Questionnaire on Sexuality
* Where do you think your heterosexuality comes from?
* When and under what circumstances did you decide to be heterosexual?
* Could it be that your heterosexuality is only a difficult and troubling phase that you’re passing through?
* Could it be that you are heterosexual because you are afraid of people of the same sex?
* If you’ve never slept with a partner of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer one? Could it be that you’re just missing out on a good homosexual experience?
* Have you come out as heterosexual? How did they react?
* Heterosexuality doesn’t cause problems as long as you don’t advertise these feelings. Why do you always talk about heterosexuality? Why center everything around it? Why do the heterosexuals always make a spectacle of their sexuality? Why can’t they live without exhibiting themselves in public?
* The vast majority of sexual violence against children is due to heterosexuals. Do you believe that your child is safe in the presence of a heterosexual? In a class with a heterosexual teacher in particular?
* More than half of heterosexual couples who are getting married this year will get divorced within three years. Why are heterosexual relationships so often bound for failure?
* In the face of the unhappy lives that heterosexuals lead, can you wish for your child to be heterosexual? Have you considered sending your child to a psychologist if he or she has turned out to have heterosexual tendencies? Would you be ready to have a doctor intervene? Would you send your child to in-patient therapy to get him or her to change?

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Heterosexuality, the opiate of the people

A flier being passed out by a feminist student organization at a French university, as collected by Eli Thorkelson during fieldwork. He notes that:

Their list of political demands hence included not only equality and an end to homophobia but also (and this struck me as being a little more unusual) an end to the traditional system of dichotomous sexual classification. Indeed, they claimed “the free disposition of one’s body and the free choice of one’s sexual identity, sex and gender.” This placed them in the paradoxical position, it seems to me, of being a feminist group trying to undermine the category of ‘women’ that served as their tacit basis of political unity: while open to all, as of yesterday no males had joined. I’d guess that they’d interpret this apparent paradox by saying that in fact they’re brought together by shared domination on the basis of their gender, and that of course the whole point of the project is to overcome this domination.

It had never occurred to me before that a generalized fear of getting pregnant is a culturally and historically contingent state of mind. But, of course, it is.

— Is Pregnancy Scary?

my hit katy perry song, “i kissed the person that it was most pleasing for me to kiss at the time without thinking about or trying to present my sexuality as a performance for the benefit of the male gaze” would not, probably, sell like hotcakes.

— SEXIST BEATDOWN: Muffin-Bluffing Is A Feminist Issue Edition [via]

There are dozens and dozens of good economic and social reasons that women choose to terminate pregnancies that have nothing to do with expanding their “careers” — which is something not everyone in this country has the privilege to be able to aspire to. Too many women are too often just trying to scrape by, and an unwanted pregnancy (or child) is just going to add additional strain that it’s entirely possible they can’t handle. That’s the whole purpose of the Obama Administration’s purported focus on reducing the economic consequences of child-bearing, not to help women better shape their lucrative careers.

— Some People Underestimate The Economic Impact Of Abortion [via]

The goal is getting you to jack off without feeding the patriarchy.

— Straight Dudes [via]

Here’s the thing: If you’re old enough to be having sex, you’re old enough to be using Plan B. Clinical trials have shown that it’s actually extremely safe, and there are absolutely no health reasons for restricting it to women 17 and older, or 18 and older. There simply aren’t. There are only political reasons and moral reasons.

And those moral reasons aren’t coherent. Because if a 15-year-old woman is freely consenting to sex, and there is some kind of mishap that leads her to need plan B, she should be able to get it. And if a 15-year-old isn’t freely consenting to sex, but a man is raping her, then she needs plan B even more. Why does the government think that possibly being saddled with a pregnancy will make men stop raping women? It hasn’t worked before. Men still find ways to rape women, even when the threat of pregnancy is there. Men still found ways to rape women before there was birth control.

— Plan Be

Since the advent of DNA testing in the late 1980s, a commercial paternity testing industry has emerged worldwide, mostly grounded in disputed paternity,” said Gilding.
“The industry is the second most lucrative application of genetic identity testing after forensics, so there is a lot of incentive to raise fathers’ doubts about the legitimacy of their children. It goes right to the heart of people’s insecurities.”
Gilding also believes that evolutionary psychologists have given academic respectability to inflated estimates of paternal discrepancy, as it fits in with their belief that men are ‘hard wired’ to seek as many sexual partners as they can, and women to seek men of superior genetic quality.
“This account of paternity uncertainty highlights their over-attachment to biologistic laws at the expense of understanding the social dimensions of human behaviour.”
“The fact is that social institutions such as marriage shape our behaviour, and we are not a just a bunch of opportunistic cheats, despite what some would have you believe.

— Fathers usually are related [via]

Women’s sexual needs are not a scientific mystery. Want to increase female libido? Put down the pharmaceuticals and free our minds with equal pay, affordable child care and equitable distribution of household responsibilities. Wondering why women gravitate toward sexually passive roles? The answer has far less to do with evolution than with the ways women are shamed for expressing aggressive desire and with the pervasive idea that women who pursue their own satisfaction are asking to be raped.

What this woman wants is an end to tired clichés dressed up as science and the beginning of a world in which women are treated as individuals, each of whom may or may not be turned on by intimacy, back-alley ravishment or any number of things; a world in which anyone wondering what a woman wants knows that the best thing to do is just ask her.

— Reader response to NYT magazine article “What Women Want” from a few weeks back [via]