Just the links this week, folks. Enjoy!

LaPrincipessa @ sexgenderbody | Why “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” Is So Important.

Ashley Sayeau @ RhRealityCheck | “Sex and the City” Hate: Why Don’t Men Get Slammed for Lavish Spending?

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist | Why Wedding Weight Loss Isn’t About “Health.” Hint: few things are where weddings and People magazine are concerned.

Amanda Hess and Sady Doyle @ The Sexist | Sexist Beatdown: The Chat They Didn’t Want You to Read! Edition. On the discourse surrounding non-consensually publicized sex tapes.

Cara @ The Curvature | Rape, Male Victims, and Why We Need to Care.

irrationalpoint @ Modus dopens | Don’t have answers. On the DSM V and other ways of pathologizing sex and gender nonconforming people and behavior.

Molly @ first the egg | motherbaby, 1981 & 2006. Images of two generations of women and their newborns.

Sinclair @ Sugarbutch Chronicles | On Processing & Analyzing. Ways of communicating, thinking, and writing about relationships.

Courtney @ Feministing | Love across oceans: U.S. government is still a sinking ship. Immigration as a feminist issue.

Ann Friedman @ The American Prospect | It’s Not the End of Men. And I wish to god we’d stop claiming it was.

^{image credit: lovers on the table by .shyam. @ Flickr.com}

First off, an internet pen-friend of mine, Natasha Curson, based in East Anglia, England, has started a new blog, Natasha Curson – a trans history, this week. From the inaugural post: “In 2007, after tussling with my gender identity for so many years, I was on the edge of giving up. I had almost accepted that I could never be happy, that there was no way of reconciling my everyday life with these inner feelings. Over the years I had dabbled with transgender clubs and support groups but even leading a hidden, second life I couldn’t come to terms with things. I couldn’t seem to find the people who felt like me, or so it seemed at the time. I was painfully shy about the things that mattered in both worlds. The real problem was, if I couldn’t admit something to myself, how could I discuss it properly with others?”

C.L. Minou @ Women’s Rights Blog points out that experiences of transgendered profs are a case study in sexism. “Before her transition, people who raised objections to her work never assumed that they were smarter than her, but now that is a common occurrence. Her access to university funds has dried up, and her salary stagnated since transitioning.”

Tracy Clark Flory @ Salon mused about how the feminist war over smut rages on and on…and on. “I dig the in-your-face, screw you attitude [of Violet Blue], and I consider myself a pro-porn feminist. So, if you detect a lack of enthusiasm, it isn’t because I think it’s a boring or unworthy aim. In fact, the intersection of feminism and porn makes for one of my favorite subjects, and it’s one I’ve been thinking, reading and writing about for most of my adult life. I just can’t believe we’re still debating whether porn is a good or a bad thing, feminist or antifeminist — as though it falls clearly into one clear, impermeable category.”

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist offers us an illustrated history of male chastity devices. Oh, yes, they made them. Definitely not for the faint of heart and possibly NSFW depending on your place of employment.

SQT @ Fantasy & SciFi Lovin’ News and Reviews opines oh the misogyny…are women in entertainment just ornamentation? (thanks to Hanna for the link). Short answer: no. SQT challenges the Ms. Magazine’s reading of Iron Man 2 as an expression of sexism in Hollywood, suggesting that it possibly has an edge of Sex and the City 2 when it comes to the portrayal of kick-ass female characters.

Jessica Valenti @ The Washington Post soundly denounces the fake feminism of Sarah Palin. Because she says it better than I can: “But, of course, Palin isn’t a feminist — not in the slightest. What she calls “the emerging conservative feminist identity” isn’t the product of a political movement or a fight for social justice. It isn’t a structural analysis of patriarchal norms, power dynamics or systemic inequities. It’s an empty rallying call to women who are disdainful of or apathetic to women’s rights, who want to make abortion and emergency contraception illegal, who would cut funding to the Violence Against Women Act and who fight same-sex marriage rights.”

Not everyone is so unambivelant about Palin being out of the club, however. Rebecca Traister @ Salon writes about feminisms tumultuous history of insiders and outsiders in Sarah Palin’s grab for feminism, concluding that “I am pretty damn nervous — more nervous than I’d like to be — about Sarah Palin’s grab at ‘feminism.'”

On the subject of being feminist, Amanda Marcotte @ RhReality Podcast had a great interview this week with Courtney Martin, who has recently co-edited a book called Click which is a collection of essays by young women reflecting on their feminist awakenings.

Lore Sjoberg @ Wired offers helpful tips in the nice guys guide to realizing you’re not that nice. “For some reason you think ‘nice’ means ‘completely devoid of sexual energy.’ When you’re attracted to someone, you treat her like you’re her brother. Her brother the priest. Her brother the elderly Victorian priest who is actually a large stuffed animal. Then when some guy comes along and does a little thoughtful flirting and actually gets her attention, you think ‘Man, that guy’s a jerkface.'” (hat tip to Alas, a Blog)

Earlier this week, I wrote a bit of a ranty post about men’s rights activists who miss the whole point about institutional sexism and intersectionality. Jill @ I Blame the Patriarchy tackles the same story in her own special way in MRAs on parade: chumpass motherfucker declares ownership of girlfriend’s uterus.

And I leave you with the always eloquent Aaron Sorkin @ The Huffington Post stepping up to the plate to defend (but not in the way you think!) Ramin Satoodeh as a theatre critic in now that you mention it rock hudson did seem gay.

^{image credit: untitled by Legominose @ Flickr.com.}

Another Lengthy Quotations Edition.

All of these articles are worth reading in their entirety, and often their arguments are too complex to capture in a single quotation. I hope the snippets are enough to hook you into clicking through to at least one or two of them!

Tavi @ The Style Rookie | a few observations. “I know that it was said that Richardson sometimes gets naked and lets the girl take pictures of him before they let him take nude pictures of them. But this isn’t him being fair, it’s a strategy. It’s manipulative, it’s scary, and the last thing someone wants when they feel pressured into doing anything sexual is for the other person to suddenly be wearing nothing but tattoos. It’s supposed to, y’know, relax everyone, but there’s a difference between putting on a smooth jazz album while preparing some nice ginseng teas and, um, being naked, all of a sudden, in an uncomfortable person’s face.” via Jill @ Feministe.

Heather Corinna @ RhRealityCheck | Disability Dharma: What Including & Learning From Disability Can Teach (Everyone) About Sex. “Disability awareness and inclusion can also help abled people get more creative when it comes to sex. Folks with physical disabilities have to be creative about things like sexual positioning or sensitivity, and are used to having to explore positioning and sensitivity ourselves a lot, dumping preconceived notions that we can do what someone else can or will feel what someone else may feel. We tend to take it as a given that rather than starting externally, with what we see elsewhere or someone else suggests, we’ll need to start with ourselves and our own bodies, feeling out what works for us (and doesn’t) uniquely. We’re less inclined to put all our sexual or physical stock in just one body part or area of the body, especially if the kind of disability we have means that sometimes our bodies or a given body part will work in a way one day that on another day won’t work well or at all. When our bodies change over time — as bodies always do and always will, and not just during puberty but through all of life — we’ve more practice at both adapting but also at processing our feelings about physical changes.”

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist | Vintage Victim-Blaming: Feminism Causes Rape, and Other Crime Prevention Tips. “The victim-blaming ‘tips’ I hear in 2010 — all those helpful crime prevention strategies presented as ‘common sense’ for women to follow in order to avoid rape nowadays — don’t explicitly blame equality between the [sexes] for rape. But 33 years later, the solution for reducing sexual assaults against women hasn’t changed: Tell them to stop moving about the world freely, and then blame them when they do.”

Cara @ The Curvature | Boys Aged 10 and 11 Convicted of Attempted Rape as Apologists Deny Assault Was Possible. “Trying these children as adults and ultimately putting them on the sex offender registry list instead of working with them through various means to ensure that they realize that what they did was wrong and lose any desire to ever do it to anyone else ever again, I think, was absolutely the wrong move” (trigger warnings on original post for rape apologism and linked articles with descriptions of sexual assault).

Molly @ first the egg | too fat to mother. “The problem is that ordering children to lose weight and separating them from their parents might be far from the best solution to this problem. If anything, the diet regimens these decisions enforce are likely to produce more misery, not less. First and foremost by making weight loss the goal courts are setting these children up for failure. The vast majority, some studies say 95% (!), of weight loss attempts fail in the long-run and dieters normally regain the weight they lost within few years. The repeated failures and the fact that these kids’ lives become exclusively dedicated to losing weight are only likely to promote eating disordered behavior and depression.”

Silvana @ Tiger Beatdown | On Heavy Girls and Sexy Time. “Fat girls are more likely to get labeled as sluts, because ‘slut’ is a catch-all word for women and girls who do not conform to ladylike and womanly behavior, and being fat is definitely not lady-like or womanly behavior. And look, I can say from experience, if enough people are calling you a slut, you start to believe it. You’re 12! What do you know about what a slut is? And you are hitting puberty, and having all these sexual thoughts about boys, and thinking, okay, people are saying I am a slut so OBVIOUSLY this is not normal and there must be something deeply, deeply wrong with me. Perhaps after a while, you think, hey, if everyone is calling me a slut, I might as well go ahead and be one, because they sure as hell aren’t going to stop, are they?”

In much more awesome news womanistmusings @ Womanist Musings | No, You Mean to be Hateful to Gay People. “Last night we were sitting around waiting for the unhusband to bbq dinner, when our neighbour popped by for a visit. For the purposes of this conversation I am going to call him Michael. We stood chatting when suddenly another neighbour popped out of his house. Michael decided to greet the new addition by yelling, ‘hey faggot’. This was supposedly a friendly greeting, though in my mind it constitutes hate speech. [My son], never being one to allow a slur to go unanswered responded with, ‘would you mind please not using that word, it is not nice’.”

Kate Harding @ Jezebel | 5 Ways of Looking at “Sara Palin Feminism”. “So, can’t I just agree to disagree with Sarah Palin – or at least to ignore her use of the term and continue to go about my business? Well, evidently not, or I wouldn’t be writing this. The problem is, words mean things. I could start calling myself a red meat conservative, or campaign for those of us who are against the death penalty to ‘reclaim’ the term ‘pro-life,’ but at some point, the relationship between your beliefs and your choice of words either passes the sniff test or it doesn’t. And someone who actively seeks to restrict women’s freedom calling herself a feminist is, not to put too fine a point on it, a liar. There’s a difference between a big tent and no boundaries whatsoever; if Palin’s ‘entitled to be accepted’ as a feminist just because she says she’s one, then the word is completely meaningless — as opposed to merely vague and controversial.”

Natascha Kennedy @ The Guardian | Once again the T in LGBT is silenced. “There has rightly been an international outcry in response to the couple’s barbaric treatment, but the protest has been against the perceived homophobia of Malawi’s law courts. The problem is, however, that one half of this couple does not primarily identify as gay. Tiwonge is most probably transgender but possibly intersex (in many parts of Africa people do not actually have clear vocabulary to express this), and considers herself a woman. Indeed she has lived ‘as a woman’ all her life.” (update: over the weekend, Malawi’s president pardoned the couple and they were released from jail.)

Ryan Thoreson @ Huffington Post | The Swing Vote. “Decades after the sexual revolution and lesbian feminism and the advent of queer theory, the is-she-or-isn’t-she debate revolves around a profoundly false dichotomy. With little meaningful information on either side, the media points to Kagan’s interest in men during law school as evidence that she’s straight, just as bloggers use her alleged partnership with a woman as evidence that she’s a lesbian. The idea that she might be bisexual or have relationships with different people without needing to identify as queer has been stunningly absent from the discussion, even by well-meaning LGBT bloggers and LGBT organizations who ought to know better.”

Hadley Freeman @ Alternet | “Sex and the City 2”: Materialistic, Misogynistic, Borderline Racist. “I’m not asking for much. I just don’t want to be sick in my mouth. I don’t want to leave the cinema feeling like I’ve paid £7.50 to be mocked, patronized and kicked in the face. I don’t want to be filled with despair at Hollywood’s increasing inability to conceive of women in comedic films as anything other than self-obsessed babies with breasts. And I don’t, most of all, want to spend two hours watching dreams and memories from my youth being trampled into humiliating self-parody. Is that too much to ask?” (spoilers for the film and TV show if you care).

The Bloggess @ Sexis | Sex and the City 2 – Why Should You Care? “So the new Sex and the City movie is out this week, and if you’re anything like me, everyone you know is talking about it. To themselves, I assume, because no one has actually mentioned it to me. Probably because they know I typically only watch zombie movies. But this is a sex column and not a zombie column so that’s why today we’re going to have a little Sex and the City Q&A.”

Zoe Williams @ The Guardian | Over-40 women, you’ve given birth to a healthy facet of modern life. “The judgmental tone is all rooted in a timeless anxiety that women are too feckless and/or stupid to be left in charge of growing children – an anxiety I have an ever growing awareness of, the more background misogyny I realise there still is. Propagation is the main work of any species, and if you seriously believe women to be inferior, it must be incredibly aggravating to see them in charge of it.”

^{image credit: Oil Painting Romantic Nude Couple by BeyondDream @ Flickr.com}

First up, several posts this week on Sarah Palin’s increased us of the F-word (“feminist,” sadly, not “fuck”)

Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon tackles the debate ’round the blogosphere about whether Palin deserves to self-identify as such (or whether anyone has the right to judge her worthy or unworthy of it).

Brittany Shoot @ Women’s Rights Blog asks whether “conservative feminist” is an oxymoron, while Michael Tomaskey @ The Guardian describes the use of Susan B. Anthony as a conservative, anti-choice feminist icon.

And via my friend and fellow dual-degree student Colleen comes Janine Giordano @ Religion in American History on the competing collective memories and historical interpretations of Susan B. Anthony’s legacy. “We’re not used to sharing the narrative authority of the history of feminism, or interpretation of the historical record, with ‘conservative feminists.’ But I say we should be happy — in a way — that social history has finally begun to empower social movements outside of the academy.”

It’s not just a question of people arguing over who can or cannot claim the identity “feminist” (my two-second opinion: you get to claim whatever identity you want, but by the same token, I get to say why I do or don’t believe you fit the description). There are, of course, many women (not just Phyllis Schlafly!) who fight tooth and nail to undo the political and cultural work of feminist activists — often in the name of their own enlightened status. Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon points to the example of columnist Maureen Dowd, who was recently full of faux concern about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s state of singledom.

Her disingenuous final paragraph really puts the cherry on the mean girl sundae:

Why is there this underlying assumption that Kagan has missed the boat?

I don’t know. It probably has something to do with you perpetuating the narrative. If you don’t like the story of how women can conquer mountains but are nothing without a man, then stop telling that story.

Similarly, Andi Zeisler @ Bitch Blogs nominates writer Caitlin Flanagan for the first ever Bitch Douchebag Decree “All-Star” award, writing

If there’s one thing Flanagan can really type some words on, besides how she hates feminism and how her mommy abandoned her, it’s teen girls and blowjobs. She’s heard a lot of stuff about how teens these days are having hookups and orgies and rainbow parties all over the place. But since Flanagan is perpetually arrested in a time of crinolines and sock hops, when all teens were apparently eunuchs, the idea that girls might actually enjoy exploring their sexuality is both logistically inconvenient and philosophically abhorrent to her.

A nun in Arizona was excommunicated from the Catholic church after making a decision at a Catholic-run hospital that a woman could recieve a life-saving abortion. Nuns can be so frickin’ awesome! The Catholic church hierarchy can be so, so not. Jill @ Feministe meditates on the inhumanity of that decision while David J. Nolan @ RhRealityCheck explains why the decision was actually not in accordance with canon law.

Alexa Kolbi-Molinas (Staff Attorney, ACLU) @ Feministing Community highlights the secular legal issues involved in the case, given that hospitals (religiously-affiliated or not) are required by law in the United States to provide life-saving care.

Not that Arizona isn’t already on a right bender, now that everyone who looks foreign in origin (read: not white) is required to carry identification papers and ethnic studies have been banned. Miriam @ Feministing has more, as does Brittnay Shoot @ Women’s Rights Blog who asks, “when they get rid of ethnic studies is women’s studies next?“

Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon reports, however, that the future might be brighter than it looks at the moment: young white people care less frightened of immigration than their elders.

People are often spend a whole lot of time and energy criticizing other folks’ sex lives. Thomas Rogers @ Salon writes about Czech twins who are lovers and controversial porn stars, asking what about “twincest” pushes peoples’ buttons and why they can’t stop watching anyway. From Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog asks “is it possible to critique rough-sex porn without marginalizing kink?” and Charlie @ Charlie Glickman challenges the sex-positive community to think about the difference between shame, arrogance, and pride.

Young people (girls in particular) are certainly not exempt when it comes to the sex-obsessed gaze of society, and Amanda Hess @ The Sexist muses about the recent outcry over a viral internet video featuring young girls dancing in sexually suggestive ways. She discusses a similar theme when it comes to media coverage of Miss USA pagent winner Rima Fakih.

Sarah Menkedick @ Women’s Rights Blog points out how the Miss USA pagent coverage ties sexism and racism together in a neat package consisting of “a little racism, a little islamophobia, a little hating on immigrants, a little hypocritical outrage at beauty pageant participants who’ve gotten a bit too sexy.” In other words, Miss USA, in a nutshell.

Melissa McEwan @ The Guardian calls out the policing of women’s sexual selves in a slightly different vein, writing about the media coverage of recent allegations by Charlotte Lewis that she, too, was sexually assaulted by director Roman Polanski.

Harris’s concentrated effort to undermine Lewis’s credibility by casting doubt on her character, motives, and integrity is a textbook example of the sort of hostile reception any survivor of sexual assault can expect to receive when coming forward about the crime, no less when the accuser must point a finger at a famous man with powerful friends.

There are those who question why Lewis waited to come forward for so long. Reading Harris’s attack on behalf of his friend Polanski, is it really any wonder why?

The UK is debating whether or not to protect the identity of those accused of sexual assault (victims are already protected by anonymity laws in Britain). Cara @ The Curvature argues that this further perpetuates the myth that false accusations of rape are statistically more likely than false accusations in any other type of crime, and Cruella @ Cruella-blog gives one example of how reporting allegations in the media helped uncover at least on serial rapist’s activities when other victims came forward.

Someone who has been disproportionately in the public eye lately has been, of course, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. My legal junkie crush Dahlia Lithwick @ Slate suggests that the anxious questions being asked about Kagan say more about the fears we have for ourselves than they do about her ability to perform the role of Justice. (Bonus points if you can name the movie the quote she uses as a headline is from).

Brittany Shoot @ Women’s Rights Blog (she either had a busy week or we have super-similar taste in news stories!) brings up another issue with the Kagan coverage: Elena Kagan is Childfree. Get Over It.

And finally, for your feel-good story of the week: Jesus Would Have Gone to Gay Weddings. Michael A. Jones @ The Gay Right’s Blog reports on a group of Catholic priests who are making waves by arguing that Jesus wasn’t a screaming homophobe afterall. That in fact, you know, he might have been cool with the whole same-sex marriage thing. As long as he was put in charge of the wine.

^{*image credit: Modern Painting of Kiss by Beyond Dreaming @ Flickr.com}

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.}

Thursday, May 6th, was International No Diet Day, but as gwen @ Sociological Images reports, some news outlets seem to have missed the point. ” Perhaps illustrating the article with an image of a slender body indicating a significant amount of weight loss wasn’t the best choice?”

Lena Chen, also known as Elle @ Sex and the Ivy graduates this month from Harvard (congrats!), and as part of her senior thesis on evolution of the virginity ideal, she held a one-day conference on Rethinking Virginity. You can find a round-up of related blog posts and media coverage at Sex and the Ivy. If rethinking virginity is your thing, I totally recommend clicking through and checking some of the posts out. For a nice thumbnail recap, check out Feministing’s list of ten virginity myths that were discussed (and debunked) at the conference.

On the not-so-positive side of things, Femocracy @ Feministing Community muses about why media stories about rape so often get it wrong, while Jacelyn Friedman @ Salon analyzes how CNN took her anti-slut-shaming talking points and made her sound like a prude. “The woman on the television screen looked and sounded a whole lot like me — in fact, she was me — but she appeared to be saying things that…I would never say. This is what it’s like to see yourself quoted out of context and turned into a sock puppet on national TV.” Friedman was allowed to follow up with a counterpoint which you can read on the CNN blog.

Mary Elizabeth Williams @ Salon also muses upon the perilous balance teenage girls (in particular) must strike in our culture between youthful testing of boundaries and behavior that will earn them the status of social pariah in Miley Cyrus: Not a girl, not yet a Britney. “Very few people ever transition seamlessly from cute teen to mature adult – whether they’re an ordinary girl or Disney’s biggest princess. Cyrus, like anyone who’s ever been 17, has a right to stumble and look silly. But if you’re going to tell the world you can’t be tamed, maybe you should consider doing it in a way that doesn’t look so painfully contrived.” Sady & Amanda @ The Sexist discuss.

In other awkward bids for attention, Andy Wright @ AlterNet reports on the six strangest things men have done in the quest for the perfect penis.

lisa @ Sociological Images offers us an intriguing set of graphs showing trends in the social acceptability of homosexuality and prostitution in selected Western nations and offers five possible explanations for the disparity between the two (homosexuality steadily more acceptable, prostitution not so much).

Not all Christian fundies are opposed to sex, they just want to make sure it’s God-approved sex. Sadly, it is often difficult to find those God-approved sex toys without being subjected to icky non-Christian depictions of sex. Never fear! As Cath Elliot @ The Guardian reports, these Christian sex enthusiast can now shop at Christian Love Toys, an online sex you store for those with vanilla tastes.

Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon, however, reports on the limits of Christian sex. “Sex addiction” has, of course, been a topic du jour for Christian conservatives long and long. At Dirty Girl Ministries, however, they tailor the message specifically for “impure” women: “On the Dirty Girls Ministries message board, visitors swap tips for keeping on the straight and narrow — for example, wearing a rubber band around your wrist and snapping it every time an impure thought crosses your mind.”

Let’s just not hope that particular Dirty Girl isn’t into a little pain with her pleasure.

And finally, via Hanna, comes this lovely blog post on How to Be Attractive (“First, remove some of the mirrors in your house.”)

^{*image credit: “Siege” by Clayton Cubitt. Hat tip to Hanna this week for finding the image for this post, via Warran Ellis’ blog.}