The American Apparel store in Manhattan’s Lower East Side now features mannequins in their window displays with pubic hair. “We created it to invite passersby to explore the idea of what is ‘sexy’ and consider their comfort with the natural female form,” said the company’s director of marketing Ryan Holiday.
A woman in the United Kingdom recently attempted to sue her attorneys for failing to convey to her that getting a divorce would effectively terminate her marriage. Jane Mulcahy, a Catholic, didn’t know that judicial separation was an option. She feels her attorneys were negligent in that they failed to make this option available to her. Though funny, this is actually an option a lot of people pursue, and not just for religious reasons.
Pin-up girls. Sometimes you look at those beautiful images representing the desires of generations past and wonder what kind of models artists used that they could contort their bodies so. Well, I have news for you. Rachael Aslett figured it out, and she made a Tumblr as proof. It appears that Vargas’ muse might have had whiskers.
Charles Seim is one of the world’s most renowned bridge engineers. But before he undertook many of the projects that would bring him to the world’s attention, Chuck, as his friends call him, was busy considering a question not often pondered by science — the stress analysis of a strapless gown. In 1956, Seim illustrated his thoughts in “A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown.†Take a look at this exquisite application of engineering to a cocktail party favorite.
Ours is a culture that has for years masturbated with Hello Kitty and fan-made erotica centered around characters from Harry Potter. Ours is a culture that obsesses over shows about high-schoolers like Gossip Girl and Glee and considers the story depicted in Twilight to represent the height of true love. We’re not being reduced to children by co-opting these things. We’re not enouraging our lovers to prey on the young. We’re self-expressing. It’s okay. Everyone calm down.
“Our society, which privileges cisgender bodies, has a systemic entitlement to bodies that deviate from the norm,” writes Kat Haché “It is seen as fair game to interrogate us, dissect us, and put us on display to gawk at our Other-ness, not as a means of truly understanding and accepting us, but as a way of justifying their own oppressive beliefs and separating us from the status of ‘normal’ people.”
We live in a society that teaches women that men are extremely sexual creatures who can’t be expected to control themselves. From teachers that tell young girls that wearing spaghetti straps is “distracting” to boys, to judges that tell women that wearing a tube top sends “signals” to an attacker, women are told, again and again, that men are basically beasts that live in a perpetual haze of desire; as a result, women are shocked when men don’t pop a boner the second she undresses before him.
Beginning with Pierre Bourdieu and how we rank one another based on our likes, to Herbert Mead’s social self, and right on through to Walter Benjamin’s ‘here and now,’ Alyce Currier effectively turns the drudgery of online dating into something fun and worthwhile exploring once again.
The mad rush to create porn that would interest women predates the runaway success of the Fifty Shades trilogy. Finally, people are realizing that women aren’t less visual than men, less interested in sex, less filled with desire and fantasy. The problem, for many, comes back to a question that’s over a hundred years old: what do women want? Two guys in the Netherlands think they have the answer: porna.
“In one study, US psychologists investigated social grooming in humans by asking participants to indicate their closest emotional relationship and report behaviors such as running their fingers through the person’s hair, wiping away their tears, scratching their back and non-sexual massage,” Jason Goldman writes at the BBC. “They found levels of relationship satisfaction and trust were both positively correlated with self-reported grooming frequency among romantic partners.”
