I’m concealing a crop underneath my clothing. It peeks out of my skirt as I move into the car, pressing painfully into the flesh of my thigh. “Where are you folks off to tonight?” “Just a club,” we both mutter, looking anywhere but at each other. The driver nods and says no more. He doesn’t …

Content warning: this article discusses sexual assault and trauma.    I distinctly remember my first time. I was in middle school. I was standing in front of a shop to buy some snacks and my body froze as I came to the realisation that someone’s hand was feeling up my privates. Years later, when I …

This is the second part of our new memoir series by Finnegan Shepard. “It’s All About Aly” details a time in Shepard’s life in which he lived in a tiny studio apartment in New York City with a cis man and shared a kind of merged identity with him. Part one can be read here. This …

I wanted him to have a safe space to discuss sex before he got into it. I wanted him to have somewhere to go to talk about the weirdness of sex and how it all works and how awkward those first moments can be.

Sophie King explores living with OCD and the intrusive sexual thoughts that accompany it.

You hardly need to be told that break-ups are awful. Even if you haven’t experienced one yourself, you’ve likely witnessed the ordeal of a friend or, at the very least, heard songs, seen films or read books that dwell at length on the topic. I recently experienced my first break-up. To add insult to injury, …

Embracing this identity has enabled me to seek sexual fulfilment in a different set of ways, and to engage my hyper-sexuality, rather than deny it.

Slut is a word that rolls off the tongue a little too easily for many of the men who call me looking for phone sex, and why wouldn’t it. Traditionally under patriarchy, women have only served two roles, the prude and the slut, and working in this industry, evidently, I am deemed the latter.

This is the first part of our new memoir series by Finnegan Shepard. “It’s All About Aly” details a time in Shepard’s life in which he lived in a tiny studio apartment in New York City with a cis man and shared a kind of merged identity with him. Part two can be read here. “The …

PTSD can erode the relationships around you and it can erode yourself. For me, the safest way to reconnect with my body has been through my own touch.

The desires to perform for the camera and for a Dom partner are comparable – and complicated. Naked, adorably chubby and covered in white body paint, I turn to the camera and shout, “I think it’s time for a spaghetti shower!” The footage jump-cuts to show my 24-year-old self pouring canned spaghetti over my trembling body while screaming, “Spaghetti shower! Aaah, I’m gonna get so clean!” This continues for …

I want women to smell their underwear everyday. Why? I overcame shame and learned to love myself by getting high off my own supply. Many women recoil at the smell of their vagina, I know, I was one of them for many years. Too many “smells like fish” jokes around the lunch table from awkward pre-pubescent …

My approach to my own kinkiness and queerness is not complete without the acknowledgment of my multitudes: being a bisexual, Asian, woman of colour.

Carving out my non-binary identity felt like going through a second adolescence. I found myself experimenting with various styles, spaces, activities and relationships – I was trying everything on for size to see if it fit. Much like my first adolescence, sexual exploration was a formative rite of passage, full of nervousness and a bit …

Non-consensual sterilisation does not address sexual violence against women with disabilities. In itself, it’s a form of violence that is lawful.

I’ve been crying in the bathtub for the past half-hour. The tub is bone dry, but the sink is running in hope to stop my sobs from passing through the paper-thin walls and into the bedroom next door. I’m completely naked, covered in a stranger’s semen. A knock at the door forces me to lift …

The plan was to gift my mother a vibrator for Mother’s Day. She was frank in her confession that since splitting from my father ten years ago, she hasn’t had sex with anyone else. She wasn’t particularly forlorn about it. Nor does she seem especially frisky. But for me, sexual pleasure and masturbation are hugely …

Content warning: this story discusses instances of sexual assault and homophobia.   For most people, their only understanding of being a virgin at 40 is the Steve Carell film. Not me. After living through years of homophobia – both internalised and not – and trauma, I recently experienced my first sexual encounter, at 48. I’m …

Sex workers who are attacked by clients are disadvantaged in Queensland, where the policing regime discourages victims from reporting, and workers who try to report are sometimes turned away.

It’s been a big year for many in our communities. We’ve seen our first legal same gender marriages across Australia, and, with that, the end of forced divorce (in most states and territories) for transgender people wishing to change the gender on their birth certificate. But with the good comes the bad, and this year …

Since I was diagnosed with vaginismus, my partner and I had endured several unsuccessful attempts at penetrative sex, which often culminated in me curled up in a ball of self-loathing while my ever-patient partner held me and assured me that it would be okay.

Learning that I was on the asexual spectrum came as a relief to someone who firmly believed she was weird and different.