Arts & Culture

From page A18 of the May 24 edition of the New York Times

What do you think? This Bloomingdales ad for Rag & Bone Jeans ($165.00) and silk Equipment top ($178.00) contains the tag line "MEET YOUR NEW MUST-HAVE" and depicts an Asian model staring into the camera with her lips parted. It accompanies an article with the headline "In Oakland, Redefining Sex Trade Workers as Abuse Victims" which, among many things, criticizes the 'exoticization' of Asian women in the US. 

The article can be found online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24oakland.html

File under "Horror Movies I don't Ever Want to See". Mattel is marketing it's new Barbie-as-concealed-video-camera by telling kids they can make movies "From Barbie's point of view". I don't know what you did with your Barbies when you were a kid, but I don't think I'd want to see movies shot from the point of view of my own. 

I'm also pretty sure that kids don't need concealed video cameras. And while the FBI is apparently concerned that kids will be tricked by creepy grownups who use Video Girl Barbie to take surreptitious kiddie porn shots, I don't think there is a girl within Mattel's advertising reach who isn't very much aware of the new doll. 

I watched the Mattel demo video ("About the doll") and found this image, which I found troubling for the way that Mattel is again uncareful about the images it creates. Does anybody remember the "Math is hard!" debacle?

Am I the only one who sees Barbie on her knees ready to be shot? The hole in her chest isn't helping me any (though I realize that is the camera lens). Again, maybe it's just that I don't want movies from the perspectives of my own childhood Barbies, but still ;) 

Sara Dopp, founder of Genderfork and longtime brilliant blogger and social media mobilizer extraordinaire has a very important new project and I want you to know about it. The idea is this: creating an online marketplace where people can sell clothing and accessories to each other and share ideas and tips about how to look the way they want to look without being constrained by department store fashions. The idea is particularly important for those of us who don't find clothing that both represents our gender expressions and and also fits our bodies at the same time. In Sara's words this would be:

a genderplayful, body-positive, fashion-savvy online marketplace. This would be a space where people sell to each other (like Ebay and Etsy), with a focused emphasis on solving all of our wardrobe problems. Together.

We’d pull in a mix of indie clothing designers, body-savvy tailors for custom alterations, small business clothing shops, crafters, and folks who want to share things from their closet. All with a celebratory and problem-solving emphasis on creating clothes that fit our genders, styles, and bodies.

If you prefer video explanations, I think you'll enjoy this one:

I love community-driven solutions to real people's actual problems. There are too many manufactured "solutions" to artificially constructed problems. Are you interested? Let Sara know. This can't be done without evidence that people want and need it. Send an email to genderplayful@gmail.com, check out the genderfork post about the marketplace, comment here or there, or make a video of your own explaining why you need this kind of marketplace.

The notion of "queer" presents a challenge to the indentity politics logic of the contemporary gay rights movement and these young people get why that's a problem now. Listen to them.

Reteaching Gender and Sexuality from PUT THIS ON THE MAP on Vimeo.

I am going to get back to blogging soon, and if I can keep my head together, I may well start with this because it's a theme that's been on my mind for a long time. i think that the identity politics focus of the gay rights movement over the past decades has been truly helpful but I think we are outgrowing its usefulness. What's next? How do we fight for rights without attaching them to identities? I think the answer lies in a human rights framework, but shifting the movement is a bit like turning a ship - it doesn't happen on a dime. 

More thoughts to come as I recreate some balance in my life.

Once I made the decision to do sex work, the rest was fairly easy.  At the time, Craigslist was a wide-open playing field for sex work of all kinds under the "Erotic Services" section.  The only problem I really had was my inexperience and ignorance of the Atlanta market.  I had no idea what I was worth as a whore.  I didn't know anything about being a sex worker at all!  

I placed an ad on Craigslist, specifically mentioning that it was my first time, and watched the emails pour in, one after the other.  I didn't have any reason to pick the guy that I did, other than I had a good vibe off of our limited email interactions.  We arranged to meet at the hotel where he was staying for work and we agreed on a price for my time - $100.00 but no penetration, only a hand job.  

Thank you to Sex in the Public Square for giving me the space to write.  

Allow me to introduce myself.  My name is Julia B. Adams.  Here's what you need to know in order to catch up with where I want to begin writing.  I'm almost 40-years-old, I've been married for about 10 years and we have two daughters.  In fact, I'm not all that different from my friends, peers, and colleagues - graduate degrees, careers, families, home life.  

I have a confession to make.  I'm not anything like them.  Julia B. Adams is not my real name.  I don't dare give you my real name because I've done something so bad that if others knew, I would risk damaging everything that matters to me: my family and my career.  Some people would treat us very differently.  People would condemn my husband, causing him to feel worse about this than he already does.  Our daughters lives' would be changed forever.  So what is this hideous crime?  I had sex for money.  

That's it.  

I saw this call for submissions in a comment thread on Alas and since I thought it would interest people who visit this site, I am posting it here:

With a half-finished bottle of soju sitting on the floor between us, and another two waiting to be opened, we settled in, my friend Mr. Lee and I, for an evening of drinking in my very small seven-and-a-half pyong apartment in the part of Seoul known as Chamshil. I lived in the the Ju-gong Apartment Complex, where the English Training Center (ETC), the hagwon, or private language school, that had hired me to each for the year housed all its faculty. We were not far from the Olympic Stadium, where the opening ceremonies for the 1988 Summer Olympics had been held. In fact, some of my colleagues and I had watched the ceremonies from the roof of my building. Mr. Lee had been a student in one of my classes, and when it was over, he asked if he could be my friend. When I said yes, he suggested this night of drinking as a way to cement that friendship.

 What a treat it was to log into Twitter and see Anthony Kennerson (@Anthony_JK) tweeting that we'd been listed by Between My Sheets as one of the 100 top sex blogs of 2010. The team at SITPS came in at #44 and is surrounded by such several good friends (in whose company I am always delighted to be). 

I can't say the list made sense to me given that there were several blogs I'd have ranked much higher than this one, but I'm certainly not unhappy about any affirmation of what we do here at Sex In The Public Square.

Five of my favorites on the list - and there are LOTS of wonderful blogs listed - in no particular order because all are fabulous, are:

• Sugarbutch Chronicles
• Kink On Tap
• Inside the Oversexed Mind of Gloria Brame
• Waking Vixen
• Dr. Petra Boynton

Click here and browse the list. Find your familiar favorites and dive into some new reading, too!