Tag Archives: gender and sexuality

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 27)

20 Sunday Jun 2010

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Sam Leith @ The Guardian (h/t to Hanna) | EM Forster’s work tailed off once he finally had sex. Better that than a life of despair. “Nobody should have to write, or paint, or sing from the depths of despair, no matter how exhilarating the results. I’m sorry we never got to read Forster’s unwritten novels, but I’m much happier he got laid.”

Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon | New Bulletin: Men Have Hearts That Break. “Both sexes are, gasp, human beings and therefore are sad when they lose a relationship. The reason that men have trouble bouncing back is that our culture doesn’t create enough room for men to heal. Men are discouraged from having close friendships where they can talk this stuff out (at least when they’re younger), and they’re encouraged to put on a stoic face and bury pain deep inside. It’s no surprise to many of us here, I’m sure, that a little crying it out can aid recovery. That men aren’t given that space is just another example of how Patriarchy Hurts Men Too (PHMT).”

Miriam @ Feministing | Is female dominance a success for feminism? “Women’s success at the expense of men is not a feminist success. Flipping the scales in the other direction is just as problematic. So what’s the solution? I don’t think it’s the tactics that Rosin reports on in her article: quiet affirmative action toward men trying to get into higher education, re-segregation of education to cater towards boys learning needs. If we keep up these tactics, we’re going to create a seesaw effect where women outpace men, and then men outpace women. We need a new strategy. A less gendered one.”

Stephanie Zvan @ Quiche Moraine (via Sex in the Public Square) | What Is an Ally? “I’m not really sure how it happened. Allies in the culture wars aren’t appreciably different than military or political allies, but somehow, the meaning of the word has changed online. We’ve gone from ‘In everyday English usage, allies are people, groups, or nations that have joined together in an association for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out between them’ to the assumption that the act of alliance comes with specific obligations and that people are ‘bad allies’ or not allies at all if particular things are done or left undone.”

Sinclair @ Sugarbutch Chronicles | BDSM is Not Abuse. “I am still surprised how often BDSM gets equated with abuse, and this list makes the distinctions so very clear, I like it. I have the feeling I’ll be referencing this quite a bit in various things. Hope the Lesbian Sex Mafia doesn’t mind that I am reprinting it here!”

Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog | How Often Should You Ask For Something? and How Often Should You Ask For Something? Part Two: The Specifics. “How do we value the right to say ‘No’ to any kind of sex we don’t want to engage in — while still valuing the right to ask for what we want? How — specifically, practically — can we make this distinction?” and “Example. If my partner asks me, ‘Can I apply hot peppers to your nether regions?” and I say ‘No, I don’t want to try that,’ it’s probably not going to occur to me to bring it up again. Not because I’m traumatized by the very idea . . . but because it simply won’t be on my radar. Even if hot peppers aren’t an absolutely firm No for me — even if they’re something I’d be willing to try if my fears and reservations about it were allayed — once I’ve said ‘No,’ for me the matter is going to be pretty much closed. But that doesn’t make my partner a bad person for opening it up again.”

Cara @ The Curvature | Group Suggests Age Appropriate Sex Education? Time to Freak Out. “Sex education, in my view, shouldn’t be about ‘preventing teen pregnancy.’ It should be about teaching young people how to engage in emotionally and physically healthy, pleasurable, consensual sexual relationships if and when they choose to engage in such relationships at all, and informing them about how to keep themselves as healthy and safe as they can and how to control their reproductive capacities as they see fit as a part of that.”

Rachel @ The Feminist Agenda | Obesity and fun sexy time. “The thing we should be paying attention to is the fact that many fat women are so beat down psychologically and have so thoroughly internalized the message that they are not sexual beings, that they don’t deserve love and sexual fulfillment, and that their bodies are worthless and disgusting, that they often put their sexual health at risk. That is fucked. You know what else is fucked? The fact that many fat people have had such negative experiences with medical professionals that they would rather risk their sexual health than interact with them.”

Vanessa @ Feministing | The sanctioning of child genital cutting at Cornell University. “Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder at Bioethics Forum brought recent attention to the controversial (to put it mildly) treatment which Dr. Poppas claims to ‘fix’ the genitals of children as young as 3 months so they can have a more ‘normal appearing vagina’ after the doctor deem their clitoris oversized.” Original post flagged with a strong trigger warning.

And I have to break away from my format-of-the-week here for a little editorializing, because Vanessa shares this appalling quote from the F-Word

One time I asked a surgeon who does these surgeries if he had any idea how women actually reach orgasm. What did he actually know, scientifically, about the functional physiology of the adult clitoris? He looked at me blankly, and then said, “But we’re working on children.” As if they were never going to grow up.

I just want to point out that, not only do children grow up — they actually experience pleasure from their genitalia as children. The fact that the doctors are only secondarily (if that) concerned with the functionality of the clitoris yet primarily concerned with the clit “looking right” (which is a highly subjective observation, given the diversity of human genitalia) tells me just how much they’ve dehumanized these young people — in part, I would argue, because their age makes them supremely vulnerable to exploitation in the name of increasing medical knowledge and “protecting” them from the (apparently irreparable) damage of being deemed abnormal according to our straightjacket codes of gender conformity.

And finally (because I am, after all, a librarian), Danika @ The Lesbrary | Lesbian Canon? “For the last couple days I’ve been thinking about the concept of a lesbian canon. I mean, I know that canons in general are problematic, but I like the idea of trying to identify the books that really steered lesbian writing.”

Which brings me to Isabel @ Feministe | Not a Fish, Not Yet A Human. “Now: I am not interested, here, in trying to reclaim The Little Mermaid as a feminist classic, because I… am never interested, really, in trying to stamp something definitively with Feminist or Not Feminist. There are fucked-up things going on in every Disney movie ever, and The Little Mermaid is no exception. …But right now, I want to focus on The Little Mermaid as a – still poignant to me – story of the painful liminal zone between childhood an adulthood.” Even though The Little Mermaid terrified me as a child and has never been my favorite fairy tale, in my book every work of fiction deserves a second chance — and Isabel musters a damn good defense of this one.

image credit: Gerstl, Richard (1883-1908) – 1901 Self-portrait, half-nude on a blue background (Leopold Collection, Vienna), made available by RasMarley @ Flickr.com.

booknotes: sexing the body

17 Thursday Jun 2010

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I took a class as an undergraduate in the Cultural History of Victorian Science and Technology, which was one of the most awesome classes of my lengthy undergraduate career. One of the conversations I remember from that class was a discussion about how and why some new technologies and scientific theories succeed and some fail. We tend to have a merit-based vision of innovative success and failure: good ideas succeed, bad idea fail. But this isn’t necessarily so — you might have a bad idea but really good marketing skills. You might have a good idea but fail to file your patent paperwork at the right moment. Usually at the beginning of a new technology (take cars for example) the a multitude of products compete for the industry standard. The gasoline-powered internal combustion engine was only one of a number of automobile technologies developed around the turn of the twentieth century: its hegemony today had everything to do with marketing and the availability of cheap oil, rather than its inherent superiority to, say, an electric motor (which was on the scene simultaneously, even a little bit prior to, gasoline-powered motors).

What does this have to do with Anne Faustos-Sterling’s Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000)? I thought of the story of the automobiles and its lesson about the interaction of science, technology, and culture while I was reading Sexing the Body because what my cultural history professor had done for modern technologies, Faustos-Sterling, a trained biologist, does for the scientific exploration of gender and sex in the human body. The work is now a decade old, but still reads (to my eyes anyway) as a fairly current account of how sex and gender have been understood through the lens of science, specifically intersexuality during the twentieth century and how the treatment of intersexual persons is shaped by larger cultural understandings of gender, sex and sexuality.

This exhaustively-researched, amply-footnoted book does a commanding job of balancing the important-yet-technical ins and outs of scientific studies involving rats and hormones with a compelling, readable narrative. Faustos-Sterling documents the way in which the production of scientific knowledge — specifically the knowledge related to human sex and sexuality — is inexorably shaped by the cultural understandings of what is normal sex and gender presentation. She begins with external markers of sexuality and a truly horrific chapter concerning how people with unacceptable genitalia have been treated by the medical establishment in the twentieth century. She then moves internally to look at the less visible ways in which scientists have identified the sex of persons, from gonads to hormones. As you might expect, her argument is that “sex” is far from easily established on a medical level, and the standards by which we have chosen to measure sex are hardly objective, unchanging scientific criteria but rather contingent on the narratives concerning sex and gender that scientists performing their laboratory tests take part in and are influenced by.

Warning to anyone who has experienced hospital or medical-related trauma: the descriptions of medical malpractice that included things like operating on infants without painkiller, operating on people of all ages without consent, and providing misleading or outright erroneous medical information to patients or the parents of underage patients are infuriating and painful to read. I find the idea of any medical professional performing invasive, medically unnecessary surgery on a person without their consent or with coerced consent so upsetting that I had to put the book down several times just to let my blood pressure drop.

Much like Hanne Blank’s history of virginity, Sexing the Body takes a concept (“sex”) that we have come to think of as biologically determined and physically identifiable and questions just how much we really know about what “sex” constitutes. Even if the components of our body that have become markers of “sex” (male or female) are, indeed, physical realities, the decision to establish those particular physical characteristics as markers of sex is, in the end, a socio-cultural decision we make, and one that we can change.

And this, in the end, is Fausto-Sterling’s hopeful call: for us all to look beyond the dualities of male versus female, masculine and feminine, and nature (what we have come to label “sex”) and nurture (what we have come to label “gender”) and acknowledge the reality that we are both and neither, that what we understand as sex and gender identity is both nature and nurture — and, in fact, more. That we cannot hope to gain more knowledge about human biology and behavior if we continue to constrain ourselves to limited, limiting categories and attempt to shoehorn the diversity of humanity into their narrow confines.

quick hit: reasons to choose "queer"

15 Tuesday Jun 2010

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Via Amanda Hess @ The Sexist.

Thomas has a post up at Yes Means Yes, Would That Make Me Queer? that dovetails nicely with the post I wrote last week on the limitations of “gay” as a catch-all for non-straight sexual identities and political movements. As commenter paintedstone wrote on my earlier post

The major problem with the LGBTQIA etc. position is that it’s trying to qualitatively define a subgroup which is at its core everything *but* something else.

…Problem is that there isn’t really a term for “everything but X,” when “X” is clearly defined as “good” and “right,” that can’t easily be written off (by Westerners, at least) as “wrong” and “evil”. People like to think in dyads, as problematic as they usually are. But then, it’s usually only those on the receiving end that care about that.

Thomas, in his post, is musing about the utility of the word “queer” as a catch-all for non-privileged sexual practices and identities.

There’s a lot of weight on terms of sexual orientation. They bundle together at least four somewhat different aspects of a person: (1) sexual; (2) affectional or romantic; (3) cultural; and (4) political. (There may be other ways to typologizes this; I’d be interested to see if others break it down differently.)

The first two are often assumed to map each other, and they generally do, but not always exactly. For example, I know women who only feel romantic love for other women, but play with guys a fair amount. The sexual behavior is bi- or pan-sexual, but their hearts are lesbian. Conflating sexual and affectional orientation also erases some asexual folks, who have the ability and desire to love romantically, and often with a gender preference, but whose preferred mode of sexual interaction is none.

And that leaves out the BDSM-that-isn’t-sex stuff; lesbian women who will top men but not fuck them, gay men who occasionally bottom to women but not if the scene is sexual, etc. There’s a whole range from “it’s sex” to “it’s sexual but not sex” to “it’s sensual but not sexual” to “it has nothing to do with sex” within the BDSM community, and this is one of those areas where I just take people at their word about their experiences.

I highly recommend the whole thing.

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 26)

13 Sunday Jun 2010

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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

$1 review: portrait of a marriage

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

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$1 reviews are posts about books I find (or Hanna finds for me) on the $1 used book carts at the bookstores we visit around Boston.

This past Sunday I happened, for one reason or another, to spend a lot of time in transit on the T here in Boston and anticipating this I had dropped a battered first edition of Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage (1973), about his parents Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. I had read it once before, a number of years ago, and have also seen the 1990 television adaptation starring Janet McTeer and David Haig (which I highly recommend). But it was fun to read the book again.

This time around, I was struck by a couple of things that I thought might interest y’all (mild historical spoilers ahead for those of you who care).

The first is that, reading with my historian’s (not to mention archivist’s) eyes, I am freshly astonished by the rich depth of the documentary record. Portrait of a Marriage, for those of you who don’t know or need a refresher, takes as its core text and autobiographical narrative written by Vita Sackville-West in her late twenties and discovered by her son, Nigel Nicholson, after her death. It tells the story of her early life, marriage to Harold Nicholson, and her tumultuous romance with Violet Trefusis that threatened to end their marriage but ended by confirming its centrality in her life. This autobiographical text, written when the crisis was still fresh in Vita’s mind, is placed in historical and biographical context by sections authored by Nigel Nicholson and drawn from a seemingly limitless supply of primary source material including family diaries, correspondence, newspaper accounts, photographs and paintings, and oral testimony. This is apparently a family that saved everything rather obsessively. I am not sure if this was because, as part of the titled classes in Britain, they felt somewhat obliged to document their private lives for the (eventually) public record, or whether Vita and Harold’s lives as writers and (in his case) a civil servant fostered the urge to record and preserve, but the Nicholson family has — in the generations since — given rise to a number of authors, many of whom have tackled autobiographical subjects and draw upon the family’s historical record. Portrait is an early example of this type of writing and I think as an example of family autobiography is a remarkable one.

My second observation, during this reading, was the way in which Vita describes her relationships with Violet and Harold, respectively, and the way they are compared within the sections written by Nigel — who is drawing heavily on family narratives concerning the events described. The marriage which this book seeks to provide a portrait of is the relationship between Harold and Vita — for it is that relationship which is seen to have endured and, in a sense, “won out” (maintained priority) in their lives in the face of competing sexual attractions: Vita’s to other men and several women, including Violet whose story is most central to this book (more below), and Harold’s relationships with men. These relationships were openly acknowledged between the couple and at times other family members, and appear to have in some measure been essential components of their shared life: some part of the glue that held them together.

The stability of this marriage — centered as it was around shared family life and a commitment to Knole and Sissinghurt Castle — is contrasted with the vicissitudes of Vita’s lesbian relationships (all comparatively short-lived), most notably her stormy relationship with Violet Trefusis whom she had known since childhood and loved passionately for a period of time in her twenties.

Vita and Violet fell deeply in love after Vita’s marriage to Harold and the birth of her children (according to Vita’s autobiography, Violet had been pursuing her since before the marriage, though Vita seems to have remained semi-oblivious, partially because she was involved in a relationship at the time with a woman named Rosamund (who was crushed when Vita announced her impending marriage). During the intense period of their relationship, Violet actively fantasized about the two going away together to the continent and living their lives together, free from Vita’s ties to family and to place and in an openly-acknowledged committed relationship. Vita, by her own account, seems to have been seduced willingly by this vision of a shared future and the couple ran off together for extended holidays on several occasions, living as a couple and ignoring the pleas of both families for them to return to England and the responsibilities that awaited them there.

It would be likely unfair to see Harold and Vita’s relationship as the key factor in putting an end to that alternate life; Violet sounds like a volatile person, impractically-minded and impatient, who tried a number of back-handed ways of separating Vita from her family life including a sham marriage to a man whom she made promise never to pressure her into sexual relations. But what I found myself wondering, as I read the story, was whether any of the players involved at the time could have imagined an end to the story that had involved Vita and Violet as the couple at the center of the tale. Whether the women, as a couple, could have — in another historical or cultural context — have been the pivotal relationship, the pairing at the center of domestic life.

As I say, it is perhaps an unfair question, given that Violet seems to have viewed Knole as a rival for Vita’s affections and had no interest herself in rural life. But aside from the specific personalities in question, I have a sense from the overarching family narrative that it never would have occurred at the time to this cast of characters (the drama played out in the late 1910s) that a solution might have been found that would not have forced Vita to make a choice between her familiar responsibilities (and, to be fair, clear desires) and her love for Violet. In another time and place it might have been more possible for the pair (and those around them) to incorporate Violet into family life rather than seeing her as a threat to it. And, too, if that had been more possible perhaps Violet would not have felt so desperate as to resort to the manipulative behavior she seems to have engaged in.

I don’t mean to belittle the love and liking that Vita and Harold clearly (through family testimony and personal correspondence) to have felt for one another — yet I mourn the fact that the love and liking of Vita and Violet faced such overwhelming odds — odds that likely contributed to its eventual unraveling.

image credit: image of Vita Sackville-West snagged from the blog Tasting Rhubarb which offers a review of a recent book on the Sissinghurst garden.

why "gay" shouldn’t be the default term

08 Tuesday Jun 2010

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People of the non-straight variety are having some issues with the “alphabet soup” practice of labeling, as in “LGBT-friendly” or “LGBTQ activism.” In the most recent issue of Bitch magazine, R.F. McCann asks whether “lesbian” is going out of fashion

It makes sense that the straight public and mass media have latched onto “gay” as their go-to term; it’s short, largely inoffensive, and widely understood, making it ideal for headlines, soundbites, and voluble public discourse. While “homosexual” is overly formal (not to mention long) and “queer” strikes some as harsh, “gay” is perky, conveniently monosyllabic, purportedly gender-neutral, and certainly less racy-sounding than “lesbian,” with its silky “zzz” sound. But why exactly has the nonstraight population allowed “gay” to slide so comfortably into ubiquity? Surely the lesbian—scratch that—gay female community could put up a fight if it wanted to. But it doesn’t seem to want to. Are women bored with the word? Do they dislike it? Have labels simply become less relevant?

While McCann’s article is openly inquisitive, seeking to document trends in language usage John Aravosis @ AMERICAblog Gay is arguing for activists to resist inclusive acronyms such as LGBT in place of the “perky, conveniently monosyllabic” (as McCann writes) word “gay” (hat tip to Amanda Hess @ The Sexist). He writes in I’m not an ‘LGBT American’

I think LGBT is a cop out for straight people. Much easier for a politician to laud the LGBT community than the GAY community, because no one outside of the gay community knows what the LGBT community even is. I’ve seen signs at rallies proclaiming something or other about “LGBT”, and I’ll bet everyone at the rally who wasn’t gay was scratching their head. In an effort to be more inclusive, we’ve shoved ourselves back into a sort of linguistic closet.

If we’re all one community, then we don’t need to keep adding letters to divide us.

Hanna and I have this conversation occasionally. I tend to err on the side of inclusivity and trying to be as accurate as possible in naming people with the labels they wish to be named; she tends to err on the side of what’s easiest to communicate in terms of an activist message (even I can’t always remember what the Q in LGBTQ is supposed to mean…!) and also expresses frustration with the need to label ourselves in the first place.

I’m definitely with her on the “it’s clumsy to say” issue and have found myself defaulting more and more to big umbrella terms like “queer,” “non-straight” and “gender nonconforming” when talking about human rights and social justice issues that intersect with sexual orientation and gender identity. I’m also of the fluid, mix-it-up generation (as much as I resist formulaic talk of generations), and variously include myself in groups of folks who identify as “bisexual,” “lesbian,” “non-straight” and “queer,” without the sense that I’m betraying the sisterhood by acknowledging that I’m not exclusively drawn to women in my sexual desiring, or denying my solidarity with a marginalized group by switching up how I identify. (Though I realize this fluidity is easier for individuals than it is for, say, nonprofit organizations that need to choose what terms will end up in the incorporation papers, on their promotional materials and web presence).

Here’s the thing. The bone I have to pick with Aravosis.

Want to argue for inclusivity with a word that helps us avoid the alphabet soup? Totally cool by me. But the solution to the alphabet soup problem is not to revert back to the word “gay.” Gay stopped being the go-to term for a reason, in that it was challenged as being exclusionary by people who do not feel the word (with its strong associations with male-identified homosexuality) really included them. “Gay” sort of, sometimes can include lesbian women (see McCann’s article above), in the way that many male-gendered terms can include female members of the human race. But the same isn’t true for “lesbian” (we sometimes say “gay men and women” but never “lesbian women and men”). Bi folks, of course, have are not exclusively gay and trans folks can be straight or gay or bi (which, really, is true for so many of us as we move through our lives — but that’s another issue entirely).

Arguing that the defult one-word term should be “gay” makes you sound like you’re not aware of this history, and of the reasons the term caused unhappiness within the non-straight community in the first place. If you’re going to pick “gay” as the catch-all term, you need to make a good case for why that word should win out over “lesbian” or “queer” or any of the other identity-labels that make up the alphabet-soup we’re currently stuck with. Gay isn’t the obvious default option, or it shouldn’t be.

Now, of course, in the end, all of this quasi-academic debate might not matter as much as shifts in usage, as McCann points out. As I’ve written about before, the English language, despite the fear-mongering of the Right over political correctness, has no “language police,” and the evolution of language ultimately happens through what words people choose to speak every day and what they understand those words to mean. But that shouldn’t stop us from having these conversations, and thinking about the implications of one usage ultimately winning out over another.

What terms do you like and dislike when it comes to sex- and gender-based identities? Which do you wish we could jettison entirely and which do you have inordinate fondness for? What words have you used to identify yourself and your communities in the past, and have those words changed over time? Why or why not? Feel free to share in the comments!

image credit: Lesbians to the Rescue by PinkMoose @ Flickr.com

sunday smut: links on sex and gender (no. 25)

06 Sunday Jun 2010

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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.

in which I have some thoughts on men, pregnancy, and parenting

03 Thursday Jun 2010

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There have been a couple stories in the news lately revolving around men and procreation that have caught my eye in the last couple of weeks, and due to the phenomenon known as “needing something to post about today” I thought I’d throw them together in a post and share a few thoughts about them — or, more accurately, about the cultural narratives and expectations about men and manhood they represent.

The first is a post by Mary Elizabeth Williams @ Salon that provocatively asks whether “men have a right to choose an abortion,” or, more accurately how much right they have to decide when and how to become a parent. Although she links to a story by Stephanie Fairyington @ Elle in which a man named George Bruell tried to pressure his girlfriend to have an abortion after she unexpectedly got pregnant after the couple (he thought) had agreed they didn’t want to have children.

The Elle article contains a lot of crap from anti-feminist “men’s rights activists” whose entire goal seems to be the struggle to free men from relational responsibilities supposedly forced upon their freewheeling selves by scheming women and their dependent children. Although updated for the 21st century, this is a narrative surprisingly reminiscent of virulently misogynistic views of women and families found in 1950s and 60s-era diatribes by men who were as unhappy with the postwar mythology of the Father Knows Best lifestyle as feminists, but rather than blame institutionalized sexism they blamed women and women’s essentially domestic, acquisitive nature that required men to work long hours to support a suburban lifestyle.

Like these postwar misogynists, the “men’s rights activists” in this story are not interested in dismantling sexist structures that warp expectations of heterosexual relationships; they’re not interested in fighting for better reproductive justice for all — they already think women have all the power and they feel aggrieved. As Fairyington writes of Mel Feit, head of the National Center for Men,

Feit’s list of grievances range from sexist social standards — why should men still be expected to foot the bill on dates? Why is crying or showing weakness verboten for them? — to what he considers discrimination enforced by the state: men’s lack of reproductive rights combined with unfair child support laws. “Reproductive choice isn’t a fundamental right if it’s only limited to people who have internal reproductive systems,” Feit says. “If it only applies to women, it’s a limited right and that weakens it.” In his view, Planned Parenthood’s motto — “Every child a wanted child” — should apply to both people who make the baby.

Most of these arguments, taken individually, are issues feminist have championed for years. The insidious problem with these grievances is not that (most of them) are inaccurate but that they are not connected to any analysis of the cultural construction of gender or understanding of institutionalized sexism. Or an awareness of how — in our culture — gender operates dualistically and women are disproportionately vulnerable in a world where patriarchal structures are still the default. This doesn’t mean patriarchy doesn’t hurt men too — as feminists, male and female, remind us continually — but it does mean that deconstructing masculinity and the expectations of men and manhood must be done with an awareness of women’s position in the here-and-now-society. Men’s rights activists seem to imply that somehow women, as a group, are (for example) forcing them to pay for dates, whereas most feminists wound point to our cultural construction of manliness that associates male power and sexual appeal with economic power to such an extent that feminist calls for an end to gendered dating expectations are usually met with anxious speculation about how feminists are trying to emasculate men. Ditto on the issue of crying and/or showing weakness.

Women as a group, in other words, are not these guys’ biggest enemy. Their enemy is anyone (male or female) who supports oppositional, essentialist gender roles.

But back to the question of men, pregnancy and “choice.” Here’s what I have to say about men and the “right to choose.”

1) The final decision whether or not to have an abortion is always the pregnant woman’s. Like any medical procedure, it is the patient who needs to have the final say about what happens to her body. End of story. Obviously, this happens in the context of a medical profession in which doctors (ideally) advise patients about the full range of options available to them. Ideally a pregnant woman trying to decide whether to carry an unplanned or dangerous pregnancy to term would consult with her partner, family, friends, trusted religious adviser, therapist — whomever she needs to help her make the best decision given the choices available. But at the end of the day, it’s her body and therefore her decision to make. If the pregnant person is male-identified or in part male bodied, then the decision would be his. This isn’t a gender-bias, it’s a question of bodily integrity and who has a say about what happens or doesn’t happen to your body.

2) Apart from abortion, men have as many options for preventing parenthood as women. If you don’t want to get pregnant at a given time, with a given partner, take steps to prevent it. Men are not at the mercy of women in this arena. Here are some of the ways male-bodied persons can prevent pregnancy.

a) refrain from sexual activity that could result in pregnancy such as penetrative penis-in-vagina sex with women, or other types of sexual activity in which your sperm risks getting on or in a woman’s vagina. The plus side to this method of pregnancy prevention is that it might encourage you to realize how many other types of sexual activity are out there to enjoy, either on your own or with a partner. One totally risk-free option for anyone who’s bisexual is deciding you’re only going to have sex with other men — no chance of pregnancy there! Cunnilingus is another way to enjoy your partners body with no chance of sperm + egg = pregnancy. Look on this as a change to experiment and discover new forms of sexual pleasure.

b) use various types of birth control which hopefully you are already familiar with when it comes to prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. there’s sadly no birth control pill yet on the market for men, but in the meantime you have condoms which are pretty damn reliable when used correctly and consistently. If you’re sure you never want to have children, you can always decide to get a vasectomy which solves the accidental pregnancy problem in all but extremely rare cases and puts the choice of pregnancy prevention squarely in your hands.

c) this should go without saying but usually it doesn’t, so I’m going to say it: COMMUNICATION is incredibly important to a satisfying sex life, and that includes doing everything you can to make sure you and your partners are on the same page when it comes to babymaking. Obviously, in situations like Bruell’s story above, communication failed and people are now stuck with the messy real-life consequences. But good communication upfront can certainly prevent a great deal of messy post facto problems, just like securing enthusiastic consent to sexual activity helps prevent instances of sexual assault.

Finally, 3) While difficult, I do think it’s viable (and not anti-feminist or anti-child) to create a legal framework for men to surrender parental rights and responsibilities up-front if a sexual partner with whom they are no longer involved decides to carry a pregnancy to term. As feminists, we have argued that it is the best-case scenario for parents and children when all children are wanted — when parenthood is a role enthusiastically chosen and when children are cared for both by their primary caregivers and by society as a whole. Women who do not choose abortion have the option to surrender the child they birth either to an adoptive family or to the state system. This often isn’t an ideal situation for the child, but it is a legal framework that recognizes that mothers sometimes feel the task of parenting to be beyond them.

There’s a whole tangle of social and legal issues here relating to competing visions of a social welfare state and the responsibility of society as a whole to enable primary caregivers to parent — but for the moment, let’s assume the birth parent has chosen not to parent and wants to hand that responsibility over to someone else. Mothers who give birth can choose to surrender their parental rights and responsibilities legally, and I believe men should have similar legal options.

I just wish the men who are advocating for them wouldn’t ask for them in a way that is hostile to women’s basic right to bodily integrity and decisions surrounding their physical person. It shows a pretty stunning lack of awareness of reproductive rights and justice issues that Feit and company really ought to be engaged in, or at least aware of. Instead, they seem to have adopted the rhetoric of women’s rights in much the same way Sarah Palin has taken to using the language of feminism — to peddle a toxic tangle of misplaced misogynist resentment that lashes out at vulnerable targets rather than working to dismantle the sociocultural structures that constrain us all.

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The second story comes from Amelia Hill @ The Guardian (hat tip to Hanna for the link). I knew we were in trouble from the opening sentence, “Expecting men to take an active role in their partner’s pregnancy and attend the birth of their children can deskill them as potential fathers and damage paternal bonding, an expert has claimed.” While I’m not an anti-intellectual, and I believe in the value of expertise (our highly complex modern world necessitates a certain amount of specialization), I’m always skeptical when an “expert” claims to have the final word on how a certain activity is going to affect complex human beings.

The disappointment and feeling of failure experienced by men expecting to have an intimate and proactive role as their baby gestates, only to find their function is largely one of passive support for their partner, can cause emotional shutdown, according to Dr Jonathan Ives, head of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Birmingham.

“Having begun the fathering role already feeling a failure may destroy his confidence,” Ives said. “It can then be very difficult for him to regain faith in himself once the baby is born and move from that passive state to being a proactive father. His role in the family is no longer clear to him. He effectively becomes deskilled as a parent and this can lead to problems bonding with the child.”

Oh, I have so many issues with this way of understanding parenthood! “Support” for a pregnant partner is somehow the opposite of being “intimate” and active? Men are somehow incapable of grasping that their pre-natal and post-partum roles will, like women’s, be different? Men as a general rule have so little self-confidence that being asked to do something like being present and supporting during pregnancy might actually destroy their ability to parent? And I have to say I’m baffled by the assumption that this feeling of inadequacy is unique to fathers — it’s always been my understanding that most parents, regardless of gender, feel profoundly inadequate for the task at hand.

And this might actually be a good thing, as the article (thankfully!) goes on to point out.

Adrienne Burgess, head of research at the Fatherhood Institute, said: “That experience of helplessness that Ives is saying is so dangerous, is, in fact, the perfect preparation for fatherhood: there are times as a parent when you can’t do anything to help your baby, when it’s crying all night and can’t be soothed. Part of being a parent is being there for your partner and child without doing anything except providing love.”

I just really want to emphasize what Burgess says here, because I think it highlights the chasm that exists between the neotraditional conception of masculinity and fatherhood that relies on rigid separation of male and female duties and a conception of masculinity and fatherhood that, well, relies on the notion that men are human beings capable of a full range of human responses. In the neotraditional version of masculinity, men must be protected at all costs from being made to feel helpless, from being (in a word) emasculated. Helplessness sets them up for “failure” and failure is so shameful and world-ending that men must avoid it at all costs — up to and including the cost of not being present to their partner during pregnancy and at their child’s birth.

In the men-as-humans model that Burgess puts forward, however, helplessness is simply part of the human condition, a run-of-the-mill part of parenting and family life. That we’ve elevated the power of parents (fathers perhaps particularly?) to such Godlike heights that the notion that inability to change the course of events necessarily equals “failure” is stunning to me. To argue that men should be encouraged to avoid the parts of family life that entail helplessness is, in my mind, a wildly unhelpful (at best) perhaps even unethically negligent (at worst) recommendation. It is akin to arguing that if a friend or family member is diagnosed with incurable cancer you should just quit spending time with them because you can’t do anything to cure them.

More often than not, it’s our simple presence — loving, nonjudgmental, patient presence — in the lives of others that is what matters. This is a skill that all of us could do well to hone, whether we are parents or children, spouses or partners, friends or extended family members. It is a skill that should be genderless, and one which we would do well to encourage all soon-to-be parents to practice with one another and, once the child arrives — by birth or other means — with that child as well.

sunday smut (on tuesday): links on sex and gender (no. 24)

01 Tuesday Jun 2010

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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

$1 review: virtual equality

26 Wednesday May 2010

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$1 reviews are posts about books I find (or Hanna finds for me) on the $1 used book carts at the bookstores we visit around Boston.

This past Saturday, Hanna found me a copy of Urvashi Vaid’s Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation on one of the $1 carts at Brattle Book Shop. ‘Cause it had all the right keywords in the title, she picked it up for me (my girlfriend is awesome!). Published in 1995, it’s fairly dated — most notably in its repeated references to lesbian, gay and sometimes bi with trans issues completely ignored, even in the section on intersectional politics (more below).

Vaid is a community organizer and lawyer (she attended Northeastern University Law School here in Boston in the early 1980s) and during the 80s and early 1990s worked for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. This book is clearly influenced by that, since she focuses on law and politics at the national level, rather than the more cutural history, personal politics stuff I tend to find the most interesting to read and think about. As an activist Vaid is also very focused on the contemporary moment (mid-90s), a perspective that means her analysis ages more rapidly (in my opinion) than it would if she was taking a longer, cultural-historical view. But then, that’s clearly my own scholarly bias!

Having said that, I’m going to turn around and more or less contradict myself by sharing a couple of passages from Virtual Equality that I thought resonated nicely with my post a couple of weeks ago about the heavy reliance of lgbt advocacy on the biology-is-destiny argument, at the expense of arguing that choosing non heteronormative relationships can be a positive and ethical personal and social choice.

From the first chapter, “Virtual Equality” (p. 30)

Homosexuality always involves choice — indeed, it involves a series of four major choices: admitting, acting, telling, and living. Even if scientists prove that sexual orientation is biologically or genetically determined, every person who feels homosexual desire encounters these four choices

Just as, I would point out, every person who feels heterosexual desire encounters them.

The first involves whether we will admit the existence of our desire: Will we acknowledge to ourselves that we feel same-sex attraction? The second choice is whether to act on this desire: Will we risk engaging in this love? The third is whether we acknowledge to other people that we are gay, lesbian, or bisexual … [this] question never end[s], because the process of coming out to other people never ends. The final choices each gay person makes is how to live a queer life.

Again, I’m struck by how easily we could understand these questions in the context of human sexuality, full stop. Regardless of the nature of our attractions, every person makes a complex series of choices about how to articulate, act on, and share with the world their own sexualness. I don’t think these questions are unique to non-straight people, but I do think they are thrown into relief for anyone whose sexuality does not approximate the normative vision of what it means to be sexual.

From “Divided We Stand: The Racial and Gender Status Quo” (p. 289)

My problem with conservative views of gay and lesbian identity is twofold: I disagree with the reliance on biology as the reason gayness should be fully tolerated, and I disagree with the idea that single-identity politics is effective. Same-sex behavior may well be related to physical differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but if our purpose in this movement is to remove the stigma surrounding same-sex love, then both biologically gay people and those who simply fall in love ought to be embraced by our movement.

I’m not particularly comfortable with how she phrases this, as “biologically gay people” on one hand and “those who simply fall in love” on the other (wait: don’t people who are “biologically gay” fall in love too??), but she’s spent the few pages before this talking about the Kinsey data on people who identify as straight but nevertheless report same-sex sexual encounters at some point during their lives, so I think that’s what she’s trying to get at, as clumsy as it sounds.

Organizing around the notion that there is a fixed, definable gay and lesbian identity is far more convenient than organizing around the notion that homosexual desire is a potential in every person. It is also far less threatening to straight America. We are certainly more comprehensible when we speak and act as if there is such a thing as a gay gene than when we attempt to argue that we seek to liberate homosexual potential in all people! … But even biology does not limit its expression to one form of being. The fact that homosexual people are as multifaceted as humankind itself means that our effort to organize around one gay or lesbian identity will inevitably fail.

What she ends up arguing is for the end to identity-based politics (which is where we see how she is arguing against the late-80s and early 1990s narratives of identity and political advocacy). In its place, she urges the necessity of a broad coalition of people organizing not around accidents of personal experience or identity but rather (dare I say) values.

In the chapter on the political right (what Vaid identifies as “the Supremacist Right” to differentiate those who are interested in preserving the democratic process from those who use it as a means to a supremacist end) she writes specifically about the importance of discussing sexual values and ethics on the left, rather than leaving such discourse to the political and religious right (p. 324).

The most provocative and, in my view, important of [Suzanne] Pharr’s suggestions is the call that the gay and lesbian movement vigorously debate sexual ethics. We must talk about our values, what we do, what we won’t do, what we think is right, and what we believe is wrong.

And, I would add, share the outcome of those conversations with the wider world. I think that since 1995 there has been more discussion about progressive and/or leftist, feminist and queer sexual values — educators and bloggers have definitely been asserting more frequently the importance of not leaving the ethics debate to conversative interests. Vaid approaches the issue gingerly, with the bitter divisions of the feminist “pornography wars” in the recent past. It was heartening for me to realize, as I read this passage, just how far we’ve come since then in articulating and embracing the wide variety of human sexual expression, and arguing for the “safe, sane, consensual” ethic as a starting point for discussing the finer points of what it means to make moral choices as a sexually active, sexually joyful human being.

Obviously, the task is far from over (will it ever be?), but reading Virtual Equality was a small taste of a single political moment captured in time through prose, and I was impressed by how much the discourse has changed since then, even if the issues remain virtually the same. Hopefully, as we begin to speak differently, we’re live differently as well. As feminism has taught me over and over again: langauge matters like hell: speaking about what we value is, hopefully, a step in the direction of seeing what we value valued all the more in the dominant culture.