Can someone explain why Autostraddle and Afterellen both conducted and published independent lesbian sex studies at the same time? Are they competing?
we did ours first, but i don’t think the fact that we did one had any impact on them deciding to do one?
Orgasms: many women consider them integral to the sexual experience, others consider them an afterthought, some struggle to have them, some struggle not to have them. Oh, and lesbians have more of them than straight women.
It is expected that SCOTUS will rule in favor of marriage equality. And if that is the case, gay marriage opponents will likely start to promote a new issue – provisional ‘opt-out’ proposals that will protect conservative religious officials who want to avoid involvement in same-sex weddings. Sound familiar?
I had entered adulthood knowing that I was queer and also knowing that I wanted a child. I understood that getting pregnant would require some money, and some sourcing of anonymous sperm. This struck me as a small obstacle, a hurdle I might easily clear. But I hadn’t anticipated the months I would spend in weekly debates with my partner trying to convince her to have kids.
Names have a lot of magic in them. In folklore, the idea of knowing someone or something’s true name is a powerful one, and someone sharing it with you is them at their most vulnerable. Many Catholic parents, mine included, name their children after saints of people from the Bible. Our obsession with names doesn’t end there: next, a Catholic will go through the sacrament of Confirmation, becoming a full member of the church, at which point we chose another saint we want to emulate and we take their name. Names are bigger than the letters that make them up. They fit an entire personality inside them, an entire history, they fit an entire soul.
The journey to finding and deciding on my real name, Melinda Valdivia Rude, took about four years.
As queer people, as queer people of color, as women, as queer women of color, Erica’s story is resounding. These are all of our stories. This is a book for anyone who has been told they were broken, or not worthy, or that their destinies had been decided by our ancestors or our culture’s myths about who they were. This is a book for anyone who has ever wished, from the bottom of their hearts, that things could be different or that our demons would finally leave us. This is a book is for anyone who has ever looked at their mother and seen a paragon of strength. This book is for anyone who has recognized that their love is an act of protest. This is for anyone who was told they weren’t beautiful, or that their histories meant nothing, and pushed on anyway.
I’ve spent the last few weeks pacing around my apartment, oscillating between coffee and booze, and trying to overcome some major imposter syndrome after receiving some fantastic news: I’ve been accepted into the third cohort of the Ada Developers Academy, a tuition-free coding school for women. This program is an extreme commitment – you attend onsite training full-time for seven months, then dive into a five-month internship as a programmer. We start this May. So for the next year, I’ll be completely immersed in coding.
As a writer who’s been tangentially involved with tech via previous retail experiences, I’ve written and read a whole lot about the lack of women in STEM fields. I know that underwhelming representation figures have compelled the White House to put together a Women in STEM initiative and that Google sent aspiring female developers to Code School for free. Women made up just 21.4% of the U.S. programming workforce in 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Receiving an opportunity to lead change and queer my tech through my future involvement in programming is both thrilling and terrifying.
How to ask for things in bed, relationships and money, developing a kinky identity, why people make so many noise complaints about loud sex and more.
In two hours we learned Jenner is indeed a trans woman, and he’s struggled with feeling this way for his entire life, he hopes his story will educate people and maybe even save some lives and Diane Sawyer probably should’ve done some more homework before doing an interview like this. We also learned we still have a long way to go before trans women are treated with full respect by the media.
“When people feel they’re losing out, they turn against the people they think they’re losing to. We see this in anger against immigrants (taking our jobs) and ethnic minorities (having too many babies, straining state welfare). As a minority group, not only will LGBT people always be vulnerable to changeable majority sentiment, current policies that privilege a certain family structure actively incentivise our exclusion.”
Just something that peaked my interest.
Anonymous asked:
bikesbabesandbooze-deactivated2 answered:
Such a good idea and now when I am dressed similar to scout I will also call these Scoutfits:
We thought a lot before even posting this news, because we don’t want to add to the cultural stigma surrounding these issues. We also didn’t want to add to the cultural silence around partner violence in LGBTQ communities. On top of all of that, there is the issue that many news outlets are reporting this with Brittney Griner’s name, only, in the headline. This is probably because she is more famous in mainstream sports coverage. However, it also speaks to and certainly adds to the implicit bias that “masculine”people are always aggressors. We don’t know if that is true here and, from what info we have, it seems that it is more likely they both attacked each other.
So we decided to post it without commentary, because we don’t have all the facts and because it is important to acknowledge that violence happens in queer relationships. It is also important to put the story out there in a way that tells what really happened and is not…awful (see: Mug Shot [which was used as the image accompanying lots of coverage of the news]), not focusing on the more masculine-presenting partner in a biased way.
So here is it.
On the question of whether this is intimate partner violence, I would say, “Yes.” Griner and Johnson may disagree and that is their right as a couple. Certainly, when things escalate to a physical fight, there are relationship issues that need to be addressed. We can all agree on that, I’m sure. In a past life, I worked in domestic violence services and I believe that the “cycle of violence” and the “power and control theory” are useful, but do not always fit the reality of how violence plays out in relationships. What DV experts might call, “Common Couple Violence” is probably what we are seeing here, which is fairly common and much less likely to include sexual or emotional violence and is not about controlling a partner. It is characterized by violent outbursts, using physical harm to escalate fighting, and is slightly more likely to be perpetrated by women than men (though they are close to 50/50). It is also less likely that the people involved will classify this as IPV, but it is violence…between intimate partners…who are not likely to hit or attack people outside of the family. It is also harder for someone in a relationship with couple violence to recognize it as abuse. There doesn’t have to be one abuser and one victim. Family violence can be much more complicated than that. And no one deserves it.
I should add that this kind of violence is also the most amenable to therapy and counseling to get through. Because there is not a power and control dynamic, it is more about learning how to communicate and how to deescalate emotionally. I have lots of love for Brittney and Glory, too, and it hurts my heart that this is happening between them. And that it’s playing out on the national media screen. I hope they can get through it and both be safe and happy, with each other or without.
I want to call IPV what it is, but I also want to see happy, healthy QPOC couples and I don’t think those have to be mutually exclusive, you know?
