Posts Tagged ‘The Frisky’
When A Rape Fantasy Isn’t
Today, the Frisky’s Anouk Collins wrote about her rape. In the story, Collins detailed how, after a fight, her boyfriend, Jacob, forced himself on her without her consent. “As he crawled on top of me, I rather sternly informed him that I didn’t want to have sex with him,” she wrote. “To my horror, he got a menacing look on his face and ignored my protests.” When “it was over,” Collins attempted to engage with her boyfriend about what had just happened. “Horrified at the suggestion that he’d misread my signals and overtaken me, Jacob began to lash out,” she wrote. “He insisted that I was to blame.”
In most cases, a confession of past sexual assault would elicit both sympathy and outrage from readers. A few of Collins’ readers did express such sympathy—for her boyfriend. “The way you manipulated your boyfriend into your own self destructive behavior and then victimized yourself by his actions says a lot about your character,” wrote one commenter. “I can’t believe you posted that article under your real name.”
Why wasn’t Collins afforded the respect deserving of a victim of sexual assault?
Could a CDC Circumcision Recommendation Inspire More Penis Ignorance?
The Centers for Disease Control is currently weighing whether to recommend the circumcision of boys and men in the United States. If the CDC finds that a circumcision recommendation would reduce the risk of HIV among American men, I think that’s swell. Providing people with information to help protect themselves from disease is a wonderful thing. But a CDC recommendation would likely come with one major adverse side-effect. For women who already find uncircumcised penises disgusting, wrong, or unfuckable, the recommendation will also provide more fuel for their ignorance.
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Semen Facials Are Like Weddings
Last week, The Frisky writer Jessica Wakeman stood up in defense of the facial. Wakeman argued that the old porn standby—whereby a man ejaculates onto a woman’s face—isn’t inherently demeaning, as long the woman wants it. “In some porn films, the facial is played up to emphasize his humiliation of and domination of her, but in other porn flicks, the money shot is just something the actors do,” she wrote. “In real life, I suspect facials happen more for pleasure than for humiliation, seeing as women have a little thing called self-respect.”
But Wakeman errs in her either/or assumption about the sex act: that facials are either grounded in mutual respect, and elicit pleasure, or are grounded in degradation, and elicit humiliation. In fact, facials can imply all of these things, though we rarely analyze it all in the moment. Plenty of sex acts made popular in mainstream pornography, like facials, are based on achieving male pleasure. Under this model, the female’s pleasure is derived by successfully pleasing the male—and in the process, allowing herself to be degraded. As Amanda Marcotte writes, “our culture constructs sex as something women do for men, and men do for fun.” That model of sexuality is undoubtedly objectifying for women. But it nevertheless—voilà!—conjures up an idea of “pleasure” for both sex partners.
The Morning After: Poor Me, Born Sexy Edition
* Great, women claim even more power over Children. The New York Times reports on scientists who have discovered “a surprising new mechanism by which women train their fetuses’ budding immune systems: the mother’s cells slip across the placenta, enter the fetus’s body and teach it to treat these cells as its own.”
* Strapped for cash? Birth 14 babies through science [via The Frisky].
The Morning After: Prenatal Care for the Aborting Edition
* Lately, at times, I’ve felt like Jezebel has dipped ever so slightly into safer ladyblog territory, the one largely claimed by magazines featuring Amanda Bynes on the cover. Then came Tracie Egan’s post on how to allay pregnancy symptoms when you’re just going to abort the thing anyway, so fuck-all to fetus-safe medical care (i.e., “Saltines”). And it was amazing and not previously published in Cosmopolitan!
* Hey, weird, someone has collected some of 2008’s top moments in feminism that are actually relevant to the women’s movement. Thanks, “The Frisky”!
* Gawker’s last lady standing signs off after one year of “Internet news-aggregating and the snark-blogging fishbowl,” i.e. the great “Dadaist experiment.”
* Wonkette has unearthed olde-tyme would-be “Junior” Senator from Illinois Roland Burris‘ GRAVE, which he has ALREADY CONSTRUCTED WITH A LIST OF HIS LIFE’S ACCOMPLISHMENTS, plus some space at the end for “unbought Senate appointment” or whatever.
* Ladyblog’s Phoebe Maltz compares abstinence pledges to her own fifth grade school-sponsored anti-smoking pledge. Both are lame!
If we stayed true to our promise (an honor code our witness) we could attend an end-of-the-year school-sponsored pizza party in the spring. . . . The end of the year came, and, although I’d managed against all odds to make it all the way to June inhaling nothing more interesting than polluted NYC air, I refused to go to the pizza party. This was in part because what could be dorkier, and also in part due to an already-present libertarian impulse, albeit one in which the teachers were stand-ins for the State.
Photo via trialsanderrors.
