Education for the iPod Generation

Who says education has to stay within classroom walls? Take your education with you with one of the podcasts from Open Cult’s University Podcast Collection. Each series is a recording of an actual class, posted for the world’s use by the professor or university. Subjects cover the range from law and business to arts and humanities to the physical and social sciences. You might also find useful stuff at the foreign language podcasts section on the same site.

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What Is Sex For, Anyway

With the issue of what people do with their genitals looming larger with every passing day, I’ve been thinking about the way people talk about the function of sex. “It’s for procreation”, they say. Asked why, they may point to Genesis, saying “God said so.” Or they may point to Darwin, claiming “natural selection says so.” Underlying even sex-postivist, ethical slut, reclaiming cunt attitudes is a sense that reproduction is the primary function of intercourse — they just believe we’re lucky enough to be smart enough to figure out ways to forestall reproduction and still have the sex. [Continue reading]

Straight? Unhappy?

Froggy Went a’ Courtin’

froggy went a'courtin'

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Back Online — for now?

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. [Continue reading]

Social Construction

As part of my class preparation, I often write essays about the topics I plan to lecture on. I don’t read them directly in class, but it helps me get my thoughts together to write out what I want to talk about. This is the essay I wrote for my upcoming lecture on “social construction”. [Continue reading]

Elyce Elucidates: The Gender Politics of Housework

The Gender Politics of Housework

One key concept to understanding how housework is political is to grasp the concept, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, that housework is work. It is valuable yet undervalued labor because it is unpaid. And the bulk of this unpaid labor, even in dual-career marriages, is done by women, without recognition of this fact.

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Chivalry and the Working Woman

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Too Lame?

Let me be clear: I love MoveOn.org. I am thrilled at the ways they’ve found to mobilize people through the Internet. But somehow, when they mess with popular culture, they come off as just incredibly lame. The first time was when they suggested that we could use the awful movie The Day After Tomorrow as an opportunity to raise awareness about global warming. Why they’d even want to be associated with that piece of dreck is beyond me — especially when the Right is doing its damnedest to discredit the science behind global warming. Why on (a rapidly warming) Earth would you interject Hollywood schlock-science into the debate? Anyway, now MoveOn has come to us with a new hope: that Lucas’ latest blockbuster (which I’m going to be seeing tomorrow) about a Senator who, “seduced by a dark vision”, seizes power and transforms a democratic republic into a nightmare vision of fascism and unfriendly aesthetics. Their latest effort, Save the Republic, is a TV ad using familiar Star Wars imagery to present Sen. Frist as the Dark Emperor leading an army of robotic judges (which they call “clones” — come on people, this isn’t rocket science!) set on destroying the “fabled order” of peace and justice upheld and protected by our “fair judges”. Oy. The project has a kind of geek charm, I suppose, but is this really going to galvanize anyone? Do we really want a movie which, if the last 2 (or, really, the last 5) are any indication of the quality of the new one, will be filled with stilted dialogue, shoddy science, and an incredibly unsubtle approach to politics (let alone the nature of evil) to be our entry in a debate which, however it ends up, will have lasting repercussions on the state of governance in the United States for decades to come? C’mon, MoveOn: changing the nomination process is Bad News, and demonstrably so — is Lucas’ fantasyland vision of politics really our best argument?! [Continue reading]

Does the Pope Spread HIV in the Woods?

Some weeks ago, the B-Log referenced some comments I’d made on the Anthro-L listserv in an excellent post on [Continue reading]