The Sex-Positive Valentine Swap is back! It's a free snail mail swap where you send handmade valentines with sex-positive themes to recipients we choose for you at random!

Heads up: This post mentions sexual assault.

1. Unorthodox
Unorthodox is a miniseries about a 19-year-old woman named Esty who leaves her ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York and moves to Berlin.

Bodily autonomy is key to consent. “My body, my rules” is a common catchphrase of the feminist movement — and rightfully so! When we think about bodily autonomy, we often think of the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion or have sex (both of which are incredibly important rights!). But other bodily autonomy issues often get overlooked, minimized, or even scoffed at.

If you've ever seen a sexual anatomy diagram, I am willing to bet that it was based on a white person. As much as the sex-positive movement strives to combat oppression, it is still largely made up of middle class white people, and we aren't always as aware of intersectional oppression as we should be.

More than half of American Indian and Alaska Native women (56%) experience sexual assault. The vast majority (96%) are assaulted by a non-Native perpetrator. For centuries, colonizers / the US government have stripped Indigenous folks of power and resources — and continue to do so today. This disempowerment and exploitation makes Native folks especially vulnerable to sexual and relationship abuse (as well as poverty, health issues, pollution, and ongoing land insecurity).

In other words, the system is really fucked up and people are getting hurt. So, what can we do?

There is no universal definition of what it means to be financially accessible. What is accessible for one person might be very different from what is accessible for another.

I’ve talked to sex-positive event organizers who see a sliding scale ticket price that starts at $15 as being very financially accessible. My feeling is that even a scale that starts at $1 can be exclusionary for some people. If you’re broke and you’re figuring out where you’re going to spend money in a day, you might have $3 to spend on lunch, and if $1 of that is required for admission to an event that you are really interested in attending, then you're forced to decide between having some crackers (or whatever you can find for $2) and going to the event, or having a bagel (or another $3 lunch) and skipping it.

Banning abortion means forced birth. Forced birth is abuse. It is at odds with the basic human rights of bodily autonomy and self-determination. In many cases, it is even life threatening.

If you, like us, are feeling outraged, powerless, horrified, and/or brokenhearted by the news of last week’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe Vs. Wade, here are some things you can do to work to make things better. No one of us can fix this alone, but if many of us do something, we can collectively dig ourselves out of the very bleak place that we are finding our country in right now.

Who this is for

This article is intended for anyone who wants to be bolder about flirting and hooking up with people but isn't clear on the line between confidently approaching people and being creepy or pushy.

Since #MeToo, people have been sharing their experiences with sexual harassment and assault with unprecedented honesty. In the wake of numerous powerful men being called out for their behavior, many men reacted by proclaiming, “None of us will be able to flirt anymore!”

When there’s a lot of bad news happening in the world, it can feel like the only appropriate reaction is despair. And if you’re not visibly upset, you’re seen as either under-informed, numb from the overwhelming amount of bad in the world, or, worst of all, an unfeeling monster. But those aren’t the only options! Being faced with tragedy is never easy, but there are steps you can take to avoid complete devastation, compassion fatigue, and burnout (which does not lend itself to working toward positive change in the world!).

Heads up: This article talks about sexual assault.

“Your no makes way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes your yes a choice.” 
- adrienne maree brown

The word no was not a part of my sexual vocabulary for years. After traumatic experiences during which my no was not respected or I was not given the opportunity to say no before my boundaries were crossed, I didn’t see the point in saying no. Why try to voice a no when it seemed like partners weren’t listening to or caring about my preferences anyways? Always saying yes seemed easier than facing the reality that my nos had not been valued before and could be stifled again.

The Bible Belt in the southern United States is known for its conservative values, which are largely influenced by the popularity of evangelical Christianity in the region. When looking at sex education, policymakers in the area tend to prefer abstinence-only-until-marriage education, if anything, to be implemented in schools.

The Bible Belt is generally considered to be the cluster of states in the southern United States where conservative evangelical Protestantism is, by far, the prevalent belief system of residents. This area includes (but is not necessarily limited to) Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.

In this article, we'll look at data on the sexual health outcomes in the Bible Belt, as compared to relatively liberal New England, to understand how the lack of comprehensive sex education — and the popularity of abstinence only education — contributes to inequality in our country.

​For Pleasure Pie, 2021’s theme was getting back to a place of being capable of doing what we strive to do. The Venn diagram of Pleasure Pie and me as a person (Nicole) is two largely — but not completely (shout out to all the not-me people that make Pleasure Pie happen!) — overlapping circles. Because of this, the times when my mental health is in the gutter are usually times when Pleasure Pie is functioning at a low capacity.

2020 was a very rough mental health year for me (as anyone who read my Healing From a Bad Breakup zine knows). So, naturally, 2021 didn’t start off on the easiest of notes.

​Employees from Good Vibrations, the feminist sex toy store located in Brookline and Cambridge, Massachusetts have been on strike to demand safer working conditions during the pandemic. 

Good Vibrations has long been a supporter of Pleasure Pie, from hiring us for workshops to buying our zines and other creations to sell in their stores, and even featuring us as a partner for their GiVe program, through which they raised hundreds of dollars for Pleasure Pie. We are grateful to have such a supportive sex toy store in our city. We also cannot justify ignoring the current issues within their company just because we have benefited from their support over the years.

I interviewed Aria Carpenter, one of the leaders of the strike.