* At Slate, Emily Gould argues that feminist blogs are motivated by jealousy:

It's a prime example of the feminist blogosphere's tendency to tap into the market force of what I've come to think of as "outrage world"—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate's own XX Factor and Salon's Broadsheet. They're ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. . . . The vibe is less sisterhood-is-powerful than middle-school clique in-fight, with anyone who dares to step outside of chalk-drawn lines delimiting what's "empowering" and "anti-feminist" inevitably getting flamed and shamed to bits. Paradoxically, in the midst of all the deeply felt concern about women's sexual and professional freedom to look and be however they want, it's considered de rigueur to criticize anyone, like [Olivia] Munn, who dares to seem to want to sexually attract men.

Really interesting points here, except for that "petty jealousy" part, where Gould's piece descends into misogyny. Poorly-researched Internet link-bait is poorly-researched Internet link-bait—and I've yet to find a comments section anywhere that's teeming with "progressive thought and rational discourse"—but apparently only "jealousy" is to blame when women are behind this. Gould doesn't offer any evidence to support the jealous theory, so perhaps she is just jealous? She is a woman writing linkbait about other women on the Internet!

* The DC Trans Coalition announces the formation of the National Coalition of State-Level Transgender Organizations, which will build a nationwide grassroots network on trans issues.

* Zack Rosen of The New Gay reminds bachelorette parties at gay bars: "I'm a person first, sodomite later":

Three nights ago I was walking down DC’s U Street, the east end of which holds several gay bars, with a couple male friends of mine. Granted many of us were wearing tank tops but I don’t think that precludes kind, humane treatment. Some girls who I don’t think were lesbians were stalled drunkenly at the alley next to Nellies, checking their phones and twiddling their Mardi Gras necklaces, when one decided to annoy the everloving crap out of me. ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO NELLIES? She screamed, in a volume usually reserved for running alongside the train taking your loved one to the Korean War. I mumbled back that no, I was going to Town, a megaclub down the street. YOU’RE SO CRAZY!!!!! she screamed back, as if singing “What a Man” to a deaf person.

I hate when people say “you’re so crazy.”

* Fugitivus gives some advice on suddenly finding you're a feminist:

A reader recently emailed me asking for some advice. She’s having her feminist “click” moment, and now finds that she is incompatible with almost everybody around her. Suddenly, the presence of rape apologism, racist jokes, sexist sneering, and other such Socialization Aids is inescapably fucking gross instead of invisibly malforming. She finds she can’t talk to anybody without finding out they believe something that is offensive, oppressive, and/or horrifyingly inhumane. She asked me, to briefly summarize: What the fuck do I do now?

* At Yes Means Yes!, Thomas MacAulay Millar on safewords and consent in BDSM, via Clarisse Thorn:

Some folks may have come across the term “consensual nonconsent.” It’s one of those terms with multiple meanings. Some people use it to describe any situation where the bottom is saying “no, don’t” but has not yet safeworded — a usage I find less than useful. Others use it to describe roleplays of nonconsensual situations. The last common usage, though, is that which I like to describe using Hunter S. Thompson’s phrase, “buy the ticket, take the ride.” It means that the bottom consents to be in a situation I’ve just described, where the top decides if the bottom needs to stop, often but not always around specific activities, and usually (wisely) heavily negotiated.

Photo via George Eastman House

* D.C. Mayoral candidate Leo Alexander only has 700 bucks in the war chest, and $200 of it came from Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. That's rough, dude.

* Woman marries her partner in D.C., but is denied a name change in her home of Tennessee, on account of her absurd document from the nation's capital claiming her to be married—to a woman!

* The Bilerico Project takes the temperature of gay online media. Zack Rosen of the New Gay submits: "The state of gay online media is, simply, that it exists."

* In the Washington Post, Mark Judge calls for more male teachers in Catholic schools, for feminism:

[T]his is the kind of feminism that can sometimes be best delivered by a man. This year girls basketball team at St. Mary's won the league championship. As a reward the girls on the team got to come to school out of uniform, wearing whatever ever t-shirts they wanted to. The boys, whose team had not done as well, were sulking around school, bristling whenever the girls would brag. I noticed they were whispering to each other, "Yeah, but girls basketball is not a sport." They would never say in front of any teachers, 90 percent of whom are women. But then the sixth grade came into my classroom in the afternoon and, the boys saw me standing in the front and they let themselves go. "It's not a sport!" they cried. They called out, men to man, for validation—"Mr. Judge, girls basketball is not a sport! Right?"

I was surprised. I grew up in the 1970s, and even in those dark ages we would never have claimed that women's basketball was not a sport. Had thing moved that far backwards? Actually, I answered, not only is it a sport, it's a lot more interesting than men's basketball. Men's basketball has become a lot of dunking. In women's basketball there is strategy, jump-shots, thinking.

The boys looked at me suspiciously for a few seconds. But then they seemed to take it in.

* So sorry to bother you, via Feministe: How men and women pitch stories to the Awl. According to the site: "The emails from men are pretty direct. The emails from women are often kind of . . . apologetic!"

Photo via Nationaal Archief

*Broadsheet's Tracy Clark-Flory reports on an X-ray manufacturer's foray into the pin-up market. Clark-Flory's take: "damn, these skele-girls got femurs for daaays. As the Weekly Vice suggests, I guess the message here is that beauty isn't skin deep, after all. Or something." I think the real message here is that even Skeletors can look "sexy" if we splay them out in a suitably compliant pose and strap the right shoes on their feet.

* At Feministe, s.e. smith declares open season on bikini season.

* Bitch Magazine's Kjerston Johnson aggressively campaigns for the Twilight series to show Bella's vampire-baby birth on-screen, in which "Edward has to deliver the baby Cesarean-style . . . with his teeth." In response to Twilight screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg's claim that "you can do childbirth without seeing childbirth . . . it doesn't mean it's any less evocative of an experience," Johnson replies: "Um, he rips their baby out of her stomach with his mouth! I would like to see what kind of mise-en-scène director Bill Condon conjures up to ensure it's no 'less evocative' without this unnatural natural birth."

* Why is the National Organization for Marriage (NOM NOM NOM) bankrolling a local ANC commissioner to the tune of $60,900? [Via Metro Weekly].

* Vote in Freedom to Marry's blogger scholarship contest; our local pick is The New Gay editor Zack Rosen. (Read his submission here).

* Zack Rosen at The New Gay on the assumption that gay men love Sex and the City: "assumptions about my relationship to SATC make me about as angry as being called fabulous," he writes. "We’ve all gone on bad dates or slept with someone who never called us again. We do not all, however, live in a New York City haze of money and extreme fashion. We do not all act as if women and gay men are half-formed creatures that will die flopping on the floor if they cannot find a mate. And most importantly, we do not all subscribe to the notion that the life lived by the SATC gals is a mirror image of that undergone by the contemporary urban gay male."

Rosen isn't just peeved at the constant comparisons between all gay men and a set of sexually promiscuous, frivolously spending, Cosmo-swilling white ladies; he's also unimpressed with the film's depiction of actual gay men: "this movie . . . features a gay wedding between two men who hate each other, love an all-white color palette and hired Liza Minnelli to sing 'Single Ladies.' I’ve hosted orgies that were less stereotypically gay than that."

* Who would you rather work for: Andrea or James?

Madeline Heilman at New York University once conducted an experiment in which she told volunteers about a manager. Some were told, "Subordinates have often described Andrea as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. She is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees' creativity."

Other volunteers were told, "Subordinates have often described James as someone who is tough yet outgoing and personable. He is known to reward individual contributions and has worked hard to maximise employees' creativity."

The only difference between what the groups were told was that some people thought they were hearing about a leader named Andrea while others thought they were hearing about a leader named James. Heilman asked her volunteers to estimate how likeable Andrea and James were as people. Three-quarters thought James was more likeable than Andrea.

The story goes on to examine the experiences of two transgender scientists at Stanford who transitioned mid-career—one transitioned to male, the other to female. I wonder who had a better time post-transition?

* SAFER Campus on WaPo's recent examination of campus rape: When you headline a story "Schools trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence," shouldn't you then report on some schools that are actually trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence?

I found the title of the article “Schools trying to prevent and respond to sexual violence” in the Washington Post to be extremely misleading. I expected to read a some stories of how schools are adequately and sincerely making efforts to prevent and respond to crimes such as rape, but instead I found myself reading a boring, shallow article that barely grazes the real picture of violence on college campuses and how institutions are dealing with it.

* Student journalists at the University of Utah who secretly inserted words for genitalia in the school newspaper will not be penalized. Apparently, publishing "penis" and an unidentified "slang term for the vagina" are not, in fact, outlawed in the school's Code of Conduct. "Administrators said academic holds on the journalism students were lifted after they determined the student code was not violated by the prank, which spelled out the words in large capital letters within The Daily Utah Chronicle's farewell columns."

* Alyssa Rosenberg points to another lady-centric movie I will definitely see:

[youtube:v=j92Rka-FtUw]

* Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown welcomes summer, and all the irrational fighting it brings. Kicking off fighting season for Doyle: Tequila-fueled feminist infighting!

Oh, the shouting! Oh, the insults! Oh, the many and various accusations, most of which, in recollection, make no sense whatsoever! I said she had internalized misogyny and cared more about protecting liberal party lines than about human decency; she said I had internalized classism and behaved “like a character from the movie Mean Girls;” I made fun of her for the Mean Girls reference, which didn’t help, and at some point, long after the conversation had transcended the bounds of sense-making, she said that she wanted to talk about how terrible I was with my boyfriend, at which point I got out my phone and started yelling, “Let's call him! Let's call everyone I've ever fucked! Let's ask them how much I hate poor people!” And I would have called them, too (“So, we dated from December of 2007 to February of 2010. During that time, to the best of your recollection, how many hobos did I set on fire for kicks? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S FOUR IN THE MORNING. THIS IS EXACTLY WHY WE DID NOT WORK OUT”) but then I started crying, and the whole thing just went completely off the rails.

As I stood up and walked outside for a cigarette, at this point visibly sobbing, she called out, “I look forward to reading about this on wherever it is you blog.”

Fun fact: I witnessed this summer-opening fight! I was slumped into a booth of some swanky Brooklyn lounge thingy, drinking my millionth beer and attempting to keep it together while some guy explained scuba diving to me. Summer is here!

* Zack Rosen of The New Gay hates lube, and unrealistic, lube-less television fucking:

In season 6 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which I am currently watching, a lot of the previously high school-aged characters have a lot of very spontaneous sex. Two people are talking or fighting or waiting for the bus when suddenly, Bam! They are fucking. The show can’t be too explicit about it, so they just show undulating bodies from the waist up, fully clothed, standing against a wall or lying on a table, miming all the faces and sounds of intercourse. As a gay man, I can’t get over this. It just seems so easy. You have the interest in having sex and then you do it. Just like that. No muss, no fuss, no lube.If Buffy wanted to show a realistic depiction of, say, Angel and Spike fucking it would not be so easy. They would fight for a while and then suddenly Angel’s legs would be locked around Spike’s waist while they kissed. Spike would pantomime trying to slip his dry dick in, and then Angel would yell “OW! Spike, are you fucking kidding me?” He might even turn into Angelus from pain and frustration while Spike went tearing around his crypt, looking for a 6 month-old packet of lube that he thinks he picked up at a gay bar and left in the pocket of his other black t-shirt. Angel/Angelus would look at his watch for a while and wonder what kind of sodomite vampire doesn’t keep lube around, for chrissakes. Spike would suggest things like conditioner or spit, and then give up and resign himself to a mutual undead hand job. (And by the way, you can all thank me for not casting Giles and The Master in the above imagination exercise.)

* Megan Fox won't be returning for the third Transformers movie, presumably because notorious asshole director Michael Bay treated her like a huge asshole. Women & Hollywood's take:

Her side told The Wrap that said she walked away because director Michael Bay was “verbally abusive” and had just had enough of his crap.  She’s also talked about how he made her tan so much for the film that’s she’s nervous about getting skin cancer.  Bay is known to be an ass to his female actors, and the article goes on to say that another of the female actors in Transformers 2 Isabel Lucas wouldn’t do publicity for the film because of Bay.But he gets away with this shit over and over because no one has the power—or the guts—to hold this man accountable.  He could never get away acting like this in an office environment.  It’s also probably true that the if the executives who hire Bay and tolerate his behavior acted like he did, they would be in court up on charges.

Photo via The Library of Congress.

This year, the DC Center—the sole community center serving the District’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender residents—will no longer be known as a “GLBT” community center. It will be known as a center for the “LGBT” community. It’s a simple transposition of two letters, but it offers a glimpse into the complicated gender politics of the people the DC Center serves.

GLBT—an acronym which stands for “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender”—was coined in the 1990s to reflect the widening umbrella of identities represented by what was originally referred to simply as the “gay community.” But when the title expanded to include additional marginalized identities, few agreed on who should come first. “There have always been fights in the community over acronyms, which letters to include, and what order they ought to be in,” says Sean Bugg, co-publisher of District LGBT—or GLBT, depending on who you ask—magazine Metro Weekly. “You sometimes wish there was a board saying, ‘This is what it’s going to be now.’”

Recently, several local institutions have arrived at some consensus: LGBT is in. And GLBT is, ahem, out.

Why the concern over the placement of a couple of letters? David Mariner, Executive Director of the DC Center, says that his organization’s acronym switch-up is “not a big deal either way,” but that the Center made the change “to be consistent with the other national organizations we are affiliated with.” CenterLink, which serves as a hub for “LGBT Community Centers Around the World,” favors the L, but its 201 affiliated centers vary on usage.

“I think it’s often a local preference,” says Terry Stone, CenterLink’s Florida-based Executive Director. “In some parts of the country, LGBT is more predominant. In other places, it’s GLBT. I don’t think that much deep thought goes into choosing LGBT or GLBT. People just use what has become familiar to them in their coming-out process.”

The DC Center’s switch isn’t the only indication that the District is now batting for LGBT. Metro Weekly also recently began favoring the acronym; Bugg says the change from GLBT to LGBT was codified in its style guide about six months ago. “I hesitate to change our style guide without having a really strong reason for it,” says Bugg. The rationale: Metro Weekly’s style was becoming increasingly inconsistent with community standards, and ‘GLBT’-schooled Metro Weekly reporters kept returning with quotes from ‘LGBT’-happy subjects. “A lot of people would be using ‘LGBT’ in a quote, and we would be using ‘GLBT’ as a matter of style,” says Bugg. “It became a bit awkward and confusing.”

The DC Center logo, before and after the switch.

Also confusing: navigating the ever-expanding roster of initials that can be added to the standard four-letter-acronym. Local newspaper the Washington Blade has an evolving approach to the acronym. According to Editor in Chief Kevin Naff, the paper “uses LGBT in stories and headlines.” In its branding, however, the paper now tacks on an extra Q.

“We’ve recently added the Q to our tagline in response to reader inquiries and concerns that those ‘questioning’ their sexual orientation were excluded from coverage,” Naff says. “We have not added the Q to standard references in stories, mostly because the alphabet soup starts to get unwieldy.”

Other emerging subgroups may add more letters to the acronym: an I, for “intersex”; an extra T, for the Native American identity of the “two-spirit”; an A, for either “ally” or “asexual”; and the Q, for either “queer” or “questioning.” Bugg says that Metro Weekly eschews the Q for clarity reasons. “We don’t use Q because it’s not standardized,” he says. “If you start packing on Q, depending on the context it can mean ‘queer,’ or it can mean ‘questioning,’”adds Bugg. “You want your readers to know what you’re talking about.”

Beyond D.C., there remains no industry acronym standard. According to GLAAD’s “Media Reference Guide,” which instructs journalists how best to cover the community, both “LGBT” and “GLBT” are acceptable. GLAAD notes that acronyms “are often used because they are more inclusive of the diversity of the community,” but warns that “Care should be taken to ensure that audiences are not confused by their use.”

Perhaps that’s why the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and the New York Times refrain from mentioning any of the related acronyms in their style guides—for the uninitiated, even the four basic initials can require a more verbose explanation.

But the politics of community acronyms go far beyond scannability. “Acronyms are tough,” says Deb Greenspan, who writes for local entertainment site Brightest Young Gays. “On the one hand, you’re able to give a bunch of discrete, self-identifying groups representation while making life a bit easier on your reader. On the other hand, whenever you start to list letters, you get the sense that you better list them all,” she says.

Lists also imply rank. “You inevitably have to put someone first and someone
last in the string of letters,” says Greenspan. The potential for point-counting is one reason Greenspan prefers to call the whole thing off: “I tend to use queer, since it removes the issue of rank,” she says. Zack Rosen, editor of local website The New Gay, also uses queer: “I want to make sure that we don’t use terms that leave anyone out, and I think queer is the most inclusive umbrella term,” Rosen says. “It doesn’t make any assumptions about how people identify.”

But for some, moving the ‘L’ to the front of the line constitutes an important political statement. “I always understood it as a nod to feminism,” says Greenspan. “For a long time, the gay community was not inclusive of women, and lesbians had to forge out on their own in a lot of ways. The balance still isn’t perfect, but I think the L in front is a recognition of that.”

If putting ladies first is a sign of respect, what does it mean that bisexual and transgender people consistently take up the rear? For a long time, working to simply tack on the ‘T’ was met with controversy. “T is still a fairly recent addition, and it’s not one that is fully accepted by all parts of the community,” says Bugg.

Since the wider community’s best-known activists don’t always focus on the concerns of Is, As, Qs and Ts, acronym inclusion can come off as tokenism. Metro Weekly’s internal style guide now contains a four-paragraph discussion of acronyms, which warns reporters against overstating the magazine’s coverage via acronym. “We only use LGBT when we’re speaking about an issue that is inclusive of all four of those. If it’s solely about gay men, you use ‘gay men.’ If it’s something that deals solely with lesbians, you use ‘lesbians,’” says Bugg.

“It’s all well and good if we use inclusive acronyms, but if you’re not actually reflecting all those letters in your magazine, then it really doesn’t matter,” he says. “As important as it is to be inclusive, it’s far more important to actually tell the stories of those lives.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Last night, The New Gay editor Zack Rosen set out to determine once and for all whether all those heteros who flock to the Dupont High Heel Race every year are there to support the gay community, or just mock all the queens in dresses. This year, the pre-Halloween drag queen race was pushed into the political arena by a little administrative switch: Instead of a parade permit, the race secured a First Amendment permit, shifting the balance a bit from party to protest. So, are people who love watching gay guys stumble around in stripper heels as enthusiastic about supporting marriage equality? According to Rosen's findings: Kinda.

[youtube:v=VP4tj7mdLdU]

Zack Rosen over at The New Gay wrote an excellent column the other day about the importance of condom use within the gay community. The post covers a lot of ground—personal responsibility, modes of transmission, casual anal bleeding:

A couple years ago when one of the cutest boys I’d ever seen begged me to fuck him without a condom. Actually, beg is the wrong word. He pleaded. He whined. He implored me not to use one as if it was simply some seasoning our our sexual entree that he found disagreeable.

Condoms, however, are not cilantro and I refused to eat without one. And the next morning I found his blood on my sheets, meaning that if he had listened to me, and I was HIV+, he would’ve been too. What a dumbass.

Zack answers a lot of questions about cultural attitudes toward condoms in same-sex relationships, but he also posed a question for me: Do straight people feel the same urgency to use protection?

I am but one woman, and I do not speak for The Straights. But D.C.'s newest AIDS numbers included two statistics that may have something do do with each other: The leading mode of transmission for new HIV cases is heterosexual sex, and 7 out of 10 D.C. citizens reported to not use condoms.

One reason I think condom concern may be lower among heterosexuals is that the HIV threat hasn't been pounded into our brains for decades, like it has in the gay community. Also, "protection" means something different than STD prevention for us—it also means preventing babies. In a lot of heterosexual relationships, sex partners are often so worried about pregnancy that the fear of conception overshadows concern over STDs.

I have to think that the real question, in the straight world, must be this: Are condoms as important to men as they are to women? In both cases—pregnancy and STD prevention—the responsibility to use protection often falls on her. She has to go to the doctor regularly and get her birth control prescription and make sure she takes it correctly every day. Often, she also has to make sure the man is wearing a condom. If she doesn't, she's more at risk than he is: In a female-to-male HIV contact scenario, women are more likely to contract the virus than men are, because of the way our bodies are made. This is true all the time—it doesn't depend on whether or not anybody is bleeding or whether the sex is anal.

So, that leads me to my question for Zack: Are condoms as important to guys on top as they are to guys on bottom?

Photo by victoriapeckham.

Rosen, who came to Washington in 2006 and worked at the Washington Blade, a weekly LGBT newspaper, said his editors weren't always game for his story pitches about indie music or gay cartoon characters — stories he said would appeal to his age group. He checked out J.R.'s. and Cobalt, well known D.C. gay clubs, but felt the atmosphere centered on hooking up. So he started TheNewGay.net, where he and others write about music, television and politics, and promote parties including Homo/Sonic at the Black Cat, a gay-friendly straight bar on 14th Street NW.

Their quest to alter Washington's gay landscape also reveals the tensions between Millennials and Generation Y-ers in their 20s, and Generation X-ers in their mid- to upper 30s and 40s. Some establishment Washingtonians view Rosen's efforts as cliche, a cycle that every so often churns out a batch of strivers who feel entitled to a brand.

"I think every young person thinks they're the new gay," said Kevin Naff, 38, editor of the Blade, where Rosen worked until he was laid off last year. "When I was that age, I thought I listened to all the cool music and knew all the cool places to go—that's what your 20s are for. I think every new generation wants to have their own music, their own language."

Oooooh, them's fightin' words! Is it just me, or does the mainstream media sound a little bit scared that these youngin's might just be the successors to the gay media throne?