Posted by Lashings of Ginger Beer Time
Special Alt.Sex.Ed edition #2! BUMPER SIZE!
More shameless blaggery -- Adam Carver at ScotsGay has a Lashings-induced epiphany:
Through song, readings, enactment, and several very personal life accounts Alternative Sex Education is an irreverent, humorous and impassioned campaign for an all encompassing queer embracive curriculum. The performance is littered with contemporary pop culture references including a wonderful ten minutes devoted to deconstructing gender roles and LGBT characters in The Lord of The Rings, Doctor Who, Harry Potter, Buffy, and an unexpectedly brilliant ‘Bad Romance’ parody of Twilight. What is clear to the audience is that each person on that stage has suffered and is contagiously passionate about changing the lives of future generations of LGBT children in the UK.
Fuck Yeah, Sex Positivity is an AWESOME tumblr blog that does exactly what it says on the tin, making excellent posts on well, sex positivity. Highlights include their topical [and most recent at time of writing] post on...drum roll, please, sex education!
Over at The Pervocracy, Cliff writes about "the way society tries to simultaneously micromanage and deny teenage sexuality," and how adults following non-traditional relationship narratives become collateral damage. Another recent-ish post on how "kinky philosophy" and consent culture are valuable for all relationships, kinky or vanilla, could have been written by one of our own Kink Scouts!
Rookie - an amazing online magazine for teens which we namecheck in the show - has so many awesome posts it's hard to pick just one! One theme that resounds across their pieces as an amazing antidote to the disempowering messages of so many mags aimed at teenage girls is that of confidence: in one's body and sexuality, in one's body and eating habits, and in one's take on feminism.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in teen-zine-land, RUNT Press are looking for contributors for 'The Einhorn', a magazine to "fill in the gaps" of LGBTQ+ sex and relationship education, which they aim to distribute for free in schools and youth groups!
Isobel Gutteridge highlights the complexity of pre-teen girls' ideas of celebrity, body image, and self in a sociological analysis of two focus groups, showing these girls cannot be considered as simply passive receptacles of media.
A surprisingly sensitive article in the New York Times (although TW for a binary-erasing definition of 'transgender') on gender-fluid and gender-variant children.
Moya at the Crunk Feminist Collective talks about the ways in which society privileges sexual relationships, and what that means for people who are classed as 'single' in society.
Melissa at Shakesville on racism, exceptionalism and the recent temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin [TW for racism, discussion of violence and muder]
In some versions of our Edinburgh show, we discuss the well-meaning but problematic It Gets Better Project. A similar project - with less emphasis on exhorting queer youth to wait until school is over, and more on just being visibly trans and happy - is the Seven Questions Project at We Happy Trans.
With another spurious 'extreme porn' trial concluded, fisting (and queer sex) are back under the microscope: Krissie at No More Lost delivers context and analysis of the homophobic undercurrents of the case, and makes a call to action.
[TW: rape, sexual assault, coerced consent] Two letters to advice blogger Captain Awkward about 'creepy dudes' in their friendship group meet with some fantastic advice and an outpouring of comments about rape culture, harrowing personal experiences, and the blindness of even our best allies. The entry now has two follow-ups: "My friend, the rapist" (seriously, TW) and "The C-Word" where the Captain forms a detailed response to all the men who wrote in to complain about being creep-shamed.
And finally... Familiar as we (and anyone who's seen our Sci Fi Skits!) are with the endemic sexism and heteronormativity of science fiction and fantasy - Orlando has recently been revisiting Pern and realising [TW: rape] just how incredibly messed up it was - it's good to remember that both genres have a history of queerness and feminism too (courtesy of Alexis of Queer Geek Theory and Maria of The Hathor Legacy)
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