"I'm always amazed that people have the courage to rear children, given that once you have them, anything people don't like about your offspring's sexuality becomes your fault. I heard a new twist on this lately: Foot and leg fetishes stem from men sitting on the floor as infants, tugging futilely at the skirts of their (obviously) distant, unloving mother. It's odd how no one pathologizes guys for liking boobs."

- Mistress Matisse, in Were Kinky People Abused as Children?, on thestranger.com

"People always bring up the "good old days" of body image, and talk about curvy Vargas girls and how Marilyn Monroe was a size whatever-it-was -- but the Left-wing idea of how healthy those days were is just as much a revisionist pipe-dream as the Right-wing idea of how moral they were.

First of all, the fact that the ideal was different doesn’t mean that there wasn’t an ideal at all. Yes, a very small percentage of women have the body of Calista Flockhart, but was the percentage with the body of Jayne Mansfield really any greater? It seems like roughly the same percentage of women are going to feel bad about their bodies at any given time, no matter which of the various competing ideals is having its turn in the spotlight.

[...]

Monroe’s curves may have been a positive from a feminist perspective, but what about the other ingredients in the recipe -- the affected voice, the expression of perpetual surprise, the fact that she had to act dumb, even though she wasn’t? Taken all together, the curves plus the other stuff paint a picture of Monroeism as the ideal of the girl-woman; of virgin chic, with the stuff that curves are made of seeming less like "real-woman" fat than baby fat. The curves of the mid-century pinup girl were there to make her seem like a naïve teenager -- trickable, conquerable, rapeable."

- The1585, in The Body-Image Essay to End All Body-Image Essays, on the1585.com

I didn't agree with everything in the article, but this is still one of the best pieces I've ever read on the usually abysmal topic of "body image."

"What is most shocking to people is not that a man, a ridiculously rich celebrity, cheated on his wife, it's that he had at least 13 mistresses! Two of these women were porn actresses, one of whom, Joslyn James, claims to have had a 3 year love affair with Tiger and two pregnancies. Directly after the Tiger Woods press conference, she and lawyer Gloria Allred pointed out that Tiger's apology -- to wife, friends, family, business partners, and fans -- was incomplete. What about the women he used and threw to the curb? Tiger demanded that James give up her career in adult entertainment because he couldn't stand the thought of her with another man. He pursued this woman, manipulated her to give up her independent income to be solely his for three years, promising her all kinds of things, including his love. Many on the blogs are making out that this porn star, Allred, and the other women are the real exploiters. I disagree. Tiger's privilege as an elite male allows him a legitimacy that these women do not have. As sex workers and mistresses they are cast as deviants, while he just made some bad mistakes. He is able to use the proper womanhood of his married wife to further stigmatize the women he cheated with (Elin is a victim and these women were just asking for trouble), and to hide behind some ridiculous claim that he is sick -- with a sex addiction -- and therefore is a victim of his own behavior as well. We should all feel sorry. I dont."

- Mireille Miller-Young, quoted Abiola Abrams' Tiger Woods' apology statement and video: 25 Top sex and relationship writers and performers react.

I live under a rock when it comes to celebrity stuff, so this was the first full article I've read about the Tiger Woods scandal.  I hadn't been aware that sex workers were among his mistresses.  Woods is hardly alone in having pressured a woman to quit sex work for him out of jealousy, but, I suppose, is now one of the most famous to pull that old douchebag move.

"Male Friendship Is Predicated On Violence and Drunkenness

There are no long-term close relationships between women on BSG, and there is only one long-term relationship between two men. [...] It is truly hard to say which gender has it worse in this situation. Is it more awful to be a woman in a world where women never have close relationships, or to be a man in a world where the only way you can express brotherly love is through violence?"

- Annalee Newitz, in The Men Who Make Battlestar Galactica Feminist, on io9.com.

I've seen so much of this dude dynamic in real life. I guess I should have posted it on Superbowl Sunday. (Warning: SPOILERS in the article, in case you still don't know who's a cylon.)

"Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature. They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander's words, 'the course of true love never did run smooth'."

- Stephen Fry, in a beautifully-written letter to himself, Dearest absurd child, on guardian.co.uk

"Work traditionally provided by women is always made natural and invisible. Everything from knowing how to care for kids and tend a garden to how to hypnotize with fabric and liquid eyeliner is seen as normal, easy and natural for us women — not hard-earned and precious."

- Juliet November, in Cunt at Rest: On Being A (mostly) Celibate Whore, on bornwhore.wordpress.com

"Saw an 'adult gigs' ad for actresses, unrated movie, sexual contact. Interesting stuff. I wrote my inquiry- and I think I'll decline.

The premise? It's rape, of course, the only type of sex that mainstream movies care to show explicitly. The man gets caught, justice served-

-but it's still rape porn, adding titillation to women's violence in the guise of realism. Fantasy I get but this is mainstream- not fantasy

And thus do I come to understand the difference between fiction & fantasy. Fiction is made up, fantasy consciously imagined knowing limits.

Fantasies are what we imagine knowing they may happen and often probably should never happen. Fiction happens to other people, could happen.

I'm comfortable portraying sexualized rape (trans, male or female, in whatever combinations) as fantasy, but not as fiction."

- Sabrina Morgan, on her Twitter at Twitter.com/SabrinaMorgan

"We spend most of our lives either seeking awareness or avoiding it, or some combination thereof. That's because there is something terrifying about absolute adherence to moral principals. A person seeking uncompromising moral consistency is uncomfortable all the time, because of threats to that consistency."

- Robert Jay Lifton, in an interview in Derrick Jensen's mostly unbearable book, Listening to the Land

"Not everyone can tilt at windmills, and most dancers just want to make their money with as little fanfare and frustration as possible. My activist entreaty has gone from 'shake the system' to 'get educated, get solvent, get out.' I applaud any woman who attempts to right the wrongs of the adult entertainment business, but I'm not convinced they can entirely be overcome. If a woman can leave the industry with some money, some insight, and some dignity, that's radical enough for me."

- Lily Burana, in her book, Strip City

"Sex workers may be 'in right' on major purchases and thus well-positioned to weather the storm because they typically pay cash for everything – their homes, cars and household goods. Having no W-2, 1099 gig, sex workers weren't invited to the easy-credit orgy of the last five years.

'My income was somewhat unpredictable and the job had the same kind of limits that modeling and playing sports have in terms of making more when you're younger and then there's the risk of getting arrested, so I was always conservative about my overhead. I just wanted to be in a place where when and if I stopped making $300/hr, I'd still be able to maintain my lifestyle,' explained M, a retired sex worker.

It's almost a biblical reversal – allegorical – the meek shall inherit the earth. Imagine all the sex workers earning six figures buying up forclosures in the right neighborhoods with their ready cash and pristine credit while the corporate bucaneers turn in their bmws and start over."

- Juliana Piccillo, in Stimulus for your package on julianapiccillo.wordpress.com

I don't make six figures, but I bought my first condo during the recession.  My landlord was kicking me out of my rental house because he bought a posh place on credit and then lost it when his 2-year ARM came up.  My new place is nothing fancy, and I had to get a cosigner- but real estate agents were practically begging me to look at their listings, and I think I got a good deal on the home I ended up choosing.

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