~oOo~

2010-05-16

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 22)




Elle @ Sex and the Ivy | Slate: Why is a former sex blogger "rethinking virginity"? " 'Rethinking Virginity' does NOT mean 'reconsidering virginity'. Not. At. All. I was/am not preaching sexual abstinence (or ANYTHING for that matter). Just, no. Off the bat, let’s get that straight."

Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon | Everyone's an expert in girls' sex lives. "What's often lost in the never-ending stream of stories about the latest trend in female sexual culture is the nuance and diversity of individual experience; young women are treated as symbols of the culture at large and spokespeople for their entire generation."

Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon | False dichotomies. "The person pushing [the hook-up vs. relationship dichotomy] is trying to imply to women that there is no such thing as a man who can love a woman with sexual experience -- and that this can never change, so you have to live with it. Both assertions are wrong."

Anna North @ Jezebel | Hookups, sex ed, and sparklevamps: Freaking out about teens. "So what's the solution for these frustrated, allegedly relationship-designed girls? Certainly not actually talking to them. Flanagan scorns the authors of a book on a teen sex party who "centered their attention almost entirely on the perspectives of the students, as though by plumbing the narcissistic reaches of the pubescent mind, one might discover anything beyond the faintest echo of the larger forces that shape adolescent behavior." Instead, she recommends Testimony, a novel about teen sex by 63-year-old Anita Shreve ("a bona fide grown-up"). "I would encourage every parent of a teenage girl to give her a copy of Testimony," Flanagan writes — because there's nothing teenagers like better than older people telling them how they feel."

Sady Doyle @ The Atlantic | The secret inner life of Laura Bush. "She supports gay marriage; her husband advocated a constitutional amendment banning it. She supports the right to legal abortion; her husband cut off funding to international women's health clinics that provided it, and appeared to be seriously set on overturning Roe v. Wade. These are human rights issues. And for eight years, she stood more or less silently and idly by....of the many points feminism has made, over the years, one of the more important is that it is inadvisable, and often disastrous, to conceal your own values for the sake of a husband."

Stephenie Mencimer @ Mother Jones | Why do so many people think Elena Kagan is gay? "You could make a better case that Kagan is simply a celibate workaholic, given the paucity of information that's leaked out about her personal life thus far...But really, what powerful woman in Washington hasn't been accused of being a lesbian?"

Anne Bauer @ Salon | My escape from marriage retreat hell. "After a few searches and one furtive cellphone call to a number that only rings, I turn back to John. He's sitting on the mammoth bed staring out the window, his eyes wide and glassy. 'There's no answer,' I say. 'I don't know if they'll be open at 6. And I don't dare call the front desk to ask.' "

Rachel Hills @ Musings of an Inappropriate Woman | We are all bad feminists, really. "But just because we’re able to make those critiques and ask those questions doesn’t mean we’re not also products of that world...individual women - even feminist women - might continue to engage in behaviours that are oppressive to themselves (or, more problematically, to others), even if on an intellectual level we understand the ways in which our behaviours and desires might have been socially conditioned."

Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog | Why does porn matter? "I think that porn can, and often does, accomplish everything that telling my fantasy accomplished in that consciousness- raising group so many years ago. (Which was, in its own way, a form of porn.) ...I think that porn can normalize sex. It can make sex seem more familiar, and less scary. It can remind people that sex is a natural desire, one that all or most of us share. It can remind us that, no matter what our sexual thoughts and desires are, chances are someone else is having them, too."

Daniel Vivacqua @ Gay Rights Blog (Change.org) | Kristin Chenoweth Defends Straight-for-pay Actors. "Thank you, Miss Chenoweth, for sticking up for us, for being a vocally progressive representative of Christianity, for discouraging closed-mindedness, and for closing by asking Newsweek to publish pieces about, 'acceptance, love, unity and singing and dancing for all!' "

Amen. That is all.

*image credit: Hygiene of intimate places, Exklusiv # 80, Sep 2009 by pixel endo @ Flickr.com.

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