Rihanna graces the cover of Rolling Stone’s latest issue (on newwstands Friday) and candidly spoke about lifting the restraining order against Chris Brown, what she likes in the bedroom, what her current love life is like and more! Hit the jump to read some excerpts.

@MarisaMendez


Sexting

Rihanna is unattached. “I’m not dating,” she says. “I’m not sexing, I’m not even sexting. It’s on complete nil.” She says she hasn’t been with anyone since breaking up with Dodgers slugger Matt Kemp, which went down before the public found out in December, so it’s been at least four months since she got any action. “You think you’re disappointed?” she says. “Try being in this body.”

Still, she says, there are alternatives. “When you’re not with the person you want to be intimate with, a picture is the next best thing. Well, Skype is safer. But a picture lasts a long time. When you’re alone, and those horny moments come up, pictures can be very handy.”

That said, she adds, “I haven’t gotten a dick picture in a long time. I think people are a little afraid. It can turn out bad.”

In the Bedroom
“I like to take charge, but I love to be submissive,” she says. “Being submissive in the bedroom is really fun. You get to be a little lady, to have somebody be macho and in charge of your shit. That’s sexy to me. I work a lot, and I have to make a lot of executive decisions, so when it comes to being intimate, I like to feel like I’m somebody’s girl.”

What else does she like? “I like to be spanked. Being tied up is fun. I like to keep it spontaneous. Sometimes whips and chains can be overly planned – you gotta stop, get the whip from the drawer downstairs. . . . I’d rather have him use his hands.” She goes on to recount a recent trip to a sex shop in Sydney called the Toolshed, where she left with two full bags of whips, blindfolds and dildos. The takeaway? “Don’t go to a sex store tipsy.”

Pain

“I do think I’m a bit of a masochist,” she says this evening. “It’s not something I’m proud of, and it’s not something I noticed until recently. I think it’s common for people who witness abuse in their household. They can never smell how beautiful a rose is unless they get pricked by a thorn.”

She thinks it explains her attraction to tattoos (14 and counting, including a skull with a pink hair bow on her left Achilles, a pistol on her right rib cage and the words Never a Failure, Always a Lesson on her collarbone), as well as her “love-hate relationship” with the media, and the fact that the darkest moments of her life are out there for public consumption. “When I think about it, I really do take some pleasure in the negativity,” she says. “I don’t want to say turned on by it – but I’m turned on by it.”

Fronting

Rihanna inside the Los Angeles Superior Court during the hearing in the Chris Brown felony assault case, on June 22, 2009

In the months that followed [the assault], Rihanna says, “I put my guard up so hard. I didn’t want people to see me cry. I didn’t want people to feel bad for me. It was a very vulnerable time in my life, and I refused to let that be the image. I wanted them to see me as, ‘I’m fine, I’m tough.’ I put that up until it felt real.”

Chris Brown

Rihanna and Chris Brown attend the 2009 Grammy Salute To Industry Icons honoring Clive Davis at the Beverly Hilton Hotel on February 7, 2009

“[Chris Brown and I] don’t have to talk again ever in my life. I just didn’t want to make it more difficult for him professionally. What he did to me was a personal thing – it had nothing to do with his career. Saying he has to be a hundred feet away from me, he can’t perform at awards shows – that definitely made it difficult for him. That was the only thing it was going to change, so I didn’t care. But you can never please people. One minute I’m being too hard, and the next minute I’m a fool because I’m not being hard enough.”