Samhita Mukhopadhyay’s new book Outdated: How Dating is Ruining Your Love Life takes a deep look at how the hell do you balance your feminist ideals with the archaic power dynamics that dating forces us to engage in and how skewed gender politics and damaging messaging are getting in the way of men and women finding real love. Read the rest of this entry »

The horrifying crisis unfolding at Penn State reminds us, yet again, of the carelessness of language used when we write about sexual violence.

In an AP article printed in the New York Times the headline reads, “2 Top Officials Step Down Amid Penn State Sex Scandal.” In countless other articles across far too many publications, journalists have also used the phrase “sex scandal” to refer to Penn State’s former defensive coordinator, Jerry Sandusky, allegedly raping and otherwise sexually abusing at least eight young boys.

A sex scandal is when, for example, a politician has an extramarital affair with a young female intern or when an evangelist preacher has an extramarital affair with a young masseur or another politician has a history of visiting escorts. In any such situation, there is (consensual) sex involved and the circumstances within which that sex was had are scandalous.

When we are talking about rape, sexual abuse, or sexual assault, and/or when these terrible acts of sexual violence occur between adults and children, we are talking about scandals of sexual violence. They are rape scandals, sexual abuse scandals, or sexual assault scandals but they are not sex scandals. Sex is consensual. Rape, sexual abuse, and sexual assault, as well as violent sexual acts forced upon children by adults are not consensual. Read the rest of this entry »

July 24, 2011. Kelebohile Nkhereanye and Renee Boyd confidently walk up a flight of stairs inside Brooklyn’s Municipal Building City Hall that sweltering Sunday morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Sugar,

Ever since I was small girl of about six, I have delighted in the idea of growth. And I don’t mean spiritual or emotional or mental growth. I mean literal growth. The idea of expansion has always excited me. Read the rest of this entry »

From Today’s Daily Rumpus email (to read entire Daily Rumpuses you need to subscribe):

“A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star.” So begins Glen Duncan’s review of Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Zone One. What does he mean? Can the porn star be an intellectual? What if an intellectual is dating another intellectual who is also a porn star? Let’s change the language and see how it sounds, “A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a poor black woman.” “A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating someone sexy who can’t read.”

Whoever is opposite the intellectual is not an intellectual as the genre novel is not a literary novel. Read the rest of this entry »

A literary novelist writing a genre novel is like an intellectual dating a porn star, right?  Well that’s what New York Times book reviewer Glen Duncan thinks.

In his Sunday Book Review of Colson Whitehead’s complex new zombie novel, Zone One, Duncan sets the parallel between dating porn stars and what he initially perceives as slumming in genre fiction, and lets the rest of the review ride on the back of this comparison.  While he’s busy offending sex workers, he also speculates that readers attracted to the story for its post-apocalyptic zombie tale will encounter so many big words as to be morally affronted.  Duncan praises the book and comes around to the idea of intellectually stimulating genre fiction, but never quite comes around to the idea of sex workers as intellectually stimulating people, concluding of his imaginary couple only that, “they look pretty good together.”

The piece came to our attention via a witty retort by Savvy stripper and staff writer over at Tits and Sass, Bubbles (whose thoughts on this issue you can read here):

“The images were graphic – they showed genitals and countless sex positions – but they were also artistic, and tasteful.”

BBC takes a closer look at The Joy of Sex forty years after its publication. The piece examines how publishers sought to avoid obscenity charges by using hand-drawn illustrations rather than photographs, focusing on creating quality artwork, and including ancient pictures as “foils” to offset the explicitness of the illustrations. We also get a glimpse of the couple who ended up serving as the main models for the many positions.

As it happens, Adrianna Luna and I grew up in the same neighborhood. We had mutual friends and, from time to time, we’d run into each other. A few months ago, I learned she started performing in porn and I was curious. Read the rest of this entry »

“To be clear: this isn’t about sexual repression; it’s about the sorry state of sexual expression. When did we forget how to talk dirty? Sexting transcripts are criminally boring. Craigslist ads read like chimp-generated remixes of the same five words. Is it the Internet? Why are Americans so bad at writing and speaking the thing they love thinking about and doing? You can measure a civilization’s cultural capital by how it encodes its basest operations. By that yardstick, we’re broke.”

Calling for a return to “the golden age of dirty talk,” this Awl piece introduces us to a 17^th century pamphlet dubbed The Academy of Pleasure and reflects on the value of euphemisms.

Having spent much of his working life as an editor, 38-year-old British writer-director Andrew Haigh knows very well the way that disparate scenes can be woven together to form a complex, unified whole. All that’s required is a critical eye to determine how the pieces fit together. Read the rest of this entry »

“I asked Crane what becoming a writer has meant to her personally. ‘When you’ve become so seasoned at shutting down your feelings because your survival depends on it, you need a crowbar to excavate them. Writing is the crucible.’”

Rumpus contributor Melissa Petro profiles Rumpus columnist Antonia Crane for Bitch Magazine. You can find all of Antonia’s Rumpus writing here.

What are the implications of female characters in comics for women?

This article ponders the question: who are today’s superheroines aimed to please? Laura Hudson describes how often contemporary comics claim their portrayals of women are sexually liberating, while they are instead undermining women.

This is an especially interesting cultural dissection when contrasted with Lisa Simpson, the literary backbone of the beloved Simpson family. The Atlantic‘s article, “A Visual History of Literature References On ‘The Simpsons”, selects from the impressive collection of literary references on the Lisa Simpson Book Club tumblr.

“The focal point for the cultural awareness of The Simpsons is, of course, Lisa, precocious bookworm and perennial conscience of the family, who laments that she’s destined for a life without friends or, even worse, a life confined to ‘grown up nerds like Gore Vidal, and even he’s kissed more boys than I have.’”

“Did I ever think I’d be taking my top off for rent money? No. I was in my mid-30s and had never danced before…”

Lawyer-turned-stripper “Carla” shares her story of dancing to recover from law school debt, and a little about the women that worked alongside her.

Rumpus contributor Anna Pulley is doling out advice as a sex columnist for Chicago newspaper RedEye. We love weekly offerings of wisdom here at the Rumpus, and thus, highly recommend the column. Check it out. This week’s topic is on how to be dominant in the bedroom (“Ultimately, the best way to learn anything is to just f**king do it.”)

Sativa January’s story, “The Phlebotomist” is about love, marriage and swingers, published on Our Stories, an online journal that publishes the best fiction on the web. Here’s an excerpt:

“But as Linda ripened and cured, marriage did something: It made her dowdy. Hetero. Almost loyal. She did, actually, now adore the way men, particularly Ed, could unfold before her without meeting her eye, as he faced away, blinking ahead at the road, or the television, or at the bottles of Jameson on the bar. She knew that as long as he didn’t have to look at her, he’d give her his past, and let her roam his face for truth.”

This is what I expected: Jay and I were meeting to talk about the one thing that is harder to talk about than sex: not wanting to have sex. Ever. Read the rest of this entry »

John Lingan wrote an essay, “Salvation for Civilians: Porn as a Way of Life,” for The Point. He discusses the contemporary debate surrounding porn—which should not be confused with the “keeping sex sacrosanct.” Instead there’s a focus on the internet as the medium through which porn makes its way to viewers and critiquing the “greater societal reality that porn is everywhere.” And who, according to Lingan, embodies this contemporary dialogue more than Rumpus contributor Zak Smith?

“For Smith, porn offers a different vision of what it means to live well. In We Did Porn, he chronicles his seamless transition from elite-mainstream art functions to the so-called alt-porn industry, which features tattooed and pierced actors and boasts more conceptual creativity, if not purpose, than standard hardcore.”

I remember clearly the first time my best friend Chelsea and I decided to play at prostitution. Read the rest of this entry »

NANO Fiction, the bi-annual publication of flash-fiction/micro essay/ prose poems, was denied nonprofit 501(c)(3) status because the IRS deemed the journal pornography.

Three months prior to their nonprofit application, they published an issue featuring the photography of Traci Matlock and Ashley Maclean, which is definitively not porn, but did include sexual themes. Now they have to reapply which is a costly enterprise in it of itself ($800), especially since the journal was applying to attain some financial sustainability in the first place. This may leave you wondering, “The IRS being ‘willfully obtuse’? Who ever heard of such a thing?”

(Though now there’s an update from NANO Fiction president saying that this whole thing may be a misconception.)

(via HTML Giant)

“I really hope I don’t have that responsibility of teaching people how to have sex.”

Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory talks with prolific male porn star James Deen.

“Ciara, 20, earned $8,000 one week, half of which she gets to keep. She supports her boyfriend, who has cancer, and his mother.”

The LA Weekly delves into the world of women who do sex work to support their families. Slideshow included.

(via @Chloe_Camilla)

Update: Also, be sure to check out Antonia Crane’s column “Recession Sex Workers,” if you haven’t already.

At the Jackson Arms shooting range in South San Francisco, we were issued earmuffs so tight I felt the beginnings of a headache Read the rest of this entry »

A literary infographic on love, desire, and Arthur Schopenhauer: Read the rest of this entry »

In late June, several days before Derek Jeter went yard with his milestone 3,000^th hit as a Yankee, something even more incredible happened in the State of New York: the State Senate passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week journalist Mac McClelland wrote a brutal, exceptional essay for Good where she plainly discussed her experience with PTSD and her desire for violent sex as one means of coping with the atrocities she had witnessed as a human rights reporter. Early in the essay, McClelland writes about being in Haiti. As a Haitian American, I immediately tensed and worried about what she might say. Read the rest of this entry »

The poster person for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a war veteran, which isn’t surprising given that anywhere from 11 to 20 percent of veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are diagnosed as sufferers. But it’s not solely a soldier’s disorder.

Mac McClelland, who reports on human rights issues for Mother Jones, and who we interviewed for The Rumpus in August of 2010, also deals with PTSD, and has written a powerful piece on the subject for Good titled, “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD.” It’s a powerful and moving piece, and one that might disturb people, especially those who’ve been the victims of sexual violence because there are some pretty graphic scenes in the essay, but it’s worth reading.

In fact, I’m going to go one step farther and say it’s important to read, because it’s important to understand who PTSD affects and how it might affect them, and it opens a window into the reasons why people who suffer from PTSD might act in ways which seem strange or even self-destructive to outsiders. Go read it. You won’t be sorry.

Susie Bright, sex-positive feminist, writer, revolutionary, and my first tongue-kiss with a woman recently released her memoir Big Sex Little Death.

Read the rest of this entry »

“…Michael was fast becoming the leading voice for gay youth until the day, in July 2007, when he announced that he was no longer gay.”

Benoit Denizet-Lewis sits down and talks with his “ex-gay friend,” Michael Glatze.

SWAAY (Sex Work Activists, Allies and You) is a new website advocating for sex workers, helping to provide information to the public about sex work, understanding the issues workers face and aiding in assuaging social stigmas.

The site features news, an event calendar and illuminates workers’ personal stories. Check it out!