Debby Herbenick of My Sex Professor invented a laugh-out-loud game you can play on any computer device that gives you lots and lots of fonts.

For reasons unknown to me, today I wondered which fonts were sexiest. Not sexy as in which font stirs feelings of arousal or excitement (because truly I would be surprised if it did that for many people), but what font made the word “sex” itself look most like the way sex feels?

That exercise quickly spiralled into a sort of reverse fortune cookie game. You know, the game where whatever someone’s fortune is, you then tag on the phrase “in bed” at the end as in “You will have great success (in bed)”.

Except here you do it in reverse: Place the font style word/phrase in front of your word. Soon enough you get things like “Berlin Sans Sex” (which – if you remember your high school French class – means “Berlin without sex”, a sad state of affairs indeed), Century Gothic Sex and even Elephant Sex.

She said it here.

She recommends trying the same thing with other words. I’ll leave it up to you to come up with the best ones you come up with either here in comments or on your own blog. (I’ll promote good ones to the front page. Though if you use Wingdings had better be very good.)

If you take the meme to your blog or elsewhere make sure you give Herbenick the credit she deserves.

Image from the Scarleteen website.

Excellent news! Scarleteen, by far the largest and best sex-education site for young people, finally has 501©3 non-profit status… which means that donations to Scarleteen are now, finally, deductible for those who pay federal taxes in the United States.

Technically tax-deductibility shouldn’t matter, right? It’s either a good cause or it isn’t (in this case it’s a very good cause) and so why fret about giving? Well, maybe it doesn’t for you personally, especially if you can’t give more than $100, or $25, or $10, or $5 anyway, and especially if like gazillions of other people you file 1040-EZ tax forms and therefore don’t itemize your deductions anyway.

But here’s the thing: it does matter for businesses that already do the equivalent of itemizing. It matters to other non-profit organizations that are themselves limited to granting funds to other non-profits. And, probably most relevant to you if you work for someone else: it matters to employers who have agreed to match employee contributions.

And it matters particularly this month because an institutional donor that’s willing to match up to $3,000 worth of contributions made to Scarleteen in February. That means if you donate this month your contribution will be doubled. And if you donate through your employer your contribution will be quadrupled!

You can always just go to the Help Sustain Scarleteen page and make a donation. (I just did that and it worked great.)

But see also

• Do You Give a Buck About Sex Education?, and
• Double Dollar Valentines for Scarleteen

So anyway, Scarleteen — a great cause and now tax deductable. What’s not to like?

P.S. If you’ve got a blog or otherwise use social media you can also help support Scarleteen by spreading the word.

P.P.S I didn’t notice this earlier but with donations over $75 you can receive a signed copy of the highly-recommended young adult sexuality guide, S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College, by Scarleteen founder Heather Corinna.

Kit Roskelly has a “Kink 101” article up at the F-Word. The article is pitched at the perfect level for feminists who are concerned, but not deadset-convinced, that BDSM violates feminist principles. If you’re kinky, feminist, and sick to death of having to argue about this issue, Roskelly’s article is not for you. But if you’re on the fence, it’s worth checking out.

I’m not a kink expert by any means; I just like to whack my boyfriend with things, like to be whacked with things, and have attended a few kink events. Most of what Roskelly says strikes me as true and helpful; I especially like “feminism should not have a prescriptive stance on female sexuality” and “Consent is an absolute requirement of sexual interaction”. You could nitpick about the safewords (you don’t need to say ‘red light’ if you have some other way of communicating that things are going really really wrong, and you should probably agree on a safe tap before anybody stuffs anything in anybody else’s mouth) but the basic idea of safewords is pretty sound. Both partners need a way to say, “stop” and be taken seriously.

I have one substantive criticism of Roskelly’s article. (This criticism is not new. Trinityva, who writes at SM Feminist and The Strangest Alchemy, has made this point repeatedly; my favorites are here and here.) Twice in her article, Roskelly urges kinky feminists to be mindful of the social context in which their desires arise. But what does mindfulness entail, exactly? Are we supposed to seek the reasons for our kinky fantasies and desires? At this point, I don’t think anybody really knows what causes people to have one set of sexual tastes rather than another. And if you did know what caused your sexual desires, what would you do with that information? Learning that your rape fantasies are the result of childhood trauma wouldn’t necessarily eliminate your rape fantasies.

There are things in the neighborhood to be mindful of. Are you really satisfied by the kinky sex you’re having, or are you doing it because you feel pressured? (And being in the dominant role doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily satisfied by the sex; submissive people can be very good at manipulating their partners into indulging fetishes they don’t really get off on, in a way that’s not reciprocal. Bitchy Jones’ kinky sexism category has a depressingly large number of examples.) It’s also a good idea to reflect on how your expression of your desires affects other people. Does the person next to you faint at the idea of needles? If so, it’s not very respectful to play with needles right in front of them. Does the event you’re organizing have pictures of naked women, and only women, on the walls? If so, you may be alienating some of the women who attend. In my experience, BDSM people are already more mindful about this stuff than average, but extra reminders never hurt.

I’m on board with mindfulness if it’s meant to apply to actions. But what’s inside your head is yours.

[Note: This post at least temporarily revives a long-dormant RealAdultSex.com category, Guest-Blogging Topics. This post offers my rough take on the core meaning of the term “sex positive.” If you’ve got different ideas as to what “sex positive” means then by all means please feel free to air it out either here in comments or on your own blog if you have one. (If you don’t have one but would like to start now they’re astonishingly easy to setup.) —fl]

In comments to my “But Are You Positive?“ post SugarMag asked

Figleaf, I am very confused by your question. OK so, sex positive means pro sex, right?

The short answer is no, sex-positive really doesn’t mean pro-sex. For instance there are plenty of people (oh, say, traffickers in sex slaves, or their customers) who are chirpy/cheerily pro sex. And, perhaps more surprisingly, there are plenty of sex-positive people who would never consider having sex themselves.

It’s also absolutely the case that, just as certain Victorians used words like “enlightened” to justify sexual activities that weren’t enlightened at all, and just as certain individuals in the 1960s and 1970s used words like “liberal” to justify exploitive behavior, it’s inevitable that certain people would use “sex positive” as leverage for some pretty seriously negative behavior. So just saying you’re sex-positive, or complaining that someone else isn’t, isn’t going to cut it.

So what exactly is it supposed to mean then? Well, I’ve gone out and done a little Googling around to confirm it but my sex-ed professor last quarter did a pretty good job of consolidating both what constitutes “sex positivity” and, even more important maybe, what constitutes “sex negativity.” I’ll cite some further reading at the end of this post but for now I’ll just crib from my (admittedly sparse) lecture notes:

Sex positivity:

• Sexual behaviors are pleasurable, not just for procreation
• Sex is for pleasure; it’s a form of play
• There’s an absence of shame
• No one makes another feel bad about wanting something sexual. (Whether they agree to engage is entirely separate.)
• Agency not objectification for all parties
• Everyone always has the freedom to decline
• There’s a gender and orientation-free perspective. (This doesn’t have to mean you have to be polymorphous, just that you’re accepting of those who are.)
• No moral judgments about masturbation, virginity, asexuality, and celibacy
• Sexuality is an element of health — appropriate amounts are good for mental and physical well-being
• Sex safety (a.k.a. “safe sex” or “safer sex”) is strongly endorsed
• Developmentally appropriate sex education is strongly endorsed
• Contraception is strongly endorsed where pregnancy is a risk and is not desired.
• Accepts porn under specifiable conditions
• Uses inclusive language
• Respects unique and individual preferences (what’s true for you or me isn’t universal)
• Comprehensive definition of sexuality

And notes for what constitutes sex negativity:

• shame and blame oriented
• privatizing
• prohibitions
• controlling

In other words, with sex negativity you wind up with people actually caring more that you have sex, how you have sex, with whom you have sex, and how often because in the context of shame and blame, for instance, it’s not just that you might be “doing it,” it’s that you might be doing it “wrong,” or, in a lot of ways worse, you might be doing it “better!” (That might give me a double opportunity for shame and blame, right? I could shame you for having it and blame myself for not enjoying it as much!)

Although, of course, thanks to the privacy angle we’re not supposed to discuss it, we pretend we don’t have it, and so we wind up in situations where we won’t actually talk to our partners about the sex we have with each other, but! We will talk about sex with our partners, or about the sex we’re pretending to have, in locker rooms, powder rooms, and, of course, on magazine covers. In terms of prohibitions we don’t just prohibit the big stuff like sex with those who can’t or won’t consent, we publish lists of “turn ons and turn offs that might surprise you” in magazines and call it educational. And finally, in terms of control? Oh, from that you get everything from archetypes chastity belts and threats of castration to divorce case law involving “alienation of affection,” to the domestic abuse of cloistering, to really trivial, ostensibly “pro-sex” things like pages-long how-to check lists and guides to this or that or the other sex act that can’t really be memorized, may not be that accurate (see “your experience or mine aren’t universal,” above), and in any event create myriad ways to “do it wrong.”

So that’s the extremely roughed-out version of what “sex positivity” does or doesn’t officially mean. But rough as it is I think it helps clarify that it really isn’t just another way to say “pro sex.”

Notes:

• What does sex positive mean?, by Cory Silverberg of About.com
• Easton and Liszt’s The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities
• The term may have been first articulated in its modern sense in Carol Queen’s Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture
• If you have other good sources let me know in comments or email and I’ll add them to this list.