To end conversion therapy, we must understand what it actually means

By Travis Salway On Monday, Calgary City Council voted, nearly unanimously, to pass a municipal ban of advertising around conversion therapy, which the city defined as “practice, treatment, or service designed to change, repress, or discourage a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression, or to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour.” …

A very, very beginner’s guide to understanding BDSM

By Mary Grace Garis Even as BDSM comes to popular light via media portrayals and increased openness about intimate habits and preferences, much about the sexual practice remains misunderstood and incorrectly presumed to be negative and abusive—especially in those media portrayals. This is perhaps most recently depicted in that degrading scene in Hulu’s Normal People, …

17 Totally Normal Things to Experience in Your Relationship Right Now

The good, the bad, and the irritating. By Anna Borges It doesn’t take a scientist to know that the coronavirus crisis is rife with stressors and challenges that would shake up even the healthiest of relationships. Maybe the pandemic is acting as a pressure cooker for relationship problems you already had or maybe it’s serving …

Is Quarantining Bringing Out The Worst In Your Relationship?

Here Are Five Communication Strategies. By Meggen Taylor For the last thirty years, Paula Heartland, who is a Certified International Life Coach, Reichian Mind-Body Counselor, Hypnotist, Nonviolent Communications Instructor, and a certified member of the United States Association for Body Psychotherapists has been helping women and couples communicate productively. “I’m a relationship and communication coach,” Heartland tells me. “For the …

Dating in Captivity

Go ahead and reinstall Tinder in self-isolation. Or, if that doesn’t work, join a virtual sext bunker. By Allison P. Davis Some things about the human spirit persist, even in crisis: namely, our hunger for one another. Lauren, an editor in Austin, started seeing someone a month ago, and by date three, they’d declared their …

Female husbands

Far from being a recent or 21st-century phenomenon, people have chosen, courageously, to trans gender throughout history By Jen Manion One summer night in 1836, police found George Wilson drunk on the street in the Lower East Side in New York City. An officer took Wilson to the station. The officer believed that Wilson was …

Why you’re probably having less (or more) sex right now

By Alexandra Ossola & Natasha Frost Most people in lockdown, as 75% of Americans are at the moment, are probably experiencing big changes to their usual routine. There’s no office commute, no school bus shuttle; there are no parties to attend, no group dinners to plan. It’s unsurprising, then, that for a lot of people, …

Sex in space:

Could technology meet astronauts’ intimate needs? by Simon Dubé and Dave Anctil The 2018 movie A.I. Rising explores how machines could fulfill desires and support humans during space travel. Lo and behold, it might contain the solution to problems related to space exploration. Astronauts, despite their rigorous training, remain humans with needs. For space exploration …

Spicing things up in the bedroom during social distancing

By Almara Abgarian It’s going to be a quiet Friday night. The coronavirus lockdown has officially begun, pubs, restaurants, gyms and other public spaces have to close up shop for the forseeable future. So, what can you spend the rest of the weekend doing? You already know what we’re going to say, but let’s say …

Using Pornography to Rewrite the Script for Consent

Anti-pornography feminists see porn as inherently degrading and exploitative, but for some viewers it can be hugely empowering and even a challenge to rape culture. By: Milena Popova There is a strong and long-lived strand of feminist thought that regards pornography as deeply implicated in the prevalence of sexual and other violence against women. Pornography …