One Utah

In the interest of management, I’ve closed the discussion below the “Dear Dwight” post - not because the discussion should stop but because it’s about to be pushed off the front page and the thread has gotten rather long and quite frankly I’m feeling pretty lazy.
Each of us brings a set of assumptions, experiences, ideas, and [...]

The discussion about modesty and sexuality has me thinking about the complicated ways in which male anxiety - specifically about sexuality - plays itself out. Calls for modesty and events chastity balls are often called for in general terms but directed at women in practice; they are equally often called for in specifically gendered [...]

You write something, post it, a few days later you move on and you basically forget it.  Then someday, often months later, someone brings it up again - sometimes even the person about whom you wrote.  It’s my favorite weird and wild thing about the internet.
Case in point, this morning while checking comments, I found a [...]

What had been going along as a relatively boring, technocratic session has become the traditional legislative freak show thanks to Chris Buttars and the homophobes of the Republican majority. Frankly, the majority of Utah legislators are just plain old fashioned anti-gay bigots. They can dress it up in all the pretty language they [...]

I’ve been thinking for a long about the issue of sexism in Utah politics. Jenny Wilson rightly pointed out that she was asked questions that none of her male counterparts were asked during the Mayor’s race. At the same time, Gayle Ruzicka is incredibly influential in Utah politics - sure, she’s nasty and [...]

Over the weekend, I read a fascinating book - Frans De Waal’s, Our Inner Ape. De Waal, one of the few primatologists to really study bonobo’s in depth, argues in the book that humans, chimps and bonobos are extremely closely related and that studying the behavior of all three species leads to a [...]

Via Feministing, I see a great article  by Sara Robinson about the changing dynamics of abortion. 
The gist of the article concerns the way in which medical termination of unwanted pregnancies (i.e. RU-486) is changing the way in which women receive and experience abortions, and is changing the locus of control over reproductive freedom - namely moving [...]

I saw this reported on KSL and decided I had misunderstood. Apparently not. Tragically not. From the D-News, I see that a group of students from BYU and UVSC are making some downright pathetic demands of Gold’s gym.
They are demanding that the gyms get rid of R-rated or sexually explicit PG-13 movies [...]

The conversation the other day in response to my post about the virginity fetish got me thinking about the oft-repeated statement one should wait for marriage before having sex. That statement contains within itself a set of assumptions that need examined about the “goodness” of married sex.

Today’s D-News has an op-ed piece by Warren Throckmorton extolling the virtues of virginity. Full of slippery logic and the casual assumption that not having sex is better than having sex, Throckmortion begins with a recounting of the story of Saint Nicholas that includes this nugget:
I also discovered that Saint Nicholas is a patron [...]

Over the weekend while I was at the gym, there was a show on TV about hazing. It was so absorbing I did over an hour of cardio so I could see the whole thing.
As part of the show, they discussed recent incidents of hazing in American high schools and colleges. In one incident, a [...]

This week, the Trib published an editorial pointing out increasing STI rates in Utah and arguing that we should institute effective comprehensive sexuality education in Utah schools.  The trib editorial is spot, and includes many important points:
Less is being taught about HIV in Utah schools now than in the past three years. And more young [...]