According to data from Pew Research Center and the U.S. Census Bureau, there are 96.6 million single Americans. Just 51 percent of the adult population is married, compared with 72 percent in 1960. And a recent Pew/Time Magazine survey found that 39 percent of people think marriage is becoming obsolete.


Our survey was by no means scientific, but it helps to know from whom these responses are coming. The average age of our survey participants was 46.2 years old. Women made up 82 percent of the respondents; men, 18 percent. About 35 percent said their annual income was under $50,000; 41 percent were making between $50,000 and $100,000; and 23 percent bring in more than $100,000 a year.

"By any material reckoning, virginity does not exist," writes Blank in this informative, funny and provocative analysis of one of the most elusive—and prized—qualities of human sexuality. Blank, an independent scholar, has pieced together a history of how humans have constructed the idea of virginity (almost always female and heterosexual) and engineered its uses to suit cultural and political forces. Blank has no shortage of fascinating facts: since Western virginity was symbolized by the color white, missionaries viewed nonwhite peoples as sexually immoral; late medieval and Renaissance moralists thought they could detect whether a woman was a virgin by examining her urine ("a virgin's was clear, sparkling, and thin"). Blank also has a pleasing, highly readable style that allows her to convey large amounts of information with wit and agility. But she becomes most animated, and political, when she probes contemporary ideas about virginity. Taking on a range of questions—why is virginity considered sexy? how does the idea of virginity fuel violence against women?—she makes the case that contemporary culture is as obsessed with, and benighted about, virginity, as those of the past. Thoroughly researched, carefully argued and written with a sly sense of humor, this is a bright addition to the popular literature of women's and cultural studies.

Nearly four decades after the United States government mandated the use of the terms “Hispanic” or “Latino” to categorize Americans who trace their roots to Spanish-speaking countries, a new nationwide survey of Hispanic adults finds that these terms still haven’t been fully embraced by Hispanics themselves. A majority (51%) say they most often identify themselves by their family’s country of origin; just 24% say they prefer a pan-ethnic label.

Moreover, by a ratio of more than two-to-one (69% versus 29%), survey respondents say that the more than 50 million Latinos in the U.S. have many different cultures rather than a common culture. Respondents do, however, express a strong, shared connection to the Spanish language. More than eight-in-ten (82%) Latino adults say they speak Spanish, and nearly all (95%) say it is important for future generations to continue to do so.

Hispanics are also divided over how much of a common identity they share with other Americans. About half (47%) say they consider themselves to be very different from the typical American. And just one-in-five (21%) say they use the term “American” most often to describe their identity. On these two measures, U.S.-born Hispanics (who now make up 48% of Hispanic adults in the country) express a stronger sense of affinity with other Americans and America than do immigrant Hispanics.

The survey finds that, regardless of where they were born, large majorities of Latinos say that life in the U.S. is better than in their family’s country of origin. Also, nearly nine-in-ten (87%) say it is important for immigrant Hispanics to learn English in order to succeed in the U.S.

This report explores Latinos’ attitudes about their identity; their language usage patterns; their core values; and their views about the U.S. and their families’ country of origin. It is based on findings from a national bilingual survey of 1,220 Hispanic adults conducted Nov. 9 through Dec. 7, 2011, by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.

As the harbor is welcome to the sailor, so is the last line to the scribe.

This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, ‘The hand that wrote it is no more.’

This gem comes from the Spring 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, entitled Means of Communication, which previously delighted us with the first usages of famous words

In researching the history of pin up art I found that before there were the “centerfold girls” there were the “pin-up calendar girls” – the semi-nude young women in lingerie whose photographs adorned calendars sold semi-legally from under the counters of gas stations and truck stops. In fact, the Marilyn Monroe nudes that established the “Playboy” magazine centerfold were actually taken years before for just such a “men’s calendar.” From “French postcards” to calendars to men’s magazines, there has always been a special relationship between photography and the male obsession with the female form. These photos were pinned in soldiers’ lockers and even carried into combat. The iconic pin-up images were even painted on the nosecones of many U.S. Air Force bombers.

The increasing popularity of intermarriage. About 15% of all new marriages in the United States in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity from one another, more than double the share in 1980 (6.7%). Among all newlyweds in 2010, 9% of whites, 17% of blacks, 26% of Hispanics and 28% of Asians married out. Looking at all married couples in 2010, regardless of when they married, the share of intermarriages reached an all-time high of 8.4%. In 1980, that share was just 3.2%.
Gender patterns in intermarriage vary widely. About 24% of all black male newlyweds in 2010 married outside their race, compared with just 9% of black female newlyweds. Among Asians, the gender pattern runs the other way. About 36% of Asian female newlyweds married outside their race in 2010, compared with just 17% of Asian male newlyweds. Intermarriage rates among white and Hispanic newlyweds do not vary by gender.
At first glance, recent newlyweds who “married out” and those who “married in” have similar characteristics. In 2008-2010, the median combined annual earnings of both groups are similar—$56,711 for newlyweds who married out versus $55,000 for those who married in. In about one-in-five marriages of each group, both the husband and wife are college graduates. Spouses in the two groups also marry at similar ages (with a two- to three-year age gap between husband and wife), and an equal share are marrying for the first time.
However, these overall similarities mask sharp differences that emerge when the analysis looks in more detail at pairings by race and ethnicity. Some of these differences appear to reflect the overall characteristics of different groups in society at large, and some may be a result of a selection process. For example, white/Asian newlyweds of 2008 through 2010 have significantly higher median combined annual earnings ($70,952) than do any other pairing, including both white/white ($60,000) and Asian/Asian ($62,000). When it comes to educational characteristics, more than half of white newlyweds who marry Asians have a college degree, compared with roughly a third of white newlyweds who married whites. Among Hispanics and blacks, newlyweds who married whites tend to have higher educational attainment than do those who married within their own racial or ethnic group.
Intermarriage and earnings. Couples formed between an Asian husband and a white wife topped the median earning list among all newlyweds in 2008-2010 ($71,800). During this period, white male newlyweds who married Asian, Hispanic or black spouses had higher combined earnings than did white male newlyweds who married a white spouse. As for white female newlyweds, those who married a Hispanic or black husband had somewhat lower combined earnings than those who “married in,” while those who married an Asian husband had significantly higher combined earnings.
Regional differences. Intermarriage in the United States tilts West. About one-in-five (22%) of all newlyweds in Western states married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010, compared with 14% in the South, 13% in the Northeast and 11% in the Midwest. At the state level, more than four-in-ten (42%) newlyweds in Hawaii between 2008 and 2010 were intermarried; the other states with an intermarriage rate of 20% or more are all west of the Mississippi River. (For rates of intermarriage as well as intra-marriage in all 50 states, see Appendix 2.)
Is more intermarriage good for society? More than four-in-ten Americans (43%) say that more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society, while 11% say it has been a change for the worse and 44% say it has made no difference. Minorities, younger adults, the college-educated, those who describe themselves as liberal and those who live in the Northeast or the West are more disposed than others to see intermarriage in a positive light.
Public’s acceptance of intermarriage. More than one-third of Americans (35%) say that a member of their immediate family or a close relative is currently married to someone of a different race. Also, nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) say it “would be fine” with them if a member of their own family were to marry someone outside their own racial or ethnic group. In 1986, the public was divided about this. Nearly three-in-ten Americans (28%) said people of different races marrying each other was not acceptable for anyone, and an additional 37% said this may be acceptable for others, but not for themselves. Only one-third of the public (33%) viewed intermarriage as acceptable for everyone.
Divorce. Several studies using government data have found that overall divorce rates are higher for couples who married out than for those who married in – but here, too, the patterns vary by the racial and gender characteristics of the couples. These findings are based on scholarly analysis of government data on marriage and divorce collected over the past two decades.

You need to understand that humans are fucked up creatures. It's very difficult for anyone to change. Abuse is cyclical in nature, meaning we often repeat what we have seen or endured through perpetration or victimization later in life. A child who is witness to or the victim of consistent abuse may not take on the behavioral patterns as an adult, but he or she still knows the process like the back of their hand. We engage in dysfunctional behavior even if we are aware of its effects because it is comfortable.

From my experience, this is what friend zone is. A “nice guy” pursues a woman, but isn’t forward with his intentions from the get-go like, say, a “jerk”. The woman is pleased to see a man who is interested in her not as a sexual object but as a human being and wishes for things to stay that way. The man is not satisfied with seeing the woman as a human being because being “expected to support a girl” is a bad deal if she’s not putting out.

Before I delve into the sociological aspects of this, I just want to point out that ”friendzone” is no more pleasant for a woman than it is a man. First, that is to say unrequited love works both ways, but the person who doesn’t return affections is considered mean only when she’s a woman. And second, what option does the woman have in a traditional “friendzone” situation? Just stop talking to a close friend to avoid “leading him on”? In high school, I found out my best friend of 2 years liked me. Having to tell him I didn’t feel the same way and being immediately ex-communicated via Facebook status (“Thanks for wasting my time”) was one of the worst things that ever happened to me. Were our two years of friendship invalid because I didn’t want anything more? Was all our time together really wasted because there was no hypothetical pay off?

Guys who do this and claim to be “nice guys” are the worst misogynists because of their sense of entitlement toward a woman. They make investments in property and expect their dividends. They are fake friends. They are selfish. And they will jump at the chance to vilify you and victimize themselves when their attempts at manipulation don’t work.

FOUR DETROIT ESCORTS WHO USED BACKPAGE TO ADVERTISE HAVE BEEN FOUND MURDERED, AND A STRIPPER IS MISSING. ALL OF THEM ARE BLACK AND MID- TO LATE TWENTIES.
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20111226/METRO01/112260388

http://www.freep.com/article/20120106/NEWS01/201060479/Dozens-pray-for-missing-mom-of-6-other-women-working-in-sex-industry

Signal boost. Please be careful.

An additional note from SWP: they were not “escorts”, and she is not a “stripper”. These were and are PEOPLE who worked in the sex industry as escorts and a dancer. Please do not take our humanity away and replace it with a job title. Be careful, workers in and around this area and elsewhere. Be safe, be vigilant, be well.

Caitlin Flanagan knows how to put a stick in the beehive of working moms and women’s movement champions.  She’s gone after professional women.  Now she’s going after – to save it, she says – contemporary girlhood.  In particular, girls’ adolescence.  The passage out of childhood.

She calls it “girl land”, and she says we’ve trashed it with rushed sexualization and Internet porn and overexposure just when girls need cozy, dreamy days with their diaries.

This hour, On Point:  American girls, adolescence, and a call to go back to a more protected, innocent girlhood.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Caitlin Flanagan, a writer and social critic, her new book is “Girl Land.” A contributing editor and book reviewer at The Atlantic Monthly and former staff writer for The New Yorker. She is also author of the book To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife.

The evidence that such messages can lead to clear, almost immediate changes in how people think and behave is accumulating fast. Students who received a supportive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to volunteer in class as those who did not, studies have found. A sympathetic touch from a doctor leaves people with the impression that the visit lasted twice as long, compared with estimates from people who were untouched. Research by Tiffany Field of the Touch Research Institute in Miami has found that a massage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depression and strengthen a relationship.

In a series of experiments led by Matthew Hertenstein, a psychologist at DePauw University in Indiana, volunteers tried to communicate a list of emotions by touching a blindfolded stranger. The participants were able to communicate eight distinct emotions, from gratitude to disgust to love, some with about 70 percent accuracy.

Notice how the differences in how they're portrayed and costumed? The men are fully clothed and deadly serious. They are clearly defined: the mighty hero, the ominous villains.

The women are all about sex, sex, sexy sextimes. With maybe a little villainy thrown in for flavor. They may be characters, but they're also sexual objects to be consumed.

I will pause now for the traditional arguments from my readers: these characters are all femme fatales in the comics, all of the characters in the Arkham games are over-the-top, the men are just as exaggerated/sexualized/objectified as the women. Got all of that out of your systems? Good.

Because that reaction is exactly what I'm talking about.

Y'see, one of the issues of male privilege as it applies to fandom is the instinctive defensive reaction to any criticism that maybe, just maybe, shit's a little fucked up, yo. Nobody wants to acknowledge that a one-sided (and one-dimensional) portrayal of women is the dominant paradigm in gaming; the vast majority of female characters are sexual objects. If a girl wants to see herself represented in video games, she better get used to the idea of being the prize at the bottom of the cereal box. If she wants to see herself as a main character, then it's time to get ready for a parade of candyfloss costumes where nipple slips are only prevented by violating the laws of physics. The number of games with competent female protagonists who wear more than the Victoria's Secret Angels are few and far between.

The idea that perhaps the way women are portrayed in fandom is aleetle sexist is regularly met with denials, justifications and outright dismissal of the issue. So regularly, in fact, that there's a Bingo card covering the most common responses. Part of the notion of male privilege in fandom is that nothing is wrong with fandom and that suggestions that it might benefit from some diversity is treated as a threat.

New Zealand gynecologist Dr. Albert Makary recently created a bit of controversy by saying, in response to a Durex sex survey that found Kiwi women amassing greater numbers of sexual partners than Kiwi men, that lovemaking had been "downgraded to paddock-mating," and that a national anti-promiscuity campaign was called for. Makary told a conference on families that "We have to stigmatize this behavior, the same way we stigmatize littering in the street."

As we know, the free-love ethos of the '70s met its demise with the onset of the AIDS crisis in the early '80s, but the pendulum has slowly swung back to the side of a more permissive sexual climate in recent years, especially in regards to female sexual empowerment in a post-Sex and the City world where men are expected to be more "cliterate" and less vibrator-phobic.

With this in mind, Dr. Pantea Farvid, a casual-sex expert who has studied the casual-sex psychology of both genders for the past six years, took issue with Dr. Makary's comments, as well as those of fourth-year Canterbury psychology student Emily McKenzie. (McKenzie told the New Zealand Herald that the sexually-casual behavior of her peers only had negative consequences. She said, "What I've seen is young girls that are sleeping around to try and find love and boost their self-esteem.")

Action and horror movies do tend to have a greater representation of sex workers as non-victim characters, but none of them have really resonated with me.  For example: I remember how excited I was when I read that George Romero's Land of the Dead would have a zombie-killing hooker as a main character.  But, of course, it is revealed that she was only a sex worker because the dictator of her post-apocalyptic society forced her to take that job, and she actually wanted to be in the militia protecting the city.  Thus, the character is redeemed to the audience for her whore-y sins, since they were not her choice.
I recently tweeted about how I'm not aware of a mainstream movie with a more positive and non-sensationalistic portral of a sex worker as the 1996 action hit Independence Day, and I wanted to expand on that.  Its director, Rolland Emmerich, is known for over-the-top absurdist visual spectacles of destruction with overbearing musical scores, such as in The Day After Tomorrow or 2012.  Yet, in Independence Day, he created the most normal sex worker character I've ever seen in a Hollywood film: Jasmine, played by Vivica A Fox.
Jasmine is a stripper who lives with her boyfriend Steve, a pilot in the US Marines who dreams of working for NASA.  She has a young son, and they live in a house in the suburbs of Los Angeles.  Her job as a stripper is treated as pretty much like any other job, and there's no dramatic scene where she's gang-raped and then made fun of, and her story is not one of being rescued from her work by a man.  She expresses zero desire to "escape" the sex industry, nor does her partner ever ask that of her.
Jasmine's job doesn't even really come into the plot, aside from a couple of of key moments: Steve's friend making a disparaging comment about the respectability of marrying a stripper, and Jasmine telling the First Lady (whose life she tries to save) that she's an exotic dancer, not a ballet dancer.

As a hormonal gay adolescent in the pre-internet age I cherished those very occasional -- and usually incidental -- moments of shirtlessness. Marc Silvestri's Havok in a torn-up costume as the Goblin Prince? John Romita Jr.'s Matt Murdock in tighty whities? Alan Davis's Captain Britain in drawstring pajama pants? Joe Mad's Banshee flashing his abs as he pulls on a sweatshirt? Any comic set in the Savage Land? These were my sacred texts. (And yes, I was a Marvel kid.)

Straight boys never have to hunt for that sort of fan service. The whole industry caters to their libidos. Gay boys and straight girls do not enjoy the same level of pandering. Sure, the men in these comics are usually buff and handsome, and they're all dressed in skin-tight clothes and they all have six-pack abs. If you enjoy looking at athletic, attractive men, you will find athletic, attractive men in these books, especially when drawn by artists like Chris Sprouse, Dale Eaglesham, Nicola Scott and Olivier Coipel.

But it's not equivalent. Superhero men are idealized, yes, but they're rarely sexualized. While women are presented as broken-backed boob hostesses whose every move is a bend-and-snap designed to flatter and entice the presumed-male, presumed-straight reader, the men are sexless paragons of strength, with propaganda poster good looks that serve as visual shorthand for their masculine, heroic bona fides.

I read this article when it first appeared in the Atlantic, and after stumbling upon it again, I take issue with some of the author's, well... issues.

I think this is a very instructive piece in that it touches on the bizarre frame of mind a lot of women work themselves into that pretty much assures they will never find a man. The requirements for the author's Mr. Right are ludicrously abstract and laughably childish. He must “delight in the small things,” have a sense of “wonderment,” “view the world” in the same way, and be “curious.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? Even if a man existed who possessed those qualities, how would you be able to tell? Listen up ladies: if these “requirements” are on your checklist for keeping a man at any point in your life, you are a lunatic.

Delving a little deeper reveals what Ms. Gottlieb really thinks a man’s role should be in a marriage. He’s just someone to take “out the trash and set up the baby gear, and he provides a second income.” In other words, a cash machine/servant/babysitter who you never have to have sex with, but will still massage your back for way longer than “two minutes.” Sounds lovely, where do I sign up? Realistically, the author should just marry some poor sap and promptly get divorced, since a transfer of material wealth without any real human contact will allow her to dote on her precious, male role-model-less kid undisturbed. Either that, or just admit she’s a lesbian.

Safe & Sexy documents women in the public space in two modes; one for comfort, one for attraction. Through portraits, interviews and audio, I explore how social conventions, economic structures, personal history and location shape our visual and psychological landscape. This seemingly simplistic approach invokes a complex dialogue on the layered realities of individuals navigating a terrain of vulnerability, power, comfort and attraction.

The women choose their outfits and a location familiar to them.
One persona does not exclude the other- at times interchangeable or the same. The diptych presents a dual ‘first impression’ and highlights that a woman’s appearance and body language function as a barometer for their level of interactivity with those around them. These portraits reference an anthropological survey and mainstream media’s fascination with self-transformation through “before and after” advertisements and TV programs.

This project developed out of a performance series titled, Do You Have the Time?, where I asked  people on the street for the time while in various character modes; businesswoman, trashy slut, jogger, etc. I asked the same question in a variety of locations to observe the response based upon my appearance and persona.

I plan to continue Safe & Sexy in a few additional parts of the world, publish the series as a book with a touring exhibition. I also look forward to expanding the project by working with men and exploring themes of comfort, power and masculinity.

As part of the 'shit people say' meme, sex workers mock the most commonly-heard offensive remarks from everyday folk.

*WE'RE GOING TO MAKE SEQUELS*
There's still SO MANY MORE things to be said so we want to make some sequels. We also want to have a diverse representation of sex workers speaking about the issues we face expressed in the dumb prejudiced shit people say to us!
So if you would like to participate, you can film yourself on your webcam, iphone, digital camera or mobile phone (landscape layout please - lengthways) and then get in touch with us... we can compile them together and host them here!

University researchers asked groups of men to read news articles suggesting that their local population had either more men or women. They were then asked to indicate how much money they would save each month from a paycheck, as well as how much they would borrow on credit cards for purchases.
When the articles suggested there was a surplus of men, the savings rate fell 42%, and the men were willing to borrow 84% more each month.
The study also found real-life evidence of this behavior. In Columbus, Ga., where there are 1.18 single men for every single woman, the average consumer debt was $3,479 higher than it was 100 miles away in Macon, Ga., where there were 0.78 single men for every woman.

Sex ratios don't affect women's financial decisions, but they do affect their expectations of how much men should spend on them, the study found. After reading an article stating that men outnumbered them, women expected men to spend more on dinners, Valentine's Day gifts and engagement rings.
In 2010, there were eight unmarried men for every nine unmarried women in the USA, the Census Bureau says. For unmarried Americans age 15 to 49, though, there were 11 unmarried men for every 10 unmarried women.
In some parts of the country, the ratio is more pronounced. Cities such as Birmingham, Ala. and Peoria, Ill. have a higher ratio of women, while Denver and Las Vegas have decidedly more men. The lopsided ratio for Sin City might disappoint male tourists, but it's a positive for the casinos, Griskevicius says. "Having more men than women might fuel gambling behavior," he says.

PLUS Model Magazine, a virtual publication aimed at larger ladies, is making waves with a provocative photo spread.

The eye-popping shots show nude plus-sized models hugging runway models in this month’s issue. The point: Decrying the shrinking size of the women who work in the modeling industry.

Models have shrunk to 23% smaller than the average American woman. The disparity was 8% two decades ago, the mag said.

Plus-sized models are also getting tinier. Madeline Figueroa-Jones, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, said the fashion industry had leaned toward plus-sized models wearing a size 6, making it impossible for normal-sized women to pick the right outfit.

For more than a decade, I’ve worked as a psychologist, treating issues of sexuality in my clinical practice, in several states in the American south west. I’ve seen scores of patients who have what most people would consider to be a highly active sex life, but I haven’t diagnosed anyone, ever, as being “addicted” to sex. I’ve publicly challenged the validity of sex addiction, and this has brought me trouble. I’ve been accused of being “evil”, “dangerous” and “heartless”. Sex addiction therapists have attacked me — I’ve even been accused of being a sex addict myself, told that I am in “denial” about the danger of my own sexual desires.
But the fact is, there’s no standard definition of sex addiction. It hasn’t been recognised as a bona fide disease by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the medical profession’s bible when it comes to mental health, so, instead, there are a dozen or so competing definitions and no two psychotherapists who apply the concept in the same way. A diagnosis is based on a therapist’s own idea of what constitutes an excessive amount of sex. But the mistake all these “experts” make is to try to apply the characteristics of drug and alcohol addiction to sex, claiming too much sex works like a drug, causing cravings, withdrawals, tolerance (the need for increasingly powerful “hits”) and a downward spiral in which sex “takes over their life”.

Over the past generation, however, standardized tests in the United States have seen that gender gap completely disappear. First among elementary and middle schoolers, then among high schoolers, and today, male and female students achieve identical average math scores on the SATs.


(Image credit: Tim Pannell / Corbis, retrieved from here.)

Despite the fact that there are known social, institutional and economic gender inequities, even while the gender disparity has been progressively disappearing for older girls and boys over time, there is still a marked gender inequality at the highest career levels. Regardless of how much the inequality has lessened over time, the idea that this is somehow due to an inherent female inferiority persists. There are still people, even today, who steadfastly believe that there are more male mathematicians and physics professors (among other fields) not because women are being treated and judged differently or unfairly, but because men are naturally superior to women at this.

(Don't think that's true? Go read the comments on my last article on gender in science, from a mere eight months ago.)

But you know how prejudices and confirmation biases work: if you think things are a certain way for a certain reason, then when your reasoning is shown to be incorrect because your premise is flawed, what do you do? Do you question your conclusions, or do you just find a new explanation that brings you to that same conclusion? Most recently, the argument goes something like, "even though men and women are equal on average in math ability, men have a greater variance in their abilities. So there are more very dumb men, but also more very smart men, and those are the ones who become scientists, etc."

Sandusky faces allegations that he sexually abused several "at risk" youth that his charity was supposed to be helping. Sandusky says he did nothing wrong. Earlier this week, he and his attorney chose to waive a preliminary hearing in the case -- a hearing which would have given him an opportunity to begin to publicly fight the charges against him.

The allegations against Sandusky have rocked Penn State and its legendary football program, and has so far let to several firings and the dismissal of legendary football coach Joe Paterno.

A court hearing is underway Friday in Pennsylvania for two school officials who lost their jobs amid claims that the school cared more about protecting its image than protecting children.

So far, it has featured graphic testimony from assistant coach Mike McQueary, who testified that he had walked into a Penn State shower room and seen Sandusky molesting a child. McQueary, who said he told Paterno about the incident, also faces criticism for not doing more -- such as immediately calling police.

Sandusky has a spot on People magazine's list of the 25 most "intriguing" people of the year, along with the likes of Britain's Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton, and courageous gunshot victim Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona. USA Today points out that the popular issue of the magazine, due on newsstands Friday, has a Hall of Shame list. But Sandusky didn't make that list.

We thought we knew what it meant to be male and good, and we have now found out the exact opposite is true.
What really fucking pisses us off isn’t the badness itself; as part of the great wave of men buying pornography and sex overtakes our country, we have been perfectly willing to look the other way as sex crimes accelerate.
The truth is that sex crimes are dramatically decreasing. In his sensational new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker makes the compelling, data-driven case that we live in a less bloody – and less brutally transgressive – world than ever before. As the Huffington Post reported in their review of his book, rapes in the USA have declined by a staggering 80% since 1973. Though we are far more aware of the danger of sex crimes against children than we were when Tom and I were boys, there is no clear evidence that molestations are on the rise.
It’s easy to confuse a greater awareness of sexual abuse with an assumption that the cases of such abuse are on the rise. The widespread belief that internet pornography has led to an increase in sexual violence simply isn’t supported by the evidence. While I’m not prepared to go to the opposite extreme, and declare that cybererotica is making the world safer, there’s a growing body of research that suggests just that. (See The Sunny Side of Smut from this past summer’s Scientific American.) If there is a “great wave” of men buying sex and pornography, it’s just not clear that this sexual tsunami constitutes the social disaster that many fear.

New research by the University of Ottawa documented women’s aggression against other women wearing revealing outfits. Women showing too much leg or cleavage are likely to be ostracized from female social circles as dangerous rivals, the scientists stated. Apparently even in this time of independence and self-expression, most women still find short skirts and skimpy tops awfully threatening – so much so, they couldn’t resist making catty comments even to total strangers.

The study, published in the current edition of the journal of Aggressive Behaviour, made use of an experiment in which pairs of women were left in a room thinking they were participating in a study on conflict. While they were waiting, an attractive woman wearing provocative clothes entered to talk to another researcher setting up the cameras. After the attractive woman left the room, the reactions of the waiting women were recorded. “Their hostility was obvious,” said psychologist Tracy Vaillancourt, lead author of the study, who coded their reactions on a “bitchy” scale.

“They were saying thing like, ‘oh, she’s dressed to have sex with her professor,’ or ‘oh, her boobs are about to pop out. They were looking her up and down, and as soon as she leaves the room, they start laughing hysterically.” By comparison, when the same woman carried out the exact same task – but this time dressed in chinos and a high-neck t-shirt – almost none of the participants in the study even noticed her.

“We can’t tolerate anyone giving the milk away for free. We are living in a modern context, but we are operating with an old brain. We have this instinctual response to people who defy social conventions in a way that threatens the group. It’s women who suppress the sexuality of other women,” Vaillancourt concluded.

Source: Digitaljournal

Vaillancourt T, & Sharma A (2011). Intolerance of sexy peers: intrasexual competition among women. Aggressive behavior, 37 (6), 569-77 PMID: 21932332

At 25, Deen is rounding eight years and a couple thousand titles, but he remains one of the youngest guys in the business. In a few years, his female peers will graduate to MILF roles, but Deen could spend the rest of his career performing alongside freshly minted
18-year-olds.

Several hundred men who would kill to be James Deen have gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the annual Exxxotica Expo, one of the largest porn conventions in the United States. In a makeshift lecture hall, Joshua Lehman, a bald, tattooed producer from sex toy and film distributor Adam & Eve, has com- mandeered the mic at a seminar called “So You Wanna Be a Porn Star?”

A dozen men raise their hands. Yes, they want to be in porn. One woman with long brown hair, sitting quietly under a man’s extended arm, reluctantly lifts her hand. “For you, it would be easy,” Lehman announces in her general direction. “Not because you’re a hot chick, but because you’re a chick.”

“Everybody with a vagina,” Lehman continues, “you don’t even need boobs or a butt. You can be a porn star.” Actually, “you don’t even need a vagina. You could have boobs and a penis and still be a star,” he says. Most men are out of luck. “I get 300 dick pictures sent to my phone every day. I don’t want to see your penis. That’s not how you get into porn.” He advises straight men to “get the hottest bitch you can and make her your girlfriend,” then “go into a producer’s office and have her tell him that you’re the only guy she’ll fuck.”

If a woman enters the industry at 18, she can ride it for ten years, starting with solo scenes ($250) before advancing to “girl-girl” scenes ($600), then “boy-girl” arrangements ($800-$1,000). Along the way, she can secure pay bumps by exposing herself in new ways: blowjobs, anal, double penetration, gang bang. If she gains a following by her late 20s, she can keep working well into her MILF days. A man won’t make as much as a woman, but he can work every day without risk of overexposure. As far as the porn industry is concerned, no one is really paying attention to him anyway. “A male talent is a prop,” Lehman says.


All of this changes, of course, when there are no girls involved at all. Gay porn stars make “a ridiculous amount more,” Lehman says. “The best male performers make $1,000 a scene on average. Some of the male performers in gay porn make up to $10,000 a scene. That’s why guys do it.” According to Lehman, “some of the guys who do gay for pay would rather be in straight porn,” but if you turn up in gay porn, “we don’t really want you on the straight side,” Lehman says.

Lehman tells me he was recently approached by “two well-known male performers” floating a DVD of their sexual exploits with women. “The box is basically them. Huge pictures of them. In the background, there’s a couple of hot chicks, but it’s real small,” he says. “I looked at it and said, ‘Is it gay porn? Because that’s what it looks like.’” Lehman cannot imagine a future in which this rule does not hold. “Even James Deen. You may see him in every movie, but do you see him at the center of a box? I don’t think so,” Lehman says. “If you put a man in the foreground on a box cover, male and female customers are going to assume it’s gay porn.”

What’s needed now is a better grasp of (and comfort with) relationships of all kinds. And this is the kind of thinking and problem solving that is most natural to women:

Women are intuitively systems-thinkers
Women seek balance
Women care more about solutions than who gets credit
Women are the worlds’ experts on collaboration
When they are passionate about something, women never give up
While I am supportive of any and all efforts to move women into the C-Suite, the boardroom, and the President’s office, it’s hard to ignore the fact that in these traditional places, women are making slow progress, if any at all.

The report's authors found 74 per cent of female cadets and 30 per cent of male cadets had been sexually harassed, and there had been incidents of far more serious sexual misconduct, such as rape and sexual assault.

''No doubt military culture is a very male-dominated culture and if you look at ADFA only 20 per cent of cadets are female,'' she said. ''It is what some people describe as the warrior culture, the predominant underpinning [is] about strength, fitness, all those things. The research suggests in those circumstances it will be more difficult for women and that is the case.''

''Female cadets were often treated as 'game' after hours, rather than as respected colleagues. Female cadets were often harassed by male cadets [and] these sorts of actions were simply part of the culture at ADFA.''
Another former cadet said she had been sitting in her room at her desk when a male cadet walked in, opened his fly and asked her to perform oral sex on him. She declined, but it took a ''significant effort'' to get the male cadet to leave.
The review was a reaction to the ''Skype scandal'', in which a cadet at the academy alleged she was unknowingly filmed having sex with a male colleague while other cadets watched over the internet.
''Our review found widespread, low-level sexual harassment; inadequate levels of supervision, particularly for first-year cadets; an equity and diversity environment marked by punishment rather than engagement; and cumbersome complaints processes,'' the report says.

This might be an example of officials assuming that (1) men are the main audience for boxing and that (2) men will watch women’s boxing more if they differentiate/sexualize women.

It might also, however, be an example of an attempt to retrench difference between men and women exactly when those differences start to dissolve.  Discomfort with the lack of actual differences between men and women sometimes leads individuals to encourage or enforce artificial ones.  I would say that this is one of the main functions of clothes today. Yeah, I said it. I think exaggerating what are actually rather weak and strongly overlapping differences between men and women is one of the primary functions of clothes.

In any case, it’s probably a combination of both.

Earlier this year they tried this with Badminton, but it didn’t take.

The idea that female athletes aren’t sufficiently feminine has been around as long as sports have been around.  Today, the feminizing of athletes is ubiquitous.  See our posts on Serena Williams’s ESPN cover, Candace Parker “is pretty, which helps,” press photos of female athletes in dresses, groundbreaking female sailor is also pretty, sexualizing female Olympic athletes, diets of champions, media portrayals of female athletes, and valuing dads in the WNBA.

Haven’t we as a society evolved past films whose sole premise consists of men playing women for comedic effect? And why hasn’t Adam Sandler personally evolved past this idiocy? I would never argue that Sandler suffers from an overabundance of artistic integrity, but Punch Drunk Love, The Wedding Singer, Funny People–those are real movies. Movies with plots and characters and stories. In Funny People, Sandler plays a sold-out, bitter, insincere comedic actor who’s made millions of dollars acting in substance-free movies in which he dresses up as women (well, mermaids) to entertain the unwashed masses. Sandler is clearly that sold-out actor. Are we those unwashed masses? Is this movie going to make him millions of dollars? Please don’t let it be so.


Yeah, that’s my real problem with Jack and Jill and all of the crap movies it’s emulating. When women cross-dress in movies, it’s a crucial part of the story. The woman is transforming herself into a man in order to accomplish something she is forbidden as a woman: Just One of the Guys, Yentl, Shakespeare in Love, etc. When men cross-dress in movies, it’s in order to mock women. You know that speech in Kill Bill where Bill says that Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race: weak, unsure of himself, a coward? Jack and Jill, Sorority Boys, Big Momma’s House–those movies are man’s critique on woman. We’re fat, we’re loud, we’re over-emotional, we’re graceless. We’re irritating and asinine, irresponsible and without sense, but deep down we’re here to help men learn a lesson about themselves and open up their hearts a little in the process.

Spanish society has been shaken by allegations of the theft and trafficking of thousands of babies by nuns, priests and doctors, which started under Franco and continued up to the 1990s.

IN THE 1990S, Stephanie Coontz, a social historian at Evergreen State College in Washington, noticed an uptick in questions from reporters and audiences asking if the institution of marriage was falling apart. She didn’t think it was, and was struck by how everyone believed in some mythical Golden Age of Marriage and saw mounting divorce rates as evidence of the dissolution of this halcyon past. She decided to write a book discrediting the notion and proving that the ways in which we think about and construct the legal union between a man and a woman have always been in flux.

What Coontz found was even more interesting than she’d originally expected. In her fascinating Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, she surveys 5,000 years of human habits, from our days as hunters and gatherers up until the present, showing our social arrangements to be more complex and varied than could ever seem possible. She’d long known that the Leave It to Beaver–style family model popular in the 1950s and ’60s had been a flash in the pan, and like a lot of historians, she couldn’t understand how people had become so attached to an idea that had developed so late and been so short-lived.

For thousands of years, marriage had been a primarily economic and political contract between two people, negotiated and policed by their families, church, and community. It took more than one person to make a farm or business thrive, and so a potential mate’s skills, resources, thrift, and industriousness were valued as highly as personality and attractiveness. This held true for all classes. In the American colonies, wealthy merchants entrusted business matters to their landlocked wives while off at sea, just as sailors, vulnerable to the unpredictability of seasonal employment, relied on their wives’ steady income as domestics in elite households. Two-income families were the norm.

Many studies have found a link between how well men do economically and their height. A recent German study, for example, found that for each additional standard deviation in height (an increase of about 7 cm) West German men are paid a 4% wage premium. So for example, a man who is less than 165 cm  (5’5”) tall is, on average, paid 562€ less per month than a man who is between 185 and 195 cm (6’1” to 6’5”). Other studies that look at data from countries throughout the developed world have found very similar results – taller men do better on average in the labor market.

There are several reasons why this relationship exists beyond simple workplace discrimination, not the least of which being that adult height is related to socio-economic status in childhood. But it isn’t just income that is causing short men to fair worse on the marriage market; even when we control for income women prefer taller men.

Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (normalized)   2002
Digital C-prints.
Ed. 5 + 2 APs. 60" x 29.5".
From a broader series begun in 1997, the photographs in this suite are the result of mean averaging every Playboy centerfold foldout for the four decades beginning Jan. 1960 through Dec. 1999. This tracks, en masse, the evolution of this form of portraiture.

Tech notes on the amalgamation body of work:

Most of the early amalgamation print work (Playboy, Class, Homes, 76BJs) was made with code I wrote in C on Unix-based SGIs using Paul Haeberli's SGI file format.

Later amalgamation work (Decades, Late Night, Special Moments) was done in C/C++ on Windows boxes with the ImageMagick C++ libraries. I did The Song of the Century manually with PC audio software (I honestly cannot remember what software, but I did download a few of the cover songs with the original Napster)

For the City and Loop pieces, we actually modelled much of Chicago's Loop as semi-transparent, textured rectangles and rendered this "city" from typical tourist vantage points. All of this was done in Maya. The Portrait pieces were done with Processing.

Do you ever hear any of these comments from your spouse, partner, boss, friends, colleagues, or relatives after you have expressed frustration, sadness, or anger about something they have done or said?
When someone says these things to you, it’s not an example of inconsiderate behavior. When your spouse shows up half an hour late to dinner without calling—that’s inconsiderate behavior. A remark intended to shut you down like, “Calm down, you’re overreacting,” after you just addressed someone else’s bad behavior, is emotional manipulation—pure and simple.
And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions. It’s patently false and unfair.
I think it’s time to separate inconsiderate behavior from emotional manipulation and we need to use a word not in our normal vocabulary.
I want to introduce a helpful term to identify these reactions: gaslighting.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” ~ Albert Camus

Trust in your longing to be free.  This longing is your wake-up call. Literally.

Somewhere you know you’re not living as you, the real you.

Do you want to know you? The real you?

Come join me for six weeks of fun, unearthing and remembering.

We’ll dive into discovering you, the real you. I’ll offer experiences and practices to deepen your discovery. You’ll come away with a new realization of what it means to be you in this female body, an understanding of your own creative process, and a deeper trust in your wise, intuitive and sensual nature, all born from your own experiences, insights and wisdom.

The Art of Being Unabashedly Female is a curriculum that has been adapted specifically for women from the acclaimed Stanford University GSB course, Creativity in Business. It is designed for women of all professions. There is only one criterion: you must be a woman longing to know and trust the truth of who you are. When you turn to the longing, the way will be revealed.

We definitely don’t want to live in a world where boys routinely see women breastfeeding. They might grow up with the idea that breasts exist for something other than their amusement.
Margaret Hartmann, “Porn Star Publicly Breastfeeds Baby, Gets Accused of Promoting Pedophilia” at Jezebel.

“Nooooo…” I disagreed, feeling as if I was defending veganism to a bunch of suburbanites, mid-turkey-sandwich. So I pulled out the mom card, risking any Oedipedal downsides. “My mom always called it ‘making love,’” I pointed out.

The two girls looked at each other, as if checking to see if the other was feeling the same 4.3 earthquake tremor. They nodded at each other, once each. “Well, in that case, it’s different. It’s okay.”

“It’s when men say it.”

Well, I hear you. Hearing a the Situation say “I want to make love to you” would make me queasy. Soooo…it took me six months to come up with a comeback, but here it is. Men can’t say “make love” without being tacky or sleazy?

“I think that making love is the best form of exercise.”

Cary Grant said it.

My boundary work has been crucial in my personal relationships, as well. As I started doing this work to protect myself and center myself in the jails, I realized that I could do it with the people in my personal life, too.

I began to see immediate effects in my relationships, as well as in the quality of my everyday life.

Even though I no longer work in prisons and jails, I still do this work just about every morning. When I let it slip, when I don’t take time to ground myself and honor my boundaries, I can feel a big difference.

Nowhere has this work impacted my life more than in my personal relationships. I used to feel like every person who I spent a lot of time with blew me around as I got caught up in their life. I noticed myself taking on aspects of their personalities and lifestyle and losing myself.

After doing this work, I now surround myself with people who are really attracted to me because of who I am. How I show up in the world: by my strength, my motivation, my passion—how absolutely me I am.

Drawing on a telephone survey of 1,500 youth, Janis Wolak and colleagues present some data giving us a clue.  They find that less than half (42%) of 10- to 17-year-old internet users had seen online pornography in the last year.  Most of them that had, further, had not sought it out.  The majority (66%) had come across the pornography by accident (e.g., they had entered a porn site without meaning to, been emailed an explicit image, or seen a pop up).

The image below shows unwanted and wanted exposure to pornography for boys as they age.  Only 1% of the boys 10- to 11-years-old had sought out pornography, by 12-13 about one in ten have done so, and by 16-17 over 1/3rd have (38%).  Unwanted pornography is a problem for boys of all ages. Seventeen percent of boys 10-11 encountered unwanted porn and this number increased as the boys aged.


Few girls seek out pornography: 2% of 10- 11-year-olds had sought out pornography, rising to 8% by 16-17. Girls have the same problem with unwanted exposure to pornography; it happens about as frequently as it does for boys among 10- 13-year-olds and even more often among 14- 17-year-olds.

I was re-reading my five billion goddamn posts about rape and force, and I realized (surprise!) there is a more succinct way for me to express what I was thinking. I tend to go on and on, circling a subject, trying to get out everything in my head that possibly relates to it, and then sometimes find I didn’t really address the subject at all. So, here is what I wanted to say in those five billion posts about rape:

If women are raised being told by parents, teachers, media, peers, and all surrounding social strata that:

it is not okay to set solid and distinct boundaries and reinforce them immediately and dramatically when crossed (“mean bitch”)
it is not okay to appear distraught or emotional (“crazy bitch”)
it is not okay to make personal decisions that the adults or other peers in your life do not agree with, and it is not okay to refuse to explain those decisions to others (“stuck-up bitch”)
it is not okay to refuse to agree with somebody, over and over and over again (“angry bitch”)
it is not okay to have (or express) conflicted, fluid, or experimental feelings about yourself, your body, your sexuality, your desires, and your needs (“bitch got daddy issues”)
it is not okay to use your physical strength (if you have it) to set physical boundaries (“dyke bitch”)
it is not okay to raise your voice (“shrill bitch”)
it is not okay to completely and utterly shut down somebody who obviously likes you (“mean dyke/frigid bitch”)
If we teach women that there are only certain ways they may acceptably behave, we should not be surprised when they behave in those ways.

And we should not be surprised when they behave these ways during attempted or completed rapes.

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs released its annual report on hate violence motivated by sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and HIV status last week. The report documents 27 anti-LGBT murders in 2010, which is the second highest annual total recorded since 1996. A whopping 70 percent of these 27 victims were people of color; 44 percent of them were transgender women.

The NCAVP report found that half of those who experienced hate violence did not contact the police after their attack. The report further found that 25.4 percent of transgender women did not file a report. So what can be done to reduce these rates of violence against LGBT people and communities of color?

The Audre Lorde Project is among the groups that organize LGBT people in communities of color that are increasingly looking beyond law enforcement and the criminal justice system for a solution. The Safe OUTside the System Collective works with bodegas, businesses and organizations within Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and surrounding areas to create safe spaces for LGBT people of color to curb violence.

The study also found that transgender people and people of color are each twice as likely to experience violence or discrimination as non-transgender white people. Transgender people of color are also almost 2.5 times as likely to experience discrimination as their white peers.

“It wasn’t a shock,” said Morales, whose organization is among the 17 anti-violence programs from across the country that contributed data to the NCAVP report. “For the last four years we’ve seen that trend—of transgender women and people of color in our communities experiencing higher levels of violence. Sadly that continues.”

Recent headlines certainly bare witness to this disturbing trend.

Lost in all the hoopla was the fact that there already exists a crop of openly queer rappers who have been making music for years. They’re talented, proud, but when it comes to mainstream media, they’re often ignored. So I reached out to some of the industry’s best and brightest to get their take on the really gay rappers who should be getting our attention. Writer and activist Kenyon Farrow summed up the bigger picture nicely when he wrote in an email: “I wish we could focus more energy and our money on artists in the community, rather than falling all over ourselves for straight people to validate our existence.” 

I started to think about this, and it really honestly scares me. When I start to think of the number of times I have been cajoled, pressured, or forced into sex that I did not want when I came into "the BDSM community", I can't actually count them. And I never came out about it before, not publicly, for a variety of reasons- I blamed myself for not negotiating enough, or clearly, or for not sticking to my guns, or I  didn't want to be seen as being a drama queen or kicking up a fuss. Plus, the fact is, these things didn't traumatize me, and I didn't call it sexual assault or rape, because I felt ok afterwards. There was no trauma, no processing that I needed.


That makes me really angry, because I realized I didn't feel traumatized because it happened so bloody often that it was just a fact of being a submissive female. WTF, right? I used to see on Alt.com and Bondage.com female submissives talking about predatory behaviour in the BDSM community, and I still see it on CollarMe and Fetlife. I remember being given the stage whisper not to play with this person or that one because they had a history of going too far, something that was often dismissed as "gossip" and kept on the DL to avoid that accusatory label of being overly dramatic. Being in the scene meant learning how to play politics- how to be polite, even good-natured, to people that you kept an eye on.


As I reflected on the number of times I've had fingers in my cunt that I hadn't consented to, or been pressured into a situation where saying "no" was either not respected or not an option, or said that I did not want a certain kind of toy used on me which was then used, I'm kind of horrified. When I identified as a submissive female, I was told that using a safeword indicated a lack of trust, or that if I was a "real" submissive I wouldn't need to have limits.

Prostitutes and the clients who frequent them are back in the news after the woman accusing French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn of rape was herself accused of being an escort. DSK is rumored to be a big fan of prostitutes, which is perhaps what led the New York Post to report that the Guinean Sofitel maid, who claims he orally raped her in his hotel room in May, was "doing double duty as a prostitute, collecting cash on the side from male guests." The maid maintains that the Post is lying, and she filed a libel suit this week that says as much.

In this funny (and actually poignant) 3-minute talk, social strategist Renny Gleeson breaks down our always-on social world -- where the experience we're having right now is less interesting than what we'll tweet about it later.

We first caught wind of the altered sculpture on Twitter, in a tweet from Jeanne: “Look what some guy welded onto a sculpture at Meridian Park. And no, it wasn’t the original artist.”



Yep, someone added to the sculptures that ring the playground at Meridian Park. (For some beautiful shots of the other sculptures, see Jeff Ng’s photostream on Flickr.)

This morning, we heard from the artist himself, who forwarded his note to the original artist:

Hi Pat,

Hope you are doing well, I really like the dragon knocker on your site.  (enough of me kissing yer ass)

I’ve re-armed your sailor boy sculpture that has was damaged and disintegrating at Meridian Playground by my house.  I thought my addition was great, a bit tongue in cheek but a nice addition.  Unfortunately while I was making my install tonight (surreptitiously of course) I was accosted by some crazy lady who was completely bent out of shape.  I thought nothing of it but she returned with her drunk husband and buddy to berate me.  Some choice quotes, “This is no longer whimsical.  I’m on the committee.  You’re an idiot! You ruined the park.  You’re an idiot! I worked hard on this park and you ruined it.   You brought a gun to the park.  You must have voted for Bush.  You’re an idiot! You don’t understand kids.  I’m sending this picture to the parks dept, the artist and the cops.  You’re an idiot!”  So feedback has been mixed so far.  I will say the bums bbg’ing in the background loved it.  And a bunch of other folks coming by, but I suspect you’ll hear first from this crazy lady.

Despite momentum for same-sex marriage in legislatures, the courts and public opinion, there's one place that seems out of step with this shift: the workplace. A recent study finds that about half of gay and lesbian white-collar workers are not "out" when they're in the office.

This image of a “submissive boy with a rosary” was suggested by Emily Marigold. I like it in part for the obvious talent in the drawing, the signs of anguish, evinced by lacerations on the man’s shoulder and the smudged eyeliner, and the fact that he’s wearing eyeliner in the first place. And, yes, I also like seeing the broken rosary, since it offers a narrative hook to imagine him as someone religiously persecuted—a martyr.

Martyrdom is a common narrative among BDSM players; “I’ll take it for you.” Certainly sexy, but many utilize the script to abdicate personal agency; rarely do these bottoms remember the more important words: “I want to take it for you.” As Dr. Staci Newmahr writes, “Martyrdom bottoming does not rely on the ultimate denial of pleasure, but in adherence to a martyr script.”

It’s unfair to levy blame on the bottoms who display such unthinking loyalty to this cultural script, though, especially the men. Other than martyrdom, common characterizations of men bottoming rely on archetypal feminization, whether implicitly (the meme of submissive men doing housework is a particularly sexist example) or explicitly (“sissified sissy maids who insist on talking about their sissy clitty”). These are obviously problematic formulations for any masculine-of-center individuals, not just men.

I have seen too much cruelty and negativity bring people down – people who do not deserve to be brought down. I want this to be the place that holds people up, fosters creativity and connects like minds. If you want to be negative or if you feel like saying mean things, then this is not the place for you. And although it’s none of my business, I challenge you to not say anything at all, or if you must write something mean, put it in a place where no one will find it.

We think that mean comments are bad. We hate them! We don’t want you be mean to each other and so the interface of this website was designed specifically with that in mind. My awesome co-founders, Sophia and Molly, and I are so lucky to have this opportunity. Ultimately, HelloGiggles is for all of you who read and contribute to this site. We truly appreciate that you share with us and allow yourselves to be vulnerable. We take this very seriously and we want to protect you, so you can grow up to be big and strong and successful at whatever the heck you want to do, to become the artists you want to become and support others in their endeavors.

We are counting on you, ladies and gentlemen, to help keep the love alive! So like your mothers probably told you, if you don’t have anything nice to say, please, don’t say anything at all.

We adore you all. Thank you for being a part of our world (and yeah, I am quoting The Little Mermaid!)

2011 marks the 20th anniversary of the bad-ass feminist road trip movie, Thelma and Louise.

At the time it was released, it was hailed as a groundbreaking feminist classic, an answer to the male-dominated road trip and buddy movie genres. But how much has it actually changed the way we think of gender, class, race, rape, rebellion and women movie characters? Panelists Nona Willis Aronowitz, Jaclyn Friedman, Sofia Quintero, Melissa Silverman and Jamia Wilson will lead an intergenerational discussion on these questions and more after a screening of the film.

Director: Ridley Scott. 130 min. 1991. 35mm.

COILHOUSE is a love letter to alternative culture, written in an era when alternative culture no longer exists. And because it no longer exists, we take from yesterday and tomorrow, from the mainstream and from the underground, to construct our own version. We cover art, fashion, technology, music and film to convey the alternative culture that we would like to live in, as opposed to the one that’s being sold or handed down to us. The result, in the form of articles, features and interviews, is laid out on our blog and in our print magazine for all to see. If our Utopia is your Utopia, then welcome!

It was my research editor who told me it was completely nuts to willingly get fucked at gunpoint. That's what she called me when I told her the story. We were drunk and in a karaoke bar, so at the time I came up with only a wounded face and a whiny, "I'm not completely nuuuuts!" Upon further consideration, a more explanative response probably would have been something like: Well. You had to be there.

"There" would be Haiti, where I'd just spent two weeks covering the one-year anniversary of the earthquake that shook the country into ugly chaos. There, a local regular at my hotel restaurant who is not accustomed to taking no for an answer had gotten desperate. After proposing for the 87th time that I have intercourse with him, he was grasping for anything that might change my mind, trying eventually, wildly, "We can do this at gunpoint if that sells it for you." And actually, it did, yeah.
On that reporting trip, I'd been fantasizing about precisely what the local guy proposed, my back against a wall or a mattress with a friendly gun to my throat. But the plan was vetoed about as soon as it was hatched, when I asked him if his firearm had a safety and he said no. Like I say: I am not completely nuts.
I realize now that I was undone. Journalists put themselves in threatening situations all the time, but they rarely talk about the emotional impact. It's not easy to complain about the difficulties of being around trauma when you've chosen to be around trauma for a living, and it certainly isn't cool. When CBS correspondent Lara Logan went public that she was raped in Egypt five months after I returned from Haiti, most people reacted with the appropriate amount of horror. Some, though, blamed the reporter for putting herself in a risky situation, and for being reckless enough to enter one when she's so hot. No wonder it's a rarity for correspondents to discuss their pain, and practically unheard of when it regards sexual harassment or assault. The handbook of the Committee to Protect Journalists didn't even mention it—until 20 days ago, when the organization published an "addendum on sexual aggression."

If the handbook had a section detailing "symptoms of a journalist who really needs counseling and should probably go home," I would have fit the description. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't stay sober. When the power went out, I just sweated in the stifling heat because I was too scared to open my windows even though they weren't the kind someone could fit through. When a French UN peacekeeper I'd met went AWOL to knock on my door, wanting to know, when I gladly unlocked it for him, please if he could to kiss me, I couldn't feel him. Literally. I watched, confused, as he climbed onto me weightlessly, though he was clearly much bigger than I am. When we met again to say goodbye more than a week later, I grasped for anything concrete: my hands on his muscled, uniformed ass, my pelvis against the gun at his waist. Still, I could feel only something static and empty in the places usually occupied by my limbs. When he walked away—telling me he loved me, god bless 'em—I cried my face off.

There’s something that still fascinates people about the Playboy mansion and Hugh Hefner. Despite the magazine’s falling circulation numbers (which, with an internet is full of free porn, seems like a forgone conclusion) and rumors about the mansion being sold to pay off Playboy’s debts, coverage of the goings-on of Hefner and his buxom blondes continues to proliferate. Case in point: the recent “Crystal Harris runaway bride, Hef left at the altar” story. When the “news” broke 5 days before the wedding it spread like wildfire through the Twitterverse. Hefner chose Twitter to let people know the wedding was off, and it was immediately passed along by people from all walks of life with different reactions to the news, ranging from “well, duh” to suspicions the bride had been planning this stunt as a promotional tool for her new single.

Why do we still care so much about this old man and his empire of naked ladies? We’d argue that our ongoing fascination with Hef reflects a younger generation’s curiosity about a man who with each passing day seems more like the relic of a past era that couldn’t exist today. We’re watching the Playboy dynasty on life support.

The documentary Bill Cunningham New York follows the photographer around New York as he snaps shots of street fashion by day and swanky parties with the city's tastemakers at night. The filmmakers also sit down with Mr. Cunningham to discuss his life, including the fact that he was being relocated from his longtime studio apartment above Carnegie Hall.

In the 1990s, social psychologists developed a theory of “depletable” self-control. The idea was that an individual’s capacity for exerting willpower was finite—that exerting willpower in one area makes us less able to exert it in other areas. In 1998, researchers at Case Western Reserve University published some of the young movement’s first returns. Roy Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky, Mark Muraven, and Dianne Tice set up a simple experiment. They had food-deprived subjects sit at a table with two types of food on it: cookies and chocolates; and radishes. Some of the subjects were instructed to eat radishes and resist the sweets, and afterwards all were put to work on unsolvable geometric puzzles. Resisting the sweets, independent of mood, made participants give up more than twice as quickly on the geometric puzzles. Resisting temptation, the researchers found, seemed to have “produced a ‘psychic cost.’”

Over the intervening 13 years, these results have been corroborated in more than 100 experiments. Researchers have found that exerting self-control on an initial task impaired self-control on subsequent tasks: Consumers became more susceptible to tempting products; chronic dieters overate; people were more likely to lie for monetary gain; and so on. As Baumeister told Teaching of Psychology in 2008, “After you exert self-control in any sphere at all, like resisting dessert, you have less self-control at the next task.”

“Never speak ill of the wrong or negative person. It takes you down to their level.”

I’m sorry for what you’ve had to go through, but in this case rule #6 is victim speak. Someone speaking negatively of you is one thing. Being solicited for sex and then blocked from a conference because you refused is a COMPLETELY different thing. These people need to be reported or outed. People should be told who this was and what conference it was so that they can protest this unacceptable behavior.

Playboy launched a Web-based subscription service Thursday called i.Playboy.com that allows viewers to see every single page of every single magazine — from the first issue nearly 60 years ago that featured Marilyn Monroe to the ones hitting the newsstands today.<br />
Playboy magazine debuted way back in 1953, when Dwight Eisenhower was president, most people still believed the world was flat, and the thought of Hef in the sack with a young beauty didn't make us nauseous.<br />
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Even though a lot has changed since then, one thing has remained constant: Men absolutely lust for interesting magazine articles surrounded by pictures of naked women. We can't help it; it's in our blood.<br />
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Now Playboy is giving us the whole ball of naked wax, undoubtedly beating WikiLeaks to the punch by mere days.

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Publication of the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in May 2013 will mark one the most anticipated events in the mental health field. As part of the development process, the preliminary draft revisions to the current diagnostic criteria for psychiatric diagnoses are now available for public review. We thank you for your interest in DSM-5 and hope that you use this opportunity not only to learn more about the proposed changes in DSM-5, but also about its history, its impact, and its developers. Please continue to check this site for updates to criteria and for more information about the development process.