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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Retrosexual: Mystery Date, Now! With Bears!

filed under: Retrosexual by Melissa Gira | 5 Comments

The classic Mystery Date girls’ game gets remade as a bear matchmaking service in this retrosexed video:

Bears so rarely are celebrated in such a charming way, let alone available on the internet teevee. Plus, isn’t there just something so safe & sweet about mashing up outsider sexuality with nostalgia?

(via a shockingly, increasingly hotter Yahoo)

Friday, July 13, 2007

A Little Bit 21st Century Slut, A Little Bit Cloistered Girl

filed under: We Are The Sex Media by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Three quick links for the weekend, dears, all care of the National Sexuality Resource Center:

• Look Who’s Googling, on managing online identity in the New Dating Age. I’m sure we can build even more so on the privacy suggestions offered (i.e., avoid posting your last name, email address, phone number, or where you work).

• Queer Connections Before Craigslist: How gay men got in touch pre-Internet times, which delivers some beautiful retro gay culture kitsch:

In 1946 Bois Burke, a resident of Berkeley, California, placed a personal advertisement in a new magazine called The Hobby Directory… But he was hoping to do more than initiate the sort of platonic exchange that was the norm for pen-pal clubs and correspondence societies of his day. Instead, Burke and the other members of The Hobby Directory, which included an overabundance of “florists,” “hair stylists,” and “male nurses,” desired a decidedly queer sort of contact: They wished to connect with others they perceived to be like themselves but whom they had difficulty locating in the regular passage of their everyday lives.

• Nightline on “Hooking Up,” with such high-larious moments as “So, what does ‘hit it and quit it’ mean?” — but watch it for San Francisco State University professor Deb Tolman smartly countering the whole Hooking Up phenom — no, getting educated & jobs did not make women total whores. And so what if it did?

Now go out there, flirt & hook up, get a little retro gay, resist the urge to Google each other, and have a great weekend.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

The New “Lady Chatterley”: Francophilia + “Natural” Sex = Crazy Good Reviews

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

There’s a new Lady Chatterely in town, and this time, she’s translated:

The New York Times, in their Video Minute (which I can’t embed here, and yes, I’m registering complaint as I blog with the “relevant parties”) lavishes praise on how “remarkable” the film is just for having been translated into French from its English source, giving the film a “newness, an aliveness, a freshness.” Sex, is, after all, fusty musty dusty and funky. Granted, that clean outdoorsy sex Lawrence is all about needs no translation.

Really, I don’t mean to overly hate on the Times. It’s just that my morning blogging habits have me reading the paper version at a cafe before cracking my laptop. They even offered up this little gem, from their review, “Parlez-Vous Lawrence? Love, Sex and Fresh Air,” which itself is no longer available without logging in: “Every frame of the film seems alive with a sensuality that is both wild and intelligent.”

I’m not free of a little French fetish, either. The French just seem to get away with approaching sex with a more “evolved” aesthetic, of suffusing sex with intelligence, of eroticizing the theory of sex itself. D. H. Lawrence himself was credited with doing to sex in the English language what the French masters had been getting away with for centuries. (Anais Nin, who was Lawrence’s first literary defender, was also given these honors. She may have been born in France, but America is where her sensual voice took root.)

Lady Chatterley is hitting American release this month, after having netted five Cesar awards in France. Showtimes here.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Newsflash: Sex Ed More Than Diagrams, Directions, Disease

filed under: State of Sex Ed by Melissa Gira | 2 Comments

A study out of Melbourne University, polling the usual captive audience of young people — this time, those who’ve received sex education in Victoria — finds (unsurprisingly) that:

Many appeared to be crying out for sex education that went further than the standard biology and risk prevention.

“If they did get sexuality education it was mostly focused on the biological, safe sex and reproduction aspects, and what they really want is someone to talk to them about the social aspects of negotiating sex,” she said.

Besides this form of sex education requiring more pedagogical prowess on the part of typically woefully over-stretched teachers, it seems a little challenged at present.

One of the rhetorical dodges of comprehensive sex education has been that it is based in science and fact; that this is just the biology of the birds and the bees; that safer sex practices are proven to reduce disease & unwanted pregnancy (true). All this “social” talk is just too prone in some moderates’ eyes to coming off as an actual commendation of sexual pleasure.

Really, though, the appeal to science! softens not at all the outcry of cultural conservatives who wish to squelch all discussion of sex — not because they’re not obsessed, mind you, but because a sexually ignorant public is far easier to push around when it comes to moral panics in times of vote-mongering. (See: US election, 2004, “God, guns, & gays,’ remember?)

For all it may be fraught when it comes to The Young People, this move towards Even More Comprehensive Sex Ed is something that we can already see in the production of sex-culture-at-large. Where once sex education was relegated to “marriage manuals,” and now to a full-fledged industry of how-to and after hours classes in erotic goods shops, a polarization has still been at play, between sex education & education — pontificating, usually — on relationships, dating, & (shiver) intimacy. Typically, “relationship” education falls back on the same sexist stereotypes it so desperately needs to question. The very act of wanting to learn more about human sexual relationships is so often tasked to women, is thoroughly feminized as a pursuit for both student and teacher.

And fuck knows the last thing the world needs is another Rules or similar rubbish.

So, has a sex smart approach to talking about relationships emerged? What would it look like? How will it be sold — to politicians, to the public?