Sex Geek Thoughts

Fosters.com: State rep. starts petition against UNH sex workers conference

ari-withtheredhair — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:01:54 -0400

Fosters.com: State rep. starts petition against UNH sex workers conference:

DOVER — New Hampshire state representative Joe Sweeney, R-N.H., has started a petition to raise support and start asking questions as to who approved using student activity money for a mini-sex workers conference at the University of New Hampshire in April.

“I think it’s an atrocity that our students brought prostitutes to our campus,” said Sweeney, who represents Rockingham County District 8.

Sweeney posted the petition on his Facebook page and the petition was also sent to media outlets by Americans for Prosperity’s state director, Greg Moore, who wrote in an email that he “couldn’t agree more,” with Sweeney.

The mini-conference spanned throughout the day on Tuesday, April 16, starting with a documentary and ending with a 7 p.m. panel discussion on the rights of sex workers.

Moore sent a Right to Know request to the university earlier this week to make public the cost of the event and is expecting to receive documentation from them on Monday.

Meanwhile, Kitty Stryker, one of the conference speakers, has started a counterpetition against the state rep. “I think it’s an atrocity that our students brought prostitutes to our campus,” said Rep. Joe Sweeney, despite the fact that only one of them may have been a full service worker, and the fact that one of them was a current UNH student and one a former UNH student, so no one really went out of their way to “bring” them to campus.

"Men and women are misogynistic for different reasons: men to marginalize women, and women to..."

ari-withtheredhair — Sat, 04 May 2013 17:01:17 -0400

“Men and women are misogynistic for different reasons: men to marginalize women, and women to ingratiate themselves with the men trying to marginalize them. Neither one is justifiable, but one is oppressive and the other is a (bad) strategy to deal with that oppression. One thus sees that if the men who are misogynists weren’t, the women who are misogynists wouldn’t have any reason to be. Ergo, exhorting women to stop being misogynists so that men will stop gets it precisely backwards.”

-
http://www.shakesville.com/2010/01/feminism-101.html (via pomegranateblood)

THIS THING RIGHT HERR.

Woman: I'm smart

ari-withtheredhair — Fri, 03 May 2013 20:01:47 -0400

Woman: I'm smart
Patriarchy: Well you're probably ugly then
Woman: I'm creative
Patriarchy: You mean unattractive right?
Woman: I have all these incredible accomplishments
Patriarchy: Yeah but look how ugly you looked doing them
Woman: I have value
Patriarchy: Not if you're ugly lol
Woman: I'm conventionally-attractive & posted selfies on my blog
Patriarchy: I'm so sick of these empty-headed chicks only caring about their looks. Just because you are attractive and get attention from men doesn't mean you are special or deserve respect. Why don't you read a book or do something productive with your life you dumb slut

souryellows: one down, three to go

ari-withtheredhair — Fri, 03 May 2013 17:01:30 -0400

souryellows:

one down, three to go

prudeboy: skysquids: so here is what happens to me when we do...

ari-withtheredhair — Thu, 02 May 2013 20:01:38 -0400

prudeboy:

skysquids:

so here is what happens to me when we do the ‘urinals’ vs ‘no urinals’ bathroom setup. it becomes an opportunity to out me, make assumptions about my genitals, essentialize my gender according to my birth sex, and push me into the men’s room. this is actually what happens to me when we do this. let’s not do this, ok? spread the word.

it’s just another way of saying “PENIS” OR “VAGINA” (choose yr own adventure!!!), just another form of cissexism & gender essentialism. the [maybe-]radical intent behind it doesn’t make it radical.

Hmmm. That’s a good point. :( Disappointing, but a really good point. Spreading the word.

(As an aside, I still don’t get why urinals are necessary. Aiming is hard?)

"Riding bikes everywhere? Using recyclable diapers? Carpooling? We’ve been doing that in Eritrea for..."

ari-withtheredhair — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:01:29 -0400

“Riding bikes everywhere? Using recyclable diapers? Carpooling? We’ve been doing that in Eritrea for decades. Where’s our reward for saving the Earth? Why aren’t we plastered all over Time magazine? If we lived in the same disgusting, gluttonous fashion that Americans lived, this planet would no longer be able to sustain the human race. But yet, they blame the world’s environmental ills on “overpopulation” (code: poor brown people existing) and then usurp our lifestyle habits, trademark it as their own and pat themselves on the back for doing the bare minimum. How convenient of such a narcissistic nation.”

- My uncle, upon learning about America’s “new Green Movement”. Obviously, he’s not impressed. (via eastafrodite)

sexistfacebookdudes: It never occurs to these guys that they...

ari-withtheredhair — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:01:49 -0400

sexistfacebookdudes:

It never occurs to these guys that *they* are the jerk/dick/asshole/bad guy, and women *are* avoiding them for actual nice guys… Really, what they want is happening but they just dont realize *they’re* the guys they don’t want women to be with.

racismschool: May is National Masturbation Month: Let’s do this...

ari-withtheredhair — Wed, 01 May 2013 17:01:33 -0400

racismschool:

May is National Masturbation Month: Let’s do this people.

ari-withtheredhair: sexistfacebookdudes: theresnorevolution: A...

ari-withtheredhair — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:01:51 -0400

ari-withtheredhair:

sexistfacebookdudes:

theresnorevolution:

Are you fucking kidding me? There were about 20 more of these and I didn’t even look through a quarter of the comments.

TW RAPE

I know it’s not at all the worst part, but I got hung up on the ‘if you walked in and saw this in your bed’ bit… this. Not she, not this person, not them. Anyway. All these people are potential rapists:

Machi Medero: https://www.facebook.com/DoctorJeringon

Aladin Trabelsi: https://www.facebook.com/Ala.Dark.Comet

Mike De Laet: https://www.facebook.com/mikedelaet

Michah O’Kelley: https://www.facebook.com/micah.okelley

Gabriel Baws: https://www.facebook.com/gabriel.baws

Welp. So about that idea that “people wouldn’t admit that they would rape!” thing…

Although I can’t help wondering how much of this, especially being social media, is about posturing for a perceived masculinity— The situation is obviously set up with an assumed answer, and if any of these guys actually said, “go sleep on the couch” or something, I imagine that would be perceived as a “failure” to be appropriately masculine.

(Which is not an argument against them being potential rapists, BECAUSE THEY ARE.)

"The shift in nomenclature toward an “LGBT” community, rather than a “queer” one, marked the..."

ari-withtheredhair — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:01:43 -0400

“The shift in nomenclature toward an “LGBT” community, rather than a “queer” one, marked the beginning of a new phase in the social history of sexual and gender identity politics in the United States. It represented a retreat from the more radical concept of alliance, resistance, and rebellion by the different groups against the same oppressive structures in the dominant culture and the adoption instead of a liberal model of minority tolerance and inclusion—sometimes amounting to little more than a “politically correct” gesture of token inclusion.”

- Susan Stryker on the tokenization of transgender people in the retreat from “queer” of the 1990s.—Transgender History, 2008, pg. 137 (via artemariposa)

hotwifeforbbc: femdomhotwifecuckoldinterracial: Interesting...

ari-withtheredhair — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:02:02 -0400

hotwifeforbbc:

femdomhotwifecuckoldinterracial:

Interesting Porn Statistics

(via

TumbleOn)

Photo

ari-withtheredhair — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:01:20 -0400

Black Queer Culture and the Misappropriation of Voguing

ari-withtheredhair — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:01:22 -0400

Black Queer Culture and the Misappropriation of Voguing:

The act of voguing symbolizes the freedom to literally take up space with unbound and evocative movement, and in a world in which queer people of color are too firmly shoved into the margins to do so anywhere else. A world where white people are the default faces for every letter in LGBTQI, while QPOC are flattened into stereotypes and reduced to statistics, if not ignored entirely. Voguing is a dance form not only defined by its sassy, emphatic gestures, couture poses and gleaming confidence, but by its history as a safe space for QPOC. The dance form itself is inseparable from the racial and sexual identity of the performers, as the dancing symbolizes the lived experience specific to its performers. Therefore, a white person voguing is a destruction of the symbol.

oh, men.

ari-withtheredhair — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 20:02:04 -0400

mylittlepinko:

In an Atlantic piece headlined, “Why Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s trial should be a front page story,” Conor Friedersdorf admits, “Until Thursday, I wasn’t aware of this story … Had I been asked at a trivia night about the identity of Kermit Gosnell, I would’ve been stumped and helplessly guessed a green Muppet.” Slate’s Dave Weigel congratulated the tweeters for getting his attention and then filed a piece sympathetic to the coverup claim, lecturing pro-choice people that “You really should read that grand jury report,” and concluding, “Social conservatives are largely right about the Gosnell story.”

It’s so nice when men decide it’s not important to read things women write. :)

No, they aren’t right about the Gosnell story. If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s not because of a coverup by the liberal mainstream media. It’s probably because you failed to pay attention to the copious coverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (almost uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, here and here, to name some disparate sources.

All quotes above are from Irin Carmon’s piece. Read the whole thing.

Jill Fillipovic: If dozens of women write about a topic but men don’t notice, do they make a sound? #Gosnell

tobeymacguire: when straight guys ask how lesbian sex works i feel really bad for their girlfriends...

ari-withtheredhair — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:05:40 -0400

tobeymacguire:

when straight guys ask how lesbian sex works i feel really bad for their girlfriends because if you dont understand how to have sex with a girl in any way other than repeatedly putting your dick in her you are having some really bad sex

fuckyeahsexpositivity: Rebloggable by request - can I...

ari-withtheredhair — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:01:39 -0400

fuckyeahsexpositivity:

Rebloggable by request - can I disapprove of some abortion circumstances and still be pro-choice?

—BB

"When I first became a feminist twenty years ago, I had an old-school feminist (wearing bright pink..."

ari-withtheredhair — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 20:01:38 -0400

“When I first became a feminist twenty years ago, I had an old-school feminist (wearing bright pink lipstick, mind you) ask, ‘What’s a feminist like you doing wearing a miniskirt?’ I said to her, ‘I got out of the patriarchy because it was always telling me what to do. I’ll be damned if I let anyone else do it, either.’ I told her that automatically rejecting everything the patriarchy demanded was allowing the patriarchy to control you just as much as if you did everything it ordered. As long as you were simply reacting, you were still granting the patriarchy all the power. Part of feminism, to me, was the freedom to choose for myself after carefully thinking out the issue, and I wasn’t going to cede that power to ANYONE, ever again. Besides, damn it, I had good legs, and I wasn’t above showing them off.”

- Minna Hong

This is an excerpt from her essay in the Let’s Talk About Names series (I have one too) on Flyover Feminism and Are Women Human? The essay focuses on her experiences with people trying to pronounce her name, race, last name changes and feminism. I love this excerpt. I wrote about something similar recently, in my essay Black Women Do Not Have To Reject Any Mention Of Beauty To Be Womanist/Feminist.

(via gradientlair)

"The real story is that though Gosnell is the monstrous result of politicizing women’s healthcare,..."

ari-withtheredhair — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 17:01:22 -0400

“The real story is that though Gosnell is the monstrous result of politicizing women’s healthcare, the case, in turn, has been used to further politicize women’s healthcare.”

- Tara Murtha, The Media and the Gosnell Case: A Case of Insecurity and a Misinformation Campaign (via rhrealitycheck)

little drops

ari-withtheredhair — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:01:39 -0400

little drops:

jazzylittledrops:

So this video started going around my facebook today, with about a dozen of my female friends sharing the link with comments like, and “Everyone needs to see this”, and “All girls should watch this,” and “This made me cry.” And I’m not trying to shame those girls! I definitely understand why they would do so. And I don’t want to be a killjoy. But as I clicked link and started watching the video, I started to feel a slight sense of discomfort. I couldn’t put my finger on why that was, exactly, but it continued throughout the whole thing. After watching the video several more times, I have some thoughts…

[For those who didn’t or cannot watch it, the basic idea of the video is this: Dove conducted what they call a “social experiment”. They focused on several “featured participants” who evidently did not know what exactly they had signed up for. Over lightly melancholy music, they each briefly talked about their appearance, and how they wished they looked different. One by one, they arrived to a building they had never been to, where they were told to get friendly with a person they’d never met. Then, they were called back into a space where a professional forensic artist was waiting with his back to them, and separated by a curtain. Each woman described herself to the artist, and he drew them. Then, the stranger they had spent a little time with came in and described the participants from their perspective, and the forensic artist drew a second sketch. At the end, each woman came back to see the two sketches, and to notice the difference between how they describe themselves and how others describe them. Almost all agree they look more beautiful when described by strangers, and that they are more beautiful than they think. They talk about how important it is for us to realize that our self-perceptions are harsh, and say that we should spend more time appreciating the things that we do like. Dove then flashes the words, “You are more beautiful than you think.” across the screen, and the video concludes.]

“Well that sounds nice! Right?” Well…

First off, I will acknowledge the positives in the video. The team at Dove makes a valid point: most of us are our own harshest critics. Most women probably are more beautiful than they think. This serves as a reminder that we shouldn’t be as hard on ourselves as most of us often are, and it’s uplifting to remember that others are more prone to look past the “flaws” that we perceive in ourselves and to see beauty. The fact that it’s reminding young women to see the beauty in themselves is a good thing, and I want to celebrate that.

Now, let’s get down to real talk.

Good question, Dove. I’m so glad that you asked…

When it comes to the diversity of the main participants: all four are caucasian, three are blonde with blue eyes, all are thin, and all are young (the oldest is 40). The majority of the non-featured participants are thin, young white women as well. Hmm… probably a little limiting, wouldn’t you say? We see in the video that at least three black women were in fact drawn for the project. Two are briefly shown describing themselves in a negative light (one says she has a fat, round face, and one says she’s getting freckles as she ages). Both women are lighter skinned. A black man is shown as one of the people describing someone else, and he comments that she has “pretty blue eyes”. One Asian woman is briefly shown looking at the completed drawings of herself and you see the back of a black woman’s head; neither are shown speaking. Out of 6:36 minutes of footage, people of color are onscreen for less than 10 seconds.

Cool. Except not so much.

Let’s look at which descriptors the editors chose to include. When the participants described themselves, these were some of the things that were implied as negatives: fat, rounder face, freckles, fatter, 40— starting to get crows feet, moles, scars… Whereas some of the implied positive descriptors used by others were: thin face, nice thin chin, nice eyes that lit up when she spoke and were very expressive (my actual favorite), short and cute nose, her face was fairly thin (this was said twice), and very nice blue eyes. So… I don’t know if anyone else is picking up on this, but it kinda seems to be enforcing our very narrow cultural perception of “beauty”: young, light-skinned, thin. No real diversity celebrated in race, age, or body shape. So you’re beautiful… if you’re thin, don’t have noticeable wrinkles or scars, and have blue eyes. If you’re fat or old… uh, maybe other people don’t think you look as fat and old as you do yourself? Great? Oh, and by the way, there are real women who look like the women on the left. What are you saying about them, exactly?

This reminds me of Winnie the Pooh…

No seriously, it does. Have you ever heard that quote, “Always remember: you’re braver than you believer, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think”? Well that quote is from Winnie the Pooh. It upsets me that lots of people share the quote without sourcing it, like they’re ashamed of Pooh Bear or something. But anyway, I digress. There’s something else that I’ve noticed: a popular version of the quote is making its way around tumblr, pinterest, and facebook. It’s the same at the start, but then add, “and twice as beautiful as you ever imagined”. That last part is usually written in the biggest text, or italicized for emphasis. It’s sort of like what this Dove video is saying, right? So… why is this so important? Why did girls feel like something was missing from that quote it its original form? Why are so many females I know having such a strong reaction to the sketches video, being moved to the point of tears?

Because the message that we constantly receive is that girls are not valuable without beauty.

Brave, strong, smart? Not enough. You have to be beautiful. And “beautiful” means something very specific, and very physical. Essentially every movie and tv show and commercial shows us that, right? It doesn’t matter what other merits a woman posses, if she is not conventionally attractive, she is essentially worthless (go watch Miss Representation for more thoughts on this). And my primary problem with this Dove ad is that it’s not really challenging the message like it makes us feel like it is. It doesn’t really tell us that the definition of beauty is broader than we have been trained to think it is, and it doesn’t really tell us that fitting inside that definition isn’t the most important thing. It doesn’t really push back against the constant objectification of women. All it’s really saying is that you’re actually not quite as far off from the narrow definition as you might think that you are (if you look like the featured women, I guess).

And actually, it almost seems to remind us how vital it is to know that we fit society’s standard of attractiveness . At the end of the experiment, one of the featured participants shares what I find to be the most disturbing quote in the video and what Dove seems to think is the moral of the story as she reflects upon what she’s learned, and how problematic it is that she hasn’t been acknowledging her physical beauty: It’s troubling,” she says as uplifting music swells in the background. “I should be more grateful of my natural beauty. It impacts the choices and the friends we make, the jobs we go out for, they way we treat our children, it impacts everything. It couldn’t be more critical to your happiness.”

Did you hear that, ladies? How beautiful you are affects everything—from your personal relationships to your career. It could not be more critical to your happiness! And while it could be argued that the woman was actually talking about how you feel about yourself or something, it is clearly edited to suggest that the “it” is beauty. I know we’ve been told it thousands upon thousands of times before, but I hope you heard that, girls: your physical, superficial beauty is the most significant part of who you are, and the most important determining factor in your life. And now I want you to hear this: that is a lie.

What you look like should not affect the choices that you make. It should certainly not affect the friends you make—the friends that wouldn’t want to be in relationship with you if you did not meet a certain physical standard are not the friends that you want to have. Go out for jobs that you want, that you’re passionate about. Don’t let how good looking you feel like you are affect the way way that you treat your children. And certainly do not make how well you feel you align with the strict and narrow “standard” that the beauty industry and media push be critical to your happiness, because you will always be miserable. You will always feel like you fall short, because those standards are designed to keep you constantly pressured into buying things like make up and diet food and moisturizer to reach an unattainable goal. Don’t let your happiness be dependent on something so fickle and cruel and trivial. You should feel beautiful, and Dove was right about one thing: you are more beautiful than you know. But please, please hear me: you are so, so much more than beautiful.

Ps: Dove Marketing team is brilliant and talented, I will give them that, but they have also made some stopovers in Sketchsville… while they have done some cool things, like reminding us about how Photoshop distorts our image of beauty, they have also been accused of using photoshop themselves. They are also a little bit manipulative in their pleas to others to stop manipulating. Sometimes, they seem like they might be more than a little bit racist… and more than a lot bit racist (Skin bleaching? Really?!) And for all of their talk of “real beauty” and empowering women to be their best selves, Dove is owned by Unilever, which also own AXE, which is widely known for having some of the most blatantly sexist and objectifying commercials out there. See Hank Green’s video on the hypocrisy of major corporations here.

dick-squaaaad: stay-human: Femen protested naked in front of...

ari-withtheredhair — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:01:28 -0400

dick-squaaaad:

stay-human:

Femen protested naked in front of an Ahmadiyya masjid. I think I’m actually going to cry. You don’t, you can’t, understand how insanely wrong that is and how much that speaks for how ignorant they are of the people they’re claiming to want to liberate. Ahmadis are discriminated against and shunned by “mainstream” Muslim communities. They’re systematically oppressed in countries like Pakistan. And it is their masjid that these so-called women’s rights activists decided to act so shamelessly in front of. Shamelessly not because there is shame in being naked, it is the utter disrespect of other cultures, other religions, other peoples that is so shameless.

I can’t even imagine how Ahmadiyya Muslim women must have felt seeing this spectacle at their place of worship. When they aren’t even allowed to have masjids, that look “Islamic”, in other places, to finally have that sanctuary and then to see it disrespected like this—honestly my heart goes out to them.

-__________________- poor ahmadis