“Should I Do It?” To Women Who Struggle with Porn-Driven Sex

Usually I address my writing about pornography to men, who are the majority of the consumers of sexually explicit material. But after a recent conversation with a woman friend, I was reminded of how often women who raise concerns about the sexism of pornography are discounted as being overly sensitive, prudish or unable to see [...]

Censored Cover Raises Question: Why Are Breasts “Obscene,” But Not Chests?

The cover of this month’s Dossier Journal magazine has caused a great stir. In a matter of a few hours, I’ve received five emails about it. Here’s what all the fuss is about: Featured is an androgynous male model named Andrej Pejic, with hair and make-up usually seen only on women, sliding his shirt off his [...]

Does Sexual Objectification Lead to Bad Sex?

Turning women into sex objects heightens the erotic experience, right? A growing body of research indicates the opposite: for women and, surprisingly, men. A new longitudinal study out of Pennsylvania State found that when women lost their virginity, they lost self-esteem, too. Before they had sex, the body image of the women in the study [...]

Click! Not a Knight in Shining Armor

As a teenager coming of age in the 1970s in mainstream culture in the upper midwest, I missed the United States’ radicalizing movements by a decade and several hundred miles. I developed conventional liberal politics in reaction to the conventional conservative politics of my father and his generation. But in a more basic sense, I [...]

We Still Believe Anita Hill (and We’re Dumbstruck by Ginni Thomas)

I somehow read The New York Times piece wrong when I first glanced at it yesterday: I thought it said that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia–she of the new tea party-linked lobbying group Liberty Central Inc.–called Anita Hill to apologize to her. Wow, Mrs. T wanted to offer an olive branch to the [...]

The Anti-Porn Men Project

The Anti-Porn Men Project is a new “online space for (mainly) men to write about and discuss anti-porn issues.” And I really wanted to like it. That statement may sound disingenuous coming from me. As a sex-positive feminist whose sexual identity is BDSM, I spend most of my time writing in favor of sexual freedom. [...]

Latinas: We’re So Hot We Broke Google

When Google released “Google Instant”–a “search enhancement” that suggests content before you finish typing your Google search words– I thought it was pretty fun to see which suggestions would pop up as I began typing random words. While I was just goofing around, others were seriously testing out “controversial” words like bisexual, lesbian and Latina. [...]

Sex Week Arouses Conservative Ire

President Obama’s first budget proposal in 2009 redirected millions of dollars of federal funds from abstinence-only sex education programs to comprehensive sex ed. Unfortunately, many students are still graduating high school without hearing much beyond Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” presentations on how to–or more likely how not to–”do it.” Into this educational breach [...]

Yes, Pornography Is Racist

In Shira Tarrant’s blog post on race and porn, she interviews some well-known African-American performers to challenge my claim that porn is racist. There are some women of color who have been successful in pornography, but this doesn’t change the fact that porn is systematically racist. Systems of oppression are flexible enough to absorb some [...]

Is Pornography Racist?

In her new book Pornland (Beacon Press) author Gail Dines argues that our sexuality is hijacked by the multi-billion-dollar-a-year porn industry. (See my three-part interview with Gail here, here, and here.) Dines also argues that pornography is racist. But not everyone agrees. In the Pornland chapter titled “Racy Sex, Sexy Racism!” Dines writes that women [...]

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