Over the last several weeks sex has been finding its way into the news in a variety of ways. Here’s a quick summary of a couple of these stories:
- Duke students object to having Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home on required reading list
Alison Bechdel, in addition to be known for the eponymous Bechdel Test, is also a prominent graphic novel creator. Her book Fun Home, an autobiographical story about growing up with a closeted father, has received critical praise and is the basis of a Tony Award-winning musical. It has also received complaints from students at Duke University who say the book is “pornographic” and inappropriate for college freshman. You can read more about this case at The Mary Sue. - What should reporters be doing with the info from the Ashley Madison data dump?
By now, anyone who cares about sex-and-the-media should be familiar with the Ashley Madison data dump. In case you need help getting up to speed, Ashley Madison is a pay-to-play web site that is supposedly about helping people get together for extra-marital affairs – it’s a dating site for married people. The site was hacked recently, and the hackers proceeded to post the data they collected about the web site’s subscribers.The big question then becomes, what do journalists do with the data the hackers released?
Journalist Jennifer Jeanne Patterson writes about the fact that she’s in the database from some research she did about online infidelity. She writes that she’s not sure what to expect from the coverage.
Gadget website Gizmodo did some in-depth analysis of the hacked Ashley Madison data and came to the fascinating conclusion that virtually all the site’s subscribers were men. Which raises the question – were subscribers actually seeking out affairs?