Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: The Rumpus Interview with Annie M. Sprinkle
Being a whore was great preparation for being an artist.
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Posts Tagged: sex
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
...moreAbout That Whole “Men Are Sex Fiends” Thing…
Well, this is interesting: “…for most of Western history, from ancient Greece to beginning of the nineteenth century, women were assumed to be the sex-crazed porn fiends of their day.”
Alyssa Goldstein chronicles the process by which that stereotype flipped all the way around—and why both its iterations have been bad for women.
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Trigger Warning
I was not surprised to see that a large number of reviews took issue not with the writing or the plot or the structure, but with the main character’s sexuality; but even I was startled by the vitriol of many of them, the insistence that a story about a girl who fucks cannot be a story with any value at all.
...moreWrits of Passion
In case you missed it last week, check out Steve Almond’s “Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto.”
It’s an excerpt from Writs of Passion, a set of six tiny books made up of Almond’s stories and essays that are too dirty for prime-time.
...more“Attention Is the First and Final Act of Love”
Steve Almond’s Writs of Passion is “the best Valentine’s gift money can buy,” at least according to About.com (and us!).
About.com guide Corey Silverberg interviewed Almond about pleasure, emotional danger, and how to write sex scenes.
A preview:
...more…even if we do enjoy sex, we find all kinds of ways to punish ourselves for that pleasure.
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.
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More or Less
In her dorm, Kisha undid my jeans. Her finger held the tab of my zipper. I heard the teeth release. My pants caught around my ankles as Kisha’s hand slipped under the elastic of my briefs. I snatched her wrist, holding her from going further.
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Nick Cave Monday #14: “Wild World”
There’s a soundtrack for when I’m about to fall in love with a girl. That precious gap of time between getting to know each other physically and mentally before diving in the pool of vulnerability and embracing love and commitment.
Laying in bed, talking, cuddling, kissing, ravishing.
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Dirty or Clean?
I felt like an arrow of sheer desire, flying through the air in a small town and emblazoned with this unfortunate tag line: “Newly single mother of a dying baby.”
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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.
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Facing Sex Addiction: A John Comes Clean
“You Are Your Lover’s Kink”
In writing about the “complexities of desire, objectification and fetishization,” Vivienne Chen gives the Rumpus some love.
Chen quotes Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott — who argues that “there is no bad reason to love a person”– and also links to “Dear Sugar #89: The Thing That Turns You On.”
...moreWho’s having a good time?
Sarah Woolley takes a closer look at boundary-pushing on film, and articulates why she winces through Hollywood sex scenes and not porn.
“…Being mindful of what media we consume, in all its guises, helps us decide what works well with our values. It’s a mindfulness that can be informed by information but never aesthetics.
...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.
...moreNever Look Away
“Who will protect us in this town, I think. There are skinheads and KKK people and bullies. There are dogs that run snarling to the edge of their yards when you walk home and stare too long at them. There are jocks and racists and homophobes and Christian crazies and angry teachers and this school, this whole school is crazy and I’m burning like a bright moving speck of fire every single day.”
Rumpus contributor Conner Habib has a new series on his blog called “Guys I Wanted To Fuck in High School,” which details his “frustrated” adolescence in small-town Pennsylvania.
...moreWhat About Men?
“Many men who turn to submissive fantasies do so for precisely the sort of vacation from responsibility that Roiphe suggests women are seeking.”
At Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory gathers the input of professional dominatrixes to shed light on male desire for submission, which was glaringly absent in Kaite Roiphe’s Fifty Shades of Grey.
...moreThe Secret About
Last weekend I rode the subway towards two indulgent firsts: I spent half of my latest paycheck in a swanky, mirror-lined restaurant with a coat check, and then I walked across the street and spent the other half on a vibrator.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Lyon Bell
Jennifer Lyon Bell makes porn with a humanistic approach, designed to get viewers to identify with the characters, not just watch them. She combines the visual quality of art films with erotica. Her ethos is that the former could be sexier and the latter just plain better.
Rethinking Sex Ed
“In its breadth, depth and frank embrace of sexuality as, what Vernacchio calls, a ‘force for good’ — even for teenagers — this sex-ed class may well be the only one of its kind in the United States.”
A NY Times Magazine article on the state of sex education highlights a Philadelphia Quaker Friends high school teacher’s comprehensive approach to teaching sex ed.
...moreJaclyn Friedman Interview
Yes Means Yes has a conversation with Jaclyn Friedman about What You Really Really Want: A Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide To Sex And Safety. Topics include the book’s writing exercises, flexisexuality, fetishization and communication, and parenting.
“…You can’t become free of influences.
...moreIllustrations in The Joy of Sex
“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.
...moreOn Dirty Talk
“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?
...moreThe Fates Will Find Their Way
“It seemed, some days, that life was nothing more than a tally of the people who’d left us behind.”
...moreDEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #57: That Ecstatic Parade
Dear Sugar,
I’m a twenty-one year old guy. I’m in college right now. Though I work full-time to pay for some of my bills, I’m still dependent on my parents for room and board. I also use their car. I have no problem with living with my parents—at least I wouldn’t if I wasn’t gay.
...moreDEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #56: Ménage à Trois
Hello sweet peas! I decided to whip out a few shortish answers this week instead of the usual longer, single column. There are three of them, all on the subject of sex.
FUNNY WOMEN #37: Taking the Tea Party to the Bedroom
Why do people think being a Tea Party Patriot means missing out on all the fun when it comes to sex?
DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #54: The Lusty Broad
Dear Sugar, Sugah, Sage,
I’m a spry 47 year-old feisty broad. For the past three years I’ve been deeply in love with a woman. The timing of our meeting was atrocious.
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