Fitzroyalty

Hyperlocal news about Melbourne's first suburb: Fitzroy 3065

Archive for the category: Sex and gender

the selective outrage of bourgeois feminism

12 April 2013 | 0 comments

Two days ago an article was published about whether it is socially acceptable for men to wear beards in corporate workplaces. The article quoted two women etiquette ‘experts’ who tell men what they can and can’t do with their bodies. The article is offensive, sexist and endorses discriminatory behaviour.

If the roles were reversed, with the article quoting men telling women what to do with their body hair and what is acceptable in the workplace, the advice in the article would be widely decried as sexist and misogynistic.…

you don’t have an inalienable right to breed

18 March 2013 | 2 Comments

Animals living in a state of nature reproduce according to their nature and the limits of their habitat. People, in contrast, mostly live not in states of nature but in political states and societies. Our reproductive freedom to have unplanned (and sometimes unwanted) children imposes a financial burden on the state (and thus taxpayers), which becomes responsible for financially supporting custodial parents in the absence of support from the other biological parent, or in providing for children when both parents are unable to.…

the sexual personality and lifestyle diagram

14 February 2013 | 2 Comments

The world needs more infographics. If you’ve used a dating website, created a profile and sought partners, only to discover that similar political values and a shared love of a particular genre of movies tells you nothing about whether you’re sexually compatible in the real world, this diagram may be able to help.

Imagine this diagram as a dynamic part of your online dating profile. You create it by answering a simple quiz, which measures your sexual personality and lifestyle across 5 categories.…

Laurence Anyways, or WTF ACMI?

31 January 2013 | 6 Comments

I recently saw the film Laurence Anyways at ACMI. It’s a visually stunning and emotionally complex Canadian film (mostly in French with English subtitles) about the relationship between a woman Fred(erique) and a man Laurence who, years into their relationship, tells Fred he feels that he has always been a women mentally and wants to become one physically.

The narrative moves forwards and back in time during the 1980s and 1990s to depict Laurence’s transition to become a woman and the different stages of her on and off relationship with Fred.…

more anti-sex hysteria, slut shaming and sexually based employment discrimination

17 December 2012 | 5 Comments

According to a recent article in the Age newspaper, a Melbourne woman used a Twitter account to share comments about sex and to post photos of herself. Nothing unusual or unlawful in that. The woman is or was a teacher at a Melbourne school. This is largely irrelevant to her personal life, as is her personal sexual expression to her job. I don’t understand why this is ‘news’.

The article indicates that the woman used a pseudonym and did not name her employer, which was sensible, but made reference to her career and the suburb in which she lives and/or works, which was not sensible.…

the meaningless of marriage laws

5 October 2012 | 0 comments

I’ve been getting steadily more bored and disinterested in current discussions about marriage in Australia. The debate about gay marriage is important in terms of equality, and I support equality. What I don’t support is stupidity and pointlessness. I wrote about the pointlessness of marriage laws five years ago and it has become more pointless since then.

Few of the participants in the marriage debate seem to recognise the difference between the social custom and the legal contract.…

men are not to blame for women’s beauty paranoia

16 August 2012 | 8 Comments

Men are commonly blamed by women for forcing them to endure beauty regimes at their expense for men’s benefit. This is nonsense. Women choose their beauty routines of their own accord regardless of the opinions of their male partners (or men in general). Women use symbols of ‘beauty’ to compete with other women for social status.

It is heartening to read the occasional recognition of the reality of this from women. When talking about women’s use of botox in ‘Beauty cuts more than skin deep‘, ethicist Leslie Cannold states:

Radical feminists – and their Christian pseudo-feminist cousins – blame men.

…

the hypocrisy of anti-sex feminism, or why women will never stop men masturbating

14 May 2012 | 6 Comments

The recent article Porn hurts women, so say the partners of users annoyed me greatly. Apart from the usual anti-sex, anti-porn rhetoric, what annoyed me the most was the rampant hypocrisy and double standards it espouses.

The author, Petra Bueskens, critiques Bettina Arndt’s 2011 article Porn is not a dirty word, wherein Arndt discusses men’s use of pornography and their confusion about why women appear to dislike this. Porn is a diverse form of media.…

why is this a crime?

27 April 2012 | 3 Comments

Publishing nude photos of your ex partner on the internet as a form of revenge for them dumping you is terribly unethical behaviour, but apparently it’s not illegal. Nonetheless, in a recent case a man was convicted for publishing an indecent article in the form of nude photos of his former girlfriend that he uploaded to his Facebook profile. He then contacted her to taunt her about it. He violated her trust and her privacy, but this is not a crime either.…