links for 2008-11-02
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"We still live in a world where women seemingly cannot be seen as sexual and at the same time be taken seriously. We still live in a world where sexuality itself is seen as degrading to women. That is the purpose of these types of exercises — to debase Palin by reminding everyone that she (presumably) has a vagina and is therefore only good for fucking. I truly believe that if sex was not still viewed as inherently degrading to women, we wouldn’t be seeing these sorts of displays at all.
The goal is to mock Palin’s intelligence not by engaging with her foolish beliefs and ignorant rhetoric, but by pointing and saying 'look, boobs!' or 'I’d sure like to hit that!'"
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"I don’t know that there was life there. But it was the beginning of something that might have been, someday. I would vote for any woman’s right to extinguish whatever lights were turning on there, and I believe it is her choice and her choice alone. But I don’t think those of us with that view – the only right view, I think – should make light of abortion, should look at it as yet another category for snarky humor. There was another, more decisive way to shoot down that odious NRO article"
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"It turns out that your experiences make you, whether people are calling you by the name your parents gave you or by a name you gave yourself. I own it all, everything I ever did. The memories are mine. Not Grace's, but mine. It will never be finished. It will never be over, not while I'm alive. We don't finish things. There is no finishing."
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"I'm baffled, but I know I shouldn't be. This kind of thing happens all the time. And it's laughable when taken to this extreme. For some reason, my personal and very safe and honest and professional choices are judged negatively and then somehow carried over to 'infect' my home and the general vicinity that I am present in as well."
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"Honestly, in all of my years in the industry I have never read such sexist, disgusting, degrading crap as I have read in the works of those like Farley, Dworkin, Jeffreys, Mackinnon, etc."
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"Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. 'Every Young Woman's Battle,' for example, tells teen-agers that 'the momentary relief' of 'self-gratification' can lead to 'shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that something is wrong with you.' And it won’t slake sexual desire: 'Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It’s better not to feed such a monster in the first place.'
Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it’s possible to 'believe in abstinence in a religious sense,' but still understand that abstinence-only education is dangerous 'for students who simply are not abstaining.'"
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"There are a vast many types of privileges: gender, racial/ethnic, sexual identity, occupation, class. What privilege isn’t is an excuse to ignore someone else's life experience, as in, 'You have privilege in this one area, so you couldn’t possibly know what you are talking about in this other area.' A frequently repeated abuse of privilege is the example of sex workers who are middle class having their experience in sex work discounted because of their class privilege. Privilege is a matrix, interlocking systems, a web, not a flat line."
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"I wonder whether male bloggers whose conservative creds are so nebulous as mine – basically amounting to being a small-l libertarian democrat – get this kind of accusation. Or whether it’s assumed that their stands, agreeable or not, are at least principled and researched."
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"In the rest of the world, however, people have an ethnicity or a nationality, even if their nation doesn’t have its own state. When I answered 'American,' the follow-up question was, as often as not, 'but what are you?' particularly because I looked like a long-lost cousin. I’m not even brown-skinned like the images of black people we send abroad. But 'black' is as good an answer as I can give."
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"That’s why those old issues of Playboy and Penthouse, with their ads for top-shelf liquor and other high-life consumer products look so lush; they had mainstream ad dollars that allowed them to produce a mainstream quality product. And that’s why today, completely cut off from any mainstream level of returns, porn today looks so shitty."
Nov 02 2008 08:30 am | Category: del.icio.us links
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