sex
We Were Here, We Were Maybe Queer: New Historical Biographies Tell Us to Get Used to It
Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers—and most infamous tyrants—were getting down with other men. Or so some folks would like us to believe. Historians and posthumous biographers have of late been venturing into the relatively uncharted territory of sexual historiography, exhuming some... Read more »
Student Counsel: Talking Sense with <em>The Education of Shelby Knox</em>’s Creators and Star
Everything’s bigger in Texas, or so the saying goes, and that may be truest in the realm of sex-education controversy. Texas, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, has also been at the forefront of abstinence-only education in... Read more »
Sex, Dreads, and Rock 'n' Roll: Suicide Girls' live nude punks want to be your porn alternative
“People think I have the greatest job in the world,” says “Spooky” Suicide. On any given day, he’s busy coding, designing, or holding up the business end of his website. It doesn’t sound too glamorous—until you realize that his site, Suicide Girls, is probably the best known in a... Read more »
Bad(ass) Brains: An Interview with Filmmaker Marina Zurkow, Creator of the Web's Freaky, Fiesty Cerebelle du Jour, Braingirl
I met Marina Zurkow in 1986 on the set of a horror film called Matt Riker: Mutant Hunt. I was the art director. She was hired to be my assistant. It was an entirely inappropriate crewing decision, typical of the low-low budget B-movie genre. I’d never studied art, never been on a film set,... Read more »
Editors' Letter: Issue 10: "How Do You Feel About Porn?"
When we put this question into our reader survey, we expected a wide variety of responses. And we got them.
"I write it/act in it": 6 percent
"I like to look at it": 36 percent
"It's ok for other people, but it's not my bag": 30 percent
"I don't like it, but what other people do is their... Read more »
Drawn from Memory: an interview with Phoebe Gloeckner, artist, storyteller, freaky mama
“I never intended this book to be published,” writes Phoebe Gloeckner in the introduction to her new collection, A Child's Life and Other Stories. Perusing these finely drawn, mostly autobiographical comic works, which span twenty years, it's not difficult to see why its creator might be... Read more »
Bitch Reads #2
Reviewed in this issue: Defending Pornography, by Nadine Strossen; Gender Wars, by Brian Fawcett; Talk Dirty To Me, by Sallie Tisdale; Going All the Way: Teenage Girls’ Tales of Sex, Romance, and Pregnancy, by Sharon Thompson; and Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out... Read more »
Talkshows: TV's Culture of Categorization
Talk shows are the scariest thing on the planet today. You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? Think about it: not only are they the lowest common denominator of American pop culture, but they’re also—because they’re in the form of “real” people talking about their “real”... Read more »
Magazines We Hate
Esquire’s annual “Women We Love” feature gives with one hand and takes away with the other. Hidden behind the premise of honoring them, the article puts women firmly in their place by using the traditional patriarchal tool of male approval—rewarding certain traits in the female while disparaging... Read more »
Amazon Women on the Moon: Images of Femininity in the Video Age
Like some grizzled old-timer sitting on the porch of the homestead talking about the good old days, I think back to the first time I saw MTV and pity the prepubescents of today who didn’t have the luck to see, as I did, the wonder of MTV when it first aired. I was eight years old, alone in my... Read more »