a sex thinktank
(in which sex and love may be childishly conflated)
by Loie Merritt
Sexual authority means a belted dress and a beast that terrorizes your intellectual hunger until you just want to dance, Beauty and the Beast:
For the rest of your life, snowball fights qualify as foreplay.Continue Reading
by Loie Merritt
Dirty Dancing came out the year I was born. It received an unanticipated level of popular acclaim. It seems no one thought the film would do well. After test audiences shuddered at the abortion subplot and rumors of the cast despising each other (naturally calling their quick and engorging passion into question), the film nearly went straight to VHS and into the dusty corner of your local video store forever. Instead, it became a fixture in late 20th century American Romance. Patrick Swayze made modern dance cool, combining ballroom style with the dirty boogie. It won an Oscar. It won a Grammy.Continue Reading
by Melissa Brooks
When I was a little kid, I didn’t understand the role periods played in reproduction. I didn’t know sex had anything to do with penetration. My understanding was only that it involved two people rolling around together, kissing and moaning, and that it was a cardinal sin unless it occurred between a husband and a wife in the privacy of their bedroom.Continue Reading
I have always considered myself a “late bloomer.” In my early teens, I had a makeshift “camp boyfriend.” He was a blonde, lanky guy. Outside of the end-of-camp dance, he kissed my cheek too hard and too wetly while I sat on his lap, fidgeting over his erection. I did not enjoy my first real kiss until the end of high school.Continue Reading
by Rebecca Kallemeyn
The playground word sits in my mouth, a grape candy. I am afraid of my own pleasure the same way I am sometimes afraid of certain colors.Continue Reading
by Melissa Brooks
Like so many celebrities before her, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting has been making headlines for disavowing feminism. To recap, this is what she said when asked if she considered herself a feminist during a recent interview with Redbook Magazine:Continue Reading
From the “sex wars” of the 1980s to today, feminism (as a multi-faceted and -faced movement with nearly as many iterations as there are practitioners, which is yet expected to comprise itself into one monolithic ideology) has, as a whole, grappled and often floundered with issues of sexuality and its representations in mass media.Continue Reading
by Courtney Morgan
Because I am white.
Because my son is black.Continue Reading
by Fei Cai
Most of us have been there as teenagers.
Wearing a backless johnny, sitting on the way-too-high exam table, and trying not to make too much noise on that weird crinkly tissue paper they always put down for “sanitary” reasons. Your doctor or nurse practitioner stares you in the face and asks the dreaded question: “So… are you sexually active?”Continue Reading
by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal
To look at my body and marvel at its size.
I can’t remember a time I’ve ever looked at my body and been pleased.Continue Reading
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