Monthly Archive for February, 2010
“Escort, hooker, prostitute, whore – I don’t mind what you call me, that’s just semantics.” – Belle De Jour
I’ve been watching Secret Diary of a Call Girl lately. I’m totally in love with Billie Piper and thrilled the show was brought back for another season. I don’t want this post to go into all of the issues that surround sex work. I’m not arguing that I am any sort of sex work expert or that this show accurately depicts the lives of sex workers.
You do all kinds of things for work that you may not really like. And that happens in every profession. Even people who do work they love don’t love every minute of it. A teacher may love teaching and love their students, but there are still days when it sucks. And there are plenty of people in jobs they can’t stand because they have to earn an income somehow.
But that really isn’t the point of my post. That attitude assumes that women, outside of sex work, always enjoy sex. I don’t mean rape, date rape, grey rape, or doing their “wifely duty” or any other pseudo rape crap. (It’s all rape as far as I’m concerned.) I mean consensual sex which a woman doesn’t really enjoy.
“Racism isn’t born, folks, it’s taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list.” -Dennis Leary
This is an amazing piece about racism by Alana. That post was spurred by this post over at Brit’s and the ensuing comments. Brit wrote her post in response to Champagne and Benzedrine’s post on privilege.
Here is an amazing quote by Beverly Tatum:
“I sometimes visualize the ongoing cycle of racism as a moving walkway at the airport. Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. The person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of our White supremacist system and is moving with it. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt – unless they are actively anti-racist – they will find themselves carried along with the others.”
I can’t say anything on race and privilege that Alana hasn’t already said ten times better. So go read.
“Whoever said that things have to be useful?” – Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder and CEO
@antitheistangie is live tweeting her abortion. You can see her Twitter feed here and read her blog here. She’s using the hastag “#livetweetingaborition.”
Thoughts?
“Never judge a cover by its book.” -Fran Lebowitz
This article, appearing in PLoS One, concludes that you can identify a person’s political affiliation simply by seeing their face. From the article:
“Here we found that individuals’ political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats.”
This paper follows a paper published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology which concludes that people can identify sexual orientation in men just by looking at their faces.
“researchers demonstrated that perceivers were able to do this even when they were shown only individual features of the target’s face. For example, when shown only the eye region (“without brows and cropped to the outer canthi so that not even “crow’s-feet” were visible”), perceivers were amazingly still able to accurately identify a man as being gay.”

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