Hullo there! I haven’t posted much for a while, so it looks as though I haven’t been writing anything. In actual fact I have been writing furiously indeed, as well as having various related investigative adventures. You can read one of the fruits of my recent labours – a (hilariously illustrated) seven-step guide to becoming a sex researcher - in the October edition of the King’s Tribune. If you have a subscription, that is!* Otherwise you’ll be rudely cut off at step three, which is sad since that’s exactly the point at which both penises and sampling come in. The solution to this problem is of course to support independent and not-boring media and subscribe!
Also up in that there October issue is a typically hilarious Helen Razer piece on Naomi Wolf’s (book) Vagina. And speaking of Naomi Wolf and her vag:
It’s kind of embarrassing, and not a little ironic, that a woman who now rails indiscriminately against hook-ups and porn, who claims to have met Jesus and who uses phrases like “goddess array”, had an enormous effect on the development of my sexual, uhm, philosophies? When I was about 15 my mother gave me Promiscuities, one of Wolf’s lesser-known books. It’s mostly an autobiographical account of Wolf’s own sexual coming-of-age, and despite the generational difference, her stories and her message really resonated with me as a teenager in the 1990s. I read it several times before passing it around to some of my Catholic school girlfriends. I no longer remember exactly what its argument was, and nor am I certain that I grasped all of its nuances at the time. If I read it again, I’m doubt I’d still like it, but I can hardly overstate the influence it had on me right at that critical moment. It might have just been one big reading comprehension error, but the message I picked up and ran with was that I could enjoy and own my sexuality and a big fuck off to anyone who didn’t like it, or who was “concerned” about me. Hence all those hook-ups Naomi is now so down on! It’s a funny old world.
PS. If you’re interested and didn’t make it along, here’s a podcast of me, Felix Scholz, Lisa-Skye and Karen Pickering discussing sex and feminism at Cherchez La Femme last month: http://lavoix.com.au/cherchez-la-femme/podcasts/
PPS. I’m posting from an internet cafe and the guy next to me just placed a very loud Skype call to the Australian Sex Party, looking for a preference list for the Melbourne City Council election. It is a confluence of deviancy in here!
* Or are fucking me
NW isn’t the first one-time youthful radical to suddenly discover at 40 that traditions are fine and maybe young people do need to respect the ways of their elders a bit better.