Tweeting, Barebacking, and More

• Thanks to William Bradley for the link to an article about a man who tweeted the argument he was forced to overhear at a Burger King in Boston.  The article's author argues that the argument should not have been made public on Twitter, and many of those who left comments agree.  I disagree, though there are too many reasons to get into why.  I just don't get why people are shocked when things done in public are made public.  Since the Rodney King beating, we know that cameras and recoding devices are everywhere, and that was before we were even talking about social media.  It's funny that so many are upset that this was made public on Twitter, but if this fight had led to the murder or assault of one member of the couple by the other, he'd be a hero for documenting what led to the crime.  We can't have it both ways.
• I love how the last paragraph of this article about some of the problems that have occurred at various occupy sites puts sexual assaults at the same level as peeing in a bottle.  We were in the middle of the power outage when a women's only tent was created at Occupy Wall Street because some women felt the park wasn't safe, so I don't know if anyone has been talking about that or if it has been kept quiet so representation of the movement stays entirely positive.
• John Hodgins tweeted a link to this great article on happiness.  It's a lot of common sense, but it's also concise, clear, and something I think I should read daily.
• I was really happy to see such an extensive article about sex parties and barebacking in SF Weekly, but I did feel compelled to leave this comment at the site: "As someone who has been around and having sex since the 80s, who lost my first husband to AIDS as well as numerous friends, I really can't believe we're still having this discussion. People were having sex without condoms way before any porn company had videos showing it, way before barebacking was a word, and way before we had even a tenth of the drugs we have now to combat HIV. If you condemn the practice, it will not disappear. It will just go further underground. Shaming people about their sexual practices (when it's consenting adults with consenting adults) will lead to nothing but more pain, death, and conflict. Lots and lots of people have sex with condoms. Lots of lots of people do not. I'd rather have conversations than point fingers and say the government should step in and do something to 'those people.'"  I've left other comments, too, in response to what some people have said to me, but it's all the same kind of conversation we all usually have on this subject, and that's sad, really.

from Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner's "Sex in Public"

Word, part two.

"Respectable gays like to think that they owe nothing to the sexual subculture they think of as sleazy. But their success, their way of living, their political rights, and their very identities would never have been possible but for the existence of the public sexual culture they now despise" (Berlant and Warner 563).

from Donald E. Hall's Reading Sexualities

Word.

"We in sexuality studies need such place-holding utopias--ones in which wide-ranging sexual diversity is valued highly, in which explorations of possible mutabilities in sexual desire (self-generated, theoretically generated, and simply temporally inevitable) are discussed energetically, in which the many ways that people engage in consensual erotic relationships are appreciated--and we need a mechanism to get us there: a missionary-like zeal for conversing among ourselves and with those who differ from us. We also need the intellectual quickness, flexibility, and tenacity to weather setbacks, shift tactics, and allow ourselves and our goals to alter in active dialogue with others. Marketplace acceptance nad token media visibility, though useful, should never suffice as the telos or our work--they are simply a side benefit" (Hall 15).