Author Archives: rosiefranklin

Long overdue Adieu

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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Dearest DDPeople,

I have not been very active as an author for DDP in some time. In that interval, I have finished a PhD and successfully defended a dissertation, gotten divorced, moved across the country, and switched careers entirely. This has left little time for writing.

And while I find myself called/drawn/convicted to begin writing again about these topics dear to my heart, I find that my perspective and values are no longer in sufficiently sync with the present active editorial board of DDP, and it has become time for us to officially part ways.

I’d like to thank the crew here, both the author/editor community as well as our active, articulate, curious, and moving commentariat for the support, feedback, education. And for your precious trust as you shared your stories with me in response to some of my own.

I will continue/resume writing at rosiefranklin.net. I hope to see some of you there.

Best,
Rosie

black and white, woman, looking down

photo credit: Jessica Keener Photography takes excellent portraits.

Pride makes me cry?

02 Wednesday Jul 2014

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(cross posted, with minor edits, from my personal facebook, after a solid half-dozen posts over the course of the weekend about pride.)

So, semi-serious post-pride post: why the fuck did this straight girl make such a big deal about going to pride for the first time? My gender presentation (short hair, androgynous style) is _utterly_ unremarkable in San Francisco. It’s one of the reasons I moved here. But it was SO NOT [unremarkable] when I was growing up.

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SF PRIDE 2014.

A whole lot of people, including much of my high school and my parents, thought I was probably a lesbian when I was in high school. (Town of 30k in [deep south state where you can barely get an abortion]). They just didn’t have anywhere else in their brain to file someone who looked and acted like I did. The folks in the town (of more like 10k) where I went to middle school just thought I was fucking weird, though nobody said lesbian to my face till I was older. Once, when I was in high school, my father and I were fighting, and he screamed “Why can’t you just LOOK NORMAL” in my face. (He has since denied that he ever did that. But no, that happened.)

But I had the internet. And I knew places like San Francisco existed. I don’t honestly know how, but I knew Pride Parades existed. The fact of their existence was comforting to me, and a light to swim towards out of the shitty fundamentalist, close-minded, evangelical deep south bullshit that I was mired in as a minor with very little control over my life. I went into science, swimming as hard away from religion and the south that I could. I eventually moved to San Francisco.

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Planned Parenthood is Amazing

30 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Reproductive Rights

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PLANNED PARENTHOODI need to take a second to tell y’all about how amazing Planned Parenthood is.

I don’t have a doctor in my new city, I don’t have health insurance right now, and I don’t have any income right now.

So Thursday morning when the UTI I’d been hoping would go away started giving me a fever and causing me to piss blood (spoiler, I have a kidney infection at this point), I took a bus down to the PP clinic.

I got screamed at on my way in: “Don’t kill your baby!!!”

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4 schools of thought sharing 2 names: what’s “sex-positive” and “sex-negative” feminism?

12 Friday Jul 2013

Posted by in Organizing, Politics, Queer-LGBTQIA

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Avowed sex nerds are probably already aware that there are multiple schools of thought regarding the intrinsic moral value of sexual activity and sexuality.

Dear the rest of y’all:

Did you know that there are like, a billion different people who lay claim to two terms that are supposed to help us in the way that language does, by attaching an abstract value to a symbol called a name, except they often don’t help a whole lot because people don’t agree on what the terms mean so we have lots of fights about semantics, whether or not we disagree about what is morally good or bad? Those terms would be “sex-positive feminism” and “sex-negative feminism.”

On Wednesday, xoJane, which I often love, published a piece called “Unpopular Opinion: I’m a sex-negative feminist.” In it, the author rails against a perception of an entrenched feminist bloc dictating that everyone have all the sex, all the time.

Her tone is defiant. She throws out all sorts of things she is in opposition to, supposedly countering sex-positive feminists, without ever clearly saying what the hell she actually means by “sex-negative feminist.”

So I’m going to attempt to describe 4 groups that trade the two terms between them. Spoiler alert: I belong to one of the “sex-positive” groups.

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In which women are silly, silly creatures and men are always right/ Open Thread

07 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Communication, Gender Roles, Open Thread

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Hey DDPeople, have you seen this one? I’m guessing yes, because it’s been spattered all over my news feed for over a month now. Go ahead and watch it or watch it again.


 
Did you think that was funny? Fuck you.

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Pavlov’s Black Gloves

02 Tuesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Empowerment, Kink, Sex Ed, Sexuality

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Content note: details of my sex life. If you don’t want to read that, especially if you are, say, related to me– please skip this one.

This post is in direct homage to Jaclyn Friedman’s My Sluthood, Myself. Please go read that, then come back. That discusses more nuanced emotional stuff that is pretty relevant to the “and how the hell did that end up happening?” of this post, but I don’t feel like going into that here. Except to say the DDP authors are a pretty excellent posse.

So. Gloves and sluttery.

In M. Lunas’s safer sex post, he went over a bunch of stuff, including the use of latex or nitrile gloves for safer sex. This is something I’d never done.

I mostly didn’t feel the need to, because I wasn’t sleeping with random people (yes, that’s a touch of residual sex-negativity on my part), and I thought I’d be seen as weird, and I thought it’d be awkward to ask people to use them, etc.

Spoiler alert: I slept with some truly random people (where did I find them?), we used gloves (why?/how do you get somebody to do that?), and I found it to be not at all a big deal, except for the part where it was really hot.
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Embryonic fixie awaits your love, will win her heart

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Humor

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(I was recently selling off some bike parts on Craigslist. I generally try and give my ads a little extra copy beyond the bare facts of what I’m selling, and I thought this one was funny. Enjoy! And talk about biking in the comments!)

Picture 124

Embryonic fixie awaits your love, will win her heart – $20 (48cm steel frame with fork) 

Naked steel frame, with fork. Bought it a while back to build up into a city bike, but first it needed stripped and painted. I stripped it, and painted the fork the prettiest damn shade of blue you ever did see.

Howeva… I didn’t get around to painting the frame. It’s just been taking up space on my shelf in my closet behind my drums* from high school and my snowboard* and my dignity*.

I have no idea what the make on it is, it was a former fixie some hipster sold me when the paint was already in pretty bad shape. The frame itself is fine though. I also have some 27″ wheels that were chalked for this project. $10 for the pair of wheels.

This could be for you! You can win your own heart! Practice self-care! Thank yourself for treating your body well and biking! Namaste! Or it could be your girlfriend, the cutest, shyest country girl you ever did see. (She’d barely unbuckled her bible belt when she landed at [my university] but she’s getting there and promises to tell her mother about you, like really soon.)  Continue reading →

Why “evolutionary psychology” is almost never science.

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Blog Things, Economics, Gender Roles, Pop Culture

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We do a lot of arguing about evolutionary psychology in the comments here on DDP.

To get straight to the point: the really big problem with most evolutionary psychology is that to be ‘science,’ you have to be able to falsify it. You have to be able to test your hypotheses in way that will reveal if it isn’t true. And you have to actually ask that question. Without that, you’re just telling stories. You can tell your stories and I will tell my stories and we won’t agree because if you’re an “evolutionary psychologist,” you probably think sexism is “genetic,” and I’m a geneticist, and I don’t.

So I’m going to list a bunch of assumptions frequently made by “evolutionary psychology,” when it purports to explain the evolutionary basis of behaviors. Then I’m going to cite a specific example, and eviscerate it. Then, I’ll tell you what you’d have to change to make conclusions based in actual science.

[“our culture” means modern industrialized, Western culture throughout this article. the hyperlinked science terms have definitions if you mouse over them.]

Why people (some men) freak out extra hard about gay male athletes

01 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Masculinity, Media, Queer-LGBTQIA

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In case you hadn’t heard, NBA center Jason Collins is gay.

Most of the internet has reacted very positively and supportively. Few people are freaking out in public. But I’m guessing you have heard, as I have, more intense freakouts in private. They’re boring repeats of a billion boring private freakouts I’ve heard from straight men about gay athletes a billion boring times before.

But you know what? There’s more to the way some people freak out about gay male athletes in a way that they don’t about gay female athletes than the fact that stereotyped lesbians (masculine) confirm the stereotypes about female athletes (masculine, all lesbians), while stereotyped gay men (feminine) challenge the stereotypes about male athletes (masculine to the max, exemplars of traditional masculinity).

Above and beyond that, the reaction to the spectre of a gay male athlete has its roots in the fears of loss of privilege. (Spoiler alert! A privilege women never have!)

Have you seen the picture meme that goes around that says “homophobia: you’re not afraid, you’re just an asshole”? While the latter is true, I don’t think the former is true.  I think this gets closer:

homophobia is the fear that gay men are going to treat you the way you treat women.

That’s real.*

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