The Lady Garden

Interesting things we found around the internet this week.

The English Obscene Publications Act looks under threat after a jury failed to convict a man for selling gay pornography.

Peacock said customers “asked me for specific titles or niches, and knew exactly what they were getting”. The jury decided that the audience could not be “depraved and corrupted” by material it had actively sought out…

“Normal jurors did not consider representations of consensual adult sexuality would deprave and corrupt the viewer.”

(This doesn’t, of course, damage the police’s ability to bring charges under Britain’s Extreme Pornography legislation, which is basically written to precisely target BDSM porn.)

Over in the US, there’s a lot of attention focussing on getting rid of obscenity. (That link is SFW.) Apparently porn not only leads to violence against women, but also destruction of the sanctity of marriage. Here’s some things people could do if they actually wanted to protect marriage, and not just be holier-than-thou bigots.

Meanwhile, OH MY GOD, the Girl Scouts, they be scary! Look at them, letting a girl into their organisation!

On a similar note, want to use a public toilet in Tennessee? Did you bring your birth certificate?

“It’s lying, cheating, money, and sex. Might make a nice story.”

An interesting insight into the fashion industry.

It would take a hundred years of Fashion’s Night Out to convince most people that the industry is not a collection of snobs whispering to each other about how fat and ugly everybody else is. Nicolette Mason, a friend of mine and writer for Marie Claire and Vogue Italia, reassures me in an email that “to address the market of lower and middle income individuals – who so often are left out of the fashion equation – and address that they have needs and a desire to be fashionable is not just smart, but progressive (maybe even radical).

At Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory looks at the “sexual counter-revolution” through the lens of the current GOP candidate debates.

Does Abstinence-Only Sex Education Encourage Bullying in Schools? I’m (Emma) unconvinced, but it’s an interesting argument.

Same-sex marriage is, as we know, legal in Canada. Right? Right?

The end is Naenae on The Men Who Hate Women.

As someone who is emphatically a “Miss”, this sort of thing fucks me (Tallulah) off no end. Seriously. Instead of banning it, how about we just get into the habit of asking women what they want to be called? Or get rid of honorifics altogether? (For the record, I have no problem with Ms. And I understand the point of it. It should not matter whether a woman is married or single. The reason I choose to be called Miss is that I don’t believe it _does_ matter that I am single, and therefore, I don’t care if anyone knows it.)

Margaret Cho on hitting back against the haters, and how everybody is deserving of love.

I want to defend the children that we still are inside, the fragile sensitive souls who no matter how much we tried were still told we were not good enough. I want to make the world safe and better and happy for us. We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay. I am no saint, but I am here for you and me. I am here for us, and I am doing the best I can.

“…The quest to become the first female president leads to a level of personal scrutiny that bordered on sexist.” Bordered? BORDERED?

On digging around for someone’s legal name, c/f the name they would like to be known by: ‘They’ is me.

And for anyone who persists in calling women “the weaker sex”…well, could you stand en pointe on someone’s head?