Good sex is all about having intentional conversations with your partner — and understanding your own mind and body
sex
Posted inLifestyle
On being a sexual poltergeist
More than simply annoying or rude, ghosting can have genuine psychological and emotional effects as being left on read can have genuine effects on a person’s sense of self-worth and mental health.
Posted inEquality, Health, Media
A new chatbot can answer your awkward questions about sex and HIV
By Mamakiri Mulaudzi, Ebenneza Kofi Okyere-D, Peace Kiguwa, Janan J. Dietrich You know how it can be super awkward to chat to someone about sex related things? Well the team at the PHRU (Perinatal HIV Research Unit) at Wits University has fixed that. Imagine that you are 22-years-old and living in Soweto. Your parents probably don’t […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health, Media
Sex as ‘making’ love: Reitman’s ‘No Strings attached’
When is sex just sex, and when does it amount to ‘making love’? ‘Making love’ is an interesting construction, of course, and is usually a reference to having sex, but – considering the verb, ‘making’ in conjunction with the noun, ‘love’, implies much more than — even if it includes — sex. Ivan Reitman’s charming […]
Posted inGeneral, Lifestyle
When do intimate relationships work?
I raise this question more as a kind of self-reflection than a hard-and-fast recipe of sorts. The latter cannot be supplied by anyone, for the “simple” reason that human beings are very complex creatures. While the interpersonal areas I reflect on below may indeed be important in all intimate relationships (and I do believe that […]
Posted inLifestyle
Should women simply put down a towel during their period and have sex?
Full disclosure: My period has been whack in 2016. It’s been a gauge for stress levels, fitness and how much I’m liking what is happening on the news. Basically it’s been a mess. Further full disclosure: During a particularly stressful work time I had my period for three weeks. Let that sink in. Three weeks. […]
Posted inGeneral, Health, Tech
The price men pay for their addiction to porn
The technological revolution that has given us television, the internet and almost inexhaustible sources of image consumption has also, concomitantly, given viewers and internet users access to pornography on a scale almost unimaginable. But, as one should know by now, technology is a pharmakon – poison AND cure – and therefore it should come as […]
Posted inGender violence
Talk dirty to me, talk about consent
“Please can I take this off you …?” Things get hot and heavy and you whisper this in a manner so low it is barely audible. The night just gets better from there. That was an instant of asking for consent. There are so many ways of asking for consent. I have friends who go […]
Posted inGender violence, General, Health
Gardening, religion and the magic of sex
I shove my filthy hands into the soil and claw out roots and weeds, savouring the mess. A waft of mulch, half-dead weeds, decomposed worms and God knows what sweetens the air. Soon this muddle will be in order: scooped out flowerbeds surrounded by clipped squares of lawn which I will lay down on this […]
Posted inGeneral
A novel that can teach us how to rebel against the colonisation of the mind
What do you get when you project the present media-saturated and media-sustained global economic-political hegemony into the future? You get a society where the kind of colonisation of the mind, brought about mainly through mainstream media’s incessant distribution of standardised discourses affirming the nonsense, that there is “no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism, is exacerbated to […]
Posted inGeneral
The seductions and betrayals of technology
We live in a time of unmitigated technophilia, or love of technology. It was not always so. Since the earliest of times people have shown their intuitive awareness of the ambivalence of technology. In ancient Greek myths, for instance, one encounters the awareness that technology as a kind of prosthetic empowers humans to do what […]
Posted inLifestyle
Why are public displays of sexual images so unacceptable?
This is a question I asked myself as my laptop froze while on a certain social media site and a particularly risqué photo filled my screen. As I fear judgment I must state that I had not purposefully clicked this link. The link title had been … misleading. I had been promised something far more […]