There is nothing romantic about a relationship in which you have to sublimate everything you are in order to be with someone else. There is nothing romantic about misery and despair and pain and being vaguely afraid of somebody you live with. Yes, when you’re a teenager things like that seem romantic, because sadness is powerful and anyway everybody at 15 is like a squirrel in a paint can anyway, but there’s a reason we grow out of that, or should.

There’s pretty much no way to be perfect when accusing the powerful of behaving badly. But even when you’re so demonstrably correct (and your abuser so demonstrably dumb) that our dim-bulb punditry has no choice but to back you up, they still manage to get a few licks in at your expense.

In a perfectly “free” labor market, everyone theoretically has the right to exchange work for commensurate compensation. But a free market is not necessarily a just one. And when the commodity is sex, how free is too free?

Sex work, and its attendant culture wars, have moved over time from traditional brothels of urban lore to online marketplaces, raising new questions about private and public freedom. In the digital world, how should trust and power be negotiated between provider and client, both encircled by systemic gender and economic inequities?

I recall how stunned I was as a teenager when I bought a used paperback copy of Fredrick Kohner’s novel Gidget with a photo of Sandra Dee on the cover. Though I had grown up with Gidget–my stepfather wrote the Gidget movies’ theme songs and incidental music, I had watched the TV show reruns as a little girl, we lived just minutes from the beach, and friends of mine surfed–I didn’t know that Gidget was (loosely) based on the adventures of the author’s daughter in the summer of 1956.

Washington’s Old Boys’ club still has its knickers in a wad over the deficit “compromise,” but women across the country can breathe a slight sigh of relief this week. The White House just issued health reform guidelines that will mandate insurance plans to provide birth control to women at no extra cost. The measure is long overdue, part of an array of preventive services recommended by the Institute of Medicine for improving women’s health. But the promise of broader contraceptive access coincides fittingly with the debate over the nation’s budget woes, because birth control is an economic issue.

In this new book, Kathleen Barry turns her attention as a sociologist to the plight of men trapped in a system which creates and maintains what she calls “core masculinity.” This concept of core masculinity can be summarized this way (and of course I expect that Kathleen will answer questions about it in our chat) that men are trained to take on the role of protector of women and to dominate them from this position.

A government can say they are taking a holistic approach to something like the ‘war on terror’ but that does not mean that they are actually doing it. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice has a new report out showing just how poorly the United States is doing in this area.

Calling attention to how the US government’s counter-terrorism measures impact women and sexual minorities (those in the LGBTI community), the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) has released a report that suggests the USG government cannot continue to claim it is taking a “holistic” approach to countering terrorism while at the same time failing to address how the so-called “war on terrorism” impacts women, men and sexual minorities differently.

I went through a country music phase a few years ago. Yes, even with Toby Keith and all that stupid “boot in your ass, it’s the American Way” nonsense country was into back when the wars were all new and shiny. I just got so sick of pop music boys whining about how “you left me, and I’m so sad, and won’t you come back” and other pathetic crap.

So apparently if you are a girl in your early 20s, by no means should you be interested in politics, and certainly don’t engage politicians via social media. If you must do both those things, at least have the grace to be hideous by the standards of conservative attack chihuahuas and mainstream society. And if you should happen to be attractive, for God’s sake don’t take pictures of yourself looking that way! Fug it up a little. Braid your hair. Put on glasses. That always makes hot chicks in movies look ugly and studious.