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One of the biggest issues for women athletes these days is the extreme hyper-sexualization many sports require women to participate in while competing at a highly advanced level. For example, car racer Danica Patrick has been very straightforward (and quite successful) about embracing her more 'feminine' side while letting her racing skills speak for themselves.

Writer, teacher, audio-show host, performer, and all-around badass feminist Susie Bright is speaking this Tuesday as a continuing part of the Bitch Feminist Perspectives in Pop Culture lecture series!

Lately I've been thinking about the process of coming out and identities/shifting, and how for so many of us it's an ongoing/lifetime process. In part because we as individuals change, and/or in part because our environment changes, and/or in part because our identities can't be read on the outside, and/or because some of us feel the most comfortable in those in-between spaces yet sometimes feel compelled to "pick a side" (so to speak/referencing here the dualism so prevalent in mainstream Western culture), because the struggle to have our identities validated (or even finding language to define ourselves and our experiences) simply becomes too much work. But then when we "pick that side," we might eventually feel the weight of that boxed-in identity start to hurt, so we begin the process of coming out again... Or geez, to put it most simply, because things just change... 

A new publication about sex/sexuality in Pakistani society from a feminist and gender-inclusive perspective has entered the publishing world. Read Bitch contributor Sarah Seltzer's interview with Chay magazine founders Kyla Pasha and Sarah Suhail in the current issue of INTHEFRAY magazine, an online magazine focused on identity and community.

This weekend, June 13th to June 15th is Sexy Spring, Minneapolis's radical, sex/body positive, sex education skill-share and conference.

The event is focused on exploring the ways sex, sexuality, relationships, our bodies, and our choices affect our lives. It's a weekend full of workshops, discussions, play, demonstrations, crafting, art shows, communal meals, telling stories, and sex/body performances and dancing.

This past weekend, we at Bitch were honored to be a community partner in Portland's Queer Documentary Film Festival's screening of FtF: From Female to Femme. QDOC is the only festival in the United States (and apparently one of two worldwide) devoted to queer documentaries, and FtF: From Female to Femme is – to my knowledge – the first feature length documentary that explores the experiences and identities of femme as a queer identity. This lack of femme analysis is a little alarming, considering the breadth and depth of analyses focused on butch, FtM, and other masculine(/queer) identities. But then again, as books like Julia Serano's Whipping Girl: A Transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity illustrate, femme identities and femininity in general continue to be misunderstood and maligned (and in some senses, masculinity so fetishized), so it also makes sense. 

Cheers to a new study reporting that, contrary to age-old stereotypes about teenage boys as indiscriminate horndogs, 16-year-old boys' primary motivations for dating are that they "really like the person" (via the New York Times health blog).