Posts tagged as:

culture

  • Sexual Obituaries 2011 (Cory Silverberg) – People who choose to work around sexuality and gender often don’t get the acknowledgment from the mainstream media or from society as a whole that they would if their work was in another field. Every year, I feel this absence when I read the lists of famous people who died. Since 2006, I’ve tried to change that by sharing some of the sex and gender activists, educators, artists, and outlaws we lost in the year that is ending. Here is a list of sexual losses in 2011.
  • Director Dee Rees And Star Adepero Oduye Talk Coming Out & Coming Of Age In ‘Pariah’ | indieWIRE – Pariah is the story of Alike (Oduye), a black lesbian teenager living in Fort Greene and navigating between the aggressive gay nightclub scene preferred by her butch best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) and a closeted life at home, where her tightly wound mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) tries to dress her in pink cardigans and quizzes her about who she’s taking to the school dance.
  • Bondage Sex And The Liberation Of Culture – ErosBlog: The Sex Blog – For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape.
  • 2011 Top Ten Sex Questions (Cory Silverberg) – I don’t dig into my statistics all that often, but once a year I like to see which questions and answers were the most popular…These ten questions are from the 105 Sex Questions that I’ve answered on the About.com site.
  • Navigating Love and Autism – NYTimes.com- Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back. [via Violet Blue]
  • When Will a Gay Pro Athlete Finally Come Out? — New York Magazine – “Something has happened in the last year,” says Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports, an advocate for and chronicler of gay sports issues for more than a decade. “It’s almost like homophobia is no longer considered cool in sports.”
  • Australian Passport Gender Options: ‘Transgender’ Will Be Included | HuffPo – Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender people, the government said Thursday.

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 09/15/2011

in del.icio.us,sex

  • Michele Bachmann’s HPV Vaccine Safety and ‘Retardation’ Comments Misleading, Doctors Say – ABC News – The medical community issued swift criticism Tuesday after Rep. Michele Bachmann dragged the safety of the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV) into the political spotlight, reigniting the controversy over the risks and necessity of vaccinating children.
  • When Sex Bloggers Get Slut Shamed | Charlie Glickman – It probably shouldn’t surprise to anyone that, in general, women in the blogosphere get a lot more harassment than men. After all, just walking down the street, women get a lot more harassment than men.
  • Assistance Needed – A Call For Help « PassionAndSoul – As many of you may have heard by now, I have had severe health concerns since mid-July. These are connected to my long term health issues, but I am in the midst of a flare up. Between July and December, I have had to cancel 13 gigs related to my health. Folks have asked for some time how they can help. This post is the answer.
  • Everyone Loses on Booberday Except Google+ – Technology – The Atlantic Wire – A breast cancer meme has broken out on Google+: Booberday. As the name suggests, it involves breasts, specifically, "posting photos of women's cleavage under the guise of fighting breast cancer," explains Jezebel's Margaret Hartmann. On the surface it's just boob shots, which some might call demeaning. But we're talking about breast cancer, so it's all good, right? Not really. Booberday is demeaning to women, makes men look bad, and doesn't help the cause. The only winner we see here: Google+.
  • Contraceptive Comeback: The Maligned IUD Gets a Second Chance | Wired – When the Mirena first hit the US market, so few women were using IUDs that many doctors didn't even know how to insert them. Today, the devices are recognized as safe, and 2 million US women have a Mirena.
  • Frank’s Story (Runner’s World) – Frank Shorter is the father of the modern running boom. An enduringly popular speaker, he spins a captivating narrative about winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon. The story he hasn't told is the dark truth about his own father.

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1 The Normal Heart 01 storyslide image 300x197 The Normal Heart: The Story of AIDS for a New Generation (Studio 360)

Photo by Joan Marcus

Six years before Tony Kushner grabbed the nation’s attention with his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, Larry Kramer staged The Normal Heart, about the AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on the gay community. The Normal Heart premiered at New York City’s Public Theater, Off Broadway, in 1985, and finally received its Broadway premiere this year, winning three Tony Awards. Of the two plays, it is more immediate and raw, and maybe angrier. Kramer’s career as a playwright took a back seat to his life as an activist; he cofounded Gay Men’s Health Crisis and the more radical group ACT UP.

The action centers on the character of a newspaper writer named Ned Weeks, a stand-in for Kramer, and his struggle to respond to the nascent epidemic. But for younger audiences, the AIDS crisis is a generation past, and the disease itself feels remote. Paul VanDeCarr spoke with young people for whom The Normal Heart is not just a tragedy, but a history lesson. Joel Grey, who co-directs the show, says audiences now are shocked by the indifference toward the epidemic in the early 1980s: “The young people are flabbergasted with the information that they hear in that show. … It’s just horrendous, and true.”

Link to audio and pics from the play

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segment 11705 460x345 300x225 The Normal Heart on Charlie Rose

Ellen Barkin, John Benjamin Hickey and director George C. Wolfe were on Charlie Rose to talk about the Broadway revival of Larry Kramer’s “The Normal Heart” about the early days of AIDS. The play’s been nominated for 5 Tony Awards. The site doesn’t allow embedding, so click on the image to be taken to the page with the video.

thenormalheart The Normal Heart on Charlie Rose

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  • My Family Found out I Blog About Sex | BlogHer – “Have you considered changing your name?” the message from my aunt read. “Our name is too obscure and boring, don’t you think? The famous do better with something catchy and bright.”…This wasn’t a compliment. It was a very polite way of saying that what I was doing with my life — writing about sex — was not in keeping with the image my father’s family desires for itself.
  • Dissent Magazine – Arguing The World – What Gail Dines Doesn’t Get About SlutWalk – Dines shares more common ground with SlutWalk than she realizes. The organizers are not celebrating the word “slut” or “promoting sluttishness in general.” The SlutWalkers are marching in solidarity with all women who have been dismissed, degraded, or hurt by the label. They are marching against sexual violence and the ugly stereotypes that help to perpetuate it.
  • Botox and Better Butts? What Messages Are We Sending to Young Girls? | RH Reality Check -
  • Uganda’s LGBT Activists Get a Temporary Victory | violet blue ® :: open source sex – The reprehensible “anti-gay” bill in Uganda has been dealt a blow by that country’s brave LGBT activists and the world human rights community. In a nation where homosexuality was already illegal, and punishable by 14 years in prison, this law would have made things even worse, establishing the death penalty, among other things, for having gay sex while HIV positive.
  • Bill Sienkiewicz And Frank Miller’s Wonder Woman: Bondage (Bleeding Cool) – DC Comics never saw this image. Neither Bill Sienkiewicz nor Frank Miller intended it to go public. But when it was sold, despite assurances that it wouldn’t go online, somewghere alon the line, it got sold to someone who didn’t know about that requirement.
  • NCSF Wallet Card – A pocket reference for dealing with law enforcement
  • ‘Paying For It’ Without Regret: An Intriguing Graphic Memoir Of Prostitution : Monkey See : NPR – It’s not that getting dumped by his girlfriend soured Canadian cartoonist Chester Brown on the notion of romantic love, exactly. Because to sour on something, one would have to, at some point, feel strongly about it. And given the facts on evidence in Brown’s latest autobiographical comic, the guy’s not much for strong emotion. No, the Chester Brown we glimpse through the tiny black and white panels the artist arranges with such exacting precision is a creature of intellect. His approach to sex, in the wake of his girlfriend’s rejection, is one of cool logic, dispassionate conclusions — and some very literal cost-to-benefit ratios.

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  • Rules of Misbehavior – Benjamin J. Dueholm – Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?
  • Trve West Coast Fiction: Spoiled (or why I sometimes feel like a rapist) | Danny Wylde – Having sex with beautiful women for a living is fun – except when it’s not.
  • ‘Game of Thrones’: Making Sense of All the Sex – Atlantic – Ultimately, Game of Thrones is about power, and the consequences of sex—both immediately and years down the line—can mean the difference between gaining and losing it. Westeros is not a modern or progressive world, and sex and violence remain its primary trades. Viewers who find either untenable should steer clear.
  • Getting Away with Murder on Long Island – Some of those 10 people might be alive today if it hadn’t been for the lackluster response of law enforcement and the press coverage of the case — much of it sensationalist and dehumanizing — all because of the first victims’ sex-worker status.
  • The Perversions of Campus Sexual Culture – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education – In other words, campus sexual culture in its dominant, heteronormative form is kinda f#%@ed up. Sexual desire is wrapped up in public humiliation, drunkenness, and yes, I’ll say the word, patriarchy. It’s not that I don’t get how such things can be sexy, how humiliation and domination in conditions of inequality can be turned into pleasure. But what is interesting is the very conflation of that pleasure with both profit and publicness, a visual pornification of power inequities so beautifully symbolized by the booty cam at Yale or the drunk college “chix” porn site.

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  • The Health of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People: Building a Foundation for Better Understanding – Institute of Medicine – To help assess the state of the science, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) asked the IOM to evaluate current knowledge of the health status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender populations; to identify research gaps and opportunities; and to outline a research agenda to help NIH focus its research in this area. The IOM finds that to advance understanding of the health needs of all LGBT individuals, researchers need more data about the demographics of these populations, improved methods for collecting and analyzing data, and an increased participation of sexual and gender minorities in research. Building a more solid evidence base for LGBT health concerns will not only benefit LGBT individuals, but also add to the repository of health information we have that pertains to all people.
  • Walk of Shame? Baby, I Strut | Sex and the 405 – In the past months I have spoken with people at Playboy and Fleshbot about properties like that of NakedCity, tossing around the incredible paradox posed by sex on the internet. The masses can’t resist sex. Any story about sex on any publication goes through the roof with views. Sex sells, goes the tired saying, and when you look at it this way, it does…But make a property devoted solely to sex and you find yourself in the precarious situation of being completely unable to show serious financial reward for your efforts. Sex, apparently, sells everything except advertising space and any hope of a decent search ranking.
  • Bringing up the rear – Tracy Clark-Flory – Salon.com – For my generation, the back-door option is like what the blow job was to the generation that came before — just a fun new taboo waiting to be broken. The phenomenon of heterosexual guys participating in all sorts of arse play is something different, though. I’ve seen female-on-male strap-on sex go from the sort of thing tittered about in women’s magazines to hearing a male friend once drunkenly blurting out in a bar that he loved it.
  • How a sex rebel was born – Sex News, Sex Talk – Salon.com – She may have traded in her punk rock leathers for one of the least erotic materials on the planet, but her fierce rhetoric about sexual freedom and pleasure has stayed the same.
  • Anne Roiphe: Sex, Art and Booze Back When Writers Broke Taboos | The New York Observer -
  • Why is this so hard? Google, Facebook and adult retailing | Econsultancy – My day-to-day marketing activities are somewhat different from yours. Instead of optimising campaigns and formulating strategy, with every day comes a new onslaught of ad disapproval, a rumour of a change in policy, a decline from an ad network or long email conversation with a boilerplate-spouting representative…In this article I’ll give you an insight into the surprisingly not-salacious world of Adult Retailing in relation to the internet’s biggest players: Google and Facebook.
  • Glee – Sexy – Sex Education on TV – The TV show Glee is great fun, but I feel like it has consistently done a terrible job talking about sex. Not only has it played young people’s sexual ignorance for humor value – a main character thought he got his girlfriend pregnant by being in a hot tub with her for much of the first season- it has allowed these misconceptions to stand as truth for months at a time.

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03/31/2011
7:00 PMto8:00 PM

bigsexlittledeath susiebright 199x300 Susie Bright at Strand Books, NYC

Doug Henwood Interviews Susie Bright (A live taped Audible interview)

One of the country’s foremost sex educators, activists and writers, Susie Bright is an outspoken advocate of sexual equality and freedom. She came of age during a time in our country’s history when sex and politics began to collide. In this widely-anticipated and intimate memoir, Big Sex Little Death, Bright recounts the adventure, sacrifice, danger and controversy of her unexpected and extraordinary life.

Doug Henwood, publisher of Left Business Observer and contributing editor of The Nation, will interview Susie Bright on the Strand Stage.

Where:     Strand Bookstore, 828 Broadway (12th/13th St), New York, NY
cost:     FREE

Book Tour Info: http://bigsexlittledeath.com/44588494

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 12/16/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

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2703 Seduced by the Dance (Sexis Magazine)

Midori:

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is a triumph … and an unforgettable erotic experience.

Matthew Bourne’s narrative can be read as a classic romance. Lovers meet, their passions intertwine, grim forces of the world tear them apart, and in the end they are united in death and redemption. On another level, though, what we have here is one big tragic queer coming-out story, complete with a rejecting parent, the obligatory girlfriend and desperate attempt to conform to social expectation … followed by depression, the first gay hookup, elation, hope, brutal bullying and finally, suicide. The attacking swan troupe, descending upon and tearing apart the lover Swan was as horrific as a lynching. I felt helpless and heart wrenched.

Far too many suffered their fate in silence and invisibility. Although debuted in 1995, this performance seems particularly timely now, given the recent media attention on homophobic bullying, youth suicides, and new efforts of outreach such the “It Gets Better” project.

Lest you think this piece is just about the boys and their swinging masculine prowess, as it can be in many homo focused works, I happily testify that the women and their roles are fiercely and unapologetically sexual as well. The Queen, richly played by Nina Goldman, is a complex mix of regal, cold, lustful, glamorous and dramatic. In one scene she chooses an evening’s lover from the ranks of military men she inspects. In another she allows the Stranger to give her pleasures, despite her son’s conflicted protestations. During the Ball, the stage is so full of mini tableaux of couples dancing entwined in lust, jealousy and struggle of wills that it’s hard to know where to focus one’s attention. I clearly recall one woman carried off stage by a group of men … possibly to be the queen bee of an orgy?

Link

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 10/23/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

  • The Downfall of Alexa Di Carlo | Charlie Glickman – But I do take exception when someone creates false credentials in order to dupe the gullible. I worked hard to get a doctorate in sex education and many of my colleagues, whether they have academic credentials or not, have dedicated years of their lives to learn about sexuality in order to provide good information. I feel a lot of anger when someone pretends to have done the work in order to make it seem as if they know what they’re talking about….It also upsets me when people misrepresent sexwork. Usually, people make it seem as if it’s much a much worse career than it might be, especially when they want to ban it. But it’s also problematic when people glorify it because it creates a misrepresentation of the challenges and difficulties that sexworkers face. In turn, this romanticizes the profession and makes it more likely that people will decide to try it out without knowing how to protect themselves.
  • Law.com – ‘Cached’ Pages May Be Evidence in Child Porn Case, Panel Says | Law.com – In a case of first impression in New York, a Brooklyn appellate panel has held that temporary files automatically “cached” by an Internet browser may serve as evidence of promoting and possessing child pornography…The Appellate Division, 2nd Department, looked at similar cases from other jurisdictions and concluded that their “consistent thread” was the need to distinguish “inadvertent” acquisition and possession of child pornography from “knowing” and “intentional” acquisition and possession.

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 10/14/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

  • Prostitution “Experts” Versus Prostitutes: Why Don’t All Sex Workers Deserve a Voice? | Monica Shores |Huff Po – This ugly display of disrespect is unwarranted and near inexplicable. Why would these women be so threatened by sex workers organizing for themselves, gaining national attention, and working to influence public perception? Is the abolitionist narrative or abolitionists’ prominence as experts more important than the people they’re purporting to help? The poor thinking and outright bigotry exhibited by some anti-prostitution figures can no longer go unchallenged. Sex workers of all ages and genders deserve better advocacy than this, and thankfully, as the recent VAMP example proves, their demands for more honest discussion may no longer go unheard.
  • How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20 — NCAC – In September 2010, the National Coalition Against Censorship, in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and the BFA Department of Visual & Critical Studies at the School of Visual Arts, held a series of programs to highlight the effects 1990s attacks on culture continue to have on art and society and to reassess the state of art funding, censorship and self-censorship today. The programs included panel discussions, film screenings and event-specific videos.
  • PEEP SHOW Interview w/ Tristan Taormino, Part One « FilmSnobbery – Tristan’s written several books, including The Ultimate guide to Anal Sex for Women, and served as an editor for many others. She was a syndicated columnist for the Village Voice for almost ten years and currently writes an advice column for Taboo Magazine. Between her writing, her teaching, and her TV appearances, we feel lucky to have gotten her to answer our Peep Show questions.
  • Trve West Coast Fuck-Up Lit: Protection | Danny Wylde – Anyone who’s been a part of the adult industry for any significant amount of time has no doubt heard countless rumors about who’s an intravenous drug user, who escorts (a polite term for an upscale hooker), who has gay sex in their private life, and who has sex with transsexual women. Some of them are baseless, but a portion always turn out to be true. Each of the above stated behaviors could be considered “high risk,” and each are practiced by performers within the straight “side” of the industry. So when going to work, every performer puts themselves at risk. It’s a part of being a sex worker. Surely, no one wants to increase that risk, but finding a scape goat is the worst possible way to address the issue.

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 06/07/2010

in del.icio.us,sex

  • Kids With Lesbian Parents Do Just Fine – US News and World Report – When compared to teens of the same age, adolescents raised by lesbian parents are doing just fine socially, psychologically and academically, new research finds.<br />
    <br />
    Not only that, they have fewer social problems, and less aggressive and rule-breaking behaviors than other teens.
  • Americans’ Acceptance of Gay Relations Crosses 50% Threshold (Gallup) – There is a gradual cultural shift under way in Americans' views toward gay individuals and gay rights. While public attitudes haven't moved consistently in gays' and lesbians' favor every year, the general trend is clearly in that direction. This year, the shift is apparent in a record-high level of the public seeing gay and lesbian relations as morally acceptable. Meanwhile, support for legalizing gay marriage, and for the legality of gay and lesbian relations more generally, is near record highs.
  • Just How Bad Is Porn, Anyway? : The Thoughtful Animal (Jason Goldman) – This is meant to review some of the research that's been conducted on whether or not there is a reliable causal relationship between pornography and various Bad Things.

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