Sexuality and American Culture

It seems that in popular discourse today, all gay men and lesbians are simply lumped together into one big, gay group and are treated as one collective individual: "the gay community." Whether as students studying their cultural contributions or as politicians attempting to appease them, straight people - and certainly many gay people themselves - have come to view homosexuals as a single, unified entity.

So Vermont just became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage following Iowa a few days ago! (Iowa, of all places!) And in D.C., it is now recognized if performed in another state, just like here in New York. 

We're making progress, but now how long until we have our ideal marriage-free country that we planned in class? ;) 

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/08/us/08vermont.html?_r=1&hp

My hero.

I love her :) 

From Morrison’s Sula and from Stevenson’s essay we do indeed see “sex in the female slave world,” as “part of the culture of adults.”  However, while Stevenson posits that women realize their sexual power in service to their families and communities (Peiss ed., 166), Morrison’s novel shows female slave sexuality to be more about the pursuit of personal pleasure and power. 

In Sula, Toni Morrison imagines a town in which men are deemed valuable and necessary in order to effectively run society. Men must be in charge, and women must remain dependent on them. "You can't act like a man. You can't be walking around all independent-like, doing whatever you like," Nel tells Sula, as she lay on her deathbed (142). Yet, oddly enough, the city of Medallion is, for all intents and purposes, a matriarchy. Men, as individuals, are portrayed as immature, irresponsible, and, in many ways, insignificant.