For a large portion of the population (including 62% of women), power exchange role play makes an appearance in our sexual fantasies. These power exchange fantasies—aka “rape fantasies”—can bring shame and confusion, making discussion of them taboo and actually exploring them out of the question. But the reasons for our carnal desires often aren’t as simple as we think, and exploring fantasy doesn’t have to feel shameful.

Rape is defined as “unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person’s will or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent because of mental illness, mental deficiency, intoxication, unconsciousness, or deception.” And while none of that should evoke sexy vibes, many find pleasure in a safe and planned power-shift fantasy with another consenting adult—which, of course, isn’t rape at all. Here are some things to consider when deciding when and how to explore your own power exchange fantasy.

As the nation cracks down on group activities so close to the Thanksgiving holiday, Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, has told Oregon's residents to call the cops if they see coronavirus violations.

“This is no different than what happens if there's a party down the street and it's keeping everyone awake,” Brown said in an interview Friday. “What do neighbors do [in that case]? They call law enforcement because it's too noisy. This is just like that. It's like a violation of a noise ordinance.”

“Oregon is on a steep and stark slope of rising coronavirus cases,” said Patrick Allen, director of the health department. “But we aren’t powerless in the face of this virus. Because it depends on us to slow the spread. Your choices make a difference.”

Dear Prudence,
I am a professional woman who has been married for 16 years. My job is stressful, and I often work 12 hours or more. We have no children. At first things were wonderful, and my husband always seemed like a sweet, mild-mannered, caring man. Three years in, he was laid off because his company ran into financial trouble. Because I am a high-earner, I told him he didn’t need to go back to work as long as he kept the house up and did basic repair projects. He never went back to work, but he never kept the house up, either. We also hired housecleaners to visit every two weeks, but in between nothing got done. I asked him to go back to work. He didn’t. I strongly suspected he was having affairs a few years later, but he always denied it. I have no concrete proof, but he did many suspicious things like hiding months of phone bills and having midnight texts. Years later he voluntarily took two polygraph tests to save the marriage (we stopped having intimate relations five years ago mostly because I no longer admired, respected, or trusted him, and because of my resentment toward him on several levels). He failed the tests.

Until lately, I generally ignored all my feelings and went about trying to have a good life. My husband will not discuss our issues because, he says, he clams up or needs time to think. I verbalize my needs and frustrations all the time. At one point he started snapping at me and rolling his eyes, but I firmly and strongly told him to stop, which he mostly has. I demanded that he get a job, and he finally works 25 hours a week making a small salary. He knows I no longer love him (in the least), but he won’t leave. We now live in separate bedrooms. We have been to two marriage counselors. I have told him I will go back if he is willing to discuss his unfaithfulness, which he still denies. He states the lie-detector tests are invalid. The house and everything we own are paid for by me alone. I need to divorce, but he will take everything I own, plus alimony. On the surface, he is a nice, charming, religious guy. None of our friends know about our marriage troubles, and they would be shocked to hear this. Advice, please.

—Trapped

In a matter of months, the foster care system found itself drowning in hundreds of new cases. By 2017, the state needed space for 6,000 additional foster children – an influx equivalent to the size of the entire foster population of the state of New Jersey.

But lawmakers, child welfare leaders and Scott did not hire more caseworkers or increase the money paid to foster families to make more homes available. And they failed to tackle the root problems driving most of the removals: lack of access to drug treatment, mental health care and domestic violence services for parents.

Instead, they stood by as foster care agencies packed children into overcrowded homes and sent nearly 200 boys and girls to foster parents previously accused of abusing or neglecting the children in their care, a USA TODAY investigation found.

A new report estimates that 29 million women and girls are victims of modern slavery, exploited by practices including forced labour, forced marriage, debt-bondage and domestic servitude.

Grace Forrest, co-founder of the Walk Free anti-slavery organisation, said Friday that means one in every 130 women and girls is living in modern slavery today, more than the population of Australia.

"The reality is that there are more people living in slavery today than any other time in human history," she told a U.N. news conference.

Walk Free defines modern slavery "as the systematic removal of a person’s freedom, where one person is exploited by another for personal or financial gain," she said.

According to the report, titled "Stacked Odds," women account for 99% of all victims of forced sexual exploitation, 84% of all victims of forced marriage, and 58% of all victims of forced labour.

Hundreds of thousands of people with mental health conditions in 60 countries are still being chained, according to a comprehensive and damning new study.

Human Rights Watch says that men, women and children – some as young as 10 – are regularly shackled or locked in confined spaces for weeks, months, and even years, across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas.

The report, Living in Chains: Shackling of People with Psychosocial Disabilities Worldwide, examines how people with mental health conditions are often shackled against their will by families in their own homes or in overcrowded and unsanitary institutions because of widespread stigma and a lack of mental health services.

Anyone who has — or had — a toddler knows that sometimes they cause you to have to say some very, very strange things.

1. "We don’t put stuff in our butt — it’s not a pocket." (It is for uncle.)

4. "Today I said, 'We do not shove chicken legs in our crotch.'" (Is the gardener extra friendly?)

6. "No, you can't take the lettuce to bed with you." "He was 4 at the time, and the head of lettuce was his new best friend." (No it wasn't. His face was planted in the grass so many times while some asshole molested him that he had to hold on to something. Lettuce feels like grass.)

Worst parents ever! Your children are being abused while you keep waiting for signs from experts that have never resolved anything useful in their entire lives.

Restaurants are trying to keep customers safe from COVID-19 – by wearing masks, serving outdoors and disinfecting from top to bottom – but a new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests it might not be enough.

Adults with confirmed COVID-19 are twice as likely to have dined out at a restaurant in the 14 days before becoming sick than those who tested negative, according to the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report issued Thursday.

Positive patients were also more likely to report going to a bar or coffee shop when the analysis was limited to those without close contact to people with known coronavirus.

Much of Orange County is transporting homeless people into Santa Ana, placing an unfair burden on that city to address the county’s homelessness crisis, city officials allege in court documents filed Monday.

The filing marks the city’s latest effort seeking legal relief over this issue. And this time, officials have some numbers and additional data that they hope will prove their point that many other cities in the county are “dumping” their homeless in Santa Ana.

“We now have better evidence that the county did not stop this practice. It’s just being done in other ways,” Santa Ana City Manager Kristine Ridge said.

Santa Ana officials and residents have long complained that they’ve become a dumping ground for the homeless.

Santa Ana officials said transfers from other communities have led to to a disproportionate number of homeless people in their city. From 2017 to 2019, homelessness in Orange County increased by 43 %; but in Santa Ana, homelessness increased by 77 %, according to the lawsuit. As of April 2019, more than 25 % of the county’s homeless lived in Santa Ana.

Rich Manhattanites are fleeing the city so fast because of the pandemic and deteriorating quality of life in the Big Apple that moving companies can barely keep up with them.

“It’s nuts!’’ Perry Chance of Show Up movers told The Post on Sunday. “We have four of our own trucks — but we have so many books that we had to start using U-Haul trucks!”

“The volume has increased by at least 70 percent” in the past few months, he said.

“[Clients] are mostly moving out of luxury buildings. [People] say the rich are leaving New York. Well, they are!”

“When you have an office on Park Ave, and you don’t see anyone but the less fortunate, the homeless, no more day-to-day workers, the high rent makes no sense,” explained a small-business owner at the U-Haul truck rental center on West 23rd Street in Chelsea, as he prepared for a move to Long Island.

The guests arrived at the Lucerne Hotel, two blocks from Central Park, carrying their belongings, stepping off buses and filling the hotel’s empty rooms, which typically cost more than $200 a night.

They were not tourists nor business travelers but residents of homeless shelters whom the city sent to the Lucerne to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the crowded shelter system. Over three days, 283 men moved into the hotel.

Their arrival has become a flash point and a test of values for the Upper West Side — a neighborhood with a reputation as one of the most liberal enclaves in New York and in the entire country.

One day after the men began moving into the Lucerne, on West 79th Street, a private Facebook group — Upper West Siders for Safer Streets — was created by residents who were up in arms. The group has more than 8,700 members.

Many commenters said the men menaced pedestrians, urinated and defecated on the street and used and sold drugs in the open.

In interviews, some longtime residents said the hotel’s conversion into a shelter had dimmed the quality of life and evoked memories of an era when the neighborhood was filled with single room occupancy hotels that helped fuel crime.

A study conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in 2018 ranked India as the world’s most dangerous country for women.

The issues examined included sexual violence and trafficking, gender-based social discrimination, lack of access to and control over contraception and childbirth, health care and maternal mortality rates. Mental and physical abuse, religious and cultural facets such as acid attacks, female infanticide, female genital mutilation, and forced and child marriages were also weighed.

Sexual violence against women is an absolute reality in many cultures around the world. In India, however, it is deeply rooted in patriarchal norms and the belief that men are superior to women and that a man should always be a protector of women.

During her interviews, Kaushal found that none of her nine subjects understood the meaning or necessity of consent from a female partner in a sexual relationship or respected them as individuals with their own unique identities. One of them, a serial gang rapist, even refused to accept the idea of rape.

Another subject, a doctor, raped a 12-year-old bedridden patient following an operation, in full awareness of the mental trauma he was causing. The attack left the patient crippled and incapable of talking about the assault for decades out of fear and shock.

I was 31 the last time I got pregnant. And after a lifetime of certainty that I did not want to be a mother, I felt an unexpected thing, cutting through the panic and the nausea: happiness.

Every morning since an intuitive nudge sent me to fetch a pregnancy test from the drugstore, my breasts oddly sore and my stomach in a low-level but constant state of turbulence, I would wake up with the thought: “I can do this. I want to do this.”

By the time I fell asleep at night, I was sure there was no possible way I could do this, this being raising a child on my own.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing about declining birth rates, the lowest in more than 30 years, across all race and class divides. We’re told millennial women “choosing” not to have children will be bad for the economy, it will be bad for the ageing baby boomer population, it will be bad for the real estate market. According to Forbes, it’s bad for older women desperate for grandchildren. But are people actually deciding to delay families, or are they finding themselves in unstable situations where the addition of a child seems unworkable? The reasons given when op-ed writers bother to ask millennials – too much debt, not enough financial security, a romantic market that is as rocky as the job market – point more to the latter.

If everyone makes it into the world safely, things that used to be taken for granted are now scarce resources one might fight and compete for. Vitally important systems like decent childcare, education and healthcare has disappeared, leaving parents to choose between inadequate choices or sacrificing untold amounts of money, time and energy to compete the limited amount of something better.

With the Premier League returning tonight, the first football game kicking off this week, people will be watching the games from their homes due to the pandemic. There are fears this could increase tensions within households, resulting in incidences of domestic abuse.

In response to this, the Cannock Chase Council’s community safety partnership has teamed up with local partners including Staffordshire Police, New Era (domestic abuse service), the Staffordshire Commissioner’s Office and local authorities across Staffordshire to deliver some messages around the issue.

The new campaign ‘Football is coming home’ raises awareness of the support services available for both victims and perpetrators during these unprecedented times.