Prude

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Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls (and America, Too!)
by Carol Platt Liebau
Nonfiction

“Once upon a time,” writes Carol Platt Liebau in her new pro-virtue manifesto Prude, “‘slut’ was one of the greatest insults. But now, being a prude is deemed to be even worse.” Everywhere in America, from the Hooters on the corner to the movies in our theaters to the songs on the radio to the pornography that “pops up, unbidden, on the Internet,” none of us can escape the “implicit message that being sexy at all times is a female imperative.”

In Prude, Liebau argues convincingly that this message is corrosive and gross, not least because it pressures girls to become sexually active at ever-younger ages. In her view, “girls between twelve and seventeen are, quite simply, too young to be engaging in sexual activity,” and “even those who are ready physically aren’t equipped for the intense feelings that accompany sexual relationships, or the psychological and emotional aftermath,” especially if pregnancy, abortion, or STDs ensue. While some readers may disagree with Liebau’s ideas about the ideal age of consent, teens will certainly benefit from her persuasive arguments about why it’s better to wait.

Given Prude’s usefulness, it’s unfortunate that Liebau tends to ignore realities that clash with the tenants of her argument. To give just one example, she uses a minor 2005 young-adult novel, Rainbow Party, and the Gossip Girl book series to illustrate youth culture’s moral bankruptcy, conveniently ignoring the other bestsellers among teen readers. They are the Harry Potter series, the Pretties/Uglies/Specials series, and Twilight series, all of which are serious and thoughtful rather than sensational or overtly sexual. Similar distortions elsewhere suggest that while Liebau cares deeply about America and its girls, she has an agenda to push. In her perfect world, sex would not occur between unmarried men and women or, presumably, between members of the same sex. In other words, in the name of chastity, Liebau may be after some cherished liberties.


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Let's go for a ride, Barbie Girl

Barrister's Clerk Profile

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Introduction

This Section of the site details information that you might find useful if you are looking to secure employment or require further details regarding working as an Barristers Clerk. This page details the following Information:-



Finding Suitable Work as an Barristers Clerk

Working Duties Expected

Hours and Environment

Working Skills Required

Training Requirements

Salary Expectations

Trade Information

Other useful Barristers Clerk Work Information
Finding Suitable Work

This website features a volume of Job vacancies advertised on behalf of a number of different employers and specialist recruiters that post vacancies ...

UK Job Interview Advice

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When You Are Preparing For The Interview:

Great news, give yourself a pat on the back and well done you’ve got an interview for a new job. You have obviously impressed your future potential employer with your CV and your application form to be offered an interview in the first place. You have probably beaten many other applicants but something in your application has made you stand out from the other candidates.

An employer isn’t looking to employ any old person to fill their job hence they have already sifted through all of the applications and compiled a ...

My Way - TV

My Way - TV

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My Way - Video

My Way - Video

mini skirts are back

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leading market indicator or lagging indicator

Privacy on parade

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Judges are creating new privacy case law with each new ruling. And with the lack of parliamentary legislation


You have 24 hours to stop the nationwide publication of your personal sex diary, which has been stolen to order by your cleaner for a national newspaper.

Chances are that you will have a better chance these days of keeping your privates private than you might have had a few years ago.

As 5 Raymond Buildings barrister Iain Christie remarks: "Broadly speaking we're seeing judgments and remedies in favour of individuals that assert certain privacy rights that you wouldn't have seen before."

This is largely as a result of the Human Rights Act (HRA), which in 2000 introduced a right to respect for someone's private and family life.

The tension is between Article 8, which asserts privacy, and Article 10, which asserts freedom of expression. Article 8 says: "Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence."

"It's the first time in English law that we've had such a positive right stated in those terms," says Christie. "Since then courts have been trying to balance privacy with the right to freedom of expression, which always exists in media cases.

"The law's being developed by the judges on a case-by-case basis." And among those judges, one stands out as the most influential man in this sensitive field: Mr Justice Eady.

The High Court
Almost all media ...

Material witless

The exponential rise in popularity of user-generated websites MySpace and YouTube has brought to the fore the fact that the copyright laws governing these media are a grey area. By Graham Simkin and Kevin Smith

[from The Lawyer]
On 17 November 2006 Universal began an action for copyright infringement in the US District Court of Los Angeles against the popular networking website MySpace. The claim follows a breakdown in negotiations between the two companies for a content licensing deal. Universal had threatened similar action against YouTube, another highly successful networking site specialising primarily in videos, but ultimately settled for a reported seven-figure equity share as part of Google's $1.65bn (£841.02m) acquisition of the site.

But as the popularity and membership of each site has skyrocketed, so too has the amount of copyrighted content being circulated. This has raised important questions about the rights of copyright owners in relation to the distribution of their content on these sites. Also, because of the rapid growth in popularity of both MySpace and YouTube with consumers (MySpace now claims a membership of more than 50 million), each site is now able to attract significant advertising revenue and they have become a major distribution channel for music and video. Unsurprisingly, they have become the target of large-scale claims.

User-generated and peer-to-peer sites
Both MySpace and YouTube began as user-generated (UG) sites, as opposed to peer-to-peer (P2P) sites. Traditionally, P2P sites have focused on distributing existing third-party material as opposed to new, original material created by site members

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De Niro, Minogue pose for Camera

Wed Jan 23, 2008 11:56pm EST
30 Nov 2007

COLOGNE, Germany (Hollywood Reporter) - Robert de Niro and Aussie pop star Kylie Minogue will receive Germany's top show-biz honor, the Golden Camera, at this year's ceremony in Berlin, organizers announced Wednesday.

De Niro will receive a lifetime achievement award, while Minogue will be honored as best international music act.

Much like a local version of the Golden Globes, Germany's Golden Cameras award excellence in film, television and music. The Golden Camera gala is the top show-biz event on the German calendar.

Previous international Golden Camera winners include George Clooney, Nicolas Cage, Cate Blanchett, Steven Spielberg and Bruce Willis.

Now in their 43rd year, the Golden Camera awards are presented by German publishing giant Axel Springer and Horzu, the country's leading TV listings magazine.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter




© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

Course: 23 Things On a Stick

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Welcome to 23 Things On a Stick

Have you ever thought, ”Gosh, I wish I had time to learn more about Flickr, wikis, or (enter your Web 2.0 tool here)?” Well, this is your chance to take the time to focus on your personal and professional development around Web 2.0 tools. It’s fun to explore these tools and figure out ways to use them in the library, with your personal Web sites, or in other ways.

23 Things On a Stick is the Minnesota twist on the Library Learning 2.0 program developed by Helene Blowers at the Public Library of Charlotte

Library of Congress, Flickr launch public photo project by ZDNet's Richard Koman -- The Library of Congress is launching a Flickr experiment and is encouraging people to tag images. Library communications director Matt Raymond blogs about the project: If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that [...]

Anecdotes are usually highly misleading or wrong.

Stella Awards. An egregious example of this is a list of six crazy “real lawsuits” circulating around the Internet since May 2001, all of which are entirely made up. According to Snopes.com, a website that debunks urban legends, “All of the entries in the list are fabrications – a search for news stories about each of these cases failed to turn up anything, as did a search for each law case.” 3 In 2003, Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz reported on confronting U.S. News & World Report owner Mort Zuckerman about referencing these fictitious cases. “Great stuff,” said Kurtz after describing two of the crazy lawsuits cited by Zuckerman. “Unfortunately for Zuckerman, totally bogus. Two Web sites -- StellaAwards.com and Snopes.com -- say the cases … are fabricated, and no public records could be found for them. Zuckerman has plenty of company. A number of newspapers and columnists have touted the phantom cases since they surfaced in 2001 in a Canadian newspaper.”4 . . . .

Gigolos speak out in conservative India

Beeb

Male sex workers or gigolos comprise a shadowy group of people in India. The BBC's Soutik Biswas meets a group of gigolos in the eastern city of Calcutta.

What is common between a draughtsman, an accounting clerk, a shop assistant and a school dropout?

Nothing much apart from the fact that the four men come from middle-class families in India and - barring the drop out - quit humdrum jobs to start selling sex to women in the crowded eastern city of Calcutta.

Dibakar, Samrat, Pallab and Goutam have also come together to bond in a group called Anandam that includes gays, lesbians, transgender groups and bisexuals to push HIV prevention programmes.

They are also stepping out of their shadowy world to talk about their lives and problems in a society where very little is known about them, talking about sex remains a taboo, and homosexuality and soliciting sex is outlawed.

High risk

Most female sex workers in India walk the streets or work out of thriving, grubby red light districts. Male sex workers usually cruise downtown streets in main cities, work in shady massage parlours and trawl internet chatrooms for clients.

There are several thousand of them in the big cities and their numbers are growing as the mobile phone and the internet have made business easier for them. . . .

The National Maritime Museum

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... collections contain more than 100,000 sea charts and maps dating from the medieval period to the present day. They document the results of exploration and discovery and show how techniques of navigation and surveying developed. Many were owned by naval officers and politicians and were used to plan and record the events which have become maritime history. The collections are not exclusively British and although they concentrate on charting the seas and coastlines, land maps are also included. Together they illustrate the work of the leading hydrographers and cartographers throughout the history of charting and mapmaking.

Charts represent the world's water-covered regions as aids to navigation. They are generally drawn on Gerard Mercator's projection (first introduced in 1569), which transforms the curved surface of the earth on to a flat plane.

The earliest portulan charts were prepared on vellum (sheep or goatskin). These concentrated on the Mediterranean. Later Italian, Spanish and Portuguese charts included new information resulting from the voyages of exploration of the late-15th and early-16th centuries.

Printed charts replaced portulan charts in the 17th century. The Dutch dominated the hydrography market and published many fine sea atlases. France and Britain next became major forces in chartmaking. Both established naval hydrographic offices, France in 1720 and Britain in 1795.

The British contribution to hydrography was highlighted by the voyages of discovery made by Captain James Cook between 1768 and 1780. Britain led the charting industry during the 19th century.

Researchers are welcome to study items but an appointment must be made in advance. Please contact the E-library for further information. Telephone: +44 (0) 20 8312 6516

Appointed Forever

Audio, Video, Multimedia

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Multimedia Search Engines and Subject Directories (for audio and video): You can use Google or Yahoo to search for terms such as webcast, netcast, audio archive, audiocast, coursecast, cybercast, podcast, Internet broadcast, lecture series, archived audio, archived video, archived lectures, web media, multimedia, audio, audio archive, video archive, on demand, streaming, swarmcasting, realaudio, mp3, sdp, etc. For example, to locate university webcasts use this Google search query: inurl:webcast inurl:.edu. Specialized sites include: AlltheWeb: Audio, AlltheWeb: Video, Alta Vista Video Search, Audiofind: Multimedia Search Engine, Blinkx, CNET Music Center, FindSounds, Lycos Music Downloads, Lycos Multimedia, Open Video Project, Radio Scout, a public radio broadcast search, SingingFish, Songtext, and SpeechBot (11/4/05: no longer available), and University Channel.
See Also: Locating Lyrics, Sheet Music, Librettos & Scores | Movies | Music

ABC Musical Notation Language - "Language designed to notate tunes in an ASCII format. It was designed primarily for folk and traditional tunes of Western European origin." Developed and maintained by Chris Walshaw. (Many . . .

Sony

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In Blu-ray Coup, Sony Has Opening But Hurdles, Too