feminist blogs

Nothing more effective in selling a product than telling women their used-up vadges are ruining their relationships. Another gem after the jump.

(Text at the bottom says "Vaginal-tightening gel for women over 40.")

via copyranter.

Tony Judt, a well-known historian, has written an engaging essay called “Girls! Girls! Girls!” for NYRBlog, The New York Review of Books blog, about how our stance towards sexual behavior on (and, by implication, off) campus has changed over the years. I don’t agree with everything he says–and he would probably say it’s because I am a product of my (and his) times–but what he says is thought-provoking. Here are some snippets, which, taken out of context, may lose some of the irony that informs them in the original:

Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU's History Department], a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study—beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the premiere of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.

How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour—that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.

***

[T]he anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the university for failing to take seriously “her” needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.

So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman—isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case.

***

Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ’60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.

Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”

Full disclosure: One reason this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the question he poses at the end of his post:

So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Except in my case she was a dark-haired and compellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Just when you thought science couldn’t get any better, a new article in Nature is about to shake up our ideas of sex and biology.

Contrary to an old view of sexual development, Michael Clinton and his colleagues at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh say in the March 11 Nature, individual chicken cells can maintain their own strong male or female identities during development instead of being directed by hormones.

Clinton says his research group ended up considering hormones and sexual identity in the course of studying three peculiar chickens donated to the Roslin Institute. Each bird looked like a rooster on one side, with a long wattle jiggling under its chin, robust legs and bulging muscles. The other half of the same bird — the right side on two birds and the left on the third — had the darker plumage, reduced wattle and dainty ankles of a hen.

Such male-female mashups, called gynandromorphs, have turned up spontaneously in zebra finches, pigeons and parrots as well as in other kinds of animals, Clinton says. These cases challenge the traditional view that genetics takes a back seat to hormonal signals in guiding vertebrate sexual differentiation.

Holy chicken nuggets, Batman! Are the chickens intersex, transgender, or what? Maybe they’re “two-spirit.” But whatever word you want to use, that’s pretty freakin’ awesome that the chickens have both male and female parts, and they’re literally split down the middle of the chromosomal line.

I once saw some fish at an aquarium that could change their sex in order to perpetuate the species. Females could become male if there was a sex imbalance in the group, in order to reproduce and perpetuate the species. Transsexual fish.

You might be wondering what the heck does this has to do with anything. Well, I think the chickens and the fish show that transgender identities exist throughout nature. Kind of cool if you ask me.

(Hat tip to the Shanman for the story link.)

I was just speaking at Ohio University and found out about a blog on campus that two women started which is designed to be a discussion forum for hook-ups. Students anonymously post their torrid tales of drug and alcohol-infused sexual encounters. As you might imagine, the posts have gotten pretty ugly and incredibly sexist, in part because of the categories, which include descriptors like "coyote ugly."

This is, as many might remember, akin to Juicy Campus, shut down in February 2009 because of legal issues.

I understand the impulse to create these sites and participate in them. In a culture that stigmatizes hook-ups, especially for women, online sites feel like a safe place to talk about some of what actually goes on in dorm rooms across America. Unfortunately, what could be a safe place to talk frankly about sexual exploration, often ends up replicating a bunch of sexist norms that exist in the off line world already.

In light of the recent controversy surrounding Rachel Simmons' post on hook-up culture, I'm reminded why these kinds of blogs are so rampant and interesting. We are so hungry to talk out loud about hook up culture--both the sexually empowering parts and the totally sexist parts. We need a space where feminists can really delve into the complexity of this issue, without being labeled, writ large, traitors or female chauvinist pigs. The blog world serves some of that, but it seems like we're still searching for a more nuanced conversation.

I doubt these juicy campus type blogs are the place to do it, but is there a way to structure such a space that would lead to a real conversation about hook-up culture? Does anyone have experiences of these kinds of sites on their campuses? Is there any liberatory potential or do they all devolve into misogynistic free-for-alls where women's bodies, reputations, and very worth are ridiculed?

*Don't miss community poster Maya's super thoughtful take on hook up culture.

“I am gay.  Those are the words that have been so difficult for me for so long.  It is something that is personal, and I don’t believe I felt with my heart that being gay would affect how I do my job.”

-- California State Sen. Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield)

This is the funniest and most pathetic story of the day. I think Roy forgot that the news broke last week, and a whole lot of people already knew.

That said, his official coming out on a Bakersfield radio show reveals that he’s still unapologetically politically homophobic, reassuring his Bakersfield constituents he’s not like those radical nasty gays who want civil rights, I presume. (GayPolitics):

Radio talk show host Inga Barks wanted assurances that Ashburn would continue to vote in a conservative manner on LGBT rights issues.  Ashburn responded, “I believe firmly that my responsibility is to my constituents.  I will take a careful look at each measure and apply that standard.  How would they vote on this?  How would they want me to vote on this,” adding that most people understood what that means.

“I don’t know how else to ask this, but are you going to live this lifestyle now in the district?” Barks asked.  Ashburn, who announced he is not running for public office again, said, “I pray to God I can find peace.  I want to go back to the senate and work hard for the people of my district…Now you know everything about me.”

This, my friends, is the definition of a self-loathing man. I suppose if his constituents wanted to round up TEH HOMOSEXUALS, he’d vote for that too. Sick.

Related:
* Republican Sexual Hypocrites, 2010 edition: add anti-gay California State Senator Roy Ashburn
* Delusional Collusion - Roy Ashburn’s closet was protected by newspapers, local gays

Washington, DC will become the first city in the US to incorporate female condom distribution in its fight against HIV/AIDS. The city’s HIV rates are notoriously high, with rates reaching 3% of the population– higher than West African statistics, and about on par with Kenya and Uganda. The initiative will include providing free female condoms in salons, schools, and convenience stores in high-risk areas.

The motivation for the measure is to empower more girls and women to take control of their sexual health:

Officials said they are turning to female condoms to give women more power to protect themselves from HIV and sexually transmitted diseases when their partners refuse to use protection.

It’s a noble cause, but I am skeptical about its effectiveness. I wonder how many men who refuse to use male condoms will be open to female condom use. Its not as if female condoms are completely inconspicuous. It seems to me that men’s attitudes toward condom usage is the most important factor here. However, I do think that by offering only male condoms, DC (and other cities) is placing an unspoken onus on the man to decide on protection, while the women remain in a more passive role. The inclusion of female condoms creates an attitude that women are active participants, empowered to make health decisions in sexual encounters.

DC has been widely criticized for not properly curtailing its HIV/AIDS problem. The city’s failure to reduce HIV infection, coupled with controversy about HIV organizations’ extravagant travel expenses and missing tax returns, has prompted campaigns such as the one shown below. This poster, prominently featured all over DC, compares Washington’s HIV negligence  to the Bush Administration’s failures during Katrina.

So will Papa Ratzi turn a blind eye to one of his boyz pimping and man ho’ ing around? Is there any other less-than-holy behavior this criminal pedophile priest protection enterprise hasn’t engaged in as it piously hatemongers against LGBTs? (Gay News Watch):

Police wiretaps are expected to result in charges against Angelo Balducci, 63, a Papal Gentleman, as lay attendant are called, and the former chairman of the Holy See’s Public Works Department, which is itself caught up in a corruption investigation.

According to police, Balducci regularly contacted Chinedu Ehiem Thomas, a Nigerian man who sings in St. Peter’s Cappella Giulia, to engage the sexual services of young male members of the choir, along with seminarians and undocumented immigrants seeking residency status.

The scandal now envelops Balducci, a well-known and powerful local figure who is married with two children, who despite all this is said to have taken remarkable risks in setting up sexual liaisons even in Chigi Palace, home of the Italian prime minister, or immediately after a private audience with a cardinal.

In 72 pages of transcribed wiretaps, Ehiem tells Balducci about one possible candidate:  “Angelo ... I’ll say no more. Two meters (6-foot-7), 97 kilos (250 lbs.), 33 years-old and completely active (top).”

In one wiretap from last December, Renzi is heard explaining the rules of engagement: ”You’ll get up to 2,000 euros ... Do not touch his balls. You need the money. Put on some music, take out the [inaudible], swallow the Viagra, and adelante!”

And how about the treatment of immigrants? Wonder what promises Baldacci sold them about residency so he could turn them out. Wow. Just. Wow.

Americans also can’t agree on what sex is.

The study, published in the February issue of the journal Sexual Health, randomly surveyed 486 adults, most of them heterosexual, between the ages of 18 and 96. They were asked the following question: “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was [blank],” and then followed more than a dozen “behavior specific items.” A press release reports that “two out of ten people did not concur that penile-anal intercourse was sex, and three out of ten said ‘no’ to oral-genital activity, as did half of the respondents about manual-genital contact.” And, while 95 percent classified penile-vaginal penetration as sex (one has to wonder what does count for the remaining 5 percent), that number dropped to 89 percent in cases where the man doesn’t ejaculate.

I wonder what percentage think it’s “not sex” if the woman doesn’t orgasm? And what if both partners are of the same sex?

Apparently your boyfriend is freaked out by your NuvaRing and doesn’t understand how the Pill works. And apparently unmarried ladies and gents across America are similarly confused! (PDF)

Here are some very frightening statistics:

-Among people who are in sexually active relationships and want to prevent pregnancy, 19% use no contraception at all. 24% use contraception inconsistently.

-42% of men and 40% of women believe that your chances of getting pregnant within one year while on the birth control pill are 50% or greater (the pill is actually about 92% effective with typical use).

-18% of men believe you can reduce the risk of pregnancy if you have sex standing up.

-24% of American singles believe that using two condoms is more effective than using one.

-25% of young men believe that douching after sex can prevent pregnancy.

-29% of men and 32% of women reported knowing “little or nothing about condoms.” 78% of men and 45% of women said the same about birth control pills.

And 90% believe they have all the knowledge they need to prevent an unplanned pregnancy.

American singles think we know a lot about pregnancy prevention, but in reality we not only know very little, but we also have a lot of totally bad information that we happily act on (the Fox News-ification of sex, if you will). So thanks, abstinence-focused American sex education system, which teaches us that birth control doesn’t really work and that condoms are kind of useless. And thanks, lack of universal health care, for making sure that young people aren’t able to actually go to the doctor to get the information and preganancy-prevention tools they need. But uh, glad to know that people are gettin’ to it in positions other than missionary I guess.

According to UN program on HIV/Aids (UNAids), the immunodeficiency disease is now the leading cause of death among women of a reproductive age.

Violence against women is the leading cause of the spread of this disease in women, with an estimated 70% of women “forced to engage in unprotected sex.” Translation: rape and sexual assault are largely responsible for the continued spread of HIV. As UNAids Executive Director Michael Sidibe reports, women who experience violence are much less able to negotiate safe-sex practices.

Although women are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS, there is still little attention given to addressing the specific needs of women and girls. The UN is now working on a five-year plan to do just that.

Reproductive needs and childbirth are also a growing concern. As Sidibe says:

“…400,000 babies are born every year in Africa – 400,000 babies with HIV/AIDS…it means that 400,000 women, mothers, have not been checked, have not been having access to services, have not been able to at least avoid transmission from mother to child. But also they will be at risk to not live with us for years to come.”

The new UNAids initiative will target women, helping disseminate information, education, preventive care, and “negotiating techniques.” But until communities of men become less likely to commit acts of violence against women in such high numbers, the bleak picture for women is unlikely to change.