This is interesting, particularly in the context of the recent flurry of studies of Virago Press, Lucy Delap, Feminist Business Praxis and Spare Rib Magazine, in what I see is a themed journal issue on feminist publishing, which appears to be Open Access, right-on, sisters! and also to included work on some of the UK feminist publishers that weren' ( Read more... )

Okay, the article itself is pretty much on the side of It's All More Complicated:
Who Killed the ‘Female Pleasure Button’? In 1998, a North Carolina doctor accidentally discovered a device that could make women cum at the drop of a hat. Two decades later, we've got nothing to show for it. This is the long, strange story of the Orgasmatron.
(Me, I ( Read more... )

Overlooked No More: Eve Adams, Writer Who Gave Lesbians a Voice: 'Her 1925 book, “Lesbian Love,” is one of the earliest examples of American lesbian literature. She also ran Eve’s Hangout, a literary haunt in Manhattan': Her “Lesbian Love,” a collection of short stories and illustrations, was published in February 1925. Written under the pseudonym ( Read more... )

- if not really directly related.
The Queer Case of Catherine/Giovanni Vizzani Vizzani’s story is one of several featuring persons assigned female at birth, but who, at some point in their lives, decided to wear men’s clothing and “pass” as men. If and when those persons decided to marry a woman and live with her as husband and wife, they were ( Read more... )

If you have a section of the archive which is held back or marked 'highly secret' 'closed until the crack o'doom' etc. And of course if stuff is Not There it excites slavering conspiracy theories...
(Will cop to in one early job of mine being given the job of looking through a series of files which had been given such a high security classification ( Read more... )

What I read
Re-read Courtney Milan, Once Upon a Marquess (2015), After the Wedding (2018), and Mrs Martin's Incomparable Adventure (2019).
Rachel Hope Cleves, Unspeakable: A Life beyond Sexual Morality (2020) about the writer Norman Douglas, who is also a case study in changing sexual mores and understandings around sexuality, and partly just what ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Conflict Is Not Abuse, which was interesting, though there were several parts where I was going 'Melanie Klein and the paranoid-schizoid position, what?' and feeling that Klein might have been useful to the thought-patterns and emotional problems she was discussing. But that might be me.
Anyway, after that it was Ben ( Read more... )

The obvious answer, in this case, and in all previous iterations, is (hat-tip to Dame Rebecca): 'Men are poor stuff. Men are terribly poor stuff'.
I came across this week some columnist in some conservative organ* a-woezering about wymmynyz these days, who are not only not getting married -
- and we remark that somebody who thinks that *OMG ( Read more... )

Happy 117th birthday, Barbara Hepworth - the video to go with today's celebratory Google Doodle.
***
I was initially cynical about an interview with a sexual psychophysiologist and neuroscientist but it's wonderfully It's All More Complicated about simplistic views about sexuality, sexual arousal, ideas of the gendered brain and patterns of arousal ( Read more... )

Apparently there is some manifestation of women in popular music being explicit about female sexual pleasure? and wow, there is pulling out of fainting couches and waving of smelling salts.
Like this has never happened before?
Okay, apparently 'dirty blues', popular in the interwar period, had something of a revival in the sixties, was mostly ( Read more... )