How To Model Healthy Sexuality for Our Daughters

As a toddler, my daughter started asking about body parts. Pretty soon it became apparent that she was the only 2-year-old at her daycare who knew and used the word vagina. Even her teachers changed the subject. Was I supposed to feel guilty about teaching her about her body? Joyce McFadden, psychoanalyst and author of [...]

After 25 Years of Paradox, A Changed Oprah Says Goodbye

When Beyonce launched into her latest faux girl-power anthem “Run the World (Girls)” to honor Oprah Winfrey on Monday afternoon, the moment crystallized what both the talk show and its hostess have been to television: 25 years of paradox. On the one hand, no one’s been a bigger proponent of real “girl power” than Oprah [...]

Does Sexual Objectification Lead to Bad Sex?

Turning women into sex objects heightens the erotic experience, right? A growing body of research indicates the opposite: for women and, surprisingly, men. A new longitudinal study out of Pennsylvania State found that when women lost their virginity, they lost self-esteem, too. Before they had sex, the body image of the women in the study [...]

Artist Challenges How Women Are Shamed About Eating

Growing up in America, we learn that sweets and junk food are “guilty pleasures.” Women, especially, are supposed to refrain from such indulgences. And, if they cannot—if they, for example, desire more than that modest slice of cake served to each birthday guest—then they should feel not only guilt, but shame. For overindulging is grotesque [...]

Tiger, Tiger: Exploring The Pedophilic Fantasy

If we aren’t reading as voyeurs, why are we reading?  Margaux Fragoso’s debut memoir Tiger, Tiger reminds us that what we are after is understanding, in all its abject, contradictory and labyrinthine intricacy. I recently attended a talk in Los Angeles given by Gayatri Spivak. Spivak argued, among other things, that reading should be the [...]

The Good News: Madea’s Not a Colored Girl

The bad news is you can’t escape the long arm of Madea in the new film For Colored Girls. Tyler Perry’s Madea, whose righteous indignation and compulsive moralizing are warped with tired tropes of Judeo-Christianism, provides the backdrop for interpreting the characters in his film version of the Ntozake Shange “choreopoem”. Phylicia Rashad’s character Gilda (a [...]

Are Women More Aggressive These Days?

For a book that might be mistaken for a treatise on violent women, Maud Lavin’s recent Push Comes to Shove covers territory of another kind: specific case studies of women’s aggression as heard in pop music, seen in films and increasingly experienced in professional and private settings over the course of the last decade. Lavin [...]

The Anti-Porn Men Project

The Anti-Porn Men Project is a new “online space for (mainly) men to write about and discuss anti-porn issues.” And I really wanted to like it. That statement may sound disingenuous coming from me. As a sex-positive feminist whose sexual identity is BDSM, I spend most of my time writing in favor of sexual freedom. [...]

Sexualizing Young Girls Is Nothing to Cheer About

Last week’s MSNBC news story about the Michigan six-year-old booted off the cheerleading squad after her mom objected to a risque routine got me thinking. This has been a strange season for news stories concerning the sexualization of young girls. Back in April, the UK’s Primark department store was taken to task for selling padded [...]

Sex Week Arouses Conservative Ire

President Obama’s first budget proposal in 2009 redirected millions of dollars of federal funds from abstinence-only sex education programs to comprehensive sex ed. Unfortunately, many students are still graduating high school without hearing much beyond Joe Friday “just the facts, ma’am” presentations on how to–or more likely how not to–”do it.” Into this educational breach [...]

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