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.}

Incidentally, I am totally in love with this illustration (above) . . . I keep searching for nice pictures of women lovers on Flickr and this is the first time a search has actually yielded something I liked well enough to put on the Sunday Smut list. It’s an illustration for an article on lesbians in the Polish magazine Wysokie Obcasy (“High Heels”) which to my mind makes it even more awesome.

Speaking of women getting a little personal, there was a lot of angst this week about women showing emotion publically. Deborah Orr & Anne Perkins @ The Guardian both take women to task for such “feminine” displays of emotion as crying and giggling and sharing personal stories. Orr writes scathlingly of actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s recent disclosure that sometimes she cries at work while Anne Perkins derides female politicians for sharing personal anecdotes and giggling, suggesting “let’s keep the personal out of politics.” Aside from the obvious sexist double standard of equating femaleness with excessive emotion (who decides what’s excessive anyway??) I find it particularly offensive that Perkins co-opts the personal-political dyad of the feminist movement, in effect calling in coded language for the rejection of feminist sensibilities in political spaces. The suggestion that things associated with women are “unserious” is really irresponsible. And stupid to boot. Like me, Whitney Teal @ Women’s Rights Blog objected to this sudden hate on emotion, asking is crying at work so wrong? And in an article on “the art of confession,” Emily Gould @ New York Magazine points out that personal confessions are recieved differently by the public, depending on whether the confessor is male or female

If a woman writes about herself, she’s a narcissist. If a man does the same, he’s describing the human condition. But people seem to evaluate your work based on how much they relate to it, so it’s like, well, who’s the narcissist?

Jill @ Feminist deconstructs the cultural narratives surrounding the publication of Harvard Law School student Stephanie Grace’s racist email, pointing out that

Why should you be able not only to have the freedom to raise whatever issue you want, but also have the privilege to do so without offending anyone? That simply is not how the world works — ideas, as they say, have consequences, and part of the consequences of raising controversial (or idiotic) arguments is that people will become annoyed, angry or offended. I don’t think that people have a right to not be offended, but you also definitely do not have a right to demand that other people accept without emotion whatever ridiculous or hateful argument you make.

I think this story ties in with the story I wrote about earlier this week involving the desire of homophobic petition signers to keep their identity secret for fear they would have to have “uncomfortable conversations” with people who did not share their views. Freedom of speech does not mean you have the right to speak up without anyone disagreeing with you, people! Just like protection from violence and harassment does not equal never having to have a tense conversation about politics. Grow up already, people!*

So possibly, the Washington Times should not be surprised when people get a little, well, emotional in response to an editorial (yes, as in written-by-and-endorsed-by-the-Times) titled “Discrimination Is Necessary: Subjecting Kids to Weirdos Undermines Decency” (I mean, really, can you get any more appallingly bigoted? in a major print publication? wtf?) Via CaitieCat @ Shakeville comes an open letter in response to the editoral which I highly recommend reading: “Let’s talk about the consequences of teaching children that cruelty is acceptable as long as the victim is ‘not normal.'” Another open letter on the subject of transphobia at the national level comes from Autumn Sandeen @ Pandagon who writes about her experience in the hands of law enforcement after being arrested for protesting DADT outside the White House.

Also on the subject of transphobia, and its intersections with other types of bigotry, Kate Borstein @ Out reflects on the outrage over a recently-released film titled Ticked-Off Trannies With Knives, while intersectionality of another sort is the subject of a thoughtful, open-ended discussion between Latoya and Thea @ Racialicious. Not being a fan of any sort of oppression olympics (people who claim “my pain is more exquisite than your pain!” as a way of shutting someone up), I highly recommend the piece, even though it doesn’t offer simple solutions.

Women and breasts were also a popular topic this week, perhaps a side effect of the much-discussed “boobquake” protest? The protest’s originator, Jennifer McCreight @ The Guardian entertained us with what she learned from her quasi-scientific experiment; Amanda Hess @ The Sexist interviewed blogger C.l. Minou (The Second Awakening) about breast augmentation and feminine beauty standards while Rebecca @ The Thang Blog shares a conversation she had with her dad (a civil rights lawyer) about the possibility of getting herself arrested while going topless in public.

Two adoption-related blog posts this week, one from Harriet Jacobs @ Fugitivus, speaking out passionately in defense of her belief that adoption is always the second-best option, and Jill @ Feministe writes in defense of single fathers’ parental rights.

In other “think of the children!” news, Sinclair @Sugarbutch Chronicles shares some thoughts on why sex education is still a radical, controversial act and Margaret Eby @ Salon suggest that, despite hysteria in certain quarters preteen girls are not yet harlots. (Sad! Because “harlot” is an underutilized word).

Hanna Seligson @ The Wall Street Journal reports on the emerging ritual of pre-planned marriage proposals, where couples stage a proposal as if it were a surprise, even though they have had extensive discussions beforehand. I’m gonna admit right up front I don’t understand this: if you want to have an engagement party, awesome! But why stage this fake surprise where the man — and in hetero couples it always seems to be the man — “pops the question” to the woman, and she feigns surprise? Seligson has some intriguing theories, even though I’m not sure I agree with her in the final analysis.

And finally, congrats to Feministing’s founder Jessica and her partner Andrew who are expecting their first child on election day this November. I hope for you a nice, long bubble of privacy as you adjust to being a new iteration of your family together.

^{*Hanna points out that it is unclear whether the email (and original remarks) were intended to be between friends or sent out to a more public audience — say a study group — and how they ended up being made public. Jill’s point, however, is that having become public for whatever reason, the email is a legitimate subject of debate, as is Ms. Grace’s reasoning re: race and its implications for her legal work.}

*image credit: kiss – illustration for an article about sex, Wysokie Obcasy #20 (523) 16 May 2009 made available by pixel endo @ Flickr.com.

Just the links this weekend, folks!

Amy Romano @ Science & Sensibility | Why my first year blogging has changed how I see everything.

Ampersand @ Alas, a Blog | If you can’t switch to vegetarian, switch to chicken.

Amanda Hess @ The Sexist | With Great Cleavage Comes Great Responsibility.

Two posts from awesome sex blogger Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog | After You, My Dear Alphonse (on why speaking up for what you want in bed is not selfish) and Mis-Matched Libidos: Can Mixed Marriages Ever Work? (on why Dan Savage’s advice to couples with mis-matched libidos is lacking).

Melissa McEwan @ Shakesville | Two Days in the Life of Fatty Fatastrophe (on being shamed by one’s doctor about weight).

Gala @ Gala Darling | xox (on why slut-shaming and virgin-shaming are wrong). Via Spiffy @ Hippyish.

Also on the subject of virgins and whores: J Maureen Henderson @ Bitch Blogs | The Young and The Feckless: Casual Sex Meets Cognitive Dissonance.

Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon | Viagra for women: The quest for the perfect orgasm.

Nancy Keenan @ Blog for Choice | Nancy Keenan Responds to Newsweek Article on Young Pro-Choice Activists (more on the question of young progressives/liberals/people generally and social responsibility later this week if I can carve out the time).

Annaham @ Tiger Beatdown | LADYPALOOZA PRESENTS! How Amanda Palmer Lost a Fan, or, My Own Private Backlash (more about internet bullying than Amanda Palmer, but don’t click through if you’d rather avoid someone being pissed at Neil Gaiman’s fiancee. just sayin’).

And finally, with amused befuddlement, I offer you Emily Votruba @ n+1 | Is Anal Sex Fair to Women? (complete with helpful comparative chart!)

*image credit: Nude sheer by Bruce Mayer made available @ Flickr.com by V-Rider.

Sunday rolls around once more, and with it fun stuff on sex and gender for your weekend leisure reading!

As I catch up on my reading and put this list together, mostly supervising the reading room at work, the MHS is hosting a conference, Margaret Fuller and Her Circles, in honor of the 200th anniversary of Margaret Fuller’s birth (23 May 1810). In conjunction, we have also mounted an exhibit, “A More Interior Revolution”: Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and the Women of the American Renaissance, open to the public Monday-Saturday, 1-4pm through June 30th. If you’re in the Boston area, come on by and check it out!

Lori @ Feministing offers us an alternate advice column in response to a young woman in Vermont who wrote to Dear Wendy asking what to do about the fact that everyone calls her a slut, and on the way by links to a recent piece by Chloe Angyal @ The Huffington Post reflecting on why media literacy won’t solve the problem of women and girls’ negative body image: “Fashion models, [the girls surveyed believe], are too skinny, unrealistic, and look unhealthy and sick. And yet 48% wish they could look just like them. This is, to state the obvious, a serious problem. It’s one thing to want to be beautiful for beauty’s sake. It’s quite another to want to be unhealthy for beauty’s sake.”

Teen mom celebrity Bristol Palin has recorded an anti-teen-parenthood PSA message that has been criticized by many feminist bloggers (among them Roxann MtJoy @ Women’s Rights Blog) as a message that basically comes across as “only rich, privileged kids like me should have sex.” What I think is fascinating is that Palin is voicing (though in a bizarre, through-the-looking-glass way) what many feminist bloggers have pointed out: that she had a robust support system that enabled her to carry her pregnancy to term and become a teen parent without many of the long-term negative effects that her less-privileged peers can suffer. Yet she rather than speak out for reproductive justice so that all girls and women have the same ability to choose parenthood she did (if they want to), she shames less-privileged girls for having sexual desires and acting on them. No points.

Anat Shenker-Osorio @ RhRealityCheck reflects on the problem with understanding sex (“what bodies are”) and gender (“what bodies do”) as distinct and oppositional categories (male/female) when in reality — biologically as well as culturally — they are often somewhere in the muddled middle. “It’s too long been standard practice to enforce a one-to-one relationship, to dismiss any divergence between sex, gender identity and even sexual orientation as some kind of problematic aberration. In fact, deviation from the mean is an interesting, useful and common aspect of humans in our forms and functions.”

Amy Romano @ Our Bodies, Our Blog writes about the unequal treatment meted out by professional associations, the legal system, and the general public towards midwives and OB/GYNs. While midwives live under constant threat of having their ability to practice curtailed or revoked with the slightest whiff of malpractice, doctors who performed a c-section on a woman who was not pregnant have faced little in the way of professional consequences.

On a similar note, Miriam @ Radical Doula calls our attention to the website “My OB Said WHAT?!?” which encourages women whose care providers (whether nurses, OB/GYNS, or midwives) has said off-the-wall shit to them during prenatal care, labor and delivery, and post-partum care. For example

“The baby can’t do that. You haven’t had a cervix check.” -L&D nurse absentmindedly while reviewing papers, to mother with a history of fast labors, when the mother stated “The baby is coming” 20 minutes after arriving in the hospital. The baby was crowning.

I particularly enjoyed this one because the exact same thing happened to my mother (who also had fast labors) when she went to the hospital to give birth to my brother twenty-six years ago. Like babies and mothers’ bodies somehow wait for the nurses to check all the little boxes in the appropriate order before getting on with things!

Harriet Jacobs @ Fugitivus has a brief post up on what it means to be a “fat acceptance” blog, and I appreciated the way she articulates the difference between telling your own story and judging others.

Do you want to talk about your own body image issues? That is awesome. Do you want to talk about the “obesity epidemic” and how if people would just eat X while dancing in a circle with Y and clapping their hands for Tinkerbell they would win the anti-gravity BMI trophy of HAPPINESS? You don’t get to do that here. Everybody gets to be the size and shape they are, everybody gets to eat how they want here, and nobody here gets to tell them they have to change, or there’s something wrong with them.

I still haven’t formulated a comment policy for my own blog, mostly out of laziness (too little traffic to make it an issue 99% of the time), but when I see stuff like this I realize I should sit down one of these days and really articulate what I believe to be civil discourse. Not pushing your own shit onto others, even (most especially?) strangers on the internet, is definitely one such criteria.

Feminist bloggers the blogosphere over squealed with glee over the news that a group of scholars disappointed in the multifaceted, intersectional gender analysis that is women’s studies, men’s studies, and gender studies, have established a new discipline that they call “male studies.” Tracy Clark-Flory @ Salon describes the group’s position and expresses sadness that their oppositional stance toward feminism could prove counterproductive for thoughtful gender analysis. Sady & Amanda @ Sexist/Tiger Beatdown rap about what this says about the state of gender politics and Amanda Hess (who can’t seem to stop giggling about this) offers some possible names for consideration as appointments to future male studies departments.

In a similar vein, figleaf @ Figleaf’s Real Adult Sex reflects on why anti-feminists are so worried that women’s advancement means men’s downfall. “Summary: A highly-exasperated reflection on the embarrassing, sometimes embarrassingly earnest, anti-feminist belief that if the playing field is leveled men can can’t compete with women.”

And finally, this week, on a thoughtful note, this column passed along to me by Hanna from The Guardian in which Denis Campbell @ The Guardian discusses the complicated ethics of transatlantic surrogacy and adoption. In the words of one couple, “I resent people saying that British couples who resort to surrogacy are buying babies abroad. We didn’t buy Harriet: she’s not picked off a shelf. She’s not a ‘designer baby’.”

*image credit: Snake on a Naked Woman made available by lucy10 @ Flickr.com.

Let’s see what the feeds brought in this week . . .

Last week, Miriam @ Feministing pointed us toward the shortlist for the LAMDA awards, while also highlighting the problem with having specific categories for gay/lesbian/bi/trans fiction and nonfiction.

A bigger problem can be found in Baltimore, Maryland where the Catholic Archdiocese is suing the city for the right to continue false advertising tactics that encourage women seeking abortion care to crisis pregnancy centers which do not offer abortion services or referrals. As SarahMC @ The Pursuit of Harpyness quips, “I thought ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness’ was a component of Christianity.” Looks like maybe not.

Another way of exerting control over women’s bodies can come through cultural assumptions about how our bodies work. Over at RhRealityCheck, sex educator Heather Corinna unpacks some of the cultural myths about the visibility of sexual activity (or lack thereof) on the bodies of women and girls.

Which pairs nicely with Jill’s piece @ Feministe about how strange it is that being pro-sex gets you attacked for being anti-sex (yes really). She takes on the rape apologetics of a college columnist at American University and makes yet another strong argument for why framing rape as mostly a “misunderstanding” or “miscommunication” between two people ignores the act of violence that those who commit rape engage in. (Trigger warning)

It’s scary to think that someone could initially say no, then change their minds and say yes, and then say that they meant “no” all along. And that’s the picture that rape apologists paint: A fun, drunken night, and the next day the cops are at your door.

But that’s not how this really works.

Most on-campus rapists don’t identify as rapists, but they do realize that they are forcing women into unwanted sex . . . I find it really helpful to actually think through, fully, an acquaintance-rape scenario as they more typically happen . . .

. . . You’re engaging in some sexual activity with someone, and they start to pull back or their body stiffens, and they say “no.” When you look at their face, they look scared. Do you continue anyway?

You’re engaging in some sexual activity and then they say “stop” or “no.” If they say “no” or “stop” or they yell, do you keep going? If they cry, you keep going? If they try to push you away, do you keep going?

You’re engaging in some sexual activity, and the person you’re with says to stop. Do you threaten them in order to convince them to have sex with you?. . .

Go read the whole thing, and bookmark it for the next time you need something to point skeptics toward.

Also on the subject of young people and sexual agency, Laura Penny @ The Guardian offers a powerful op-ed piece on the way youth sexual subjectivity is co-opted by adult agendas. “For young women in particular, a double standard is in place. We are pitied for growing up amid media encouraging erotic availability, but we are also portrayed as wanton strumpets, vomiting our worthless GCSEs into drains with our knickers around our knees, especially if we are “girls from deprived areas”. Nowhere is there the idea that young women might have their own minds.”

Not only young people, of course, but a myriad of other folks who don’t fit our cultural ideal of acceptable sexual hotness are relentlessly policed when it comes to personal agency. Chloe @ Feministing follows up on her post about the show Ugly Betty with another post titled “Beautiful girls are bitchy and ugly girls are nice.” Chloe has also offered some great reflections on fucking dating while feminist, in follow-up to Jaclyn Friedman’s interview with Amanda Hess @ The Sexist. Jaclyn has clearly provoked a lot of thought among those of us in the feminist blogosphere about the role of feminism in our personal lives and relationships.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, meanwhile, guest blogs at Sociological Images about the fat shaming in the television show “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution.” While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with media that demonstrates how to cook nutritious meals that are simple, tasty, inexpensive, I think it’s important to critique shows that buy into the cultural myth that people who do not conform to our cultural standards of thinness are automatically unhealthy, lazy and immoral. And it sounds like this particular show carries those messages in spades.

If you can’t view the video, here’s a quick summary: Headless fatties? Check. Enormous food stock footage? Check. OHNOES Obesity Crisis ^TM? Check. Being fat is ugly? Check. Fat people are lazy? Check. Fat people are stupid? Check. Fat people are sick? Check. DEATHFAT? Check. Mother-blaming for fat kids? Check. Fat as a moral failure? Check. Religious shaming of fat? Check. Fat people don’t have “the tools” to not be fat? Check. Fat people need a skinny savior? Checkity-check-check!

I want to note that there is, buried somewhere beneath the 10 metric fucktons of fat-shaming (and not an incidental dose of misogyny, for good measure), information about healthful eating (e.g. not eating any fresh veg, ever, isn’t good for anyone), but this is information that could be delivered without a scene in which a mother of four whose husband is gone three weeks a month is told that she’s killing her children while she’s weeping at her kitchen table.

The premiere episode has absolutely zero structural critique, not even a passing comment about the reason that millions of mothers feed their kids processed foods is because it’s cheap and fast, which is a pretty good solution for people who are short on money and time.

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s pretty immoral to spend your time shaming folks about individual choices while ignoring the structural forces that limit their range of choices, not to mention ignoring the ways in which our assumptions about health are (partially if not wholly) culturally constructed rather than set in stone.

Also on the subject of visual representation, some Holocaust scholars are disputing the legitimacy of including images of lesbians in a holocaust memorial highlighting homosexual victims of the Nazi regime. Arguing that persecution of lesbian women was “not comparable” to that of gay men, and that using an image of two women on the memorial (as part of a rotating series of videos depicting same-sex couples kissing) “distorts history.” While I think it is a legitimate scholarly point to make, that because of mid-century understandings of sexual orientation and gender men were disproportionately targeted, lesbians were hardly free to express their sexuality without punishment (see Aimee and Jaguar).

Also on the subject of queer history, Simon Callow, writing for The Guardian, muses about a new history claiming to tell the tale of “gay icons through the ages,” which instead fails to engage critically in the historical debate over how valid it is, exactly, to read our own understandings of sexuality back into the past

As David Halperin points out in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (Routledge), it is virtually meaningless to compare the experience of a New Guinean youth who, in order to reinforce his masculinity, daily ingests the semen of his elders, to that of a young gay man in Manhattan who is heavily into fellatio. Both involve sex between men, but the nature of the participation is radically different. Such questions are fundamental to any overview of gay history, but they do not seem to have come within Ambrose’s remit.

Similar questions about changing conceptions of human sexuality plagued the characters of the web comic Cat and Girl earlier this week (thanks to Hanna for the link), as one character doesn’t understand the word “cisgendered,” and another has to explain. It made me think again about how vocabulary has been changing so quickly within the gender and sexuality field, and how to communicate why changing how we speak matters, even though it is by its very nature a never-ending process of transformation (language, ideally, changes as we change to better meet our needs as human beings).

And finally, on a lighter note: “President Obama—Our First Gay President?” Hendrik Hertzberg @ The New Yorker News Desk thinks not, but offers his own nominee for who might have been, at least by the Bill Clinton/Toni Morrison standard.

*image credit: Nude Lady with Drink by dave11198 @ Flickr.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This’ll be your last Sunday Smut list until I return from Oregon, so watch for no. 15 to appear on March 28th. In the interim, you’ll be on your own when it comes to the latest sex and gender related gossip in the blogosphere.

This week, to start us off, we have dueling videos: made-of-awesome and made-of-misogyny (not to mention misandry). On the pro-side we have a “That’s Gay!” segment posted by lisa @ Sociological Images that lampoons the discomfort surrounding Johnny Weir’s appearance at the Olympic games (“is Johnny Weir too gay for figureskating? . . . Wait. Is that even possible?”). On the con side, we have a PSA video produced by the socially conservative sexuality education organization SexReally posted by Jos @ Feministing (and just about every other feminist blog). It indulges in a whole host of harmful stereotypes, not the least of which is the idea that all men are sexual animals whom women must protect themselves from via safer sex practices.

Elsewhere, SKM @ Shakesville shares Johnny Weir’s response to critics (web video + partial transcript).

There’s been a lot of talk this week about the current state of sexism in popular culture, and how certain practices are being marketed to women as feminist when, possibly they aren’t all that different from traditional notions of how “nice girls” ought to feel and behave. Susan J. Douglas @ In These Times asks whether sexism is being sold to women as “empowerment”; Jessica Grose @ Slate’s DoubleX muses about cycles of slut shaming and the powerful cultural taboos over casual sex (Rachel @ The Feminist Agenda weighs in); Lucy Mangan @ The Guardian musters a quality rant on how Helen Fielding and her character Bridget Jones “destroyed my 20s”; and finally, Charlotte Raven @ The Guardian reviews several new books of feminism and culture, and suggests that it’s time for more women to become re-politicized about their position in society: “In the 50s, as now, the early gains of feminism had been squandered by a generation who thought it unglamorous and inhibiting.”

A new report shows that sexually-active Americans know alarmingly little about pregnancy prevention and how to protect themselves from sexually transmitted infections. Amie Newman @ RhReality Check reports the cold, hard facts, while Amanda Hess @ The Sexist offers us sex ed, Microsoft Paint edition.

Over @ The Lesbian Lifestyle, goldstardyke announced the winners of this years Lezzie Awards in blogging; of the blogs I follow, Feministing.com won in the category of Best Lesbian Feminist/Political Blog and Essin’ Em’s Sexuality Happens was a Runner Up in the category of Sex/Short Story/Erotica.

Congratulations are also due to Samhita @ Feministing, who has been chosen by the members of Feministing’s collective as the first to fill the rotating position of Executive Editor.

Cara @ The Curvature offers a powerful and scathing analysis of the recent report on sexual assault on college campuses and the continued failure of officials to respond meaningfully or create a climate in which victims of sexual violence are willing to come forward and report. Her argument is nuanced and worth digesting in full, but a few choice quotations (bold emphasis mine):

This idea that some rapes are Really Bad Rapes, and other rapes are Eh, Not That Big of a Deal Rapes, is incredibly damaging — especially when the only kinds of rapes that count as Really Bad Rapes are the kinds that are the least common — and also incredibly pervasive. Some rapes are more violent than others, but the bottom line is that rape is rape.

Saying that there are “middle” rape cases, that involve miscommunication and mutual intoxication, first of all, is patently false. Rape does not occur because of “miscommunication” — it just doesn’t. It occurs because of one party’s decision to ignore, disengage from, and/or reject communication. The idea that there are hoards of rapists out there “accidentally” raping is absurd on its face. But even if it was true, it results in a no less responsible rapist. If you don’t want to rape someone, you make sure that the other party is enthusiastically and meaningfully consenting. If you fail to do that and rape someone, there was no accident involved — just the likely and logical outcome of a conscious choice to disregard the bodily autonomy and safety of another person.

. . .

Here is where the overarching problem with schools’ disciplinary procedures, as well as the problem with how we as a society evaluate rape in general, comes to light. We spend more time looking at how the rapist thought about the event, rather than what the rapist actually did. We spend more time thinking about how the rapist might have meant things differently, rather than looking at the violence and oppression the rapist actually enacted. And we give more credence to the rapist’s intent than to the victim’s trauma and sense of violation.

And there can simply be no justice for rape victims when the first order of business is always to consider how the rapist feels.

Read the entire post at The Curvature.

Also (sadly) in the annals of rape culture Melissa McEwan @ Shakesville reports on a columnist who claims women joggers who desire solitary exercise are asking to be raped and murdered.

The Women’s Collections Roundtable of the Society of American Archivists reports that the awesome Women and Social Movements online collection is free for the month of March in celebration of women’s history month.

While Heather Corinna conducts a study on attitudes and experiences of casual sex, Sady and Amanda @ The Sexist ask is hook-up culture eating our brains?

Via SFSignal (thanks to Hanna for the tip), Lambda Literary announces a new webzine devoted to book reviews, author interviews and more.

And finally, a slightly dated (from last August) post from mlawski @ Overthinking It making the case that Strong Female Characters ™ are actually detrimental to the feminist cause. I should note that this post prompted a lively discussion in our household due to the classification of Leia in Star Wars as a modified Damsel in Distress ™. Hanna argues that mlawski is cherry-picking examples and thus destroying her case; I bow to Hanna’s mastery of the history of genre film in general and Star Wars in particular while maintaining that mlawski’s identification of a trend and its weaknessness is still valid. I leave it to my readers to decide for themselves.

*image credit: painting of sleeping nude by afewfigsstudio @ Flickr.com

Just links this week folks . . . ran out of oomph to provide commentary.

Can You Get Sexuality Info at the Library? | Charlie Glickman @ the Good Vibrations Blog.

Sexually Confused | Zoe Margolis @ The Guardian.

But Women Don’t Rape (about female-on-male sexual assault) | Rachel Hills @ Feministe.

When Rapists Graduate and Victims Drop Out | Amanda Hess @ The Sexist.

“A Culture of Indifference”: Report on Campus Sexual Assault Reveals Inaction Taken by Schools, Education Department | Vanessa @ Feministing.

Our Addiction to Tiger Woods’ “Sex Addiction” | Marty Klein @ Sexual Intelligence.

How *not* to write about sex addiction | Amanda Marcotte @ Pandagon.

Surrogacy: The Next Frontier for Reproductive Justice | Miriam Perez @ RhRealityCheck.

Worried About Women of Color? Thanks, But No Thanks, Anti-Choicers. We’ve Got It Covered | Miriam Perez @ RhRealityCheck (’cause why not link the Radical Doula twice when you can?)

How childbirth caused my PTSD | Taffy Brodesser-Akner @ Salon

“What does a feminist mother look like?”: 2 of 2 | Molly @ first the egg.

Our Labia Look Just Fine, Thanks: Part III | BeckySharper @ The Pursuit of Harpyness.

Is Saying “I’m Gay” Offensive? | Toni Infanti @ Feminist Law Professors.

Gay Relationships & the US Census | Charlie Glickman @ the Good Vibrations Blog.

Gay Mafiosi and Group Marriage Monotheists: Sex, “Caprica,” and a Changing World | Greta Christina @ The Blowfish Blog.

Lady Gaga sports a strap-on | Jessica @ Feministing.

Cyndi Lauper & Lady Gaga Go Off Script, Discuss Safe Sex On GMA | Margaret Hartmann @ Jezebel.

which leads for obvious reasons to…

Homophobia and the Olympics & Johnny Weir, you’re awesome | Amanda @ Feminist Musings by a Christian Woman.

*image credit: Figure Skating Johnny Weir 2009 NHK Trophy made available by ando.miki @ Flickr.com