We talk a lot about the violence that occurs in the intimacy of relationships, but very little about desire, about what happens to us women in the murky waters of sexuality. Like any other human experience, sex, love, and eroticism are also learned; they don't arise instinctively, detached from culture. From the available representations in literature, in the audiovisual world, in the stories told about us, we know very well what men's desire is like, what it consists of, how it is expressed, and how far it can go. Or rather, we know the desire of men who feel entitled to display their size, to put on a show of strength not only to impress their potential romantic conquests but also to compete with other men like themselves, to demonstrate that they are bigger, more potent, and more powerful. The sexuality that dominates the collective imagination is, therefore, the sexuality of predators who experience conquest as a hunt. To avoid appearing weak and helpless before their male counterparts, they pursue, harass, dominate, and sometimes even domesticate women to the point of annihilation, turning them into trophies.

I have absolutely no desire to be twenty again. When I was twenty, I looked in the mirror and didn't see myself. I only focused on everything about my body and personality that I wanted to change. And although I already had the determination that has saved my ass so many times, it wasn't as honed or as well-focused. I wasn't as brave as I am now either. And I experienced far more fears and insecurities. Fewer than at fifteen, but a whole lot more than now. I wasn't really sure what I could do with my life, and I still had to fully believe that what I sensed was possible (working as a screenwriter and trying to write a children's book someday) could actually be real.

"Barcelona is the twelfth most hot “Of the planet.” This was the headline that journalist Adaia Teruel (Barcelona, ​​1978) read one night in 2022 while lying in bed, looking at her phone. This statement prompted her to begin fieldwork in the Catalan capital, visiting swingers' clubs, fetish gatherings, sex worker demonstrations, and other experiences of people who live sex very differently from the majority. This research is compiled in the book Sex in my city (KO Books), a collection of chronicles and testimonies about a Barcelona often unknown to many of its own residents.

In early July, the French courts acquitted two women who had claimed on social media that Brigitte Macron, the wife of the President of the French Republic, is transgender. In their comments, they listed the multiple surgeries she had allegedly undergone and claimed that she was not the biological mother of their children. A court ordered them to pay eight thousand euros to the first lady in September 2024, but they were acquitted ten months later, a decision that the Macrons appealed to the French Court of Cassation. Furthermore, her lawyer recently explained that Brigitte is determined to provide scientific and photographic evidence in court to "prove" that she is a woman, after the influencer ultra Candace Owens has dedicated several podcasts and a book to denying it.

The first place adolescents begin to express their identity is in their room. Sometimes they do this by wanting to rearrange furniture. These changes are related to the process of identity construction. The gesture of closing the door signals that the young person begins to seek privacy, to explore and find their innermost being. "It's the beginning of the process of more active identity construction. It usually happens between the ages of 12 and 15, although some young people never need to do it," says Sara Desirée Ruiz, a social educator and psychotherapist specializing in adolescence. What she suggests to families is to observe, and when adolescents begin to close the door, the family should knock before entering.

Mireia Grossman appears with a vulva-shaped pillow and an anatomical model of the kind she uses in her workshops to teach thousands of women what they have between their legs. "I am like The stranger "in a crotch version," she jokes. She discovered it in her forties, when she was studying physiotherapy and signed up by chance for the elective course on women's health. "Elective!" she exclaims. What she discovered was so surprising that she has since dedicated herself to spreading the word as a pelvic floor physiotherapist. And not just to help prevent it. common problems such as prolapse or urine loss, but to guarantee and prolong the fun.

What do children know about sexuality? And how do they experience it? This is the starting point of SexAFIN, the action-research project on affective-sexual and reproductive education in educational communities. The research is promoted by the AFIN Research Group of the Anthropology Department at the UAB, which is dedicated to research on families, reproduction, childhood, and sexuality. SexAFIN was established in 2017 in two schools in Gelida with children in 2nd, 4th, and 6th grades. Since 2019, it has expanded to include children and young people from 13th to 4th grades of Compulsory Secondary Education from around forty public and private schools throughout Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa).

More than 25% of girls – one in four – of Generation Z [born between 1997 and 2012] identify as non-heterosexual. This percentage is double the way their older sisters, the millennials, identify, and also distances themselves from their male peers, who show a more normative sexual orientation. This data is extracted from research by Maria Rodó-Zárate, a researcher at the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona (UPF), and Joel Cantó Roche, a doctoral student at the Canadian University of Toronto. Based on two official surveys of 4,000 young Catalan women of both generations, they analyzed how between 2017 and 2018, "more and more young people are opting for less rigid identifications, and moving away from fixed labels such as... gay either lesbian", the authors of the study point out, while adopting "more open positions, such as bisexuality or other forms of sexual diversity".

I'd heard of the wage gap, the digital gap, and the gender gap, of course. But I haven't heard of the orgasm gap yet. I see I now have another reason to complain (as long as women in general), because a study that appeared in the publicationJournal of Social and Personal Relationshipstells us that “women who have sex with men tend to have fewer orgasms than men” and suggests that this is because men (those selfish, hairy devils) “tend to focus on their own orgasm and feel they have the support of their partners in achieving it” while women (these softer angels) “ab deny.” They call this the “orgasm pursuit gap.”

One of the most important demands of feminism in the 1970s was that of a "sexual revolution". Fifty years later, can we say that this revolution has taken place? As the #MeToo movement and the more recent #MeTooInceste movement in France have shown, sexual harassment and abuse, especially of women and minors, is still very much alive fifty years after feminism began to denounce it. This sexual violence is transversal and affects institutions that should have the highest ethical standards, such as religious or educational institutions (ARA's report last Sunday about abuses by certain teachers at the Institut del Teatre is an example). In addition to the violence that the people who have been subjected to them have had to endure, the collective tolerance towards these behaviours shows the extent to which they were normalised and perhaps still, to a large extent, continue to be, at least until these collective actions began.