- Michele Bachmann’s HPV Vaccine Safety and ‘Retardation’ Comments Misleading, Doctors Say – ABC News – The medical community issued swift criticism Tuesday after Rep. Michele Bachmann dragged the safety of the vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV) into the political spotlight, reigniting the controversy over the risks and necessity of vaccinating children.
- When Sex Bloggers Get Slut Shamed | Charlie Glickman – It probably shouldn’t surprise to anyone that, in general, women in the blogosphere get a lot more harassment than men. After all, just walking down the street, women get a lot more harassment than men.
- Assistance Needed – A Call For Help « PassionAndSoul – As many of you may have heard by now, I have had severe health concerns since mid-July. These are connected to my long term health issues, but I am in the midst of a flare up. Between July and December, I have had to cancel 13 gigs related to my health. Folks have asked for some time how they can help. This post is the answer.
- Everyone Loses on Booberday Except Google+ – Technology – The Atlantic Wire – A breast cancer meme has broken out on Google+: Booberday. As the name suggests, it involves breasts, specifically, "posting photos of women's cleavage under the guise of fighting breast cancer," explains Jezebel's Margaret Hartmann. On the surface it's just boob shots, which some might call demeaning. But we're talking about breast cancer, so it's all good, right? Not really. Booberday is demeaning to women, makes men look bad, and doesn't help the cause. The only winner we see here: Google+.
- Contraceptive Comeback: The Maligned IUD Gets a Second Chance | Wired – When the Mirena first hit the US market, so few women were using IUDs that many doctors didn't even know how to insert them. Today, the devices are recognized as safe, and 2 million US women have a Mirena.
- Frank’s Story (Runner’s World) – Frank Shorter is the father of the modern running boom. An enduringly popular speaker, he spins a captivating narrative about winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon. The story he hasn't told is the dark truth about his own father.
socialmedia
- The Case Against Drop-down Identities | Smarterware – Human beings and their relationships are complex and nuanced, so the software that attempts to describe them must accomodate a wide range of expression.
- Dickinson College students protest school’s handling of sex assaults – Philly.com -
- HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation – HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It encrypts your communications with a number of major websites.
- Planned Parenthood: House Bars Planned Parenthood From Federal Funding – On February 18, 2011, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to bar Planned Parenthood health centers from all federal funding for birth control, cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other lifesaving care.
- 6 Surprising Bad Practices That Hurt Dyslexic Users – UX Movement – When dyslexic users read text, sometimes they can experience visual distortion effects [5]. These effects vary in degree from person to person, but they can make reading text that much harder. Below are six bad practices that are likely to cause these visual distortion effects for dyslexic users. These bad practices can also make reading difficult for non-dyslexic users. But the effect they have on dyslexic users is much worse.
- ACLU intervenes in Gay-Straight Alliance dispute, protest underway – Since Monday’s report, the local newspaper has editorialized that the district has placed themselves in a difficult position and the ACLU has gotten involved on behalf of the student seeking to for the club. More details after the fold…
- Open Marriages – Galleries – The Daily Beast
Tagged as: crime, design, facebook, firefox, gender, identity, lgbt, marriage, planned_parenthood, politics, polyamory, privacy, queer, reading, relationships, security, sex, socialmedia, teen, usability
- The Female Gaze Does Not Exist? – I think my frustration also occurs because decrying terms like “porn for women”, “female friendly” and “the female gaze” (however flawed they are) can have the effect of denying straight women their own space in the pornosphere. As I said in this post two and a half years ago, these phrases are about creating a space in an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry.
- How to get birth control privately when you’re a teen & keep condoms from breaking | Scarleteen – To review, you are old enough to seek health services at a clinic and obtain hormonal birth control options without parental consent, for potentially reduced cost. Plus, we had a bonus discussion about correct condom use because it is important to keep on protecting yourself against STIs even if you have another method of contraception, and condoms make a great birth control backup if something goes amiss with your other method.
- Gmail Gains Delegation Feature: Who Wants To Answer All My Email? | Techcrunch – By way of a new feature in settings, you can grant another Google account holder access to your email account. This allows another person to both send and receive emails on behalf of your account.
- It is not just violent clients who hurt sex workers | Audacia Ray | Guardian.co.uk – In Uganda and many other countries, they are denied access to HIV treatment, stigmatised by authorities and brutalised by police
- Transsexuals Are Edging Into the Mainstream – Is 2010 the Year of the Transsexual? – NYTimes.com – Not since the glam era of the 1970s has gender-bending so saturated the news media. The difference now is that mystery has been replaced with empowerment, even pride.
- Sarah Mei » Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora – The “gender” field in a person’s profile was originally a dropdown menu, with three choices: blank, male, and female. My change made it an optional text field that was blank to start. A wide open frontier! Enter anything you want.
- Why you shouldn’t give to the Salvation Army this holiday season | The Bilerico Project – While many think of the group as just another charity, in truth the group is a religious sect that is notoriously anti-gay; you shouldn't give to the Salvation Army this holiday season if you support gay rights.
Tagged as: birth+control, condoms, culture, design, discrimination, email, feminism, gay, gender, google, minors, porn, privacy, sex, sexuality, sexwork, socialmedia, tools, transgender, transsexual, Uganda
- Prop 8 Panel Deeply Skeptical of Standing | The Recorder – Proposition 8 proponents faced tough questions from all three of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals judges today hearing the constitutionality of Prop 8, with the court focusing on the question of whether voters took away a right that previously existed in California…A good chunk of the two-hour arguments in the gay-marriage cases focused on the application of Romer v. Evans , the 1996 Supreme Court ruling that struck down a law aimed at repealing various gay-rights statutes in Colorado.
- Bullies Aren’t Just Other Kids: LGB Teens Get Harsher Treatment | Charlie Glickman –
- Digital Self-Harm and Other Acts of Self-Harassment | DMLcentral – As they started looking into specific cases of teens answering "anonymous" harassing questions, they started realizing that a number of vicious questions were posted by the Formspring account owners themselves. They appeared on Formspring as anonymous but they were written by the owner while logged into their own account.[1] In other words, there are teens out there who are self-harassing by "anonymously" writing mean questions to themselves and then publicly answering them.
- Assange’s Interpol Warrant Is for Having Sex Without a Condom – The Slatest – Slate Magazine | Slate – While the "consent of both women to sex with Assange has been confirmed by prosecutors," as a former attorney wrote in an impassioned op-ed, Assange has been charged with something called "sex by surprise," which reportedly carries a $715 fine.
- Melissa Petro Call Girl Turned Teacher – Melissa Petro Interview on Selling Sex on Craiglist – Marie Claire – In college, she stripped. In graduate school, she sold sex on Craigslist. Then Melissa Petro became a popular grade-school teacher, known for inspiring her students. Her secret past could have stayed that way — until she blogged about it.
- The porn supremacy | The Age – It's a dirty little secret, the thing they don't tell you, and they don't talk about – how every wave of technological advance has been fuelled by pornography. ("The Erotic Engine" by Patchen Barss.)
Tagged as: Formspring, lgbt, marriage, porn, prop8, proposition+8, samesex, sex, sexwork, socialmedia, technology, wikileaks, youth
- Follow That Story: Lara Jade Won Her Lawsuit | violet blue ® :: open source sex – Way back in May 2007, young female photographer (and aspiring fashion photog) Lara Jade Coton put a plea for help up on Flickr. One of her photos (that she had shared on DeviantART) was being used as an American porn boxcover — reprehensibly, it was not only used without permission but it was also a self-portrait she’d taken on a family vacation when she was only 14.
- Sexual ‘thesis’ deserves zero out of 10 | Zoe Margolis – Perhaps her lack of self-awareness and her inability to provide a social critique are what has led to so much criticism, and the fact that she named people publicly is an obvious violation of others’ privacy, which clearly highlights her naivety. What worries me, though, is the widespread “slut-shaming” the author is now receiving from the media: her sex life is being routinely condemned. Were a man to have written this, he’d be getting slaps on the back (or have a movie made based on his life) for being a “stud”. Women who talk about sex instead attract newspaper headlines chastising them for their actions and have moral judgments cast on their behaviour which men do not have to endure.
- Yale Fraternity’s Chant Reveals Depth of Our Culture’s Misogyny | Will Neville | RHRealityCheck.org – The problem isn’t that a group of young men at yelled something stupid, over and over agian. The problem is that I’m no longer sure we’re shocked by people who turn rape and sexual assault into some kind of a joke. It’s embarassing for those involved, sure. But the sentiment they expressed is shockingly — and terrifyingly — mainstream.
- Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” Series: A Critical Compendium | ARTINFO.com – Works from Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series — paintings and sculptures that depict the artist with his then-lover, Italian porn star Cicciolina, in a variety of romantic situations — have returned to New York, where many were first displayed in 1991 at the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo. (Some pieces — of the slightly less hardcore variety — were shown at the 1990 Venice Biennale.) New York critics, with perhaps only one exception, have lambasted the current “Made in Heaven” show at the Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan, following in a rich lineage of writers that have panned work. Over the past two decades, the series has earned near-universal scorn from most art critics and inspired some of the all-time-great takedowns in recent criticism.
- My Mother And Her Vibrator | Pamela Madsen | Psychology Today – It lived in her closet for years. – until my mother turned 81. Every-time I brought it up. – mom would tell me that she was frightened of hurting herself. I would talk to her about this. “Come on mom – how are you going to hurt yourself?”.. She could never explain to me her fears, and in the end the vibrator remained unused…And then one afternoon my mother called me. I knew something was up at “Hello”. She had this cat who had caught the canary kind of voice….”Well, I used it!” She gushed.
Tagged as: art, copyright, Flickr, Jeff+Koons, La+Ciccolina, porn, sex, sextoys, socialmedia, society, vibrator, women
