Need some new media with which to populate your brain this weekend? Here’s some of my favorite stuff from around the internet as of late…
• I love to read about interesting kinks. Here’s a piece on a man with a smoking fetish and what appeal the act holds for him. “I’m also into specific rituals and mannerisms. For instance, I love when a woman is dangling a cigarette from her mouth while fishing through her purse for a lighter,” he says. “I love lighting women’s cigarettes, too; it’s an intimate moment that’s all about eye contact.” (My friend Caitlin also likes this moment.)
• The folks at xoVain wrote about how they take selfies and it’s fascinating (plus useful info for rabid selfie-takers comme moi).
• If you’re looking to shake up your music collection, I can’t recommend Said the Gramophone’s annual Best Songs of the Year list highly enough. Sean writes beautifully about each and every song on his list. I’ve already discovered a few new gems to obsess over.
• My friend Sarah wrote about the unpaid work sex bloggers are asked to do, although pretty much all creative types are asked to work for free all the damn time. “Paying people for their labor shouldn’t have to be a revolutionary thing,” she writes. “If you think bloggers’ work is good enough for you to want to partner with us, pay us. It’s truly that simple.” Yes girl yes!
• Even if you’re not all that interested in perfume, you might enjoy The Dry Down, a perfume-focused newsletter written by Rachel Syme and Helena Fitzgerald. The one sent in early January was a beautifully written treatise on how perfume interacts with gender and economic privilege, and what perfume can be when it’s not about “inaccessible, monied femininity.” Fragrances, Helena writes, are “a way to invite both other people and yourself to play, to explore whatever gender or expression thereof interests you, whatever memories you want to crawl into the warm burrow of and sleep pressed against through the winter, whatever dormant stories you want to unlock from your own closed archives.”
• Caitlin wrote about the difference between a vulva and a vagina. Messing up this distinction is the quickest way to piss off a sex blogger, FYI…
• After reading my piece about feeling addicted to love, a friend sent me this article about “the shadow side of alternative sexuality,” and how kink and polyamory can “[paint you] into a corner of identity politics that nobody will be able to rescue you from because it feels too much like sex-shaming.” It’s heavy stuff, and I don’t think it’s a perfect match with my own experiences by any means, but it’s definitely some food for thought.
• Brandon Taylor – who is fantastic – wrote a Twitter thread about lessons he’s learned. Some faves of mine: “47. If you want to suck a dick, then suck one. Don’t take your sexual frustration and confusion out on others with oppressive legislation.” ✨”52. There is no making it. There is no line. There is no point at which you’ve achieved all your goals. Always be scheming and dreaming.”✨ “27. Gay men, LOL. Yikes.”
• This piece about the origins of the phrase “eat a bag of dicks” made me cry with laughter. “They say necessity is the mother of invention; at some point, it’s obvious that we as a society simply realized that telling someone to suck or eat one dick was no longer an adequate insult,” Tracy Moore writes. “We needed to go bigger.”
• Shon Faye’s “guide to everything you need to know about your twenties” is so, so good. Read it.
• “I have a depression and I always will,” writes my pal Sarah in this poignant, painful, but ultimately hopeful blog post.
• I’ve been swoonin’ over this Paul Cook song, “A Real Thunderbolt.” It’s such a lovely crystallization of what it feels like to be suddenly, profoundly attracted to someone. 🎵Someone who makes your heart jolt. Not some “okay” girl. A real thunderbolt.🎵
• Queer femmes’ online communities are super important, flying in the face of misogyny (both the sociocultural and internalized kinds), homophobia, femmephobia, and millennial-shaming. “Having queer femme friendships is essential. It’s non-negotiable,” says one interviewee in this article, and I am wont to agree.
• This poem on “how to make love to a trans person” is gorgeous.
What were your favorite things you read/wrote/listened to this month?