TO have sex. It’s because everybody wants sex so much that we need all these rules! Obviously WITHOUT these rules, people would run mad and make all kinds of big mistakes, because people can’t tell for themselves what’s right or wrong.
Sex positivity doesn’t take the opposite tack and say that sex is always good. Rather, its basic principle is that sex is ordinary.It’s like anything else humans do, like eating or sleeping or speaking or touching people. It’s value-neutral. People get to decide how they feel about it and whether they want to have it. If we make a society built on sex-positive principles, the average person will have enough information and empathy to be able to make the choices that feel right for them and others.
Sex positivity means understanding that if someone doesn’t want to have sex, that’s their absolute right, and it has the same moral weight as if they do want to have sex.
Sex positivity means that if someone has sex, the most important thing is whether they genuinely understand what sex is, what its risks are, what their rights are, and how to make it safe and pleasurable–and whether, knowing all these things, they have freely chosen to have this sex at this moment. The same goes for anyone else involved in the sex. Sex-positive sex with other people depends on valuing everyone involved; everyone involved has to be able to form their own opinions, make their own decisions, and have their own needs and wishes respected.
We don’t currently live in a sex-positive society. A society where being attractive or sexy is mandatory, where promiscuous sex is viewed as compulsory, and where people are shamed and punished for not wanting to have sex, is not actually sex-positive. And the sex-positive movement itself, sex-positive people, can miss the mark and fail to live up to their own principles, by not making space for people who need the freedom to express very different desires and boundaries.
The key to sexual liberation is not the “sex” part. It’s the “liberation” part. It’s about giving everyone the same freedom.
(Rules: If you want to argue with me you need to send me $20 to pay for the research and analysis it will take to seriously engage with you; otherwise, make your own post. No accusing me or anyone else of being a sexual predator without proof. No death threats, suicide bait, or invocations of harm like “I hope you die”/”somebody ought to kill you”)
