Bieber may be wearing short pants, but they are not shorts. Wikipedia helpfully reminds me that we have better words for them: culottes, capris, pedal pushers, and clam-diggers. All of which seem like good options when it's this f@%#ing hot.

I'm certainly not the first person to write about this (though I'm flattered you think so); there are a bunch of queer theorists who've written about the relatively conservative (lower-case c) politics of same-sex marriage activism. Essentially, the concern is that we're still unquestioningly accepting the premise…

I wouldn't go so far as to say we should ban religious marriage (any more than we should ban any other religious rite), but it's not a terrible idea to get rid of the special legal status for married couples. And I say this as one half of a gay married couple (though my current state doesn't recognize us as such).

I completely agree that we need to critically assess the cultural contexts in which fantasies about things like rape (probably one of the most common fantasies) are born—if rape culture was less prevalent, if people didn't consume very popular media about the sexiness of aggressiveness, etc., then maybe those…

No one's saying you can't *feel* grossed out, disturbed, etc. by other people's turn-ons, or even that we can't talk critically about those things. I'm just saying that people don't have complete control over what excites them, and that—insofar as fanfic is more like an extension of individuals' fantasies than it is a…

Asexual and sexual people alike could do a lot better with respecting diversity in the amount and type of other people's desires, and that's a feminist issue. Leaders in the mainstream of the asexual visibility/awareness movement have made a point of distinguishing between making it OK for people, asexual or…

People can feel whatever feelings they want to feel. But expressing those feelings in a way that puts down other people's turn-ons because they gross you out is something that people who identify as feminist should think long and hard about.

This isn't my particular kink, so I don't know the fictional universe that well. My point was a more general one—that fanfic is a relatively safe place to explore kinks and turn-ons that we might never actually want to happen in real life, including things that we'd actively politically oppose. That…

The question you posed is a tricky one! On one hand, it's important to have spaces for people to explore their fantasies, especially when those fantasies aren't very visible in mainstream media. On the other hand, when does writing about unsafe, or nonconsensual, or otherwise "bad" sex risk normalizing those…

If there's a depiction of gay sex and someone makes a face and goes "yuck" or mocks it, a lot of people (myself included) would suspect that person was homophobic (or at least, not a very good ally). That doesn't mean all straight allies have to love gay sex, but they should be able to say "Hey, that's not my thing,…

You're right that technically, erotic fanfic is in the public domain and thus fair game for analysis, and it's not without its problems. And I'm an academic, so I'm into analyzing stuff. That said, I'd much prefer to encounter representations of non-consensual sex (or really any kind of sex) in fanfic than in…

You make some good points here, and I don't disagree:

Agreed - one of the really wonderful things about fan fiction is that it lets you combine things that turn you on while avoiding things that bug you, even when in real life those things tend to go together (for example, enjoying the idea of impregnation but being really uninterested in reading about straight…

Yes, socioeconomic status matters for child wellbeing, and yes, adoption can be pretty expensive. However, you're wrong about who the study included (maybe actually read the study before making such broad claims about it?). From their results section:

Actually, the percentage of same-sex couples in the U.S. raising children is highest in the South, the Midwest, and the Mountain West. http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/wp-content/upl…

Not all same-sex couples have their kids via adoption or assisted reproductive technologies. Some have children from previous heterosexual relationships. Some lesbians become pregnant as a result of rape. While, of course, same-sex couples aren't going to have accidental pregnancies together (unlike straight couples),…

I posted this elsewhere, but it's relevant here:

Several people on here are talking about the confounding factor of wanted vs. unplanned pregnancies to account for different outcomes among children raised by straight and gay couples, and I agree that it's something we'd want to control for.

Being a numeric majority doesn't always translate into cultural or political power. There's a huge body of economic and sociological research showing that fat people are disadvantaged in paid work (in wages and in hiring/promotion rates), their parents are less likely to help them pay for college, they're more likely…

Yes, it sometimes/often happens that people make bad decisions when they're drunk, and given two equally culpable parties, it's shitty if one person disproportionately bears the blame.