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Last Week’s Most Popular Blog Posts
The Sexist will be out for the holiday weekend tomorrow, so I leave you with last week’s greatest hits. What better way to celebrate America’s birthday than reading a bunch of random shit about sex on the Internet?
1. This Week in Sexist History: Girls, Girls, Girls Edition, an indulgence in olde-tyme sports writing. I say it’s sexist! Commenter says it isn’t! Steve Silver says it’s “interesting how it has to be explained to some readers 100 years later that an article published 100 years ago describing women purely as objects for men’s pleasure is sexist.”
2. Teen Sex Scandal!, in which I put the feminist linkbait-and-switch theory to work.
3. Big Penis Site Reveals Inches Before First Date, in which 7orbetter.com has more longevity than I gave it credit for.
4. Disney’s Closeted Gay Agenda, in which High School Musical debunks all theories about Disney promoting heterosexuality.
5. Sex Tips From Drunk People, in which I pledge to do more research in this area over the holiday, and I encourage you to do the same! E-mail your drunk sex insights to ahess@washingtoncitypaper.com.
Photo by Misserion
Indians Divided Over End to Gay Sex Ban
Today, “New Delhi’s highest court decriminalized homosexuality,” the New York Times reports. The decision, which overturned an 1861 law banning “carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal,” marks the first decision from an Indian court to “directly address rights for gay men and lesbians.”
Indians are intensely divided over the issue, and both supporters and detractors have flooded Internet message boards with their thoughts on the ruling. It seems absurd that anyone would object to erasing a law that would punish a private sex act between consenting adults. Yet as One Yahoo! India message board on the issue reveals, many of the conversations occurring in New Delhi today look pretty similar to U.S. debates over legalizing gay marriage.
Click Here For (A Feminist Critique Of) Sarah Palin’s Throbbing Thighs!
Yesterday, DoubleX tweeted the following teaser to a story on Sarah Palin’s recent profile in “Runner’s World”:
“Sarah Palin, in spandex, discusses her ‘throbbing thighs,’” is the classic ladymag linkbait-and-switch:
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The Onion’s Best and Worst Rape Jokes
I’ve written a lot recently on who can successfully tell a rape joke and what targets are fair game for the butts of those jokes. One perennial source of rape humor, the Onion, gets the rape joke dynamic right a lot of the time. The format has a lot to do it: as America’s leading source of fake news, the Onion is always skewering the media along with its make-believe subjects, and media treatment of sexual violence is often ripe for satire. Sometimes, its best and worst shots, after the jump.
Sexist Beatdown: Let’s Talk About Sex, Whatever That Is
Quick Quiz! Sex. What is it, exactly?
A. One step past whatever you were just caught doing with that woman who is not your wife.
B. Anything that two people do together in private when they love each other very much, not including whatever those queers are doing.
C. Whenever the one with a penis has an orgasm.
D. Given the obvious power disparity between men and women in the patriarchy, an implicitly non-consensual act—unless two girls are doing it, but only if two girls are doing it exclusively for their own pleasure and not to satisfy the male interest in two girls doing it.
E. Dancing.
Today, Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I will get to the bottom of this mysterious phenomenon, and figure out why the definition of “sex” is not actually any particular combination of penises, vaginas, anuses, and mouths, but rather a tool for cheaters to pretend they’re not cheating and homophobes to pretend they’re different from gays. Good morning, by the way!
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When Gender Equality Goes Horribly Wrong
AdFreak has discovered these sexualized advertisements for Davidoff cigars. Each ad is accompanied by a photograph of a male model appearing to orgasm upon catching a whiff of some fine Davidoff cigar smoke. The ads read, “Every Man Has a D-Spot.”
Finally, you may be thinking. Men reduced to sex objects in order to sell phallic shit, and not women this time around! [See female "O" faces in advertising: Exhibit A, Exhibit B, and a bonus nonconsensual orgasm ad in Exhibit C]. So is this gender equality? Is it regressive? Or is it just icky?
Is Michael Jackson the New Nipple?
The Huffington Post entertainment page has been conspicuously absent of female nipples lately. I think we’ve finally found the kryptonite to HuffPo’s entertainment page sexism: The biggest, weirdest star in the world suddenly dropping dead.
Observe:
Prevent Abortion By Selling Babies!
In this Bloggingheads conversation between BeliefNet’s Steven Waldman and Slate’s William Saletan, two dudes demonstrate why two dudes should not film themselves talking off-the-cuff about abortion for an hour. They call the segment “Two Men, No Uteruses.” Waldman and Saletan putting their headsets together to figure out how to convince women not to be so aborty? I call it torture.
Broadsheet’s Amy Benfer sums up the low point of the dialogue, which begins around the 26-minute mark:
This Week In Sexist History: Girls, Girls, Girls Edition
Newspaper stories from the good old days say the darndest things. So every week on the Sexist, let’s take a ride on journalism’s way-back machine, to a time when descriptors like the following—”big girls and little girls, blonde girls and brunettes, dark-haired blondes, sunset blondes, Rhinegold blonde—blondes of all kind save the prescription pattern”—qualified as college baseball commentary.
This Week in Sexist History:
Good Ol’ Day: June 23, 1909
Dateline: New York, NY
Subject: Reporter at Yale-Harvard rivalry baseball game fluffs up his flowery play-by-play with a rhapsodic account of the glorious array of girls in attendance. Collect one in every ethnicity!
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Why Female Politicians Don’t Cheat. Hint: Too Busy Being Female Politicians
Last week, Politico’s Melanie Mason tackled the question of why female politicians are so rarely caught with their pants down. Mason starts out with a pretty good theory—”Men far outnumber women in elected office, and statistical probability dictates that if a random politician is caught in a sex scandal, it is overwhelmingly likely that the politician would be male”—and then offers up a bargain basement of half-baked ideas in order to cover all the basis—and sexist stereotypes against women. Most of these reasons would never, ever actually stop a woman from messing around, but that won’t stop us from buying into it all again.
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