Okay, I have so much work to be doing that I shouldn’t even be allowed to know that the internet exists, but this was too good not to share. “I couldn’t imagine sitting there, smiling, and being honored by someone who would deny me the right to my civil, human, basic right to marry my […]
Reading about Christine Jorgensen’s transformation from male to female and Cal’s transformation from female to male highlights the superficiality of presenting one’s chosen gender identity to others. Presenting as male or female seems to be less dependent on the status of someone’s actual genitals, and much more on the kinds of cosmetic procedures they decide […]
Last class we talked about the prophet Tiresias, and how Hera cursed him with blindness after he revealed to Zeus that women enjoy sex 9 times more than men. Although the myth doesn’t explain why Hera was so angry, I have a theory based on “Why Women Always Take Advantage of Men,” a folktale retelling […]
I don’t remember where I saw this video (although it was probably Facebook) but I thought it was really effective and wanted to share it with the class. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h95-IL3C-Z8E&feature=player_embedded From the Youtube info: With “Not Ever, Rape Crisis Scotland has launched Scotlands first ever TV campaign aimed at tackling women-blaming attitudes to rape. “Not Ever” […]
Re-reading Middlesex as I happen to be drowning in ideas about postmodern fiction (side effect of my thesis), I can’t help but focus on this novel as a challenge to traditional binary systems of understanding. Of course there’s the male/female binary, but there’s also nature/nurture, past/present, fact/fiction, etc. Which makes it ironic that Cal says, “Something you should understand: I’m […]
It’s a funny coincidence that this week’s readings feature Joe, a gay Mormon, and outsports.com just posted an essay by a gay ex-Mormon volleyball coach. Like Joe, she thought getting married would fix her homosexuality. Also like Joe, she tried to escape the “Mormon bubble,” by going to college at UCLA. Although she moved back […]
I have to admit, finishing Lolita often felt like a chore. I found the pace painfully slow, and Humbert’s omphaloskeptical narration boring and annoying. I wonder if this was another Nabokovian attempt to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. Just as the offending subject matter and the lack of graphic sex scenes […]
Throughout Part One of Lolita, H.H.’s descriptions of nymphets in general and Lolita in particular strongly reminded me of Pearl, from The Scarlet Letter. Of course, Pearl was 7 for most of The Scarlet Letter, and H.H.’s nymphets are 9-14, but she seems to fit the rest of the characteristics. Hawthorne and various characters throughout […]
As I read this week’s documents and essays, I couldn’t help but think: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The documents in Chapter 7 and the essay in Chapter 9 struck me as particularly timeless. Ads for soft-core porn, sexual virility, and snake-oil elixirs have been reincarnated in the 21st century […]
Hey guys, Saw these two articles in the New York Times a week or two ago, have been meaning to post them. “Whatever Happened to Sex in Movies?” – Discusses the lack of heterosexual sex in serious American movies, the prevalence of “the demure fade to black and the prudish pan — coitus interruptus […]
