There’s a prevailing myth in our culture that gay men are all, inevitably, into varying kinds of sexual freakery. (Lesbians, of course, never have any kind of sex at all.) This myth no doubt helps to perpetuate anti-gay bias. But how grounded is it in reality?
Researchers have recently undertaken a massive study in which 24,787 gay men were polled about their most recent sexual encounters. Some of the amazingly non-lurid details to emerge from the results include:
– Gay men are most likely to have sex at their home (and the next most likely location is the home of their partner)
– They are most likely to have sex with their partner
– The most commonly reported sexual activities are “kissing on the mouth” and “oral sex”
The feminist author Naomi Wolf has criticised the erosion of the right to public protest in the United States after she was arrested alongside Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in New York.
Wolf was led away in handcuffs after addressing protesters outside an awards ceremony held to honour New York’s governor, at which she was a guest.
…
She told the Guardian on Wednesday: “When I came out, the protesters had been pushed across the street. This happens in Britain, too, with kettling. Police keep inventing this right to barricade people in and tell people where to protest, but in the United States this is wrong: it’s against the first amendment rights of freedom of assembly.
“So I walked over to where they were – they were backed up against the wall. Police said there was a permit saying they couldn’t walk on the sidewalk. There was this giant phalanx of police.”
After discussing the issue with officers, Wolf said she established that the event’s permit did not prevent people from walking on the sidewalk outside the venue. Along with a small number of other protesters, she started to pace up and down the sidewalk.
“Then, a huge group of men in white shirts, who seem to be affiliated to the New York police department, but who are not self-evidently so – bigger and fitter than the rank-and-file blue-shirted officers – came in droves. About 30 or 40 of these men appeared.
“They got a megaphone – which the protesters are told is illegal – and they started shouting that we were illegally disrupting an event and we should disperse.”
Wolf said she “calmly” disputed the order with one of the officers in white shirts, who are more senior than those in blue shirts. “By this time I was surrounded by them. One of them asked me if I was going to get out of his way. I didn’t think consciously that I couldn’t step away, but I froze. My conscience froze me.”
Officers then detained Wolf, and took her to a precinct where she said she spent about half an hour in a cell. Her partner, the film producer Avram Ludwig, was also arrested. Both were later released with a summons for “refusing a lawful order”.
To be more serious for a moment, the clip seems scary to me. It turns out that one cannot conduct a calm argument with the police. If you are wrong, you can get arrested.
Far worse than being an undergraduate in a logic course.
Feminist Philosophers 