I Wanna Sext You Up

You learn something new every day, don’t you? Today, I learned the ‘word’ “sexting”. I also had to wonder whether the Fairfax press’s clammy excitement over this tawdry teen fad was just sublimated chortling at that awesome portmanteau word.

Last year I had a brief sextual liaison with a chap who lives in another city, and we managed to text each other in complete sentences, without the use of pictures. But I realise now that this is unusual sextual activity – kind of kinky even, like fucking while blindfolded – because The Age would have us believe that:

a) only teenagers sext, whereas adults are “blind to the trend”;
b) sexting is always a form of cyber-bullying, aimed to coerce and humiliate
c) only females ever circulate sexually explicit images of themselves by phone, so this is only a problem for them

Okay, let’s go through these one by one.

Jessica Valenti Responds To The ‘Jezebel vs The Blogosphere’ Fracas

Dawn Chorister Elmo wrote about the Thinking And Drinking/Slut Machine/Moe/Lizz Winstead interview fallout yesterday, and – having watched the interviews, read the comment flamewars, and the involved parties’ personal responses – I’ve been trying to work out how I feel about it ever since. The media – and the post-fem/anti-fem/sexist portions of the population – like nothing more than to rant about how feminists are fighting with each other, how it’s all dissolved into a massive bitch-fest, and so on. It seems no one can decide whether Moe and Tracie were representing Jezebel, or themselves, or feminism as a whole, or whatever. It’s a minefield.

But I think this closing point from Jessica Valenti’s Feministing piece on the topic sums up where I personally stand on it all:

I deeply care about the way that feminism is portrayed, the ways that feminist issues get talked about and how to create a better world for women. And maybe that makes me some post-hipster too-earnest uncool idealist, but I’d rather be a dork with a cause than a nihilist with a lot of page views.

As one of the commenters on Feministing said, “‘I’d rather be a dork with a cause than a nihilist with a lot of page views.’ And that pretty much says it all. I want that on a t-shirt, for real.” Sign me up for one of them.

Well, I Know When I Think Of Investing, I Think Of Headless Naked Chicks, Too

More sterling work from the photo editors at The Age online, who today give us this little doozy on the front page (down the bottom where they illustrate/advertise their partner sites), this one for InvestSmart:

Sadly we’ll never know (at least until Scooter in tech gets onto it) what or why they were “taking it off”, because clicking the link brings up this sorry little message:

An error has occurred while accessing the requested page.

InvestSMART’s technical support department has been automatically notified of this problem.

Regards
The InvestSMART Team

See, InvestSmart and The Age? Sexism makes the baby internet Jesus cry, too.