Random, like me

Todd Levin is one of the funniest people I know. Sometimes I think he could say anything and make it funny. I love that his work is on a friend of mine's wall. I love that everyone who was there remembers his so-funny-my-face-hurts performances at my last two birthday parties. I love that he was unexpectedly at SXSW and I kept getting these reports on him, even though I'm sad to have missed his dirty storytelling. I love that he writes things like:

I tend to think I am more entrenched in the Internet and online technology than most of my close friends, but at SXSW I sincerely felt like a retarded child who had been given a digital watch for his birthday.

Whether you were there or not, check out his awesome "South by South-BEST" piece at The Morning News.

My favorite part was his made-up but spot-on panels:

“Damn, Girl, I Wish I Were That Scoliosis Brace”: Leaving Comments on Women’s MySpace Profile Pictures and the Art of Seduction

I missed out on the "nuclear tacos" in Austin. I should be scared, but I now see them as a challenge for next year. Who's with me?

I'm gonna start sounding like a broken record, but Rebecca Woolf. Damn. That girl makes me cry. Just so you know, she has two blogs, Girl's Gone Child and Straight from the Bottle.

A review of Hanne Blank's Virgin: An Untouched History, which I look forward to reading. The notes I'd read from her website sounded fascinating, and I quoted Hanne in "The Virgin Non-Suicides" (another column title I didn't write and didn't love, but those near-the-end two columns on virginity are two of my all-time favorites).

"Families, religious authorities, and governments once faced little opposition to the idea that they had a legitimate stake in people's sexual behavior. Now we are increasingly likely to believe that the primary legitimate stakeholder in an individual's sexual life is the individual him- or herself." Our federal government's official recent support for abstinence over contraception troubles Blank, but she takes heart that "perhaps the only thing that is at all clear about this unprecedented legislation of virginity-flavored agitprop is that a politically powerful right wing, faced with the cumulative social change of the last century, has begun to panic in earnest" and that it "may be best understood as a signal of nothing more than a deep-seated terror of change."

See also virginbook.org

Look Both Ways author Jennifer Baumgardner on bisexuality (I've started this but haven't finished it, so will have to save my thoughts for another time, though I suspect I'm not quite so passionate as I once was about labels as I am about getting my own life, personal and professional, sorted out. In other words, I'm not not bi, I just am not as obsessed with sex as I was in my twenties and hence less concerned about what anyone thinks of what I do, or don't do, but that's a bit off the topic.)

Baumgardner credits feminism as a hugely liberating factor in allowing women to consider the option of sapphic love—which she sees, in a way, as a political act. In addition, she focuses on the idea that, as she writes in the intro, “Sexuality isn’t who you sleep with, it’s who you are. It doesn’t change according to who is standing next to you.” That’s a bold notion in a world where lifelong lesbians who fall in love with men inspire eye rolling among their friends, and in which outwardly straight men who enjoy secret gay trysts are shamed into silence. It’s in this way that Look Both Ways tackles yet another bit of bi baggage: invisibility.