Doing It Down Under

Following the special issue of Blawg Review at Jennifer Clare Burke's Transcending Gender, we're now doing it down under at Peter Black's Freedom to Differ.

The headline for this post introducing Blawg Review #85 is borrowed from the title of a book about the sexual lives of Australians.


Doing It Down Under is based on the extensive 'Sex in Australia' research reported in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health in 2003. As the 'largest sex survey ever done in Australia', and with an impressive sample size of 19,307 randomly-sampled men and women, this research is an excellent contribution towards understandings of sexual practices and sexual health in twenty-first century Australia.

In 18 small and easily digestible chapters, the book covers the basics of what people do sexually and how often, sexual attitudes, masturbation, using sex toys and pornography, cheating and infidelity, sexual identities, pregnancy and contraception, sexual difficulties, paying for sex, sexually transmitted infections, and in a sobering chapter, sexual assault.

Not that any of these topics will be covered on Blawg Review #85 in great detail. Freedom to Differ is not a blog about the Gay and Lesbian Struggle for Civil Rights, either. That's just one of those coincidences that surprises us as much as those who arrive here searching for interesting stuff on the worldwide web.

The title of Peter Black's law blog, Freedom to Differ, is inspired by the Opinion of the US Supreme Court in Board of Education v Barnette 319 US 624 (1943), a case concerning the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution that protected students from being forced to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance in school, where Justice Robert H. Jackson, for the majority, famously wrote:

But freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's see what Peter Black, an associate lecturer in law at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, has put together for Blawg Review #85 at Freedom to Differ.