sexuality

Well now this is interesting–and on a continuum, somehow, with the National Organization for Women’s late 1960s protests against sex-segregated help-wanted ads in the New York Times. As Lynn Harris reports over at Broadsheet, my local NOW chapter (NYC-NOW) has scored a homerun with their anti-human trafficking campaign. Specifically, New York magazine announced this week that it would no longer be running ads for sexual services, including escort agencies and suspicious “massage.” And according to the New York Post, it’s the 15th publication to do so this year.

Writes Lynn, in good third-wave feminist style,

To be sure, not every “Punjab Princess” advertising in New York is doing “bodywork” against her will. And it’s hard to imagine that Pink Orchid is going to close up shop just because it can no longer snare New York readers pretending to be looking for the Approval Matrix. But those are hardly good reasons to shrug and keep running the ads, or to dodge an opportunity to make a move based on principle. One of NOW’s stated goals is to “shed light on how the trafficking industry is a part of the local economy and identify the legitimate businesses that do business with traffickers.” At very least, it’s a necessary reminder that women and men are trafficked not just in Bangkok, and not just in hidden brothels, but right next to our own crossword puzzles.

Another dear friend, sociologist and sex researcher Virginia Rutter, is revising her classic, The Gender of Sexuality, and is in search of blog, columns, books, and articles to reference in the new edition. Specifically, she is looking for 3rd-wavey writings on contemporary women’s sense of entitlement with regard to sexuality and sexual activity. I’ve suggested Lisa Johnson’s Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire and also (though less 3rd-wavey) Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs. Does anyone have titles/articles/blog suggestions to add to the list? Feel free to post em here, and I will compose a mini-biblio in a post to share with all.

So tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Rosaura “Rosie” Jiménez, the first known victim of the Hyde Amendment in the United States. And the amazing Gloria Feldt is going to be joining María Luisa Sánchez Fuentes (executive director of Grupo de Información en Reproducción Elegida) for a cross-border dialogue about the recent gains and losses in the reproductive rights movements in the United States and Mexico over at the Women’s Media Center. Check out what Gloria has to say about it all today on HuffPo.

Journalists welcome:
9:30-10:30 am EST
The Women’s Media Center
350 Fifth Avenue, Suite 901
New York, New York 10118
RSVP by email (kathy@womensmediacenter.com) or by calling the Women’s Media Center at (212) 563-0680. A call-in option is also available.

Let’s make this news.

I’m quoted in a Reuters article posted today by Helen Chernikoff, “Burlesque revival: more nerdy than sexy?” I think Chernikoff did an excellent job portraying the nuance of new burlesque. And while I’m on it, the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly puts the new burlesque in context. A quick summary of the issue, which is titled “The Sexual Body”:

The mid-1970s feminist critique of the female body, sex, and pornography ignited a debate that has continued to this day. Through critical essays, fiction, poetry, and images, this provocative issue of WSQ probes this territory in the light of emerging areas of study. Engaging the fields of critical race studies, film studies, history, literary criticism, performance studies, and political theory, The Sexual Body energizes the debates on the status of sex, pleasure, power, and desire. Ranging from soul food to dance hall music to new discussions of female-and transgender-directed pornography, this issue mobilizes cutting-edge feminist, race, and queer scholarship to push critical theories of the body to their limits and anticipates where race and sex will inform the next generation.

This one comes courtesy of Broadsheet. Apparently, maternity clothing designers are getting hip to the fact that there are (ahem) pregnant brides. I’m not sure if this is another way to glamorize the baby bump in our newly MILF-focused culture, or a long overdue acknowledgment of the fact that weddings and babies don’t always happen in that order. Regardless, as an aspirational late-mom who also plans on tying the knot one of these days soon, I’m kind of into it, even though I’d more likely wear a red dress and cowboy boots when the blessed event occurs (the wedding, not the labor).

Anyway, I’m not sure I believe Maternity Bride’s survey, which claims that 1 in 6 brides are preggers. Still, nice to know there are options for those who are screwing with the traditional order of things and still want to wear the traditional big white dress.

Ok, I’m on a roll this morning and really MUST get to work (um, paid work). But I just had to share this post from Jessica over at feministing, on some shoddy reporting about how feminism is responsible for the stripping poles some fraternities are apparently installing in their lust dens.

I saw over the weekend that my Guardian piece on why I hope the whole stripping pole business soon goes the way of the old charred bra was picked up by the Kuwait Times last week. Here’s a tidbit from it – I wonder how this reads in Kuwait??:

What the burned bra was to the second wave, the stripping pole has become to the third – a bogey that distracts us from the far less sexy reality that feminism is, and always has been, serious work. It is time to stop deploying rigid and vapid cliches – damsel, good girl and slut – and fixating on the alleged excesses of one contested aspect. We need to keep our eyes on the wider array of women’s issues. May the stripping pole go the way of the charred bra, a quaint reminder of how those calling it from the sidelines got it very wrong.

I’m so pleased to start off the day with a guest post from Melinda Parrish, a 22-year old instructor in the English Department at the US Naval Academy. Melinda is based in the Writing Center. Here she is! -GWP

Wendy Shalit’s new book, Girls Gone Mild, is the second in her legacy of literature, which includes numerous articles and online publications that preach abstinence to young girls as the best way to reclaim their feminine identity from the hedonistic, post-sexual revolution culture that currently holds it hostage. She claims that, “the plain fact is that girls today have to be ‘bad’ to fit in, just as the baby boomers needed to be good. And we are finding that this new script may be more oppressive than the old one ever was.”

But, Wendy, by countering the sexual revolution with another sexual argument, are you not just perpetuating the cycle? Whether you’re pro-abstinence or, well, easy, aren’t you still allowing what happens to your “good girl” (wink) define the entire girl? Isn’t THAT the biggest threat to the feminine identity of a young girl in modern society?

It makes me furious to think since the dawn of time, women have been defined primarily by their sex lives. I concede that in recent decades the values table has flip-flopped because of the sexual revolution and some young women may feel pressure towards promiscuity for social acceptance. But I don’t regard Shalit’s counter-argument as an enlightened or relevant one because it leads us back to where the feminists of the late sixties and early seventies started. Aren’t we a sophisticated enough society to progress beyond this issue? Can’t we find SOMETHING to focus on that doesn’t reside between our thighs?

My plea to my fellow young women: stop making your vagina your defining characteristic! Don’t let someone pigeon-hole you as a Madonna or a whore, or allow your life’s happiness to rest solely on the success you achieve in bed; rather, devote your energy into developing your (other) physical, intellectual and artistic abilities to such a degree that your worth as a human being is undisputed, regardless of who you go to bed with!

(If you’re interested in more of Shalit’s work, check out her blog entitled, “Modestly Yours.”)

I think a lot about the line between research, me-and-my-friends-search, and journalism. I read with interest the review of Wendy Shalit’s GGM in Sunday’s Washington Post. Reviewer Jennifer Howard seems to feel, as I did, dubious of Shalit’s method, yet somewhat sympathetic to the portrait she details. Writes Howard,

[Shalit] asks, “Why, in the year 2007, should women’s focus be completely on pleasing young men?” (Is it?) And she wants us to take heart (and I do, I do) from the growing number of young women whom she describes as “rebellious good girls.” These new avatars of girl power give abstinence talks to high-schoolers; they stage “Pure Fashion” shows in which fashion doesn’t just mean flesh; they become “girlcotters” who lobby retailers such as Abercrombie & Fitch to pull tee-shirts emblazoned with sexist slogans. They don’t sleep with the first, or second, or third boy who comes along. They don’t become “people-pleasing bad girls” who will do anything, anything, to get a boy’s attention.

More power to them. Behind Shalit’s celebration of such girls, however, is some very dubious sociology.

Dubious indeed. And passing off anecdotal journalism as researched reality is particularly frustrating to the academically inclined in light of the fact that Shalit is onto something important. As the American Psychological Association noted in a May 2007 report, there’s a paucity of research on the sexualization of girls.

Jim Naughton over at Episcopal Cafe has an interesting take on it all:

Wendy Shalit has made a career as the sort of journalist whose trend stories fall apart on closer examination. But no matter, because by the time closer examination occurs, the stories have frequently started quite useful conversations. Her latest book, Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It’s Not Bad to Be Good, is a case in point. Unless one believes that the plural of anecdote is data, there is simply no evidence for a resurgence in modesty. But by the time a reader figures that out, he or she has skipped past the need for data, and leapt to the discussion of whether such a resurgence would be desireable. It is possible to regard Ms. Shalit simultaneously as a mediocre journalist and a useful contributor to contemporary conversation about morals.

And so I ask you, when does mediocre journalism constitute a useful contribution, and how do we draw that line?

Around the same time that GGM arrived in my mailbox the other week, I also received notice about these cool new resources:

1. The Barnard Center for Research on Women has assembled ephemera dating from 1970-1999 related to women’s sexual health–resource guides, newsletters, and pamphlets written for (and by) diverse groups of women. Addressing issues like safe sex, teenage pregnancy, lesbians, and AIDS, advancements in reproductive technologies, contraceptives, reproductive health, and forced sterilization, these are documents that have empowered women to make well-informed decisions about their own bodies since the dawning of feminism’s second-wave. The collection is online, here.

2. In May 2007, the American Psychological Association released the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, linking the phenomenon to some of the most common mental health problems in girls and women. You can read the executive summary here. (To request a copy, contact Leslie Cameron at lcameron@apa.org)

Pass it on 🙂