sexuality 
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SOURCE: New York Daily News
10/21/2020
Jeffrey Toobin and the M-Word: Let’s be Honest about what Makes this Scandal so Scandalous
by Jonathan Zimmerman
Jeffrey Toobin's scandal reflects the weight of the idea of the enlightenment individual and the fear that individuals freed from constraint would fall into corruption.
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SOURCE: YouTube
9/29/2020
Bawdy Civil War Letters, In the Style of Ken Burns
by Katie Hemphill
Historian Katie Hemphill's recent crash course in video editing for Zoom teaching let her fulfill a longtime goal: set the bawdiest Civil War letters she found in her research to the stirring sounds of documentary music. Content Warning: Cuss Words.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
9/22/2020
Desiring Machines
In 1993, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, consensual same-sex relationships were decriminalized in Russia as the economy underwent a wrenching transition away from central planning. Documentarian William E. Jones documents this moment by splicing together the non-sexual scenes from gay pornography shot in the former Soviet bloc.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
9/14/2020
The Long History Behind Donald Trump’s Outreach To LGBTQ Voters
by Neil J. Young
Gay Republicans emerged as a political force in response to both radical leadership in the gay liberation movement and the rise of evangelicals as a force in the Republican party. Today they may have to decide which fight is more important.
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SOURCE: Black Perspectives
9/9/2020
Black Women in Nineteenth-Century France: An Interview with Historian Robin Mitchell
Robin Mitchell's book "Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France" examines how sexualized descriptions of Black women contributed to French racism.
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SOURCE: Labor and Working Class History Association
8/31/2020
Alexandra Finley on Her New Book, An Intimate Economy
Historian Jacob Remes discusses the new book "An Intimate Economy" with author Alexandra Finley.
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SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
8/27/2020
Qanon Misdirects Our Attention Away From The Real Threats To Children
by Paul M. Renfro
"Moral panics like QAnon work to distract from less outrageous, far more insidious sources of harm. Even worse, they contribute to punitive policies that separate and hurt families, perpetuate mass incarceration and keep people in a state of fear."
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
8/11/2020
“The Sex Lady Talks”: Disability Rights and the Normalization of Sex in a 1980s Institution
by Elizabeth A. Nelson, Emily S. Beckman, and Modupe Labode
Therapist Lisa Freeman bucked the authorities of an Indiana psychiatric hospital to advocate for the right of residents to have consensual sex and sex education. Her work shows the ways that paternalistic values are embedded in state treatment of people with disabilities.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
8/5/2020
The Revealing and Disturbing Story of America, Told Through 20 Years of Reality Dating Shows
Reality dating shows, for better or worse, have focused a lens on the state of love, sex and relationships in American society. Here is a list of shows that define each of the 20 years of the genre (and might be historical documents someday?)
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5/31/2020
Little Richard: Bold, Pioneering, Complex, and Unapologetic
by Elwood Watson
Little Richard left a lasting musical and cultural legacy because of his talent and his willingness to be more boldly black and sexual than other artists dared.
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SOURCE: NPR
5/9/2020
How The Approval Of The Birth Control Pill 60 Years Ago Helped Change Lives
FDA approval of oral contraception in 1960 had a transformative effect on women's lives but remains controversial today.
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/17/2020
‘A Curious History of Sex’ Covers Aphrodisiacs, Bicycles, Graham Crackers and More
Wherever we are heading, whatever your proclivities, historian of sexuality Kate Lister has this comment: “I promise, it’s all been done before.”
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SOURCE: Washington Post
5/2/19
How Franklin Graham betrayed his father’s legacy
by Nancy Beck Young
Instead of treating issues of sexuality with compassion, Graham has weaponized them.
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SOURCE: Times of Israel
1-17-14
4,000-year-old erotica depicts a strikingly racy ancient sexuality
Clay plaques at The Israel Museum, made 1,500 years before the Kama Sutra, display graphically that Old Babylonian culture held an ‘exalted’ view of sex.
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SOURCE: Salon
6-22-13
Jonathan Zimmerman: Children are Sexual Creatures
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at New York University. He is the author of Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory and three other books. In 1985, the founder of modern American sex education gave a controversial speech about erections in fetuses. To Mary Calderone, who had started the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States back in 1964, new evidence about arousal in male fetuses demonstrated once and for all that children were sexual beings.Nonsense, said conservatives. To critics of sex education, childhood was — or should be — a time of sexual innocence. Racy movies, TV shows and magazines made kids prematurely interested in sex. And so did sex education, which robbed them of their natural virtue and replaced it with tawdry thoughts and feelings.I thought of this debate as I read the comments by Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, during the House debate on Monday over a bill that would ban almost all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. According to Burgess, fetuses do not simply experience sexual arousal; they actively arouse themselves.
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SOURCE: Boston Globe
5-7-13
Jonathan Zimmerman: The Prom -- An American Relic
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University. He is writing a history of sex education around the world.In 1954, American Girl magazine published a book of beauty tips for young women. It included helpful suggestions about preparing for the ultimate American beauty contest: the high school prom.“This is the moment to slip into your dress . . . Put your hair in place again, fasten your necklace or bracelet, and step into your pumps,” the book advised. “And wheee! Look now! There really is another you in the mirror. A you that is practically exuding a subtle new fascination, a wonderful femininity.”I’ve been thinking about this passage as I watch my own daughter get ready for prom, which seems like a relic from another age. And maybe that’s the whole point of it. In a time of enormous flux and ambiguity in gender relations, this ritual returns us to a time when men were men and, yes, women were women.The first recorded reference to a prom is from a student at Amherst College, who wrote in 1884 about attending prom at nearby Smith. But as more Americans joined the middle class, prom left the elite precincts of private colleges and filtered into the nation’s burgeoning secondary schools....
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SOURCE: Harvard Crimson
5-7-13
Niall Ferguson publishes open letter in "Harvard Crimson"
Niall Ferguson is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University.Last week I said something stupid about John Maynard Keynes. Asked to comment on Keynes’ famous observation “In the long run we are all dead,” I suggested that Keynes was perhaps indifferent to the long run because he had no children, and that he had no children because he was gay. This was doubly stupid. First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second, I had forgotten that Keynes’ wife Lydia miscarried.I was duly attacked for my remarks and offered an immediate and unqualified apology. But this did not suffice for some critics, who insisted that I was guilty not just of stupidity but also of homophobia. I have no doubt that at least some students were influenced by these allegations. Nobody would want to study with a bigot. I therefore owe it to students—former and prospective—to make it unambiguously clear that I am no such thing.
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SOURCE: Guardian (UK)
3-23-13
What the sculpture of Pan reveals about sex and the Romans
Nothing is more likely to inspire us to see for ourselves than a warning about the effects of looking. Take the media interest this month when it was revealed that the British Museum's exhibition, Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum, is to include a "parental guidance" notice. The reason? An ancient marble sculpture of the god Pan (a part-human, part-goat figure) having sex with a she-goat is not to be segregated, as it has been since its discovery in 1752, but displayed openly with the other exhibits – a liberal move by London, if also one which dulls the object's impact. Getting this story into the news ensures that centuries of censorship are not swept under the carpet, and that Pan, and the show he speaks for, remain "hot property".But the news story also exaggerates this censorship. Far from being forgotten in its first modern home in the royal palace at Portici on the Bay of Naples, the sculpture, which was part of a restricted collection in the cellars, was quickly a celebrity.
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SOURCE: NY Daily News
2-5-13
Jonathan Zimmerman: The Silly Debate over Ed Koch's Sexuality
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”Was Ed Koch gay? I don’t know, and I don’t care. And neither should you.When the former New York mayor died last week, we heard all the old cliches about why he should have come out of the closet-or why it was necessary to “out” him. If he were openly gay, the story goes, he would have done more to fight AIDS during the early years of the epidemic. And he would have made it easier for other people to come out, too.But as Koch correctly insisted, his sexual orientation was nobody’s business but his own. And to see why, let’s imagine that Koch wasn't male and gay, but female and straight.Then let’s suppose that Ms. Koch — like 40% of American women — had undergone an abortion. Would it be OK to “out” her for that, too?...
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HNN Hot Topics: LGBT History
All across the world LGBT people are celebrating. Here's the background you need if you want to understand what it's all about.
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