Letters from Johns.

in

One of Susannah Breslin's projects: Letters from Johns. The project provided (it wrapped in 2009) an opportunity for men who've used the services of sex providers to share their stories, motivations, and experiences.

A sample from a letter:

I was a thirty four year old virgin when I first visited a prostitute.

I've always been shy and a bit of a computer geek, and somehow I missed out on opportunities at college and university that might have got my sex life off to a start. Once I graduated I ended up in an IT job, full of other single male geeks. None of us had much in the way of a social life, but I was furthering my career so it didn't seem to matter much. It was only when I hit thirty that I started to worry about the other things missing from my life. At that point, my age and lack of experience were a major worry. I was tempted by online dating, but knew that anyone I might meet would be more sexually experienced than me, and this became a major stumbling block.

At one point, I seriously considered sexual surrogate therapy, but in the end the price put me off. It did, however, make me start thinking about paying for sex, but at a different level. Websites and forums are what I do, and mostly how I interact with other people, so it didn't take me long to find forums devoted to escort work. I researched diligently, read up on the pros and cons, and the dangers, health and otherwise, of seeing escorts. The forums were an eye opener. The escorts posting sounded genuine, even relatively normal, and not the junkies I'd expected. I made up my mind to go for it.

The rest of the letter, and many more, here.

One of the original letter writers sent an update letter, two years after he sent his first letter. Link here.

Vice documentary: The Japanese Love Industry.

in , ,

From Vice:

Japan is a country that is dying—literally. A nation that was once considered the strongest economical powerhouse in the world, rivaling the US, has now slipped to second best. Japan has more people over the age of 65 and the smallest number of people under the age of 15 in the world. It is the fastest growing negative population in the world, and that's because hardly anyone is having babies. In these difficult times, the Japanese are putting marriage and families on the back burner and seeking recreational love and affection as a form of cheap escape with no strings attached. We sent Ryan Duffy to investigate this phenomenon, which led him to Tokyo's cuddle cafes and Yakuza-sponsored prostitution.

Some have pointed out that documentaries like this are simply capitalizing on the whole Japan is super weird stereotype. The content of this documentary is not representative of the Japanese culture in general - Vice tends to focus on experiences that are outside of the norm (i.e., cuddle cafes and the Yakuza), as that's what they find most interesting.

Somewhat NSFW (you can also watch a way more NSFW version on Vice.com: link):

Like VICE News? Subscribe to our news channel: http://bit.ly/Subscribe-to-VICE-News Check out more episodes of The VICE Guide to Travel here: http://bit.ly/1id8igT Japan is a country that is dying-literally. Japan has more people over the age of 65 and the smallest number of people under the age of 15 in the world.


Questionable stats in the battle over legal approaches to prostitution.

in ,

From the Walrus:

Dirty Tricks Is the anti-prostitution lobby inflating sex-trafficking stats? By Alexandra Kimball

In 2007, a twenty-year-old Anishinabe woman from Garden River First Nation in Ontario quit her call-centre job, packed her bags, and boarded a Greyhound bus out of nearby Sault Ste. Marie. Before the call centre, Naomi Sayers had worked as an exotic dancer; she was heading for a network of clubs in southern Ontario, because another performer had told her it was a good place to maximize hours and profit. She arrived in London, moved into a dancers’ house, and began touring Windsor, Woodstock, and Peterborough. Keeping safe by travelling with other performers, she shared hotel rooms, transportation, and job leads. Her best friend and housemate, who worked under the stage name Alex, showed her the ropes: where to put her stuff, which dancers to watch out for. Sayers’s boyfriend had a car; sometimes he drove her to the club, and held onto her cash when she went in for shifts.

Sex work, she says, was entirely her choice. “Dancing got me out of the Sault,” explains Sayers, who is now a University of Ottawa common-law student and blogger-advocate for Indigenous women’s issues. And yet, she can’t shake the victim label.

As a young Indigenous woman who moved to an urban centre to work in the sex trade—even of her own free will, hoping to better her life—she fits the RCMP profile of a person who is vulnerable to domestic sex trafficking. The Criminal Code was amended in 2005 to make domestic trafficking an offence, and the definition is broad. Victims need not be moved, and while trafficking must contain an element of exploitation (“conduct that could reasonably be expected to cause” someone to fear for their own safety or for someone else’s), the code also states that people need not consider themselves exploited. This means they don’t necessarily get a say in whether they are victims; it’s up to the discretion of authorities.

In recent years, sex trafficking has gained attention and resources: the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking commands a $25 million budget and has developed partnerships with several NGOs to raise awareness about the prevalence and severity of trafficking. Non-profits such as the Canadian Women’s Foundation have created their own task forces; CWF released a $2 million white paper on the subject in October.

Yet few can agree on how widespread the problem is, or how best to address it. This troubles former RCMP superintendent John Ferguson: “Are there victims? Yes. Is this a systemic problem? The evidence tells us no.” (Between 2005 and 2009, the RCMP reviewed 242 potential international human-trafficking cases, but made no convictions.) He points to the absence of information: Canada has no standardized system for the collection of such data. Ferguson also points to a 2003 RCMP report that claimed each year 600 women and girls are trafficked into the country for forced sex work; the report has since been discarded by the RCMP itself.

Instead, anti-trafficking advocates such as University of British Columbia law professor Benjamin Perrin rely on anecdotal evidence to bolster their arguments. In his 2010 book, Invisible Chains: Canada’s Underground World of Human Trafficking, Perrin seems to suggest that most prostitution involves coercion and threat; this risks conflating consensual sex work with a criminal offence, and misleads the public into believing that the trafficking problem is more acute than it actually is.

This may, in fact, be intentional.

Inflated or unsubstantiated trafficking stats are often disseminated by the same people who support C-36—the controversial bill that, if passed, would criminalize the buyers of sexual services, as well as third parties who exploit sex workers. In railing against sex trafficking, they can argue against the inherent evils of the sex trade without relying on explicitly moral or religious rhetoric—a useful digression when the public is less inclined than ever to condemn prostitution on moral grounds. (In July, one in five presenters at the Department of Justice committee hearings on C-36 had evangelical connections.)

Read the rest here.

Ethical porn.

in ,

From The Guardian:

Is there such a thing as ethical porn? The actors say they’re happy, the makers say it’s guilt-free – but what exactly is ‘fair trade’ porn? We find out By Zoe Williams

[…]

I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000 women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious: porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map. It was, in other words, a total conflict, and the rogue factor was that I don’t watch porn. So I could just absent myself into neutrality. (I think I was chairing the meeting, so I was meant to be neutral anyway.)

[…]

A common assumption is that “fair-trade” porn is going to be very soft and wholemeal and respectful; some of it is, but most of it isn’t. It does address female sexuality in a way that mainstream porn doesn’t (how you go from “female gaze” to “wholemeal” is, of course, via the misapprehension that female sexuality is really sweet). “This image of ethical porn is pretty and fluffy and storyline-driven, a hardcore version of daytime soap operas or Harlequin romance novels,” says Sinnamon Love, previously a performer, now a “sex educator”. “But a lot of women, especially of this younger generation, are looking for more hardcore porn that’s to their taste.”

[…]

Feminism is not a prerequisite when it comes to making ethical porn, Blake says. “Feminist porn is explicitly focused on women’s desires and sexuality. So, for example, the belt-whipping scene where I got the life thrashed out of me, that I would say is feminist, because it’s about my journey and my sexuality. Whereas I think it’s possible to produce male-gaze porn in an ethical and fair trade way. That means complete respect for performers, for their boundaries and consent. If someone says no, you don’t ask again, you don’t ask last minute in the middle of a scene. You don’t trick them into doing stuff. You pay them. It’s not only all of those principles, but also communicating that to your audience.”

People protesting against porn and sex work take as their opening position that nobody would be doing it if they weren’t coerced, or so desperate for money that it amounted to coercion. Ms Naughty insists that the porn she produces is not done this way: “There’s this urban myth that all of the women in porn are drug addicts or abused and don’t know what they’re doing.” She doesn’t say this never happens, that nobody is ever on drugs; but when you look at what she makes, you’ve never seen couples who look so consensual, so un-ground down by the heel of life.

[…]

Makers of ethical porn believe you can have a violent fantasy, of any kind, and that can be a legitimate part of your sexual identity, one that you have a right to explore. This is the point at which anti-porn campaigners stick. There is a chasm here, between people who think that all violence in sex is the result of a patriarchal culture and will lead to violence in real life, and should be stamped out; and people who think that all fantasy is legitimate, and almost all of it can be legitimately met by porn.

[…]

And perhaps this is the sophistication of ethical porn: without exploiting or harming the participants, it allows you to explore what you’re into. You have a right not to be ashamed. This, says Cindy Gallop, gives us our cue about how to talk about porn: “When you force anything into the darkness, you make it much easier for bad things to happen, and much harder for good things to happen. The answer is not to shut down. The answer is to open up.”

Read the rest here.

And some more related pieces for those interested:

Ethical Porn at the Huffington Post Tristan Taormino Feminist Pornographer as Cosmopolitan The Rise of Ethical Porn at the Globe and Mail

Data visualization of top 500 porn tags.

in ,

From Gizmodo:

The 500 most popular types of porn in one chart

Everybody watches porn but everybody has different tastes. And there is just so much porn to watch. But how can we figure which type of porn is most popular? This chart from Data Looks Dope's Max Einstein reveals the top 500 video tags in porn. You'll see everything from hardcore to Argentina.

The data comes from Xvideos' 500 most used tags. The idea is simple, if there are a lot of tags, there's a lot of demand.

Any surprises? Brunette beats Blonde, stockings is shockingly popular and words like 'this' 'and' and others make the cut. Einstein writes:

This is a visualization of how users of the most popular porn website in the world tag the astronomical amount of content being transferred each month.

And the chart (click to make larger - it's enormous):

Pornhub data on women's porn preferences.

in ,

Pornhub, as described by Wikipedia, is a "video sharing website and the largest pornography site on the internet." Like most modern businesses, Pornhub do analytics to better monitor performance and gain insights into their customers and market. They report some of their findings on a blog called Pornhub Insights, which is good fun. One of their more recent posts provided a glimpse at what their female viewers search for and watch:

What Women Want

Pornhub Insights is getting down with demographics! As part of a collaboration with our friends over at Buzzfeed, the Pornhub statisticians are offering a unique look at the way that members of the fairer sex get turned on with everyone’s favorite porn site. By segmenting by gender within our analytics tools, we were able to generate anonymized data that brings us one step closer to answering the time old question: what do women want? What does she desire? Well, apparently they want to watch a bunch of gay sex. Pornhub’s Lesbian category is the leading favorite among the ladies, with Gay (male) following close at second place. The Gay category only falls into 7th place for men in terms of top viewed categories so it’s noteworthy here that overall, this category ranks higher with the sex opposite to that which this type of content is intended for.

There’s no love from the ladies for the bigger beauties of porno land with the BBW category noticeably absent from the list on the female side despite its ranking at 13th place for the men. Though other classics like Teen, MILF, Threesome and Anal pepper this list as well, it’s clear that the type of sex that women are most interested in watching occurs between members of the same sex.

Go read the rest here.

Feminist perspectives on objectification.

in

Pornography has been criticized for objectifying women, and further that pornography increases male sexual objectification of women in general. As noted in class, pornography is by its nature objectifying, as it features people who are intended to be the objects of our sexual fantasies, at least while we watch. But does this make it inherently problematic? For those of you who are curious to read more, there is an excellent entry in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy which provides an overview of objectification in pornography, and whether it is a force of good or bad.

Feminist Perspectives on Objectification

Objectification is a notion central to feminist theory. It can be roughly defined as the seeing and/or treating a person, usually a woman, as an object. In this entry, the focus is primarily on sexual objectification, objectification occurring in the sexual realm. Martha Nussbaum (1995, 257) has identified seven features that are involved in the idea of treating a person as an object:

  1. instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier's purposes;
  2. denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination;
  3. inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity;
  4. fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects;
  5. violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity;
  6. ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold);
  7. denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account.

Rae Langton (2009, 228–229) has added three more features to Nussbaum's list:

  1. reduction to body: the treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts;
  2. reduction to appearance: the treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look, or how they appear to the senses;
  3. silencing: the treatment of a person as if they are silent, lacking the capacity to speak.

The majority of the thinkers discussing objectification have taken it to be a morally problematic phenomenon. This is particularly the case in feminist discussions of pornography. Anti-pornography feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, influenced by Immanuel Kant's conception of objectification, have famously argued that, due to men's consumption of pornography, women as a group are reduced to the status of mere tools for men's purposes. Moreover, feminists like Sandra Bartky and Susan Bordo have argued that women are objectified through being excessively preoccupied with their appearance. Important recent work by feminists has also been devoted to exploring the connection between objectivity and objectification. More recently, some thinkers, such as Martha Nussbaum, have challenged the idea that objectification is a necessarily negative phenomenon, arguing for the possibility of positive objectification. While treating a person as an object (in one or more of the ways mentioned above) is often problematic, Nussbaum argues that objectification can in some contexts take benign or even positive forms, and can constitute a valuable and enjoyable part of our lives. In her forthcoming work, Nancy Bauer questions the very idea that it makes sense to specify the marks and features of the term ‘objectification’. Such an attempt, she argues, will only distort the phenomenon in question (2015, forthcoming).

Go read the rest here.

The limits of GGG.

in ,

There are several philosophies to live by when it comes to sex and one's partners. One of those is Dan Savage's GGG, or good, giving and game: "GGG stands for 'good, giving, and game,' which is what people engaging in sex should strive to be. Think 'good in bed,' 'giving equal time and equal pleasure,' and 'game for anything—within reason.'"

However, there are limits, and this relates to what we were talking about in class last week - how to fit atypical sexual preferences into a sexual relationship that is otherwise typical. It's also worth mentioning that vanilla sex, or typical sex, is becoming the equivalent of being described as boring. In other words, it's starting to be seen in a negative light. Is there really anything wrong with vanilla sex?

Dan Savage posted the following letter to Savage Love:

It seems like a lot of the questions lately have been from straight women saying things like, "I want to be GGG, so I agreed to do this fantasy for my husband/boyfriend..." Um.

Is "wanting to be GGG" the only reason they're agreeing to these fantasies? It doesn't sound like any of them particularly WANT to be a part of the action, they're just agreeing to make the male partner happy, and because they want to seem cool and fun and agreeable, and they also probably want to keep the guy from straying and seeking fulfillment elsewhere. Which I guess is fine, but I'm not getting the sense that the dudes in these relationships are doing anything similar for their ladies—they're not going outside their comfort zones to accommodate their female partners desires. It doesn't really seem like a super great deal for these women.

Maybe you should clarify that GGG doesn't have to mean "pretending one's own reservations don't exist." It just seems like a lot of women are falling into this "must be cool and not nag and go along with what he wants" trap and your GGG concept is playing into that. I just really feel like there are not a similar amount of guys almost desperate to prove how GGG they are by going along with their female partners' desires and fantasies.

Troubling To Me

His response:

People should be "good, giving, and game" for their partners. But GGG doesn't mean a person has to do any damn thing their partner wants. I've been hammering away at that point for as long as I've been promoting the GGG concept. Here, for example, is some recent advice I gave to a woman who was wondering if her "GGG Card" would be revoked if she refused to vomit on her partner:

Let's revisit my original definition of GGG: "GGG stands for good, giving, and game, which is what we should all strive to be for our sex partners. Think good in bed, giving equal time and equal pleasure, and game for anything—within reason."

Some kinksters skip past the "within reason" part of the definition when they're discussing kinks with vanilla partners. They shouldn't. Extreme bondage or SM, shit and puke, emotionally tricky humiliation play, demanding that your partner have sex with other people because it turns you on (asking your partner to assume all of the physical risks that go along with that, to say nothing of the emotional risks for a partner who isn't interested in having sex with other people), etc.—all of that falls under the FTF exclusion, or a "fetish too far," which you'll find in the fine print on the back of your GGG card, PUKE.

There are definite risks when someone heads out of his or her sexual comfort zone to please a partner. But anyone who learned about being GGG by reading my column will also have learned about the importance of good communication, mutual respect, and honoring a partner's boundaries. And sometimes respect for a partner's boundaries—respect for a partner's limits—means a particular fantasy/kink/desire is forever off the table.

Read the rest here.

Nominations for the 22nd Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

in

From The Telegraph:

The shortlist for the 22nd Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been announced.

According to Literary Review, which has run the prize every year since 1993, its purpose "is to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them".

The 2014 shortlist contains some illustrious books, including The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, recipient of this year's Man Booker Prize, The Snow Queen by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham, and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. Also featured is BBC broadcaster Kirsty Wark for her debut novel, The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle.

The Bad Sex panel also considered Andrew Marr's questionable prose in his political thriller Head of State – "they bucked like deer and squirmed like eels", reads one sexual description – but ultimately was not selected.

Past winners include Melvyn Bragg for A Time to Dance (1993), Sebastian Faulks for Charlotte Gray (1998), and Norman Mailer for A Castle in the Forest (2007). A Lifetime Achievement Award for Bad Sex in Fiction was given to John Updike in 2008. Last year's winner, The City of Devi by Manil Suri, described a sexual episode through a metaphor of exploding supernovas.

So far, the 2014 shortlist includes:

The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham

The Narrow Road to the Deep Northby Richard Flanagan

The Hormone Factory by Saskia Goldschmidt

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

The Age of Magic by Ben Okri

The Affairs of Others by Amy Grace Loyd

Desert God by Wilbur Smith

Things to Make and Break by May-Lan Tan

The Lemon Grove by Helen Walsh

The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle by Kirsty Wark

Below is a selection of quotations from this year's nominees:

"Her body was hairless. Her pudenda were also entirely devoid of hair. The tips of her inner lips protruded shyly from the vertical cleft. The sweet dew of feminine arousal glistened upon them." Wilbur Smith, Desert God

"Her mouth is clean in an herbal way, no herb in particular but that sense of green rampancy." Michael Cunningham, The Snow Queen

"He kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line." Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

"When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch & she came alight. He touched her belly & his hand seemed to burn through her." Ben Okri, The Age of Magic

"I unbuttoned my pants, pushing them down past my hips, and my beast, finally released from its cage, sprang up wildly. I started inching my way back up, continuing to stimulate her manually, until the beast found its way in." Saskia Goldshmidt, The Hormone Factory

"I arched my body against him and taking his hand I guided it down over my navel and placed it between my legs, my hand on top of his, holding it there, gasping as his fingers circled me softly. I had never imagined that I was capable of wanton behaviour, but it was as if a dam within me had burst and we made love that day and night like two people starved, slowly suffused with more and more pleasure, exploring and devouring every inch of each other, so as not to miss one single possibility of passion. It was as if I were drinking in life itself." Kirsty Wark, The Legacy of Elizabeth Pringle

"She became aware of him gliding into her. He loved her with gentleness & strength, stroking her neck, praising her face with his hands, till she was broken up & began a low rhythmic wail." Ben Okri, The Age of Magic

"Her throat as open as her body, wet everywhere from tears and the coming, and I did hear it, a long high twisting cry and a twisting in my arms as my fingers dove up and up into the full expressive wetness of her." Amy Grace Loyd, The Affairs of Others

"She comes and comes, waves of hot silk – I grit my teeth and push her off. I bend her over and really give it to her." May-Lan Tan, Things to Make and Break

"He feared losing himself, his freedom, his future. What had a moment before aroused him so intensely now seemed charmless" Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

"The girls entwined themselves lithely around Tsukuru. Kuro’s breasts were full and soft. Shiro’s were small, but her nipples were as hard as tiny round pebbles. Their pubic hair was as wet as a rain forest." Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

"His mouth is on hers; his tongue is jabbing around her gums, the wrinkled roof of her mouth." Helen Walsh, The Lemon Grove

The winner will be announced on December 3.

New study: Gay genes, and their potential role in shaping orientation.

in

From New Scientist:

Huge Twin Study Homes In On 'Gay Genes' by Andy Coghlan

A genetic analysis of 409 pairs of gay twins has provided the strongest evidence yet that gay people are born gay. The study clearly links sexual orientation in men with two regions of the human genome that have been implicated before, one on the X chromosome and one on chromosome 8.

The finding is an important contribution to mounting evidence that being gay is biologically determined rather than a lifestyle choice. In some countries, such as Uganda, being gay is still criminalised, and some religious groups believe that gay people can be "treated" to make them straight.

"It erodes the notion that sexual orientation is a choice," says study leader Alan Sanders of the NorthShore Research Institute in Evanston, Illinois.

The region on the X chromosome picked out by the study, called Xq28, was originally identified in 1993 by Dean Hamer of the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, but attempts to validate the finding since have been mixed. The other region picked out is in the twist in the centre of chromosome 8. Known as 8q12, it was first signposted in 2005.

Statistically stronger

The latest study involves about three times as many people as the previous largest study, which means it is significantly more statistically robust.

Over the past five years, Sanders has collected blood and saliva samples from 409 pairs of gay non-identical twins from 384 families. This compares, for example, with 40 pairs of twins recruited for Hamer's study.

The team combed through the samples, looking at the locations of genetic markers called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – differences of a single letter in the genetic code – and measuring the extent to which each of the SNPs were shared by the men in the study.

The only trait unequivocally shared by all 818 men was being gay. Because the twins were non-identical so don't have the same genes, all other traits, such as hair colour, height and intelligence, varied by different degrees between each twin in a pair and between all sets of twins. Therefore, any SNPs consistently found in the same genetic locations across the group would most likely be associated with sexual orientation.

Only five SNPs stood out and of these, the ones most commonly shared were from the Xq28 and 8q12 regions on the X chromosome and chromosome 8 respectively. But this doesn't mean the study found two "gay genes". Both regions contain many genes, and the next step will be to home in on which ones might be contributing to sexual orientation.

Sanders says he has already completed the work for that next step: he has compared SNPs in those specific regions in gay and straight men to see if there are obvious differences in the gene variants, and is now preparing the results for publication. "Through this study, we have the potential to narrow down to fewer genes," says Sanders.

Whatever the results, Sanders stresses that complex traits such as sexual orientation depend on multiple factors, both environmental and genetic. Even if he has hit on individual genes, they will likely only have at most a small effect on their own, as has also been seen in studies of the genetic basis for intelligence, for example.

Read the rest here.

Autonepiophilia.

in

Autonepiophilia: sexual preference for taking on identity of an infant.

This is from a somewhat patronizing documentary on women and kinks.

It appears that for Kailey, dressing and acting like a baby is a way of experiencing what she felt she missed as a child, rather than a source of sexual arousal. As Kailey notes, if she and her boyfriend start having sex while she's taking on the role of Baby Ella, she switches back to Kailey. Her boyfriend definitely finds Baby Ella, and their play together, sexually arousing. Still, the documentary does leave open the possibility that Kailey is also turned on by playing the role of Baby Ella. And she does report being into BDSM.

Secret Lives of Women - Baby Ella

And a bonus video:

Stanley is a 31 year-old obsessed with being an adult baby. For more visit http://tlc.howstuffworks.com/tv/my-crazy-obsession#mkcpgn=yttlc1

Atypical sexual preferences on Reddit.

in ,

In class, we discovered that many people (i.e., students) have atypical sexual preferences that they find weird, cause them distress (i.e., shame, embarrassment, guilt, etc.), and/or they wouldn't disclose to their partners. These types of preferences are not uncommon. There have been several threads on Reddit devoted to atypical sexual preferences; they provide a glimpse at what some people like, and how that can play out in relationships. Click on the following links to check them out. I've also provided some screenshot samples below (click to make large - NSFW). What would you consider to be the strangest thing that you like sexually?

What's the weirdest thing your SO asked you to do in bed and did you do it?

Ex-prostitutes of reddit, what was the weirdest thing you ever got hired for?

Click to make larger:

Atypical sexual preferences, guilt and shame.

in , ,

Another piece that's too nuanced to be cut up. In its entirety, from xoJane (click the link to get to the comments section, which is worth reading in and of itself):

TRIGGER WARNING: sexual violence.

Hit Me Baby, One More Time: Slapping, Spitting, Name-Calling and Other Sex Preferences I Feel Guilty About by Emily McCombs [check out more about Emily here]

I might prefer that my big controversial sex preferences involved whipped cream or whatever instead of wanting to be slapped in the face during intercourse, but that is not the hand I was dealt.

I feel bad about my BangBus.

Not while I'm actually watching it. Sexual arousal doesn't leave a lot of room for ambivalence and who stops masturbating to ponder the political implications of what they're getting off to? I can barely stop masturbating if someone else comes in the room, much less to make way for niggling feminist guilt.

But occasionally, when someone asks me if I watch porn, I feel embarassed to say that the only porn I regularly watch is founded on the (scripted) premise that a bunch of dudes are driving around in a van coercing women into having sex on camera with the promise of cash, before dumping them by the side of the road, shouting insults as they peel away.

Yep, that's what my vagina's into.

She unfortunately doesn't consult me much on what turns her on, and she never checks the current political climate, or she definitely would NOT be aroused by all the degrading, violent stuff she has shown a marked interest in over the years. I'm starting to feel weird about personifying my vagina in this way, so I'm going to shift gears.

I consider myself to err on the side of sexual submission. I have never been into the performative aspects of it all -- I am not some weird sex LARPer who wants to wear costumes and address each other as "Master" and "Slave." I don't want to go to special events, I shouldn't have to wear pleather just to get it done, and I don't want to "play." I want to have weird sex with weird people who like weird things, like an adult.

Some of those weird things that I like include: rough breast play including slapping, clothespins and ropes; name-calling of the slut-bitch-whore variety; forced deepthroating; facials; "Daddy" talk; rape play; spanking; dirty talk; hair-pulling; group sex; anal; and basically anything else filthy/nasty/taboo/found in your average pornographic video. Also, and here's the stuff that's more for special occasions and that I don't want to admit on a site for ladies: being slapped, being spit on, being choked, being urinated on.

Does that sound like a list of nightmares to you? To me it sounds like a delightful Tuesday evening.

I don't begrudge anyone their role as captain of their own sexual steamship. Desire is complicated and tricky to regulate -- I don't think I could stop being turned on by being treated "badly" any easier than a gay man could suddenly start being attracted to women. I might prefer that my big controversial sex preferences involved whipped cream or whatever instead of wanting to be slapped in the face during intercourse, but that is not the hand I was dealt.

A lot of factors go into the creation of a fetish, just as they do our non-sexual preferences. One of mine is almost certainly trauma. I wish this is something they had told me about rape: that afterward, your brain will try to work out what happened in bizarre, repetitive ways, which may include recreation of the trauma in your fantasies and life. I don't really understand it intellectually, but apparently my brain and heart think they can make things turn out differently this time, somehow reverse the past by taking control of what was once a powerless scenario.

You don't have to have been raped to have fetishes like mine. In fact, I liked a lot of this stuff before the traumatic event. But it's certainly an angle that seems to go unmentioned by those who think admitting that some women have rape fantasies is in some way encouraging men to rape. Are we willing to tell women how they should process their own experiences?

Recently I did a consulting job in which the state of modern sexuality was a major topic of discussion. We were given a presentation from a nervous young PR consultant whose main thesis was that pornography has damaged the state of gender relations irrevocably, that women now feel they can't measure up to the paid actresses and men's desires have been warped by repeated exposure.

"How can men and women be truly equal in a world in which men want to cum on women's faces?" he asked.

These issues are certainly real, but the idea that men consume porn and women are damaged by it seems too rigid to me. We'd all do well to remember that the actors and actresses in films are getting paid to do things that even they might not engage in in real life. I'll do a lot of shit for money I wouldn't do for fun. In reality, not all men want to cum on a woman's face, and a lot of women like having their faces cum on. (Just picture me doing that two thumbs "This guy" gesture right now.)

We all, male and female, live in a world where a wider range of sexual activity is visible and accessible to us. As long as we keep consent, respect and common courtesy top of mind, that fact in itself doesn't have to hurt anybody.

If you don't have fantasies like mine, I can understand the impulse to want to erase them from the world. But women like me and all the other straight freaks in this world stubbornly refuse to be erased. Sex is too important, too essential a life process, to spend our lives faking it. Anybody who thinks I, personally, am going to spend the rest of my life being sweetly made love to while I cry tears of sheer, uncut BOREDOM is out of their freaking minds.

Sometimes I hear women say that by engaging in "politically incorrect" sex, we are sending a message to men that all women want to be treated in such a manner. But consensual sexual activity, even if it resembles some non consensual sexual activity, isn't rape any more than movie murder is real murder. And while some people certainly think we should eliminate movie violence lest it drive the easily influenced to commit violent acts, we're not talking about movies here. We're talking about people. And you can't eliminate people or ask them to eliminate parts of themselves, no matter how messy or unappealing their desires may seem to you.

Since we can't erase reality, we better start dealing in nuance.

Getting slapped and called a slut because it turns me on and I've asked for it is not abuse. The men who want to do that are not abusers; in fact a lot of them are some of the nicest and most respectful men I've met outside of the bedroom. Rape play and rape are never going to be the same thing. And pretending that the two are similar is actually way more confusing and dangerous than clearly differentiating them.

If our men truly can't tell the difference between hurting, abusing and degrading a woman, and participating in consensual play utilizing some of these elements, then the problem lies with them and sexual education in our society, not with those temptingly rape-able women who enjoy rough play.

If you are still confused, consider this: After we're done, when I'm spent from being used, being told I'm a filthy whore as you hold me down or toss me around or hit me if those are the boundaries we've agreed upon, when I'm covered in saliva and sweat and bodily fluids, look at my face. I will be smiling.

That's the difference.