In this episode, we are going deep into a powerful conversation about bedroom habits from the other side of the fence. We’ll discuss topics such as kink, BDSM, and how to find your place in all of it. Joining us in the studio is Viktor Zahtila, a BDSM practitioner, and on video we have Colette […]
The post LELO Podcast: The World of BDSM appeared first on Volonté.
Do you ever get that thing, that slightly psychedelic thing, when you hear an idea so good that it changes how you encounter the rest of the world? When it installs itself like a migrainous aura in your vision, colouring unrelated thoughts, its simplicity offering whispered suggestions for other ways a problem might be solved? It happened for me with porn.
An essay by Oxford professor Amia Srinivasan offers a solution to the many problems with pornography, and rather than the suggestion that people just switch off their phones or even that schools teach “porn literacy”, it is to offer young people a kind of “negative” sex education. “It wouldn’t assert its authority to tell the truth about sex,” but remind them that, “the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them.” Lessons in the lost power of sexual imagination. I could not love this more.
It featured an erect penis, and could be bought on the high street. The groundbreaking film changed attitudes to sex and censorship – paving the way to the Pornhub era
The second sexual revolution began 30 years ago, on 23 September 1991, with the release of an educational videotape called The Lovers’ Guide. The revolution’s unlikely figureheads were a film producer who had been making how-to videos about gardening and pets and cooking, and a 56-year-old doctor, while their ally was an American former TV and theatre director who had become Britain’s chief film censor.
The producer was a man called Robert Page, who had been approached by Virgin – which had recently started making condoms – to make a sexual health film for men that explained how to use one. There were two difficulties with that. The first was that no erect penis had been shown on screen in Britain. The second was that Page had no interest in making a film about penises. The censor – James Ferman, the director of the British Board of Film Classification from 1975 to 1999 – took care of the first issue.
Addiction to pornography has been blamed for erectile dysfunction, relationship issues and depression, yet problematic use is rising. Now therapists and tech companies are offering new solutions
Thomas discovered pornography in the traditional way: at school. He remembers classmates talking about it in the playground and showing each other videos on their phones during sleepovers. He was 13 and thought it was “a laugh”. Then he began watching pornography alone on his tablet in his room. What started as occasional use, at the beginning of puberty, became a daily habit.
Thomas (not his real name), who is in his early 20s, lived with one of his parents, who he says did not care what he was doing online. “At the time, it felt normal, but looking back I can see that it got out of hand quite quickly,” Thomas says. When he got a girlfriend at 16, he started having sex and watched less pornography. But the addiction was just waiting to resurface, he says.
Summerhall, Edinburgh
Mamoru Iriguchi and Afton Moran raid their dressing-up box to give us a cheery guide to the evolutionary history of reproduction, and what it says about gender fluidity in humans
I imagine the curriculum has changed since my day but, even so, I’m pretty sure not many biology lessons look like this one by Mamoru Iriguchi. With a dressing-up-box aesthetic and a naive enthusiasm, the Edinburgh performer casts the audience in the role of 14-year-old pupils at “Summerhall secondary school”. Ably assisted by Afton Moran, using hand-knitted pubic hair and clownfish costumes as visual aids, and making natty use of a computer monitor that turns real-world objects into screen animations, he takes us through the evolutionary story of reproduction. It’s an illustrated lecture that traces the journey from the earliest sea creatures to the appearance of land animals and onwards to the present day.
The show has a rough-and-ready charm, performed with more enthusiasm than subtlety, and an appropriately adolescent sense of humour. It takes a wide-eyed approach to the allure of human nudity (no other creature is turned on by nakedness) and the magic of organisms that can reproduce by severing parts of their own body.
The government’s words at the global education summit are completely at odds with its behaviour. Whatever the event achieves will be despite its UK hosts, not because of them
With all the fanfare Covid would allow, the global education summit opened in London this week. Ahead of the meeting, the minister for European neighbourhood and the Americas was on rousing form. “Educating girls is a gamechanger,” Wendy Morton said, going on to describe what a plan would look like to do just that.
The UK, co-hosting the summit with Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, plans to raise funds for the Global Partnership for Education, from governments and donors. The UK government has promised £430m over the next five years.
Sex education is currently taught too late, with 50% of children already sexually active when it begins in year 10, Contos says
Prime minister Scott Morrison will discuss reforms to combat rape culture with Chanel Contos, whose petition calling for earlier sex education in schools prompted hundreds of testimonies from former Sydney schoolgirls about sexual assault earlier this year.
Speaking after briefing other federal MPs on Thursday, Contossaid concepts such as sexual coercion are still “not understood by the wider community” although policymakers, including the curriculum authority, were now taking them seriously.
Related: The trouble with boys: what lies behind the flood of teenage sexual assault stories?
Questions to ask your partner can be difficult to find. Getting to know each other, when you are a new couple, remains stimulating and embarrassing in the same time. Hundreds of questions must be roaming in your head, but only a few will pass to your lips. Embarrassment meets excitement, the desire to preserve the […]
A digital media agency created the sexual education campaign, which included a heavily criticised video showing a woman smearing a milkshake over a man’s face
The federal government spent nearly half the $7.8m it allocated to its “Respect Matters” campaign on a website that included a “bizarre” video that taught sex consent through milkshakes, which has now been removed in response to widespread criticism.
According to the government’s public contract database, the Department of Education paid a digital media agency nearly $3.8m to create the campaign that included the video.
Related: The trouble with boys: what lies behind the flood of teenage sexual assault stories?
This is the government’s new video to educate teenagers on consent… and honestly, I think I actually know less about the issue after watching this. What’s going on?
Originally reported by @samanthamaiden
Full video here –https://t.co/hzxSFGWvKq pic.twitter.com/MflbzhDPZP
Related: Sexual consent education is too important to become a schoolyard joke | Renee Carr
Some of the Australian government’s new educational resources are not just ridiculous, but also confusing and concerning
Drinking milkshakes, eating tacos and getting into shark-infested water – you could be forgiven for not understanding what any of these things have to do with sexual consent.
Yet it’s these topics – dished up as bizarre, evasive metaphors for sex – that feature in the Morrison government’s new “Good Society” consent resources for school students.
Young people are capable of nuanced conversations around these issues; they’ve been calling for clear and accurate information
As a sex therapist for over 10 years now, I enjoy connecting with amazing people online.
I am promoting Safe, Healthy and Genuine Sex. You can ask me (almost) anything and I will answer you to the best of my knowledge.
