I am her friend” is vastly different than “I have been friendzoned”. One is a statement of friendship, and the other is a statement of sexual rejection couched in a term that implies the woman doesn’t know what is best for her.

— (via nerdy-nicole)

(Source: feministzilla)

Other frameworks that center around health and rights can miss important connections between the ways the State and ruling classes coerce and abuse groups of people based on race, class, gender, and ability (among other factors). Focusing on the number of clinics or Supreme Court decisions are important aspects of answering reproductive oppression, but are usually neither the most pressing or the most adequate in addressing these larger concerns.

When we focus instead on liberation from reproductive oppression as a social justice goal, it’s no longer the state and legislators granting and protect rights. It’s a question of communities and structures answering root causes of systemic inequality that manifest in issues surrounding reproduction, pregnancy, sexual health, sexual identity, poverty, and incarceration (just to name a few).

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Reproductive Justice 101: Oklahoma Edition | OK4RJ: Oklahomans for Reproductive Justice

Awesome informative post and quick read!

(via fuckyeahfeminists)

You can consent to sex without consenting to other things. You can consent to sex without consenting to pregnancy, stds, certain types of sex, marriage, relationships, and a multitude of other things. You can consent to oral sex, but not to penetrative sex. You are not a tease for wanting to do one thing and not another. You can consent to sex once without consenting again.

—

The whole post is great but this is one of the most important points in my opinion

Read/Reblog here

(via we-named-the-dog-indiana)

(Source: redrahloo)

Studies suggest that about 1% of the world’s population identifies as asexual. So that accounts for a large number of people who don’t experience sexual attraction, but who do experience relationships in a variety of ways. Some of us are romantic and interested in intimate relationships. Others, like me, are aromantic and more solitary in nature. Some of us have a sex drive though it isn’t directed at anyone, and others don’t. The complexity of asexuality remains largely unstudied, something that I hope to see changing over the coming years as it becomes more widely recognised as an orientation in its own right.

— SE Smith on Guardian Comment: “Asexuality always existed, you just didn’t notice it” (via guardian)

By running away from a serious discussion about sex in the birth control debate, we’re appealing to a deep-rooted paranoia and fear in this country. Fear of young people having sex. Fear of young people exercising agency over their own bodies. Instead of using this political moment to challenge that stigma and re-frame the debate with a sex-positive message, I’m afraid we’ve taken the easy way out. We’ve chosen to prioritize a sensationalized and fear-based discourse that completely undermines our ability to alleviate the root causes of sexual and reproductive oppression.

We’ve chosen a strategy that undermines young people.

—

-Andrew Jenkins, Choice USA

Putting the Sex Back in Birth Control: Why the Dominant Narrative on Contraception Undermines Young People

(via glitterinference)

We continually malign the good girl as “repressed,” while the bad girl is (wrongly) perceived as intrinsically expressing her individuality and somehow proving her sexuality. Taking off your shirt is a way to “be part of history,” according to a professor who has studied the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ phenomenon. Leave your clothing on, and who will notice you or know that you are proud of your body? Modesty is always taken to be shame, although they are two distinct words and two very difficult concepts. The prevailing view is that if you think sexuality should be private or special, then you must be ashamed of it. You’re a prude. Conversely, if you are “comfortable with your sexuality,” then you should be “cool” with lifting your shirt for strangers or cheering on your man as he enjoys a lap dance with another woman.

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Shalit, Wendy. Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect & Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. Random House; New York. 2007. (pg. 26 - 27)

Now that some ‘Playboy’ bunnies are defecting, admitting publicly that the sex at the ‘Playboy’ mansion is actually quite awful, the time is perhaps ripe to discard some of our assumptions. Even non-bunnies, such as Jennifer Saginor - whose father was Hugh Hefner’s “doctor,” in charge of providing diet pills and breast enhancements for Hefner’s “girls” - felt she was damaged by seeing nineteen-year-old girls dying of drug overdoses, and girls whose last act on earth was performing sexual favors for men in public. Today she admits that seeing sex so violently dissociated from emotion has made it “difficult to be intimate. Very difficult.

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Shalit, Wendy. Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect & Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. Random House; New York. 2007. (pg. 27)

…if the majority of messages a young girl receives add up to “Take your clothes off; it’s empowering,” and “Have casual sex; it’s empowering,” and if those who disagree with such messages can’t really articulate why, then we’ve got problems. If our top women leaders require forty-five minutes and the intellectual root canal work to merely suggest that taking off your clothes and playing with dildos in public is not the be-all and end-all of women’s happiness, and even they feel bad about having said anything against it - then, again, we’ve got serious problems. Either people believe in the bad girl as the only model, or they are simply too intimidated to challenge her rule.

You might wonder, as I did for some time, how the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ mentality has been so successful in setting the terms of the debate. Essentially, I discovered, the exhibitionists rule by intimidation, by making others feel that there is something wrong with them if they think sexuality should be private, or special. Are we not “sex-positive?”

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Shalit, Wendy. Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect & Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good. Random House; New York. 2007. (pg. 206)

It’s deplorable that sexually adventurous young women are constantly told they are “degrading themselves” by seeking out various experiences, that every bit of enjoyment eats away at some secret store of purity. This whole tradition–the idea that women need be preserved in glass so as not to “ruin” themselves, lest they diminish their sexual value by “giving it away”–restricts the lived autonomy of women in ways I can’t even begin to articulate. None of the slut-shaming makes sense unless you assume women live to give themselves to men in their purest possible form.

—

Kerry Howley (via thenewwomensmovement)

An older lady overheard my friends and I talking about my poly life.  When we could feel eyes on us, we turned around and stared at her.  She told me “well that sounds fun, honey, but you’re getting to the age where settling down will give you lifelong security.  If you stay on this path, sweetie, you’ll regret it when you get to my age.”

I’m 26 and I regret all the years I wasted listening to that slut-shaming.

(via sexpositiveodyssey)

(Source: misogynistshaming)