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* Via BLOgT: Even ex-gays are allowed to wear fabulous scarves.
* Feministing points to a Brightest Young Things piece on how some LGBT folks define queer virginity.
* At Tiger Beatdown, Silvana reacts to a piece in the Washington Post about a victim of trauma who built an anti-terrorism career out of her fascination with "evil and violence":
Ironically enough, reading an article about someone else’s fascination with terror caused me to feel a little terror of my own. What if this explained it all? What if my fascination with detention and corrections, and compulsion to fight for people who are locked up, was all a complicated outgrowth of my history of trauma? I was harassed almost every day as a teenager, groped, assaulted, and in my late teens and early twenties raped repeatedly by a boyfriend. I was surrounded by people who had done bad things to me. But instead of being repulsed by criminals, rapists, terrorists, I identify with them. Because, just like women are the sex class, to be the recipient, the dumping-ground for male aggression, men of color and especially mentally ill men of color are the dumping ground for white male authoritarian state-sanctioned violence.
* At Jezebel, Irin Carmon interviews former staffers about The Daily Show's boys club. Head to the comments to read a deluge of defenses of this "progressive" product with a gender problem.
* Tracy Clark-Flory on a man who allegedly hacked into over 100 computers in search of private sex tapes and photos (44 of the victims were underage):
When we come across stories about violations of people's sexual privacy, whether on the news or in our personal lives, there's a tendency to go, Oh, well, that was stupid of them — they shouldn't have filmed that, they shouldn't have taken that photo, etc. And then you feel a bit safer, thanks to your superior wisdom, which tells you that you should not let your boyfriend keep a copy of your homemade sex tape and that you should decline that guy's request for a sexy photo (and maybe you even follow this advice, most of the time). The reality, though, is that precautions—no matter how sensible, no matter how self-righteously we trumpet them—are no match for someone set on exploitation.