Let me know if u guys want a video on how you (yes, you!) can be fake bi!!

In which I discuss the greater female need for commitment, the absurdity of anti-freedom “solutions” to it (coming from reactionary feminists)

Life sucks, I guess. Yet more evidence I’m glad I’m aromantic.

Inam heads back to the dungeon for a thoughtful look and autobiographical dive into the roles she’s there to play.

Top or Bottom, Rigger or Bunny, Inam learns to be present in the moment, inhabit the role and most importantly: enjoy herself.

Hooking up: sexual liberation or unethical exploitation? With the rise of dating apps, sexual gratification seems like a few taps (or swipes) away at any given moment. What implications does this have for sexual ethics around consent, fantasy, and using other people merely for pleasure? In this episode, Ellie and David dive into the history, theory, and criticisms of hookup culture. Is there a way to hook up ethically? Some argue that the power imbalances fundamental to hooking up prevent it from ever being on equal grounds, yet others claim that the shift to hooking up generates potential for queer exploration and for sexual discretion in ways that were previously unavailable. Let’s find out!

What do a bunch of male nudists get up to on an overnight retreat? Turns out, there’s just a lot of sitting around making conversations – oh, and overcoming social anxiety, of course!

This graphic novel follows Caitlin Cook, who is asexual but does not yet fully realize it. From evangelical purity politics to the footloose college campus, Caitlin navigates different worlds each with their own sexual orthodoxies, and clumsily attempts to fit into each of them. A thoughtful and immersive coming-of-age memoir about one girl’s struggle to figure out and then claim her asexual identity.

An absolutely lovely novel.

In this provocative investigation into OnlyFans—the adult platform where subscribers around the world spent more than $7 billion in 2024—journalist Leon Neyfakh teams up with comedian and OnlyFans creator Gracie Canaan for a one-of-a-kind exploration into the current state of human connection.

Throughout, they discover that the site originally built for spicy adult content has quietly and surprisingly become something more complicated—an emotional marketplace where desire, performance, care, fantasy, and vulnerability seemingly blur together.

Fascinating anthropology.

The dynamics of this are straightforward: when a man is not ravenous for female approval, he relaxes and stops contorting himself into shapes designed for the approval of others (which girls hate, ironically), and a natural consequence is a significant step-change in attractiveness. “Confidence” is the casual shorthand for this phenomenon.

Libido, Sex Drive, Desire… as a society we put so much weight on the pressure to have an abundance of this ethereal thing, that we can feel a real deep loss when it wanes.

Cyan shares with us their story, as she’s takes steps to rediscover, heal, and explore her own changing relationship to sex.

Many people will tell you this, about being queer, but you will fuck up your own life until you believe it, so here’s one more repetition: Believing the meanest thing about yourself also requires you to believe the meanest possible thing about the people who love you. You cannot be good for even one other queer person if you are still doing hate crimes to yourself.

But there is another man in that scene, and he is also losing something — not by choice, not for the sake of some grand principle, but because his boyfriend cares less about his feelings than he does about some abstract idea of Righteousness. Being kind to the people who love you is also righteous, and William is resolutely failing to do it. He’s so steeped in his particular suffering that he can’t see the pain he’ll cause.

Regarding the feminist concept of sexual objectification, Bauer explains that it was coined as part of a feminist shift in how to understand the world and one’s experience in it. According to the shift in question, in a context in which women experience widespread, systematic, diachronic, and structural disadvantages, certain ways of perceiving and representing women tend to cause them material and psychological harm. Bauer argues that once someone participates in this shift, the term ‘sexual objectification’ will ‘light up’ the relevant phenomena, and the person in question will see objectification everywhere she looks in contemporary culture. This is the case even if she is not in a position to specify exactly its marks and features.

Finally, I have read my first SEP entry in full. This reading has definitely strengthened my understanding of common positions, but no real illumination was had with respect to what to do about this whole thing. Sigh.

There’s an irony in this. We use these words euphemistically because we’re too afraid to say the word ‘sex’. Our inability to talk about sex plainly forces us to recruit other (very useful!) words for the task. Because we cannot say ‘fucking’, ‘eating out’, or ‘jerking off’, we say ‘we slept together’, or ‘we were intimate yesterday’. The irony is that this prudishness is making everything more sexual.

I kinda get what this person is tryna say, but it don’t feel quite right. I think for many people reading the article, the message fell flat because of its inherent crassness. I think the author does phrase in a useful way the relationship between social categories and social scripts, but I they ultimately end up falling into the pit of “if only everyone just…” I dunno; I need to keep digesting it.

But I will also in many ways be a man – for once the term has meaning and distinguishes me from the feminist women with whom I politically identify – and sometimes that will mean that my eyes will see you, woman, and there will be sensations and emotions, lust and eroticized longings, and this will be true even though I don’t want to be your colonizer and your oppressor. / What I will also be feeling is my own defenseless sensitivity to those very feelings. I’d like it if women understood that. It’s a bit scary when women I’m attracted to hold it against me.

I particularly want to name as traumatizing the belief that male sexuality is unwanted, uncontrollable, and threatening and harmful to women; that men are continually on the verge of committing sexual violence; or that male sexuality is fundamentally alien from female sexuality, with no overlap or shared experiences. These beliefs are profoundly sexist (yes, even when feminists say them) and common in a wide range of diverse subcultures. If you are a good, kind man who wants to respect women, and you are taught these beliefs, you’re going to dissociate from your sexuality. You’ve been taught that being predatory is not a choice made by people who can choose differently, but an inherent feature of male sexuality. You don’t want to be predatory, so it feels like you shouldn’t be sexual.

Man, this sex stuff is really hard, huh.

The sissy must behave against a patriarchal backdrop, not in a vacuum. Sexually assertive behaviors which would not be considered oppressive otherwise are open to being interpreted that way precisely because other men, in general, have behaved as they have. Nowhere does this have greater impact than in the matter of the simple, honest declaration of sexual attraction. Surrounded by females complaining of the exploitative, insensitive nature of men’s raw sexuality, and often confronted head-on with the generic automatic female response to all male expressions of immediate sexual interest, the sensitive young male who identifies with and respects women is likely to be rapidly polarized. He ends up being driven towards a masculinizing track of ceasing to feel hurt by such interpretations of his sexuality, or else towards complete cessation of expressing appetite for women in order to avoid being accused of, to put it tritely, “being only after one thing.”

see: https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353592023005

Emotional factors encompass anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, body image concerns, and past traumatic experiences. Relational factors play a significant role, as partner conflict, dissatisfaction, poor communication, or lack of sexual skill can contribute to FOD.

Dating apps were built on the bones of Grindr. I have been known to joke that everything wrong with dating apps is divine retribution for culturally appropriating them from the gays.

(If this idea makes you freak out about the friend zone, I’m almost impressed with you because young people seem to do so little socializing that no one complains about the friend zone anymore. Pat yourself on the back for having friends if you’ve managed to develop a resentment complex around the friend zone)

This woman sure is able to churn out pithy prose. I agree with her spiritually, but there is a lot of gender essentialism. But perhaps what’s happening is that the apps are actually working to create and amplify differences between the genders (think Shilling, 2017, ch. 2).

‘Sexed bodies’ reviews how sexed bodies have been classified historically, which provides useful insights into cultural perceptions of men and women. If social prejudices and practices can shape physical development, amplifying or creating differences between the sexes, recent developments in neuroscience suggest that the brain is also likely to be affected by these processes. Advances in endocrinology have also promoted a significantly different view of the relationship between the body and sex. It concludes with the views of the contemporary feminist, Judith Butler, who has argued that the sexed body attains its social significance and appearance of substance as a result of the performances people engage in.

Gender socialization is terrifying, bro.