Month of February , 2006

Female X-Men

Power comes from control over their surroundings or other people; beautiful (some would say "stacked")

• Dr. Jean Grey: intuitive, empathic, manipulates people and things from a distance
• Storm: controls natural forces
• Rogue: consumer, parasite; saps men of their vital powers

Male X-Men

Power comes from ability to physically defeat opponents; some good-looking, some not so much (e.g. Nightcrawler)

• Psyclops (sp?): creates energy, destroys all in his sight; male gaze destroys opponents
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Arwan at Pandagon describes herself as pro-sex, anti-porn, opening up a discussion on the boundaries of pornography and how individuals interact with (or choose not to) those boundaries. I left a long comment responding to two of the commentors' posts, both of which concerned me for their projection of assumptions about the nature of porn onto those who produce and consume it. The comment is in the moderation queue, and I don't know how that works over there, so I figured I'd post it here (plus, I make some points I want to come back to someday, and this site is for storing ideas I want to come back to someday):

One Man's Opinion is back -- for now.

Beginning in October, I started taking on about 1 gigabite of server traffic a day, mostly from referrer spam. My first host shut down the site when it began destabilizing their servers, and to add insult to inury, deleted my files. I'd tell you to stay away from them, but it looks like they just got taken over. Anyway, don't use MaxiPointServers, and if you see their IT guy around the neighborhood, kick him in the shins. Hard.

I transferred the site to a new host, hoping that the couple weeks downtime would have discouraged the baddies. It didn't. 5 days later I maxed out my month's allotment of bandwidth. I took the site down. I tried again in December. 6 days later...

So here I am again. I've got a monster of a .htaccess file between myself and the baddies, and I've set the site up so that the old domain refers to my CV site. I've tried to set it up so that old links will redirect to the new site, but it doesn't seem to be working, and I can't remember how all the old URLs were configured so I couldn't redirect them all anyway. And since the old webhost deleted files from the several months when, unbeknownst to me, my hard disk was failing so I was backing up corrupt data, I lost a lot of posts. And most of the comments. I've tried to reconstruct as much as I could from Google's cache, but... I lost some opinions.

I'll be keeping an eye on traffic the next few days; hopefully, the precautions I've taken will let me keep this site online. Since I couldn't use this site, I've started a new site called ThinkNaughty, exclusively dedicated to material relating to research on sex and gender in the US, for a project I want to start when I clear my plate of my existing work. And I'm still busy at Savage Minds, the anthropology blog. For the most part, this site will be an archive of past work, while I focus myself on more academic pursuits -- but who knows? I may find myself needing an outlet for thoughts that don't have a place at the other two sites.

According to the Epstein Sexual Orientation Inventory (ESOI), of which the Scientific American test is an extract (and if I want to be cynical, an extract expressly designed to cater to the current sensationalization of bisexuality, especially female bisexuality), I'm pretty heterosexual, with a mean sexual orientation (MSO) of "3" and a sexual orientation range (SOR) of "6". What that means, so far as I can tell, is I'm pretty much heterosexual (no surprise there) but have a high degree of sexual flexibility (they italicize it, so it must be important).

According to this test (which must be scientifically valid, as it's on Scientific American's website) I'm equally heterosexual and homosexual.

How will I explain that to my parents?!

Bitch|Lab's post on how the current argument about whether feminism or technology have done more to free women from the "drudgery" of housework ignores dimensions of race and class as well as the historic construction of notions of cleanliness and morality brought to mind an essay I wrote long ago. At the turn of the 20th century, middle-class women engaged in what was essentially a missionary effort directed towards poor immigrants, establishing "settlements" in poverty-stricken areas like the Lower East Side and offering instruction on diet, hygiene, and good citizenship, all with a healthy dose of moralizing.

This essay deals with the ways in which "Americanization" was carried out on the Lower East Side. It examines the Settlement House movement, in which middle-class "settled" in working-class immigrant neighborhoods in order to help the immigrants to Americanize, through instruction and example. I am especially concerned to show the carious spheres of activitiy and ideology through which both immigrant and non-immigrant women, as well as working- and mddle-class women, move and act, reshaping the contours of American conceptions of charity, social work, protest, and ultimately American-ness itself.

This essay deals with the ways in which "Americanization" was carried out on the Lower East Side. It examines the Settlement House movement, in which middle-class "settled" in working-class immigrant neighborhoods in order to help the immigrants to Americanize, through instruction and example. I am especially concerned to show the carious spheres of activitiy and ideology through which both immigrant and non-immigrant women, as well as working- and mddle-class women, move and act, reshaping the contours of American conceptions of charity, social work, protest, and ultimately American-ness itself.