By the way, I forgot to mention this when it went up, but my column over at the Canadian women’s magazine Cahoots is different in nature than it used to be. In the old days, I wrote about blogging women, basically reviewing interesting blogs by women with quotes and praise and so on.
However, I ran out of steam on that — reviewing blogs is just not interesting work, I think, and I prefer to just splat praise on my own site when I find a good one — so I talked it over with the editor and, inspired by my essay on “The Male Gaze,” which was published in Cahoots as well, we decided that the magazine could do with an essay from, uh, let’s say, an “enlightened” (yet occasionally challenging) male perspective.
Enlightened is a tough order to fill, of course, so let me define it: I mean, someone who’s trying to think through things sensibly, compassionately, and reasonably. Not that I never misstep, but that I’m willing to consider the possibility, to understand and to admit it. Likewise, it’s probably odd to some readers to discover that I’m writing for a Canadian women’s magazine. When I mentioned it to some friends back in the early days, they were puzzled and amused. But I’m proud to be able to write stuff so far from the area I usually work in.
Anyway, the first installment of my column is basically a rallying cry to simply recognizing that discussing the dimension of sociobiology in which humans as sexed creatures — male and female — is not backwards or sexist, as long as we know what the hell we’re talking about. The column installment, titled “Planet Crazy,” is here. And the rest of my contributions to Cahoots, including a piece on the British magician Derren Brown, are linked here.