Stories about: sex
The first time I tried amyl was not during sex. It was at a music festival west of Melbourne when I was about twenty-one. I’d lost my crew and during the search ran into my mate Dylan. He gave me a beer and dragged me to an experimental stage with a crazy light show and …
For a fat lady, sex and desire are complex beasts. I regularly refer to the time I’ve spent learning how to love and fuck as ‘work’. While not a romantic turn of phrase, it’s a fairly accurate description of how it feels. Describing adolescence or adulthood spent in a larger body feels almost redundant these …
Lady Sings It Better is a comedic cabaret made up of four women who perform misogynistic songs by the likes of Robin Thicke, Usher, and Nine Inch Nails. This tongue-in-cheek cabaret quartet is bringing their show to the Melbourne Comedy Festival, and Charlotte Long caught up with one of their members, Maeve Marsden, for a …
Happy endings, massage and exploitation: Stuck between a towel and a hard place
Sometimes the smallest shifts are the hardest to make. So you make a drastic move and opt, instead, to change everything. Moving to Australia from Turkey was that change for me. I came to Melbourne to escape an abusive relationship, the cultural codes stuck to my body from birth, my job as an art director, the prestige of my education …
My first time masturbating was more awkward than my first sexual experience with someone else. Possibly because I had no idea what I was doing, uncertain as to what my body actually enjoyed, and because I was a fumbling 24 year old, alone in a sharehouse bedroom, desperately hoping nobody would hear the quiet …
Want to learn erotic yoga, navigate non-traditional relationships, or sensually tie up the babe you met on New Years Eve? You might want to try Sydney’s Festival of Really Good Sex. Entering its fifth year, the festival promises five days of interactive workshops, films and discussions spanning topics like Mindfulness, Physicality, Creativity and Imagination, Movement and …
We’ve had a big year over here, at Archer HQ. We launched our ageing issue and our culture issue, expanded into the US, toured the UK and Europe, and won an award from the United Nations. Our team also doubled in size, to about 12 volunteers plus a whole heap of supporters. We always keep an eye on what our readers …
I remember it clearly: falling for a Leo in the heat of summer. It was a season of trespassing, skinny-dipping, telling secrets on rooftops and sharing sloppy kisses when no one was looking. Winter had hurt me. Years of putting others first, of unspoken things, had caught up to me. I was exhausted. On the …
Have you ever had sex that was just kind of meh? The kind of sex where there wasn’t anything particularly wrong with it, there just wasn’t anything great about it either? Maybe even the kind of sex that you completely forget about after the fact? We tend to see these types of sex as ‘bad’ …
Sandra Daugherty is a podcasting, workshop-teaching, sexual-shame-fighting “sex nerd” based in Los Angeles, California. After just missing her in L.A., Amanda Bloom got her on the phone to find out about what’s new and exciting in the world of sex, gender, relationships, and general sex nerdery. Find Daugherty’s podcast, Sex Nerd Sandra, on Nerdist and …
I remember the first time I really noticed that sexuality was important to older people. I was working as a nurse unit manager in a residential aged care unit when a nurse reported that John, one of the male residents, was masturbating while she assisted him to shower. She felt she “shouldn’t have to put …
Archer Asks: Cyndi Darnell, sex & relationship specialist, and creator of The Atlas of Erotic Anatomy & Arousal
Cyndi Darnell is one of Australia’s leading qualified sex therapists and educators, spearheading progressive and inclusive sex education workshops and seminars for adults. She has a passion for speaking, public sex education and has presented her work to acclaim across Australia as well as London, NYC and L.A. Archer caught up with her to talk …
Porn and pleasure: Navigating the feminist conflict between morality and desire in watching porn
Guilty pleasure doesn’t entirely sum up my relationship to porn. Ambivalence, the deep type that derives love and hate from the same source, maybe better describes it.
As a sexologist and sexuality coach, clients ask me all the time why they can’t orgasm during penetration. I tell them it’s the same reason a lot of people with vaginas can’t. Penetration is not a great way to stimulate the clitoris, and the clitoris is the most common way to bring on a climax. When delivering …
The author of Sex in your seventies spoke to dozens of septuagenarians to find that sexuality is still varied and complex later in life. When two people, as a couple, do not have intimacy, it makes their relationship less warm. There can be too much sexual contact, or too little – you must draw a …
For me, the world of BDSM is generally a gentle and peaceful place. In this subculture, I find my boundaries respected in unique ways, and the majority of folk are able to engage in more than idle chit-chat.
Sex is an art. And one that lesbians in particular have apparently, according to myth, taken a few decades to get their heads and legs around. Let alone actually in their beds. Today however, lesbian women have more orgasms, better sex and sex that lasts longer than their heterosexual female counterparts. And they’ve also mastered Lesbian …
Walter Crasshole is a US-born writer and porn performer, and founder of new men’s sex website, Dandy Dicks (NSFW). Amy Middleton caught up with him in Berlin to ask about his work, sex, erotica and identity. A: Tell us about your project, Dandy Dicks. WC: Dandy Dicks is a new online erotic gay magazine that not …
Constance and Eric are a US based photography duo who take intimate portraits of couples, groups, and individuals. Darryn King caught up with them for Archer to ask a few questions about their work. Constance and Eric – how did the idea actually come about to photograph couples during the most intimate of acts? It …
I passed by a familiar face at the top of the stairs. He smiled knowingly at me. I remembered him from a one-time fuck some months ago – a face that had popped up on apps a few times, but had never materialised in the flesh again, until now. We spoke openly, the silence …
How would we feel, Nietzsche wondered, if a demon visited us in our darkest hour to deliver the message that this moment, and every other from birth to death, would be lived again and again for eternity? Would the knowledge of a life that echoed throughout time lend it a crushing weight? Or would we be able to affirm each moment’s eternal recurrence? …
By our own hands: society’s fraught and shameful relationship with masturbation
I had my hair permed for the first and last time when I was 10 years old. An hour or two after we returned home from the hairdressers, my mother caught me masturbating in the lounge room. In 1986, it was acceptable for 10-year-olds to get perms, but not to masturbate in the lounge …