Tag: sexuality

A fascinating look at so-called obscenity, then and now.

Deenie Hartzog-Mislock confronts a lifetime of body image trauma when her marriage turns south and sexless.

Deena ElGenaidi considers the ways in which adoring Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine from afar in her teens and early 20s provided a safe outlet for expressing desire.

While searching for photographs that depict black young women and girls living free in the second and third generations born after slavery, Saidiya Hartman finds a disturbing image.

On the profound loneliness of female desire in Lisa Taddeo’s “Three Women.”

An anthropologist on a return visit to a remote village in Papua New Guinea learns that all the village’s young men are terribly wounded.

Darcey Steinke says that most menopause memoirs “end with this come-to-Jesus moment of, ‘Then I accepted hormones.’ I’m not against it, but … I wanted to hear what it’s like for other women.”

What/If references the celebrated steamy genre of the 80s and 90s, but lacks its guts. Why can’t any of the new neo-noirs go all the way?

Black women face outsized threats if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

A tender relationship with a fellow exotic dancer shows Natassja Schiel how to love her sister, a recovering addict.

Minda Honey interrogates her sexuality and questions the future of straight-by-default.

Growing up, Niya Marie sought refuge in Whitney Houston’s ethereal notes; as an adult, Marie found recognition in her silences.

While healing from a back injury, Mariam I. Williams learns to let go of the ways she has been taught to mistrust her body.

As Caitlin Moran explains, there are Bad Men, and then there are Badly Educated Men.

Journalist Donna Minkowitz realizes 25 years later she was victim to her own internalized homophobia and ignorance on trans issues when she broke the story of Brandon Teena, subject of Boys Don’t Cry.

Lessons of race, blackness and power from a self-described nerdy Black girl.

How the MeToo movement became a feminist sexual revolution.

Men, get ready to be uncomfortable for a while. While forgiveness may come one day, it won’t be soon.

Laurie Penny wants a new conversation about women, men, consent, desire, and autonomy.

After longing to be a sex-symbol as a child, Shannon Lell grapples with a lifetime of self-objectification.

“I’ll never go back to dating a real woman again — no matter what happens.”

A Muslim international student came to New York City, and soon embraced her sexuality and all the cultural challenges it would create.

“When my state passed one of the most rigid abstinence-only sex education laws in the nation, I went back to school.”

Jason Phoebe Rusch, in a raw and honest essay in Entropy, takes readers through an experience of being transgender that’s different from most of the narratives the media focuses on.

In the two years since I compiled the first installation of “The Lives of Nuns,” Autostraddle wrote about queer nuns in history, Racked shadowed (fake) nuns growing marijuana, and The Huffington Post reported on a nun’s murder and the students who want the truth. Those stories and more are included below. Seclude yourself and read.

The curious quest to trace the history of a sex toy found in a 19th-century Quaker family home.

An excerpt from Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’.

Alysia Abbott recalls being raised by her poet father—a single, openly gay man—in the San Francisco of the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

The sound stage for Orange, where we proudly employ what has to be at least 64% of lesbians in the New York City metro area, is not a place where you can shy away from women or sexuality. And if you’re trying to, Lea Delaria (Big Boo) will nip it in the bud by inviting you […]

The following writers straddle the line between explanation and expression. Here is my piece. It is personal. Lauren Morelli’s piece especially touched me. An ex-boyfriend once told me he consulted with his pastor and his wife to see if he should be concerned; would my “healthy fascination with bisexuality” (his words, which I don’t necessarily […]