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Commitment is Not the Death of New, Exciting Sex

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Being on Team O’a has lots of perks (including learning about the latest developments in female pleasure) but one of the best is the all-access pass to having a conversation with your lady friends about sex. Working here sometimes feels like a slumber-party after the witching hour, when filters have fallen away and we feel safe enough to talk deeply about naked-time fun that isn’t part of a usual happy-hour conversation.

And we wish you could be here too! We know not everyone has this experience at work (or even during normal fuzzy-slipper-wearing-hours) so when a member of the community reaches out with a thought, question, or comment, we love to help suss out what’s what.

The topic today is from one of those email conversations that starts innocuously, with a community member we’ll call Saffron, who wrote to chat about her thoughts regarding one of our recent posts.

Here’s Saff:

I wish they’d teach [about variety]  in sex-ed. When every piece of media says sex is supposed to work one way (not to mention Freud’s 2 cents on the subject), it’s nothing short of debilitating. And, it got me thinking that we have such a limited scope of experiences to compare with and learn from. It’s frustrating. Like, you can’t “learn” a lot from watching porn – it’s a fantasy. And there are a million books on how to get better at sex, but half of them are bunk and I wouldn’t even know how to begin sorting through the other half. I just don’t know how monogamous couples are supposed to be able to improve their sex lives.

Saying I should ask for what I want is like taking me out to a restaurant blindfolded, handing me a menu, and not even telling me what the place serves. All I can say is “well, I know I like mac n’ cheese, do you have that?” And that gets me lots of mac n’ cheese, which I like, but I might never know there’s foie gras profiteroles. And even if I did know there was foie gras profiteroles, because I saw them on a website, I sure as hell wouldn’t know how to tell the kitchen how to make them.

This is what life is like when you’ve had 1 sexual partner in the last 10 years. It’s the blind leading the blind. Well, poorly-sighted at least. You put two inexperienced people together, then have them mate for life, and then expect them to figure out how to be sexgods? Yeah right!

The good news, Saffron and any other long-term-monogamous-relationshippers out there, is this:

You can absolutely discover how to prepare and order “foie gras profiteroles” if you (and your partner) are willing to put in some work, and are okay with more than a little bit of fumbling, awkwardness, and earning participation awards rather than gold medals right off the bat – because truth be told, you’re going to have to practice. Here’s how:

Be curious.

Think back to a time in your life when you weren’t sure what you wanted – or even what you didn’t want (maybe choosing a major in college, or a career path). What did you do? Well, you explored your options, gave anything appealing a try, and checking in with yourself after to see how you felt about it.

And the same can be true for finding what interests you in bed.

So go ahead! Crack open erotic literature – even some that you don’t even think you’ll like or haven’t tried (we’re presently obsessed with Rachel Kramer Bussel and you can get her anthologies discounted through our Indiegogo campaign by selecting the perk “all tied up” perk.  Watch some saucy adult films (a few of our favorites here) not with the sole intention of getting off, but like a scientist tinkering in a lab would (the experiment, of course, being what you might want to try). As you take all this content in, ask yourself, “Does that seem like fun?”

Consider working with a sexpert – there are some seriously amazing sex coaches out there these days! Kit’s interviewed many of our favorites, including Layla Martin, Ashley Apple, and Psalm Isadora for the Pleasure with O’actually podcast. (And you can get a wild discount of 25% OFF Layla’s EPIC LOVER Course through the Indiegogo campaign and Ashley’s amazing videos are all donation based!)

Field trip destination: a comprehensive, pleasure focused, adult store.

Grab your beloved’s hand, skip the novelty adult store and check out somewhere like SheBop, Good Vibrations, or Babeland, While you’ll be tempted to giggle together, again, approach this field trip with the same curiosity as you do reading and watching erotica – with the mindset of “Could we find a way to use this together?” With your research before, you probably have some ideas now.

Take notes – and make a list.

As you read, watch, and learn, take notes. Seriously, grab a pen and paper (or screen and stylus) and jot down anything that piques your sexual curiosity as you explore. Maybe it’s fan-fic vampire erotica, maybe it’s a remote controlled vibrator for date night, maybe it’s wanting to make out to NPR (true story, one O’a team member loves this – nothing like learning and getting off at the same time!).

As you review this list, you can start to make connections as to what you’re interested in – it might not be exactly what is listed, so look for broader themes. To use the examples above, enjoying vampire fan-fic erotica translates well to role playing in bed; a remote controlled vibrator suggests one of you likes being in control while the other likes being surprised (hello, exploring BDSM!); and yes, even NPR can be related to simply knowing you like having your mind stimulated while fooling around (another member of Team O’a is slightly obsessed with dirty-game night – like taking all the Jenga pieces, writing naughty to-dos on them, and then building the tower).

A few notes from the tried and true.

Our resident Team O’a long-term relationshipper said she and her manfriend like mixing up locations. Sometimes the bed you’ve been sleeping in for years isn’t really a bastion of creativity for sex – but going to a hotel, a weekend away, or your backyard can change your mindset.

Now the harder part: trying it all out!

It’s one thing to explore and say “Yes, I like that!” It’s a lot like furniture shopping. You might know you love the picture of that mid-century modern bookshelf – heck, you might even love it in person and know the dimensions are just right. But sometimes you take a piece home, place it where you imagined it going, and think “Ooooooooo. No.” And it can be disappointing – there was so much build up and anticipated joy. So you might have to move it around the room, try other places, or even just let it sit and see if you start to enjoy it.

Okay, extended metaphor aside, what we’re trying to say is that it’s not easy to discover what you like. There will be some trying and practice required – but if you go into the discovery with an open mind, a willingness to laugh, and accepting you might not like it now but think about it later or even like it ever, then you’ll be on the right track.

Remember: this isn’t a competition, or in the end, even about anyone else. It’s just about you and your partner, and experiencing pleasure together.

Finally, have an open commitment to sex.

When lives are busy with the day to day grueling schedule of kids, work, household chores, dog walking, social obligations, and yard-work, sex can feel like an unnecessary waste of time. But it’s not, and it can often go a long way into maintaining an intimacy and sense of fun in your relationship that lets you escape that mundacity for a while.

Having an open commitment to sex means you work to not let it feel like a chore, but do process how important it is to the intimacy and health of your relationship (as well as your own personal well being!). Even when you might not necessarily be completely jonesing for it at the beginning, it probably won’t take long for you to be having a blast (and if ten minutes in you’re not, then it’s a-okay to stop. This is about your pleasure).

Saffron, we know this sounds a teeny bit like work – and that’s because it does require effort and yes, sifting through some of those sex books (our faves are The Guide to Getting it On and She Comes First). But know that this is the sort of work even long-term single folk go through: exploration, trying, and laughing. And ideally, this discovery process is actually pretty FUN.

Readers, do you have any other advice or tips? We’d love to hear them in the comments – it’s for the benefit of the community!

 

Not All Sex is Created Equal

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Sex is good for about a thousand and one reasons. But in celebrating all the tingles, breathy voices, and electrified skin touches, we can often lose sight of one fascinating thought: not all sex is created equal. And so, we were blown away by Rebecca Traister’s “Consensual Sex Can Still Be Bad” in October’s New York Magazine in which she takes a brave, deep, dive into the often unexplored waters of feminism, pleasure, the cultural meaning of sex-positivity.

At the beginning of the sex-positivity movement, the key takeaway was women were allowed to say “Yes!” to sex. But that “Yes” now comes with an interesting set of expectations.Traister explains:

Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.

We’re having sex for the sake of sex, and we’re saying sex with consent is always good sex even if it doesn’t feel good. A lousy lover or iffy situation becomes categorically “good” so long as consent was given. Never mind how you actually feel during sex, and certainly never mind how you feel after. This is a disservice to sexually active women. We all have first or second hand experience with sex that was fully consented tobut after a few days leaves us feeling really weird – and it’s hard to pinpoint why.

Somewhere along the way, our culture seemed to forget that sex is not just about the right to have it but about experiencing pleasure unlike any other (which is one reason O’a exists – to remind you all of the power of orgasm!). Which leads us to another of Traister’s points about sex:

It’s rigged in ways that go well beyond consent… Young women feel that they are being judged either for having too much sex, or for not having enough, or enough good, sex.

This is a huge tangle for women. Not only are we at risk for slut-shaming, but suddenly we’re at risk for pleasure-shaming, too. So we say “Yes” to sex because we do want sex (we like sex!), and perhaps also a little bit because we’re supposed to as liberated ladies. Except, as Traister notes:

“A lot of sex feels like this,” [Reina] Gattuso wrote in May, after her popular Crimson columns drew the attention of Feministing, a website at which she has since become a contributor. “Sex where we don’t matter. Where we may as well not be there. Sex where we don’t say no, because we don’t want to say no, sex where we say yes even, when we’re even into it, but where we fear … that if we did say no, or if we don’t like the pressure on our necks or the way they touch us, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t count, because we don’t count.”

Part of us still believes our pleasure doesn’t matter. We say “Yes” to everything, and everyone, except ourselves.

Which is why it’s time for women – and men – to aim for more than “consent” as being the indicator of good sex. Just because we’ve consented to sex doesn’t mean sex feels good – during, or even after – and feeling good is most of the reason to have sex. We need genuine, honest communication between the sheets about our wants and needs. We need sex that allows for vulnerabilities and intimacy, where each party involved enjoys themselves from start to finish. And we need sex that brings pleasure not just in the moment, but when you remember it a day, a week, or a year later.

In other words, it’s time to redefine good sex.

Rebecca Trainster agrees:

One thing that’s clear is that feminists need to raise the bar for women’s sex lives way, way higher. “Sure, teaching consent to college freshmen may be necessary in a culture in which kids are graduating from high school thinking it’s okay to have sex with someone who is unconscious,” says [Maya] Dusenbery. “But I don’t want us to ever lose sight of the fact that consent is not the goal. Seriously, God help us if the best we can say about the sex we have is that it was consensual.”

Seriously indeed.

To support PLEASURE – donate to O’actually’s Indiegogo campaign here!

Indiegogo Press

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With O’actually, Women “Come” First

Female #sextech startup launches Indiegogo campaign

O’actually – first female led adult film project on Indiegogo raises over $15k by 80 backers in first week of ground-breaking campaign

 

(Boston, MA, October 15, 2015) — O’actually, a new adult content platform, focusing on enhancing women’s sexual pleasure, is having unprecedented success on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform. The company, once barred from all mainstream crowdfunding platforms because of their commitment to celebrating a highly curated selection of adult films for women, is now set to prove that the the world is ready and eager for more curated, high-quality porn that caters to a female audience.  to produce three erotic film projects.

O’actually’s founder, Kit Murray Maloney, has been called “a badass entrepreneur” for her unwavering dedication to women’s sexual pleasure and releasing the taboo of women’s masturbation. After struggling to find sexually stimulating films that showcased hot scenarios from a female perspective and that celebrated genuine female orgasms, she decided to create her own.

So on Thursday Oct 8th O’actually launched their  campaign to raise money for an in-house production wing to create the adult content women are craving. The campaign raised over $12k in the first 24hrs, breaking precedence and shattering previous beliefs that crowdfunding for x rated material was an impossibility.

“O’actually is excited to combat the status quo in mainstream pornography, by changing what you can expect from adult content by creating beautiful films that showcase a diverse range of women’s sexual fantasies and body types in our films. This way the women and men watching can easily feel good about themselves and each other while enjoying O’actually’s adult content.”

Collaborators on the project are filmmaker Lex Sloane and adult performer and creative director Maxine Holloway, who will be helping write, direct, and produce these tantalizing films.

For more information, please visit the campaign on Indiegogo at http://igg.me/at/oactually!

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ABOUT O’ACTUALLY:

Launched in February 2015, O’actually is a web-based platform and resource center celebrating women’s sexual pleasure. The company hosts a curated selection of adult content, highly acclaimed podcast, and leads a community of women through a month long program to commit to daily orgasms.  O’actually’s mission is to stimulate, inspire, and grow the movement for women’s sexual satisfaction around the world. Visit www.oactually.com to learn more.  Like O’actually on Facebook, and follow on Twitter @Oactually, and Instagram.  #givetogetoff

Media Contact:

Molly Rider – info@mollyrider.com

Ms. Maxine Holloway

Kit Murray Maloney

Lex Sloane

Indiegogo

BREAKING NEWS!

O’actually is launching an Indiegogo campaign from October 8 – November 16th.

At O’actually, an all-women run media startup company,

we believe that enhancing female sexual pleasure will better the world.

Our Goal is to Raise $120,000

To Create 3 Original Film Projects

Packed With:

Hot Sex, Captivating Diverse Characters, and Creative yet Believable Plot Lines,

All Focused on Maximizing Pleasure for the Viewers and Performers Alike.

We are creating sexy, playful and sophisticated adult entertainment from the female perspective, that celebrates women’s sexual pleasure and genuine female orgasms. This campaign is about creating powerful, socially responsible adult content that turns people waaay on.

O’actually is excited to combat the status quo in mainstream pornography. We are fully prepared to represent the importance of genuine female pleasure. We are changing what you can expect from your adult content by curating beautiful and diverse range of women’s sexual fantasies and body types in our films. This way the women and men watching can easily feel good about themselves and each other while enjoying O’actually’s adult content.

O’actually is incredibly fortunate to have found its ideal collaborators and partners in Lex Sloane and Ms. Maxine Holloway

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These talented women have been forging their own path in the sex-positive adult world in their own way.

Ms. Maxine Holloway is an adult film performer, filmmaker and pleasure artist. Her adult performances have earned her an XBIZ Award for ‘Best Feminist Release 2015’, and an AVN nomination for ‘2015 Best All Girl Group Scene’. Holloway is certified in HIV/STI Prevention, and has her masters degree in public health from SF State University. Much of her activism and policy work focuses on the health and safety of sex workers. Holloway teaches classes ranging from consent and healthy relationships to fetish and fantasy fulfillment. @maxineholloway on twitter

Together, we will create orgasm-inducing artistic masterpieces that will change the landscape of adult entertainment for the better and gives women and men the powerful content they deserve and need.

Uberlube Family ShotO’actually is partnering with überlube, the luxuriously silky personal lubricant that we love so much, in this campaign. A generous contributor to our projects and O’actually as a whole, überlube is committed to opening up dialogue and removing the stigma and taboo around sex. Amazing product and even more amazing people behind the product.

O’actually needs your help to make it all happen: your generous donations will support film production from start to finish:

  • From the perfect script, most tantalizing edit, and top-tier wages for cast and crew to equipment rentals, backend website infrastructure, hosting and distribution costs… We are counting on you to make our dreams come true so we can bring your fantasies to life.

We have exciting incentives at all levels to make you part of the whole experience all along the way.

So, if you are curious to see what happens when you unleash female creativity in the adult space, if you believe that sex is hotter when everyone involved is having a good time, and most importantly if you believe that pleasure can champion over violence, misogyny and perhaps most insidious, sexual misinformation, then please…

Sign up with your name and email address below to be one of the first to learn all the launch details and  be ready to donate!

Partnership Opportunities:

The options are endless – we would love to feature your brand or product in one, two or all three of the film projects… our beautifully crafted and wholly original, tantalizing, sex-positive stories that cater to what women really want, made by women for women. 

We’d love the opportunity to go over this idea in more detail. Send an email to Kit@oactually.com to set up a time to chat.

Press:

Check out our press release on our upcoming Indiegogo campaign HERE

Help Us Spread the Word:

SOCIAL MEDIA:

Please share this site with whoever comes to mind, the more the merrier, let our collective excitement-seeking voices be heard! Here’s some ideas for ways to spread it around…

We even made pretty versions to copy, paste and send!

Indiegogo---Pre-Campaign-SM---Affiliate-1  Indiegogo---Pre-Campaign-SM---Affiliate-2Indiegogo---Pre-Campaign-SM-Affiliate-3  Indiegogo---Pre-Campaign-SM-Affiliate-4

EMAIL:

Not a social media person? We got you covered as well, here is an email to inspire you – again, all you have to do is copy and paste, spread the word and prepare to #givetogetoff!

Hi there,

I read about this rad Indiegogo campaign and I couldn’t help but share it with you!

The gist: a female-led startup is producing erotic films that celebrate women’s pleasure. You know – the kind with an actual plot, beautiful real people, and with genuine orgrams. Something that might actually turn ladies on. Because seriously, women love sex as much as men – we just love it a little differently.

I thought this was a fun and worthy cause that I could benefit from; I thought you might want to support and stay in the loop too.