Category: Relationships
-
Interviewed for Playboy article on “Fifty Shades of Grey”
Check out Adam Howard’s great piece on the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise over at Playboy It’s a great examination of the contradictory appeal of this very contradictory franchise—featuring some commentary from yours truly: I do think it’s an interesting franchise because it’s premised on this whole idea of the forbidden,” Reina Gattuso, a columnist for Feministing who writes about gender,…
-
To fight harassment, we must learn how to break up
Read the original article at Feministing. “We are taught how to fall in love, but we are never taught how to deal with love ending.” A young man said this recently during a community discussion on sexual harassment and violence. It struck a chord in me. Intimate partner violence, after all, tends to escalate when the victim is…
-
How Men Can Confront Toxic Masculinity (+ Why It’s Important for Mental Health)
With the #MeToo movement dominating the headlines over the past few months, many of us have had to ask tough questions about our own experiences of gender, power, and relationships. While women have taken the forefront of the movement, it’s also been a moment of reckoning for men. The movement has not only provided an…
-
The Psychology of the Orgasm Gap
We know that women face a number of challenges to achieving equality. In the boardroom, we face the wage gap. And in the bedroom: The orgasm gap. Researchers (and everyday people!) have found that a gap exists between the frequency with which men and women experience orgasm, especially during heterosexual sex. Specifically, women consistently have fewer…
-
Having Healthy Sex after Sexual Assault
The summer I was nineteen, I researched and wrote a travel guide to Italy, journeying from Venice to the Cinque Terre armed only with a sundress and my handy dandy Macbook. It sounds pretty ideal, and it was—except for the constant, terrifying, enraging sexual harassment. From being groped on the train to being kissed non-consensually…
-
What Ethical Non-monogamy Can Teach us About Healthy Relationships
Find the original article at Talkspace. I’m not so hot on monogamy. It’s always been strange to me that society decides one way of doing romantic relationships: boy meets girl; boy and girl date; boy and girl marry; boy and girl never date or sleep with anyone else ever again. If we’re all unique, why…
-
Broad City’s Amorphous Partiality
Read the original article at The Advocate. Adrienne Rich was not writing in an age when women could video chat each other while riding their male partners cowgirl-style. But when she wrote about existence as a spectrum of decentralized pleasure—about the hands and the clit and the cunt, about the wrists and the toes rather…
-
Fucking with Feministing: Squirt-O-Rama, Redux
Check out the original article on Feministing. Welcome to Fucking with Feministing, Feministing’s column about all things fucking and fucking-adjacent. Got a question about dildos? We’re on it. Want to explore fun, sexy sex outside of the realm of p-and-v intercourse? All over it, baby. Or maybe you’ve got a totally different question, which you can send…
-
Fucking with Feministing: No Hard-On? No Problem!
Originally published at Feministing. My question is: What are some ways to have great male to female sex without penetration/ with a male who suffers from erectile dysfunction (ED)? My boyfriend was recently diagnosed with ED and its been really tough – that fucking patriarchal pressure for men to be ridiculous ultra-virile sex machines is…
-
I’m an American woman living in Delhi. ‘Don’t date the locals’ is horrible advice.
I first fell in love in Delhi three years ago, with an Indian classmate during a college semester abroad. The city and the relationship were new and exciting. We spent hours talking in the warm kitchen, a cigarette dangling from my girlfriend’s lips as she cooked. My budding relationships with her and with our new friends…
Reina Gattuso 