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]

No, Really, How Gay am I?

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). [Continue reading]

How Gay am I?

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?! [Continue reading]

Uptown/Downtown

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. [Continue reading]

Bottoming from the Top, or: Do FemDoms Dream of Electric Toasters?

Twisty of I Blame the Patriarchy offers the flipside of my recent discussion of BDSM in two posts about the patriarchy-affirming nature of even the safest, sanest, and consensualist BDSM sexplay. [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]

Oh Lauren, We Hardly Knew Ye!

Lauren is leaving Feministe. After bringing on Jill last year and a couple of new full-time writers (apprently from the pool of guests that’s filled in from time to time over the last couple years), the site, I’m sure, can stand the loss — but for me, Lauren is Feministe (no offense to Jill and the others). She was one of the first bloggers I read regularly, one of the handful that it was important to me, when I started blogging, to get the attention of. My understanding of gender and feminism and all things related (even knitting!) has been considerably deepened by Lauren’s sharp and often very personal analyses. [Continue reading]

All Things in Moderation. Except That!

Emily Jenkins in Salon writes on sexual moderates, people who like sex just fine but don’t obsess over it, don’t feel the need to define every aspect of their lives in relation to sex — and the way our culture marginalizes what is probably a pretty normal attitude about sex as weird, dysfunctional, frigid, etc.: [Continue reading]

Pro-Life = Anti-Sex?

I’m Pro-Choice and I Fuck by Rachel Kramer Bussel [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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