My linkers

By Kathy G.

I was just looking at the stats about where my traffic is coming from, and I was delighted to discover that one site that has recently linked to me is Howard Phillips' blog. Yes, that Howard Phillips, wingnut extraordinaire. He's so far right that back in the 90s, he decided the Republicans weren't conservative enough for his liking, so he formed his own party, the U.S. Taxpayers Party (now the Constitution Party).

The link is puzzling, though. It's a link to my recent Thomas Frank post, which doesn't mention Phillips at all. But Phillips includes it in the section of his website called "other recent news coverage of Howard Phillips."

Whatev. I sincerely appreciate both the link and the characterization of this humble blog as "news." And hey, he's being a lot classier than Megan McArdle, who couldn't be bothered to link to me when I called her out on her ignorance about monopsony. She wrote that "a number of people wrote, blogged, or commented" about her post that mentioned monopsony, but so far as I could determine, there was only one blogger who responded to said post, and that was yours truly.

Not acknowledging that was not very gracious, to say the least. But I notice that McArdle has the annoying habit of making vague references to her critics without bothering to link to them -- like here, for instance. This makes it harder for her readers to judge who's gotten the best of the argument, but I guess that's the point, isn't it?

Another site that has directed traffic my way is this one: realadultsex.com. Now when I first saw that I was getting traffic from that site, I was tickled, I'll admit. Because it had occurred to me that by giving this blog a sexed up name, I might get visitors who were looking for a porn site. And my (admittedly far-fetched) hope was: hey, they'll come for the porn, but maybe they'll stay for the feminism and policy wonkery?

So I went to realadultsex.com, where I found, to my disappointment, that it wasn't a porn site at all. Well, duh! - I should have known. Dudes looking for wanking off material are not bloody likely to visit a site named for a female erogenous zone. Pleasuring women is the exact opposite of what mainstream porn is about, after all.

But then I looked at realadultsex.com some more, and I discovered that it's a really smart, interesting site that can be characterized, for lack of a better term, as sex-positive feminism. So go check it out -- it's well worth your time. And I'm happy to discover the internets have one more feminist site, and one less porn site, than I'd imagined.

Comments

[dsquared]

[Not acknowledging that was not very gracious, to say the least. But I notice that McArdle has the annoying habit of making vague references to her critics without bothering to link to them -- like here, for instance. This makes it harder for her readers to judge who's gotten the best of the argument, but I guess that's the point, isn't it?]

yup. She also has a habit of doing what she's done in her latest post linking to you, which is picking fights and then, faux-innocent, asking why everyone's fighting with her.

[NutellaonToast]

"Kathy G is worried that I failed to point out that perfect Coasean conditions never hold in the real world."

Ha, now she's linking to you but to this post and not the one that actually contradicts here. What a fucking tool.

[figleaf]

Thanks for the nod, Kathy,

If sex, gender, and internal and external dynamics of relationships were even modestly Pareto efficient I'd probably blog about something else.

As for our respective URLs, I found your blog via a link from someone at TAPPED, I think, and so wasn't really expecting anything salacious. On the other hand you did tackle unconventional partner bias in your second post, made a brilliant point about Senator Clinton's non-topical enemies in the next, and further thumped nouveau agony aunts and uncles for bad methodology in the one after that... and just felt right at home.

Take care,

figleaf

[knzn]

"Pleasuring women is the exact opposite of what mainstream porn is about, after all."

I'm not exactly sure what mainstream porn is (I often get the impression that it's a genre to which I've never been exposed), but, "mainstream" or not, surely lesbianism is a major theme in pornography directed at men. It's hard to see how a video of two women pleasuring each other could be about anything other than pleasuring women. More generally, I may be an atypical male, but for me the thought of a woman experiencing sexual pleasure is about the sexiest thing there is. (Indeed I find the title of your blog kind of... "disturbing...but in a good way.") Based on what I've seen around the Internet, I don't think I'm all that atypical.

(Granted, in the above paragraph, I use the term "pornography" loosely. If you want to define pornography in such a way that it excludes most material that is about pleasuring women, then of course it will exclude such material. But, definitions aside, you seem to be asserting the substantive proposition that men aren't interested in such material, which is contrary to my experience and impression.)

BTW I found your blog via a link from Mark Thoma in one of his daily lists of links.

[john jansen]

Regarding pornography: i believe Eisenhower era Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined it as, " I know it when I see it".

He probably got that right!