Dare To Be A Feminist

Badly educated men in rich countries have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism

Mother’s Day is traditionally filled with flowers, cards, and sometimes breakfast in bed. Most fathers are honored to honor the mother of their mutual children by helping pick the daffodils and burn the toast, carefully covering the black part with a thick layer of marmalade. But mothers are also included in a stark statistic: one…

As this type of porn gains visibility, it reflects a greater demand for explicit sexual representations among women, where sex isn't always a "ribbon-tied box of happiness and joy," say editors in this excerpt from "The Feminist Porn Book."

...With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people than ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic-driven fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society's dread of women who own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations of proper female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, "Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value." Rubin maps this system as one where "the charmed circle" is perpetually threatened by the "outer limits," or those who fall out of the bounds of the acceptable.

On the bottom of this hierarchy are sexual acts and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy and reproduction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the privileging of normative and constricted sexualities and the denigration and punishment of the "sexual rabble."

[Trigger Warning: This post contains a description and photos of physical assault that may potentially be triggering for survivors of such abuse.]

...Since it was published, Lewkowicz’s project has received negative attention because many commenters feel that Lewkowicz should have tried to stop the abuse rather than standing by and documenting the incident on her camera.  Lewkowicz actually did call 911 (and includes images of their response in her photo essay as well), but for many this was not enough.  Even Maggie was attacked by commenters for allowing the abuse to happen, for staying with Shane, and for not fighting back.  As one commenter states, “She is not a victim.  She is the perpetrator.”  But as Jina Moore notes in her article on Salon.com, the only person who isn’t blamed in these comments is the man committing the violence.