Be heard on the issues that matter most to you!
A couple years ago we had the Alabama Vibrator case. Now we have the Staunton Pornography case. According to NewsLeader.com, Rick Krial, owner of After Hours Video, a store whose express purpose was to sell "adult" material to adults, was indicted on 16 felony charges and 8 misdemeanor charges for obscenity because in his shop he sold pornography to ... wait for it ... adults. From August 12-15 he was tried on two of the misdemeanor charges. He was convicted on one. His store was convicted of the same charge. An employee was found not guilty of the same charges. My attempt to make sense of this is below the fold.
"The sex act itself is neither male nor female: it is a human being reaching out for the ultimate in communication with another human being." -Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon
I learned from Jessie Daniels on Twitter and then from the San Jose Mercury News that Del Martin died today. Del Martin was a lesbian feminist author and activist. She was a founding member of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first out lesbian on the board of the National Organization of Women, and a key organizer in the efforts to decriminalize and demedicalize homosexuality. She dedicated much of her work to fighting discrimination and violence against women.
She and Phyllis Lyon, her partner, were the first couple to be married in San Francisco when same-sex marriage became legal in California on June 16, 2008. They were 87 and 83 respectively and had been together for more than 50 years. Lyon was with Martin when she died today in San Francisco.
Dr. Jessie Daniels, a sociology professor at Hunter College, is looking for bloggers who consider themselves feminists (any sort) to participate in an interview-based research study. (Please click here if you are interested!) Her book, White Lies (Routledge 1997) is a well known investigation of the intersections of race, class and gender in white supremacist groups. Her new book, Cyber Racism (Rowman & Littlefield 2009) continues that investigation as such groups move their interactions to the internet.
I met Dr. Daniels when we were on a panel together at the Eastern Sociological Society meetings this past spring. She was presenting an excellent critical analysis of race and gender on sites like the Holla Back NYC blog I think her work is fabulous and I hope that some of you will help her in this new project. She also discussed Racism Review, the blog she maintains with Joe Feagin.
An overview of her feminist blogger project, in her own words, below the fold
It appears the tolerance level of her neighbors was shorter than her dress. When 20-year old Kymberly Clem went to the Richmond Mall* wearing a dress she had bought there the day before, she apparently seemed too attractive to be allowed to stay. She was approached by a security guard who humiliated her and forced her to leave because he said that several women had complained to him that their husbands were staring at her. (For the basics, see these stories in the Richmond Register and Fox News. The Fox story includes a photo of the dress.)
I saw the delftware dildo on Audacia Ray's Naked City and then followed the links to the reviews by Tess at Urban Gypsy and by Always Aroused Girl, but I really wanted to know about who made the thing. So I followed links to the Oooms home page and the collection above is what I saw.
Can I just say I think it's really cool that a company selling tables and chairs and salt and pepper shakers isn't afraid to put anal beads and dildos amongst its other merchandise? In fact they almost get lost in the picture, which is a shame really given how beautiful they are. But if you look closely you'll find them. There they are in the center near the bottom. How appropriate :) (Click on their image to see a larger photo.)
There are few places where our public and private lives become blended into such ugly displays as they do in custody and divorce proceedings. The current controversy surrounding Jefferson's appeal for support because of a custody challenge that is, at least partly, based on his blogging about his sex life demonstrates that better than almost anything could. The details have been documented over the past week in several other places, and I am coming late to the story having just returned to town.
Briefly, Jefferson is the pen name of a NYC sex blogger, author of One Life Take Two, and member of the community to which we all here at SITPS belong, to greater or lesser degrees.* He is currently being sued by his ex-wife for full custody of their children whose custody they had shared since divorcing, and it appears that information he revealed in his blog is being used against him in court. That information includes his bisexuality, his hosting of sex parties, his drinking, and his having sex with lots of different people, many of them women much younger than he. Some of his friends have set up a legal fund - the Friends of Jefferson Legal Defense Fund while others of his friends and some of his former lovers are advising caution about contributing.** This conflict started an online public debate about Jefferson's life, his writing, and the current custody dispute that has quickly spread throughout the sex blogosphere and has been occasionally ugly but also very thoughtful.
Pop quiz - Subject: Local politics
Question: Your town has a million dollars in its reserve fund. The plan is to spend it on paying off a bond that financed the town's water treatment plant. Suddenly, the plan changes. The mayor has learned that a strip club in the area has come up for sale and he wants to buy it and shut it down. He arranges the financing through an anonymous third party because he knows that the club owners would never agree to sell to the town. According to the local newspaper the city manager describes it like this:
“We knew they would never sell it to us, but a third party, who does not want to be identified, offered to buy it for us. Just before noon (Tuesday) we closed on the property, and the keys were turned over to us. They (former Cafe Risque owners) won’t find out until (today) who really bought it.”
The mayor announces this radical change in spending priorities at a standing-room-only meeting at City Hall. Which of the following do you think happened at the meeting:
"You run like a girl." It was an insult aimed at boys. Being "like a girl" was clearly a bad thing for a boy to be if he wanted to be an athlete. Not being enough "like a girl" on the other hand, is devastating for women.
It was not so long ago that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) used to require all women athletes to be tested to discover whether they were 'truly women' or not. [Bracket, please, for a moment the question of what a 'true woman' might be. We'll come back to it. I promise.] Now such tests are only performed, according to the story in today's New York Times, when a woman athlete's sex is questioned. [Bracket for a moment why this never, apparently, comes up in men's sports.] What would cause her sex to be questioned? The Times does not present a list of specific suspicious indicators, but does say that it has come up in the context of doping tests. What is so striking about this is that it represents an insistence that women be held to a biological standard of womanhood. Consider the variations among women. What does it mean to set aside some group of women and say they are too powerful to be 'real women'? Consider how this makes even less sense when we are talking about women who represent the strongest, fastest, most agile, most physically powerful women in the world.
Max Mosely, head of Formula One racing, won his privacy suit against the British tabloid "News Of The World." The New York Times reports:
The judge, Sir David Eady, awarded Mr. Mosley, 68, damages equivalent to about $120,000 and legal costs estimated to be at least $850,000 in his lawsuit against The News of the World.
Question: Because this was a lawsuit it had to be framed in terms of a legal question, hence the focus on "press freedom" v. "individual privacy", but wouldn't this kind of thing be better discussed in terms of journalistic ethics? Instead of worrying about whether this decision represents a limiting of freedom of the British press, should the British press be discussing ways to make sure its members adhere to ethical reporting standards?
I'm all for investigative journalism, but there has to be something in the public interest to justify it. Exposing a person's private, legal, consensual sexual activity is certainly not in the public interest. It may be very interesting to the public, but that's not the same thing!
A: None, according to the U.S. Census
Why? A New York Times article on July 18 quotes Steven H. Murdock, director of the U. S. Census Bureau, who explains that because of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act marriages between people of the same sex cannot be recognized or counted even in the states where they are legal. Even by the Census.
Why does it matter? Gay rights activists argue that it matters because it renders married same-sex couples invisible. I agree. That absolutely matters. But it also matters because it is evidence of our government's blinding itself to reality. It is further evidence, as with interference in climate research and health research, that the government cannot be trusted to put science and reason ahead of ideology, religion and faith.
