“Back in 2011, one researcher for the BBC Radio 4 documentary Teenage Kicks said memorably that she kept coming up against the assertion among teenagers that certain abusive behaviour - such as “slut-shaming” on the internet, “back-handing” a girl if she refuses your advances, or passing your girlfriend around your friends for sexual favours - is “technically wrong, but normal”, so hardly worth complaining about. This means that we have to encourage open discussion about abuse, and hold lessons and lectures and seminars about abuse, rather than hoping that any checklist will do the work for us. Identifying abuse is the start - but building relationship education properly into the national curriculum is the only way to seriously target a culture of ‘normal’ violence, assault and mistreatment that starts in the playground and escalates over a lifetime.”

13 April 6 Permalink

“The three qualities that constitute a hookup are its sexual content, its brevity and its apparent lack of emotional involvement.

1. A hookup includes some form of sexual intimacy, anything from kissing to oral, vaginal or anal sex and everything in between.

2. A hookup can last as short as a few minutes to as long as several hours over a single night.

3. A hookup is intended to be purely physical in nature and involves both parties shutting down communication or connection that might lead to emotional attachment.”

5 April 2 Permalink

“We need to focus on the messages that men are getting and about how they relate to women. We also need to focus on what messaging men are getting about women and about what kind of women get raped”

27 March 2 Permalink

“This is why straight men and straight women can never truly be friends.

The guy is always trying to sleep with the girl while the girl thinks it’s just a friendship. And he’s not the only dude to make this argument:

And you know what? These guys are absolutely right.

So long as we continue to live by and construct our relationships around oppressive, patriarchal understandings of sex and gender, straight men and straight women cannot be friends, and for that matter, gay men can’t be friends with any other men.

If men believe that they have no control over their “biological imperative” to “spread their seed,” then every friendship with a potential “mate” will be defined by a constant game where the man is endlessly jockeying for position to sleep with his “friend.”

The problem with this line of thinking, though, is that it presumes that men are not, in fact, human.”

19 March 1 Permalink

“These consensually nonmonogamous relationships, as they’re called, don’t conform to the cultural norm of a handholding couple in love for life. They come in a dizzying array of forms, from occasional “swinging” and open relationships to long-term commitments among multiple people. Now, social scientists embarking on brand-new research into these types of relationships are finding that they may challenge the ways we think of jealousy, commitment and love. They may even change monogamy for the better.”

20 February 4 Permalink