Sexpectations can be stressful, right? Recently, designer and your royal flyness, Melody Ehsani dropped a new tee for the 2016 and let's just say the PSA couldn't have "come" at a better time.
The O.G. curator of dope things, from cool accessories to limited edition Reebook sneakers, peeled back from any elaborate designs this time, opting instead to let her limited words do the big talking. Choosing a classic white crew neck, the word "PORN" can be seen etched into the shirt's chest. The back, however, goes on to elaborate:
"Dudes out here expect you to do a cartwheel and land on their dick. Bro, FOH! --M.E."
Ahh, simplici-tee at its finest!
Melody also goes deeper into the tee's description, breaking down the meaning and inspiration behind the shirt, regarding the distorted lines that separates computer love from real lovemaking:
"Porn isn't what it was. The stakes keep getting higher and with technology making it so accessible, It's become an epidemic of sorts for many reasons. In this era most males are getting their first intro to sexual education by watching porn. We feel this has created some distortion. Sex is sacred, powerful and should always be about mutuality. Lets talk about it! P.S. If you can do a cartwheel more power to you!"
If this isn't the truth! And per Mel's suggestion to "talk about it," we're going to do just that!
The reality is, like most things taken in excess, porn can lead to unrealistic expectations for sex. And unfortunately in 2016, hardcore pornography can be accessed by nearly any and everyone, dangerously confusing perception for reality to the young and sexless.
Parental control settings for web browsing is a joke and everyone has a phone with internet these days, anyways. And let's not forget that social media is practically soft-core porn within itself. We're all just a hashtag away from clicking into a "Titty Tuesday," "Eggplant Friday," or a "Sweet P***y Saturday," as deemed by rapper Plies.
So what does all the sensationalizing mean? Well for one, for those growing up in the computer era, it allows more and more young women to be viewed (as well as view themselves) as objects and not goddesses. And frankly baby girl, your body is a temple. It should be sanctified, not objectified. Even as adult women many of us know this, yet still tend to forget. So imagine how much harder it is to believe in your exclusivity when you're watching graphic porn in HD, as young as the average age of 10 to 13.
Porn places pressures on both male and females, especially unsuspecting ones, in a few ways:
1. Distorted Male Body Images: the idea that the size of a male's member is the leading factor in measuring your pleasure. When in reality, camera angles play a huge role in how a penis looks on a monitor. Not to mention, it's not always fair to lose interest based on inches.
2. Distorted Female Body Images: The same goes for women feeling like they need to be insanely curvaceous and have fake breasts and/or butts in order to be desired. All shapes are beautiful, and your partner should love and cherish you as is!
3. Party of 3: Sex between two people is so 90's... according to porn these days. Pornography will have you thinking that a party of two just won't do, and that casually throwing in a third person is clutch for a climax. But not so fast. Sex is a beautiful bonding of the bodies and a very personal act. Unless this is something you and your partner both agree to, no woman should feel pressured into inviting someone else into their bed. Just ask our relationship writer, sometimes less is more when you're trying to score. And the extra sweat isn't worth the regret.
4. Inserting Anything, Anywhere: In porn, using foreign objects is seen as the norm. However, when it comes to toys and sex games, there are dangers in product placement- so be careful. A 2014 sex-surveyvia Reddit showed that the majority of the 100 women surveyed did not prefer being "probed" with objects during sex with their man, no matter how erotic porn makes it look. Sometimes the real deal "D" is all she needs, along with some phenomenal foreplay of course.
5. Duration: Pornography is a movie- literally. And most of us know this. However, something about trying to "recreate" a movie seems to be goals for those going at it in the bedroom. Especially when you're young and impressionable. Truth is, after foreplay, the actual act of sex can last a anywhere between a satisfactory 3 to 7 minutes. Don't believe us? Peep how "Most women are here for 5 minute sex."
All in all, it's okay to watch a good movie but it's important to know the difference between pause and play. The dangers of such explicit exposure for most adolescent and teen introduction to intercourse, is that it is much less a setup for a healthy sex life later, than it is a disaster. Long gone are the days where the "first time" was once portrayed in movies by high school seniors who, although inexperience, at least had enough sense to keep it sensible and sensual more than anything.
Even rapper J.Cole recounted losing his virginity in his track, "Wet Dreamz," where he rapped a few lines about his first time, admitting he felt pressure to satisfy his partner, who herself was a virgin:
I'm hoping that she won't notice it's my first time
I'm hoping that my sh-t is big enough to f-ck with
And most of all I'm praying, "God don't let me bust quick"
I'm watching pornos trying to see just how to stroke right
At the end of the day, Melody's "PORN" tee is pretty neat. No one is saying you can't spice it up in the bedroom, just make sure that the "seasoning" is even-- and that both parties are making it hot! At the end of the day, love making should be a mutual exchange of the minds and bodies, not just a demand from one partner. Sex should be respected more than expected. And it should always, always be consensual!
Get Melody Ehsani's "PORN" tee here! What are your thoughts on it?
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Ding. Ding. DING.
A life coach by the name of Thomas Leonard once said that “Clarity affords focus” and, believe you me, when it comes to dealing with other human beings, if you don’t get clear on where you stand when it comes to your interactions with them, you can very easily find yourself “focusing too much” on those who don’t deserve it and too little on those who absolutely do. And y’all, this lil’ PSA couldn’t be more relevant than when it comes to what I call “casual friendships.”
Let’s dig — and for some of us, dig our way out of — what it means to have a casual friend, so that you can get clear on if you really need those in your life…and if so…why?
Article continues after the video.
It Can’t Be Said Enough: Always Remember What “Casual” Means
GiphyThere’s a reason why I decided to share two videos by mental health coach Isaiah Frizzle at the top and bottom of this article. It’s because a lot of what he shares in both of them complements a piece that I wrote for the platform last year entitled, “This Is Just What Purposeful Relationships Look Like.”
It’s the author M. Scott Peck who once said, “Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it” and please believe that the older (and hopefully more mature) you get, the more you tend to see just how valuable — and fleeting — time is; and that is what plays a huge role in motivating you want to only involve yourself with people, places, things and ideas that will honor your time — and when something is casual? In my opinion, it’s highly debatable that it’s worth much of your months, days, hours, or even too many of your minutes.
The main reason why is addressed in an article that I wrote back in the day entitled, “We Should Really Rethink The Term 'Casual Sex.'” The gist? When it comes to relationships, “casual” is certainly not a favorite word of mine because I know what it means. Have mercy — why would you want to invest your time, energy, and emotions into something that is, by definition, apathetic, indifferent, careless, lacking emotional intimacy, and/or is without purpose?
I don’t know about y’all but that sounds like a complete and total crap shoot to me — especially if you are going to go so far as to consider this type of dynamic a true friendship (check out “Ever Wonder If A Friend Is Just...Not That Into You?,” “6 Signs You're About To Make A Huge Mistake In Making Them A Close Friend,” “5 Signs Of A Toxic Friendship That Is Secretly Poisoning Your Life,” “12 Friend Facts That Might Cause You To Rethink (Some Of) Your Own,” and “Less & Less Of Us Have Close Friends These Days. Why Is That?” ).
To me, when you decide to call someone “friend,” it means that they are loyal, reliable, consistent, trustworthy and willing to be there to support you to the very best of their ability — even if it’s inconvenient to do so sometimes (check out “Life Taught Me That True Friendships Are 'Inconvenient'”). How in the world can you expect that from something that has the word “casual” in it?
And you know what? That actually segues into my next point about casual friendships pretty darn well.
Ponder the Purpose “Casual Friends” Serve in Your Life
GiphyA couple of years ago, Verywell Mind published an article entitled, “How the 4 Types of Friendship Fit Into Your Life.” The four that it listed were acquaintances (which I actually don’t consider to be friends; check out “6 Differences Between A Close Acquaintance And An Actual Friend”), casual friends, close friends, and lifelong friends. After reading the piece, I think they consider casual friends to be the “pleasure” friends that I mentioned in the article, “According To Aristotle, We Need ‘Utility’, ‘Pleasure’ & ‘Good’ Friends.”
And although I certainly get that, I think my “cause for pause” is calling those people “friends” when they probably should be called something like an associate or possibly even a buddy instead. Why do I feel this way? Well, I’ve shared in other articles that I think social media has jacked up vocabulary words and their true meaning on a billion different levels.
Take “friend,” for example. Facebook had us out here calling everyone we connected to on their platform “friends” when some of them, we’ve never even spoken to before — and I personally think that influenced, affected and perhaps even infected our psyche to the point where we will call folks, both online and off, “friend” even when they haven’t earned it and/or who possibly don’t deserve it.
That said, do I think that we all could use lighthearted interactions that don’t go very deep and are filled with not much more than fun? Sure. However, if we were to move this over into a sexual thing — those types of people would probably be called a sneaky link, and there is nothing significant or substantial about ‘em. In fact, if anything pretty much automatically comes with an expiration date, sneaky links would have to be it.
And that’s kind of the point that I’m trying to make about a casual friend — so long as you know that the word “casual” is being used to describe them, while you may enjoy the people who fit that bill, they aren’t really anything that you can or even should fully rely on. Instead, take them for what they are and don’t really expect much more than that. Otherwise, you could be in for some profound levels of disappointment. And who wants that?
Final point.
How a Casual Friend Can Become a Huge Red Flag
GiphyI’m telling you, y’all gonna quit clowning Tubi. LOL. To me, the best way to describe it is it’s the Cricket of current streaming apps. What I mean by that is, back when Cricket (the cell phone service) first came out, people, like me, who used it service got incessantly clowned because it was seen as a bootleg provider. Now it’s owned by AT&T, and as someone who has rocked with them since I was in my 20s, I don’t have one regret for doing so. Cricket has always been good to me, chile.
And Tubi? Well, when you get a chance, check out CNBC’s article, “CEO at 33, Tubi’s Anjali Sud on success hacks she learned at Amazon, IAC on way to top of Fox streaming” — take note of the moves the streaming app is making and the quality of programming that is transpiring in real time.
Anyway, I find myself bringing up Tubi more and more in my content because it helps to amplify some of the points that I like to make. This time, it’s a movie that’s (currently) on there calledRight Man, Wrong Woman. If you haven’t seen it before, I don’t want to give too much of the film away. What I will say is that the main female character, she had a casual friend and then she had a close friend.
That casual friend—the one who liked to kick it all of the time—was a lot of fun; however, dealing with her came with a ton of semi-unforeseen consequences. Meanwhile, the close friend? She’s what the Aristotle article (that I mentioned earlier) would call the “good friend” because she tried her best to hold her friend accountable.
And really, it shouldn’t be a shock that the casual friend turned out to be a plum trip because if someone is loads of entertainment and pleasure and yet they are indifferent towards you, they make careless decisions around you and/or they don’t really make known the purpose for you being in their life other than to pass some time — where really do you and that person have to go past drinks after work or dinner on a rooftop restaurant from time to time? And if that is all that the two of you are doing, again, why are they deserving of the word “friend”?
Hmph and don’t get me started on the lack of reciprocity that typically transpires when it comes to dealing with people like this because, while they won’t mind you spending your coins on them, taking their calls in the middle of the night or listening to all of their issues — when it comes time for them to show up for you, they very well may gaslight you into thinking that you are being dramatic, clingy or “doing the most.” Why? Well, it’s mostly because the two of you never really established what the hell the both of you are to one another.
And so, while you’re somewhere taking them seriously, they are out here seeing you casually, and as much as it might hurt to hear, that doesn’t automatically or necessarily make them a bad person. You shouldn’t expect much where no clarity is involved. After all, casual is just that: CASUAL.
____
I’m hoping that you can now see why I entitled this piece in the way that I did. It’s because a red flag is pretty much a warning, and to me, a casual friend is about as big of an oxymoron (again, to me) as casual sex is. Friends and sex are both too intimate to be seen or treated casually. Oh, but if you step out and take that risk, you could find yourself getting far more involved than the other individual ever wanted to go, because casual is how things have always been. “Friend” was simply to get you more mentally and emotionally invested. SMDH.
American columnist Walter Winchell once said, “A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.” A wise person once said, “One good friendship will outlive forty average loves." Former President Ulysses S. Grant once said, “The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity.” Does any of this sound casual to you? Yeah, me neither.
Again, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have people in your life who aren’t on deep levels. I’m just saying that you might want to consider putting them into another category than friend, because what friends do for people? There ain’t nothin’ even remotely casual about it, sis. Not even a lil’ bit.
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