Objectify This

The American Dream has great power. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an American social ideal that stresses egalitarianism and especially material prosperity”; but this is incomplete. The American Dream is also bound up in those four words, “the pursuit of happiness,” an “unalienable right” guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson and Franklin elided our right [...]

Since I’m getting some traffic from Ms. Chen, I’ll make it easier to find the post she refers to: Here’s a discussion of sex columnists and sex blogging, called Carrie On: Sex and the College Sex Column, and here’s a Vindication of the Rights of Sexbloggers. The argument (whose title is drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft’s [...]

According to Micheal Magee, “Poems are, like, total bullshit unless they are/squid or popsicles or deer piled/on elk in the trunk of David Hasselhoff’s/cutlass Sierra.” That’s pretty much the spirit of the first poetry movement of the 21st century: semi-dadist riffing with Googleian specifics. It’s an interesting metaphor for modern consciousness– globalization has brought the [...]

Are spicy things sexy? Well, it’s hard to say, really. Not here in America Latina, por lo menos. There are separate words for hot (caliente) and spicy (picante) and while caliente has overt sexual overtones, picante generally does not. . . at least in the places where I’ve lived. Then again, Colombia and Costa Rica [...]

In the past, women who experienced rape or sexual assault were faced with the immediate decision of whether or not to prosecute, even as they still reeled from the trauma of violation, which is often manifested as post-traumatic stress disorder. This was necessary because any action such a woman took following her rape, such as [...]

College is a place where people talk about sex. Most have sex, too, of course, but everyone talks about it: sex in general, their friends’ sex, the sex presumably causing the moaning that they can hear through the flimsy wall. The talk about sex is sometimes writing about sex. After Sarah Jessica Parker’s portrayal of [...]