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The President’s Club, MeToo and a difficult conversation
Two things I believe to be true in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Firstly, that many men have been put in positions of power over women, which they have abused to varying degrees. Secondly, that this is at least partly a result of the way our society teaches men to behave. The former statement is accusatory: there are men who have done bad things. The second is explanatory: here is a reason why they do those things. The former sounds like a blanket condemnation, while the latter feels uncomfortably like an excuse. But if I believe both these things to be true, how do I go about having a conversation with men I love about sexual violence and consent?
This post will naturally discuss consent, sexual assault and other similar things. I’ve tried to avoid going into gruesome detail and simply linked out to full accounts/reporting where possible.
Let them pick the music
I hanker for a lot of things from my dating days and my youth. But one of the things I don’t miss is the awkward feeling, early on in a hook up, that the men I wanted to fuck were playing music at me. A fairly common scenario involved me sitting on my hands and trying not to lean in for a kiss too soon, while a hot guy commandeered the stereo, picked an album and told me: “you’re going to love this, I know it.” Few of my dates ever let me pick the music.
Reasons I have not replied to your message
We live in anxious times, soundtracked by the constant, incessant ping of phones and laptops. Notifications are everywhere, bleeping and flashing and demanding a response. So how do we deal with it? Some people probably just switch their phones off or put them in a different room. People like me, though, write blog posts trying to explain ourselves to others in a desperate attempt to either make them forgive me or make them leave me alone. So with good and bad, selfish and silly and paranoid and everything in between, here are a few reasons I have not replied to your message.
Guest blog: ‘Not to Choose’ by Valery North
I am ridiculously excited about today’s guest blog – as you can probably tell by the fact I’m posting it on Monday as opposed to Friday when other guest blogs go up. Valery North – who has written here before on how your physical responses to sex toys can change as you get older – has just published a book! Not to Choose is a BDSM relationship novel about kinky sex, feminism and one person’s spiritual faith. And the extract that Valery has sent to give you a taster of the book is ridiculously hot, and very much my cup of tea. Or my cup of ‘vigorous, intense BDSM fuck’, if you will…
Guest blog: Male porn performance or ‘We need to talk about boners’
When you’re working in porn, how hard is it to get hard? How do performers ensure that they can get and keep erections, sometimes for long stretches at a time? I’ve heard people discussing these questions a lot before. But today’s guest blogger – Marcus Quillan – is here to look at these questions from a different angle: what are the expectations of cis male porn performers in the industry? And what do these expectations tell us about toxic masculinity in porn, and the welfare of performers?