While I am writing, the question of same-sex marriage is still a heated debate in most parts of the US (currently eclipsed by healthcare, of course), and will probably remain as such for the next few years (hopefully, not more). The debate has always struck me as a curious test for the imagined integrity of the law: not simply the US Constitution, but the heternormative law as a system that is precisely codified as a difference from what it fa...

There is a memorable scene in the film Logan’s Run (Michael Anderson, 1976), in which Logan 5 (Michael York), in his jovial state of idleness, teleports a series of potential female partners from the community-run circuit (meat market). When a woman of his fancy is finally beamed into his apartment (whose name is revealed later on in the film as Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter)), Logan welcomes her with open arms, “Let’s have sex!”

I just received from the university counsel, almost a year after the events, a copy of an anonymous denunciation of me sent to my dean by some cowardly scumbag writing on behalf of “Concerned Graduate Students” from the e-mail address “jazzsmith55@yahoo.com.” Alluding darkly to “what happened to one of our graduate student friends” (unnamed, of course), the letter informed the dean that “you should know that Professor Saussy sleeps with his s...

Best known as a novelty catalog of unusual sex positions, the Kama Sutra is in fact much more than that. When read start to finish, it seems to offer rules for all of life.

To be frank, I could never say no to a skank. I’ve known many virgins. As lovers they stank. I’m not one to rue the wine I once drank; For most of my fun there’ve been skanks to thank. &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Loose-limbed, leering, slinky and lank -- &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I prize the bad pupil who’s courting a spank. &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp No thought how dank the dungeon, how ripe or rank, &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp When I ask why not — -- — ...

I was talking the other day with a scholar whose work changed the face of American feminism in the 1980s, and who was part, more generally, of the wave of feminist theory and criticism that swept through the academy, the courts, and society in general in that era. “What ever happened to feminism?” I asked her. I meant the question, though of course at some level I know very well what happened to it: much of its energy went into gen...

Barely time to do anything this morning, so I'm just going to point you, instead, to this piece in the New York Times about the life of a boy in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who has been beaten, mocked, and otherwise terrorized by his school's bullies for five or six years. (The image is from Bully: Scholarship Edition, a video game that an association of Canadian schoolteachers has attempted to ban.)

I recently discovered a website called Kids in Mind, which rates movies for parents so they can determine whether they are appropriate for their children to watch. Their rating system is much more complicated than G-PG-R. Each movie gets three numbers, one for Sex & Nudity, one for Violence & Gore and one for Profanity. Fifteen movies scored a perfect ten in the first category.

Two people I'd never heard of emerged into the national consciousness this week*, each of them engaged in public conduct that they have presumably come to regret. That Miss Teen South Carolina and Idaho Senator Larry Craig were bound together in public ignominy in the last week of August, 2007 is probably the last thing they'll ever have in common. In what follows I want to think about the kind of public culture that would bring these two toge...

In this second installment of E Hayot and my discussion of the Burger King “Wake up with the King” ad, watch as we try to think through current trends in advertising, struggle against the urge to screw a revamped 70s corporate icon, and continue an implicit but intense battle between GenY and GenX.

In a paper on fast food and obesity in America, a student of mine described McDonald's as hocking "portions that would make a caveman sick." I circled the word caveman and punctuated it with a question mark, and this was enough to make the caveman not appear in the final version of the paper. Which is a little unfortunate, actually. While she later told me what she was going for, that, according to her, portion sizes are not based on any measu...

TV writers particularly lamented the rise of reality TV, since it put them out of a job. The good news for them is that this trend too is passing and scripted drama is making its comeback. The new trend in network TV is what I call the Long Arc series (though I think the suits are still using the old catch-all term "high concept"), shows whose individual episodes are often a little weak but which keep you watching by an addictive season-long...