Leta Blake

author. human. working hard to become stellar at life.

Leta

Sex Ed — How Young? | Getting HIV at 16, the First Time I Had Sex | HIVPlusMag.com

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I read the below article the other day and this quote really stuck out to me:

I contracted HIV the first time I had sex, a few days before my 16th birthday, on the second day of my sophomore year of high school. When it came to losing my virginity, condoms were never a thought. Yes, I knew about STIs, unwanted pregnancy, condoms — even HIV and AIDS. But I honestly thought these things happened only when you were having sex with a woman, not with a man. When it came to sex with another man, I was clueless.

via Getting HIV at 16, the First Time I Had Sex | HIVPlusMag.com.

See, I’ve worked hard to make sure my kid, age eight, already knows the facts of heterosexual sex and, because conversations have led down this path, she also knows about birth control pills and condoms. A conversation we have occasionally in our household:

Me: Hey, kid, when you are a grown-up having sex, what can you do to keep from getting pregnant?
Kid: Use birth control pills and condoms.
Me: What do birth control pills NOT protect you from?
Kid: Sexually transmitted diseases.
Me: What, aside from not having sex, is the only thing that will help protect you from sexual transmitted diseases?
Kid: Condoms.
Me: Give me five. Tell all your friends when you’re, I don’t know, twelve, okay? Tell them ALL. When you’re twelve or thirteen. And if they argue or tell you something different say, “No, you’re wrong. This is how it works.” And if you have doubts, come ask me, I will always tell you the truth about sex.

Which leads me to gay sex. She asked me about it. “Mom, how do gay men have sex? What about gay women?”

What a complicated question! I mean, I hear all the time from gay men about how anal sex is not the end-all-and-be-all of gay sexual relationships and that we shouldn’t emphasize it so much. And, hey, I didn’t tell her about heterosexual anal sex, either. I mentioned oral sex and what we could call frottage and use of hands for pleasure, but didn’t mention any butt stuff. I am trying to figure out when I should mention that. Obviously, I want to and I will need to decide how I want to talk about it, because, here’s the deal:

I want her to know deep down like it’s breathing how to keep from getting pregnant or contracting a disease. I want her to be sure and confident. I want this for her safety and I want this for the safety of her friends. So, yes, I need to make sure she knows about anal sex, condoms, and the relationship to STDs and HIV.

How horrifying that a sixteen year old gay young man didn’t know enough to keep himself safe. I don’t want that for my girl or her friends. Ever.

“I absolutely adored this book!” 5 Stars! Training Season | Live Your Life, Buy The Book

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“I absolutely adored this book! Definitely one of my favourite ‘feel good’ books. Ever!! It was perfect. Just perfect ♥ Normally I don’t particularly like swishy MC’s but Matty swished his way right into my heart! He and Rob were just delicious together.”

read more of the review at Training Season | Live Your Life, Buy The Book.

 

trainingseason

 

60% Off The River Leith by Leta Blake! Gone Fishin’ Sale! #ebook #discount #sale

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I’m headed off for a week long writing vacation! Just me, myself, and my files in a lonely hotel room in an area of the country that provides zero temptations or distraction! In celebration, for the entire week I’m away, I’m offering my latest book The River Leith up for 60% off (aka $1.60!) at Smashwords with the following coupon.

COUPON CODE:  FJ73R

(Coupon expires 6/22/14)

Direct link to the book on Smashwords: THE RIVER LEITH

In addition, let me give a heads up that I’m not sure what the cell phone reception will be like or the internet availability, so if I don’t respond to emails, messages, etc, right away that’s probably the reason. I’ve got blog posts scheduled to go up and hopefully I’ll still have some access to the interwebs. We’ll see how it goes. Otherwise….

GONE FISHIN’, Y’ALL! 

Memory is everything. After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain. For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach's choices may come back to haunt him. Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.
Memory is everything.
After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain.
For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach’s choices may come back to haunt him.
Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.

Guest Post and Giveaway: The River Leith by Leta Blake #gay #mmromance

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“Today I am so pleased to welcome Leta Blake to Joyfully Jay. Leta has come to talk to us about her latest release, The River Leith.  I reviewed this book last week and totally adored it.  She has also brought along a copy of the book to give away!  Please join me in giving Leta big welcome!”

Please click on through to comment for a chance at the giveaway –> Guest Post and Giveaway: The River Leith by Leta Blake — Joyfully Jay.

Amelia C. Gormley & Marie Sexton on Adult Children of Alcoholics « The Novel Approach

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“It’s hard to admit to ourselves (and even harder to admit to anybody else!) that what we want and need most is for the merry-go-round ride to just END. That feels so brutally cold-hearted. And yet, the thought of having the cycle continue is just more than we can bear.”

via Amelia C. Gormley And Marie Sexton Are Our Guests Today On The “Saugatuck Summer” Blog Tour « The Novel Approach.

 

Please click through on the above link to read Amelia Gormley and Marie Sexton’s discussion of life as adult children of alcoholics and how that has informed a couple of their characters.

Selkie Inspiration #toriamos #mylife #music

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I’ve been a fan of Tori Amos since I was seventeen years old and something that never fails to amaze me is how often her music seems to tap directly into a particular vein of my life in incredibly unexpected ways.

For example, the song “Selkie” from the latest album. Well, my daughter has long been obsessed with the story “The Selkie Bride”  as told on the Tell Me A Story audiobook compilation. She listened to that story almost every night for over a year and while she’s moved on at this point, it remains one of her all-time favorite stories that she returns to for comfort.

When this album came out and the song “Selkie” was on it both she and I felt like once again Tori had tapped into the most important veins of love, comfort, joy, inspiration, and wonder in our lives.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/6DqVyYf9Bp8]

Dang, Demanding Characters With Musical Opinions! Music from The River Leith #music #playlist #extras

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Now, some people might call me crazy, and that’s okay, but my characters have their own opinions about music. I almost always have a book-specific playlist for any novel I’m working on, and the songs are picked by the characters themselves. The following is a link to Leith’s playlist. He chose the songs. He was absolutely fixated on The Vitamin String Quartet covers, but was also mad about The Gaslight Anthem’s acoustic stuff, Snow Patrol, and Billy Bragg. He also had a hard-on for a few Ed Sheeran songs, amongst a select few others.

So, for those interested, press play and see what Leith insisted I listen to as I wrote his book.

[spotify id=”spotify:user:12122330928:playlist:3FpF7QdsRE7oTI4JhCfbfu” width=”300″ height=”380″ /]

 

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Memory is everything. After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain. For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach's choices may come back to haunt him. Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.
Memory is everything.
After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain.
For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach’s choices may come back to haunt him.
Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.

Hooray! 5 Stars for The River Leith! From Kristen Addicted to M/M Romance

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“Bottom line? I loved this story. I related to both MCs so much. I understood both of their POVs and thought their feelings were valid and very honest. Wonderful love story about overcoming loss and rebuilding a relationship.”

via Goodreads | Kristen Addicted to M/M Romance’s review of The River Leith.

 

Memory is everything. After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain. For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach's choices may come back to haunt him. Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.
Memory is everything.
After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain.
For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach’s choices may come back to haunt him.
Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.

Joyfully Jay says, “So you guys really need to read this book.” 5 Stars! — The River Leith #mmromance #gay

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FIVE STARS from Joyfully Jay for The River Leith!

“So you guys really need to read this book. I truly loved everything about it. I couldn’t put it down and was so sad for it to end.  Blake’s writing is beautiful and so eloquent.  I could feel the tension between the past and the present, of figuring out where to draw the line between remembering their experiences together and building new ones.  The men are sweet, romantic, and incredibly sexy together.  This story is just so fabulous and well done, I highly recommend it.”

read the rest of Joyfully Jay’s lovely review via Review: The River Leith by Leta Blake — Joyfully Jay.

 

Memory is everything. After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain. For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach's choices may come back to haunt him. Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.
Memory is everything.
After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain.
For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach’s choices may come back to haunt him.
Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.

Maleficent: My Fast Thoughts #movie

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I absolutely loved Maleficent even more than I anticipated. It moved me deeply and touched me in ways I hadn’t expected, especially for a Disney movie. I am hoping that someone will write up all the symbolism and meaning, the mother/daughter stuff, the way women’s wings get clipped and how, in our damage, we wound our daughters, but I’m not going to do that today. Nevertheless, I am anxious for someone to write that up.

I want to state upfront that I loved it because now I’m going to talk about the things that could have been better, in my humble opinion. In the scheme of the movie they aren’t huge, but I just needed to get them off my chest so I can continue my love affair with the rest of it.

The main failing, in my opinion, was the lack of true characterization for Stefan. I would have much preferred being shown Stefan’s greed and ambition, rather than just being told of it. I’d have enjoyed seeing Stefan and Maleficent fall in love–did he ever really love her?–and then I’d like to have been shown the ways temptations of the human world lured him away from his affection for her. I’d have appreciated more of an explanation for his ambition than simply that it was assigned as “human”. I’d have also liked to see Stefan’s wife’s opinion of him, whether they were ‘happy’, or what his life was like before the christening.

If they’d taken the time to do those things, I’d have found the movie pretty much perfect, despite the predictability of the ending. Maybe because of it.

Eep! Reminder! Five Copies of The River Leith #giveaway #free #ebook

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CLICK HERE to participate in the contest to win a copy! Five copies to give away!

Last day to enter is June 09, 2014!

Memory is everything. After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain. For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach's choices may come back to haunt him. Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.
Memory is everything.
After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain.
For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach’s choices may come back to haunt him.
Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.

The River Leith – Typos CORRECTED! New Files Uploaded!

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Embarrassingly, it came to my attention that there were eighteen typos in the final files in The River Leith that went up for sale two weeks ago. One of those typos came in the middle of a very important conversation between the characters and was quite cringeworthy.

I’d like to apologize to the readers that these errors made it through. It’s kind of amazing given the attention to detail and number of eyes that were on this book, and yet it happened as it did. Regardless, it’s important to me that readers have the best book available in their hands, so I’ve taken the steps and paid to have the files re-formatted and as of two days ago, I’ve officially uploaded new files to all vendors.

Hopefully we have caught all of the typos in the book now and going forward there will be no problem. If you’ve already purchased the book, you can go to the vendor to see about updating the file for your reading.

At Amazon in particular, I know there is an option for updating your file to the corrected version. Here are the directions on how to do that from their page:

Customers can choose to receive the updated files through their Manage Your Kindle page on Amazon.com.  If you’d like to receive updates to your Kindle books that we have confirmed improvements were made in automatically, you can turn on automatic updates for your books from the Manage Your Content and Devices page.

Before you enable the Automatic Book Update feature, make sure to turn on the Annotations Backup for your Kindle device or Kindle reading app to sync your notes, highlights, bookmarks, and furthest page read. The following devices automatically enable the Annotations Backup:  Kindle Fire HD, Kindle Fire HDX, Kindle for Android, Kindle for Windows 8, and Kindle for BlackBerry 10.  As a result, you cannot turn off the Annotations Backup.

Follow these steps to enable the Automatic Book Update:

1.  Visit the Manage Your Content and Devices page 
2.  Select “Automatic Book Update” from the left navigation bar.
3.  Click Turn On.

 

 

Memory is everything. After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain. For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach's choices may come back to haunt him. Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.
Memory is everything.
After an injury in the ring, amateur boxer Leith Wenz wakes to discover his most recent memories are three years out of date. Unmoored and struggling to face his new reality, Leith must cope anew with painful revelations about his family. His brother is there to support him, but it’s the unfamiliar face of Zach, a man introduced as his best friend, that provides the calm he craves. Until Zach’s presence begins to stir up feelings Leith can’t explain.
For Zach, being forgotten by his lover is excruciating. He carefully hides the truth from Leith to protect them both from additional pain. His bottled-up turmoil finds release through vlogging, where he confesses his fears and grief to the faceless Internet. But after Leith begins to open up to him, Zach’s choices may come back to haunt him.
Ultimately, Leith must ask his heart the questions memory can no longer answer.

“The problem isn’t small with only me as its isolated victim.” — @flickerjax #feminism #40 #yesallwomen

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“I meant this to be personal not political, (but the personal is, oh you know…) but I can’t avoid it because at nearly 40 I know much more of the world than I did at 16 and now I can see that the problem isn’t small with only me as its isolated victim.  It’s vast and keeping us all down and it’s shaped me over the years to dream of something better for anyone.  Where once I wanted to be taken seriously as person, now I wish to be taken seriously as a gender.  I want to live to see my sisters equally represented in positions of power.  I want our governing bodies, the world over, to truly represent our whole society.  Give me 51 female senators and 218 female representatives in my own country’s federal government.  Give all my sisters equal pay and equal opportunities or rise to commercial positions of power.  Bring us all up and punish those who strive to keep us down through sexual and physical violence, through words and actions, so that we may have justice with equality.  For my next 40 years that is my fondest wish, to live to see a world in which women can see a reflection of their true selves.”

via JJ writes & rambles | Hocine bibo aut in eum digitos insero?

Please do click the link above to read more from Ajax Bell. Really beautiful, powerful stuff.

Coming Out at 43 and Need Help! #gay #comingout

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I have a friend (and that is not a euphemism for myself) who is coming out in his forties and is looking for supportive blogs to read and stories similar to his own. I haven’t been very helpful to him in this regard, so I thought I’d reach out to the community and the world wide web and ask for suggestions. If you have any links to blogs or anything like that, please do share them in comments here.
THANK YOU!

 

Porn For Women Is Pointless? Oh, Puh-lease. #sex #porn #givemeabreak

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pron

I have a lot, and I mean A LOT of problems with this article, Is Porn for Women Pointless?, (including problems with my belief in Ogas and Gaddam as decent scientists of any kind) but I’m only going to address one of them today, and that problem lies in the space around these quotes:

1) Most women, says Ogas, are “not interested at all” in visual pornography, preferring erotic texts like stories and novels. But of the 10 to 30 percent of women in Ogas’ study who did prefer visual porn, most of them “tend to like the same kind of material men are interested in, which is more graphic and hardcore. There’s a clear contrast between what activists and women in the erotic industry talk about as women’s preferences, and what women are actually looking at,” he says.

[He then goes on to say that the 30% or so of women who enjoy visual porn are looking at the same hardcore stuff as men and DO NOT enjoy the so-called female-friendly porn. FWIW, I 100% concur with this, but still find his ultimate conclusion in 3 below to be complete bullcrap. He also says that of that 30% of women who enjoy visual porn, they test as more aggressive women both in life and in bed. Uh, okay, whatever the fuck that means. *eyeroll* We’ll go with it.]

2) Angie Rowntree, the creator of female-friendly adult site Sssh.com, believes the gap between male and female porn viewing patterns has less to do with innate differences between the two sexes, and more to do with the fact that most porn has been made “by and for men.” “Is it any wonder that a relatively small portion of women wants to watch it?” she recently told Alternet. “To me, that number just speaks to the opportunity on the market for porn made with a female viewership in mind. It’s just a function of the numbers and what has been available on the market, historically speaking,”

3) “I just don’t think visual porn will ever be something that a majority of women embrace,” Ogas says. “There’s plenty of female-friendly material out there, and there has been for a while. It’s not a question of changing people’s attitudes toward [women watching porn]. It’s something more fundamental than that.”

Okay, I’m having to actively resist my huge urge to explain why Ogas and Gaddam are shitty scientists and actually just focus on what’s being said here. So…*deep breaths, deep breaths*…okay. Let’s go.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that the women I’m talking about are straight or bisexual women because I really can’t speak at all to lesbian porn preferences, since 97% of my own sexuality is tied up in various respects with men’s bodies, and most of the women I’ve talked to about porn are either straight or bisexual, too.

So, first Ogas points out that research shows that of the women who do watch porn, they aren’t digging the so called “female friendly” stuff. Righto. I concur. Female friendly stuff is so yawn worthy and boring and blahhhhh. THERE MIGHT BE A REASON FOR THAT, YO. Could it possibly be that the people making the female friendly stuff don’t actually know what kind of porn women want to see?

I’ve watched a lot of porn. There. I’ve said it. Tar and feather me, baby. I’ve watched a lot of straight porn and a lot of gay porn, and I’ve realized something important over that time. Straight porn and gay porn are shot, for the most part, in entirely different ways. And, interestingly, a lot of non-homophobic straight women discover that, hey, they kind of like gay porn better. This straight-women-liking-gay-porn thing is something that Ogas and Gaddam have also tried exploring (BADLY) by the way, but the conclusions they drew were utterly absurd and biased, and, well, vaguely misogynistic. I won’t mention that again, because, ugh, these guys are assholes. BUT ANYWAY….

Here’s what I’ve discovered about porn:

When it comes to straight porn, women aren’t necessarily any more interested in the fuzzy, narrative-heavy, “love-making” of the so-called “female friendly” stuff, any more than straight guys are. Sure, sometimes a woman might like to get off to a scene of passionate, loving sex, but sometimes she might want to get off to a scene of rough, fast stuff, or BDSM, or something else altogether. (By the way, it is always, always  erroneous to just assume that a woman or man wants in their real life what they are looking at in porn! Or what they read or what they write! Sometimes they are one in the same and sometimes, uh, NO.) But they aren’t really loving the other porn out there either.

Why is that? I would posit that women are interested in seeing a person who is really into whatever is going on in the scene (or possibly really not into it, if that’s your kink), and they’re interested in men’s bodies. Straight porn, even female friendly stuff, has forever catered to the male’s fragile ego by not concentrating much on the male in the scene. We don’t get reaction shots of their faces as they push into whatever orifice they’re putting their dick in, we don’t get visuals of their bodies, their sounds. We get a lot of noise from the girls, a ton of close-ups of the girls’ reactions, their asses and vaginas, and just about the only dick we get to see is the boring, boring shot of dick in vagina, dick in vagina, dick in vagina. *snooze*

Hmm, maybe instead of trying to make porn for women that is more narrative based, or prettier, why not just make it about what women actually want to see? Crazy concept, I know! And what is that? MEN AND THEIR REACTIONS AND BODIES! I mean, most of the straight porn I return to has a guy that is somehow really reacting to the woman he’s having sex with–trembling thighs, hands shaking, whispered, wrenched exclamations of pleasure. And it has nothing to do with what kind of scene it is: if it’s BDSM, lovemaking, rough, whatever. I just want to see the guy and see that he’s into it. Why? Because my sexual arousal is about MEN. That’s why.

Now, back to gay porn for a minute and why many women who watch it end up liking it better than straight porn.

1) It’s all men all the time. And that’s what these women want to see. Men’s bodies, their reactions, their dicks. And because the people shooting gay porn don’t know what the gay dude they’re making it for wants to see or will be getting off on, you almost always get reaction shots from both penetrated and penetrator, you get shots that show BOTH dudes are LOVING whatever the heck is going on in the scene. You get tons of visual eye candy, and, oh WONDER OF WONDERS the guys in gay porn? ARE ACTUALLY USUALLY HOT. Unlike, oh, 95% of the guys in straight porn who are usually really not hot in some way or another.

Because they don’t need to be, you see…because they’re not usually even in the shot. They just need a big dick, and, boom, the rest of the scene will be focused on the girl, so it doesn’t matter. Because it’s not about him. It’s about her–because straight dudes want to see the girl, because their orgasm/pleasure is tied up in women’s bodies, right? Well, shocker! Straight women are the opposite of that!

(James Deen, oh, you are such a wonderful exception to the ugliness rule. *sigh* Oh, and that new guy they’re using a lot lately…whose name I can’t seem to figure out. Young, pretty? Hmm.)

2) There’s (relatively) no cognitive dissonance to deal with in gay porn. As a woman, you don’t have moments of thinking, “Yeah, I’d never have an orgasm in that position. That’s stupid. And painful.” You don’t have distracting thoughts about fake tits, or ridiculous and ugly make-up and nails, or the really RIDICULOUS belly button rings, omg, what the fuck is that??? Why? Belly buttons exist, y’all. You can show them in porn!! I promise! No one’s gonna lose their boner because they saw a belly button! And if they do, they didn’t deserve that boner to begin with!

Nor do we have to think about the fact that 90% of straight porn has a 18yo with a 45yo man. (Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of gay “daddy” porn videos out there, but that is a small number, compared to the creeptastic amount of vast age difference scenes in straight porn.) And, you know what? Having an age kink in your porn viewing is fine, but it gets creepy after a while, honestly, watching all these young girls doing it with older dudes for money.

3) The guys in gay porn actually look like they’re loving it, whereas most chicks in straight porn look like they’d rather be eating a sandwich. I watched some straight porn a few days ago and I was like, “OMG she would so rather be having some ham and swiss right now, no matter what noises she’s faking.” *sigh* That was a so-called “female friendly” clip by the way. BORING.

So, do I think it is fair to draw the conclusion that a majority of women will NEVER be interested in porn because they aren’t interested in the “female friendly” fare provided for years? Nope. I think that so long as NO ONE has ever earnestly tried to make porn that is actually of interest to women with a focus on the male body and the reactions/pleasure he’s experiencing, along with showing genuine  female pleasure/kink/excitement/orgasm/interest then there’s just no way to say for sure.

So, yeah, you crappy scientists, Ogas and Gaddam, go draw your conclusions elsewhere, because they are, like so much of your work, bogus. Again.

Confused About My Anniversary. Sixteen? Twenty-six? Both! #anniversary #life

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So, I’ve been with my husband for over twenty-five years, but we’ve been married sixteen of them.

I get rather confused when discussing this because I tend to value the larger number as the most real of the two, so I’m always telling people we’ve been married for twenty-six years and then people assume we got married when I was fourteen. It’s the South, so it plays nicely into their stereotype. But, nope, we waited until we were out of college to get married.

Anyway, today is our sixteenth wedding anniversary and I would marry him again tomorrow. Because he’s just that great. And cute. And funny. And good. And, well, I love him.

Happy anniversary, husband of mine! Though it will feel more real on November 7th when it’s been twenty-six years!