Tag: sex

The Secret Sex Lives of Nuns

Sisters Federica and Isabel knew that their feelings had gone far beyond a platonic friendship when they were on mission in Guinea Bissau in 2012. The nuns were from the same religious order near Turin in northern Italy, and they had never been alone outside the semi-cloistered life until they found themselves in missionary work in Africa.

Sister Federica, who prefers not to give her real name, says she can’t remember if it was an accidental touch that led to an embrace or eye contact that made her blush, but at some point in the mission, they kissed. By the time they made it back to Italy, they had cast aside their vows of celibacy and were madly planning their departure from religious life. In 2016, they were married by Turin’s mayor in one of Italy’s first same-sex unions.

Sister Federica, who is no longer a nun, says romance among women religious is far more common than many might believe. And it is not just lesbian love; nuns commonly fall in love with their priests or parishioners.

The Secret Sex Lives of Nuns

Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons — Quartz

Hey, guess what? I got married two weeks ago. And like most people, I asked some of the older and wiser folks around me for a couple quick words of advice from their own marriages to make sure my wife and I didn’t shit the (same) bed. I think most newlyweds do this, especially after a few cocktails from the open bar they just paid way too much money for.

But, of course, not being satisfied with just a few wise words, I had to take it a step further.

See, I have access to hundreds of thousands of smart, amazing people through my site. So why not consult them? Why not ask them for their best relationship/marriage advice? Why not synthesize all of their wisdom and experience into something straightforward and immediately applicable to any relationship, no matter who you are?

Why not crowdsource THE ULTIMATE RELATIONSHIP GUIDE TO END ALL RELATIONSHIP GUIDES™ from the sea of smart and savvy partners and lovers here?

Every successful relationship is successful for the same exact reasons — Quartz

“Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side | Vanity Fair

About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party. Sometimes the venue is an epic mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights; sometimes it’s a lavish home in the foothills of Atherton or Hillsborough. On special occasions, the guests will travel north to someone’s château in Napa Valley or to a private beachfront property in Malibu or to a boat off the coast of Ibiza, and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same.

The stories I’ve been told by nearly two dozen people who have attended these events or have intimate knowledge of them are remarkable in a number of ways. Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule. Like Julian Assange denouncing the nation-state, industry hotshots speak of these activities in a tone that is at once self-congratulatory and dismissive of criticism. Their behavior at these high-end parties is an extension of the progressiveness and open-mindedness—the audacity, if you will—that make founders think they can change the world. And they believe that their entitlement to disrupt doesn’t stop at technology; it extends to society as well. Few participants, however, have been willing to describe these scenes to me without a guarantee of anonymity.

“Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side | Vanity Fair

How has the internet changed sex work? — Quartz

“Elle” is a 63-year-old sex worker. She’s been at it for decades, and what makes her extraordinary isn’t just her longevity in the business, but her ability to adapt to a changing market. Sex work is as old as civilization, but in the past 20 years the market for illegal sex services has undergone a radical transformation thanks to the internet, upending how it is sold and priced. There are now more women selling sex, more overall encounters, and—unlike in many other industries disrupted by the web—higher wages for workers.

Gregory DeAngelo, an economist at the University of West Virginia, scraped 17 years’ worth of data from The Erotic Review, a website that is like the Yelp for illegal sex services. The dataset features about 1.1 million reviews, which contain extremely detailed descriptions of encounters, time spent, features of the sex worker, and price. According to data on the site, average inflation-adjusted hourly rates increased 38% between 2000 and 2015. Elle’s reviews have appeared since 2000 and her prices—now around $270 per hour—almost exactly track the national average each year.

How has the internet changed sex work? — Quartz

Women Absorb And Retain DNA From Every Man They Have Sex With, Study Shows

The study, which discovered the startling information by accident, was originally trying to determine if women who have been pregnant with a son might be more predisposed to certain neurological diseases that occur more frequently in males.

But as the scientists picked apart the female brain, the study began to veer wildly off course. As it turns out, the female brain is even more mysterious than we previously thought.

The study found that female brains often harbor “male microchimerism”, or in other words, the presence of male DNA that originated from another individual, and are genetically distinct from the cells that make up the rest of the woman.

According to the study: “63% of the females (37 of 59) tested harbored male microchimerism in the brain. Male microchimerism was present in multiple brain regions.”

Women Absorb And Retain DNA From Every Man They Have Sex With, Study Shows

China’s Mistress-Dispellers | The New Yorker

Yu Ruojian was pleased to learn that his target ran a sex shop. Someone who worked in retail would be used to talking to strangers, and it would be easy, posing as a customer in such an intimate store, to bring the conversation around to personal matters. In March last year, he visited the store, in Wuxi, a city about seventy miles from Shanghai, where he lives. He told the proprietor, a gregarious woman in her forties whom I’ll call Wang, that he was looking for herbal remedies to help a friend whose marital relations were hampered by shyness. They chatted for half an hour before exchanging contact details. “I’ll be back to pester you soon enough,” Yu said as he left. “You’d better!” Wang responded, unaware that she’d walked into the first in a series of carefully laid traps.

A month earlier, Yu had heard from a woman in her fifties, the wife of a factory manager in Wuxi, who explained that her husband was having an affair with Wang. She had tolerated it for years, but now she’d found that he had spent more than two hundred thousand yuan—thirty thousand dollars—on her, savings that should have been going toward their old age and a house for their son.

China’s Mistress-Dispellers | The New Yorker

Daddies, “Dates,” and the Girlfriend Experience: Welcome to the New Prostitution Economy

A growing number of young people are selling their bodies online to pay student loans, make the rent, or afford designer labels. Is it just an unorthodox way to make ends meet or a new kind of exploitation?

…

“The girlfriend experience” is the term women in the sex trade use for a service involving more than just sex. “They want the perfect girlfriend—in their eyes,” says Miranda, the young woman at our table.* “She’s well groomed, cultured, classy, able to converse about anything—but not bringing into it any of her real-world problems or feelings.”

Vanity Fair

CASUAL SEX: EVERYONE IS DOING IT

Zhana Vrangalova had hit a problem. On a blustery day in early spring, sitting in a small coffee shop near the campus of New York University, where she is an adjunct professor of psychology, she was unable to load onto her laptop the Web site that we had met to discuss. This was not a technical malfunction on her end; rather, the site had been blocked. Vrangalova, who is thirty-four, with a dynamic face framed by thick-rimmed glasses, has spent the past decade researching human sexuality, and, in particular, the kinds of sexual encounters that occur outside the norms of committed relationships. The Web site she started in 2014, casualsexproject.com, began as a small endeavor fuelled by personal referrals, but has since grown to approximately five thousand visitors a day, most of whom arrive at the site through organic Internet searches or referrals through articles and social media. To date, there have been some twenty-two hundred submissions, about evenly split between genders, each detailing the kinds of habits that, when spelled out, can occasionally alert Internet security filters. The Web site was designed to open up the discussion of one-night stands and other less-than-traditional sexual behaviors. What makes us engage in casual sex? Do we enjoy it? Does it benefit us in any way—or, perhaps, might it harm us? And who, exactly, is “us,” anyway?

New Yorker

The Secret Life of America’s Greatest Swinger

Say you’re a guy who’d like some other guy to bed your wife. No? Well, it happens. And when it does, Dave’s the sort of man you call. He’s a demure doctor from a quiet neighborhood. But thanks to some rare talents and ubiquitous technologies, he’s also a star in the bedrooms of others—and a helpful guide to the joyful, lusty life of the truly modern hedonist.

….

In an era when the Internet and hookup apps customized to every taste are unleashing sexuality in unprecedented ways, Dave usually needs a few hours just to juggle the weekend’s many possibilities. He is in his early 40s, a soft-spoken primary-care doctor, a tall and muscular black man with tattoos and a disarmingly boyish face—all of which has made him particularly sought-after in this wealthy part of Phoenix.

GQ