I can see myself spending a lot of time in the next year or so debating issues of sex and porn, so I’ve been looking around (with the help of the Women’s Studies email list) for a guide to the latest debate.

Which led to my being pointed to this excellent – and recently updated – article by Laurie Shrage, Feminist Perspectives on Sex Markets, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

More generally that looks to be an excellent resource, and free online – well done!

I was reading a piece about Uganda, one of the “success stories” of Africa, which is curently battling (although not all in the same place) outbreaks of ebola, yellow fewer, cholera, meningitis and bubonic plague. Bad enough, and then I read the explanation of why it was chiefly women who were suffering from the last disease:

Dr Otaala attributed the incessant occurrence of plague in Nebbi along the frontier line with the DR Congo, to the primitive culture of the indigenous people “where men sleep on beds while women sleep on the floor.”
“The people mainly affected are women because in that district (Nebbi), women only come up on the bed (for sex),” Dr Otaala said, at the Media Centre in Kampala.
“The flea (that causes plague) can only jump up to six inches (high) and (that means) if everybody was sleeping on a bed, there would be no plague in this country,” Dr Zaramba.

The prevalence of female genital mutilation in Kenya has fallen from 50 per cent in 1999 to 34 per cent now. (What this figure actually refers to isn’t entirely clear – presumably girls emerging from the danger period.)

And showing that it is possible to almost stop the mutilation entirely, in Cameroon, the rate has fallen from 20 per cent to 1 per cent.

And in Nigeria, Kano state which adopted shariah and threatened to stone women for adultery (there were a couple of highly publicised cases) has toned down the approach, the New York Times reports, with the once Iranian-style religious police being reduced to directing traffic and guiding at football stadiums. Amina Lawal, one of the women threatened with stoning, is now a local political activist.

That’s a question now being put to the test in Sweden, with the equal opportunities ombudsman due to rule shortly.

I would have thought the equality argument was impossible to resist.

But what I’d like to know is what is the “hygiene” issue referred to by the “leisure centre spokesperson”. Why is a woman’s chest less “hygenic” than a man’s?

(I was pleased to see that when I went to this story, the lead item on the entire Brisbane Times was the retirement of the Australian netball captain, Liz Ellis. Even though I personally could never stand netball as a sport.)