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Jaclyn Friedman, the author of What You Really, Really Want (an amazing book that I think everyone should read), has a guest post over at feministe.us about the ways that women attack and shame other women around sexual assault. It’s a great read, but then, pretty much everything she writes is.
One of the things that I’ve noticed is how gendered the mechanisms of social control often are. My experience has been that men are more likely to exert this control through violence, while women tend to use shame, although of course, those are simply trends. While men’s violence has gotten much more attention in some circles, the effects of shame are often discounted or minimized even though they can sometimes be even …
Continue reading Shame and Violence: The Mechanisms of Social Control
Last week, Fetlife (the kinky social networking site) went offline, as can happen. And the folks running the site decided it would be funny to tweet about it:
#bbpBox_105135991261642752 a { text-decoration:none; color:#0084B4; }#bbpBox_105135991261642752 a:hover { text-decoration:underline; }
Whoops… FetLife just went down like a drunk hooker…
Predictably enough, a mini twitter-storm ensued, as various folks called Fetlife out for it. And a few days later, a post by Rayne on Eden Cafe (the blog affiliated with sex toy company Eden Fantasys) defending the tweet as “just a joke” compounded the error. But that post and some of the comments highlight the confusion that a lot of people have about the original tweet.…
Continue reading Fetlife Just Doesn’t Get It When It Come to Joking About Sex Workers
This showed upon my screen and I wanted to pass it along. Please share it with anyone who might be interested. It looks like a fantastic project!
“AIN’T I A WOMAN: RACE, FEMINISM AND SOCIAL MEDIA”
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Morgane Richardson,
Professional Feminist, Founder of Refuse the Silence and Ain’t I a Woman Events
and
Jessie Daniels,
Associate Professor, CUNY – Hunter College and the Graduate Center
Overview
We are currently seeking essays on the importance of social media for, by and about women of color within the feminist movement. In 2011, feminists gathered in New York and Los Angeles at Ain’t I A Woman (AIAW) events to discuss race, feminism and social media. The discussions started at those events have continued through a wide …
Continue reading Call for Submissions: Ain’t I A Woman: Race, Feminism And Social Media
I’ve been an advocate for sex workers’ rights for a long time. Unlike many people, I think it’s possible to create a world in which people have the freedom to engage in commercial sex AND the freedom from having it imposed upon them. I’ve known too many people who paid their way through college or grad school with sex work, who have appreciated the flexibility that sex work can offer (perhaps to travel or perhaps to be able to take care of their kids), or who have enjoyed the work and their clients to be willing to fall into the “all sex work is bad/rape/slavery” camp.
I certainly acknowledge that there is a huge problem when folks who are forced into sexual slavery, which …
Continue reading When Arrogance Meets Activism: Ashton Kutcher and Sex Trafficking
There’s a post on SexIs today from Roland Hulme, in which he shows that he almost gets how his privilege works. In his piece, he discusses the responses to a previous post of his, in which he wrote that (at the time), he was of the opinion that transgender people shouldn’t be able to change the designated sex on their birth certificates. And as he wrote:
It drew a lot of comments — many of them angry and frustrated — and opened my eyes to a lot of different perspectives on the issue. Ultimately, the debate revealed that something I thought was cut-and-dried turned out to be a lot more complex than I’d imagined. My opinion was challenged and my attitudes changed by the
…
Continue reading When Straight, White, Cisgender Men Don’t Get It
One of the difficulties that those of us who are looking to challenge the Act Like a Man Box (see my post The Performance of Masculinity for an explanation of that, if you aren’t familiar with it) is that the Box itself gets in the way. My observation is that’s because “believes in the Box” is inside the Box, so when a man starts to question it, the guys in the Box immediately perceive him to be outside it and dismiss anything he says about it.
On the other hand, I’ve also seen a lot of men who want to break out of the Box do so by rejecting everything inside it. I’ll come out of the closet here and admit that for a few …
Continue reading Picking and Choosing from the “Act Like a Man Box”
If you need some evidence that we’re not actually in a post-racism world, here’s another bit of proof.
When adolescent women show up at emergency rooms saying that they’re experiencing lower abdominal pain and/or urinary or genital symptoms, just over 26% of them test positive for gonorrhea, chlamydia, and/or trichomonas. And since many adolescents don’t have primary care doctors, they end up at the ER, so it’s especially important that they get appropriate care. Of course, in a society that offered both accurate sex education and universal, affordable health care, we wouldn’t be asking ER staff (who are more used to dealing with actual emergencies) to deal with STIs, would we?
In any case, it turns out that when young women (13-21 years old) …
Continue reading Race Bias Influences Who Gets STI Tests
Psychology Today posted a piece by someone with a PhD in computational neuroscience and someone with a PhD in biologically inspired models of machine learning, which apparently qualifies them to make some remarkable statements about gender, sexuality, and relationships. They seem to prefer making some remarkably reductionist and essentialist claims about how sex works, along with the usual sweeping statements. That might work well in the computer lab, but that’s hardly how people work in the real world.
So I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that their recent piece Why Feminism is the Anti-Viagra is more of the same. Their thesis centers on the idea that “gender equality inhibits arousal”. To support this, they offer a few bits of evidence:
- many women have
…
Continue reading When Scientists Don’t Understand Sex: Feminism, Dominance, and Arousal
One of the many challenges of being a parent or a teacher is helping kids and young people learn how to treat others with respect. It’s certainly not easy, especially when we’re surrounded by (among other things), disrespect masquerading as humor.
One of the most effective ways to get away with saying hurtful things is to follow them up with “just kidding” because it then makes it seem like the folks who take offense are humorless and can’t take a joke. Powered By Girl has a post about “go make me a sandwich,” which is an unfortunately common way for boys and men to get a rise out of girls and women. As in: “Bitch, shut the fuck up and go make me a sandwich.” …
Continue reading If You Thought That Sexism Was Over…
It won’t be any news to you that things aren’t equal between men and women. The toll of sexism on everyone, regardless of gender, is huge, although it lands differently on different people. But this guy is trying to deal with it in exactly the wrong way.
Roy Den Hollander is a lawyer who’s all worked up about gender-based discrimination. His problem though, isn’t that women make less money than men, that they’re judged for their looks more than men, or that women are much more likely to be sexually harassed and assaulted than men. No, his beef is that bars and clubs often offer women free or discounted admission and gosh darn it, it’s not …
Continue reading The Wrong Way to End Sexism
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