Departments

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sexuality

  • SOURCE: Perspectives on History
    9/29/2021

    Muscle Motion:

    by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela

    A 1983 home workout video featuring the Chippendales dancers reflected the convergence of multiple cultural changes in home video, fitness culture, pornography, and the mainstreaming of female desire. Everything has a history!

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    9/6/2021

    Who Lost the Feminist Movement's "Sex Wars"?

    by Amia Srinivasan

    As a new book reconsiders the debates among feminists over sexuality and pornography by emphasizing the role of liberalism in reducing the radical demands both sides made for the remaking of relations between men and women to narrow issues of law and civil liberties, that history resonates with current controversies about the place of trans women in the feminist movement.

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    4/26/2021

    The Tyranny of the Female-Orgasm Industrial Complex

    The writer's personal experiences, in light of a historical review of ideas about female sexuality, suggests that more knowledge has reinforced the social control of women by making pleasure obligatory rather than prohibited (Note: contains frank, explicit and extensive discussions of sexual activity).

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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."

  • 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.