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Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Sexerati Is Crushed Out

filed under: Sexerati Hearts by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Crushed out, meaning, dear sweet fuck, has Spring sprung up so full upon us, with not just strapped-on sandals and heady notions of nonstop skin, but smart, smart ass inspiration in the form of well, what we’ve been reading between the dressing and the undressing:

Shake Well Before Use is Ariel Waldman’s daily compendium of “art, advertising, sex, & technology.” Convergence is the theme: where innovation & sex bleed from boutique to pop, the edge to the mainstream, and then, how sex is sold back to us. She’s sassy as hell, and her Twitters will make you fall in geek love.

Sex and the Ivy is “a bleeding heart nympho’s guide to Harvard life.” Elle’s blog shocks in that it’s so soulful about sex, and not just for those harboring tweedy Cambridge-based fetishes. And I do. But also, clever and taut writing about sex that refuses to turn an eye from the hard bits, physical or emotional? There’s precious little. Bring on the book deal already.

Jezebel, oh Jezebel, you’d been hinted to me long before your perfectly golden and gaudy birth on Monday, and thank fuck, not just for deconstructing what passes for pop media for women (all the while supposedly offering us the same, but you are so much more), but for proof that passionate writing about sexual politics (yes it is) needn’t be bare, pared down, and without flourish & heady pomo reference. My every run-on today is for you.

Monday, May 14, 2007

“A Place For…” Friends Predators Moral Panics

filed under: Strange Bedfellows by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Because sex perverts just aren’t clever enough to create a social networking profile under an assumed name, right? Again MySpace is being accused of not doing enough to protect “the children,” with seven US attorneys general, in North Carolina, Connecticut, Idaho, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania, seeking to force Mr. Murdoch’s Neighborhood to release the names of the alleged thousands of registered sex offenders on the site.

Context, please? SNS researcher danah boyd, David Finkelhor (Director of Crimes Against Children Research Center), Amanda Lenhart (PEW), and Michele Ybarra (President of Internet Solutions for Kids) give up their own data in this talk last week, Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization.

Turns out, even when the quantitative studies don’t support the notion that sharing personal information on social networking sites leads to “online victimization,” that doesn’t keep the numbers from being positioned as reason to increase online surveillance. Meanwhile, other threats to young people’s sexual well-being? That don’t improve from having law enforcement hang out on MySpace all day? Well.

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

HPV Vaccine Getting Smacked Around Again

filed under: Smart. Safe. Sex. by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

Oh, HPV vaccine, it’s been a hard year. People accused you of making girls slutty, like in Texas, where efforts to make you mandatory for girls aged 11 and 12 are stalled in the State Legislature. Now the Los Angeles Times says you “may be less effective than previously thought,” though of course, many, many other headlines on this same study in the New England Journal of Medicine (who, just to make things extra complicated, has this editorial on why mandatory vaccinations make sense) resound with optimism that you are curing cervical cancer.

Just in time, though, a new ill to pin on HPV: throat cancer. Shocking to absolutely no one who counsels people about their sexual behavior, the virus formerly known only as “the virus that causes genital warts and some strains of cervical cancer,” is now believed to cause oral cancers as well. We appreciate that science does have a few more miles to go before it can definitively come to the same conclusions as community health educators — that people fuck with mouths too, hello — and that the media can’t decide if all the new HPV news is good (yay, cure for cancer) or bad (but look out for the new cancer) might be heartening, as well, if it weren’t all going down in the context of a culture largely sans sanity around safer sex. The takeaway message could be, unless couched in real people’s sex lives, yet again, sex is nasty and dangerous and involves unavoidable risk.

Is it naive to hope that there’s a way to report on sexual infections and not prop up sex-negativity?

Tuesday, May 8, 2007

From the Awkward Sex Files

filed under: Design for Sex, Smart. Safe. Sex. by Melissa Gira | 4 Comments

Special to the “Awkward Safer Sex Activism” Department:

(thx, mister.)