Did I see the Dildo Sign in the sky? Time for: Random Sex Product Info From ThirtyKnives!
Pjur is fucking awesome. Seriously. Totally hypoallergenic. Most of their silicone lubes have two, maybe three ingredients, all of it lubricating. No filler, all killer. Everything about that company is rad. Well, mostly because their international sales manager has the most excellent little moustache.Basically they make the best silicone based lubes. Slippery, water resistant (for shagging in the shower or the bath), great for rougher play and anal. Downside is you can’t use silicone lube with silicone toys, as it basically sticks to the surface and makes it sticky and nasty as fuck. This is a pity, since all the best toys these days are largely made of silicone. They have apparently developed a Toy Lube that is silicone and toy friendy, but I’m not convinced.
I’m going to be a total suck and link to the shop I work for: Pjur 50ml drop stop. TK gotta get paid, son.
Some people don’t like that satiny texture that silicones leave on the skin, and you’ll need a water based lube anyway for use with toys, should you have any. I reccomend Astroglyde or Astroglyde Natural, if you’re really worried about ingredient origins. Both are glycerine and paraben free, which is what you need in a lube, and they are going to absorb into the skin slowly so you don’t wind up still slippery well after your encounter.
KY on the other hand is bullshit. It was designed as a medical lube, not to be used in large amounts or regularly. It’s got a lot of glycerine in it, which will contribute to yeast growth and gunk up your junk right proper. It also dries out and gets gluey and is generally horrid. Just don’t. Especially avoid the His and Hers, it’s got fucking honey in it.I’ve noticed that there is a lack of accessible information here regarding to lubricants and safe lubes, so please check this out along with this guide here for what NOT to use as a substitute for lube courtesy of sexmadesimple
Dozens of local teens gather at the Capitol to talk about sex Monday.
It was part of a “Real Sex Ed Saves Lives” rally calling for more sex education in New York’s schools.
The event highlighted the value of sex education for New York’s youth.
Students FOX23 spoke with said the message schools are sending to kids is the wrong one.
“Today we don’t see a lot of schools supporting our real sex lives. They are preaching abstinence and that’s just not logical, we need more support and safe ways to have sex,” said Jason Martin, a Senior at South Glens Falls High School.
Family Planning Advocates of New York State who hosted Monday’s rally said comprehensive sex education curriculum also addresses bullying- an issue many students and schools struggle with.
Did I see the Dildo Sign in the sky? Time for: Random Sex Product Info From ThirtyKnives!
Pjur is fucking awesome. Seriously. Totally hypoallergenic. Most of their silicone lubes have two, maybe three ingredients, all of it lubricating. No filler, all killer. Everything about that company is rad. Well, mostly because their international sales manager has the most excellent little moustache.Basically they make the best silicone based lubes. Slippery, water resistant (for shagging in the shower or the bath), great for rougher play and anal. Downside is you can’t use silicone lube with silicone toys, as it basically sticks to the surface and makes it sticky and nasty as fuck. This is a pity, since all the best toys these days are largely made of silicone. They have apparently developed a Toy Lube that is silicone and toy friendy, but I’m not convinced.
I’m going to be a total suck and link to the shop I work for: Pjur 50ml drop stop. TK gotta get paid, son.
Some people don’t like that satiny texture that silicones leave on the skin, and you’ll need a water based lube anyway for use with toys, should you have any. I reccomend Astroglyde or Astroglyde Natural, if you’re really worried about ingredient origins. Both are glycerine and paraben free, which is what you need in a lube, and they are going to absorb into the skin slowly so you don’t wind up still slippery well after your encounter.
KY on the other hand is bullshit. It was designed as a medical lube, not to be used in large amounts or regularly. It’s got a lot of glycerine in it, which will contribute to yeast growth and gunk up your junk right proper. It also dries out and gets gluey and is generally horrid. Just don’t. Especially avoid the His and Hers, it’s got fucking honey in it.I’ve noticed that there is a lack of accessible information here regarding to lubricants and safe lubes, so please check this out along with this guide here for what NOT to use as a substitute for lube courtesy of sexmadesimple
- asked a friend. I wrote:
AWESOME QUESTION
THANK YOU FOR ASKING :D :D :D
I’m going to focus on straight, cis people - they’re the ones most affected here (I reckon) and also a lot of this is about socialisation, and we’re all socialised and assumed by society to be straight and cis (and many queer folks have worked out lots of what I’ll say already.)
I think it’s damaging to define ‘sex’ as *only* penile-vaginal penetration (or PIV, penis-in-vagina, sex. For clarity, I’ll call it ‘intercourse’ here.) And I think that a lot of people do define it this way, or call it ‘full sex’ or ‘real sex’ or something else meaning ‘the pinnacle of sexual experience’. It’s fourth base, it’s the only way to lose one’s virginity, and so on. It sets up the idea of foreplay! What on earth is ‘foreplay’? Everything before the main event - everything before you actually start having intercourse, which therefore doesn’t count as sex.
Essentially, it’s damaging because there is so much more to sexual experience, and focusing solely on intercourse erases a vast amount of absolutely awesome stuff to do with sex. Loads and loads of people don’t ever have intercourse at all, for various reasons, but do have loads of other awesome sex, and that’s ignored.
It is heteronormative - it makes intercourse the norm, and everything else a deviation, an aberration from that. It makes it ‘other’ (just like queer people are ‘other’), less ‘real’ and less good.
It erases the experiences of queer people - if you’re having sex with people with similar genitals to yours, intercourse isn’t really an option: and so all the sex you’re having isn’t ‘real’, right? This has created some other interesting trends -
- for cis gay men, it’s kinda made anal intercourse a new pinnacle of sexual experience: loads of cis gay men don’t have anal intercourse, and the idea that it’s a necessary thing is rubbish and creates loads of undue pressure. It’s also the root of lots of homophobia, I reckon - it’s sodomy that many homophobes are hating on, and that’s reflected in the fact that many homophobes are more okay with lesbians than they are with gay men. (Also, lesbians are hot, of course.)
- for cis lesbian women, other people ask us a lot ‘how do you have sex anyway?!’ - for many people, it’s unimaginable that people could have sex without a penis involved, and it’s also a telling thing about the PIV definition: though it involves a vagina and penis, the vagina aspect mysteriously disappears when the penis does too - I think it’s mostly imagined as a penis receptacle, rather than an autonomous sexual organ. (And there’s also a fallacy floating about that lesbians strapping it on is an imitation of het people - it’s not, it’s an entirely different kind of dynamic. Just like butch presentation isn’t an imitation of men, but people still ask ‘why go out with her when you could have a real man?’ of their partners, or assume femmes are really straight, etc. Which I think is related to this centralisation of het experience.)
- also, virginity! Because real sex is intercourse, anything that isn’t intercourse isn’t real sex, right? So lots of people have lots of sexual interactions that they never call sex, and we’ve got situations such as young people in the States swearing purity pledges and then doing *everything but* have intercourse. Including anal intercourse, while saving the vagina for marriage (some people call this ‘saddlebacking.’) (I wonder how many of the women having anal intercourse to save themselves for marriage were pressured into doing so by their (similarly pure) partners? It’s not like it’s a particularly easy thing to do pleasurably when you’re 16, after all. Records of barrier protection use here aren’t great, either.)
It’s also very much a genital-focused view of sex. Many people only start to consider kinds of sex that don’t involve genitals if they don’t have use of their genitals, through various kinds of impairment. If people acquire a physical impairment, they often think their sex lives are over, forever - because they generally haven’t heard of other kinds of sex. Lots don’t have sex again, lots have other kinds of really awesomely excellent sex with different parts of their bodies.
Intercourse might also not be an option for people with some mobility impairments - it is a complicated, physically challenging thing to do - but oral or manual genital-focused sex again can be absolutely awesome as a focus. Yet more people can’t have intercourse because of past traumas, but fingers, tongues and toys serve just fine.
So, that’s some stuff on queer and disabled people. It erases all the other kinds of awesome, ‘real’ sex there are out there, ‘others’ and marginalises queer sex, and is genital-focused, which just isn’t relevant or necessary for many people.
What about het people?
So, for het men, sex becomes all about the penis, and all about intercourse: meaning that men must ‘perform’ well to be good at sex - they must easily become erect, ‘last’ a long time, orgasm from intercourse and from penile stimulation alone, etc.
It erases the experiences of men whose penises don’t behave like this (ie. in some ways, everyone) and paints other kinds of sexual stimulation for men as ‘other’ to that (an aberration, or a lesser thing: eg. nipple stimulation, anal penetration etc.)
For het women, it’s all about the vagina! The clitoris is never really mentioned in discussions on intercourse, and where intercourse is the main event, the clitoris is ignored - so again, clit stimulation is an extra, an ‘other’ in addition to intercourse.
It’s fairly well recognised nowadays (in the UK) that most women need clitoral stimulation in order to have orgasms (many only start having orgasms, btw, after getting a vibrator for this purpose), but there remains quite a bit of pressure on women to have orgasms from intercourse alone anyway. It can happen, for very few women, but there seems to be an idea that it’ll happen if someone is really really turned on, or really in love, or there’s enough thrusting, or her partner’s penis is big enough, or if the angle is just right, and so on. People expend huge amounts of energy hunting for the magic formula to make this happen (and more recently, lots of this rhetoric has spilled over into conversations about the G-spot.)
(There’s also some stuff here about how vaginas work. Most vaginas need quite a bit of warm-up to take something as large as a penis (or penis-sized dildo), and extra lubrication is almost always useful. I’ve found that this is an assumed thing when having sex with people who have cunts, and something I’ve had to talk about and teach with people who don’t. More crudely, some men think it’s reasonable to just stick it in and go, and that’s not how it works. And it’s nothing to do with arousal level, either!)
It makes intercourse - or, let’s be generous, other kinds of sex involved penises and vaginas - the main kind of sex available between het people. So anal sex for men is struck off the menu. She can never strap it on. A milion kinds of kinky sex I’m not even going to start trying to list here aren’t an option - or (for any of these) aren’t an option on the standard, default menu. To explore these, they have to (firstly) know they’re even an option (and good luck finding a sex ed curriculum that mentions, say, prostate pleasure) and (then) *talk* about them, because they’re weird and special and for occasions and need preparation and… yeah.
Another quick thing on queer sex! The sex ed curriculum is reproduction-focused, so intercourse-focused, so phallocentric heteronormative intercourse-focused - talking about different kinds of pleasure isn’t really a thing yet. A trend we tend to see in film classification and porn classification is that *non-normative kinds of sex are seen as more dirty.* Things like fisting, strap-ons, some kinky stuff - they’re ‘extreme.’ And they also tend to be kinds of sex that queer people have more. So: queer sex is ‘extreme’, it’s ‘niche’, it’s got specialised subheadings on porn sites - it’s been marginalised by not being talked about in the standard discourse of sex, and it continues to be marginal in other areas.
Make sense? So, in summary, a view of intercourse = ‘sex’ is heteronormative and phallocentric. It erases and makes ‘other’ the experiences of (and many of these categories overlap):
- many het men
- most het women
- all queer people ever
- many many disabled people of all genders
- all kinky people ever
- oh, and masturbation definitely isn’t sex! Nooooo.
It doesn’t really benefit anyone! So here’s to a better, more inclusive definition of sex. One definition I really like is ‘a significant exchange of erotic energy, where the participants decide what’s meant by all those words.’^
The trailer for the documentary “Scarlet Road” about a sex worker who focuses on men who are mentally/physically/developmentally disabled. As a guardian/student teacher of people with disabilities, this brings tears to my eyes. I wish that my 20 year-old kid (actually sister, but I largely raised her) had this opportunity to experience sex in a safe and comfortable environment like the men in this vid. So many people think that mentally and physically disabled people don’t experience any sexual desire (even involved parents who are otherwise educated about said conditions). I try and combat this stereotype whenever I encounter it (resulting in lots of awkward impassioned speeches). This DOESN’T MEAN REPRODUCTION. I don’t want my sister to reproduce, as she neither likes children nor is capable of caring for them (plus odds are any offspring would have major developmental problems). I still want her to happily experience this major facet of the human experience though. (Plus I’d like to limit the number of times I walk in on her masturbating as it is mortifying). Individuals with disabilities fantasize about the same things the rest of us do, and shouldn’t have to live without the sex they desire simply because of the way they were born. I know of at least one disabled man who has a relationship with a female sex worker and he is one of the happiest disabled adults I know (which is at least 40 individuals). We all deserve to have that chance. Sorry for the meandering ruminations, but this is a subject I have felt passionate about for many years/I have had a few cocktails. If this raises problems for you, please respond, as I would love to have an honest, polite, conversation (made possible by the superficial anonymity of the internet) about this subject.
Recently watched this and it is fantastic, thought-provoking, and educational all rolled into one. I highly recommend anyone interested in sex positivism, sex work activism and/or disability watch for themselves.
THIS IS AMAZING
Did I see the Dildo Sign in the sky? Time for: Random Sex Product Info From ThirtyKnives!
Pjur is fucking awesome. Seriously. Totally hypoallergenic. Most of their silicone lubes have two, maybe three ingredients, all of it lubricating. No filler, all killer. Everything about that company is rad. Well, mostly because their international sales manager has the most excellent little moustache.Basically they make the best silicone based lubes. Slippery, water resistant (for shagging in the shower or the bath), great for rougher play and anal. Downside is you can’t use silicone lube with silicone toys, as it basically sticks to the surface and makes it sticky and nasty as fuck. This is a pity, since all the best toys these days are largely made of silicone. They have apparently developed a Toy Lube that is silicone and toy friendy, but I’m not convinced.
I’m going to be a total suck and link to the shop I work for: Pjur 50ml drop stop. TK gotta get paid, son.
Some people don’t like that satiny texture that silicones leave on the skin, and you’ll need a water based lube anyway for use with toys, should you have any. I reccomend Astroglyde or Astroglyde Natural, if you’re really worried about ingredient origins. Both are glycerine and paraben free, which is what you need in a lube, and they are going to absorb into the skin slowly so you don’t wind up still slippery well after your encounter.
KY on the other hand is bullshit. It was designed as a medical lube, not to be used in large amounts or regularly. It’s got a lot of glycerine in it, which will contribute to yeast growth and gunk up your junk right proper. It also dries out and gets gluey and is generally horrid. Just don’t. Especially avoid the His and Hers, it’s got fucking honey in it.
PSA time folks.
As fancy and pleasing as the packaging maybe.
As popular KY is
Despite the fact that it does come in fancy flavours and all
I’d rather y’all not buy the KY. There are a substantial amount of reports and complaints of this lube cause yeast infections (thrush) and other not so nice things with users who have vaginas. In all honesty, just avoid lubes and stuff that have glycerin in it when you’re working with that area- especially for those of you who are incredibly prone to thrush.
FUCK GLYCERIN.
THIS SHIT HAS HONEY IN IT.
HONEY!!!!
WHO APPROVED THIS??
I DID NOT KNOW ABOUT THE HONEY
OH SHIT
JUST DON’T USE KY FOLKS
EVER
PLEASE
YOUR GENITALS WILL THANK YOU
PSA time folks.
As fancy and pleasing as the packaging maybe.
As popular KY is
Despite the fact that it does come in fancy flavours and all
I’d rather y’all not buy the KY. There are a substantial amount of reports and complaints of this lube cause yeast infections (thrush) and other not so nice things with users who have vaginas. In all honesty, just avoid lubes and stuff that have glycerin in it when you’re working with that area- especially for those of you who are incredibly prone to thrush.
I totally admit to this becoming a sex-ed blog but seriously folks TO THOSE WHO OWN THE JELLY TYPE PRODUCTS PLEASE READ THIS
PLEASE
