Men are Pigs, and the Internet is for Porn? My World Comes Crashing Down.

Over the course of the last five months, Sex Like Men was at a standstill. No new posts, no comments, no sign that it would ever live again. And yet, during these same five months, one Friday in February to be precise, 1,220 people read my post on Vanessa Hudgens. That day was an extreme, but pretty much every day that particular post gets me more attention than anything else on this blog (although Marina’s nice plug did shift the numbers recently: thanks!) The great pity is that this post isn’t even a good one! It’s not analytical, certainly not profound, but something more like filler. Of course, most of the people who’ve landed up there don’t mind. They’re weren’t necessarily looking for analysis, so much as pictures of Vanessa Hudgens naked. That brings us to one of the more disturbing features of the blogging world: the ability to track the search terms people were using when they stumbled upon your site:

“vanessa hudgens”; “vanessa hudgens naked”; “vanessa hudgens naked pictures”; “sex fuck girls naked”; “sex children girls”; “vanessa hudgens pics”; “vanessa hudgens sex”; “naked vanessa hudgens”; “men who want to watch young girles have”; “pigtails sex”; “lesbians having sex naked”; “vanessa”; “women sex party”; “vanessa hudgens naked pics”; “girls watch men have sex”

I know. The name of this blog is Sex Like Men. There was bound to be some confusion. Which is exactly what concerns me–that, despite my wish not to judge people’s desires, I’m terribly dismayed every time I read these search terms. Is this really what people look for on the Internet? Obviously it is, and the truth is that I just didn’t want to know.

Abstinence: Close Your Eyes and Think of Gandhi

Sure, I’ll admit it. Sex Like Men has been out of commission. But that was before a spokesperson for the anti-sex campaign went and employed my phrase, in the goddamn New York Times Magazine (you’ll remember them from that classic piece, “The Kids Call It Hooking Up”). This most recent article features Harvard student and abstinence-crusader Janie Fredell, who argues that:

“Conventional feminism teaches that control of your body means the freedom to have sex without consequences — sex like a man. ‘I am an unconventional feminist,’ Fredell said, in the sense that she asserts control by choosing not to have sex — by telling men, no, absolutely not.”

While abstinence-only programs are federally funded and touted by many of the nation’s leaders as the only moral choice, on a conventional college campus in the Northeast, the public decision to abstain from sex can be a lonely road. But Janie had coping mechanisms of her own: “To bolster herself, she often thought of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.”