Journal of Mistress Kat

1. “Cultural sexualities: Appreciate the varieties of cultural sexual and gender differences and complexity, and the struggle between he local and the global.  
2. Contested sexualities: Recognise the ubiquity of agonistic conflicts and look for peaceful resolutions.  
3. Dialogic sexualities: Know yourself, recognise the sexual other, identify power and move towards a common mutual horizon.  
4. Empathic sexualities: Understand others – appreciate and maintain dialogue with your sexual partners and their worlds.  
5. Caring sexualities: Be kind – care for the sexual other as well as your self, and work to reduce violence.  
6. Just sexualities: Seek justice – create free, fair and equal sexual and gender relations.  
7. Dignified sexualities: Foster human rights and dignity – respect others, their sexual dignity and their sexual and gender rights, being aware of their fragility and vulnerability.  
8. Flourishing sexualities: Encourage lives to flourish – foster relational flourishing for all across gender and sexuality.  
9. Pragmatic sexualities: Stay grounded and be practical – keep at it, it’s not easy!
10. Hopeful sexualities: Be positive and work for better worlds for all – keep hopeful in sexual relations. Reduce sexual harm and foster peace.”

“... actual advance toward desired success-symbols through conventional channels is, despite our persisting open-class ideology, relatively rare and difficult for those handicapped by little formal education and few economic resources. The dominant pressure of group standards of success is, therefore, on the gradual attenuation of legitimate, but by and large ineffective, strivings and the increasing use of illegitimate, but more or less effective, expedients of vice and crime. The cultural demands made on persons in this situation are incompatible. On the one hand, they are asked to orient their conduct toward the prospect of accumulating wealth and on the other, they are largely denied effective opportunities to do so institutionally. The consequences of such structural inconsistency are psycho-pathological personality, and/or antisocial conduct, and/or revolutionary activities. The equilibrium between culturally designated means and ends becomes highly unstable with the progressive emphasis on attaining the prestige-laden ends by any means whatsoever. Within this context, Capone represents the triumph of amoral intelligence over morally prescribed "failure," when the channels of vertical mobility are closed or narrowed in a society which places a high premium on economic affluence and social ascent for all its members. This last qualification is of primary importance. [...] It is only when a system of cultural values extols, virtually above all else, certain common symbols of success for the population at large while its social structure rigorously restricts or completely eliminates access to approved modes of acquiring these symbols for a considerable part of the same population, that antisocial behavior ensues on a considerable scale. In other words, our egalitarian ideology denies by implication the existence of noncompeting groups and individuals in the pursuit of pecuniary success. The same body of success-symbols is held to be desirable for all. These goals are held to transcend class lines, not to be bounded by them, yet the actual social organization is such that there exist class differentials in the accessibility of these common success-symbols.” (Merton, 1938: 679-80, emphasis as original)