While popular debate grapples with the legality of gay marriage, networks of medical, political, and juridical discourses produce and situate sexuality in a field of knowledge that is constantly under examination and administration. The rationalization of sexuality, and its dispersion into multiple fields of knowledge, has become part of a system of power relations that produces identities and manages them. Within this context, this paper places Horkheimer and Adorno's excursus on Sade's Juliette in conversation with Foucault's first volume of the (...) History of Sexuality. It explores how instrumental reason and power/knowledge relationships produce discourses of sexuality, which have come to dominate Western society. It also explores possible sites of resistance, through the notion of performativity, that exist within these modes of rationalization and power. I argue that this interlocution of Horkheimer and Adorno with Foucault helps us see sexuality as a site of both domination and resistance. It also shows how sexuality is produced in a field of contestation where possibilities of practices of freedom are always circumscribed by modes of rationalization and networks of power. (shrink)

While popular debate grapples with the legality of gay marriage, networks of medical, political, and juridical discourses produce and situate sexuality in a field of knowledge that is constantly under examination and administration. The rationalization of sexuality, and its dispersion into multiple fields of knowledge, has become part of a system of power relations that produces identities and manages them. Within this context, this paper places Horkheimer and Adorno's excursus on Sade's Juliette in conversation with Foucault's first volume of the (...) History of Sexuality. It explores how instrumental reason and power/knowledge relationships produce discourses of sexuality, which have come to dominate Western society. It also explores possible sites of resistance, through the notion of performativity, that exist within these modes of rationalization and power. I argue that this interlocution of Horkheimer and Adorno with Foucault helps us see sexuality as a site of both domination and resistance. It also shows how sexuality is produced in a field of contestation where possibilities of practices of freedom are always circumscribed by modes of rationalization and networks of power. (shrink)

Wonder Woman's co‐creator William Marston believed that sexual bondage was key to achieving a peaceful society. Though Marston intended Wonder Woman to provide an alternative to the masculinity of the superheroes of his day, Marston's vision remains relevant today. The behavior and attitude of Marston's Wonder Woman anticipated contemporary feminist philosophers' contributions to the ethics of care. There is also an underlying ethics of care in Wonder Woman's role as what Marston calls a "Love Leader", and that combination (...) of kink and care is itself reflected in contemporary BDSM. Marston's stated goal in his academic writing was to promote "a new code of conduct, based on love supremacy". Marston's comic‐book creation, Wonder Woman, fit his depiction of an ideal Love Leader: a sexually alluring and powerful, yet loving, mistress whose feminine charms would make women and men submit to her authority. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, (...) Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized, in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies Edited by Bernadette J. BrootenEboni Marshall TurmanBeyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies EDITED BY BERNADETTE J. BROOTEN New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 352 pp. $30.00In her introduction to this edited collection of essays, Bernadette Brooten asserts that religion has long been complicit in the construction and practice of the logic of human enslavement. She provocatively claims (...) that religion and the racial and sexual norms that emerge from religious inquiry have historically [End Page 236] designated women and other bodies that defy white male normativity as inherently “slaveable.” She further contends that the religious and sexual legacies of slavery are not relegated to a moment in time, now past and gone. Rather, contemporary society is the heir of a flesh-and-blood hierarchy that continues to shape its “social values, religious thought, and economic realities” (3). The remnants of enslavement persist among human communities not only as a lived reality that, as Mende Nazer suggests in the epilogue, continues to threaten the lives and life chances of poor women and children throughout the world, but also as a blood memory—a recollection that runs so deep into the social fabric of our theopolitical worlds that in spite of slavery’s superficial obscurity, it remains as the pulse of human everydayness, lurking beneath the surface of daily exchanges.The insidious legacies of slavery that emerge from bigoted God-talk promote dehumanizing racial-sexual stereotypes, dictate the quality of marriage and intimate relationships, corrupt and exploit sexual expression, and drive the development of public policy and law in ways that disproportionately marginalize and disempower women and girls. Consequently, this volume proposes resistance and calls readers to communal action that renounces slavery in all its forms.In parts 2, 3, and 4, the essays detail the racial, religious, and sexual character of slavery by focusing on the experience of black women’s oppression in America. This focus on the varieties of black women’s enslavement—from legal chattel slavery and social-political bondage to incarceration—provides the groundwork for the volume’s subsequent engagement of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic law, which demonstrates how slavery and its concomitant assignment and rationalization of embodied inferiority has been primarily cultivated by sacred texts. In her essay, for example, Sheila Briggs explicitly connects religious belief and dehumanizing practices; she ingeniously links religious textual interpretation with the sexual violence of early Christian gladiatorial practices in ancient amphitheaters.In parts 5 and 6, the volume reintroduces the substance of slavery’s legacies by way of a historical survey that connects enslavement across social contexts. In linking Debra Blumenthal’s discussion of slavery in late medieval Spain and Catherine Clinton’s analysis of the racial hypocrisies of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond to the problem of the Bible and the oppression it yields for sexual minorities as uncovered by Sylvester Johnson, Brooten exposes the vast and prevailing scope of slavery that affects all of us—women and girls, men and boys, sexual minorities, and even those who dare to fall in love across racial boundaries. In parts 7 and 8, Frances Smith Foster and Dwight Hopkins directly engage the “herstories” of black women who are marked by the legacies of slavery and yet who have consistently resisted in creative and effective ways (271). [End Page 237]Undoubtedly, this volume is a critical contribution to the field insofar as it uncovers an enduring social issue that continues to influence how we engage each other across differences of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The breadth of its disciplinary scope proves to be overwhelming at times. Nonetheless, Brooten’s constructive method serves well to emphasize the titanic complexity of enslavement and the challenge of its demolition.Eboni Marshall TurmanDuke Divinity SchoolCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nina Pelikan Straus RETHINKING FEMINIST HUMANISM Important challenges to feminist philosophy have been launched by Martha Nussbaum and Carol Gilligan. Taken together, Nussbaum 's TL· Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Phüosophy (1986)1 and Gilligan's In a Different Voice (1982)2 direct us to die consequences of feminism's critique of humanism, supplemented recendy by attempts at a union with Foucaultian genealogy.3 Each of these texts provokes (...) questions about the reliance on deconstructive theories, like those of Michel Foucault, in contemporary feminist discourse. In this essay I will indicate some of the limitations ofthat union and contrast it to the expanding possibilities generated for feminist thought by a revised discourse of modern humanism. The desirability of this revision will appear more clearly once we take up the quarrel ofsome feminists with the humanist tradition and realize that there is no satisfactory single account of what humanism means. Nussbaum's revision of humanism, for example, is based on a reexamination of human cognition, one which includes emotional responsiveness, traditionally associated with women, as a source of ethical knowledge. Gilligan's humanist revision suggests another variety of humanism, grounded in the claim that Freudian psychology's descriptions of the cognitive developments of men and women fail to account for the different approaches to ethical dilemmas expressed by women's voices. Nussbaum's humanism has classical roots in Plato, Aristode, and die Greek tragedies, while Gilligan's humanism is derived from modern psychoanalysis. Such differences in themselves illustrate humanism's long and pluralistic history. Although Nussbaum does not describe herself as a modern feminist and Gilligan does, each of their texts Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 284-303 Nina Pelikan Straus285 suggests how, respectively, a woman scholar's response to classical Greek tragedy and philosophy and a woman psychologist's approach to psychoanalysis offer reinterpretations of both feminism and humanism. Parallels between Nussbaum's and Gilligan's contributions to philosophy and psychology suggestan innovative study ofvoices, stories, and images which employ woman as a vehicle for a new approach to etiiics.4 Read togedier, they indicate ways that feminists can redescribe the humanist tradition without either succumbing to the essentialist doctrine which Foucault exposes as oppressive in its consequences for women, or by being seduced by Foucault's antihumanism itself. Nussbaum and Gilligan both expose what Annette Baier calls "a striking feature ofmodern moralphilosophizing"—namely, its "avoidance of the concept of love"5—and each suggests how that feature can be transformed. As linked meditations on unsolved problems of our own way of life, Nussbaum's project is to correct the "notoriously crude and hasty" Aristotelian "investigation of the potential of women for excellence " (FG, p. 471), while Gilligan's work is a response to the dire consequences of Freud's influential notion that "women's experience of sexuality and relationships" is a "dark continent."6 One outcome of feminism's use of Foucault's critique of humanism is the possibilityofits settling into a new orthodoxy or politically "correct" position used to measure degrees of feminist commitment. A better outcome is that feminist discourses which have assimilated Foucault's analysis of power may help to combat this threat.7 The threat is taken to be orthodoxy, and Foucault's discourse is characterized as a guarantee against orthodoxy's temptations. A more problematic consequence of die Foucaultian influence, however, is a devaluation of liberal feminist discourses about "human nature" in favor ofthose which follow Foucault by (in Foucault's words) changing the subject and asking instead, "How has the concept of human nature functioned in our society?"8 This change in emphasis depends upon a description of knowledge as inseparable from power—with Foucault's own texts as the most powerful examples of the emphasis. Michel Foucault thus becomes the Strong Poet whom some feminists incorporate or resist in their writings.9 This incorporation can circumscribe their approaches to feminist problems in ways that suggest traditional female bondages to founding-father texts from which Foucaultian discourse is supposed to liberate them. 286Philosophy and Literature The problem is then one oftemptation. Exercising power is pleasurable, and if we stop with the pleasure that assimilating Foucault yields, we... (shrink)

In this article, I sketch out something of a manifesto for the writing of queer theology. Beginning with a glimpse of the ways that anxieties about non-normative bodies and sexualities implicate all queer identity and practice, I then suggest ways that an awareness of the values and practices of the bondage, discipline, dominance and submission, sadomasochism community can illuminate the indecency of theological reflection. I believe that kink represents a valuable approach to meaning-making which holds great possibilities for the (...) theological discipline, particularly its unique relationship to social and interpersonal power dynamics, as well as its willingness to ‘dig around in the dirt’ of those things which are scary or taboo and find satisfying, sexy ways of relating to that fear. Above all, I hope to provoke new ways of thinking that challenge our easy answers about what progressive or liberative theology might look like, with deliberate attention to what is indecent in our frameworks. (shrink)

This paper examines the interaction of law and policy-making on prostitution, with that of BDSM (bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism). Recent policy and legal shifts in the UK mark out prostitutes as vulnerable and in need of ‘rescue’. BDSM that amounts to actual bodily harm is unlawful in the UK, and calls to decriminalise it are often met with fears that participants will be left vulnerable to abuse. Where women sell BDSM sex, even more complex questions of choice, (...) exploitation, vulnerability, power and agency might be thought to arise. Does the combination of activities take two singular behaviours into the realm of compound harm? Are those who sell BDSM doubly vulnerable in a way that would justify criminal intervention? This paper argues that in imposing categories of vulnerability, the state engages in the heteronormative construction of risky sexual subjects who must be rehabilitated, responsiblised or punished. Through an examination of existing empirical studies on BDSM, the paper offers a feminist critique of the potential criminalisation of commercial BDSM and calls for more research on the lived experiences of those who buy and sell BDSM. (shrink)

The public sphere, be it the Greek agora or the New York Times op-ed page, is the realm of appearances - not citizenship. Its central event is spectacle - not dialogue. Public dialogue, the mantra of many intellectuals and political commentators, is but a contradiction in terms. Marked by an asymmetry between the few who act and the many who watch, the public sphere can undermine liberal democracy, law, and morality. Inauthenticity, superficiality, and objectification are the very essence of the (...) public sphere. But the public sphere also liberates us from the bondages of private life and fosters an existentially vital aesthetic experience. Reign of Appearances uses a variety of cases to reveal the logic of the public sphere, including homosexuality in Victorian England, the 2008 crash, antisemitism in Europe, confidence in American presidents, communications in social media, special prosecutor investigations, the visibility of African-Americans, violence during the French Revolution, the Islamic veil, and contemporary sexual politics. This unconventional account of the public sphere is critical reading for anyone who wants to understand the effects of visibility in urban life, politics, and the media. (shrink)

This article compares Freud and Hegel, arguing that Freud independently uncovered and used the Hegelian dialectical method. It is argued that Freud used the method in reconstructing the psycho-sexual development of the individual begining with sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit and proceeding through the dialectic of self-consciousness. The development in prehistory from food-gathering (oral assimilative stage) through hunting (anal aggressive stage), the pastoral and agricultural stages (lordship and bondage) to the city state (stoici stage), is briefly presented. (...) This article was revised and developed further in the author's The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel Never Wrote (Prometheus Books: 2012), ch. 8. (shrink)

The work of Cox, Bales, Dingwaney, and others is cited in an effort to construct an argument about the special rights violations of contemporary slavery. It is contended that two forms, debt bondage and sexual slavery, are related and bear close examination.

Violence against women is a global stigma. At least two conditionsstirred the global community: Malala Yousafzai who took a bullet in 2012 andwho advocate girl’s education to date, and the 2014 reported kidnap of 300Nigerian girls by Boko Haram. There are oppressive stereotypes of women.Violence can come in different forms. These can come as verbal abuse, intimatepartners violence, non-intimate partner violence, trafficking, forced prostitution,exploitation of labor, debt bondage, physical and sexual violence, sex selectiveabortion, female infanticide and femicide, deliberate (...) neglect and girl’s education,rape in war, dowry murder, pornography, dating violence, female genitalmutilation/circumcision, and acid attack. With the aid of Hermeneutics, therich allusions and strong Feminist voices that exhume the elements of VAW areinherent characteristics of the Cebuano-Visayan Feminist poetry. The poemsconvince women to reclaim femininity, regain self-worth, challenge patriarchy,defy social prescriptions and conventions for women’s behavior. The four selectedCebuano-Visayan poetry with sound Feminist voices are support systems forwomen. Further studies on VAW in Cebuano-Visayan poetry are recommended. Keywords: Hermeneutics, poetry, Violence Against Women , descriptive research,Cebuano-Visayan language, Philippines. (shrink)

This paper presents the early findings of research into the experiences of pain for those who live with chronic pain and engage in BDSM (bondage and discipline, domination and submission, sadism and masochism), explored using a critical crip approach rooted in crip theory and feminist disability studies. The research took the form of a series of interviews with eight disabled people living with chronic pain who experience pain in their BDSM practices, developing a narrative of experiences. The majority of (...) those living with chronic pain, or who have diagnoses of chronic illnesses causing chronic pain, are women. Chronic pain is frequently assumed to be similar to acute pain; however, thinking through pain in terms of normativity and able-bodymindedness reveals the ableist structures that underpin normative attitudes towards pain and those who are in pain. Pain is understood as dehumanising—and thus the person living with chronic pain is understood as not human, abnormal, and disabled. The disabled body, the body in pain, is a horrifying object of abjection, and the non-disabled observer assumes that to be in pain is to suffer; therefore, living with chronic pain is understood as an ontological impossibility and must be stopped. BDSM is a series of practices forming a space in which the people living with chronic pain in this study are able to engage with their somatic experience in ways that do not expect normalcy, while being disabled and living with chronic pain gives them space to explore non-normative sexual practices. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Aisha's Coming Out The Legal Controversy Understanding the Context Violence Physical Violence Phenomenological Violence Epistemic Violence Aisha's Crossing Over Notes.

On what we can call the “folk” conception of sexual orientation, sexual orientation is understood as sex-based attraction, that is, as (partly) attraction on the basis of the perceived sex of the person to whom one is attracted. However, in recent discussions, philosophers have either added gender to sex as the basis of sexual orientation, or have altogether replaced sex with gender. Moreover, this addition or replacement has gone—mostly—unargued for. This paper argues that a sex-based conception of (...) sexual orientation remains plausible because (1) it is compatible with gender-based attraction, which I argue can be understood as a preference; (2) the reasons so far on offer for adding gender to sex (or for replacing sex with gender) are not convincing; (3) we have good evolutionary and non-evolutionary reasons for thinking that sex is the basis of sexual orientation; (4) we have good reasons to not add gender as a basis of sexual orientation; and (5) a sex-based conception of sexual orientation accommodates the various sexual orientations that have recently appeared, orientations in addition to the folk two (or three) of heterosexuality, homosexuality (and bisexuality), such as pansexuality, skoliosexuality, gynsexuality, and androsexuality. What emerges is a conception of sexual orientation based (partly) on the sex of the people to whom we are attracted, but that understands sexual-based attraction in broad enough terms to include surgically altered bodies. (shrink)

Socializamos aquí una experiencia llevada a cabo por un grupo de docentes, de nivel medio, que ha conformado un Equipo ESI. Nos referimos al Proyecto de Promotoras Estudiantiles de Género, que vibra en una escuela que se encuentra atravesada por un complejo entramado de relaciones sociales. El mismo, busca aportar a la construcción de un proyecto educativo que habite los intersticios de la escuela formal desde una pedagogía otra. El contexto en el que se encuentra inscripta la escuela, configura las (...) identidades estudiantiles, sobre las que recaen múltiples opresiones de género, clase, nacionalidad. Las juventudes subalternizadas que habitan esta escuela invitan a romper con la categoría monolítica de juventud, y ello implica un desafío para que nuestras prácticas docentes no reproduzcan, en términos de Guha un colonialismo discursivo. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow argues that because of women's longer life expectancy philosophers who advocate the genetic modification of human beings to enhance welfare rather than merely supply therapy are committed to favouring the selection of only female embryos, an implication he deems sufficiently implausible to discredit their position. If Sparrow's argument succeeds, then philosophers who advocate biomedical moral enhancement also seem vulnerable to a similar charge because of men's greater propensity for various forms of harmful wrongdoing. This paper argues there are (...) various flaws in Sparrow's argument that render it unsuccessful. The paper also examines whether dimorphism reduction is a more desirable outcome than male elimination, thereby further illustrating the difficulties besetting the distinction between therapy and enhancement. (shrink)

With more than 700 specific strategies and solutions to use in the classroom, school, and community, this book covers just about everything that educators need, providing a comprehensive and detailed blueprint for an overall plan and policy to prevent and deal with peer harassment.

Feminist and queer theorists influenced by Michel Foucault have given analyses of sexual violence and of sexually violent pornography that are generally taken to be in striking opposition to those defended by radical feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon. In this commentary on Linda Martín Alcoff’s Rape and resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation, I suggest that these seemingly divergent analyses of sexual violence are more similar than they have appeared to be and I ask: Might this (...) book help to bring an end to the so-called ‘sex wars’ between the Foucauldians and the MacKinnonites that have been raging since the mid-1980s? (shrink)

Novello, Henry We all know that these are difficult times for the Catholic Church in Australia as it grapples with the scandalous and painful issue of child sexual abuse by some clergy, religious, and lay church personnel. The Commonwealth Royal Commission investigating institutional responses to child sexual abuse, announced by Prime Minister Julia Gillard on 12 November 2012, has made life for the faithful even more difficult, as the Catholic Church in Australia comes under intense and continual public (...) scrutiny. The church's Towards Healing protocol for responding to incidents of child sexual abuse acknowledges that not just the victims and their families but the 'whole Church community has been affected by incidents of abuse, for all Catholic people have been dismayed by the stories they have heard'. Thankfully, a spirit of sincere cooperation with the work of the Royal Commission is discernible on the part of the Catholic Church today, as both share in the objective of providing satisfaction to the victims and improving institutional responses as best they might. (shrink)

L’ouvrage dirigé par Elizabeth D. Heineman est le prolongement d’une conférence organisée en 2006 à l’université d’Iowa sous le titre « Conférence sur les droits de l’homme pour combattre la violence sexuelle dans les zones de conflit ». En réunissant des chercheuses et chercheurs, essentiellement d’universités états-uniennes, qui tous étaient confrontés à la violence sexuelle dans le champ qui était le leur, l’ambition n’était pas celle de l’exhaustivité mais bien d’inscrire ces violences da...

The ArgumentTo describe the attitude of the Jewish tradition toward eugenic ideology and policies, it is necessary to examine classical sources from a contemporary perspective. In the heyday of eugenics, Rabbi Max Reichler (1916) enthusiastically endorsed its ideology, supporting his position with numerous traditional texts. Similar views of traditional teachings on “chosen people” and on the importance of lineage have a certain contemporary following as well. The paper argues, however, that these views involve a one-sided reading of the Jewish tradition (...) and, particularly, the suppression of traditional critiques of lineage and of the notion of a “Jewish race.”. (shrink)

Sexual dimorphism, symmetry, and coloration in human faces putatively signal information relevant to mate selection and reproduction. Although the independent contributions of these characteristics to judgments of attractiveness are well established, relatively few studies have examined whether individuals prioritize certain features over others. Here, participants (N = 542, 315 female) ranked six sets of facial photographs (3 male, 3 female) by their preference for starting long- and short-term romantic relationships with each person depicted. Composite-based digital transformations were applied such (...) that each image set contained 11 different versions of the same identity. Each photograph in each image set had a unique combination of three traits: sexual dimorphism, symmetry, and color cues to health. Using conjoint analysis to evaluate participants’ ranking decisions, we found that participants prioritized cues to sexual dimorphism over symmetry and color cues to health. Sexual dimorphism was also found to be relatively more important for the evaluation of male faces than for female faces, whereas symmetry and color cues to health were relatively more important for the evaluation of female faces than for male faces. Symmetry and color cues to health were more important for long-term versus short-term evaluations for female faces, but not male faces. Analyses of utility estimates reveal that our data are consistent with research showing that preferences for facial masculinity and femininity in male and female faces vary according to relationship context. These findings are interpreted in the context of previous work examining the influence of these facial attributes on romantic partner perception. (shrink)

The sexual exploitation of children in Indonesia is a serious crime that threatens the fundamental rights of children and their physical, emotional, and mental development. Cases of child sexual exploitation continue to rise, whether in the form of human trafficking, pornography, or sexual abuse, yet the response remains far from optimal. Although regulations and prevention programs are in place, the lack of coordination among law enforcement agencies and the low level of public awareness are major obstacles to (...) resolving these cases.This study employs a qualitative approach using a normative-empirical method, involving an analysis of the legal framework as well as in-depth interviews with legal practitioners and relevant stakeholders. The results indicate that although there is a strong legal foundation, policy implementation is often hindered by bureaucracy, limited human resources, and low legal awareness in society. Additionally, social stigma against victims exacerbates the situation, especially in rural areas.The study recommends an interconnected approach involving substantive law, legal structure, and legal culture as an effective solution to address the escalation of child sexual exploitation. These findings imply the need for improved inter-agency coordination, law enforcement training, and more extensive public awareness campaigns. (shrink)