About a dozen people have sent me this gushing Salon review of Daniel Bergner’s book. In the interview, Bergner makes two of the (dozen or so) mistakes I’ve devoted this blog to correcting. (1) Sex is not a drive. I’ll write about that another time (you can read about that here if you aren’t familiar [...]
(trigger warning) So first of all, go read this Slate article about how drowning doesn’t look like drowning. Then join me back here. Got it? Okay. I couldn’t read this article without thinking, “We make the same mistake with sexual violence, and we make it for the same reasons.” The media teaches us that sexual [...]
The short answer is no, but the long answer includes why anyone would think they might be. So this was on Twitter today: Fear & anger produce the exact physiological response as sexual arousal. Thats why all the ‘fight & fuck’ stories. – ow.ly/lyB3q — Susie Bright (@susiebright) June 2, 2013 To which I responded: [...]
Man, am I struggling with Naomi Wolf’s Vagina. Remember how, when I was reading Sex at Dawn, part of my problem was that those authors were reporting the science incorrectly, and part of my problem was that the voice of the book was so… asshole dickwad jerkface? Well, Wolf is also describing the science very [...]
For reasons it would be otiose to name, I am rereading Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” He describes the ways in which cultural proverbs can function as “means of discovering and revealing truth” in predominantly oral cultures. Essentially his claim throughout the book is that the metaphors we use – and the media we [...]
Journalists. I love them and I love their important job, and god knows I could never do it. But one way I’d measure the success of my (putative) book is if intelligent journalists read it and then stopped making unnecessary mistakes. For example, everyone at the NYT needs to learn about responsive desire (it’s in [...]
I worry about people This article about trauma in journalists makes me worry. Because it makes it sound like the secret to preventing or overcoming PTSD is talking about it. And talking about it is not the point. It’s one of those thing where there’s a difference between WHAT YOU DO and HOW IT FEELS. [...]
Late in the spring semester this year, I took a couple twentieth century sex manuals into class and read aloud to my students. First, this from Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique by T. H. van de Velde (1926), defining “normal sexual intercourse”: That intercourse which takes place between two sexually mature individuals of opposite [...]
At the Origins Stories Weekend at ASU, Bill Nye told this story from when he was a paperboy: “In the Washington Post on Sundays there’d be Ripley’s “Believe It or Not” […] and it would say from time to time – they would run this story, roughly “According to aerodynamic theory, bumblebees cannot fly!” And [...]
Okay, so I talk all the time about the stress response and what it does to feelings. Well. Allie Brosh has just posted on the internet the most amazing pedagogical device in the history of the earth on for teaching about The Feels. So I’m taking full advantage. Ready? So we’re monkey’s right? (No, we’re not [...]