Thursday, May 23, 2002
Salon.com News | Soccer may be the world's sport, but it will never be America's

To be churlish about soccer is to indicate that you're not a good European or a good world citizen, or something like that.

Wednesday, May 22, 2002
Cary Tennis is waxing quite poetic this week.

Salon.com Sex | Whose baby is it?

The scene has been pegged an act of violence, showing how quickly the line between civility and brutality can be tripped. Reports say the forced group-grope was one of many that festive night. But the Mardi Gras molesters cannot be dismissed as perverted monsters. They look jovial, clueless, entitled. They are the guys next door, our sons, caught up in an extreme rendering of "boys will be boys."

I know the party line of defining sexual assault as violence, as power abuse, not sex. But tossing this mass violation into some aberrant cesspool allows us to dissociate from the perpetrators and rise above the sexual stench of our own making. Can you view this photo of clean-cut guys as they revel in mauling anonymous body parts, and not wonder: "How are we raising our boys?"

Entitled... emphasis mine. The sense of entitlement is the key. In my experience many men have metamorphosed their sexual insecurity into a sense of entitlement to free access to women's bodies. We are irretrievably dehumanized in their eyes as long as they carry the neurosis, and it's a neurosis that's widespread, pervasive, deep-rooted. After all, who among us isn't insecure?

So, who among us women is safe from this kind of man? Nobody.


Salon.com Life | Go out and get a piece, son!

Outstretched hands attached to some two dozen young men push toward and upon the mostly naked young woman. She's pulled taut with her legs and arms pinned, a voluptuous torso served raw for grinning gropers. Though you can see vividly the hungry, amused faces of these party boys, their unwilling plaything's face is digitally blurred, revealing only darkness for her eyes and gaping mouth.

A technological twist on the silent scream.

Reuters | Transvestite Ancient Roman Unearthed in Britain

Although the skeleton was discovered in 1981, it took nearly 20 years for archeologists to work out the puzzle of a male body adorned with female jewelry.

Sunday, May 19, 2002
MediaGuardian.co.uk | Broadcast | US media cowed by patriotic fever, says CBS star

Dan Rather, the star news anchor for the US television network CBS, said last night that "patriotism run amok" was in danger of trampling the freedom of American journalists to ask tough questions. And he admitted that he had shrunk from taking on the Bush administration over the war on terrorism.