Placeres y peligros del bondage

The Pleasures and Dangers of Bondage
by Tristan Taormino
October 29th, 2007

Last week, the autopsy report was released for Rev. Gary Aldridge, who died in June of accidental asphyxiation while engaged in self-bondage and autoerotic asphyxiation. By now, you’ve probably heard something about the pastor of Thorington Road Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, who was a friend of Jerry Falwell and was found dead in lots of rubber with a butt plug in his ass. There have been plenty of blog entries about how he was yet another closeted, kinky, conservative hypocrite who preached salvation but practiced sin. But in reading the details—especially from the coroner’s report—I was struck by something else: Man, this guy was  really into bondage. He was found alone wearing two rubber wet suits, a face mask, a rubber head mask, rubber underwear, diving gloves, and flippers; the various ways he was restrained seem to indicate he was hogtied, which is difficult (but not impossible) to achieve by yourself. He was definitely  not a novice bondage fan.

So, it seems, he died doing something he loved. Some people put themselves in bondage because that’s their turn-on, but it’s much more often a two- (or more) person sport. I wonder if Reverend Aldridge did it by himself because he couldn’t bear the shame or potential exposure of sharing it with someone else. If he could have found someone to share his kink with, he might still be alive.

When many people recall their first experience of bondage, it usually reaches all the way back to childhood. As part of cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, or another kids’ game, someone had to be restrained at some point. You’d grab a necktie or a belt or something from one of your parents’ closets and tie up the bad guys. Some people look back on those experiences as fun memories; bondage enthusiasts usually remember the first time they were tied up (or tied someone else up) with a lot more detail and glee.

Hipersexualización del nudismo

Naked & natural
Local nudists discuss their lifestyle

Published Thursday, October 4, 2007.
Caitlin Price / Culture Senior Writer

Those looking to embark on a free-spirited lifestyle should start by simply taking off their clothes.

Dating back to the hippie era of the 1960s, nudism tends to be thought of in a negative light. Americans often associate nudism with sex and think of nudist “colonies” as places for sexual activity. But practicing nudists — or naturists, as some prefer to be called — prefer this all-natural lifestyle for more spiritual and social reasons, not for nudity’s sexual stigma.

The idea that nudism is a sexual activity exists mainly in the “public imagination,” said Zen Nudist, a local nudist who prefers to remain anonymous. Nudity can be sexual, he said, but in the case of nudism, people just happen to be naked in front of one another.

Reflexiones sobre el matrimonio

Jane’s Guide

more on marriage
Thu Sep 27, 2007

Now I’m all feeling like I want to expand on yesterday. If you’ve been reading me for a long time, you’ll know that my journal (blog, now) used to be much more dominated by talk about relationships. I was in a poly marriage, and it worked for a time. But it worked in a way that I’ve seen quite a few poly relationships work, in that my then-husband and I were mostly roommates. I started to type that I wasn’t sure which part happened first, the “roommates” or the poly, but it was the poly that turned us into roommates, and eventually bitter adversaries when the marriage was falling apart because we could not be the person the other wanted.

I found that I couldn’t do poly. I’ve written about that before, but not extensively because so many people I respect and admire are in those relationships and I didn’t want to be seen as knocking a lifestyle. Yet at the same time every time I read platitudes about how much work it is to be poly, and how great the rewards if you do the work, I bristle. I suppose it’s because it somehow feels implied then that monogamous relationships don’t take as much work, or are for somehow less valid rewards, and I don’t think that’s true at all.

I believe it can take as much or more work to listen and work through problems with someone long term, when it’s just the two of you. There is no escaping to an outside relationship when things get tough, which is certainly what I experienced in poly. Actually, it’s not even when things get tough. It’s the little bumps that you ignore instead of working through, because it’s easy to push aside seemingly small things on your way out the door to another. We became roommates because instead of dealing with issues in our relationship, we’d be amicable with each other, then schedule time with others that we actually wanted to be with. We used marriage like many monogamous couples do, as a safety net or security blanket, there in the backs of our minds but never attended to. The work is done, we’re married! Time to attend to the rest of life.

Mujer con dos vaginas

Savage Love
I Have Two Vaginas. When Do I Tell My Sex Partners?
by Dan Savage
June 26th, 2007 1:00 PM

Q. I would love your advice on how to deal with some news I got recently. At my most recent gyno visit, I found out I have two vaginas. I’d had a number of routine pelvic exams with my old doctor, but she never discovered it. During my first visit with my new doctor, however, she discovered my “atypical anatomy” right away. The anatomical specifics are sort of irrelevant to my question—everything is fully functioning, sex isn’t painful, and everything externally looks completely normal. I’m a straight girl in my early twenties and I’ve only had one sex partner. Sex was great, and only occasionally did I have to take the guy’s dick and redirect him to the “better” vagina. We were both each other’s first—at the time I figured the occasional readjustment was par for the course. I didn’t find out about my two vaginas (sounds like a sitcom) until after the relationship ended, and I haven’t had sex since. So here’s my question—is this little tidbit something I need to reveal to new sex partners before sex? After? Ever? —VERY ABNORMAL GIRL

Chicas a las que les gusta el porno

El Mundo, Viernes, 18 de mayo de 2007. Año: XVIII. Numero: 6361.
CATALUNYA, suplement de cultura Tendències núm 116

‘Girls who like porno’

En la red cabe de todo, incluso relatos de mujeres que cuentan secretos de cama inconfesables. El ‘blog’ de agueda y maria ha bajado la persiana, pero sus historias han despertado reflexiones para la posteridad.

ROGER BERNAT

Han decidido cerrar y, sin embargo, era uno de los centros de discusión sobre posporno, queer y nuevo feminismo más emocionantes de la Red. Durante dos años estuve leyendo sus posts en www.girlswholikeporno.com (todavía en la Red) y, poco a poco, sin darme cuenta, como realmente ocurren las cosas, adentrándome en un ámbito del pensamiento que se me ha acabado revelando indispensable.

Al principio me conectaba con la ilusión de que fuera un blog ideado para levantar los espíritus, esperaba encontrar links de páginas de culos y tetas tomados desde ángulos inimaginables, pero con el tiempo fui acostumbrándome a leer y olvidarme de los links. Leía apasionado porque la sola idea de que unas mujeres se plantearan que otro universo sexual era posible me animaba a repensar el mío propio.

Deseos dispares

Coitus Interrupt Us

Couples with mismatched libidos have few resources to address their issues

by Tristan Taormino

May 15th, 2007 6:27 PM

When people come to me for advice about their sex lives, much of the time they believe that everyone else around them is having great sex and they’re not.

One of the most common things that couples struggle with is the issue of mismatched libidos: when one person’s sexual desires don’t gel with his or her partner’s. The complaints vary: She wants sex all the time; he doesn’t. He wishes she’d be more sexually adventurous; she thinks he’s a freak. She wants sex to last more than five minutes; he’s happy being a quick shooter. Sexual incompatibility is a problem facing lots of people, yet there is surprisingly little dialogue about it in self-help books or other media. Popular magazines instruct women to “Thrill Every Inch of Him” and men to “Keep Her Coming Back for More,” and Dr. Phil says, “Forget about the dishes, forget about the kids, and just do it.” All this reinforces the idea that something called “perfect sex” exists and if we’re not achieving that as often as possible then there’s a problem and someone has to take the blame. Even sex therapists can feed into the myths, by making one partner the problem (she’s frigid or he’s oversexed). The lack of honest, helpful information has led to misunderstanding and judgment about our sex drives and our sex lives.

Betty Dodson

Liberation starts with masturbation
SEXUALITY / An interview with the Mother of Masturbation, Betty Dodson

Diane Walsh / Xtra.ca / Monday, April 30, 2007

She’s been called the Mother of Masturbation and credited as one of the most important queer, sex-positive feminists in North America’s sexual liberation movement.

Betty Dodson has spent nearly four decades liberating sexuality and encouraging everyone, and particularly women, to experience the pleasures of their own genitals. Her bestseller, Sex for One: The Joy of Selfloving, has sold more than one million copies in the last 20 years; she is also an artist and a sex educator. Now she is coming to Victoria to present what’s being billed as a “frank, funny and fearless” workshop on orgasms at the Erotica Festival of Film and Arts, May 5.

In preparation, she sat down with Xtra West to talk about sex, the hazards of censoring it, and the revolutionary ideas underlying SM play. Here is an excerpt from that interview.

¿Hay que revelar las infidelidades?

Don’t Tell Me
Some couples say that when it comes to sleeping around, ignorance is bliss.
by Kai Ma
March 6, 2007

“If my girlfriend falls in love with another guy, I want to know,” says Serdna, a twenty-two-year-old painter from Queens. “If she goes on a date with a guy, or if she kisses another guy, I don’t want to know. If she sleeps with another guy, assuming she uses protection, I definitely don’t want to know. But if there ever comes a time that she can’t do this anymore, I want to know. And then we would work it out from there.”

Serdna is sitting across from me at a café in Manhattan’s East Village. Soft-spoken and calm, his large, boyish eyes contrast the scruff of his barely-there beard. What he’s telling me goes against all the conventional relationship wisdom I’ve ever heard. Even the most liberated, iconoclastic couples I know agree: total openness needs to be maintained in a healthy relationship. If you make the mutual decision to have an open relationship, fine, but you and your partner should practice complete transparency when it comes to the whos, wheres, whens and hows of your sexual activities.

But is this really the best way to do it? Or has it simply become gospel via hundreds of advice columns? The concept of “communication” is often defined as full disclosure. But people like Serdna think this rigid interpretation is illogical. For the past three years, he’s been in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” relationship with his girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old fashion student we’ll call Leslie.

Sexo en grupo (II)

(Texto extraído de The Ethical Slut. A guide to infinite sexual possibilities, de Dossie Easton y Catherine Liszt, 1997, Greenery Press, pp. 251-264.)

CHAPTER 2. GROUP SEX, PUBLIC SEX, ORGIES…

Do you want to be an orgy slut? This is a choice. No matter what you may have heard, group sex is not obligatory for open relationships, and we know many fine outrageous sluts who don’t attend orgies, or promote three-ways and four-ways in their homes. And we know monogamous couples who frequent public sex environments for the sheer pleasure of playing with each other, in a special and sexy place, complete with an appreciative audience.
If you have ever had a fantasy of being made love to by five people, or having an extra pair of hands to make love with, or lots of hot people to get impulsive with right now, or an appreciative audience that will thrill to your thrashing and screaming in delight… in other words, if you are attracted to the idea of sex parties, this chapter is for you. Here we will tell you what you need to know to have a good time and deal with any difficulties that might come up.

El sexo como valor

San Francisco Values
- Violet Blue, Special to SF Gate
Thursday, November 16, 2006

I’m now absolutely certain that Bill O’Reilly is the reason ball gags were invented.

Two weeks ago, Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich used the term “San Francisco values” as the three dirtiest words they could think of to label future Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (and her Democratic brethren). While politer pundits rally for and against what these words mean, citing liberal issues and pot clubs and immigration, we all know what “San Francisco values” posited as dirty words really mean. When someone says, “San Francisco values,” they mean sex.

But while conservative pundits cite San Francisco’s sexual values as the new evil — no doubt imagining all kinds of lurid details about assless chaps and sodomy, glory-hole fellatio and white shoes after Labor Day in the Castro — they are actually right. In truth, San Francisco’s sexual values go further and run deeper than they can even imagine. Because if we’re going to talk about San Francisco as a placeholder for a certain kind of sexual value, let’s really talk about what’s so different about San Francisco’s collective sex life.

Fetichismo de ser cornudo

Savage Love

by Dan Savage
December 5th, 2006 1:10 PM

Q: My boyfriend and I are currently doing the long-distance thing, as I’m finishing up some schooling. About two months ago during some dirty phone talk he said he’d been masturbating while thinking about me fucking another man while he watches. This was unexpected. In the past, I screwed around on boyfriends. He knows this, but I thought he also understood that I only want to be with him and that I am not interested in additional male partners. He brings this scenario up whenever we’re having phone sex or we’re together and he’s aroused. When he’s not hard, he says that the thought of my being with another guy is gut-wrenching and awful, but when he is aroused, he tells me that he really wants me to do this. I’m confused. Previously, partners have brought up unexpected stuff in bed and I’ve rolled with it (bondage, strap-ons, etc.), but they were always able to talk about it later—what it was about, why it was a turn-on, etc. My current man gets upset when I try to talk about it outside of sex. Are you familiar with this sort of drastic, disgusted, after-the-fact denial? —UNSURE ABOUT THE CUCKOLD THING

Nina Hartley

Sexual Guru
Porn star Nina Hartley fucks, and we reap the rewards

by Tristan Taormino
November 22nd, 2006

Nina Hartley (nina.com) has had a lot of sex. At 47, she has been in the porn industry for 22 years and appeared in more than 600 movies. Her on- and offscreen fucking (she’s also been an active swinger) has given her experience and insight beyond what most everyday women could achieve, and lucky for us, she likes to share. (In fact, she has been not only a role model, but a personal friend and mentor to me.) For nearly two decades, she has used the knowledge gleaned from her unconventional life and career to teach others through her line of sex-instruction videos. The first two, Nina Hartley’s Guide to Better Cunnilingus and Nina Hartley’s Guide to Better Fellatio, were instant hits when they debuted in 1994, and they remain bestsellers today. The video series, which is distributed by Adam & Eve, has produced 32 titles and sold more than 500,000 copies. She is a one-woman sex-education empire, and she recently expanded her territory with the publication of her first book, Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex.

Sartre y Beauvoir

Sartre y Beauvoir. La historia de una pareja
Hazel Rowley
Traducción de Montse Roca. Lumen. Barcelona, 2006. 584 páginas, 24 euros

 

 

Una nueva biografía aprobada por la hija adoptiva de Simone de Beauvoir y rechazada por la heredera de Sartre vuelve a recordar los aspectos más contradictorios de la pareja. Lo que realiza Hazel Trowley en su retrato de Sartre y Simone de Beauvoir es una gran ceremonia de la simplificación. Con solemnidad de datos y entrecomillados a lo largo de más de 500 páginas, la biógrafa nos invita a mirar en los cuartos oscuros de unos seres enredados hasta el tuétano en complicaciones amorosas. Pero no hay que olvidar que ambos participaron con brío y convicción ( y por tanto con errores) en los avatares de su tiempo, escribieron algunos de los libros más importantes del siglo XX. Por esa razón echamos de menos una visión más profunda de la realidad humana, ideológica y literaria del dúo de intelectuales franceses.

Matrimonio y pasión

Keeping Married Sex Hot
Reddened cheeks, damp panties, and bedroom bliss

by Rachel Kramer Bussel
August 24th, 2006 4:42 PM

 

On my way to meet psychotherapist Esther Perel, I pass a sign for the new Brad Garrett sitcom ‘Til Death with the tagline, “Marriage . . . No Sex in the City.” I later see him on Entertainment Tonight declaring that the message of the show is to “get out while you still can.” (Garrett and his wife of seven years, Jill Diven, separated in April.) He’s spouting a common, if backward, view of marriage as a place where sex goes to die. I ask Perel, whose new book, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, explores the stereotype: Husbands want sex, wives hold out. Perel demurs, claiming an even split among her clients. Regardless of gender, “The spouse who wants less sex is the one who has control. The other person goes berserk then because they know it, and feel rejected,” she notes.

Having attended three weddings this summer, I was curious whether marriage changes sex, for better or worse. Plenty of recent books share tips on spicing up the marital act; there’s Holly H. Hollenbeck’s Sex Lives of Wives: Reigniting the Passion, Shmuley Boteach’s Kosher Adultery: Seduce and Sin With Your Spouse, and even Paul Coughlin’s No More Christian Nice Guy, which argues for greater erotic intimacy within marriage. Coughlin writes that for men, “Sex is our Lifetime Network, our Oprah. Sex is the closest we get to being those screaming, insane girls at a Beatles concert.”

Pérdida de sensibilidad

Este artículo de Girl with a one-track mind plantea una hipótesis muy sencilla: los hombres que se masturban con frecuencia pierden sensibilidad en el pene y luego les cuesta correrse por medio de la cópula al no ser suficientemente intensa la estimulación que les proporciona la vagina.

¿Alguien quiere confirmar, desmentir o reflexionar al respecto?

La nueva monogamia

The New Monogamy

Until death do us part—except every other Friday.

Em & Lo

Claire is a pretty, 31-year-old Park Sloper who studies furniture design. Her husband, Alex, is a 32-year-old Web-design consultant with a fondness for floral shirts. He’s the center of attention at a party; she’s the one off to the side, seemingly aloof but really just shy. That’s why she was shocked when, more than a year into their relationship, she was the one who found herself attracted to someone else.

“I was totally confused, because I’d assumed that once I found ‘the one,’ I would be done with all that,” says Claire. “Going through all this was hard for us as a couple.” But when her husband subsequently got a crush of his own, she was more prepared. “Now that it was his turn, I was in a position to understand,” explains Claire. “So I told him, if he wanted to kiss her, that was okay—but I wanted to know about it, and I wanted that to be as far as things went without him talking to me first.”

For much of human history, monogamy (or, at least, presumed monogamy) has been the default setting for long-term love. Hack the system, goes the theory, refuse to forsake all others, open the door even a crack—and the whole relationship will crash. Any dissenters have been pathologized as delusional idealists or worse. But now a new generation of couples is employing a kind of homeopathic hypothesis: that a tiny injection of adventure will ward off the urge to stray further—as long as it’s all on the table and up for discussion. (And just as with homeopathy, a healthy percentage of the population considers this premise bunk.)