"What does virginity mean to a queer person, who may never have vaginal intercourse in her/his/hir life? What of a lesbian who chooses to never engage in any sort of penetrative sex act her entire life, does she remain some sort of super, extra virgin? If a straight man receives a blowjob, he will in all likelihood still consider himself a virgin, but a gay man receiving a blowjob may have a more complicated understanding of what it means for his sex life. In many ways, our conception of “virginity” erases or invalidates queer sex."
"
Once you start to speak, people will yell at you. They will interrupt you, put you down and suggest it’s personal. And the world won’t end.
And the speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don’t miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And you will still flirt and paint your nails, dress up and party, because, as I think Emma Goldman said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” And at last you’ll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.
"
"In this new study, Backlash From the Bedroom, the researchers find that:
‘…under the right circumstances—that is, when the experience promises to be safe and pleasant—women are just as likely as men to engage in casual sex.’
Key words: safe and pleasant. It’s more difficult for women to have casual sex, not because they, as a universal group, necessarily don’t desire it, but because women live in a world that is neither safe or particularly ‘pleasant.’ I’m not saying that if we lived in an equitable society free of sexism and the threat of violence all women would be having casual sex all the time, but I am saying that what we need to understand about men and women and sex is that universalizing based on solely on evolutionary psychology that ignores cultural and social contexts is dumb."
"We have not been taught how to speak. In fact, we have been taught how to
not speak – how to cover our emotions with things like “I’m tired” or “I’m sick.” The excuses everyone else gives to strangers and acquaintances we give to friends, family, to our face in the mirror.
We’ve been taught how to believe our own lies. We’ve been taught that we can’t even trust our own emotions, and we’ve been taught how to leave them completely unexamined. So when we finally do speak, we’re venturing into the unknown, onto uncharted land. We are expressing emotion that we will probably take back and reassert as something else. We are putting words to experiences that we have never had vocabulary for. We are trying to express things there are no words for.
"
"Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate."
—
I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame by Brene Brown (via
hollow-gram)
(Source: runa-lovegood)
"The mainstream media is ripe with oversexualized images of women of color, and policy often stigmatizes and shames this same group of people. Women of color and poor women are blamed for their inability to keep their legs closed and for having too many children. For marginalized groups of women, sex is not linked to pleasure or freedom; it is demonized and used as an example of all the ways in which these women lack self-control. As a result, a lot of conversations around sexual freedom discount the experience of people of color, failing to take into account how much sexual freedom is assumed to hinge on a woman’s privilege—be it because of her race, economic status, or social standing.
Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Jill Nelson, Alice Walker, Leti Volpp, Saidiya Hartman, and countless other feminists of color have either directly or indirectly brought up the idea that the social consequences of sex are greater for women of color. Women are sexualized by the media, period, but women of color face a unique set of circumstances where they have historically been hypersexualized, and then held to white standards of purity. According to popular ideas of sexuality, women of color start out impure. One concrete example of this happens around rape and sexual assault. When the survivor is a woman of color, the assumption is that she started out consenting. After all, the bodies of women of color are for consumption and therefore they are always ready and willing to have sex."
"Society has put up so many boundaries, so many limitations on what’s right and wrong that it’s almost impossible to get a pure thought out. It’s like a little kid, a little boy, looking at colors, and no one told him what colors are good, before somebody tells you you shouldn’t like pink because that’s for girls, or you’d instantly become a gay two-year-old. Why would anyone pick blue over pink? Pink is obviously a better color. Everyone’s born confident, and everything’s taken away from you."
"I’m unapologetic not because I’m strong-willed or over-confident. I’m unapologetic because this is it; this is my life. There is nothing I can do, no one I can please. I am a person with a strong sense of being, that’s all."
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Why is being a loner characterised as a ‘social disorder’? It makes me never want to speak to anyone again. It makes me annoyed to be labelled as ‘antisocial’/ socially anxious. I am in fact very comfortable in social situations, I just have a truthful and realistic view of the meaning of friendship and relationship-That you cannot get on ‘really well’ with everyone, you cannot even really ‘like’ everyone (though most people pretend to). In reality, each individual probably finds they don’t have a real ‘connection’/ chemistry with no more than 5 real people at any one time in their lives.
I feel like if you don’t get on really well with someone, there is little point in spending time socialising with them. Most events are full of people talking about nothing and this makes me feel even worse than staying at home, alone. Or perhaps I am just jealous of the people talking about nothing and cant step out of this godforesaken bubble that makes me want to never go out again.
Some people need time alone to process thoughts/ events and some people don’t. I will probably always be this way. Every boyfriend I have ever had has been a loner. I wish people wouldn’t make introversion into a personality flaw.
"
