Blogaround

Patrick Stewart sitting among a bunch of pumpkins. Image source.

1. 7 Things You Need To Know To Be A Good Ally To An Intersex Person (posted October 23) "Despite numerous studies indicating infant genitoplasty does more harm than good, physicians in the U.S. and elsewhere still routinely perform medically unnecessary procedures on intersex babies."

2. On Bisexuality and Reformation Bingo (posted October 23) "For every one thing that I put out on the internet about bisexuality, I've got a couple of women at least emailing me, being like, 'That's also my story, I also came from purity culture, I'm married to a dude, I'm bisexual but like what's the point of coming out, etc etc.'"

3. This tweet in a Twitter thread of "biblical sexual ethics" (such as when Abraham set Sarah up to be sexually assaulted by Pharaoh). The whole thread is good, but that tweet in particular was shocking to me- it says "Leviticus 21:9. If the daughter of a priest has sex not in marriage, she is burned alive." It blew my mind to see that listed as an example of the bible being IMMORAL in terms of sexual ethics. Before, I always read that verse like it was about unmarried sex being a sin, which is a complicated topic we can debate- it's not something that's so clear that you would put it in a tweet to convince people the bible is wrong. But. No. The issue is not whether unmarried sex is a sin. The issue is the death penalty for having unmarried sex. And that is very obviously immoral- but I never noticed it before.

To me, sex was always this huge, scary, terrible thing that of course we shouldn't do. (Until you're married and it's suddenly the best thing ever, right?) It never occurred to me to think, "even if it is a sin, it doesn't deserve the death penalty."

4. Literally, Why Can’t I Say #MeToo? (posted October 16) [content note: descriptions of sexual assault] "I feel guilty using those words. I feel like I’m being dramatic."

5. Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects (posted October 31) "Here is a 3D-printed turtle that is classified at every viewpoint as a “rifle” by Google’s InceptionV3 image classifier, whereas the unperturbed turtle is consistently classified as “turtle”." Cool!