It took two special sessions, working through protests and a filibuster, but governor Rick Perry of Texas finally got to sign into law one of the most restrictive abortion bills we’ve ever seen in the United States. The repercussions are serious: this bill will eliminate 37 out of 42 clinics in the state, basically leaving west Texas without access to clinics at all. So why is the pro-choice movement beating up on a 14-year-old?
Silicon Valley has to get smarter about the fact that adult content has a place in society. To continue to exploit it for traffic while making it impossible for creators to equally profit is an outrage. But the worst part is what the heavy-handed treatment of all things related to sex signals, whether these things are imagery or educational materials: that sex is something that has no place in our lives. Sex does have a place in our lives.
Camille Paglia has a compelling essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the dogma that seems to dominate academic discussions of kink. The short of it: the dependence of gender studies on postmodernist thinkers is making it impossible for us to observe, understand and comment on sexual trends.
Paul Schrader has the classic Hollywood thing going, porn star James Deen dishes. “‘I’m gonna put you in a movie!’ It’s like, who cares? … I have more IMDb credits than you do, Schrader! I’ve been in more movies than fucking Al Pacino! Just because they’re not the movies that you categorize as big Hollywood movies!” This is how porn’s favorite basically told Hollywood to go fuck itself.
A few weeks ago, the line of sex toys inspired by the runaway erotic best-selling Fifty Shades trilogy finally landed in the U.S., and they’ve taken up at almost every imaginable retailer online and off. The toys, called the Pleasure Collection, are, of course, named with the books in mind — oh yeah, just what you always wanted! Inner Goddess Silver Balls and Twitchy Palm Spanking Paddle!
The earliest records relating to this particular celebration date to the 1600s, when sex workers came to the local shrine in Kawasaki to gain divine favor — prosperity for their business and protection from sexually transmitted illness. Today, the festival continues to celebrate fertility and promote healthy sexual relations — as well as prosperity in business. Almost everything present during the celebration is shaped like a penis — from sweets to candles — and most proceeds from the festival are put forth to fund HIV research.
Having spent all of March crisscrossing the U.S. giving out free toys from their vibrator line, Trojan decided to take it up a notch, heading out west for tax day. Parked outside various key locations in Los Angeles and San Francisco, their Pleasure Cart-pushers handed out sex toys to every decent, tax-paying citizen who crossed their path. “It’s a stimulus package they will never forget,” said Bruce Weiss, Trojan’s vice president of marketing. It sure is.
Brian K. Vaughan, co-creator of the space opera SAGA, released a statement on his blog saying that Apple had banned its 12th issue. As it turned out, it wasn’t Apple but CosmiXology, the distributor of SAGA, who had preemptively censored the comic. But fans should be cautioned not to breathe a sigh of relief — this is a clear red flag about the power of ambiguous policies and seemingly arbitrary censorship events from digital outlets.
Though Facebook sometimes allows renditions of the nude male figure in works of art, they consider it a breach of their standards to share images of the nude male body in relation to research and education. The latest victim is Scientific American, which had the audacity to post a link to a piece about a study regarding factors that contribute to male attractiveness, an article that also included a thumbnail of computer-generated nude male bodies.
The role of feminism isn’t to turn patriarchy into matriarchy. Feminism seeks to abolish the things that make women unequal, so anything that supports woman as the object, the passive actor in the stage of life, runs contrary to its tenets. Unfortunately, separating the celebration of love into a day for women and one for men has the unintended effect of turning both men and women into passive objects at different times.
