Why Audrie & Daisy is Required Watching in a Culture of Slut Shaming and “Locker Room Talk”

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by Courtney Morgan

 TW: Sexual assault, rape culture, suicide

Last Friday, October 7, 2016, was a big day in the media for sexual assault. President Obama signed the historic Sexual Assault Survivor’s Bill into law. The same day, Access Hollywood released tapes of presidential candidate, Donald Trump, in 2005 bragging about his propensity toward, and ability and history of committing acts of sexual assault against women. And I, that evening, just happened to watch Audrie & Daisy—the documentary (which premiered at Sundance and released on Netflix September 23), about the sexual assault cases of two American teenage girls, Audrie Potts and Daisy Coleman. This imbroglio of mixed messages sort of felt like an average day in America—but it also painted a pretty clear picture of what needs to change.Continue Reading

“There Is No Normal”: A Chat with Couples Therapist Jane Ryan on Sexuality and Relationships

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Jane Ryan is a couples and family therapist based out of Tacoma, Washington. She is also my mom. I was lucky enough to not only grow up learning from her wisdom, but to also chat with her recently about her work with relationships, the myths about sexuality and sex addictions, and the unique and vulnerable nature of each individual’s erotic template.

Ansley Clark: How did you get involved with sex therapy? When did you first discover that this was a field you were interested in and passionate about?Continue Reading

Modern Love and the Trouble with Soulmates

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Boschs Garden 2

by Melissa Brooks

I was once a love-forlorn little girl. I harbored a seething desperation to grow up just so I could find my soulmate. It seemed nothing in life could ever possibly match the ecstasy of falling in love that I witnessed in songs, books, movies. In Disney’s Cinderella, I was captivated when our heroine and the prince first locked eyes and gravitated to one another immediately. Without a word they begin dancing, enchanted with one another and oblivious to the world around them, sharing a harmonious, telepathic duet: “So this is love. So this is what makes life divine. The key to all heaven is mine.”Continue Reading

Tiny Dictators and Purple Lattices–A personal essay

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Tiny Dictators and Purple Lattices

by Rose Hawthorn

It was 2 a.m. and I had just peed behind a dumpster in a parking lot. My shoe was in the wrong place at the wrong time and small wet dots speckled its toe. Away from the dumpster, I pulled my pants down for a second time, just enough to show a guy I barely knew a purple latticed bruise covering my right ass cheek. “Holy shit!” he said. We were drunk.Continue Reading

Steven Universe: A Gender Fusion Buffet on Cartoon Network

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by Rachel Busnardo

I just can’t stop talking about Steven Universe, Cartoon Network’s first show created solely by a woman, Rebecca Sugar.

Cartoon Network launched on October 1, 1992; Rebecca Sugar is the first female to create a show. Let that sink in for a second.

First, let me tell you I’m a woman in my 30s and I love this cartoon. I loved it before I ever knew a woman created it, and loved it even more after. And, yes, it’s made for children—but the older I get, the more I realize that the loving/wounded child in me needs nurturing too. That girl will always have more room in her heart for narratives featuring a gender buffet of badass female-presenting superheroes voiced by an ensemble of diverse, talented women.

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Aphrodisical Recipe: Peruvian Ceviche

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aphrodisiac recipe

 

Chef Eileen RichardsonEileen Roscina Richardson is The Thought Erotic’s chef-in-residence, and a true fermentation enthusiast and certified Natural Foods Chef. Eileen discovered her passion for food, fermentation and health at a permaculture ranch in Costa Rica six years ago. She attended culinary school at Denver’s Nutritional Therapy Institute and has since helped in the development of various commercial fermented products, started a fermentation education business, written a variety of recipes, completed a fermentation focused residency with author Sandor Katz and founded the culinary seed company, Grown Home, with her partner Stephen.

 

 

 

 

Why Can’t Women Just Get Along?

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by Melissa Brooks

When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, I rented a bedroom in a house co-owned by a middle-aged woman and her twenty-six year old son. The son didn’t live there, but the mother did, making her simultaneously my landlord and roommate. Three weeks went by and despite the awkward set up, I thought things had mostly been going okay. No arguments had ensued and we regularly asked after one another’s wellbeing. I made sure to clean up after myself, stay out of the way, respect her privacy and be quiet. So it came as a shock when one day she spontaneously started yelling at me, boldly proclaiming that “this situation” wasn’t working for her and she didn’t like me. Confused by what I had done to offend her, she boiled down her hostility to a single trite creed:

“Women can’t get along.”

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The Myth of the Hymen: A Social And Medical Mystery

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hymen female anatomy 3

by Fei Cai

Hymen. Maidenhead. Cherry.

For something that people do not seem to know much about, it definitely has a lot of names.

I am not sure when I first heard about the hymen. Like many growing up, I thought it would hurt to tear it, and that it was some kind of physical sign that a woman had lost her virginity. I was convinced that the first time I had sex, there would be bleeding and pain, which of course, added to the already huge amount of anxiety I had about having sex for the first time.Continue Reading