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Soy Free Weight Loss Shakes / Best Chest Exercises Bodybuilding

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Copy Of Insanity Workout Calendar / Lose Weight At Home India

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:26:01 +0000

Full Insanity Workout Free Download - Best Way To Lose Weight At Home For Men

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:25:39 +0000

Good Vibrations: U.S. Consumer Web Site Aims to Enhance Sex Toy Safety: Scientific American

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:10:29 +0000

Proven Hojo Motor For Sale - Solar Companies

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 05:43:27 +0000

Virginia school district ponders banning cross-gender dress | Reuters

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:20:48 +0000

Showcasing how ignorance is a life-threatening, clear and present danger, a "Virginia school district is considering banning cross-gender dressing in a move proponents said aims to protect students from harassment," Matthew Ward reports. The ban is being considered "after teachers […] said some male students were dressing like girls, prompting complaints from other students."

Although wanting to protect youth from harm is noble, misguided bans on expression are functionally equivalent to censorship, and serve no protective purpose. Worse, ignorance of gender diversity "could actually make the students more susceptible to bullying," not less, according to the executive director of Equality Virginia, James Parrish. "They're calling it cross-dressing, but if [one wears] clothes that reflect their gender identity [then] that's appropriate gender dressing," he said.

Read brief source…[kot-contrib]. (Thanks, maymay!)[/kot-contrib]

Update: A grass-roots petition to oppose the ban has been circulating on Tumblr. A vote is expected in March. Hopefully, the petition along with the threat of legal action from the ACLU of Virginia will be enough to deter this dangerous violation of student’s freedom of expression.

Kink On Tap — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:46:00 +0000

S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse
blogs.sfweekly.com
@WickedGrounds is closed today. We are very sorry for any inconvenience. That tweet went out two Wednesdays ago. It was at once cryptic and unsurprising. On the one hand, it might just mean wha... Continue reading "S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse" >

S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:45:37 +0000

@WickedGrounds is closed today. We are very sorry for any inconvenience. That tweet went out two Wednesdays ago. It was at once cryptic and unsurprising. On the one hand, it might just mean wha...

Continue reading "S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse" >

Kink On Tap — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:35:19 +0000

S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse
blogs.sfweekly.com
@WickedGrounds is closed today. We are very sorry for any inconvenience. That tweet went out two Wednesdays ago. It was...

Kink On Tap — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:29:03 +0000

#Lesbian High #School Couple Crowned #Homecoming King & Queen "before a cheering crowd of their peers"
www.advocate.com
A lesbian high school couple in San Diego was crowned Homecoming king and queen before a cheering crowd of their peers Friday night. Rebeca Arellano also made history as Patrick Henry High School's first female homecoming king. Her girlfriend Haileigh Adams won the title of homecoming queen. The...

#Lesbian High #School Couple Crowned #Homecoming King & Queen "before a cheering crowd of their peers"

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 19:29:02 +0000

A lesbian high school couple in San Diego was crowned Homecoming king and queen before a cheering crowd of their peers Friday night.

Rebeca Arellano also made history as Patrick Henry High School's first female homecoming king. Her girlfriend Haileigh Adams won the title of homecoming queen. The pair have been dating since February of their sophomore year.

"They were chanting my name and it was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had," the high school senior told KGTV News.

Though there has been some negative feedback, and hurt feelings of male students who were bypassed as Homecoming king this year, Adams and Arellano said they've received mostly support from their classmates and teachers. One teacher, according to ABC News, told Arellano, "Today, school is a bit better because of you girls."

Adams said, "The fact that other people are feeling more confident about themselves or feeling like they might have a chance at doing this, it's opening doors."

Kink On Tap — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:54:03 +0000

#Wisconsin State Sen. Pam Galloway pushes abstinence-only bill for #SexEd classes. Hey, Galloway, WHERE ARE THE #JOBS?
www.wausaudailyherald.com
Wisconsin school districts offering sex education courses won't be required to teach about birth control if a bill co-sponsored by a Republican Wausau lawmaker is approved. The legislation, introduced by New Berlin Republican state Sen. Mary Lazich and supported by state Sen. Pam Galloway, would...

#Wisconsin State Sen. Pam Galloway pushes abstinence-only bill for #SexEd classes. Hey, Galloway, WHERE ARE THE #JOBS?

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:54:01 +0000

Wisconsin school districts offering sex education courses won't be required to teach about birth control if a bill co-sponsored by a Republican Wausau lawmaker is approved.

The legislation, introduced by New Berlin Republican state Sen. Mary Lazich and supported by state Sen. Pam Galloway, would roll back an existing state law that prohibits school districts from teaching abstinence-only sex education programs.

That legislation, passed last year as the Healthy Youth Act, has been credited by advocates with reducing teen pregnancy rates and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Galloway said the new bill is intended to give control over curriculum back to local school boards.

"The Healthy Youth Act was a one-size-fits-all approach," Galloway said.

The new bill requires districts that opt to provide sex education to present abstinence as the only sure way to prevent pregnancy or STDs. Schools could opt to provide information about birth control.

Opponents of the bill packed a committee hearing in Madison Wednesday, arguing that the measure would increase teen pregnancy and disease rates.

The proposal would require school districts that maintain a sex education curriculum to teach abstinence as the preferred choice for unmarried students, provide instruction in parental responsibility and the socioeconomic benefits of marriage and explain pregnancy, prenatal development and childbirth.

School districts also would no longer be required to notify parents if a human development course will not be offered. Volunteer health care providers -- doctors, nurses and other specialists -- also wouldn't be permitted to teach human development courses.

The issue inspired an often emotional debate in the Merrill Area School District last year. The district's school board eventually approved a human growth and development curriculum including information about birth control and allowed objecting parents to pull their children from the class.

Merrill School Board President Bill Jaeger said he didn't know the details of Lazich's proposal but said the district's committee on human growth and development plans to review the curriculum each year. He said a change in state law wouldn't necessarily re-ignite the debate, particularly if the number of students opting out remains low. Jaeger said he believed fewer than 10 students opted out last year.

"I think the curriculum has gone quite smoothly," Jaeger said. "After what we went through with last year's debate, I'm not sure that we'd look to do it again."

Kink On Tap — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:31:19 +0000

National Organization For Marriage (@NOMTweets) Uses Photoshop To Create Doctored Photos Showing Support For Repealing New Hampshire Gay #Marriage
www.huffingtonpost.com
The National Organization For Marriage (NOM) is an anti-gay group that has gone to great lengths in hopes of ensuring that marriage remains between one man and one woman. Lately its members have turned their attention to New Hampshire, where Republican lawmakers are working to repeal the 15-month...

National Organization For Marriage (@NOMTweets) Uses Photoshop To Create Doctored Photos Showing Support For Repealing New Hampshire Gay #Marriage

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 07:31:17 +0000

The National Organization For Marriage (NOM) is an anti-gay group that has gone to great lengths in hopes of ensuring that marriage remains between one man and one woman.

Lately its members have turned their attention to New Hampshire, where Republican lawmakers are working to repeal the 15-month old gay marriage law passed by the state's Legislature.

Though polls show that the citizens of New Hampshire are against the repeal by a 2-1 margin and Governor John Lynch says he'll veto the bill if it comes to his desk, NOM is toiling away trying to make people believe that the majority of the people in the state support the repeal.

How are they doing this? With the magic of Photoshop.

As the blog Good As You and Rachel Maddow pointed out yesterday, NOM has taken (at least) two photos of rallies held for now-President Obama and repurposed them to make it look like thousands of people are attending their anti-marriage events.

The first photo, featured on the NOM website, was taken from an Obama rally held in St. Louis in 2008. The second photo, Good As You notes, was used to make NOM President Brian Brown's speech look well attended but is actually from a rally where 60,000 people came out to see Obama in Columbus, Ohio, in 2008.

As Rachel Maddow said in the clip above, "Caught you!"

Kink On Tap — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:10:23 +0000

#OccupyWallStreet & the #Poetry of Now-Time: "He…didn’t seem very much like a sadist at all." A BDSM'er's take on #OWS:
www.observer.com
If you really want to understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to talk to the poets. One night last week, late, after ducking out of a birthday party, we wandered down Broadway like we sometimes do now, looking to extend the evening a bit, see what was doing in the park. Zuccotti was quiet, but...

#OccupyWallStreet & the #Poetry of Now-Time: "He…didn’t seem very much like a sadist at all." A BDSM'er's take on #OWS:

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:10:06 +0000

If you really want to understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to talk to the poets.

One night last week, late, after ducking out of a birthday party, we wandered down Broadway like we sometimes do now, looking to extend the evening a bit, see what was doing in the park.

Zuccotti was quiet, but charged with energy as it had been for a month and counting. Many of the sleeping bags were already lumpy and zipped tight. Some were moving gently. The library was closed, covered with blue tarps. But two of the librarians, who were also the poets, were still kicking it. They met three weeks ago and are now best friends, they agreed.

These were Stephen Boyer, 27, a former model and paid dominatrix, and Filip Marinovich, 36, a sometime associate professor of poetry.

Not that any of that really matters anymore. “Hierarchies are bullshit,” Mr. Boyer said. In the last three weeks, he had met celebrities, philosophers, politicians—then curled up under a table to await the next unknowable day. “I’m in the most uncomfortable situation I’ve ever been in in my life, and I have more access to the world than ever.”

Sometimes things are their opposites. Mr. Boyer learned this doing his other job, tag-teaming with his girlfriend, dominating people for money. This is physical work, no getting around that, but it’s also psychological. Mostly it’s about power and how to flip it. Good training, actually, for a member of a revolutionary movement.

Mr. Boyer and his girlfriend moved back to the states from London just a few weeks ago, and they were staying in a hotel overlooking ground zero, preparing for a trip to DC, a business trip. Lots of clients down there—all the doms know it’s the best place in the country to beat people and humiliate them and maybe fuck them with a strap-on for money.

When he reunited with his New York friends, they were going on and on about Occupy Wall Street. “I was like, ‘Let’s get a fucking drink. I haven’t seen you in forever.’ Like, whatever. I’ve been to a zillion protests. I really expected nothing.”

The next day, though, he wandered over to Zuccotti Park. After walking around for five minutes, he recalled, “I just started crying. I was like, This is not like anything I’ve ever seen. It’s what we’ve always wanted to be happening but never figured out how to do.”

Mr. Marinovich agreed. “I gave up on this a long time ago, and yet here it is,” he said.

+++

Of course we asked them about what everyone outside this movement—especially members of the media—seems want to talk about, and nobody on the inside is particularly concerned with: What do you all want? What are the demands? How do you know when you’ve won and can go home?

The poets were polite. They tried to answer. They were tired, as everyone is down there. Running on pure adrenaline. But these were the wrong questions, the ones you ask when you don’t yet get it. These were the questions of the world outside the park—the world of prose. Occupy Wall Street is actually, it turns out, occurring in the realm of poetry and spirit. It’s a sort of waking dream. Which is why it’s so strangely powerful and cannot be sneered away or shoveled over with cynicism (not that we didn’t try) or kettled into history, and may even survive the winter in New York.

“Demands will grow,” Mr. Boyer assured us calmly, with a patience we immediately envied, as we had not felt patient like that in a very long time. He was tall and young, and wore mostly black and didn’t seem very much like a sadist at all. “Demands will eventually come. But this is a space for learning. I’ve learned more here in the last two weeks than I have in all those years of college.”

That’s not a dig on the University of San Francisco, where Mr. Boyer majored in creative writing and sociology. The degree didn’t get him far, though, so he has done what he had to do for money, some good, some not so good. He walked the runway last year in London for Ziad Ghanem, for instance, the designer widely viewed as the creative heir to Alexander McQueen. Mr. Ghanem placed volumes of Mr. Boyer’s poetry on every seat in the front row, and Mr. Boyer’s picture turned up in British Vogue. That was the good job.

But it seems like a different life now. He no longer knows the person in those pictures.

In his 1985 cult anarchist treatise T.A.Z., Hakim Bey, aka the poet Peter Lamborn Wilson, described what he dubbed the temporary autonomous zone: “a guerrila operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination).” Which is as good a description of Occupy Wall Street as any.

The library. (Flickr/hukdunshur)

Such zones have flourished, however briefly, around the world, often in secret, Mr. Bey wrote, but in in contemporary America he thought such a space would most likely emerge after three conditions were met. First, people needed to understand not only how the State (Wall Street, the One Percent, whatever) had enslaved them but also “the ways in which we are ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us.” When the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek showed up in the park a few weeks back, he compared this process of awakening to the John Carpenter movie They Live, in which the protagonist, Nada, finds a pair of special sunglasses which reveal that the advertising billboards all around him carry hidden messages: submit, stay asleep, conform, consume. The dollar bill? This is your god. (And spoiler alert: the rich are all aliens.)

The second condition was that the internet would need to evolve into a useful tool of dissent and organization.

And third, Mr. Bey wrote, “The State must progress on its present course in which hysterical rigidity comes more and more to mask a vacuity, an abyss of power.”

Check, check, check.

+++

It was windy. The blue tarps were whipping around. Mr. Boyer was asked another of those questions a reporter might ask, an outside-the-zone question. We were just visiting, after all.

“Ever have any famous clients?”

“I’ve had powerful clients. I’ve also had a lot of middle-class clients and a lot who just lost their jobs and don’t know what to do and are freaking out and they want fetish relief from all the pain. I’m like, ‘Sorry, I didn’t want to take your money, but that’s what it’s about.’”

“Political people?”

“So many times.”

“People you recognized?”

“Sure. I’m not going to give you names. But like, I’ve had clients before who are very close to Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, for instance. And I’m just like, ‘Really? Really? You hang out with them every day?’”

Mr. Boyer suggested his girlfriend come to Zuccotti. She said no. Her room was overlooking the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site, and at one point, Mr. Boyer stood on the balcony, peering down at what felt to him like a graveyard. Then he turned back to watch her on the luxurious bed in the sleekly minimalist room. “She looked so isolated. And I was like, ‘You sure you don’t want to come to Occupy Wall Street?’” No thanks, she said.

“I think that division of psychic-ness is the main reason why we had to go our own ways.”

It seems clear that the lack of demands is not the problem with this thing but its engine. We ask the usual questions because that is how we understand—or, not understand at all, really, but control and contain, and then dismiss or exploit, according to our individual agenda or cast of mind. Those of us standing outside the park—who could, at any moment, simply step across the threshold—want to flick it aside it or put it to use, because that’s what we have learned to do. Box it up, slap on a label, file it away.

Like Mr. Bey said, “As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind an empty husk.”

Which might be why everyone keeps asking.

+++

Mr. Marinovich is married and has a place on the Lower East Side. He doesn’t sleep in the park but hangs out all the time. He has taught poetry at Columbia and the St. Marks Poetry Project. He had a wild beard, and soft eyes and was wearing a hooded wind-breaker.

He compared Zuccotti Park to Sherwood Forest. “It’s the true Akademia,” he said, referring to the original school founded by Plato in an Athenian grove of olive trees. He, too, struggled to remember the person he was before Occupy Wall Street. “There’s this huge clash and rift between everything that came before and now. It’s so full of danger and possibility and opportunity and ecstasy and everyone’s falling in love and everyone looks so beautiful and you just want to walk through and have sex with everyone.”

Not that either poet had had any actual sex in the sacred grove. Another literal question we had to ask. Truth be told, we too were falling in love with this movement, but we remained affixed to the other zone, ever alert to the clickable headline.

Anyway, the point was not about sex, both poets agreed, laughing. “There’s a tremendous psychic eros going on here, this connection that we feel together,” Mr. Marinovich explained. “It creates this courage to stand up to whatever happens.”

“The TAZ is an art of life in continual rising up, wild but gentle,” Mr. Bey wrote, inspired, to a large degree, by the great Sufi poets. It’s “a seducer not a rapist, a smuggler rather than a bloody pirate, a dancer not an eschatologist.”

Mr. Marinovich added that most interactions in the world outside are money-centered. Not in the park. They had no money, and yet they were well fed. Nobody mentioned Jesus, or the communities of early Christians, but you have to think those disciples had a brightness in their eyes that these poets would recognize. They, too, had crossed a threshold between then and now. The followers of Jesus had abandoned their families, had given up concerning themselves with money or anything practical, feeling certain the messiah was coming (to ask whether he did or not is to miss the point). They had loaves and fishes that fed a multitude. The occupiers have pizza—sometimes 300 pies a day—that somehow just arrives. They trust that they will be O.K., that fellowship will sustain them, and so far they are O.K.

Mr. Marinovich marveled at the “immediate, urgent intimacy” he felt in the park, among the occupiers. “It’s completely natural and unforced,” he said, “and it has so much to do with the absence of money as a center, because when that’s not in the center, what is in the center we don’t know, and into that opening everything can flow.”

+++

Mr. Marinovich views Zuccotti Park as sacred space. Mr. Boyer’s description of ground zero as a “graveyard” seemed apt, he said. There was a reason, maybe subconscious, that they were occupying this place. Close to Wall Street, yes, but closer to where the towers fell.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he said. “The dead have been used for ten years as fuel for this war. I don’t think that’s anything they would have wanted. To hijack the spirits of the dead and use them to create this permanent state of war is one of the vilest things you could possibly do.” (One thought of Mr. Boyer’s clients, who might have been in that Pentagon basement when the decisions were made, plans drawn up. Or maybe that’s just what johns inside the Beltway always tell their young boy poet–dominatrixes.)

“I feel like this is the real tenth anniversary of 9-11,” Mr. Marinovich continued. “It’s weird what was leading up to this. The whole commemoration, but before that Hurricane Irene, which was like this cleansing thing. All that happened. And being here on the periphery of ground zero, so loaded with spirits….”

A year ago, he’d been walking around the area, and he’d felt that the spirits were walking with him. Telling him things. Which he wrote down in a poem that is now in the Occupy Wall St. Poetry Anthology, which Mr. Boyer and Mr. Marinovich created together, out of contributions from people in the park and others who sent in work online and keep sending more, so much they can hardly read it all. Contributors include Anne Waldman, Adrienne Rich, Michael McLure, Elliott Katz, but anyone can contribute by sending their work to stephenjboyer@gmail.com, with “occupy poetry” in the subject line.

Two copies of the anthology, which are in binders so they can grow each day, are kept in the Occupy library and are not online. But you can borrow them—there is no checking out or checking in—or hear them at the weekly poetry assembly, every Friday at 9:30 p.m. Or you can just ask, like we did. Mr. Marinovich went first, reading the piece he’d written a year ago, when the spirits of the dead had whispered to him. “This is called ‘Wolfman Librarian and the Trembling Pair of Actor Hands,’” he said, and noted that it was long. The beginning went something like this: “Tell me this grove will protect me / From World Trade Towers Lightning forking the brain / Mine! Mine! / Why are there trains under the grass / And my butt is wet / Why do you constantly interrupt yourself? / My rhythm is the rhythm of interruption.”

Mr. Boyer went next, with a poem he’d put down in a rush on one of his first giddy nights in Zuccotti Park. Again, an except: “We need a sex space in the park, a space surrounded by tarps, held by the people, so we can get naked and fill each other with ourselves,” he read. And a few lines later: “I want to moan as the bankers and men on Wall Street watch with their binoculars, and in this way we shall win. They’ll come, demanding our naked bodies, and we’ll share ourselves. Sasha Gray, where are you? Get down here and gang bang for democracy. And show them just how beautiful our bodies, and the way we glow when we make one another radiate.”

+++

Mr. Boyer used to suffer from anxiety. He used to do drugs, sometimes hard ones, and drink every day. In his three weeks in the park, spending hour after hour meeting people, talking about ideas, reciting poetry, he’s felt free of that. “There’s this hunger inside for the kind of community that I am now having access to,” he explained. “Since that wasn’t available to me, I’d partake of drugs to kind of numb that desire, because there was such a void in me. A lot of people are in the same mindspace.” He added, however, that some were actually using more, maybe because they’re so disoriented and exhausted. Who knows? It was hard to pin down exactly what was going on for the people who’d entered into this experiment.

Mr. Marinovich jumped in. “This is nonlinear time, saturated now-time,” he explained, “‘time shot through with the presence of the the now,’ as Benjamin called it.” We had to look that up. Now-time was a long time ago for us. The reference was to Theses on the Philosophy of History, which Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish literary critic, wrote in January 1940, as the Nazis prepared to invade France. Eight months later, after fleeing to Spain, Benjamin learned that Franco had decided to return the refugees to Paris. He swallowed a handful of morphine pills.

Anyway, that was history. This was now-time. Jetztzeit. The revolutionary moment, the messianic age, which might extend forever, or not that long, but was somehow ever-present.

It seemed inevitable somehow that in the eyes of the outside world, at least, that the Occupy Wall Street movement would eventually flame out. People would begin to bicker. Splinter groups would form. January would be colder than anyone imagined. It all seemed very fragile. But by a different measure, the occupiers had already won. Their lives felt meaningful, were meaningful, in a way they hadn’t been before, which is a treasure that does not trade on the stock exchange and that most of us, whatever our percentile, rarely get our greedy hands on.

“Look around,” Mr. Boyer said. “We just slept through three days of pouring rain and everyone is still smiling.”

Kink On Tap — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:43:27 +0000

"Isn't He Lovely: Male #Bisexuality Doesn't Exist…Oh, Wait, It Does!", @CristenConger writes @BitchMedia.
bitchmagazine.org
Designer Tom Ford once told _Details_ magazine: “There’s one indulgence every man should try in his lifetime. If you’re straight, sleep with a man at least once, and if you’re gay, don’t go through life without sleeping with a woman.” Gucci's sartorial savant could—pardon the following...

"Isn't He Lovely: Male #Bisexuality Doesn't Exist…Oh, Wait, It Does!", @CristenConger writes @BitchMedia.

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 10:43:21 +0000

Designer Tom Ford once told Details magazine: “There’s one indulgence every man should try in his lifetime. If you’re straight, sleep with a man at least once, and if you’re gay, don’t go through life without sleeping with a woman.”

Gucci's sartorial savant could—pardon the following phrase—"get away with" that—pardon the following adjective—"edgy" quote since he's an out gay man. Having already wandered away from the heteronormative fold, of course it's fine for him to explore both male and female physical contact. A straight guy saying that? Whoa, buddy, you've gotta be gay. Because male bisexuality doesn't exist, right? Oh, wait.

That Ford quote popped up in 2009 Daily Beast column discussing how male bisexuality was so hot right then. Well, for starters, Ford wasn't explicitly advocating for bisexuality but open-minded heteroflexibility. Its interpretation as a bisexuality plug isn't all that surprising, however, since the cultural conclusions we draw about male-on-male sexual activity are far more black and white than those we make regarding females. If, say, Adam Levine had written "I Kissed a Boy and I Liked It?" do you think it would've been as well received as Ms. Perry's pop single? I think not.

That 2009 column argued that pop culture "bromances" were bringing male bisexuality into the mainstream, but that thesis was tenuous at best. The "bro" in "bromance" offered a linguistic cue that any guy pals labeled as such were merely platonic, not gettin' physical like Oliva Newton John. And not until earlier this year has scientific research dismantled the whole "gay, straight, or lying" sexual stereotype imposed on men.

Some brief background:

A 2005 study found that male participants exhibited distinctly diverging patterns in arousal when watching erotic movies involving only women or only men. In other words, the guys were either into the the guys or into the women on screen. No middle ground. Their conclusion in a nutshell? Male bisexuality is bunk.

Then, New York Times magazine featured an article in 2009 detailing the differences in male and female genital arousal when viewing erotic interactions, which implied that it's far easier to for women to swing both ways:

No matter what their self-proclaimed sexual orientation, they showed, on the whole, strong and swift genital arousal when the screen offered men with men, women with women and women with men.

A pertinent problem with denying the existence of male bisexuality is that it, by extension, denies men the sexual fluidity afforded to women. Yes, female bisexuality is eroticized and objectified in a negative way that derides such sexual behavior as a performance to satisfy the heterosexual male gaze. But society is nevertheless more comfortable with it. For bisexual men, it's another story. We aren't sure what it looks like and how to negotiate it and calmly, rationally accept it as part of the sexual spectrum. So instead, we call them liars? That can't be good for anyone. Dan Savage has offered personal anecedotal evidence of (usually) younger men who claim bisexuality to delay or avoid coming out completely, and additional academic research confirms that pattern. But again, extrapolating such evidence to frame male bisexuality as some sort of stop along the way toward Gaytopia, a gateway drug to full-blown phallic addiction, isn't helping us either.

Fortunately, a study published this summer offered an empirical reason to reexamine this mistrust of male bisexuality. A psychology team from Northwestern University tightened the criteria for recruiting bisexual men and found that, lo and behold, the arousal patterns indeed matched their self-identification. The study authors noted "bisexual participants in past studies were partly or exclusively recruited from the gay community," and did not rely on actual bisexual behavior or relationship, all of which could understandably skew results. Adjusting for those potential pitfalls, the Northwestern psychologists discovered something that sounds a lot like sexual fluidity to me:

On average, the bisexual men in our sample had distinctly bisexual patterns of both genital and subjective arousal. That is, their arousal responses to their less arousing sex tended to be higher than those of homosexual and heterosexual men.

What does this bisexuality talk have to do with the beauty/body image bent of Isn't He Lovely? No, I don't have any findings about what bisexual men see in the mirror and how they internalize and externalize the heteronormative media messages bombarding us all. But sexuality—and the acceptance of one's sexuality, both personally and publicly—eventually traces back to the body. Healthy perspectives on sexuality tend to correlate to healthy physical perspectives as well. Imagine for a moment how you'd feel if people constantly called your sexual identity and biological arousal a fraud. Not too sexy, I'd wager.

#Sex at…

Kink On Tap — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:07:39 +0000

#Sex at #OWS' #OccupyWallStreet: “You occupy my heart…. The protest has already inspired at least 1 #marriage proposal"
www.salon.com
Alexander is sitting on the edge of Zuccotti Park holding a cardboard sign reading, “Who’s to say a homeless guy can’t take a girl on a date? Donations?” The 19-year-old’s arms are covered in flaky scabs and the bridge of his nose bears a scar, presumably from a fight, but his gutter-punk look is...

#Sex at #OWS' #OccupyWallStreet: “You occupy my heart…. The protest has already inspired at least 1 #marriage proposal"

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 04:07:32 +0000

Alexander is sitting on the edge of Zuccotti Park holding a cardboard sign reading, “Who’s to say a homeless guy can’t take a girl on a date? Donations?” The 19-year-old’s arms are covered in flaky scabs and the bridge of his nose bears a scar, presumably from a fight, but his gutter-punk look is softened by beautiful green eyes and a round, warm face. I sit next to him on the sidewalk, amid the chaos of Occupy Wall Street, and ask whether the wad of dollar bills in his collection cup is really going toward a date. “Definitely,” he smiles. “But my idea of a date is dropping 2C-B” – a psychedelic drug, he explains, when I have to ask – “and going on an adventure around the city.”

It’s easy to see how reports of drugs, public sex and other licentiousness could take off at an overnight camp site. But while some on the right have seized on such stories to dismiss the movement as one big public orgy, the truth is that those like Alexander — who boasts of fooling around with “a chick” under a tarp just feet from a police officer — are easy to find but not the norm. Not even among the hardcore protesters who camp out every night.

“Sex doesn’t happen here,” says John, a 22-year-old college graduate from Virginia Beach who has slept in the square for a couple of days now. “There are a lot of people in a very tight space. It’d be really hard to do.” A handful of other protesters in their 20s tell me that they haven’t seen any of the apparently apocryphal “lawn sex” or condoms littering the ground. Indeed, Zuccotti Park is by far the cleanest sliver of the city that I’ve seen.

Clearly, there’s a minority that feels more inspired by all the cute activists than by the movement itself — the blog Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street is just one obvious manifestation of that. With so many young people with shared passions gathered in a city square, it’s inevitable that sparks would fly. It’s like college all over again — at least for the ones who aren’t still in school, and many are. Missed Connections regularly pop up on Craigslist – most famously, one from a man looking for the “cute anarchist” he was arrested with while protesting on the Brooklyn Bridge. He wrote, “You made fun of my shoes’ tongues falling out because they’d confiscated our shoelaces!” For those of us with parents who joined the antiwar movement in the ’60s, these sound like familiar love stories. The protest has already inspired at least one marriage proposal, in which a man used the human microphone system to pop the question, “Will you occupy my life?”

Contrary to the pornographic imagery conjured by some conservatives, the movement’s romantic connections are awfully sweet. “I have a crush,” a long-haired 20-year-old named Joshua, who is reading tarot cards for change, told me. When I inquired further, he started to blush and simply put a painted fingernail to his lips to shush me. Spirit, an 18-year-old student sitting by a pile of sleeping punks with face tattoos and mangy pups, said she knew of a couple who met here, fell in love and are now traveling the country together. “You put enough young passionate people together, there will be some love connections,” said Beccah, 25. “If you walk away with your future husband, great. My parents bonded protesting tuition hikes at Boston University.”

It isn’t just romantic connections that are being made, though. There are also intense conversations happening between men and women about gender and sex. I joined a powwow of a dozen 20-somethings sitting on scraps of cardboard and discussing things like “white male privilege,” sexual consent and gendered language. We went around the circle introducing ourselves by our name and preferred gender pronoun. “My name’s Jordan, I go by ‘they,’” said one participant. Another “male-bodied” person with orange dreadlocks and purple nail polish also identified as “they” — but the rest of the group stuck with “he” and “she.” When someone said something others agreed with — say, about how sexism and the gender binary perpetuate “our corrupt social system” — they would do a variation of fluttery “jazz hands” instead of clapping.

It would be an understatement to say that those sexualizing the protest, like the guy behind Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street, are unpopular among Zuccotti Park campers. One young woman said of the blog’s creator, “I hope he doesn’t ever come back here because we’ve done such a good job so far of being nonviolent” — the none-too-subtle implication being that he would get his ass kicked. Although Beccah from earlier said, “If it takes titties to get people here, who am I to argue?”

Initially, 19-year-old Alexander was drawn to the protest because of the free food and blankets, but the “sexy,” “passionate” young women kept him around — along with make-out sessions in phone booths. Eventually, though, he actually got behind the movement and started writing poetry about the cause. He says, “That’s the only reason I’m still here.”

Kink On Tap — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 03:02:03 +0000

Score! Big wins for #transgender peoples' rights in #California: #Gender Nondiscrimination Act expands legal protection
colorlines.com
In California, where one in four transgender people earn wages below the poverty level and trans folk of color are up to a third poorer than their white counterparts, two important anti-discrimination bills have become law. Signed on Monday, the new Gender Nondiscrimination Act (AB 887) carves...

Score! Big wins for #transgender peoples' rights in #California: #Gender Nondiscrimination Act expands legal protection

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 03:02:02 +0000

In California, where one in four transgender people earn wages below the poverty level and trans folk of color are up to a third poorer than their white counterparts, two important anti-discrimination bills have become law.

Signed on Monday, the new Gender Nondiscrimination Act (AB 887) carves out a specific category for “gender identity and expression” in the existing law against discrimination at work, school, the doctor’s office, housing, and public spaces. Transgender people were already protected from, say, being fired or evicted for coming out, but according to the San Francisco-based Transgender Law Center, many didn’t know their rights.

The Vital Statistics Modernization Act (AB 433), also passed on Monday, eliminates demeaning hoops that transgender people have to jump through to update their birth certificates and get a court-ordered gender change. The Transgender Law Center is one of three organizations that led the push for these changes. Program manager Maceo Persson explains how Cali’s trans folk will benefit.

Let’s start with the AB 433, the ID law. Explain what the obstacles were.

Before the Vital Statistics Modernization Act, people could do a legal gender change but it was a very intimidating, outmoded process instituted in the 1970s. It was almost like getting a legal name change: You’d fill out a form, get a court date and stand before a judge to state why you wanted to do a gender change. But then the judge—not your doctor—would get to decide whether you’d undergone ‘clinically appropriate treatment’ to be your authentic self. AB 433 helps ensure that that decision stays between you and your doctor. Transitioning is a personal and medical process. AB 433 puts judges out of the business of making medical decisions; now they just verify that you’re undergoing treatment so you can get the ID you need.

How will this impact immigrants, particularly those seeking asylum because they’re transgender?

Well, [many] transgender people immigrate to California so they can be their true self. When people come here and apply for asylum, they [usually] have a one-year [review] period. This law allows them to apply for a legal gender change simultaneously. It also streamlines the process overall because it conforms to the same standards that apply to changing your gender on your passport. You’re less likely to end up having a bunch of different standards for establishing your gender, and you’re less likely to deal with the discrimination and harassment you get when you don’t have consistent ID.

Talk about the basic non-discrimination law, AB 887. If transgender people had rights, why did you need to spell it out?

Because gender identification and expression weren’t listed on, say, the worker protection posters you see in the kitchen at your job, or in the equal opportunity clause of your lease agreement, people didn’t understand that they’re weren’t allowed to discriminate. We kept getting calls from trans and gender nonconforming people who had looked at their workplace posters or the nondiscrimination notices at their school and were confused about whether they were protected. They literally didn’t know that they had rights. This law makes it clear that the discrimination they might experience in the workplace, the community health clinic, at school is illegal.

And how does race factor in?

In our research we’ve found that a lot of trans people face some kind of discrimination in their everyday lives. The rates of discrimination almost correlate directly to income level and education attainment. Because of systemic racial oppression, trans folks of color are likely to have fewer employment opportunities, lower education levels and have less income. It’s almost like they’re caught in a cycle of discrimination. This law will [interrupt] that cycle.

For information about the connection between race and gender discrimination on a national level, click here.

Read this online at http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/10/score_a_transgender_peoples_victory_in_the_state_of_california.html

Thank you for printing out this Colorlines.com article. If you liked this article, please make a donation today at colorlines.com/donate to support our ongoing news coverage, investigations and actions to promote solutions.

Kink On Tap — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:28:44 +0000

#Sex on the brain: #Orgasms unlock altered consciousness, may offer insight into how thoughts affect physical sensation
www.newscientist.com
_Our intrepid reporter performs an intimate act in an fMRI scanner to explore the pathways of pleasure and pain_ WITH a click and a whirr, I am pulled into the scanner. My head is strapped down and I have been draped with a blanket so that I may touch my nether regions - my clitoris in particular...

#Sex on the brain: #Orgasms unlock altered consciousness, may offer insight into how thoughts affect physical sensation

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:28:25 +0000

Our intrepid reporter performs an intimate act in an fMRI scanner to explore the pathways of pleasure and pain

WITH a click and a whirr, I am pulled into the scanner. My head is strapped down and I have been draped with a blanket so that I may touch my nether regions - my clitoris in particular - with a certain degree of modesty. I am here neither for a medical procedure nor an adult movie. Rather, I am about to stimulate myself to orgasm while an fMRI scanner tracks the blood flow in my brain.

My actions are helping Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, and colleagues to tease apart the mechanisms underlying sexual arousal. In doing so, not only have they discovered that there is more than one route to orgasm, but they may also have revealed a novel type of consciousness - an understanding of which could lead to new treatments for pain (see Top-down pain relief).

Despite orgasm being a near-universal human phenomenon, we still don't know all that much about it. "The amount of speculation versus actual data on both the function and value of orgasm is remarkable," says Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana.

It is estimated that one in four women in the US has had difficulty achieving orgasm in the past year, while between 5 and 10 per cent of women are anorgasmic - unable to achieve orgasm at all. But without precise data to explain what happens during this experience, there are few treatment options available for women who might want help.

Komisaruk is interested in the time course of orgasm, and particularly when an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex (PFC) becomes active. The PFC is situated at the front of the brain and is involved in aspects of consciousness, such as self-evaluation and considering something from another person's perspective.

Komisaruk's team recently found heightened activation in the PFC during female climax - something not seen in previous studies of the orgasm. Surprisingly, this was also the case in individuals who can achieve orgasm by thought alone. With fantasy and self-referential imagery often reported as being part of the sexual experience, Komisaruk and colleagues wondered if the PFC might be playing a key role in creating a physiological response from imagination alone. That is why I am here.

Komisaruk instructs me to tap my thumb with my finger for 3 minutes, then to simply imagine my finger tapping my thumb for the next 3 minutes as fMRI tracks where blood is flowing in my brain. Immediately after, I follow the same cycle with Kegel exercises - brief squeezes of the pelvic floor muscles - and then clitoral touches. I'm then asked to self-stimulate to orgasm, raising my free hand to indicate climax. Despite the unique situation, I am able to do so without too much trouble.

Over 30 areas of my brain are activated as I move from start to finish, including those involved in touch, memory, reward and even pain (see "Orgasm snapshot"). As Komisaruk expected, the imagined clitoral touches and Kegel exercises activated the same brain areas as real ones, albeit with somewhat less blood flow. The PFC, however, showed more activation when touches and pelvic squeezes were imagined compared with those that were real. He suggests this heightened activation may reflect imagination or fantasy, or perhaps some cognitive process that helps manage so called "top-down" control - the direct regulation by the brain of physiological functions - of our own pleasure. The team presented their results at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference in San Diego in November 2010.

However, when Janniko Georgiadis at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and colleagues, performed similar experiments they found that the same brain region "switched off" during orgasm. Specifically, they saw significant deactivation in an area of the PFC called the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).

Altered state

Georgiadis argues that the OFC may be the basis of sexual control - and perhaps only by letting go, so to speak, can orgasm be achieved. He suggests this deactivation may be the most telling example of an "altered state of consciousness" and one not seen, as yet, during any other type of activity.

"I don't think orgasm turns off consciousness but it changes it," he says. "When you ask people how they perceive their orgasm, they describe a feeling of a loss of control." Georgiadis suggests that perhaps orgasm offsets systems that usually dominate attention and behaviour. "I'm not sure if this altered state is necessary to achieve more pleasure or is just some side effect," he says. It is possible that the inability to let go and reach this altered state may be what prohibits individuals with anorgasmia from reaching climax.

There may be a simple explanation for the discrepancies between Georgiadis's and Komisaruk's work - they may represent two different paths to orgasm, activated by different methods of induction. While participants in Komisaruk's studies masturbated themselves to orgasm, those in Georgiadis's were stimulated by their partners. "It is possible there is a difference between someone trying to mentalise sexual stimulation as opposed to receiving it from a partner," says Georgiadis. Perhaps having a partner makes it easier to let go of that control and achieve orgasm. Alternatively, having a partner may make top-down control of sensation and pleasure less necessary to climax.

"This kind of research is incredibly useful," says Heiman. "Orgasm is tied into the brain's reward system and likely other important systems as well. There is much we can learn about the brain, about sensation, about how pleasure works and probably much more from this one physical response."

Komisaruk agrees. He hopes to one day use neurofeedback to allow women with anorgasmia to view their brain activity in real time during genital stimulation. The hope is that this feedback may help them to manipulate their brain activity to bring it closer to that of an orgasmic pattern of activity. He also believes that further study of the orgasm - and the PFC's role - will offer much needed insight into how we might use thought alone to control other physical sensations, such as pain. "There's a lot of mystery in this one intense human experience that is just waiting to be figured out," he says.

Orgasm snapshot

Click here to see what Kayt Sukel's brain looks like at the moment of orgasm. The scan is a sagittal section, essentially a profile shot, that shows one moment in time in different "slices" through the brain.

The coloured dots represent blood flow. Cooler colours show less blood flow and less activation. Warmer colours mean more activation.

You can see from the extent of activity that an orgasm is a whole-brain experience. Activation in the prefrontal cortex (A) is clearly visible, as well as activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (B), thought to be involved in the experience of pain.

Top-down pain relief

The orgasm is a strong analgesic. With brain-activation studies of orgasm showing unique patterns of activation in regions implicated in attention, self-awareness and consciousness, researchers believe its study may also help with the control of pain.

"Orgasm is a special case of consciousness," says Barry Komisaruk at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. "If we can look at different ways of inducing orgasm, we may better understand how we can use top-down processing to control what we physically feel."

People who suffer from chronic pain conditions can be coached to relieve some of their symptoms through such top-down techniques, says Kenneth Casey at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. That is, they can use high-level mental processes to modulate what they feel physically. "The placebo effect is an easy example of practical top-down control. You believe you are taking a pill that will help and somehow it does," he says. "In my experience, simply telling a patient that the pain they are experiencing is not harmful has an analgesic effect."

Researchers from Stanford University in California recently showed that individuals were able to control pain by watching real-time activity of a brain area called the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and then mentally adjusting it. The ACC is also activated in orgasm.

A better understanding of what these brain areas are doing in situations of pain and pleasure, Komisaruk argues, may open the door for improved top-down techniques to modulate both.

Kink On Tap — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:12:02 +0000

‘What’s Your Number?’ Raises Usual #Sex Partner Questions: Is #gender socialization a factor in counting partners? Yup.
www.thedailybeast.com
With _What’s Your Number?_ opening in theaters this week, longstanding questions about how many sex partners people have, how many is too many, and differences between the sexes are back on the table. In my work as a sex researcher and educator at Indiana University and The Kinsey Institute–as...

‘What’s Your Number?’ Raises Usual #Sex Partner Questions: Is #gender socialization a factor in counting partners? Yup.

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:12:02 +0000

With What’s Your Number? opening in theaters this week, longstanding questions about how many sex partners people have, how many is too many, and differences between the sexes are back on the table.

In my work as a sex researcher and educator at Indiana University and The Kinsey Institute–as well as a sex columnist—I field such questions all the time. Most recently, a 28-year-old wrote to ask me whether he should break up with his girlfriend after he read an online poll that put a woman’s average number of sex partners at four (and his girlfriend’s number was nine). Although the man himself had slept with seven women, he had embraced what we scientists call the “sexual double standard.” Among the features of this cultural ball and chain is that men get rewarded for playing the field whereas women get labeled as sluts. (How dare we explore our sexuality? Back to the kitchen, ladies!) To me, this is an intriguing aspect of What’s Your Number?—that movies like High Fidelity and Broken Flowers, in which men revisit their exes, are about soul-searching with no hint of the “how many is too many?” question. And yet a movie that highlights a woman retracing her ex-steps involves the central question of her “number.”

Kink On Tap — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:58:21 +0000

House Passes #HR358, the "Let Women Die" Act, says it's ok that a #pregnant woman fighting for her life be left to die
www.rhrealitycheck.org
Today the GOP-led House of Representatives, with the blessings and encouragement of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops and extremist religious groups such as the Family Research Council, passed a bill in a vote of 251 to 172 that would, among other things, allow doctors and hospitals...

House Passes #HR358, the "Let Women Die" Act, says it's ok that a #pregnant woman fighting for her life be left to die

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:58:17 +0000

Today the GOP-led House of Representatives, with the blessings and encouragement of the United States Council of Catholic Bishops and extremist religious groups such as the Family Research Council, passed a bill in a vote of 251 to 172 that would, among other things, allow doctors and hospitals to "exercise their conscience" by letting pregnant women facing emergency medical conditions die.

Yes. Die.

This is what the Republicans called the "Protect Life Act." And no, I am not kidding.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called it what it is... "a savage assault on women's health."

Fifteen Democrats voted for what women's groups are calling the "Let Women Die" Act. These include anti-choice Congressmen Jason Altmire (PA), Sanford Bishop (GA), Dan Boren (OK), Jerry Costello (IL), Mark Critz (PA), Henry Cuellar (TX), Joe Donnelly (IN), Tim Holden (PA), Dan Lipinski (IL), Jim Matheson (UT), Mike McIntyre (NC), Nick Rahall (WVA), Mike Ross (AR), Collin Petersen (MN), and Heath Shuler (D-NC).

"Extremists prevailed today in the House of Representatives," said Debra Ness of the National Partnership for Women and Families, "proving again that they are badly out-of-touch with the majority of Americans who want lawmakers to focus on economic recovery, jobs and promoting, rather than restricting, affordable, quality health care -- not [on] an extreme, anti-woman agenda."

Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, called passage of the bill yet another reminder of how playing politics with women’s health and privacy is a priority for Speaker John Boehner.

“Americans are facing real challenges, yet House Speaker John Boehner is ignoring the public’s call for Congress to focus on jobs, “said Keenan. “Instead, he is coming up with new ways to give politicians more control over our personal, private decisions. The House’s attacks on women’s freedom and privacy are out of touch with our nation’s values and priorities.”

The bill, H.R. 358, about which we have written extensively, revives the earlier failed Stupak amendment, which would force health plans to drop comprehensive coverage in state health insurance exchanges, cutting off millions of women from the benefits they receive today and prevent women from paying for health insurance with abortion coverage with their own money.

H.R. 358 contains other provisions revealing complete disregard for women's health and lives. It permits states to enact sweeping refusal laws that would allow health plans to refuse to cover women’s preventive services, including birth control, without cost-sharing — undoing a new protection under health reform supported by 66 percent of Americans. It also codifies and significantly expands an already expansive refusal clause (also known as the Weldon amendment) without any regard for patient rights or protections. Under current law (through the 2004 Weldon amendment), hospitals, health care facilities, and insurance plans can refuse to provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions. The Weldon amendment has no protections for patients to ensure they have access to care and information in a timely manner. H.R. 358 codifies this unfair and discriminatory provision. H.R. 358 further allows health care entities--hospitals, clinics--to refuse to "participate in" abortion care. This could mean that a hospital employee with no medical training or role in a patient’s treatment decisions could refuse to process bills, handle medical records, or even set up an examination room for a patient seeking abortion care.

And finally, it overrides protections for pregnant women under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. EMTALA was enacted in 1986 to ensure public access to emergency services regardless of ability to pay, including women in active labor. Under EMTALA, hospitals must stabilize a pregnant patient who, for example, is facing an emergency obstetric condition or life-threatening pregnancy and either treat her--including an emergency abortion--or if the hospital or staff objects, to transfer her to another facility that will treat her.

H.R. 358 overturns decades of precedent guaranteeing people access to lifesaving emergency care, including abortion care and says its ok that a pregnant woman fighting for her life be left to die.

Read it again. It is that breathtaking.

As Representative Jackie Speier (D-CA) stated during floor debate, had this law been in effect 20 years ago she might not be here, because she was one of those women who needed an emergency abortion to save her life.

But the real lives of real women don't seem to be of great concern to the predominantly white male Congress.

“This bill is a collection of dangerous ideas that will undermine women’s health,” said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “Most devastating, the bill eliminates protections for patients seeking care in emergency circumstances, and would allow a hospital to deny lifesaving abortion care to a woman, even if a doctor deems it necessary.”

President Obama has said he would veto the bill if it were to reach his desk. "The Administration strongly opposes H.R. 358," said the statement of policy put out by the White House, "because, as previously stated in the Statement of Administration Policy on H.R. 3, the legislation intrudes on women's reproductive freedom and access to health care and unnecessarily restricts the private insurance choices that women and their families have today."

"America’s women and families are counting on the Senate to reject this measure," said Ness of the National Partnership, "and, if necessary, for President Obama to make good on his promise to veto it.”

Kink On Tap — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:40:18 +0000

#BDSM versus #Sex: Divide & Conquer — @ClarisseThorn at @Feministe: "this weird ongoing debate about what 'qualifies'"
www.feministe.us
Every once in a while, someone will ask me a question about something BDSM-related that I feel “done with”; I feel like I did all my thinking about those topics, years ago. But it’s still useful to get those questions today, because it forces me to try and understand where my head was at, three...

#BDSM versus #Sex: Divide & Conquer — @ClarisseThorn at @Feministe: "this weird ongoing debate about what 'qualifies'"

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:40:16 +0000

Every once in a while, someone will ask me a question about something BDSM-related that I feel “done with”; I feel like I did all my thinking about those topics, years ago. But it’s still useful to get those questions today, because it forces me to try and understand where my head was at, three to seven years ago. It forces me to calibrate my inner processes. I often think of these questions as the “simple” ones, or the “101″ questions, because they are so often addressed in typical conversation among BDSMers. Then again, lots of people don’t have access to a BDSM community, or aren’t interested in their local BDSM community for whatever reason. Therefore, it’s useful for me to cover those “simple” questions on my blog anyway.

Plus, just because a question is simple doesn’t mean the question is not interesting.

One such question is the “BDSM versus sex” question. Is BDSM always sex? Is it always sexual? A lot of people see BDSM as something that “always” includes sex, or is “always sexual in some way”. In the documentary “BDSM: It’s Not What You Think!“, one famous BDSM writer is quoted saying something like: “I would say that eros is always involved in BDSM, even if the participants aren’t doing anything that would look sexual to non-BDSMers.”

But a lot of other people see BDSM, and the BDSM urge, as something that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with sex — that is separate from sex.

I see two sides to this question: the political side, and the “how does it feel?” side. Both sides are intertwined; when it comes to sex, politics can’t help shaping our experiences (and vice versa). I acknowledge this. And yet even when I try to account for that, there is still something deeply different about the way my body feels my BDSM urges, as opposed to how my body feels sexual urges. I don’t think that those bodily differences could ever quite go away, no matter how my mental angle on those processes changed.

This post is about the political side. I’ll follow up with a “how does it feel?” post in a few days …

The Political Side of BDSM versus Sex

“BDSM versus sex” could be viewed as a facet of that constant and irritating question — “What is sex, anyway?” I’ve always found that the more you look at the line between “what is sex” and “what is not sex”, the more blurred the line becomes.

For example, no one can agree about what words like “slut” or “whore” actually mean. As another example, recall that ridiculous national debate that happened across America when Bill Clinton told us that he hadn’t had sex with Monica — and then admitted to getting a blowjob from her. Is oral sex sex? Maybe oral sex isn’t sex! Flutter, flutter, argue, argue.

It is my experience that (cisgendered) women are often more likely to claim that oral sex is not sex, while (cis) men are more likely to claim that oral sex is sex. I suspect this is because women face steeper social penalties for having sex (no one wants to be labeled a “slut”), so we are typically more motivated to claim that sex acts “don’t count” as sex … whereas men are usually congratulated for having sex (more notches on the bedpost!), so men are typically more motivated to claim that sex acts “count” as sex. (Unless they’re Bill Clinton.)

So we already have this weird ongoing debate, about what “qualifies” as sex. And you throw in fetishes such as BDSM, and everyone gets confused all over again. A cultural example of this confusion came up in 2009, when a bunch of professional dominatrixes got arrested in New York City … for being dominatrixes … which everyone previously believed was legal. Flutter, flutter, argue, argue, and it turns out that “prostitution” (which is illegal in New York) is defined as “sexual conduct for money”.

But what does “sexual conduct” mean? At least one previous court had set the precedent that BDSM-for-pay is not the same as “sexual conduct for money” … and yet, in 2009, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office decided that “sexual conduct” means “anything that is arousing to the participants” … and then decided that this suddenly meant they ought to go arrest dominatrixes. It’s not clear why the Manhattan DA did not, then, also begin arresting strippers. And what about random vanilla couples on a standard date-type thing, where the woman makes eyes at the man over dinner, and the man pays for the meal? Sounds like “sexual conduct for money” to me. Which could totally be prostitution, folks, so watch your backs.

In his piece “Is There Such A Thing As Kinky Sex?“, Dr. Marty Klein says that:

If practicing kinky sex makes you “other”, not one of “us”, if it has non-sexual implications, if it means you’re defective or dangerous — who wants that? And so as “kinky sex” and its practitioners are demonized, everyone is concerned — am I one of “those people”? It makes people fear their fantasies or curiosity, which then acquire too much power. It leads to secrecy between partners, as people withhold information about their preferences or experiences.

… I’d like to destroy the idea of binary contrast — that kinky and non-kinky sex are clearly different. Instead, I suggest that kinky and vanilla sex are parts of a continuum, the wide range of human eroticism. We all slide side to side along that continuum during our lives, sometimes in a single week. We don’t need to fear our fantasies, curiosity, or (consensual) sexual preferences. They don’t make us bad or different, just human. Some people like being emotional outlaws. They’ll always find a way to get the frisson of otherness. But most people don’t want to live that way. So ending kink’s status as dangerous and wrong, and its practitioners as “other,” is the most liberating thing we can do — for everyone.

That’s certainly reasonable from a political standpoint. I’ve made similar arguments. (Some folks, such as the brilliant male submissive writer maymay, also argue against the common idea that “kink” is limited to “BDSM”; they prefer an expansive definition of “kink” that denotes a vaster cornucopia of sexuality.)

Plus, I even suspect that a lot of the distinctions made by BDSMers ourselves are based far more on stigma than sense. For example, when I was younger, I went through a period where I couldn’t stand to have the word “submissive” applied to myself. I insisted that I was into BDSM solely for the physical sensation, and swore I would never ever do something solely submission-oriented (such as wearing a collar). It was like I could only handle BDSM as long as I distanced myself from the power elements; the power elements carried too much stigma in my head for me to acknowledge them … yet.

I also used to carefully separate “BDSM” from “sex” in my head. Part of me felt like, “If my desire for pain and power is sexual, then it’s weird. If it’s not sexual, then it’s less weird.” (It looks strange when I type it, now, but I guess that’s how sexual stigma works: it rarely holds up against the clear light of day.) It took me a while to integrate sexuality into my BDSM practice. In contrast, I once met a couple who told me that it took them a long time to do BDSM that wasn’t part of sex. In their heads, the thought was more like: “If the desire for pain and power is sexual, then it’s not weird. But if it’s not sexual, then it’s really weird.”

I’ve heard of plenty of dungeons where sex is not allowed — sometimes for legal reasons, but sometimes because there is actually a social standard against it: people are like, “Dude, let’s not get our nice pure BDSM all dirty by including sex.” (Note: My experience is primarily with dungeons owned by “lifestyle” BDSMers — “lifestyle” being a clumsy word that attempts to denote those of us who are motivated to do BDSM for reasons other than money. While there is some overlap between “lifestyle” BDSM and professional BDSM, the overlap can be surprisingly rare, and professional BDSM is often banned at lifestyle BDSM parties. Lifestyle dungeons are often non-profit organizations, and often function more like community centers than moneymaking venues. I understand that some professional dungeons have a “no sex” rule out of a desire to protect the boundaries of dominatrixes who work there, who may not wish to be asked to engage in sex.)

There are also plenty of cultural groups who do things that look suspiciously like BDSM … who insist that they have nothing to do with BDSM. For example, I’ve heard of spanking clubs whose members get really mad if you dare bring BDSM up in their presence.

And then there’s groups like Taken In Hand, a Christian organization. Actual testimonial from the Taken In Hand site:

There are lots of websites for people in the BDSM, D/s, DD (domestic discipline) and spanking communities. There are websites for people who belong to religions that advocate male-head-of-household marriage. There are even websites for Christians who are interested in BDSM. But there are very few websites for people who are interested in male-led intimate relationships but who are not interested in all that the above communities associate with this kind of relationship (jargon, clothes, etc.) Some of us don’t even like thinking of this as a lifestyle.

Well, my friend, you know what … you can refuse to call yourself BDSM all you want, and you can reject our “jargon” all you want, and you can “dislike” thinking of this “lifestyle” until the end of time … and you have every right to insist that we have nothing to do with you. But when your site has posts with titles like “When rape is a gift,” well … I’m just saying.

Also, since you mention rejecting BDSM “clothes”? I’ll just say that I can be an astoundingly badass domme in a t-shirt. And I have done so. Multiple times.

Personally, I am particularly frustrated by the stigmatizing idea that BDSM has nothing to do with love. Sometimes I encounter this idea that BDSM has to be separated from sex because BDSM has nothing to do with sex, whereas sex supposedly “should” be about love. The truth is that both BDSM and sex are very different for different people, emotions-wise. Although many people experiment with “casual BDSM”, the same way many people experiment with “casual sex”, a stereotype that BDSMers cannot find love in the act is wrong and absurd. (There’s even an actual study that found that positive, consensual BDSM increases intimacy.)

So yeah. Nowadays, many of these “BDSM versus sex” reactions strike me as being born out of pure, irrational stigma. As Dr. Klein noted, these reactions are usually born of the terrible human urge to exclude: to find ways to differentiate ourselves from “those people”. Humans apparently love to think things like: “I’m not like those people. It doesn’t matter if I, for example, write extensive rape fantasy fiction! That couldn’t possibly be BDSM! Because I’m not a BDSMer! Because BDSM is dirty.”

But we shouldn’t necessarily blame people for this instinct to reject and categorize: the instinct is one that comes from being scared and oppressed … because the social penalties for “getting it wrong” are high. Remember, those New York City dominatrixes thought they were “safe” from the law as long as BDSM didn’t count as sex. But as soon as someone decided BDSM “counted as” sex, those dominatrixes were arrested.

It’s just one more example of how sexual stigma for “different kinds of sex” is constantly intertwined. No type of consensual sexuality can express itself freely until people agree that “among consenting adults, there is no ‘should’.” The Romans, those ancient imperialists, used to say: “Divide and conquer.” When consensual sexualities are scared of each other, we will continue to be conquered. As long as “vanilla” people are afraid of “BDSM” … as long as “BDSMers” are afraid of being seen as “sexual” … as long as the social penalties for being a “slut” or a “whore” are incredibly steep … as long as sex workers are stigmatized and criminalized … everyone will be bound by these oppressive standards.

Kink On Tap — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 06:20:06 +0000

The price of oppressing your #women is your country's continued plight of #poverty. Do the math—if you have the balls!
english.aljazeera.net
The top and the bottom of the list of countries in _Newsweek's_ recent cover story, "The 2011 Global Women's Progress Report", evoke images of two different worlds. At the top of the list - the "Best Places to be a Woman" - we see the usual suspects: Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, the...

The price of oppressing your #women is your country's continued plight of #poverty. Do the math—if you have the balls!

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 06:20:06 +0000

The top and the bottom of the list of countries in Newsweek's recent cover story, "The 2011 Global Women's Progress Report", evoke images of two different worlds.

At the top of the list - the "Best Places to be a Woman" - we see the usual suspects: Iceland and the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Canada. On that planet, we see rankings in the upper 90s for the survey's five categories: Justice, health, education, economics, and politics.

Women are out-earning men in college degrees (United States), domestic abusers are being banned from their homes and tracked with electronic monitors (Turkey), and female prime ministers are being elected (Denmark and Australia).

Now look at the other planet, "The Worst Places in the World to be a Woman". In Chad, the worst of the worst, women have "almost no legal rights", and girls as young as ten are legally married off, which is also true in Niger, the seventh worst place for a woman. Most women in Mali - the fifth worst - have been traumatised by female genital mutilation. In Democratic Republic of Congo, 1,100 women are raped every day. In Yemen, you are free to beat your wife whenever you like.

In Chad, women have "almost no legal rights" [GALLO/GETTY]

Though it is stunning to see these two worlds in such stark and detailed relief, their existence is not news: Development specialists and human rights groups have been calling attention to these inequities for years. But the systemic oppression of women tends to be cast in terms of claims for empathy: We shouldn't follow these policies because they are not nice, not enlightened. Some development researchers have started to make a compelling case, too, that oppression of women impedes countries' efforts to escape poverty.

Economy and oppression

But the data in the Newsweek list show that we need to frame this issue in stronger, more sweeping terms: When poor countries choose to oppress their own women, they are to some extent choosing their own continued poverty. Female oppression is a moral issue; but it also must be seen as a choice that countries make for short-term "cultural" comfort, at the expense of long-term economic and social progress.

It is not politically correct to attribute any share of very poor countries' suffering to their own decisions. But it is condescending to refuse to hold many of them partly responsible for their own plight. Obviously, the legacy of colonialism - widespread hunger, illiteracy, lack of property or legal recourse, and vulnerability to state violence - is a major factor in their current poverty. But how can we blame that legacy while turning a blind eye to a kind of colonialism against women in these same countries' private homes and public institutions?

When the poorest countries - most of them in Africa or with Muslim majorities - choose to sustain and even devise new policies that oppress women, we have to be willing to say that, in some measure, they are choosing the economic misfortune that follows. The developed world's silence suggests that it takes the mistreatment of black and brown women by black and brown men for granted, rather than holding all people to one standard of justice.

The "surprises" on the Newsweek list confirm that educating women boosts economic prosperity. Many countries with histories of colonialism and other forms of tyranny, as well as countries without abundant natural resources, have chosen to educate women and grant them legal rights. Some continue to struggle economically, but none is abjectly poor - and some are booming. Think of China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, South Korea, and Turkey.

"Studies show that helping women access trade and grow businesses helps create jobs and boost incomes."

- Hilary Clinton, US secretary of state

The low status of women on Planet Worst cannot be blamed on cultural stasis: Many of the "surprise" countries - Romania, Portugal, the Philippines, and India - treated women far more unequally a mere 50-100 years ago. In Pakistan, marital rape is not illegal today, and there are 800 honor killings a year. What kind of economic boom might stagnating Pakistan enjoy if patriarchy relaxed its grip?

If you are not innumerate, you can start a business. If you are not living in mortal fear of rape and beatings at home, you can organise your community to dig a new well. If you are not subjecting your daughter to traumatic genital injury at three and marrying her off at ten, she can go to school. And, when she does marry and has children of her own, they will benefit from two educated, employed parents, which means twice as much literate conversation in the home, twice the contacts, and twice the encouragement to succeed.

Educated, pushy mothers make all the difference.

As US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it in the Newsweek issue, "The world needs to think more strategically and creatively about tapping into women's potential for growth. Studies show that helping women access trade and grow businesses helps create jobs and boost incomes."

But on Planet Worst, forcing terrified, uneducated women to remain at home is more socially acceptable than facing the fact that this means choosing to drag down incomes for everyone. It is time to stop tiptoeing around the poorest countries' responsibility to do something essential about their own plight: Emancipate their women.

Naomi Wolf is a political activist and social critic whose most recent book is Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

A version of this article was first published on Project Syndicate.

Kink On Tap — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 06:03:03 +0000

'Sexting' driven by peer pressure
www.sciencedaily.com
Both young men and women experience peer pressure to share sexual images via the new phenomenon of 'sexting', preliminary findings from a University of Melbourne study has found. 'Sexting' is the practice of sending and receiving sexual images on a mobile phone. The study is one of the first...

'Sexting' driven by peer pressure

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 06:03:01 +0000

Both young men and women experience peer pressure to share sexual images via the new phenomenon of 'sexting', preliminary findings from a University of Melbourne study has found.

'Sexting' is the practice of sending and receiving sexual images on a mobile phone.

The study is one of the first academic investigations into 'sexting' from a young person's perspective in Australia. The findings were presented to the 2011 Australasian Sexual Health Conference in Canberra.

Ms Shelley Walker from the Primary Care Research Unit in the Department of General Practice at the University of Melbourne said the study not only highlighted the pressure young people experienced to engage in sexting, it also revealed the importance of their voice in understanding and developing responses to prevent and deal with the problem.

"The phenomenon has become a focus of much media reporting; however research regarding the issue is in its infancy, and the voice of young people is missing from this discussion and debate," she said.

The qualitative study involved individual interviews with 33 young people (15 male and 18 female) aged 15 -- 20 years.

Preliminary findings revealed young people believed a highly sexualized media culture bombarded young people with sexualized images and created pressure to engage in sexting.

Young people discussed the pressure boys place on each other to have girls' photos on their phones and computers. They said if boys refrained from engaging in the activity they were labeled 'gay' or could be ostracized from the peer group.

Both genders talked about the pressure girls experienced from boyfriends or strangers to reciprocate on exchanging sexual images.

Some young women talked about the expectation (or more subtle pressure) to be involved in sexting, simply as a result of having viewed images of girls they know.

Both young men and women talked about being sent or shown images or videos, sometimes of people they knew or of pornography without actually having agreed to look at it first.

Ms Walker said 'sexting' is a rapidly changing problem as young people keep up with new technologies such as using video and Internet via mobile phones.

The Australian Communication & Media Authority reported in 2010 that around 90 percent of young people aged 15-17 owned mobile phones.

"Our study reveals how complex and ever-changing the phenomenon of 'sexting' is and that continued meaningful dialogue is needed to address and prevent the negative consequences of sexting for young people," she said.

Kink On Tap — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 05:47:02 +0000

Topeka, Kansas considers decriminalizing domestic violence to avoid prosecuting cases: "it's a big game of chicken"
feministing.com
Last night, in between approving city expenditures and other routine agenda items, the Topeka, Kansas City Council debated one rather controversial one: decriminalizing domestic violence. Here’s what happened: Last month, the Shawnee County District Attorney’s office, facing a 10% budget cut,...

Topeka, Kansas considers decriminalizing domestic violence to avoid prosecuting cases: "it's a big game of chicken"

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 05:47:01 +0000

Last night, in between approving city expenditures and other routine agenda items, the Topeka, Kansas City Council debated one rather controversial one: decriminalizing domestic violence.

Here’s what happened: Last month, the Shawnee County District Attorney’s office, facing a 10% budget cut, announced that the county would no longer be prosecuting misdemeanors, including domestic violence cases, at the county level. Finding those cases suddenly dumped on the city and lacking resources of their own, the Topeka City Council is now considering repealing the part of the city code that bans domestic battery. The thinking here is that the county won’t let domestic violence go unpunished in Topeka and so will be forced to step in and start prosecuting it again if the city won’t. Basically, it’s a big game of chicken–where the “chicken” is, I suppose, the chump who won’t allow domestic abusers to walk free?

Of course, if you’d somehow gotten the impression that domestic violence is not really all that much of a priority for the county (which stopped prosecuting the cases almost a month ago) or the city (which is seriously considering officially legalizing the crime), think again. On the contrary, everyone involved professes to believe, as the DA’s office said, “that domestic violence is a crime that should be taken seriously and charged.” It’s just that everyone wants someone else to pay for it. And honestly, as deep cuts to state and local governments across the country take their toil, it’s hard to blame them too harshly for that. Thanks, austerity!

But while this clusterfuck is getting sorted out, domestic violence advocates in Topeka say it’s already putting vulnerable people at increased risk. Since the county stopped prosecuting the crimes on September 8th, it has turned back 30 domestic violence cases. Sixteen people have been arrested for misdemeanor domestic battery and then released from the county jail after charges weren’t filed. “Letting abusive partners out of jail with no consequences puts victims in incredibly dangerous positions,” said Becky Dickinson of the YWCA. “The abuser will often become more violent in an attempt to regain control.” The YMCA also said that some survivors associated with their Center for Safety and Empowerment were afraid for their safety if the dispute wasn’t resolved soon.

The City Council is expected to reach a decision next week. As an alternative to the “decriminalize domestic violence plan,” the county DA has also offered to continue prosecuting the cases in exchange for a one-time payment from the city, although it seems unclear if this is a feasible option. I’ll echo Jo Charay, a survivor who spoke at the Council meeting last night: “I just ask that somehow there has to be a resolution.” Seriously.

Kink On Tap — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:53:03 +0000

San Francisco #Sex Workers Speak Out In @ComeByStJames Campaign: "media attention…fuels enforcement [not] support"
www.huffingtonpost.com
"Sex workers go to work, come home, take care of their children -- just like everybody else," reads the poster on Muni. Below the quote is a portrait of a smiling woman with a tagline reading: "Someone you know is a sex worker." This poster is one of many included in St. James Infirmary's new...

San Francisco #Sex Workers Speak Out In @ComeByStJames Campaign: "media attention…fuels enforcement [not] support"

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 21:53:02 +0000

"Sex workers go to work, come home, take care of their children -- just like everybody else," reads the poster on Muni. Below the quote is a portrait of a smiling woman with a tagline reading: "Someone you know is a sex worker."

This poster is one of many included in St. James Infirmary's new media campaign promoting the rights of local sex workers. A collaboration between St. James Infirmary (a San Francisco peer-based organization offering free medical and social services to sex workers) and artists Rachel Schreiber and Barbara DeGenevieve, the campaign features portraits of sex workers and supporters -- spouses, partners, family members and health care professionals -- putting faces to the people who work in the industry.

While photographing, Schreiber interviewed her subjects and included quotes on the posters, reading: "No one asks, 'you're so smart, why did you become a plumber?'" and "Farm work can be difficult, but we don't outlaw agriculture. We regulate it to improve conditions for those who work in that industry."

(SCROLL DOWN FOR PHOTOS)

"We wanted to make visible the workers who tend be invisible," said Schreiber to The Huffington Post. "Sex workers aren't people hanging out in a dark alley somewhere; they are nurses, teachers and mothers. Our goal is to demystify sex workers. They are just everyday people." Schreiber believes that because of the mystery and invisibility surrounding the sex industry, workers have trouble accessing the resources they need -- an issue she's hoping the campaign will bring to light.

Schreiber, a volunteer at St. James Infirmary, had been interested in launching a media campaign for years. But the recent controversy surrounding Ashton Kutcher's anti-sex trafficking campaign caught her eye. "Of course St. James Infirmary and I are against sex trafficking," said Schreiber. "No one should be forced to do something they don't want to do. But the figures are so often exaggerated and that doesn't help the problem. When the focus of so much media attention is on the trafficking, it doesn't leave room for anything else -- like the resources to keep those who choose to work in this industry safe and healthy, and to give those who feel like they don't have a choice a way out."

According to Schreiber, the problem with the media attention is that it fuels enforcement rather than support. "Many of the sex workers we assist at St. James choose to do what they do. And they have needs and rights just like everyone else," said Schreiber. "And for those who feel stuck due to financial situation, the answer is in getting them the help they need, not in having them arrested."

The result of the project: an honest, sincere and informational campaign across San Francisco. Schreiber originally planned to house the campaign on billboards across the city, but both Clear Channel and CBS Outdoor rejected the campaign, telling Schreiber that "sex worker [is] not a family friendly term."

"I was working with a local sales rep from CBS Outdoor, and at some point she told me that she'd have to 'run the creative by corporate.' At that point, I began to suspect that they wouldn't run the campaign." After working with CBS, she contacted Clear Channel, telling them outright that she'd been rejected by CBS. "The rep told me that Clear Channel tends to be even more conservative than CBS Outdoor."

But Titan 360, the ad company that supports BART, Muni and AC Transit, happily agreed, posting Schreiber's photographs on Muni busses all over San Francisco.

"We're hoping this starts a dialogue," said Schreiber. "And we want sex workers to be a part of that dialogue."

Check out posters from the St. James Infirmary in our slideshow below, courtesy of Rachel Schreiber:

Kink On Tap — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:30:04 +0000

Australian court rules that a penis is no prerequisite to being considered a man - GlobalPost #trasngender #GLBT
www.globalpost.com
Australian men do not need a penis, the country's High Court has ruled. Or words to that effect. What the Australian Associated Press newspaper was trying to convey in this slightly sensationalized lead paragraph was a court ruling that: "The physical characteristics by which a person is...

Australian court rules that a penis is no prerequisite to being considered a man - GlobalPost #trasngender #GLBT

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:30:03 +0000

Australian men do not need a penis, the country's High Court has ruled.

Or words to that effect.

What the Australian Associated Press newspaper was trying to convey in this slightly sensationalized lead paragraph was a court ruling that:

"The physical characteristics by which a person is identified as male or female are confined to external physical characteristics that are socially recognizable. Social recognition of a person's gender does not require knowledge of a person's remnant sexual organs."

The ruling arises from an appeal by two transgender people against a decision by Western Australia's Gender Reassignment Board, which refused to issue them certificates of recognition of gender because both retained a female reproductive system.

The pair, who have had their breasts removed and are having testosterone therapy, which renders them infertile, say they are men.

The effect of the judgment is that female-to-male transsexuals do not have to undergo penis construction surgery, which is dangerous and no doubt expensive, given its not performed in Australia, to legally swap genders.

Nor do they have to have their internal female reproductive organs removed for WA to issue them with gender certificates, the West Australian reports.

The paper quoted one of the men as saying:

"After over three years of fighting this case, we are incredibly excited that the High Court has upheld our appeal.

"The High Court has taken a common sense approach to the interpretation of the law, recognizing that it is unrealistic to require people to undertake specific, medically unnecessary surgical requirements that are neither practical nor attainable.

The decision is completely in line with the recommendations of the Australian Human Rights Commission, as well as with other, similar cases around the world."

Kink On Tap — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:31:02 +0000

#OWS: Police mistreatment of #transgender man during #OccupyWallStreet arrests: "handcuffed to a railing," denied food
www.racialicious.com
My name is justin adkins. I am a transgender man who was arrested at the Occupy Wall Street Protest October 1st on theBrooklyn Bridge. This was my first arrest. This was the second weekend I participated in the Occupy Wall Street protest. I have been coming down on the weekends because I work 2...

#OWS: Police mistreatment of #transgender man during #OccupyWallStreet arrests: "handcuffed to a railing," denied food

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:30:34 +0000

My name is justin adkins.

I am a transgender man who was arrested at the Occupy Wall Street Protest October 1st on theBrooklyn Bridge. This was my first arrest. This was the second weekend I participated in the Occupy Wall Street protest. I have been coming down on the weekends because I work 2 full-time jobs to make ends meet. One of those jobs is as Assistant Director of the Multicultural Center at Williams College in Massachusetts. The other is as a website developer.

I was toward the front of the march and after being trapped by the police on the bridge; I was able to watch as they arrested people one-by-one. I went peacefully when it was clear that it was my turn. My arresting officer, Officer Creer, found out I was born female when I yelled that information to the legal observer on the bridge. My arresting officer asked what I meant when I told the legal observer that I was “transgender” so I told him that I was born female. He asked what “I had down there”. Since it is a rude and embarrassing question to ask someone about his/her genitals no matter what the situation, I simply told him again “I was born female”. He asked, appropriately, if I wanted a male or female officer to pat me down. I told him it was fine if he patted me down. He then turned and asked a female officer, I believe her name is Officer Verga, to pat me down explaining to her that I am transgender. She patted me down and then preceded to refer to me as “she” even though I kept correcting her that my preferred pronoun is “he”. Luckily she disappeared after about 40 minutes, as I sat cuffed at the apex of the Brooklyn Bridge with hundreds of others.

Once we arrived at Precinct 90 in Brooklyn, the male officer taking everyone’s belongings asked if it was ok to search me. I said. “yes” and he proceeded to respectfully empty my pockets. I was arrested with a group of 5 other guys, and once they got us to the precinct, they initially put me in a cell with those same men. They asked if that was ok with me and I said yes. About 5 minutes after they took the cuffs off and shut the cell door an officer came back to the cell to move me. When he opened the door and looked my way, I was aware of what was happening. I knew that my transgender status would potentially be an issue once at the jail, which is why I told the legal observer that I was transgender. The officer glanced at me motioning to come out of the cell and then told me to put my hands behind my back as my fellow protestors looked on in bewilderment.

As we walked out past the other protestors waiting to have their pockets emptied, one woman looked at me with a puzzled look, we had connected on the long drive around Brooklyn as they tried to figure out where to take us. I told her that it looked like transgender people got “special treatment”. Within the first 15 minutes of being at precinct 90 I was being segregated and treated differently from the rest of the protestors arrested.

They took me away from the cellblock where they had all of the protestors locked up and brought me to a room with 2 cells and a bathroom. One small cell was empty and the large cell had about 8 men who had been arrested on charges not related
to the protest. Unlike me, these men had been arrested for a variety of crimes, some violent. When I entered the room they had me sit down in a chair on the same portion of the wall as the restroom, and then handcuffed my right wrist to a metal handrail. I thought that this was a temporary arrangement as they tried to find me a separate cell as part of some protocol regarding transgender people, which I later discovered does not exist in New York City. After about an hour I realized that they had no intention of moving me. I remained handcuffed to this bar next to the bathroom for the next 8 hours.

The cells, on the other side of the precinct where they had locked up the other 69 protestors, did not have working toilets. Every person who had to use the toilet was brought to the one next to where I had been cuffed. This was not only disgusting, but also embarrassing. The smell of urine was so strong that I, and the men locked up in the cell in the room that I was in, mentioned the odor on more than one occasion.

Once they started bringing women in to use the bathrooms, a short young female officer, who was in charge of people locked up in the same room, harshly turned my chair around with my arm still locked to the railing but now pinned behindmy back. She said that she knew it hurt but that they were bringing in women to use the restroom and she could not have me watching. I had no interest in watching anyone use the bathroom, and every-time a male had come into use the restroom I had respectfully turned away. This process of people coming in and out to use the restroom went on for the full 8 hours.

I was distinctly treated differently than the other protestors during my entire time at Precinct 90 in Brooklyn. At one point in the night, all of the protestors were given a peanut butter sandwich and water. I asked for a sandwich three times but no one acknowledged my request. I do not know when or how long those men were being held but I was there for eight hours and had sat on the bridge for about 2 hours and was never once offered water or a sandwich as my fellow protestors received.

At one point the woman I had spoken with earlier was brought in to use the toilet. When she entered the room she looked over
at me, shocked, and asked why I was attached to the railing. I told her again that it was the “transgender special”. She clearly understood that I was being discriminated against because of my transgender status. She asked the female officer in the room why I couldn’t be given my own cell and the officer said “you don’t know why he is locked up here” the woman said that she did know and that I should at least be given my own cell if they were not going to house me with the male protestors I was originally arrested with.

Throughout the night it became clear that they wanted my fellow protestors to think that I did something criminally wrong. That I had done something different from them. That I was not just a peaceful protestor exercising my rights on that bridge. That I deserved to be handcuffed to a railing on the side of the precinct with violent criminals. Everyone seemed to wonder why I had been separated. When other officers chatted amongst themselves about me, one officer suspected aloud that I was a “ringleader”. The woman officer stood a few times outside the glass wall with the door open as male officers asked about me. It appeared that she told them that I was transgender as they gawked, giggled and stared at me. This was embarrassing and humiliating. Only I have the right to out myself as a transgender person. She was using my identity to get a laugh with those she thought would find me curious and freakish.

At one point in the night a young man who had participated in the earlier NYC Slutwalk march to protest against explaining
or excusing rape by referring to a women’s clothing, came into use the bathroom wearing a mini-skirt. He was one of the protestors arrested with me on the bridge in the Occupy Wall Street March. The officer escorting him started poking fun at his mini-skirt at which point I explained that he looked good and the skirt was fine. When he sat down to go to the bathroom the officers laughed even more saying that they had “seen everything tonight”. The attitude of the officers made me realize that as much as I needed to urinate it would not be a good idea to do so. The space did not feel safe. By the time I was released I had not gone to the bathroom for 11 hours.

I was more than comfortable and safe with the 3 men I was initially put in a cell with. They were nice and we had a lot in common. If the officers concern was about my safety, I perceived I was in much more danger in the accommodations they gave me–away from my fellow protestors. Additionally, I was made fun of and treated differently throughout the entire process.

At about 2 am I was released with a desk appearance ticket and charged with disorderly conduct. To my knowledge I was the only one out of 70 processed at Precinct 90 who only received one ticket. The rest received 2 or 3 tickets, most including refusing to disperse and blocking a roadway. Why was I treated differently than the other 69 protestors? The only reason that I was treated differently was that I was transgender.

The NYC police department needs to have a written protocol and train its officers on how to treat transgender people. Most trans people who are arrested are trans women of color. Without a protocol all of us have a tough time fighting against the systematic oppression of the militarized police. A written protocol would help all of us. No one should experience the blatant discrimination and embarrassment that I did as I practiced my constitutional rights as an American citizen.

Solidarity,
justin adkins

http://justinadkins.com

Kink On Tap — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:16:03 +0000

Certain species of male beetles mistake beer bottles for females, and find the stubbies (literally) deathly attractive
www.sciencedaily.com
It was a case of a besotted male and beer. Love-sick and lonely, the male girded his loins and took immediate action to relieve his unhappiness -- but with a surprising outcome, as a U of T Mississauga professor discovered. The male in question, an Australian jewel beetle (_Julodimorpha...

Certain species of male beetles mistake beer bottles for females, and find the stubbies (literally) deathly attractive

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 08:16:03 +0000

It was a case of a besotted male and beer. Love-sick and lonely, the male girded his loins and took immediate action to relieve his unhappiness -- but with a surprising outcome, as a U of T Mississauga professor discovered.

The male in question, an Australian jewel beetle (Julodimorpha bakewelli), became so enamored with a brown "stubby" beer bottle that he tried to mate with it -- so vigorously that he died trying to copulate in the hot sun rather than leave willingly, says Professor Darryl Gwynne of biology, an international expert in behavioural ecology, specifically the evolution of reproductive behaviour.

Gwynne and his Australian colleague David Rentz were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize at Harvard University for their 1983 paper "Beetles on the Bottle: Male Buprestids Mistake Stubbies for Females." The Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prizes, are awarded annually by the scientific humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research to "first make people laugh and then make them think." The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative and spur people's interest in science, medicine and technology.

"I'm honoured, I think," Gwynne says, with a smile on his face. "The awards make people think, and they're a bit of a laugh. Really, we've been sitting here by the phone for the past 20 plus years waiting for the call. Why did it take them so long?"

Gwynne and Rentz were conducting field work in Western Australia 23 years ago when they noticed something unusual along the side of the road. "We were walking along a dirt road with the usual scattering of beer cans and bottles when we saw about six bottles with beetles on top or crawling up the side. It was clear the beetles were trying to mate with the bottles."

The bottles -- stubbies as they are known in Australia -- resemble a "super female" jewel beetle, Gwynne says: big and orangey brown in colour, with a slightly dimpled surface near the bottom (designed to prevent the bottle from slipping out of one's grasp) that reflects light in much the same way as female wing covers. The bottles proved irresistible to males. Ignoring the females, the males mounted or tried to climb up the bottles, refusing to leave. They fried to death in the sun, were eaten by hungry ants or had to be physically removed by the researchers.

Gwynne and Rentz determined that the males were attracted only to stubbies -- not to beer cans or wine bottles of a slightly different shade of brown. And it wasn't the bottles' contents that captured their attention: "Not only do western Australians never dispose of a beer bottle with beer still in it, but many of the bottles had sand and detritus accumulated over many months," the research paper notes.

Beer and sex humour aside, the research has serious messages, Gwynne says. First, when humans interfere -- perhaps unwittingly -- in an evolutionary process, there can be unintended consequences; in this case, female beetles are ignored by males which can have a huge impact on the natural world. "Improperly disposed of beer bottles not only present a physical and 'visual' hazard in the environment, but also could potentially cause great interference with the mating system of a beetle species," the paper says. To that end, Gwynne forwarded research results to a leading western Australian brewer.

And secondly, Gwynne points out that the research supports the theory of sexual selection: that males, in their eagerness to mate, are the ones that make mating mistakes.

Gwynne conducted his research as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Western Australia in Nedlands. He joined U of T Mississauga in 1987. The research was published in the journal of the Entomological Society of Australia and the U.K.-based journal, Antenna.

Kink On Tap — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 21:03:04 +0000

Choosing a Pronoun - He, She or Other - After Curfew - @NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com
AFEW weeks ago, Katy Butler, 16, updated her status on Facebook with an enthusiastic shout-out for Google+, the social network’s latest rival. “Oh my God Google! I love it! I was signing up for Google+ and they asked me my gender and the choices were male, female or OTHER!!!!! Oh ya Google!”...

Choosing a Pronoun - He, She or Other - After Curfew - @NYTimes.com

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 21:03:02 +0000

A FEW weeks ago, Katy Butler, 16, updated her status on Facebook with an enthusiastic shout-out for Google+, the social network’s latest rival. “Oh my God Google! I love it! I was signing up for Google+ and they asked me my gender and the choices were male, female or OTHER!!!!! Oh ya Google!”

Katy, a high school junior in Ann Arbor, Mich., first encountered “other” as a gender option at a meeting of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning and Allies (LGBTQQA) in seventh grade. “For those of us in the nonconforming gender community, it is great to see Google make the option more mainstream,” she said.

Though Google created the “other” option for privacy reasons rather than as a transgender choice, young supporters of preferred gender pronouns (or P.G.P.’s as they are called) could not help but rejoice. Katy is one of a growing number of high school and college students who are questioning the gender roles society assigns individuals simply because they have been born male or female.

“You have to understand, this has nothing to do with your sexuality and everything to do with who you feel like inside,” Katy said, explaining that at the start of every LGBTQQA meeting, participants are first asked if they would like to share their P.G.P.’s. “Mine are ‘she,’ ‘her’ and ‘hers’ and sometimes ‘they,’ ‘them’ and ‘theirs.’ ”

P.G.P.’s can change as often as one likes. If the pronouns in the dictionary don’t suffice, there are numerous made-up ones now in use, including “ze,” “hir” and “hirs,” words that connote both genders because, as Katy explained, “Maybe one day you wake up and feel more like a boy.”

Teenagers are by nature prone to rebellion against adult conventions, and as the gender nonconformity movement gains momentum among young people, “it is about rejecting the boxes adults try to put kids in by assuming their sexual identity labels their personal identity,” said Dr. Ritch C. Savin-Williams, director of the Cornell University Sex and Gender Lab. “These teens are fighting the idea that your equipment defines what it means for you to be a boy or girl. They are saying: ‘You don’t know me by looking at me. Assume nothing.’ ”

Dr. Savin-Williams, who is also the author of the book “The New Gay Teenager,” went on to list some of the new adjectives young people use to describe themselves: “bi-curious,” “heteroflexible,” “polyamorous” and even “wiggly.”

The semantic variations are part of a nascent effort worldwide to acknowledge some sort of neutral ground between male and female, starting at the youngest ages. Last year, a preschool in Sweden, appropriately called Egalia, opened with the goal of eliminating all gender bias by referring to the children as “friends,” instead of girls and boys, as well as avoiding all gender-specific pronouns.

Australia last month issued new passport guidelines allowing citizens to give their official gender as male, female or indeterminate. In Britain, the Home Office is also considering a third gender category on passports, according to reports.

In the United States, the transgender movement is beginning to find advocates in high schools. There are now nearly 5,000 Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs, high school organizations offering support to teenagers, registered with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, a national organization whose mission is “to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.”

“More students today than ever are thinking about what gender means and are using this language to get away from masculine and feminine gender assumptions,” said Eliza Byard, the network’s executive director.

Some colleges, too, are starting to adopt nongender language. Last month, students at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., voted to edit the student constitution so that it contains only gender-neutral language. And in 2009, the University of Michigan Student Assembly passed a resolution eliminating gender-specific pronouns from the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities.

From an early age, it was obvious to Loan Tran, 16 (whose P.G.P.’s, are “he, him and his,” and “they, them and theirs”), that his “assigned” gender did not align with the roles society prescribed. “If I don’t state my P.G.P.’s, people assume I am a ‘she, her, hers,’ from my high-pitched voice,” said Loan, who is president of the Gay-Straight Alliance at his high school in Charlotte, N.C.

When told that because of the nature of his name and the fact that the interview was being conducted over the phone, I now actually had no idea if Loan was born a boy or girl, Loan replied, “Awesome.”

It was only toward the end of the conversation that Loan revealed that he was “assigned female” at birth.

Loan said he grew up in a traditional Vietnamese family, where men’s and women’s roles are strictly defined. “At first it made my parents angry that I was not this perfect extension of them,” Loan said. “But now they are trying to learn more about the community.”

Loan is a student ambassador for the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. “Today more people are O.K. with the gay and lesbian community than the gender-neutral community, which feels more threatening, I suppose, because it impacts a greater portion of society,” Loan said. “But the important thing is we have a safe meeting place as teens to express our P.G.P.’s and show our true selves to one another.”

Kink On Tap — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:56:04 +0000

What to Wear to a #SlutWalk | The Nation
www.thenation.com
“What does one wear to a SlutWalk?” I asked myself as I combed through my closet. A strapless romper? Too dated. A white pleated sundress? Too summer wedding. “What do you think I should wear?” I asked Solomon, my partner of thirteen years, who was becoming as exasperated by my private catwalk as...

What to Wear to a #SlutWalk | The Nation

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 20:56:02 +0000

“What does one wear to a SlutWalk?” I asked myself as I combed through my closet. A strapless romper? Too dated. A white pleated sundress? Too summer wedding. “What do you think I should wear?” I asked Solomon, my partner of thirteen years, who was becoming as exasperated by my private catwalk as I was. “Whatever you want,” he answered. “Isn’t that the point?”

It was indeed the point. SlutWalk, an anti-rape march and street protest that has gone viral, is as much about freedom of expression as it is a political protest. The first SlutWalk, organized last April by Heather Jarvis and Sonya Barnett in Toronto, was a response to a Toronto police officer telling a group of students in a public safety class that women "should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized." Since then, more than seventy SlutWalks have popped up in places as diverse as Chicago, Berlin, Cape Town, New Delhi and Mexico City. New York City’s highly anticipated SlutWalk is scheduled to take place on October 1.

In the United States, SlutWalks have been greeted with a mixed response. Feminist icon Alice Walker recently told the online magazine Guernica that she “always understood the word ‘slut’ to mean a woman who freely enjoys her own sexuality,” and observes that “the spontaneous movement that has grown around reclaiming this word speaks to women’s resistance of having names turned into weapons against them.” I agree. In her op-ed in the Washington Post, Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com and author of the Purity Myth, wrote, “SlutWalks have become the most successful feminist action of the past twenty years.”

But SlutWalk’s critics abound, and their ranks are as diverse as the movement’s supporters. “I think when a woman is dressing in an immodest way, in a provocative way, she has got think about what is she saying by her dress,” said conservative singer/songwriter Rebecca St. James on the Fox News show Hannity, confirming that women also participate in victim-blaming. Meanwhile, writer Rebecca Traister penned the most visible feminist criticism of the marches in The New York Times Magazine; in “Ladies, We Have a Problem.” Traister described the SlutWalkers as “dressed in what look like sexy stewardess Halloween costumes” which “seems less like victory than capitulation (linguistic and sartorial) to what society already expects of its young women.”

Sexy stewardess, however, wasn’t quite what I had in mind that morning—and Traister, like many of SlutWalk’s critics, seems to have missed a critical aspect of the march’s pageantry. While many participants at the DC march I participated in wore in jeans and sneakers, the women who stood out the most were rape survivors wearing the clothes they had been assaulted in—from pajamas to thigh-high boots—carrying signs that said, “This Is What I Was Wearing When I Was Raped.”

After texting back and forth with fellow feminist Holly Kearl, author of Stop Street Harassment, who tried on twelve different outfits ranging from running clothes she is routinely harassed in to a business suit, I solved my wardrobe predicament: a black-and-white baby-T cut-out that reads, “Got Consent?," suede strapped heels and a black pencil skirt hiked up to a mini held together by a charcoal leather belt that hadn’t seen sunlight for years.

Sadie Healy, a speaker at SlutWalk DC, wore the green-and-gold sequined outfit she was assaulted in to the march. She told me that “every law enforcement officer, district attorney and even friends and family I spoke to about my assault asked me what I was wore that night.”

“I wore that outfit,“ Healy continued, “to show that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you are wearing, they will call you a slut because you come forward and say you were sexually assaulted. The word has everything to do with who we think deserves to be sexually assaulted.”

The sartorial reappropriation that Healy, a white, college-educated Mid-Westerner, managed to find at SlutWalk, however, may well not be possible for women of color who always wear the added complication of race. That’s what Farah Tanis, co-founder of the New York–based feminist group Black Women’s Blueprint, recently declared in “An Open Letter From Black Women to the SlutWalk.” The letter, directed at organizers of SlutWalk NYC, expresses concern that “Black women and girls have found no real space in SlutWalk.” “As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is,” Tanis and others write. “The perception and wholesale acceptance of speculations about what the Black woman wants, what she needs and what she deserves has truly, long crossed the boundaries of her mode of dress.”

“Approximately 40 percent of African-American women report coercive contact of a sexual nature by age 18,” Tanis told me in an interview. “Part of the problem with SlutWalk in the United States is that is doesn’t speak to the myriad of needs and the complex situations that African-American and even Asian-American, Latina, and Native American women experience when it comes to sexual assault.”

As the co-signers of the open letter suggest, the word and iconography of “slut” can be more difficult for African-American women to reclaim because of the longstanding stereotypes about black women as innately hypersexual. Dating back to the eighteenth century, European and white American slaveholders routinely applied the myth of the jezebel, the sexually promiscuous and morally loose woman, to justify their widespread rape of enslaved black women.

This myth, however, grew to encompass not only slave women and the jezebel fast became the catchall for all black women’s sexuality, regardless of their social standing or legal status. A white woman, with the exception of prostitutes and some manual laborers, could be a “lady,” the model of respectability, modesty, and even sexual purity. A white woman can be labeled a slut on the basis of specific behavior, such as perceived promiscuity. But black women, stereotypically, can be considered sluts at any time, no matter what they do or wear.

We witnessed the jezebel’s most recent incarnation this summer when the New York Post ran the headline describing Nafiassatou Diallo, the West African hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Khan of sexual assault, as a “hooker”—when the only “evidence” backing up the accusation was an unnamed source. “Not all women can stop being called a slut when they go home,” Tanis says.

But it is precisely because of the sexual stereotypes associated with black women, says Robin Givhan, fashion critic for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, that “the reverse is also possible. It would seem to me that black women might have an even more powerful reason to want to defuse the power of the word ‘slut.’ ”

“There has always been a strategy amongst African-American men and women that you win respectability by being respectable. The marchers and protesters in the civil rights movement wore their Sunday best because it was a show of their own sense of dignity,” Givhan tells me.

“But I wonder if we have gotten to the point when that doesn’t have to be the only way. I would raise the question, ‘Are black women confident enough in their respectability and femininity that they can wear shorts and a halter and say I am still someone worthy of your respect? Someone who is worthy of being respected? Especially, in an age when the icon of American womanhood is Michelle Obama?’”

Many SlutWalk organizers around the country—who operate independently—deserve the legitimate criticisms that they have not been inclusive of women of color. At the march I attended, despite the efforts of SlutWalk DC organizer Samantha Wright, the majority of women were white.

And that’s precisely why I decided to march. While I had heard the critiques, and agreed with aspects of them, I made the choice to participate as a way of protesting the alarming rates of sexual violence that black girls and women experience. During my speech, I said I was there

because too many women and girls, who look like me, haven’t always been invited to marches like this.… Because young girls, and especially girls of color, are called Jumpoffs. Whores. Sluts. Almost everyday. By friends. By strangers. By parents. By police officers. ’Cause when I took that long walk home after I was raped, my spaghetti strapped dress was turned inside out. And I was afraid to go to the police and be told it was my fault. Scared of someone telling me that being trapped in a room wearing a spaghetti-strapped dress with a man who threatened my life wasn’t rape.

As a longtime activist against sexual violence who has seen the way survivors are consistently silenced, the idea of a march that brought attention to sexual violence and celebrated its survivors was too compelling to ignore. I had to be there.

Still, one of SlutWalk’s biggest strengths—spectacle—might be its ultimate weakness. So far, only a handful of SlutWalks have maintained momentum after the march. For Chai Shenoy, author of “This is Why I Don’t Care to SlutWalk” and an attorney for Washington Empowered Against Violence (WEAVE), the real problem with SlutWalk DC is that “SlutWalk is not a movement, it’s a march.” To create long-term change, says Chai, “It needs to have a purpose beyond just a march. I think it needs to have larger purpose, a call to action, beyond people who already belong to the same community coming together.” Shenoy believes that such a “call to action,” would entail working with communities and grassroots organizations already committed to ending sexual violence, ultimately creating more opportunities for women of color and immigrant women to engage.

None of this negates the fact that SlutWalk has been the most successful protest against sexual violence in the United States since the birth of the Take Back the Night marches in the 1970s. For me, walking alongside women who confidently wore the clothing in which they had been sexually assaulted was exciting and empowering. As a black woman and a rape survivor, it was one of only times in my life that I felt like I could wear whatever I wanted, wherever I wanted, without the threat of rape.

But like any great spectacle, SlutWalk risks going out of style. In order for it to be more than a passing fad, it has to become a healthy marriage of substance and spectacle, a movement that builds on the anti-rape activism of black women, like civil rights activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Rosa Parks, as revealed in Danielle McGuire’s recent book At the Dark End of the Street. One that integrates, as its organizers and protesters, those women—lesbian, queer and transgendered; women of color, low-income women and sexually exploited workers—who are most vulnerable to sexual assault and more likely to be called “slut,” regardless of what they’re wearing.

Maybe this is why when I got back on the Acela after the march, I felt compelled to pull my down my skirt. Just a little.

Kink On Tap — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 19:48:35 +0000

'Men buy girls, not sex' and other myths of anti-prostitution moralists | @MelissaGira on #SexWork
www.guardian.co.uk
According to the documentaries running on near-constant repeat on CNN and MSNBC, men all around America are just waiting to buy women for sex, fuelling what is referred to as a "multibillion dollar industry". In CNN's latest sex trade special, Selling the Girl Next Door, we're told that girls are...

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Kink On Tap — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:35:19 +0000

S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse
blogs.sfweekly.com
@WickedGrounds is closed today. We are very sorry for any inconvenience. That tweet went out two Wednesdays ago. It was...

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Choosing a Pronoun - He, She or Other - After Curfew - @NYTimes.com

What to Wear to a #SlutWalk | The Nation

Kink On Tap chosen + community links feed

Soy Free Weight Loss Shakes / Best Chest Exercises Bodybuilding

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Virginia school district ponders banning cross-gender dress | Reuters

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Kink On Tap — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:35:19 +0000 S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouseblogs.sfweekly.com@WickedGrounds is closed today. We are very sorry for any inconvenience. That tweet went out two Wednesdays ago. It was...

#Lesbian High #School Couple Crowned #Homecoming King & Queen "before a cheering crowd of their peers"

#Wisconsin State Sen. Pam Galloway pushes abstinence-only bill for #SexEd classes. Hey, Galloway, WHERE ARE THE #JOBS?

National Organization For Marriage (@NOMTweets) Uses Photoshop To Create Doctored Photos Showing Support For Repealing New Hampshire Gay #Marriage

#OccupyWallStreet & the #Poetry of Now-Time: "He…didn’t seem very much like a sadist at all." A BDSM'er's take on #OWS:

"Isn't He Lovely: Male #Bisexuality Doesn't Exist…Oh, Wait, It Does!", @CristenConger writes @BitchMedia.

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#Sex at #OWS' #OccupyWallStreet: “You occupy my heart…. The protest has already inspired at least 1 #marriage proposal"

Score! Big wins for #transgender peoples' rights in #California: #Gender Nondiscrimination Act expands legal protection

Read this online at http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/10/score_a_transgender_peoples_victory_in_the_state_of_california.html

#Sex on the brain: #Orgasms unlock altered consciousness, may offer insight into how thoughts affect physical sensation

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Orgasm snapshot

Top-down pain relief

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Kink On Tap — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 23:35:19 +0000

S.F. Loses a BDSM Community Hub with the Closing of Wicked Grounds Coffeehouse
blogs.sfweekly.com
@WickedGrounds is closed today. We are very sorry for any inconvenience. That tweet went out two Wednesdays ago. It was...