When I first moved to San Francisco two years ago and threw down all of my remaining money on a deposit for an apartment, I found myself broke and desperate for work.  After several failed attempts to get a restaurant or cafe job (most of my work experience in the past had been in the service industry), I quickly took the opportunity to work the counter service at one of the remaining all male strip theaters in the city.  Aside from putting on live nude strip shows, the establishment also catered to male public sex with its basement video porn arcade.  At first I thought this would be an interesting experience in working male public sex industry (and interesting it was indeed) because I had believed that male public sex spaces might serve as places of empowerment for validating gay sex.  What I found however was that the space sometimes functioned off of implicit principles of internalized homophobia.  Interestingly enough, I began to question the notions of solely ascribing a liberatory status to institutions that provided spaces for what appears to be non-heteronormative sexual experiences and instead began to understand the ways in which shame, anger and hatred were also inflected in the daily happenings of these establishments.  Allow me to give a few examples:

During each eight hour shift, my job primarily consisted of managing the strip performers, selling porn videos, sex toys or novelties at the front counter, or exchanging...

While I was somewhat disappointed that I was laid up in bed sick for the festivities of the Halloween weekend this year, I was somewhat relieved that I decided not to venture beyond my home for the holiday. I tend to love Halloween because I love to dress up in ridiculous costumes, although I hardly restrict myself to one or a few days a year to engage in this activity. I'm always somewhat ambivalent about Halloween due to a sexualized phenomenon that by now has become an American cultural cliche. Taken straight from a line of one of my favorite 21st century teen cult classic movie "Mean Girls": 'in the regular world, Halloween is when children dress up in costumes and beg for candy. In girl world, Halloween is the one night of the year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.'

Don't get me wrong. I'm of the opinion that women and anyone for that matter should be able to wear whatever they want without being held to a sexual standard. I also personally abhor the blame the victim rhetoric of sexual assault that claims: 'well if she was dressed like that she must have been asking for it.' But there's something that makes my stomach turn when I see streets flooded with women in costumes that consist mainly of 'some form of lingerie and animal...

I've said it once, and I'll say it again: I really enjoy bad television.  Granted bad is a subjective term, there's something to be said about realizing how bad the show you're watching is and still being unable to tear your attention away from it.  The program in question today is the Maury Povich Show and in particular his exposes on teen girls who want to have a baby.  This one is perhaps my favorite:

The general pattern of these shows is that the 'deviant' teen in question is usually booed by the audience and gently berated by Maury into recognizing the irresponsibility of their decisions or possible future choices.  What does it look like if we however maybe take a step into Victoria's shoes?  I proceed by presenting a possibly feminist re-reading of her character.  Here we go...

Clearly, Victoria is a modern girl-on-the go who knows what she wants. She is gonna have her baby.  Clearly Victoria has thought out her decision and planned accordingly.  She's been preparing herself by building up an array of baby care paraphernalia.  That's right, if her baby loses its pacifier, that's okay, she's got three more.  She also has a vivid financial plan for how to take on the monetary burden of a...

Sometimes I forget that for the past few years in both Brooklyn and San Francisco that I'e been living a sort of fantasy reality where everyone incessantly dresses up in outrageous costumes, assumes multiple made-up performance names and progressive parents bring their children to events like day-time guerilla drag shows and Folsom Street fair.  It often takes a reality check to remind me of the increasing prevalence of sex-negative discourses, particularly those revolving around sexual development.  Thank you, Judith Levine, for bringing these issues to light for me!  In reading her illuminating manuscript, "Harmful to Minors," I had to take a step back and retrospectively interrogate the 'intimate' moments of my youth which most assuredly impacted my own sexual development.  I was most struck by a survey cited by Levine of mental health and child protection professionals stating the interventions were necessary against mothers in particular who either kissed their children on the mouth, presented themselves nude to children before the age of five and hugged their children too much before the age of ten.  It's a wonder then that my family's doorstep was never overcrowded by child welfare workers.  

Yes, my mother frequented bathed with me as a child: it was the beginning of a sexual education and lifelong appreciation of women's bodies.  Yes, my mother hugged me many, many times a day before and after the age of ten: it taught...

I have to admit I have a truly guilty habit of watching really bad tv sometimes. It's not entirely my fault; I have an unemployed roommate, who aside from going to yoga two times a day and doing volunteer tai-chi with AIDS ward patients at a local hospital, spends the majority of her day smoking pot and watching re-runs of "7th Heaven" and Maury Povich paternity test shows (just to give a few examples.) Together we discovered our sick fascination with Lifetime made-for-tv movies. The more I watch these horrendous productions complete with bad actors, poor screen writing and shoddy cinematography, the more I question what the producers of Lifetime are thinking when they commission this stuff. Perhaps I am making the assumption that the phrase "Lifetime: Television for Women" (and apparently Gay Men now that Project Runway has moved networks and taken Bravo's constituency with them) somehow is supposed to denote empowering programming for women. And yes, indeed, there are instances where Lifetime will air actual mainstream, Hollywood produced films that speak the romantic side of my inner feminist lesbian. Examples including "Boys on the Side," "Fried Green Tomatoes," and "Thelma and Louise." However, I'm constantly confounded by this former style of programming that deals not at all with issues that might empower women or imagine a world of gender equality but rather focus on extremely hyped up situations of all the reasons women...