What did you do on the evening of February 11, 2023? We ask mainly because we are itching to tell you what we did that night, which was host the Reproductive Justice Salon! Our goal in hosting this event was three-fold: 1) raise money to donate to abortion funds across the country 2) speak out about pressing issues regarding abortion and reproductive justice and 3) create a space of community for activists and supporters of reproductive rights for people of all genders, everywhere.

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!

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.

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.

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.

While I was living in Jerusalem and trying to find sexuality-related initiatives in the area (for this zine), I came across the website of an organization called the International Youth Alliance For Family Planning (IYAFP for short). They’re a youth-run (ages 15 to 30) nonprofit that advocates for sex ed and sexual rights around the world.

​So, you want to start a sex-positive student group at your school? That's great — here are some tips!

​2017 was a tough year for the United States. Like many of you, we here at Pleasure Pie asked ourselves, "WTF should we do?" as things spiraled downward on a national level. Should we drop the sex-positivity stuff and do more direct political engagement? Should we stick to what we know, and push for a culture of consent and healthy sexual expression at a time when the need for this is even more visible than usual (with the "locker room talk" and allegations of sexual assault against so many politicians and celebrities)?

You, too can put on a workshop! You don’t need to be an official “educator” or have certification (or even a college degree).
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You do need passion for the subject and willingness to put time and effort into it. And you should know a good amount about the topic you’re going to cover. I recommend reading things on the internet (or, you know, books) – and fact checking anything you want to use. You can do it!

By Nicole Mazzeo

​[The “Sparknotes” version is at the bottom, for people with limited time/attention spans.]

I’m not talking about respect for a person’s right to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy, or respect for a fetus’s right to life (no comment on either of those right now). I’m talking about respect for people who you disagree with. Your “opponents.”

Have you ever heard a pro-choice advocate talk about “pro-lifers”? Or a pro-life advocate talk about … “pro-abortion-ers”? (Or whatever anti-abortion people call pro-choice people.)

If so, it’s likely that you’ve heard this done in a way that paints the disagreeing party as bumbling idiots. Not just bumbling idiots, but conniving, deceitful, bumbling idiots with really bad intentions.

Local sex-positive mastermind Kit Stubbs, Ph.D., is in the process of launching [drumroll please…] The Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity! The Effing Foundation aims to foster sex-positive artists, activists, educators, and entrepreneurs, and celebrate diverse expressions of human sexuality.

[Full disclosure: Kit and I are friends and we sometimes collaborate on sex-positive projects.]
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I sat down with Kit to ask them some questions about their plans for the new nonprofit, how they navigate being a sex-positive activist, and what brought them to sex-positivity in the first place.

Emma started her internship at Pleasure Pie only a little over week ago and has already done so much.

Emma helps to keep Pleasure Pie connected to you by:

• Sharing on Pleasure Pie’s social media sites so that you can see what we’re creating and working on,
• Putting together Boston’s Sex Positive Newsletter to make it easy for you to be involved with local sex positive events,
• Spreading the word about events so that people actually show up,
• And much more!
  
  

Emma is also Pleasure Pie’s presence in Boston this winter while I’m touring the southern United States, which means we don’t have to miss out on all of the awesome events going on in Boston from now until March.

My favorite things about working with Emma so far:

• Her enthusiasm for sex positivity.
• Her can-do attitude and willingness to go for things that she wants to make happen.
  
  

I’m excited to introduce Emma as the newest addition to Pleasure Pie’s team!

-Nicole Mazzeo, Pleasure Pie founder and director

***

Q&A with Emma!

Emma Glassman-Hughes: Hi everybody! I’m Emma, the new Pleasure Pie intern, and I’m very eager to introduce myself to this community. As a way for you to get to know me, as well as my place in the world of sex positivity, I’m going to answer some questions for you.

Nicole Mazzeo: So Emma, why is sex positivity important to you?

EGH: Though I’m an Atheist by mentality and a Jew by heritage and sense of humor, my family still celebrates Christmas for the hell of it. My gift this year from my dad, fully embracing my burgeoning feminist pride, was a book called The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lapore, which highlights one of America’s most beloved superheroes, while masterfully weaving in the comic’s shining feminist subplot. Though I’m not yet finished with all 300+ pages, I was struck by the introduction of the wife of William Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, named Sadie Elizabeth Holloway. She was supposedly very independent and an avid reader of the ancient Greek poet Sappho, a feminist of her time who is described in the book as “the symbol of female love.” Holloway was deeply inspired by Sappho, this feminist symbol, and it is speculated that Wonder Woman is inspired by Holloway. Thus, by my calculations, Wonder Woman is, by association, a superhero whose true super power is the power of female love. To me, this proved very important. I had never thought of my love—my sex, my friendship, my passion—as a power before. 

So I suppose I would say that sex positivity is important to me because it helps me see the power in owning my sexuality, and it reminds me that sex is more than something that society simply expects for me to give; my sex is my autonomy. I’ve always had trouble embracing my own sexuality to its fullest potential—learning to effectively communicate with partners, let go of self-consciousness, and separate myself from sexual shame are just a few of the things I have had to work toward. And, while that struggle is far from won, my continued learning about sex positivity has helped unwrap the happier, healthier, and more self-aware woman that was hiding under layers of limiting societal pressures. The power behind female love is a more extraordinary phenomenon than we are taught to believe in school (my third-of-a-year-long high school sex [read: abstinence] education was, needless to say, a letdown), and I am thankful for sex positivity and for Wonder Woman for showing this to me.

NM: What’s your take on intersectional activism?

EGH: As a feminist, one of the most interesting things about keeping up with media coverage in times of nationally heightened racial tensions (such as the recent uproar about how police brutality disproportionately affects black victims) is hearing black activists talk about black men the same way that feminists talk about women. I hear so many of the same buzzwords, like “victim-blaming,” and it becomes difficult for me to see a separation between the two issues. Racial injustice and gender injustice are inextricably tied, and you simply cannot have true feminism without an anti-racism component. It is also important that sex positivity in particular embraces intersectionality (I hope this is a word because I like it) and specifically tackles racial injustices because the sexuality of people of color has historically been controlled, commodified, and exploited in this country. 

Though racism is often at the forefront of my thinking due to its growing coverage on different forms of media, people who face other kinds of oppression also need feminist advocates. Because I grew up in Southern California, an area with some of the country’s largest homeless populations, as well as a very close proximity to the Mexican border, I began thinking about class and immigration issues at a young age. Disadvantages in people’s lives can lead to unhealthy views of sex, which contributes to the anemic and destructive overarching sex culture in our country. People of every background deserve to be knowledgeable about sex, to love their bodies, and to know how to give and ask for consent. People of every background deserve to feel safe and free from sexual violence. People of every background deserve to know how to make themselves happy. Eradicating the oppression of all people is the real business of feminism, empowering those who have historically been silenced will lead us all to a better future. Intersectional activism, to me, is the only activism worth pursuing because it unites diverse voices in order to more effectively create change. 

NM: What do you want to accomplish by doing this internship?

EGH: Not only am I a fabulous Pleasure Pie intern, but I am also a fabulous college student and young woman with a lot on my mind. As much as I would love for these things to not belong in the same sentence or even the same blog post, as a female student, I am constantly reminded of rape culture. Need I even mention the obscene statistic that approximately 1 in 5 female college students will be sexually assaulted before she graduates? People of all sorts and genders (yes, this includes men *gasp*) suffer in a society that refuses to promote healthy sexuality and instead fosters sexual violence. I would love to live in a world where people can come into their own sexualities free from fear, judgment, entitlement, and shame. This sexual utopia can be achieved, I am convinced, if we improve the conversations that we are having about sex, and if we embrace a healthier and more informative sex education curriculum that covers all kinds of varying sexualities, gender identities, and contraceptive choices, which is a lot of what sex positivity is about. As a sex positive intern, I would love to learn new ways to make this topic more accessible for a variety of people with different backgrounds, to help eradicate rape culture, to work to improve sex education in schools, and to do my best to create a more accepting and all-inclusive sex culture through productive and forward-thinking conversation. Working for Pleasure Pie is my way of entering this conversation with purpose, and, of course, a wealth of nifty zines to guide me through it.