Sexing the Political:
A Journal of Third Wave Feminists on Sexuality
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Volume Two Number Two |Volume Two Number One | Volume One Number Two | Volume One Number One
Volume Two Number Two, September 2002
A Letter From the Editor: Turning
the Tide: Some Thoughts on the F-Word
Krista Jacob
Undoubtedly, the thousands of supportive emails we receive show how important feminism is to our generation of women, and how connected Gen X women feel to feminist issues, whether or not they identify these issues as “feminist.” (We frequently here the I’m-not-a-feminist,-but-love-your-zine response) Yet, despite three waves of feminism and other progressive social movements,--which have inarguably given women more opportunities than they’ve ever had before,--and despite an entire generation of women and men who have come of age post-women’s liberation movement, our culture is still very misinformed about what feminism is, and who feminists are.Girls In Print: Sexism in the Media Prevails, But Not Without Notice
Alia Levine
The enormity of what one reporter said to me a month ago begs the question: Is there any relation with how the media (mis)represents women, and how women in the industry are treated? In both areas, women are vastly under-represented and outrageously misrepresented - both as journalists, and as newsworthy subjects.Voices From the Motherland
Emari Dimagiba Lavine
I experienced a cultural identity crisis when two women I worked with (and respected) encouraged me to be proud to be a woman of color, to be proud to be a Filipina. But I just couldn’t grasp what they meant: How do you learn to be proud of your cultural identity when most of your life has been so removed from the motherland?Living Single: The Right Lifestyle for Me
Carolyn E. Hopkins
I have never married, but I did give birth to a son seventeen years ago. I made the decision that I did not want to marry my son’s father, and my mother met this decision with no opposition. We elated in adding a new addition to our female family unit, and doted on this new, rambunctious male child. I did find, however, at times, guilt haunted me because I had been led to believe that I was being selfish by denying my son the societal acceptance of marriage.Aiding and Abetting?
Kim Springer
I wanted to write something for this issue of Sexing the Political that was light! Fun! Summery! Had an idea all mapped out and then…well, I tuned into cable station Black Entertainment Television (BET). BET’s crime was not the usual bevy of rumpshakers shaking their moneymakers, but the abominable Ed Gordon interview with rapper, accused child molester R. Kelly.If You Don’t Wear a Scarlet “O,” How Will I Recognize You?
Elizabeth
Recently I have come to realize that there are two parts to Othering. The first is where we imagine huge differences between us and those who seem unlike us, which makes it easier for Us to treat Them badly. But there is another side to Othering, really the opposite side of the same coin. Maybe I should call it Anti-Othering.Nearly a ‘Tween
Patti See
“You’re so lucky you have a boy,” Karen says. “No cliques at school. No pressure for the right clothes and the right things. I’m so tired of Brittany wanting stuff. Nine years old and she thinks she should have everything. We were never greedy.” Her mother’s rant can only be let loose around a close friend. I remember Karen’s battles with her cowlick; she remembers my first father-picked glasses.Boomerang: Baby Boomers Speak Out
Boomerangst
Kathleen B. Jones
We worked for welfare reforms and watched a Democratic President end a national program of support for families with dependent children. We worked to end war and imperialism and now find it difficult to negotiate the rising patriotic seas. We worked to free sex from sin, but also to end the degradation of women, which led to contradictory ideas about pornography and harassment and violence. And we struggled with questions about love and power: Can I be liberated and still have a loving, caring relationship?Third Eye Open
The Divine Choice of Neo-Spinsterhood
Rhonda Chittenden
In a photo, two women stand together, their arms wrapped around one another’s waists. They are dressed in fashionable coats and they are laughing. As I imagine their laughter, I hear friendship, shared stories, and an abiding affection. I listen a little longer and then I understand: they are spinsters, in stylish San Francisco fashion, circa 1932.Shameless: Reflections on a Sexual Life
Approaching D-day
Ashley Sovereign
It’s July. I am nine months pregnant, and can hardly think or write about anything else. My only (only!) goals for this month are to finish writing my doctoral thesis and get ready for this baby, and so I sit endlessly at my computer with someone’s tiny foot stuck uncomfortably in between my ribs, surrounded by the unfamiliar belongings of a person I have yet to meet. I try to write, to get work done now because I know I won’t have any time to myself after delivery. Instead, I usually end up lying on the floor in front of the air conditioning, re-reading the baffling instructions for my dairy-farm inspired electric breast pump and trying to make sense of everything that is happening.The Feminism of Everyday Life
Double Your Pleasure with triple creme
Melisse Gelula
Melisse Gelula, columnist of The Feminism of Everyday Life, interviews triple creme, an all-queer, all-girl Brooklyn-based band about their novel position in the music world and their new CD.An Eye For the Ladies
True Virtual Romance
Alia Levine
Feminist Disclaimer: After months of researching the concept of online romance, it has become clear: feminism does not necessarily inform, enhance, or hinder one’s (virtual) dating motive, strategy, or practice.Note to Self
Grinding the Concrete (Third) Wave
Shauna Pomerantz
So. I’m walking down the street not too long ago and I hear the familiar sound of polyurethane on concrete. A skateboarder is approaching. I don’t even turn to look because I know he’ll be zipping past me momentarily. And I’m already envious because where I came from (suburban Toronto) girls didn’t carve or grind. It just wasn’t part of our cultural repertoire.The Price of Motherhood by Anne Crittenden, Metropolitan Books
Reviewed by Ahndi Fridell
So, why are policies in the United States so schizophrenic? Do we want women in the workforce or not? Do we want cheap, mobile labor or experienced, committed, well-paid labor? Do we want to encourage a stable population of future taxpayers and social security contributors? Can we sustain an economy where it is affordable to have only one person be the breadwinner? Should we encourage a thriving system of daycare and preschool or should we advocate a shift to large, extended family networks?Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice by Kathleen B. Jones, Rutgers University Press
Reviewed by Jamie Russell
In Living Between Danger and Love: The Limits of Choice, Kathleen Jones offers painful and personal insights into the complexity of victim profiling, domestic violence and coming to terms with loss. Bringing to light the multi-faceted issues of domestic violence and the cycle of abuse, she unfolds the story of the life and death of Andrea O’Donnell, a 27 year old women’s studies major and student director of the Women’s Resource Center at San Diego State University.Godspeed by Lynn Breedlove, St. Martin's Press
Reviewed by Melisse Gelula
Tribe 8 frontman, Lynn Breedlove, goes unplugged--but not acoustic--with her first novel, Godspeed.Still Blind After All This Time
Elizabeth
Volume Two Number One, February 2002
A Letter From the Editor: Turning the Tide by Krista Jacob. Third Wave Feminism and Oprah?
Highlights
Flippin' the Script by Kimberly Springer. Dang. I hate being used. I guess, y'know, who doesn't, but I'm talking about being used for political expediency. I see it all around me in the news: the historic use of women's bodies as reason to annihilate and destroy in the name of patriarchy and white supremacy. Given that it's a new year, I wanted to get this off my chesty chest before 2001 got too far away because, at the rate we're going, I can see the made-for-tv series "Step on Women's Rights" going into syndication in 2002.
The Feminism of Everyday Life by Melisse Gelula. With so much jingoist rhetoric to rail against in the media and more forms of activism than ever to take up, especially in flag-waving New York City, forming a comprehensive response to the World Trade Center business isn't possible herein. Instead what follows is a litany of quotidian responses by a misbegotten feminist to that day and since.
Get Your Stereotypes Off My Relationship by Elizabeth. We know all those things you think. We've heard them from people we love, we see them in the eyes of strangers, we are forced to think about them everyday.
Feature Articles
A Radical Language of Choice by Krista Jacob. Not all of the topics covered in the cyber-pages of Sexing the Political speak to what one might consider the "capital I" feminist issues (ie: abortion, affirmative action, equal pay for equal work, etc.), however many do. The common thread that weaves these contributions together is an ardent commitment to improving women's sexual lives and experiences. At the very least, we want to support the use of humor, irony, and parody to help balance the hopelessness and frustration that too often paralyzes activists. We believe that humor can be as effective as serious, theoretical commentary. (Alia and Ashley)Good Divorce? Good Gun Fight? by Patti See "They were made for each other," our mothers cooed at our engagement party. Both of us the youngest of large families, tagalongs, bar rats, head of the class, athletes. Despite our shotgun wedding, our world believed if anyone could make it, we would.
Why I Want To Be A Man In Bed by Martha McCaughey and Christina French. I am a woman, and I often have sex with a man. When I think about all the things I've learned to do to appeal to him and pleasure him, I realized that I, too, would like to be the man in bed. I don't mean, however, that I'd like to be the one with the penis.
Columns
Shameless: Reflections On A Sexual Life by Ashley Sovern. Recently I asked a roomful of women to reveal their earliest "sexually forbidden text". In other words, the first sexual materials kept hidden away under the metaphorical mattress.
Third Eye Open Interview by Rhonda Chittenden. I recently interviewed my friend Laura, who lives with her partner Nancy and their son Ian, on the intersecting influences of being a lesbian mother and a feminist. As part of a middle-class White couple living in the suburbs of a mid-sized Midwestern city, Laura's family represents both the integration of queer families into the socio-cultural fabric of mainstream America while offering a progressive, proactive, and empowering model of queer feminist parenting for other women who parent with their female partners.
An Eye For the Ladies by Alia Levine. If we are so bold as to be gay and honest with ourselves in a world largely constructed against us, why can't we get up the nerve to ask a cute girl to dance? We've come all this way (baby) and we can't even sidle up to a girl and ask her to shake her shimmy. I asked a handful of queer women if they'd ever Made The Move.
Note to Self by Shauna Pomerantz. I was watching a Sex and the City rerun the other day, the one where Carrie gets to be a model and Margaret Cho is the surly fashion director who affectionately calls everyone "fuckette." It was a fantastic episode full of girl power bravery, yet something about the show nagged me to the bone. The fashion stuff was cool. Samantha's naked photo shoot was fine. Charlotte's gay matchmaker routine was innocuous enough. But wait just a minute. What about Miranda? Yes! It was Miranda's plotline that got my thigh-high socks in a knot.
Book Review: Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution Reviewed by Hanne Blank
With Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution, Paula Kamen brings a long-awaited dose of perspective to the complex and often controversial topic of younger women's sexual lives, relationships, and behaviors. As a thirty-something myself, I've been frustrated by the opportunism of the press when discussing the sex lives of the so-called "third wave" generationJane Hocus, Jane Focus: An Introduction to Jane Sexes It Up by Lisa Johnson. Jane Sexes It Up--a book of confessions and kinks--begins with this recognition of the very real limits on what a woman can say about her sexuality without putting herself in physical danger and/or social exile.
Volume One Number Two, June 2001
Feature Articles
A Letter From the Editor: Turning the Tide Apparently, the STP writers aren’t the only young feminists thinking about sexuality and feminism . . . we received seventy-eight submissions to be considered for this issue. Women sent them to us from seven different countries.
Sex In the Language of Politics Lise Sanders deconstructs the political rhetoric of the recent presidential election. "It's no coincidence that the rhetoric of virgin and pregnant ballots, the sullied purity of the democratic ideal, emerges against the background of, among other female political triumphs, Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate victory."
Drawing Curtains, Drawing Lines Charlotte Green Honigman-Smith, an outspoken Jewish feminist, shares how she negotiates her Reform background with her feminist values. "The mechitza doesn’t just physically divide women from men, it divides women who accept it--provisionally, as I do, in order to pray with a certain congregation, or completely, as a matter of law and custom--from women who see it as one of the most glaring examples of misogyny in traditional Jewish practice"
Embracing the Housewife Within Suzie Guillette shares one woman’s struggle between her lesbian identity and a new found desire to date men. "Many women come to the Center to transcend the potentially stifling "housewife" role, not to embrace it. Her suggestion deserves a moment of reflection, in which a sense of unspoken mirth floats over the telephone line."
Burning Bras . . . Not Exactly A personal essay about becoming a feminist, by Hope Borchardt. "Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines feminism as; 1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes; 2: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests. According to Webster’s definition, I support feminism and therefore am a feminist."
Departments
Third Eye Open Rhonda Chittenden challenges third wavers who may be camped out in restrictive ideologies to build authentic and effective alliances that traverse race, class, culture, ability, gender, etc, and to embrace the aspects of identity that exist outside of labels and categories. "After all, her favorite question, Are they Black or White? has been rendered powerless with the answer of BOTH. And how can she offer the obnoxious reminder that I "swing both ways" when it’s clear that I am joyously in mid-flight?"
The Feminist Fan: Moving Backwards and Forwards Putting sexuality theory into practice, Emari Dimagiba Lavine celebrates Good Vibrations, an all women-operated and owned sex toy store. "Good Vibrations represents a new breed of sexual revolutionaries who are committed to demystifying sexual taboos, and normalizing discourse about sex and various sexual practices."
An Eye For the Ladies Alia Levine takes a hilarious look at lesbian boundaries, or lack thereof. "The gene pool is shrinking day by dykely day. A quick inventory shows that nearly all the girls I’ve dated live on the same stretch of street. A simple brunch plan can be as treacherous as a Sapphic snake-pit…"
The Feminism of Everyday Life Melisse Gelula discusses the feng shui of femme fashion. "Shoes, I feel, should foment revolutions, capture the imagination, or at least require thought."
Shameless, a sex advice column Sexuality Expert Ashley Sovern gives a basic primer on polyamory and polyfidelity. "Because the success of a poly arrangement depends, at its core, on communication, polyamory offers people the chance to make explicit their expectations about connections in a way that can create a more fulfilling and enriching relationship."
Note to Self Drawing from pieces of pop culture, Shauna Pomerantz challenges culturally engrained messages, which mandate that heterosexual, thirty-something women must get married. "Sure the biological clock is a reality. Sure having babies becomes a little harder and riskier as our bodies age. And sure, having a partner to help out with the work would make things easier. But to see such a representation so vividly and drastically exposed on a mainstream television show smacked of antifeminist backlash."
Motherhood is Political Katie Novotny discusses the politics of breastfeeding. "Breastfeeding is the most nutritious food for babies, yet society discourages it."
Reviews of Recent and Retro Recordings: The Octaves Beyond Silence Project by Kristy Beckman "The Octaves Beyond Silence Project was compiled to raise awareness about the violence women have suffered- and continue to suffer- around the world. The CD fund-raises money for six organizations that help women around the world, from countries such as Afghanistan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosova, and the United States."
Book Reviews: The Prisoner’s Wife, by Asha Bandele Reviewed by Kimberly Springer, PhD "Though she never uses the word "feminist," or "womanist" for that matter, all the while asserting a belief in the rights of women, Asha Bandele’s memoir unequivocally puts a contemporary spin on the feminist slogan "personal is political."
The Splintered Day, by V.K. Mina Reviewed by Alia Levine "A series of fractured, lonely vignettes do not necessarily add up to a conventional novel, but by providing us with the surefire plot of love (and how to get it), V.K. Mina constructs a stark, yet hopeful world that is hard to leave until the last page."
Volume One Number One, Feb/March 2001
Feature Articles
Engendering Change: What’s Up With Third Wave Feminism?
A new kind of activism is brewing among young women -- "Third Wave Feminism." Many of us, inspired by larger theoretical discussions about race and sexuality, have started to place a greater emphasis on establishing multiracial alliances among women.The Feminist Fan: Recovering heroines and heroes in film, fantasy, and foreign places
"Quickly – Get Thee a Roman Tunic!"
It’s that time of year again, when the TV schedule is littered with so many awards shows that the only difference between them are the frenzy of fashion statements.An Eye For the Ladies
If you've gotten as far as this web site, chances are that you have had some experience with ‘Feminism 101: Images of Women,’ sexist binaries and double standards, homophobia fueled by oppressive stereotypes.To Seek My Own Revenge: An Interview with Rape Survivor and Collage Artist Rhonda Chittenden
Sexing the Political interviewed Rhonda Chittenden about her provocative collage, "C’est fini!"
Departments
Reviews of Recent and Retro Recordings: Like A Virgin
Shameless:
Ashley Answers Your Sexual QuestionsMotherhood is Political:
Thoughts from A Stay-At-Home Mama
Third Wave Feminist Bookworm:
Manifesta: Young Women,
Feminism, and the FutureThe Feminism of Everyday Life: a web column
From the Editor: Turning the Tide
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Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminists on Sexuality
Editor and Publisher: Krista Jacob
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