The Tyranny of Youth – Now for Men, Too!

Since I’ve been home for the holidays, I’ve availed myself of my mom’s People magazine collection. Actually, she doesn’t buy People very often. She mostly likes the year-end roundups – and, as I noticed this week, the “World’s Hottest Men” issue.
I guess I’m my mother’s daughter, because I like hot men, too. But darn it [...]

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The Family that Votes together … Stays Together?

Ever heard of “family voting”? I hadn’t, either, until I came across the term in a translation project on Eastern Europe. It might sound warm and fuzzy at first blush. It’s anything but.
Here’s what the UN has to say about family voting:
A particular issue that often affects women and merits attention in voter education efforts [...]

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Who’s the Biggest Boob?

The charity Rethink Breast Cancer, which just produced a moronic video to “raise awareness” of breast cancer? Or LA Times reporter Dan Neil, who thinks this ad, entitled “Save the Boobs,” is a swell idea? (I think something may be rising and swelling, but I highly doubt it’s awareness.)

Jeff Fecke of [...]

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In Which I Argue for the Homoerotic Potential of Mainstream Porn

So you may have already heard about Tom Coburn’s chief of staff, Mike Schwartz, declaring that all porn is actually gay porn; I heard it first from Sir Charles at Cogitamus:
all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards. Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old [...]

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The Ballad of Sean and … Kemp?

Sean Lennon and his girlfriend, Kemp Muhl, have “recreated” the Lennon/Ono shot that’s seared in the memories of baby-boomers (of which I’m one of the youngest). The pic will appear in Purple magazine, which I’d never heard of ’til now. Naturally, since naked girl skin was involved, the HuffPo was all over it (h/t aagblog’s [...]

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Filament Expands “the Female Gaze” (Just a Little)

Remember Filament magazine, which I mentioned here a few weeks ago? They were searching for a printer who’d accept pictures of erections in their second issue, and as Laura Woodhouse reports at the F-Word, they found one. Good for them.
And because it’s much more intriguing than working on my syllabi, I checked out the promotional [...]

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The Partisanship of Penile Politics

Why is it that the only two presidents to undergo public speculation about the shape of their genitalia have both been Democrats? Sure, there was a short flurry of attention to the bulge in Dubya’s flight suit after his “mission accomplished” landing, but as far as I could tell, the question was mainly: codpiece, yes [...]

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Hawt Girl-on-Girl Action … ‘Til the Boys Look Away

Last fall, the topic of girls kissing girls for boys’ jollies came up in one of my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies sections. I’m still perplexed at how we landed there on the very first day of class, but hey, there we were. So I asked the group, which was about 90% freshmen, how [...]

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Women Are Soooo Mysterious!

Alternet has an extremely long piece exploring the mysteries of the female body. “Why do Women Orgasm?” by David Barash (mega-alpha-dog in evolutionary psychology) and Judith Eve Lipton asks a bunch of questions that are actually interesting, such as why evolution favored menstruation, menopause, and female sexual pleasure. Unfortunately, they don’t provide any answers that [...]

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Erotic Pictures for Women: Still Leaving Me Cold

A couple of weeks ago, Laura Woodhouse at the F-Word told the sad tale of a new women’s magazine in Great Britain that’s struggling to find a willing printer. The mag in question – Filament – is smart and sexy, she says, even if it’s not overtly feminist. Oh, and it intends to show naked [...]

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The U.S. As a “Sex Criminal”

Alternet has a deeply disturbing essay on the United States’ use of sodomy as an interrogation tactic – or as we used to say in those halcyon pre-9/11 days, torture. (Fair warning: Both the Alternet article and this post may be triggering to some folks.) I’m not sure whether its author, Allan Uthman of the [...]

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Since When Does Crazy = Girly?

Oh, Maureen Dowd. For a gal who questions whether men are really necessary, you sure do say some dumb shit about women.
I don’t usually read Dowd; she’s too glib, and today’s column is no exception. But today I hoped she’d buttress my interpretation of Mark Sanford as a Crappy Governor caught in the clutches of [...]

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Marriage as Sacrifice for … Whom, Exactly?

Via Glenn Greenwald, I just made the acquaintance of a paragon of toxic masculinity, Andrew Klavan, and I don’t know whether to laugh or wince or drop-kick my laptop. He’s a writer of hard-boiled fiction who has apparently solved the puzzle of sexual harmony. Here’s Klavan’s take on marriage:
I’m the old-fashioned King of the Castle [...]

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The Peculiar Prudery of HBO Porn

So I’m in Eugene, Oregon – home of the Mighty Ducks! – at a conference on pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering seen through a philosophical lens. As a historian, I’m a not-so-mighty duck out of water, but the actual philosophers are turning out to be warm, welcoming, and very very smart. I attended an absolutely fabulous [...]

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Deconstructing Beauty: Why Do We Care?

I got my hair cut and dyed today, stripey red and blond (it’s less funky than it sounds). I don’t look like Paris Hilton. I look better! No, really. I look just as fabulous as I possibly can, and that means I feel better, too. Now you can see that I was snarking yesterday when [...]

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Strip Searches in Schools: Not Just for Girls!

Is it ever okay to strip-search a student? The SCOTUS is hearing arguments on this, and if so, under what limitations. Justice Stephen Breyer – normally a good ally to liberals – managed to trivialize the issue in a dudely way, and both Historiann and Amanda Marcotte are taking him to task for it. Historiann [...]

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Our Old Tired Ethics

Moralists are ever ready to sacrifice one-half of the human race for the sake of some miserable institution which they can not outgrow. As a matter of fact, prostitution is no more a safeguard for the purity of the home than rigid laws are a safeguard against prostitution. … Yet society has not a word [...]

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To the Highest Bidder

This evening my university is hosting an event that makes me deeply uncomfortable, yet there’s been not a peep of protest. Probably because it’s “for a good cause.”
Over the past two weeks I’ve gotten two emails asking me to support this event – a formal dance – either by attending or by purchasing an ad [...]

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Queering Masculinity, ’70s Style

A few days ago, while I was having coffee with a colleague and friend of mine, we somehow got onto the subject of “Match Game.” I spent hundreds of hours watching that show during those long, lazy summers when I was in late grade school and junior high, circa 1975. The fact that everyone’s parents [...]

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God O Thunder Falls to Earth

Lego version of Thor, the Norse God of Thunder; image by Flickr user Dunechaser, used under a Creative Commons license.
Yesterday, Columbus police arrested a guy who’d been an active member of an Internet discussion board for johns, where he reviewed prostitutes and issued advice on not getting busted. The Columbus Dispatch reports he posted under [...]

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