Julia H.'s First Post

First days in England are a blur of cars, adverts and pub food. My project is taking some interesting turns as I talk to people in London. First it was just going to be about sexuality in the visual media. Then it morphed into sex and sexuality. I also want to cover some of the hot topics in American media today so I am branching out. My project will now include sex (the way it is viewed by the culture), sexuality (LGBTQ), drugs (rules and regulations and societies acceptance), and contraception (availability, abortions, and acceptance). Each will have the added label of private or public.

Been in London for about a week. Learned a lot walking around Soho. The people in this city are more friendly then I would have expected. Learned from a woman in Costa that the metro, a free city newspaper, is like a snap shot of the news whereas the bigger newspapers like the times are deeper in their topics and the news reports they give. I cannot really think of anything similar in Muncie or even Chicago. I will have to look into this more upon my return. The Sun has given me more to think about. It has an advice column on sex and relationships. It also has a page tree girl, who is topless. These differences are fascinating.

Ah Edinburgh. I love this city but its culture is even more interesting. It has some gay clubs, not really labeled as such outside the establishment but know as such to the younger community. It appears that drugs are easily accessible (to those who want them) and the implements to use them are on display in shop windows with some frequency around the city. The amount of adverts displaying sex, however, are not on every street corner or phone box. Instead we did find a free magazine that was full of topless women called The Sportsman. Not sure what the sport was but the public displays of breasts does not seem to hold the same stigma that it might back in the US. There are adverts for rape and stalking, especially on campus. In the Cosmo on Campus there was an article about how rape is being joked about by the men, well boys really, and that we should start saying the f* word. By this they mean feminism. It seems that sexual education is far more public here.