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The Enduring Dissensus of the Queef

To queef or not to queef? That’s not really much of a question

Air: We need it to survive, but at times air can be so cruel, so crass, and in some cases, infuriatingly cock-blocking…well, more like fuck-disrupting, but you get the gist. The long-lost sister of the fart, a queef is an elusive, impetuous scene-stealer. It’s only natural there are a multitude of varied feelings surrounding the uninvited cameo of the queef during sex, among them shame, unease, amusement, bemusement, and even heightened arousal.

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Sex & CultureAnna del Gaizo
Yoga and Cannabis: A Not At All Cautionary Tale

I’m not into the idea of purposely getting high for a particular activity, unless it involves staying home and watching South Park, or reruns of The Golden Girls, for that matter. (Bea Arthur’s deadpan stare never ceases to pry a chuckle or two out of me.) It’s too deliberate. As in, “Let’s get high and go to Six Flags! That would be so dope!”

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Trendsetting Artists to Watch In 2016

Some have already come, seen, and conquered. Others are clearly up for the challenge. This year welcomes a healthy mix of fresh up-and-comers worth looking out for and already-established pop stars dropping new albums any minute now. What they have in common: Equally unmistakable personal style and musical personas. If this list is any indication, 2016 is primed to be the year of severely badass females.  

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The Most Major Beauty Moments Ever

When it comes to elements of style, style icons and fashion rebels are naturally intertwined, a match made in endlessly imitated, audaciously cool, fashionably adventurous heaven. It’s only logical the two would go hand-in-manicured, tattooed hand; it takes a degree of daring to launch a trend or do something different, while the vast majority of women are merely doing their best to look “pretty” and milking their smooth blowouts into day three.

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StyleAnna del Gaizo
What Does the Way You Apply Your Perfume Say About You?

An unscientific guide to your personality based solely on the way you put on your fragrance, in the grand tradition of insipid women's magazines

There’s been much written about what your choice of fragrance says about your personality. Those who gravitate towards fruity scents are fun and happy-go-lucky. A floral perfume connotes a girly, romantic sensibility. Women who wear sweet, sugar-inspired aromas appreciate nostalgia and apparently pleasing their men. Something woodsy translates to sexy and mysterious. But what about the way you apply your fragrance?

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StyleAnna del Gaizo
Interview: We Are Handsome’s Jeremy Somers

A few years ago, I remember wandering into a lingerie store in my neighborhood (Brooklyn Fox in Williamsburg, to be specific) and getting distracted by a few pieces hanging off the swimsuit rack. Namely one: an appropriately skimpy string bikini featuring a roaring wildcat, incisors on full display, dead-center on the crotch. It was hilarious yet glamorous. While spotty animal prints remain relatively ubiquitous, no matter the year or season, this print struck a new level of cheekiness. Even though it was winter and the notion of migrating off to a sultry locale was but a pipe dream, I wanted it. I took note of the equally offbeat name hanging from the tag: We Are Handsome. I bought it.  

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Beauty Rules That Don't Mean Shit

Wipe those rules off your face!

I hate rules. Except for the rules I’ve made up for myself, like always keep an open mind; lightly smile at people whenever possible, except for say, unwanted suitors; and don’t go on gratuitous multi-day party binges that render you incapacitated on the couch, you face-planted on your couch and in a burrito.. Then there are the so-called, unofficial rules of beauty, imposed upon us by women’s magazines, beauty editors, trend-forecasters, moms, sometimes even your friends, and potentially worst of all, ourselves. 

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The Jamaican Roots Reggae Artists You Need to Hear Now

As it goes with fashion, music—more specifically, popular music—lives in cycles. And as with fashion now, what was prevalent in the seventies is again celebrated in music. Is more formulaic dancehall music out and communal band-based roots reggae in? All signs point to yes. If you don’t know why Snoop Dogg changed his name to Snoop Lion in 2014, albeit briefly, it’s because he recorded a reggae album in Jamaica, aptly titled Reincarnated. (He changed it back after a falling out with former Bob Marley bandmate Bunny Wailer.) OMI’s upbeat ditty “Cheerleader” is reggae-pop at its fluffiest, but it still qualifies, and it’s officially one of the biggest songs of last year.

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Sex & CultureAnna del Gaizo
Stop Making Scents: What's Up With Pheromones?

Can we use the power of scent for personal empowerment? 

We’re all familiar with the power of scent: its ability to transport us to another moment in time by bringing back a memory, its potential power over our moods, and yes, its capacity to make us feel a sense of attraction to another person. Speaking for myself, though I’m aware I’m in no minority here, I know I’m really into a guy if I love the way he smells –and yes, I have burrowed my face into a borrowed shirt or two like a creep. Or could it very well be I’m really into the guy because of the way he smells?

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Sex & CultureAnna del Gaizo
DEERDANA’s Dana Veraldi on Her Cult-Favorite Tees

When Bowery-based Dana Veraldi started sketching precocious portraits of her friends, she hit on something special. What began as a side project for her pals in 2008 segued into a major success, thanks in part to the fact that her illustrations are as arrestingly idiomatic as they are unassuming. Odds are you’ve seen a DEERDANA t-shirt, featuring celebrities, like Naomi Campbell, Larry David, Grace Jones and Jean-Michel Basquiat, on one of your own friends by now. Or on Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z and FKA Twigs. So far, Dana has collaborated with Curtis Kulig, Miguel and Opening Ceremony, to name a few. I got to ask her about how DEERDANA came to be, her favorite moments and what’s next. 

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Defining the Rebel Archetype: The Bitch, the Bad Girl and the Rock Star

In 1997, a sassy, slip dress-wearing, guitar-strumming singer named Meredith Brooks had a big hit. For months, “Bitch” was omnipresent, probably first and foremost for its “racy” title but also because, even though most of us were too embarrassed to admit it, girls identified with the admittedly cheesy song that was unapologetic in announcing some of us – and really, all of us – are messy amalgams of perfectly imperfect, logically irrational contradictions.

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The Broadly Guide to Having Sex in Public

The A to Zs of getting it on and getting away with it

Act natural
Three words: Calm, cool, and collected. If you act suspicious, you are suspicious. Also, it helps not to care if strangers or friends are onto you. Besides, if people see you leaving, say, a bathroom with somebody else, they'll probably just assume you were doing drugs. Let them speculate after you ejaculate!

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Sex & CultureAnna del Gaizo
Get a Makeover: An Argument for Switching It Up, Stat

It’s the inside that counts, but what’s on the outside can really add up

Towards the end of the classic mid-nineties film Clueless, makeover maven Cher Horowitz, comes to a realization: “I decided I needed a complete makeover, except this time I’d makeover my soul.” The supposedly shallowest girl at Bronson Alcott High School becoming a selfless do-gooder who’s not thinking about looks first? It’s a turnaround for her; indeed, according to best friend Dionne, “Cher’s main thrill in life is a makeover, okay? It gives her a sense of control in a world full of chaos.” But Cher isn’t exactly off the mark when upon meeting grungy new girl Tai, her first instinct is to change her life by dyeing her hair, hacking her polo shirts into crop tops, and teaching her how to use a lip brush.  Sure, if you’re vapid and purposeless at your core, no physical alteration can help you. But, silly as it sounds, taking yourself out of your aesthetic comfort zone can have a major impact on your life and even your soul.

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StyleAnna del Gaizo
Learning to Be Less Stupid with Patricia Marx

Author and humorist Patricia Marx discusses search history shame, trying to learn Cherokee, and fighting the reality that we've all been getting dumber since college

If you've heard of Patricia Marx, you likely already know that she was the first woman elected to The Harvard Lampoon or that she was a writer for Saturday Night Live during the show's glory days in the early '80s.

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Sex & CultureAnna del Gaizo
The 9 Most Prohibited Beauty Moments

While the arguable majority of women—or at least those of the “basic” variety—are merely doing their best to look “pretty” and milking their smooth blowouts into day three, it requires a degree of daring to unintentionally launch a trend or depart from the accepted beauty norms. When people take on an aesthetic stance that doesn’t necessarily appeal to the masses, things get audacious and absorbing. In the spirit of appreciating untraditional beauty’s recent spear-headers, here are the most noteworthy unofficially “prohibited” beauty moments in recent history. They're not the most extreme: No neck-extending Masai chokers, 16th-century waist-suppressing iron corsets, bound feet of the Manchu women or ear-stretching gauges of teenage mall rats here. But they have had the biggest effect on the masses, inspiring admirers and eager imitators to follow suit.

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Style & BeautyAnna del Gaizo
Oh, Grow Up: The Plight of the Woman-Child

How to ensure your arrested development doesn’t get sentenced to life without parole

When I was an early adolescent, I thought once I turned 30, by some sort of evolutionary magic, and with a whole lot of nouveau money, I would wake up with a sleek, stick-straight blowout every day and wear lean pencil skirts with my Tom Ford pumps at virtually all times. Except, of course, when I went to sleep in my silky satin pajamas between crisp, daily-washed white sheets.

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Sex & CultureAnna del Gaizo
How to Be Different and Make It Work

Because being the same is overrated.

Odds are you’re not familiar with a ditty entitled “Different Yet the Same” from a 1984 episode of Sesame Street. I’m talking about a singing British cow named Gladys and a glass-half-full friend of hers, Buster the Horse. Buster knows cows and horses are different (he’s not stupid!), but he maintains: “Yes, in some ways we’re different, oh, as different as can be, but in some ways we’re the same…You can look at the difference if that’s all you want to do, but I’d rather find a way I like you.”

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Sex & CultureAnna del Gaizo
The Highs, Lows and… Drys of Sex and Cannabis

Vaginal dryness: It’s a topic no one really wants to talk about at length, aside from those silver-haired seductresses in the Osphena commercials, but as of late, “cotton vagina” has kind of become a thing. There’s been a fair amount of hype over the fact that smoking cannabis might temporarily dry you out. And all this time we were thinking it was making sex better! Or maybe I’m the only one who’s that oblivious. But, really? As if there’s not already enough to worry about, what with remembering to keep tampons around once a month and trying not to get pregnant.

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Friendly Tips for a Successful One-Night Stand

Commitment can be so overrated! What to do when you’re in the mood for fun over fidelity

1. Know what you want.
Namely, not a relationship, at least not at this very moment. If you’re in that mode, your desired conquest will smell it a mile away, and that kind of desire or desperation acts as an automatic sexual repellent to most humans. Sad but true. On the flipside, you’re doing this for you, so once you get into the thick of it, so to speak, decide this: Who cares what they (the male or female you’re having sex with) think? One-night stands are shallow, sloppy, and just a tad taboo – and therein lies the appeal.

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