Red Hot Riding Hood

I just happened to come across this whilst searching for material for a certain other blog of mine and I thought I'd share it here. This article is about a Russian strip club that caters to het women. It raises some pretty interesting questions about "the gaze", the role of feminism and consumerism in sex culture and the essential differences (or lack thereof) between men and women.

The thing that really stands out to me is that the article constantly asserts that this whole thing 'isn't gay', which to me implies that we've come so far from being able to accept the female erotic gaze that we automatically see male nudity or male displays of sexuality in terms of homosexuality. See also this SocImages post on a related topic.

Too angry to blog properly (probably #1 in a whole series)

God, I go away for a weekend and when I return all hell breaks loose. I'm too angry/tired for a real blog post but here are the headlines.

Texan politician says that Asian Americans should change their legal names to more Westernised ones in order to make things "easier for Americans to deal with." (I'm pretty sure that the Americans who are Asian American deal with it just fine, thanks).

Stupid films still think that rape jokes are ok.

And oh yeah, amazon.com have completely fucked up by basically lumping in books by gay authors (such as Jeanette Winterson and Stephen Fry) in with erotica and pornography and tried to make the whole lot invisible to users. This reeks of censorship and homophobia. I've been meaning to write a full-scale post on this, but things are developing too quickly for me to really dedicate a whole lot to what I think without some new detail cropping up. All I know is that amazon aren't going to be getting any medals for the piss-poor way they're handling this, either.

Carey vs Marcotte

Ok, I'm posting a lot of things in quick succession here, so I promise this'll be my last one for now. I just wanted to point out how weird it is that Pandagon, one of my favourite progressive blogs, have put a post up about Mariah Carey and her attitude to sex/marriage.

Now I'm not saying for a second that this sort of thing is innapropriate for a political blog, as even - in fact, often especially - pop culture is responsible for a lot of the prevailing attitudes that a society has, so I'm not for a second asking, as some of the commenters have, "why are you even bothering with this?" No, I'm bringing this up because I actually consider myself a not-so-closeted Mariah Carey fan.

Now, just a caveat, I swear that I do like other, better types of music too. Just a little bit of discretion, my favourite band in the whole wide world are the wonderful The Dresden Dolls (perhaps not better than Mariah Carey, dependent on one's personal taste). But what can I say? I suppose I just have a soft spot for polished pop-ballads performed by someone with an unmistakeable natural talent.

Still, sometimes I do wish that she would just keep her mouth shut when she's not singing, as otherwise I find myself doing ever more complex feats of cognitive dissonance to keep myself liking her while a lot of her admitted ideas and politics are so transparently slightly backwards and/or stupid. Pandagon has just gone and underscored a great example of this.