Comment

Thursday Night Music: Steve Vai, 'Juice'

10
Steffan6/18/2009 8:43:28 pm PDT

I don’t think I want to know what’s going on here:

Toward a ‘culturally cliterate’ family law?

Sexual desire and sexual activity long have played central roles in family law, rationalizing its rules, informing its policies, and animating any number of calls for reform. Since the 1970s, gender equality has also become a salient value in family law - purporting to correct legally imposed double standards of the past. Yet, despite the conceptual centrality of sexual desire and sexual activity, family law says nothing explicit about sexual pleasure. And despite the salience of gender equality in contemporary family law, the field remains preoccupied with performances that produce heterosexual men’s orgasms while ignoring or rejecting women’s interest in orgasmic pleasure. As a result, family law today is marked by fundamental omissions and inconsistencies.

The article goes on to describe a “culturally despised body part.” Three guesses which part - the first two guesses don’t count.

To be honest, there are a host of women who have been maimed by what is euphemistically called “female circumcision,” but the feminist euphenism for this event is beyond my gag factor.