Whose pleasure is prioritized during sex, and why?
Psychosexologist Karen Gurney explains how a lack of equal pleasure in the bedroom actually reflects broader gender inequality in society — and asks you to reconsider what dynamics are at play, even behind closed doors.
Editor’s Note: Read more, see link below for original item… see video at link…
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One of the exasperating features of everyday gender inequality is that couples can be aware of imbalances in doing housework, state a dislike of them, and yet fall right into them anyway.
The discrepancy shows up most obviously in the amount of time men and women spend on tasks such as cleaning and caregiving, including when both work full-time.
Today, men in different-sex relationships contribute more than they did in the 1960s and ’70s (a low bar), but often take on a “helper” role under the “manager” role of their female partner, who’s saddled with noticing what must be done.
The job of noticing is a recurring theme of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, a new book by Kate Mangino, a gender expert who works with international nonprofits. Mangino is aware of how American society could be made more equitable among genders—say, with paid parental leave and universally affordable child care. But she recognizes that individual couples have households to oversee now, and offers tactics for couples to bust out of that irksome helper/manager dynamic.
Photo Illustration by Vanity Fair; Photo by Nina Leen/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images.
When the shutdown left us stranded at home, some women clamored for a tangible sense of freedom. A year later, one writer reassesses the bra with help from an O.G. expert, an Instagram-savvy start-up, and Seinfeld.
It took me 351 days to take off my shirt for a stranger on the internet. Somehow I had made it this far into the pandemic without partaking in the talked-about extracurriculars: an OnlyFans side-hustle; a virtual boyfriend (I have a real one at home). Instead, here I was, at a little past noon on a recent Thursday, making small talk over Zoom in a who-knows-how-old lacy bralette.
Tania Garcia, director of fit at the lingerie brand Cuup, was about to guide me through a size assessment. I apologized for having only baker’s twine and a handyman’s tape measure. “We’ve gotten very crafty in our fittings,” she said, describing the MacGyver-like setups she has witnessed since the company launched in late 2018. (Without a brick-and-mortar presence, remote fittings were baked into the business plan from the beginning, unexpectedly teeing up Garcia’s team for the Zoom-all-day era.) “I did a fitting once with floss, so we’re okay,” she said, her voice reassuring in ways that transcended the subject at hand. “Let me tell you, we’re fine.”
The president said in an exclusive interview with CBS News that the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID crisis was “even more dire than we thought.”
Explore the campaign for women’s suffrage in the UK
“In 1918 the Representation of the People Act granted some women the right to vote in parliamentary elections, and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 gave men and women equal voting rights for the first time. Explore short articles and examine scrapbooks, political pamphlets, photographs and posters to discover how suffragists and suffragettes campaigned for this democratic right.”
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