JESSICA GOLD HARALSON

An article I did for Nerve.com, Sex Advice From: Internet TV Stars, published today.

Check it out!

The amazing guy pictured above = one of my interviewees, John Halcyon. We all wish we could be THAT cool.

An equation for a Jessica-sized disaster:

Vacation + Aunt’s Birthday Largesse + Vintage Shopping + “Comic Life” @ Macbook + Limoncello + Insomnia = MANOLO BLAHNIK HIJINX.

Enjoy at my expense. Come on, you know you wanna laugh:

…But on the bright side? I do gots some lovely shoes.

-J

(Do you know where this image is from? Guess correctly, and you’ll get a cookie)

Boys and girls, I hate to neglect this space, but I’ma be gone again like Britney Spears’ career! Sunny Florida calls for a long Labor Day Weekend with the TRIPLE A’S:  Abuelita, Abuela, and my Aunt Susan. I need the break before the start of senior semester.

Play nicely while I’m gone, ya heard?  I just may have to whip ya otherwise.

Taken yesterday with my brand spankin’ new Macbook

Visiting my mom and my sis in the Lone Star State — a much needed vacation.

I’ll be back on the Internets soon, but this weekend? Family time. Trust.

XOXO -Jess

Warning: this post will be link heavy — but the LOLZ are worth it.

This “picture” of PA State Rep Mark Cohen, lovingly Photoshopped by noted Phila blog-o-character Dan McQuade (alias D-Mac to friends and foes alike), betrays not one, but two recent stories of teh crazy in “The City That Loves You Back”. (Considering all the sex-related crimes lately, it’s more like “The City That Flashes Itself, Rubs Itself Against You, and Wants To Fondle You Back.” But I digress!)

The first story concerns Cohen’s massive amount of fail on teh Internets. From today’s Phila Metro:

You don’t have to travel too far across the Internet to find politicians being criticized, but Pennsylvania state Rep. Mark B. Cohen says a local blogger has gone too far.

Cohen — a regular on local messageboard Phillyblog.com — has been a topic of recent posts on Philadelphia Will Do, a blog hosted by local newspaper Philadelphia Weekly. The blog’s editor, Dan McQuade, has written several humorous articles about Cohen’s posts to Phillyblog.com.

Cohen, however, isn’t laughing. He’s posted comments in response to McQuade’s writings on Will Do, claiming to be the victim of malice and libel, legal terms for the willful destruction of an individual’s reputation often accompanied by a lawsuit. Other users of the site have responded to Cohen’s allegations with lewd, political and downright bizarre comments of their own.

“I’m not necessarily saying that I’ll file a lawsuit,” said Cohen, who views his fellow commenters as participating in the malice. “I am saying that I am being libeled.”

Cohen said that he’s reached out to PW’s editor, Tim Whitaker, but has yet to hear back.

Typically, libel laws do not apply to opinions or satire written about public figures such as elected officials.

“I’m not a lawyer, but I don’t see where he’s being libeled,” McQuade said last night. “He seems to be mad about the commenters on the blog, but they’re nonsensical. I don’t get why he’s concerned about what idiots like me are saying on a blog.”

Don’t you just love when e-lawyers get pissy about “libel”? Most of the defamatory statements in D-Mac’s blog are written by commenters personifying Cohen’s penis. The horror! Lock ‘em traitors up!

And the other “only in Philadelphia” story? Well, that explains the wonderfully The Onion esque pic of the flasher above — Common Pleas Judge Lisa Richette’s cray-cray son assaulted her, then flashed the reporter above who knocked on his door for comment! Hot. This isn’t the first time the aggrieved Richette has faced a brush-in with the cray-crays. According to this NBC10 article, the lady’s been assaulted, like, a katillion times by angry Philly citizenry!

Best quote about the oft-beleaguered Common Pleas judge:

Twenty years ago she was attacked by a purse snatcher; she was punched in 2005; and she was assaulted again just last August by a woman while sitting in her car in center city

The moral of this post? D-Mac is a critically relevant journalist — where PA State Mark Cohen’s penis is concerned! Considering the Cohen + flasher double play, it might be safe to say that D-Mac is — dare I say it? — the Philadelphia penis expert. I anxiously await even more genitalia reports from this alt-weekly wunderkind.

From a Baltimore Sun editorial by Cristina Page,  author and pro-choice feminist, re: Mitt Romney’s anti-choice rhetoric:

…But for those trained to hear the subtleties, Mr. Romney was acknowledging something more. He implied an opposition to the birth control pill and a willingness to join in their efforts to scale back access to contraception. There are code phrases to listen for - and for those keeping score, Mr. Romney nailed each one.

One code phrase is: “I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as starting at implantation, the first moment a pregnancy can be known. Anti-abortion advocates want pregnancy to start at the unknown moment sperm and egg meet: fertilization. They’d also like you to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the birth control pill prevents that fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.

Mr. Romney’s code, deciphered, meant, “I, like you, hope to reclassify the most commonly used forms of contraceptives as abortions.” In fact, he told the crowd, he already had some practice redefining contraception: “I vetoed a so-called emergency contraception bill that gave young girls abortive drugs without prescription or parental consent.”

 Y’know, it’s a stock cliche, so trite as to be meaningless, that many who fear legalized abortion are less interested in the life of the fetus and more interested in the life of the mother — controlling her life, that is. (Who was it that said that if men got pregnant, abortions would be a Sacrament?)  Yet I read stories like these and my blood runs cold. I understand there are conscientious, reasonable people whom oppose abortion.  Yet my spidey sense tells me Mr. Romney is not among those ranks.

The real question, though, is Why? Why are legislators and moral evangelicals like Romney interested in policing the lives of women? What is the root of this societal conflict? Why is it prevalent here, and not, say, in Scandinavia, where abortion is safe, legal, and rare? And to digress a little, why does this same force make a woman like, say, Hillary, unelectable? (And why does Hillary feel the need to make namby-pamby abortion neutral statements, instead of roaring her pro-choice support like Rudy Giuliani?)

I guess the real question is, why are Americans still fighting the same feminist battles over and over again?

It truly stumps me.

 What do you think?

 Source via Feministing

Do you bacn?

Unless you’ve lived under a rock without wireless Internet access, you’ve probably heard of bacn, this week’s latest Internet meme. Publicized by media maestro Chris Brogan and coined by Andy Quayle et al at PodCamp Pittsburgh, bacn is defined as “mail you want — but not right now.” Not quite Spam and not quite a personal message, bacn encompasses notifications about a new Facebook friend, Twitter follower, or comment in need of moderation. It’s annoying in that you probably *want* to read the message, impersonal as it may be, but you don’t want to wade through the mounds of administrative bacn any web junkie gets these days. The term was coined last weekend, but has already spread like wildfire amongst the social-network savvy. Viva la Intarwebz!

In the spirit of Net-speak, I propose two derivatives of bacn:

Bacn fat. You know when you make an Internet acquaintance and they find — and friend you — on eleventy jillion social networks, so you get twenty messages at once that “SoandSo is following you on Twitter” and “SoandSo just added you to Pownce”? That’s bacn fat. This is bacn that’s flattering and egregious — but too much of it will clog your e-arteries.

Bacn grease. Like bacn fat, but skankier. Bacn grease is when someone sleazy — usually a creepy old guy who thinks you have n00dz on your Flickr page, stalks you across das Internets, giving you the heebie-jeebies every time another notification of his pops up in your inbox. Sleazy, slimy, sinister — that’s Bacn grease.

So, that’s my contribution to the whole bacn phenomenon. How many derivatives can you come up with? Is there annoying mail out there that neither the terms Spam nor bacn can describe effectively?

ETA: Well slap my ass and call me Sally! Those blowhards at the Washington Post have already caught on to the bacn phenomenon. This just increases my resolve to attend PodcampBoston this fall — I can only hope that the Massachussetts ‘campers will as creative!

So I’m a spoiled brat, because my mother is springing for a laptop as a gift for living for twenty-one years. I don’t deserve it, but I’ll take it.

I’ve caved in to peer pressure and, well, the pretty – in a few hours I’ll be voraciously fondling a sex-ay Apple MacBook. Of course, I’m not satisfied with basic white. Real girlie girls, of course, must flash their apple in pink:

Nouveau Apple devotee-ism aside, I still hate their “Get a Mac” ad campaign. Mac’s personification, Justin Long, looks like a Zach Braff-esque emosogynist — smarmy and snarky, just plain douche-baggy. PC, on the other hand? You just want to give him a hug, God bless him. He’s not as sexy, but he’s the guy who will listen to your stories over dinner and remember your anniversary. Adorkable.

This ad campaign though, is frikkin’ genius. Substitute “Civil Union” and “Marriage” for Mac and PC, and you have some brilliant political capital on your hands:

As of about five minutes ago, I’m officially twenty-one!

Yay! Eep!

A year twenty post-mortem might follow soon. If I feel like typing in a drunken stupor, that is. Kidding!

A musicologist friend of mine recently lent me Terry Eagleton’s brilliant academic manifesto After Theory, a tour-de-force lamenting the lack of “Foucaults, Derridas, and Cixouses” of this generation; the lack of significant contributions to an academic theoretical framework for the 21st century. I’m no snob — theory usually makes me wrinkle my nose — but I’ve devoured this volume like gangbusters. Written simply and lucidly, Eagleton deftly observes academia as it is, rather than as we imagine it, and has words for what he feels are its failings. While he praises this generation for acknowledging that pleasurable activites are just as worthy of academic study as “serious” ones, he metaphorically rolls his eyes at an “intellectual climate where some circles are more interested in the politics of masturbation than the politics of the Middle East.” Zing!

While Eagleton acknowledges that human sexuality’s place in academic canon is vital and necessary, he’s got a bone to pick with those who prioritize sex over other equally worthy subjects. I was simultaneously repulsed and riveted, for instance, by this statement:

 Among students of culture, the body is an immensely fashionable topic, but it is usually the erotic body, not the famished one. There is a keen interest in coupling bodies, but not in labouring ones. Quietly-spoken middle-class students huddle diligently in libraries, at work on sensationalist subjects like vampirism (Ed: this reminds me of the great academic book about fandom, “Will The Vampire People Please Leave The Lobby“? which explores this phenomenon quite well) and eye-gouging, cyborgs and porno movies.

 … Nothing could be more understandable. To work on the literature of latex or the political implications of navel-piercing is to take literally the old adage that study should be fun… There are advantages in being able to write your Ph.D. thesis without stirring from them in front of the TV set. In the old days, rock music was a distraction from your studies; now it may well be what you are studying. Intellectual matters are no longer an ivory-tower afffair, but belong to the world of media and shopping malls, bedrooms and brothels. As such they re-join everyday life — but only at the risk of losing their ability to subject it to critique.

 

Others before I have certainly examined the bourgeois, middle class nature that is usually necessary for sexual exploration — Audacia and Rachel Kramer Bussel come to mind — but never before have I read such a brilliant insight into the current academic culture of studying the “sexy”. Heck, my brilliant friend Maria presented a paper on music and figure skating for a pop conference — wonderful scholarship, but scholarship that fits squarely into Eagleton’s critique. (Full disclosure: I’ve toyed with the idea of doing my senior thesis on late 90’s music videos, a la ‘N Sync. I’ve also considered throwing in the towel to the cottage industry that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer academic literature).

Hell, you could consider my own aspirations as squarely complicit in the problem of prioritizing the pleasured body over the pained one, of, as Eagleton puts it, “writing about Friends and not Flaubert”. But on the other hand, why should pleasure be sneered at by the literati? Why re-enforce a Platonic binary of pleasure v. pain anyway — isn’t humanity far more complex than that?

Or, as one of Eagleton’s favorite subjects would say, perhaps this debate is wholly sound and fury, signifying nothing.

What say you?