Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Sam Benjamin
Porn was always stronger than me, and it still is.
...more
sex
The Rumpus Interview with Susan Wright
Susan Wright, activist, writer, and founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, sits down to discuss the recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders updates, and what they mean for the kink community.
...more
Admit You’ve Paid For It: The Savage Honesty of David Henry Sterry
Writer, performer, educator, and activist David Henry Sterry talks about the deep cultural roots of shame associated with the American sex industry, and how freeing it can be to bleed out the truth about our lives as buyers and sellers of sex.
...more
Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
Being a whore was great preparation for being an artist.
...more
Captain Save-A-Ho
I’d been down that road a million times before and had learned the hard way that unless you had some kind of special line just for them, it never paid to give a client your phone number.
...more
When Faggots Shoot
It takes two years before Bob shows his gun collection to me. The guns are in the corner closet of a room I’ve slept in over thirty times. He opens the slatted door with a key, and one by one, he pulls out latched wooden boxes, heavy velvet bags, and cardboard boxes of bullets
...more
Lady Cheeky’s Sex Satori
Antonia Crane sits down with sex blogger and erotica writer Lady Cheeky for an interview about her journey to passion, positive body image, and orgasm via True Blood.
...moreClick this link for a picture of a rabbit vibrator
Good Vibrations has donated a special vibrator for a scene in the Happy Baby movie. It’s called The Rabbit Habit. Thanks Good Vibrations, we love you back!
...more
It Doesn’t Mean Very Much At All
I was tired of endlessly explaining that sex work could be empowering and could be exploitative, but that most things in life could be either of these things as well.
...more
Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto
Because I’ve devoted perhaps eighty percent of my adult waking hours to thinking about sex, and it seems dishonest to pretend otherwise in my work.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with a Ginza Hostess
Mayumi, a hostess in the Ginza district of Japan, lends an intimate perspective of the country’s notorious Water Trade.
...more
Things Women Have Said to Me in Brothels
I worry about you when I don’t see you for a while.
...more
The “Most Beautiful Thing That Ever Fucked”: The Rumpus Interview with Oriana Small
I was dying to interview Oriana Small about her porno memoir Girlvert.
...more
Here Comes the Girl
I didn’t analyze production levels or consider marketing strategies. I didn’t say to myself, “Tonight you’re going to get with the jack-off program.” I was a dime-a-dozen girl doing a customer service job, and that job demanded more and more of me whether I liked it or not.
...more
Jane Fondas I Have Known
However I came to possess the magazine, I looked at it often, if with a smoldering shame. Unlike what I could find on television, the pictures were clear and shiny, and seeing women in bikinis showed me parts of the female body I had never seen before—the dimpled lower back, the tendon in the crook between inner thigh and crotch.
...more
Facing Sex Addiction: A John Comes Clean
A Tale of Three Coming Out Stories
We are still in that time in our history where public figures come out of invisible closets largely built by a public insatiable in its desire to know all the intimate details of the private lives of very public people.
...morePro Tip: Penning The Erotic
Erotic fiction seems to be making some kind of comeback.
In light of this, we could all learn a thing or two from Seth Fried. The writer spices up “Das Kolumne” by teaching us how to write erotica. To wit:
“Readers who seek out erotica tend to be motivated more out of curiosity and boredom than actual lust.
...more
How Men Fight For Their Lives
Until now, it has always felt like lying when I tell people I was gay bashed in the first few hours of January 2008. Actually, it still feels a bit like I’m telling a lie but – I think – that’s the point of what I’m about to write.
...moreEEE or Everyone Else Enjoys it
The simple fact that you are no longer an adolescent, shouldn’t mean that you are obliged to forgo the thrill of the sext. Thanks to Eva Wiseman, the techo-sexual generational gap has been bridged with her newly forged dictionary of grown-up sexting acronyms.
...more“The Profundity of Female Friendships”
At The New Yorker, Anna Holmes writes about how “Girls” and Sheila Heti’s new novel How Should a Person Be? “treat heterosexual coupling as secondary, and how they depict the profundity of female friendships, not to mention their real perils—which are quite different from the competitive jockeying that is so often imagined.”
Holmes proposes that these texts may signify “the beginnings, perhaps, of a revolution in the way women’s relationships are discussed.”
Read Emily Rapp’s wonderful essay on the power of female friendship here.
...morePole Tax
Tits & Sass on the “pole tax”, a tax on strip club patrons that goes to fund sexual assault prevention.
Bubbles points out that there is no link between patronizing a strip club and sexual assault. It would make much more sense to tax patrons of McDonald’s and use the funds for diabetes research.
...moreNothing But the Facts
“The fact is, I’m gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn’t be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud.”
Anderson Cooper comes out. (Hooray!)
...moreErotic Little Women
OR Books will soon publish Fifty Shades of Louisa May: A Memoir of Transcendental Sex, which gives Alcott, who “probably didn’t have much erotica in her life” “a second chance at sex.”
“It just hijacks the modern erotica category, throws away the seriousness and the bondage, and lets legendary authors perform ridiculous and embarrassing sexual acts.
...moreExistential Ménage-à-Trois
Andy Martin, author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper, writes about the woman called Wanda who ended the “bromance” between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.
“Camus was the new kid on the block, confronted by the great metropolitan circle of critics and publishers and philosophers around Sartre – and yet he could score over the master with his ice-green eyes and don’t-give-a-damn charm.
...moreWomen Better at Sex Writing?
Martin Amis, whose new novel made it onto the PW Best Summer Books list, explained to his audience at the Hay Festival that “women write better about sex.”
“As a novelist you are in a God-like relation to what you create. You are omnipotent and the question of potency is embarrassing for men.
...moreOdor and Desire
“I went into this party wondering what kind of guys I’d be attracted to just on the basis of pheromone smell. Could I clear away all the flotsam in my heart – the fetishes for big noses and curly hair that I’ve had since high school, or my habit of falling for cocky artists and writers?”
At Salon, Rumpus contributor Lauren Eggert-Crowe writes about her experience participating in a pheromone party, a phenomenon at the intersection of science and speed dating.
...moreRandy Packs Give-Away!
Randy Packs are “hand drawn improbable sex-act trading cards.” Each card is the work of a different artist, who, after being assigned an improbable sex-act, drew a non-explicit representation of the chosen act.
Series #1 contains 20 collectible cards that come in random packs of five with a cover/checklist card listing all the acts.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Dita von Teese
Dita von Teese, burlesque superstar, author, actress, costume and lingerie designer, and formidable businesswoman, is idolized by many who might not otherwise fancy themselves enthusiasts of burlesque, let alone openly admire a star of “adult entertainment.”
...more