Inventory: A family affair, burlesque, hockey night in Canada, and the Big Apple

I can't believe the past week. We wrapped up the first half of our MPub second semester, the Olympics are here, and the lunar new year is here. This weekend, 30 family members descended on my grandma's house from all over the world to celebrate Chinese New Year. Some of them, I haven't seen for more than a decade. It's surreal to think that this might be the last time that we all get together in one room. Our families are getting bigger and we're also moving to different countries and continents. Before, you could contain us in Toronto and Vancouver.

We've been catching up, throwing down, and filling up. Last night, some of us went to see an Olympics women's hockey match between China and Finland. The Chinese goalie was incredible. She blocked all but 2 out of 48 shots on goal. And while the Chinese team only got 4 shots, they scored one shorthanded.

I'm now detoxing from five days spent eating greasy food, sugary treats, and far too much imbibing. But the party is winding down. My brother's already left and my uncles and cousins are leaving over the next few days.

On Friday, I'm heading to New York to meet my future colleagues at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference. The wonderful Ms. Katerina Ortakova is going to be my partner in crime, as we learn about the ultimate in geekery: books and computers.

I'm also looking forward to going to the New York Public Library's main branch on Bryant Park and spending a dorky hour touring the building; it's going to be a bibliophilic orgasm. Also, a meeting is in the works to spend some time at the Esquire offices in the Hearst building.

No more posts until I'm back in Vancouver but follow me @megan_lau for the latest. I will blog a lot about what I'm eating, it is always one of the huge highlights of being in the city (suggestions, anyone?).

When I get back, I'll be working with Sad Mag to put together Issue 3, our black and white issue, featuring cover girl and burlesque superstar Crystal Precious. It's going to be sexy, beautiful, and revealing.

................

Vancouver events you can't miss:

February 19: Queerbash No. 4 at the Wise Hall. This is Vancouver's wildest dance party (it looks a little something like this). Queer Bash is a queer focused dance party and a non-profit with a emphasis on fun, art and community. This month's theme is Gamers vs. Flamers: "Techno Nerds. Torch-bearers. Flaming Queens. Video Junkies. Muscle Marys. Celebrate or Condemn those Games by being as queer as can be."

For more info, see the Queerbash blog

March 19: Sad Mag Party No. 3 at the Anza Club. Cheap beer, Vancouver's finest undiscovered performers, and creative folk come together for dancing, celebration, and free magazines.

More info to come in March.

Writing about Sex

WEEEEEEEEEEKEND! Why don't we kick off your Wet Hot Canadian summer with an excerpt from the latest issue of Harper's by Wallace Shawn? In this piece, "Writing about Sex," Mr. Shawn asks you to take your clothes off for the good of humanity.

My local newspaper, the New York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people. Many of its readers might enjoy it much more if it did, but those same readers still might not buy it if such images were in it, because it could no longer present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate world--a world not ideal but still good enough--which it is the function of the Times to present every day. Nudity somehow implies that anything could happen, but the Times is committed to telling its readers that many things will *not* happen, because the world is under control, benevolent people are looking out for us, the situation is not as bad as we tend to think, and although problems do exist, they can be solved by wise rulers. The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the world we know.

But perhaps it would be a good thing if people saw themselves as a part of nature, connected to the environment in which they live. Sex can be a humbling, equalizing force.... When the sexuality of the terrifying people we call "our leaders" is for some reason revealed, they lose some of their power--sometimes all of it--because we're reminded (and, strangely, we need reminding) that they are merely creatures like the ordinary worm or beetle that creeps along the edge of the pond.

Read the rest of the essay on Harper's website (get your credit card out) or in Shawn's forthcoming book, Essays.

[Basically copied from The Awl's newsletter]

The Joy of Sex in 2009

A podcast from the New Yorker about the history of The Joy of Sex and a review of the 2008 edition. Right click to download.

Author Ariel Levy says that writing about sex and culture is like writing about money because it's "a way to talk about everything. When people talk about sex, they talk about what they feel about family, responsibility, and monogamy and their balance between their personal need for adventure and independence and security and stability." How true!

The hilarious accompanying slideshow can be found here.

Left: "Charles Manson having sex with a pretty lady"

Lynn Barber has something to say to you young women

Barber, regular contributor to the Guardian and former contributor to Penthouse offers her opinion.

I was brought up to believe, and still believe, that who you marry is the most important choice you make in life. Does that make me anti-feminist? I don't think so, because I believe it's as true for men as it is for women. You can't be happy if you're married to the wrong person.

Being older and already married, I could only watch with bemusement as feminism went through its florid evolutionary stages in the Seventies - the 'all men are rapists' phase, the Andrea Dworkin compulsory boiler suit phase, the bra-burning, picketing Miss World phase, the sitting-in-a-circle-inspecting-your-vagina-in-a-mirror phase. But I was very aware in the Eighties of the 'having it all' phase when women were supposed to 'juggle' career and motherhood. I was aware of it because I was actually doing it at the time but I never thought juggling babies was a good idea. What it actually involved was permanent exhaustion and permanent guilt.

The problem for young women is, as it always has been, an economic one - that just when they need to be pushing ahead with their careers and earning decent money is also when they need to be having babies. It worries me that so many young women now choose to defer the babies, thinking they can somehow magic them up by IVF when they are in their forties. Often they can't, so they have no children to console them when their much-vaunted careers end in redundancy. In an ideal society, I believe, couples would have children young, preferably in their early twenties, when they're energetic and flexible enough to live on little money, and then start the serious career-building in their thirties when the children are at school. The present recession might actually make that easier - if there are no careers for 20-somethings to pursue, they might think it is quite a good idea to have babies instead.

Excuse me, I have to go have babies now because I don't have a job.

Sex, Part III

Now, it's obvious that if you watch Friends or Gossip Girl, you love God (or pretend to), and you are a teen girl, you are pregnant:

Teenagers who watch a lot of television featuring flirting, necking, discussion of sex and sex scenes are much more likely than their peers to get pregnant or get a partner pregnant, according to the first study to directly link steamy programming to teen pregnancy.

The study, which tracked more than 700 12-to-17-year-olds for three years, found that those who viewed the most sexual content on TV were about twice as likely to be involved in a pregnancy as those who saw the least.
....
Among the 718 youths who reported being sexually active during the study, the likelihood of getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant increased steadily with the amount of sexual content they watched on TV, the researchers found. About 25 percent of those who watched the most were involved in a pregnancy, compared with about 12 percent of those who watched the least. The researchers took into account other factors such as having only one parent, wanting to have a baby and engaging in other risky behaviors.
....
Among the shows the teens watched were "Sex and the City," "Friends" and "That '70s Show." Chandra would not identify the others but stressed that they included dramas, comedies, reality shows and even animated programs on broadcast and cable networks.

"We don't want to single out any individual programs," Chandra said.

[Yo, Chandra. You just did]

--Rob Stein, Washington Post

So This Is Why Red-Staters Are So Angry

A colleague (I won't reveal his name) was up late last night watching "Thelma and Louise" on Lifetime. During a commerical break, an ad for Trojan's Vibrating Touch fingertip massager for women came on. Naturally, my colleague's journalistic curiosity was piqued and he rushed to the website mentioned for more info. (Hey, in these final stressful days of the campaign, a man's gotta do what he's gotta do to stay distracted.)

Reading the Vibrating Touch blog (this just gets better and better, doesn't it?) he noticed complaints from women living in Texas that they were unable to purchase the product. Probing further, he discovered that the sale of Vibrating Touch is prohibited in a number of states: Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia. And apparently, the folks at Trojan have received their share of disappointed emails from frustrated women in these states, because, on the Vibrating Touch FAQ page, one can find this exchange:

Q. I can’t purchase the Trojan Her Pleasure Vibrating Touch fingertip massager in my state. Why?

A. We’re sorry, but some states prohibit the sale of products such as these.
These states are Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia.

Wow. How sad is that? In these stressful times, how cruel must a state be to refuse its female residents "products such as these"?

But, alas, it's true. As I promised my righteously outraged and perplexed colleague, I did a quick Google search on the matter and pulled up random episodes from the frontlines of sexual repression, including this strange tale of law enforcement run amok, in which a former fifth grade teacher and mother of three was busted in Texas for selling a vibrator to undercover cops posing as a "dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid." (Now there's a fine use of police resources.)

These are real laws, people--some of which have been tested and upheld in recent years, such as the Mississippi Supreme Court's 2004 decision not to overturn a state ban on the sale or distribution of “three-dimensional devices designed or marketed primarily for the stimulation of human genitalia.” As if life in Mississippi weren't hard enough. (And, yeah, I lived there for a time, so save your indignant hate mail.)

All I can say is, I know what I'm getting all my red-state friends and family for Christmas.

It seems blues really do have more fun.

--Michelle Cottle, The New Republic