Oh hey girl hey!

Welcome to this week's Ravishly round-up of gear-turning fodder. And boy, has it been a busy one. In between interviewing '90s wet dream Lisa Loeb, eviscerating systemic oppression in America, and examining Barbara Walter's puzzling stomach-churning coverage of child rapist Mary Kay LeTourneau, we got a serious wisdom-drop from Theo (our resident four-year-old therapist) and filled up our love-cup with an unlikely tale of romance between opposing "types."

We hope your weekend is a blissed-out one filled with brownies, rump-shaking beats, and all the brain-stew you can handle. In between your own adventures, we hope you get a chance to read some of the scintillating stories below. You won't regret it. (Any more than that brownie you ate circa 3 am in bed, all the chocolate crumbs now melted on your bedspread.) Which is to say, not at all.

Cheers dear Ravishers, to you!

This Crowdsourced Porn Series Wants To Film Your Fantasy (NSFW)

Ravishly editor Nikki Gloudeman gets the lowdown on feminist porn film-buff Erika Lust's latest (maybe greatest) project to date.

Choice quote: "According to Lust, the series began with a simple idea: Offer a portal for people to submit their anonymous sexual confessions. Soon, she realized the fantasies were something else: porn scripts just waiting to be produced in film. 'The public's imagination is far beyond that of the mainstream porn industry, so I knew the confessions could make great films with the right screen adaptation and direction,' Lust says. 'Plus, everyone's a bit of a gossip and an exhibitionist, so being able to confess anonymously gives the notion of power in secrecy.'

When deciding which fantasies to commit to celluloid, Lust says she looks for the hallmarks of any great film: 'erotic tension between characters, or a very accurate description of a particular atmosphere.'"

Don't Call Me The "Cutest Weightlifter"

Samantha Wright—a competitive weightlifter—writes a piece for our latest Conversation series, Gender Inquality in Sports, exploring the sexism and obsession with aesthetics that plagues female athletes.

Choice quote: "Behind the pairing of those words, 'cutest' and 'weightlifter,' lies an implicit irony, an irony intended to juxtapose mental images that render the qualities of daintiness beside that of brutishness. Contrary to that implication, the qualities, beauty and strength, are not antithetic. They are harmonious.

Through the centuries, women have battled discriminatory social norms, antiquated laws, and oppressive counterparts. We’ve won fights for suffrage, marriage and dating liberties, the right to work, equal compensation, and the honor of serving next to our brothers. With each conquest, we have shattered a piece of our self-diminishing societal conditioning, and have begun to embrace our beauty, knowledge, ability, power, and strength."

My Queerness Is Not An Annulment Of Your Identity

Contributing writer Little Bear Schwarz takes gender to task, explaining all the reasons why genitals and chosen garb have nothing to do with identifying as a man or a woman. Or neither. Or something wonderful in between.

Choice quote: "Let me be clear: Nothing is wrong with being a woman. Nothing is wrong with having a vagina. But having to call myself a woman just because I have a vagina is to be held at proverbial gunpoint. And it doesn’t matter that you’re throwing Rock’em Sock’em buzzword punches like, “perpetuating gender roles,” at me either: If you’re disappointed because I don’t boil my entire gender down to my hairy bits, then the problem isn’t internalized misogyny on my part—it’s internalized transphobia on yours. 

My gender isn’t something you can see. It’s not my cunt. It’s not my beard. It’s not my makeup. It’s not my pride about asking for directions, or my inability to have an argument without crying. It’s not the floofy crinoline I wear or the Hanes boxer briefs I wear underneath."

The Epic Myth Of The Sleeping Toddler

Joni Edelman explains what it's like to raise 5 children, all of whom are supposed to sleeping—according to Reuters—10 hours a night . . . and instead spend their evenings in existential quandaries.

Choice Quote: "My kids like to go to sleep, oh around, whatever the hell time they please. This might be 8. This might be 10. I'm not really in control of this situation. And the first person who says anything to me that even closely resembles, 'If you set a schedule, they will follow it,' gets to take them for a week.

Anyone? . . . Anyone? Bueller? I didn't think so. Another fun activity my 3-year-old especially likes to initiate is a little game called: Ask Mommy 73 Probing Questions at 3 am.

Yes, I said am. Which means ante meridian. Which means before noon. Which, in this case, means 3—in the morning. Topics covered include, but are not limited to: the sun and other objects in space, cars/trucks/tractors and their engines/exhaust/catalytic converters, the air conditioner, and pancakes. The first person who tells me, just put him back in bed! gets to come explain internal combustion while 4/5ths asleep."

Janelle Monae's Sexuality Is Not For Our Consumption

Ravishly staff writer Jetta Rae tells us why we all need to back the hell off and stop speculating on celebrities' sexuality. 

Choice quote: "In for a penny, in for a pound: in respecting Janelle Monae’s rejection of male attention, we must also respect her rejection of queer attention. Some have taken Monae's response to the tweeter as an admission of queerness—not the first time she's been labeled as such, her own voice on the matter be damned. In 2013, 'queer lyrics' on her album Electric Lady were also interpreted as 'proof' she was a lesbian, speculation Monae herself brushed off.

Speculating on Janelle Monae’s sexuality because she rejects and defies male consumption isn’t just tacky, or belying a tremendous ignorance of 'male attention' and why some people don’t want to entertain it—it invites a particular marginalization, and the systemic violence that follows, of someone who hasn’t spoken for themselves."