Sunday Sex Reads: Best of the Week

monica bellucci lui

Above: Monica Bellucci in Lui Magazine November 2015.

  • “By 1830, the average length of a whaling voyage was thirty months, but they were often longer—Nantucket wives were dubbed “Cape Horn widows,” because their husbands might be gone for eight years. In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab tells his first mate, Starbuck, that of the past forty years of “making war on the horrors of the deep” he’d only been ashore three, leaving only “one dent in [his] marriage pillow.” “[W]ife?” Ahab rages, “wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive!” The dildos, called “he’s-at-homes” in some books on the history of the Yankee whale fishery, were meant to be some insurance of fidelity for a husband who was rarely present.”
    There Once Was a Dildo in Nantucket (LitHub)
  • “I’m here to talk about sex and writing about sex, especially writing sex in SF that expands beyond real-world boundaries and assumptions about sex. To evoke a recent Hugo winner, I’ll call it a three-body problem, where the three elements are sex, science fiction, and writing itself, and the solution requires understanding of each. I see many essays about sexuality or sexual identity in genre fiction—I’ve written quite a few myself—that I feel don’t adequately include the act of writing itself in the equation. Because once I began to address writing directly in the relationship between sexuality and science fiction, I laid bare the entire fallacy of the literary establishment, which condemns laser beams and lasciviousness equally.”
    Out of This World Sex Writing (Strange Horizons)
  • “In 1964, Gerald Harris successfully prosecuted Jonas Mekas for showing a 43-minute film by Jack Smith called “Flaming Creatures,” which included nudity and sex acts. Fifty-one years later, after reading an article about Mr. Mekas in The New York Times, Mr. Harris reached out to the defendant to apologize.”
    The Prosecution Resets in a 1964 Obscenity Case (NYT)
  • “A classic bridge experiment was conducted in 1974 by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron that had men contacted by an attractive woman either on a scary suspension bridge, or a non-fear arousing bridge. The woman asked them to fill out questionnaires. The men on the fear-arousing bridge felt more sexual arousal for the woman.”
    Decoding the Science Behind Makeup Sex (LadyLux)
  • “That Oregon has a lot of strip clubs is well known to any resident. Why here? Locals understand it’s partly because Oregon loves free speech. It’s the only state to have no crime of obscenity, which remains a federal offense. Oregon’s free speech protections are far more expansive than those of the federal government. The all-nude, liquor-serving strip clubs are just the most visible manifestation of a legal framework that protects everything from naked bike rides to verbal harassment to unlimited campaign spending.”
    How an Oregon football scandal changed the state’s free speech laws forever (SB Nation)
  • “If a pirate had a mid-’70s lounge, it would look like this. Just a typical San Francisco sex party. A voluptuous, tattooed woman wearing nothing but a thong interrupted the light chatter with a question. “Anyone want to help me hold down and fuck my pregnant friend?” Her question was met with a chorus of arms raised, and I was left alone, squinting in the direction of a pile of girls surrounding a woman, eight months pregnant and getting enthusiastically fisted.”
    I’m Always the Wallflower at the Orgy (NY Mag)
  • “There were a few other women in the class. We all smiled awkwardly at each other and made small talk while we sat in folding chairs. We pretended we weren’t about to take a class that promised to teach the psychology of a submissive male, how to manage a stable of men, and, my personal favorite, how to harness your pussy power. I was there to finally change the pattern of my love — and sex — life.”
    The Dominatrix Class That Changed My Life (Narratively) See also, recommended: ForteFemme
  • “Although people might separate their romantic orientations from their sexual orientations, some feel that these distinctions are problematic and steeped in centuries of homophobia. Charles Pulliam Moore discussed the phenomenon of “bisexual but hetero-amorous” men in a Thought Catalog piece and how their willingness to have sex with men, while withholding the emotional attachment, prevents them from being accepted by both the heterosexual and LGBT communities. “Bisexuals get a bad rap for not being able to explain their emotional actions that seem so incongruous with their sexual proclivities. That doesn’t need to be the case.”
    Are You a Heteroromantic Bisexual? A Guide to One of the Most Misunderstood Sexual Orientations (Mic)
  • “While conventional psychotherapists still debate the ethics of hugging their patients, Rogers and Thole have pioneered a form of intensive therapy that incorporates consensual BDSM activities into their sessions with clients. The objective is to activate repressed emotions in order to process them in a safe and supportive environment. In order to better understand their technique, which they call Light/Dark Therapy, the couple invited me to participate in an immersion with them. For the next forty-eight hours, we will not leave this cabin.”
    That Time I Tried BDSM Therapy (The Atlantic)

Share This Post

Post Comment