Month of January , 2006

Twisty of I Blame the Patriarchy offers the flipside of my recent discussion of BDSM in two posts about the patriarchy-affirming nature of even the safest, sanest, and consensualist BDSM sexplay.

Via Shrub comes this post by Mahlia Miles, a self-described "pretty woman in a wheelchair", who writes of the way her physical condition feeds the male body, both as a physically limited female body (and thus simply an exaggerated version of the female body's helplessness in general), and as a (with a nod to Sarah Jones) 3-foot blowjob machine, a twisted version of the "grateful ugly girl" whose mouth is forever set at groin-height:

As part of my class preparation, I often write essays about the topics I plan to lecture on. I don't read them directly in class, but it helps me get my thoughts together to write out what I want to talk about. This is the essay I wrote for my upcoming lecture on "social construction".

This is where I, the blogger, ask you, the reader, for your input. I'd like to put together a booklist of works relating to sex and gender. Not non-fiction -- that'll come later -- but works of fiction that deal with these issues in interesting and useful ways, the kind of stuff you might assign a class on "Sex and Gender in Literature". For instance, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God explores the the way blackness and womanhood shape the lives of both men and women in the rural South, as well as offering at least one avenue towards empowerment (as I recall -- it's been over 15 years since I read it). Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises deals with a particular kind of (Hemingwayian) emasculated masculinuty.

Lauren is leaving Feministe. After bringing on Jill last year and a couple of new full-time writers (apprently from the pool of guests that's filled in from time to time over the last couple years), the site, I'm sure, can stand the loss -- but for me, Lauren is Feministe (no offense to Jill and the others). She was one of the first bloggers I read regularly, one of the handful that it was important to me, when I started blogging, to get the attention of. My understanding of gender and feminism and all things related (even knitting!) has been considerably deepened by Lauren's sharp and often very personal analyses.

Emily Jenkins in Salon writes on sexual moderates, people who like sex just fine but don't obsess over it, don't feel the need to define every aspect of their lives in relation to sex -- and the way our culture marginalizes what is probably a pretty normal attitude about sex as weird, dysfunctional, frigid, etc.:

I'm Pro-Choice and I Fuck by Rachel Kramer Bussel

The Gender Politics of Housework

One key concept to understanding how housework is political is to grasp the concept, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, that housework is work. It is valuable yet undervalued labor because it is unpaid. And the bulk of this unpaid labor, even in dual-career marriages, is done by women, without recognition of this fact.

On Chivalry

Originally posted at Savage Minds on November 16, 2005.

Every time I teach the section on marriage in my Intro to Anthro class, I inevitably face the same question. The book lists four types of marriage: monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, and group marriage. and someone always asks "What about swingers?" (Of course, I live and teach in Vegas...) The question points to a limitation of the concept of marriage not just for anthropological understanding but even within our own everyday usage.