By Wendy Stainton Rogers

---

“Resisting the Darwinian Phallocracy” – Don’t you just love the language?! It’s from a new book out by Lucy Cooke, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution & the Female Animal and is full of sass like that. With a Masters in Zoology and tutored by Richard Dawkins, she explains:

I was taught that this apparently trivial disparity in our sex cells laid cast-iron biological foundations for sexual inequality. “It is possible to interpret all other differences between the sexes as stemming from this one basic difference,” Dawkins told us. “Female exploitation begins here.”

Male animals led swashbuckling lives of thrusting agency. They fought one another over leadership or possession of females. They shagged around indiscriminately, propelled by a biological imperative to spread their seed far and wide. And they were socially dominant; where males led, females meekly followed. A female’s role was as selfless mother, naturally; as such, maternal efforts were deemed all alike: we had zero competitive edge. Sex was a duty rather than a drive.

And as far as evolution was concerned it was males who drove the bus of change. We females could hop on for a ride thanks to shared DNA, as long as we promised to keep nice and quiet.

Lucy Cooke

Continue reading →

By Siobhán Healy-Cullen

When I embarked on my doctoral research in 2018 I was interested in how young people made sense of gendered images in online pornography. I was also interested in what caregivers and teachers thought about young people’s pornography use. A new, in vogue,  term called “porn literacy” caught my eye. In those  early stages of the project, I thought “Sounds good… Why not talk to young people about pornography!? It’s clearly something many young people engage with, and to ignore or censor it would be like other prohibitive interventions, which haven‘t worked!” However, as I explored  the notion of “porn literacy”, it became plain to me that the ways pornography, young people and their pornography viewing are thought about invariably shapes porn literacy as an educational response.

Continue reading →