With Occasional Music

Seems relevant due to the current tumblr interest gender identity.
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“Sworn virgins” (burrneshas in Albanian) are Albanian women who decide to ignore their female identity and live as men in the Balkans. Photographer Jill Peters traveled to Northern Albania to meet and photograph these women.  The decision to live as men is more related to gender roles in the Albanian culture rather than a statement of sexuality; these women live their lives appearing as men.

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One could persuasively argue that “angry Christians” fueled this controversy, with a lawsuit filed by a Christian legal firm demanding that the city resume its preferential treatment of Christianity each winter. Scores of local Christian churches were unwilling to host the displays on their own property and objected to being on the losing end for one year of a fair and impartial allocation system. Indeed, one might conclude that it is the Christians, not the atheists, who seem to insist on being unreasonable and militant in reaction to being held to the same standard as other beliefs.

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So, scientists do find some differences, but they have largely failed to link these to differences in men’s and women’s observed emotions, cognition,  or behavior.  That is, we’ve found some differences, but we have no proof that they translate into anything. Moreover, new research suggests that differences we observe may be designed not to create differences between men and women, but to reduce them.  The brain may have two strategies for achieving the same outcome or one difference may compensate for another.  (For more, see Brain Gender by Melissa Hines.)

That’s one reason why Venker is wrong.

The second reason is even more damning.  Most of the research attempting to explain gender difference assumes that there differences to explain.   In fact, meta-analyses aimed at summarizing the literature on human sex differences and similarities in traits, personality, cognitive abilities, sexuality, temperament, and motor skills offer better evidence for similarity than difference.  On the vast majority of traits, men and women overlap tremendously.

It’s not these fetishes define geek sexuality — far from it. I’m just saying that you see them a lot. Which isn’t too surprising, given that many of the SF stories geeks love are full of psychic mind sex, futuristic orgies on giant halo worlds controlled by AI, robots who are “fully functional,” shirtless vampires, magically sex-powered detectives, and of course ladies and gentlemen who wear nothing but teeny leather straps as they ride on the backs of wild Martian snake-dragons. I’m not naming any names here, but you know what I’m talking about. Science fiction is full of sex that goes way beyond vanilla missionary position stuff, and that reflects a certain amount of tolerance for kink in the wider geek world generally.

Percentage of men who say they would have an affair if they knew they would never get caught 74%

Percentage of women who say they would have an affair if they knew they would never get caught 68%

The gist:

Today, I want to add a bit more nuance to the identity prosumption model. Specifically, I want to demonstrate that sites of identity prosumption (both online and offline) affect the identity prosumption process in non-uniform ways. I focus here on two key variations: collective vs. individualist orientation, and degree of control over identity meanings. I explore these variations through a comparison of two identity prosumption sites: Facebook and FetLife. The former is the preeminent social network platform, the latter an (ironically) mainstream social network site for people who like BDSM. To employ a twist on the Hipster trope, “FetLife: you’ve probably heard of it.”

These are good sites for comparison because they maintain quite similar formats (FetLife is crafted quite noticeably in the format of Facebook, including profiled content, “love” buttons, friend requests, and a ticker style newsfeed), but with different foci that hold key identity implications.