Tracy Clark-Flory

…are filled with images of “smooching, dry-humping and unhooking of bras.” [READ MORE]

Andi was sitting on the toilet peeing when her boyfriend bent down in front of her.

“It looks like you’re proposing,” she joked.

“Would you like me to?” he asked.

She laughed. “Yeah.”

“Do you want a ring?”

“Yeah.”

He went into the other room and came back with a diamond. He slid the family heirloom onto her finger before she even got up from the toilet. They’re now happily married and it’s a cherished story that they share “more frequently than is appropriate,” she says. [READ MORE]

We didn’t have much of an audience. There was a couple just out of earshot reverently staring at the horizon, and a lone crow hovering in place a couple of feet in front of us, its glossy black body effortlessly buoyed by the lift of the ocean wind. ”Hey, you,” I told the bird, nonchalantly. “We just got engaged.”

Christopher and I had hiked four miles through the mossy Point Reyes forest to a dramatic cliff overlooking the ocean. We sat in the dirt, which was pockmarked with mouse holes and accented with ice plant in electric-pink bloom. Turquoise waves churned below and a seagull took stomach-turning dives as we read each other letters we had written moments before alongside a shady creek. These notes — our individual expressions of why we wanted to make this commitment — said the same things with different words. We cried, hugged and then took turns asking, “Will you marry me?” We both said yes and, hands shaking, slipped engagement rings on each other’s fingers. [READ ON]

“‘Coaching is more for people who are functioning relatively well,’ she says. ‘But breakups tend to cause most of us to kind of regress … so sometimes it can be a bit confusing whether a person needs breakup coaching or therapy.’ Or, you know, a good friend.” (Read more)

I was going to include the rapper’s name in this post right on up until a minute before I published this piece. Did I make the right choice?

The rumor was retweeted ad infinitum: Last week, a popular rapper got a blow job onstage from a female fan during a show in Minneapolis. When someone tweeted at the artist in question to ask if the rumor was true, he — or someone using his Twitter handle – responded, “and didn’t miss one bar.” As the tale jumped from Twitter to various music blogs, the boastful tweet was deleted, but the buzz continued. Some virtually high-fived the rapper, while others found it just another story about misogyny and objectification of women in hip-hop. But today, rapper Kitty Pryde, who is currently on tour with the rapper in question and witnessed the incident in person, wrote a blog post reframing it as sexual assault. “It was an actual sexual assault, and somehow nobody gives a fuck about that but me,” wrote Pryde, who refers to the rapper as her “best friend.”

You can read the whole piece here.

I’d like to immodestly announce that I won an award from the Council on Contemporary Families. And now I’d like to immodestly quote from the official announcement:

Jurors commended Clark-Flory’s ability to discuss contemporary sexuality in a provocative but thoughtful way, and to contextualize it across generations and geography. We feel that her ability to connect individual stories with published data and broader scholarship engages readers of all kinds—parents, teachers, and the general public—in important conversations.

/endselfpromotion