Rentboy.com, Sexism, and “End Demand”

Have you been following the news about the raid on the Rentboy.com offices? Rentboy was a website designed to connect trans and cisgender male escorts with clients. Two days ago, police arrested the CEO and six staffers, charging them with promoting prostitution. When we compare the way that Rentboy is being talked about compared to […]

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Pro-Voice: A New Approach to Abortion

Abortion is a difficult topic to talk about, and not just because the experience can stir up a lot of challenging emotions. It’s hard to talk about because the two main sides to the cultural arguments about it don’t have much common ground. The anti-abortion folks (I refuse to call the pro-life until I see […]

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What Affirmative Consent Looks Like

It’s been really excited to see the progress of California Senate Bill 967. If it gets signed, it will require all universities that receive financial aid to use a standard of “affirmative consent” in disciplinary hearings about sexual assault. In a nutshell, it shifts things from “did anyone say no?” to “did everyone say yes?” […]

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End Demand Is Bad For Sex Workers

One of the most disheartening shifts I’ve seen in the political battles around sex work is the growing trend for various jurisdictions to shift towards a version of the Nordic Model, in which buying sexual services is illegal. While it’s a minor improvement over arresting sex workers, it’s an incredibly flawed and overly simplistic approach. […]

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Why Men Need to Learn How to Not Be “That Guy”

Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville wrote a piece today about why she thinks that straight men shouldn’t write articles or blogs telling other men how to not be creepy. She makes some good points, though I think she also misses some key points. Her first argument is that when men talk about creepiness, they tend […]

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My Introduction To Rape Culture

I remember exactly when I first understood what “rape culture” meant. I was nineteen and a sophomore in college. I was talking with a woman I knew about gender and sexual politics, and I just wasn’t getting it. She was describing what it was like for her to move through the world as a woman, […]

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Unpaid Emotional Labor

The amazing Alex Morgan posted this on Facebook today: Post by Alex S. Morgan. I don’t think there’s any doubt that had this driver’s passenger been a cisgender man, he’d never have dared to pull something like that. But there’s more to this that needs to be unpacked. It’s disturbingly common for men try to […]

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