Marie, forget about me for a second! What happened? Were we robbed? Oh my god, you're handcuffed! I'll never get those off! I'll call the police." she said frantically as she started to reach for Marie's cellphone. In the spirit of lesbian camp bonding, I told my new crew about my situation — nonmonogamous, not sure how to feel about it — which seemed to pique the interest of beer bathing suit girl, because she would soon afterward follow me into the impossibly tiny bathroom, bursting in on me mid-pee.

Alright, you two," Marie said to her two bound and gagged sisters. "Time for me to tie myself up again. I'm setting my phone alarm for one hour, just in case I fall asleep. Then I'll hop over to the desk and get my handcuff key, and then maybe, just maybe, I'll untie the two of you after I free myself," she said while putting the handcuff key on the edge of her desk. "Maybe," she said for the third time for emphasis. For now, though, Olivia’s brand remains quite wholesome. On the first night there, I witnessed a marriage proposal (“Do you think they just met?” joked a woman at my table; “That’d be a record”). Tisha, the cruise director and VP, met her wife on an Olivia cruise. And she emphasized to me that it’s a place where many women go to fall in love — which certainly does happen.For the last stretch of our afternoon, we were dropped on a secluded beach at Nevis, where a few of us ferried beers and our new favorite drink, the very college-esque Panty Ripper (coconut rum and pineapple juice), from shore to the rest of the women waiting in the water. One woman stuffed a bunch of beers into her bathing suit and we cheered whenever anybody pulled one out. A couple women had GoPro cameras, with which we took a lot of increasingly drunken group shots while we swam. One of them was attached to a floating handle that looked very much like a big yellow dildo, which, once somebody pointed it out, kept sending us into hysterics.

She’s a true Pisces — romantic and dreamy and always processing. (My Capricorn groundedness makes us a good match, allegedly.) She’s known she was gay since she was 5 years old. Her mom still prays that, someday, she’ll find herself a good man.Have a seat on the edge of the bed," Marie told her. "Put your legs together and lift up your feet." I would move out of an apartment that I adored, that I’d almost single-handedly furnished, that I thought I’d live in for years to come. I would hug my landlady, crying again because she was crying for me. Oh, ... but wanting to be tied up isn't all that unusual. I think of it myself sometimes," Erin admitted. Captured at a time when homosexuality was considered taboo, these remarkable images defiant women who flouted convention in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Yeah, me too!" Amanda said, surprised that she wasn't the only person in the world who felt that way. "Maybe now that we know we're all interested, we could help each other out in that regard."

Uh, I don't think so," Erin said. "I was the first one to find Marie like this, so I get to be tied up next. We'll tie you up tomorrow instead." I would tell my partner that I cared about them deeply, and the past five years were among the best of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything. But I also felt like we had come to a crossroads, and we weren’t facing the same futures. I had tried so hard to see myself in their dreams, but now I was having dreams of my own. And I didn’t think I saw a future, even a part-time one, in Montana. By this point, I was — somewhat unintentionally — quite drunk. We started making out (I was still peeing) and almost right away, I began writing a goofy story about it in my head, thinking about how I’d relay the anecdote to my friends (“So I had sex in the bathroom of a catamaran???”). But there was another part of me that was very much not into it, especially when the makeout gave way to other things and people started banging on the bathroom door.

Survivors are trapped in a cycle that delegitimizes their experience: first by downplaying the likelihood that it could happen at all, then by not validating it once it happens, and finally by not analyzing the data—and therefore creating awareness—after it does.

Afterward, I had lunch with Dana and some of the other Olivia staffers and asked them about it — why not make the Public Posts more prominent, MichFest style? Especially since the younger people at the first Gen O event had explicitly asked for more sex content. Olivia had run sexuality and intimacy workshops before, and at the lunch, the staffers floated the definite possibility that they will again. I know for a fact that a lot of my queer friends would be way more likely to book a future Olivia cruise, uncool as cruises might be to cash-strapped millennials, if they knew how likely they’d be to get some action.Enjoy these animated gifs, and maybe even share your desires with your next partner. There are many BDSM lovers out there, but some don’t dare to voice their desires. It’s up to you to initiate them! Over 10 years later, same-sex rape on college campuses is just starting to be quantified on a national level. Haven, an online sexual assault and awareness program that logs sexual assaults directly from students, works with self-reported data from over 800 colleges and universities. Haven had never compiled a report on undergraduate women who have been assaulted by women, but teamed up with MarieClaire.com to reveal new information: While the number of reported sexual assaults by women was low compared to assaults overall (only about 2.5 percent), the most striking difference came down to the likelihood of survivors to report the incident: 30 percent of women assaulted by another woman told no one, compared to 25 of women who didn't report an assault by a man. Stephanie Trilling, manager of community awareness and prevention services at the Boston Area Rape Crisis (BARCC), observes that for her queer female clients who have been assaulted by women, the first hurdle is simply understanding the assault as rape. Since this scenario is rarely portrayed in the media or in educational programming, "it can be especially challenging to identify their experience as violence," she says. "Many people have a difficult time believing that a woman could be capable of inflicting violence on another person." Sarah is not an outlier. "Many of our clients in same-sex relationships are very hesitant to report at all," says Caitlin Kauffman, campus and community outreach coordinator for Bay Area Women Against Rape (BAWAR)—where Sarah eventually sought counseling. The consequences of coming forward with sexual assault allegations are fraught for any sexual violence survivor. But for queer women, who already typically live, date, and make friends within a smaller network of other queer-identified women, the risks can be even more complex. The images capture Victorian and early-twentieth century females in intimate poses and showing a daring level of openness with one another for the era they were living in.