~oOo~

2010-03-28

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 15)




Because when you can start out a links list on sex and gender with an xkcd comic like this, why wouldn't you?

Since this is the cleaning-up-my-feeds-from-Oregon edition, this is gonna just be authors, titles and selected quotes folks. I'm trying to get my blogging feet under me again (not to mention my work feet, in-school feet, and domestic-life feet), so posts might be a little more sluggish than usual in the coming weeks. Maybe even the next few months, depending on work schedules and how the writing of my thesis (eek!) goes, so bear with me. I promise I'll try not to disappear entirely. But the one-a-day rate I've been posting this past six months will probably not be possible in the immediate future.

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist | Deconstructing Rape Myths: On Short Skirts (On Lesbians). "If she’s out in a same-sex couple that’s perceived as insufficiently feminine, she’ll get negative attention. If she’s out in a same-sex couple that’s perceived as fuckable by the standards of some heterosexual male passerby, she’ll get negative sexual attention."

Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon | Women chasing, men running. "suggesting that couples that are living together are generally stuck in the she’s chasing/he’s running mode doesn’t make a lot of sense to me."

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist | College Sex Columnist on Masturbation, Money Shots, and Scandalized Grandmothers. "Over the past couple of months, Hill has heard from the haters ('Can you tell me how talking about masturbating is ‘progress’ in female journalism?'), lovers ('THIS ROCKS SO MUCH'), and one student who wrote in opposing Hill’s column because her grandmother read it one time and became overwhelmed by the column’s impolite subject matter. Seriously.

Thomas @ Yes Means Yes | Review: Guyland. "I don’t think Kimmel’s assertions about Guyland bear being generalized. But as long as I read them as critiques of a subculture, of Dude/Bro, I thought they were very good."

Also by Thomas @ Yes Means Yes | Affirmative Consent as Legal Standard? "If two people lean in to kiss each other at the same time and stick their tongues in each other’s mouths, I think we can be pretty clear on consent." (Long and complex, but worth reading if you care about how to support better legal and cultural expectations about consensual sex).

Natasha Curson @ The Guardian | Trans people still miss out on equality. "If you were to decide, for your own comfort and wellbeing, that you wanted to present at work as one gender two days a week, and another for the rest of the week, the law does not provide for you, and only the most enlightened of employers are likely to support you. But why shouldn't someone be able to do that, if they feel comfortable enough with themselves to want to be visible?"

Susie Bright @ Susie Bright's Journal | My Little Runaways - What You Won't See in the Movie. "Let me make something clear that the movie only hints at: The Runaways band would not have happened, could not have been conceived, without the Underground Dyke Punk Groupie Slut culture that stretched from the San Fernando Valley to the bowels of Orange County."

Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog | Some Evolving Thoughts About Weight and Sex. "A huge amount of my libido right now is focused on the changes my body is going through, and the ways it’s different from what it was before. Which is understandable: things that are in flux get more attention than things that are in relative stasis. But this has had the unfortunate effect of making me feel weirdly disconnected from my body and my sexuality of the past."

Rebecca @ The Thang Blog | Talking to highschoolers (about being trans). "I did have one student ask, 'So, if you did get...the surgery, and you like women...how would you have sex after?' One of the other students waved her fingers in front of his face, which made me laugh."

Roxann MtJoy @ Women's Rights Blog | Panel Says Pregnant Women Don't Have the Right to Refuse Surgery. "Personally, I would think that since a pregnant woman is still a human being, she should still have all of the rights of any other human being in this country. I would be wrong."

Chloe @ Feministing | Pretty ugly: Can we please stop pretending that beautiful women aren't beautiful? "So, what does it mean when even the 'ugly' women on our screens are conventionally beautiful? Firstly, it means that the bar for female beauty is being set higher than ever: if Tina Fey, Lea Michele and America Ferrera are 'ugly,' what hope is there for the rest of us? It also means that we're being told one thing and sold another."

Ashley Sayeau @ Salon | Help! My Daughter's a Girly Girl. "I would never have imagined that I would essentially live in the Disney palace, forced by my daughter to talk in "a handsome voice" and mostly about getting married or mopping the kitchen. "Cinderella loves tidying up!" she frequently proclaims."

Courtney E. Martin @ The American Prospect | A Manifesta Revisited. "They made it okay to be feminist and funny (this had always been the case, of course, but I'd been duped)."

Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon | Sexual shame is so hot right now. "As I see it, young women have fully proved that we can have one-night stands, hear us roar -- and maybe we're beginning to also allow ourselves more nuanced feelings about our hookups."

Marty Klein @ Sexual Intelligence | Court Finally Limits Persecution of Teen Sexuality. "These parents are heroes for insisting that the government doesn’t own their kids’ bodies or sexuality."

Hadley Freeman @ The Guardian | Why everyone deserves to go to their high school prom. "When McMillen protested, saying "I won't pretend 'I'm not gay' and brought in the lawyers, the school cancelled the prom. 'Thanks for ruining my senior year,' one classmate sneered."

S @ The F-word | Painful Vagina? Your Poor Husband! "I am convinced that a young man of my age, complaining of serious sexual dysfunction and pain, would not have been treated in the same way. Firstly because in an otherwise healthy young male, loss of sexual function would rightly be seen as devastating (whereas for me it was treated as a mild difficulty), and furthermore because I do not think these doctors would assume a man was being ‘over-emotional’ or was suffering from a psychological problem rather than a physical one."

G.L. Morrison @ SexIs | Labels and Street Signs: Navigating Gender & Orientation in the Global Village and Cyber-ghettos. "Should I define myself (gender and orientation) by what I am, what I am doing, who I am doing it with? If I were sleeping with multiple men or looking for male partners I would call myself bisexual (though I wouldn't believe it) to protect other lesbians from the advances of men wanting to be 'the next exception to the rule.'"

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist (can you tell she's my new blog crush?) | Why Rape Isn't One Big Misunderstanding. "Researchers then asked the men how they know when a woman is refusing sex. The men indicated that women also often rely on body language and euphemism to relay their lack of consent. Interestingly, even though the men professed to favoring the exact same tactics, they attributed these devices to the way that 'women are.'"

Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog | Closeted Politicians and Bi Invisibility. "It’s occurring to me that it might make more sense to talk about right-wing homophobic politicians who are secretly having sex with same-sex partners . . . instead of talking about right-wing homophobic politicians who are secretly gay."

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist (see?) | Fucking While Feminist, With Jaclyn Friedman. "A couple of guys were shocked that I like to play various games in bed, because I’m a feminist. That’s always really interesting to me. I’m always like, 'Are you kidding me? The feminists I know are the craziest women in bed you can find!' Those are the moments where I feel like a one-woman feminist PR machine."

And before this post gets more unwieldy than it already is, I leave you with Shaker Maud @ Shakesville | On Being a Woman, Not a "Female." "Referring to women as 'females' defines them solely in terms of gender, denying them any other attributes of personhood, and specifically denies them womanhood, marking that as a condition which is the speaker's to confer or withhold based on their list of qualifications."

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