Whew, it's been a long time since I've posted! (Hmmm...August 27th to December 20th? Sounds like a busy term in grad student land to me!) Thought I'd make up for it with a brilliant idea posted by Nora, an educator who trains other educators in how to teach sexualities. Nora (she didn't leave a surname) wrote to PostSecret that she uses some of the images from PostSecret to help educators and students explore some of the very real human issues we think/worry/wonder/ about when it comes to our sexualities. It's a brilliant idea, and one that I think could revolutionize the way we teach sexualities.
PostSecret, for those of you who don't know, is a community art project where people are invited to create a postcard and mail their secrets in. It's been going on for a few years now, and has become a bit of a cultural phenomenon inspiring several books, and countless PostSecret events all over North America.
New secrets are posted on the site every Sunday, and it's a fascinating glimpse into the act of being human. It's also incredibly addictive, and the first site I visit every Sunday.
When I read about Nora's brilliant idea, I started seeing how many of these secrets could apply to teaching sex edcuation. The next few posts will be exploring some of the images that could be used pedagogically to inspire conversation about real issues of sexuality. (All images owned by PostSecret). I think she's on to something big here. What do you think?
An innovative new teaching tool designed to educate parents and inspire conversations about sexualities between adults and their children has been developed in Brooklyn, NY communities. Community input used to create a set of three audio cds, which were distributed in neighbourhoods where youth were considered at risk to engage in early sexual activity. These communities were identified primarily through ethnicity; statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2000 suggest that 16% of African American youth, 8% of Hispanic youth and 5% of White youth reported having sex before age thirteen. Researchers in the study described here conducted extensive focus groups in the schools and community (38 focus groups involving 109 youth and 64 parents) and from this input the intervention ,“Saving sex for later” was developed, featuring professionally scripted and produced cds that tried to build on realistic ‘natural opportunities’ that could translate into teachable moments between parent and child. (i.e. events that could happen at school or to friends, television shows, song lyrics, etc. )
Strategies that aim to delay sexual initiation need to target pre-adolescent youth, which often resulting in controversy and worries that interventions aimed at youth of this age can actually have the opposite intended effect. With this in mind, and building on community feedback from an advisory board of parents and teachers, a parental education program was thought to be a potentially important project. The schools in which the intervention took place were in Brooklyn New York, where 90% of the student population were Black or Hispanic. 133 cds were randomly to parents in the community, and roughly half of them returned feedback, which was overwhelmingly positive and suggests that this kind of parental teaching innovation is highly welcomed. On average, about 90% of the parents who received the cd listened to it and would (or did) recommend it to other parents. Around 80% listened to it with their child, and more than 85% of the parents who responded said it initiated conversations with their child.
Interestingly, in parental feedback, the terms “caring and concerned” were used several times in the feedback, as can be seen below:
“As a caring and concerned parent, the CD’s I listened to were very helpful and useful. It taught me a lot, as well as my son. For the first time, I can really say while listening to the cds (Saving Sex for Later), it made it much easier and [more] comfortable to talk with my son about sex and its consequences, as well as safe sex…His feedback was amazing. I would like to take this time to thank you for your help and support in doing this, because it is very hard sometimes to talk to your children about these things”
“Let me first say thank you very much for your care and concern about all teens and the language of sex. There should be more programs such as yours reaching out to our children…Thank you! You have been most respect[ful] to me and my daughters.”
Incorporating an ethics of care into sexualities education may require that we consider the impact we could have as educators if we were to incorporate innovative strategies such as this to include parents and give them tools with which they can gain a level of comfort in discussing sexualities with their children.
(source: O'Donnell, L., Wilson-Simmons, R., Dash, K., Jeanbaptiste, V., Myint-U, A., Moss, J., et al. (2007). Saving sex for later: developing a parent-child communication intervention to delay sexual initiation among young adolescenets. Sex Education, 7(2), 107-125.)
Concern over whether teachers who teach sexualities curriculum are adequately informed enough to assume an ‘expert’ role in the classroom prompted an interesting recent study in the UK. Unfortunately, this survey of 155 sex education teachers in England (94 female, 61 male) suggests that not only do most teachers not have enough knowledge, but only rarely is their teaching in this subject even assessed. Adding to the uneasiness, teachers worry about the possibility of parental complaints, or even worse, litigation. As parents are able to pull their child from sex education at any time, it leaves a residual ambiguity with educators who are unsure about what material must be taught and what is optional.
Assessing sexual health knowledge in this study involved developing a questionnaire designed to measure three components: (i) contraceptive use and methods(i.e. “do you need parental/guardian consent to obtain contraceptives for under 16s/”(ii) sexually transmitted infections(i.e. “can you be unaware that you have a sexually transmitted infection?”) and (iii) about the relationship between contraception and sexually transmitted infections (i.e. “ do all methods of contraception protect you from sexually transmitted infections?” Other parts of the survey listed various medical conditions and asked educators to identify which were STIs, and attempted to measure the level of preparedness teachers felt they had to teach the subject.
Although teachers scored well on general sexual health knowledge, more than half were unable to correctly answer that emergency contraceptive pills are effective for up to three days after unprotected sex, and only 43% could state that the emergency contraception has an effectiveness of 85% if used correctly. Generally speaking, educators do not feel that they have been provided with sufficient information regarding STIs, youth legal rights or contraception. A concerning 73% felt ill-prepared to discuss the availability of local or regional sexual health services that might be available to youth.
Clearly, there is a disconnect between the desired and stated learning goals and outcomes of sexuality curricula, if we are not ensuring that educators are able to teach the material effectively and confidently. Perhaps most telling is that 83% of the teachers involved in the study suggested that they believed that sexualities education should be taught by partnerships involving “teachers, healthcare professionals and other outside agencies” (Westwood & Mullan, 2007, p.151). Providing this scaffolding could radically empower both teachers and youth in the sexualities classroom, and create very different learning opportunities than those that are being quelled through lack of knowledge or confidence.
(source: Westwood, J., & Mullan, B. (2007). Knowledge and attitudes of secondary school teachers regarding sexual health education in England. Sex Education, 7(2), 143-159.)
The Girl Guides have come a long way since the days of my delinquent Brownie youth, when our Tawny Owl(who had a wee bit of a problem with the bottle and a bigger one with good judgement) would send us into the forest to look for burrs while she contentedly sipped gin in the church basement...but I digress.
The Girl Guides of the UK polled a thousand girls and young women (age 7-25) involved with their organization about what they thought girls should know. The result is The Guide to Living for Modern Girls, with some interesting suggestions that point to where the priorities are for girls and young women.
Ages 16-25 want to know about:
Money management skills (93%)
Performing resuscitation (85%)
Speaking confidently in public (84%)
Practising safe sex (80%)
Producing a first-rate resume (66%)
Assembling flat pack furniture (55%)
Ages 10-15 listed these as their priorities:
Cooking a healthy meal (79%)
Leading a team (74%)
Pitching a tent (74%)
Knowing how to stand up to boys (68%)
Learning word processing and spreadsheet software(66%)
Ages 7 -10 thought they should be versed in:
Knowing the Green Cross Code (80%) (I'm not sure, this might be the UK version of the Brownie code)
Safe web surfing (78%)
Caring for a pet (75%)
First aid (75%)
Furthermore, in more applause-worthy directions, the Girl Scouts of America established theGirl Scout Research Institute in 2000, as a "center for research and public policy information on the healthy development of girls as they mature toward adulthood."
So much more than cookies! Tom Jones had it right, "women and girl (scouts) rock my world!"
This is making the rounds on gamer blogs a lot this week. An interesting edit from Saturday morning cartoons of the Super Mario Brothers with a safer sex / sex education message. Bound to get kids' attention more than many of the materials that are being used, and it might get some conversations opened for some more detailed sexualities education discussions.
An innovative partnership between Fiesta Condoms (run by by the DKT Indonesia Foundation, the local chapter of a Washington-based charitable organization) and the Singapore-based multimedia health platform Love Airways launched a free service where people can text-message their questions about sexual health and get a response by a health professional. The hotline is a response to a study that found Indonesian youth were alarmingly unaware of accurate information in regards to sexual health, with almost half of young people getting their sexual knowledge from porn.
The hotline service allows teenagers and anyone with access to a mobile phone from all over Indonesia to send their queries to a panel of Indonesian doctors by text messaging to +65 94 DRLOVE (+65 943 75683) anonymously, allowing plenty of privacy and freedom to enquire about a topic that is largely a social taboo. "All questions are welcome and no question is too outrageous," said founder of Love Airways' "Dr. Love" aka Dr. Wei Siang Yu, who also set up the world's first wireless sex education initiative in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2002. He also pioneered a similar wireless campaign in Singapore, which is said to have received up to 8,000 queries daily. Although not all questions will be able to be answered due to insufficient resources, questions received in the next month will be compiled into a 20,000-point database that will not only help map out the most common questions Indonesians have about sex, but will also be converted into Indonesia's first interactive digital avatar, "Nova", at http://www.loveairways.com/.
Kudos to the organizations in Jakarta for championing this initiative. Too often, studies are conducted time and time again that suggest that young people are not having access to the information that they need to be sexually healthy, and nothing is done. Here in Canada, the Canadian Council of Ministers of Education conducted a massive study in 2003, duplicating one that been done accessing the knowledge of youth in the mid 1980's, and found that almost half of kids in grade 9 thought that HIV/AIDS is curable, and that the number of youth having unprotected sex had risen substantially. Sadly, four years later, the government has not responded in any proactive or urgent way to the study's findings, which have largely been shelved and educational activism around sexual health has been left primarily to activist agencies and organizations who pick up the cause.
The following is a blog posting by Disappearing John on the choice he and his wife made about getting their daughter vaccinated with the new-ish HPV vaccine. I thought this was an insightful post, and that it might inspire some interesting commentary, and appreciate his honesty in the way he thought through some of the issues he discusses below. (Reprinted with permission of the author)
*** Why is this a difficult choice?
I seem to be on an ethics role lately, but my wife and I ran into a question at our pediatrician's office last month, and I was surprised by all of the discussions I have gotten started just by bringing it up with others...We have a 13 year-old daughter. (okay, when she's hormonally challenged, I say my WIFE has a 13 year old daughter but, none the less). We took her to our doctor to look at a mole that has begun to change on her back to get referred to a dermatologist.
While there, we found out she was due for some immunization boosters, so, over our daughter's staunch objections, we said, "let's get them today, too!"It was then the pediatrician sat down and said, "We have a new vaccine available that is not mandatory, but we recommend it... The HPV vaccine. It is a series of three shots, given two months apart..." My wife and I were both familiar with it, and said, "certainly, let's give that as well!"The pediatrician breathed a sigh of relief, and said, "You would not believe how many parents have been offended that I have suggested it, or yelled at me for suggesting their daughter might be sexually active or advocating that kids this age be sexually active. I am saying nothing of the sort, but this vaccine works best if given before sexual activity begins."
My wife and I have had many frank and open conversations with all of my kids, and they all know our moral positions and beliefs, and know they can talk to us about anything. We explained to our daughter what the shot was for, and reinforced why we were getting her immunized, and that it was not "our blessing" for her to be sexually active. I talked about this at work the other night, and was surprised that a couple of the nurses I work with were opposed to giving their daughters this vaccine. These are emergency room nurses who see pregnant 14-15 year old girls all the time!
To my wife and I, it was a no-brainer. We faced a similar dilemma 6 years ago when our oldest daughter had a severe bout of ovarian cysts, and the best course of treatment was low-dose birth control pills. Deciding to put your 15 year old daughter on birth control pills is a hard choice for a man (any parent, I guess) to make, but it did help open many important conversations.I guess it underscores the current confusion with sex education in America, which is not where I wanted this post to go, but in my humble opinion, closing our eyes and pretending that if we don't tell our kids about sex, birth control and STD control, that they won't become interested in sex and experiment sexually is pretty stupid.It amazes me that people think that getting their kids an immunization is equivalent to saying, "Okay, go have sex now!"
As you may know, sex education was essentially removed from the curriculum in Quebec in January of 2005. Stunning, since this province has one of the highest rates of youth having unprotected sex and sexually transmitted infections going. Head and Hands, a community group I work with is going into the schools this fall and will be teaching sex ed in several local high schools through their SENSE Project. As an innovative fundraiser, they are inviting you to help support sex education and have a little fun as well. For a donation of $10 (or more if you can do so), you can get an online tarot reading over Facebook to answer one of life's burning questions!
Here's how: Add Channing Rodman as your friend. You can find her by typing her name in the facebook search bar or by going to the Head & Hands group page Send her a message saying you are interested in the tarot reading. She'll answer your question, send you pictures of your cards... Karma will give you a big smooch for doing your thing for sexual health!
To pay, go to Head and Hands and click on "Canada Helps" (this is an online donation method and requires a credit card.) It is an easy step-by-step donation process that will take less than5mins to complete. You'll get an email tax receipt for your donation to H&H from Canada Helps. This is an excellent and reputable organization, and they are really needing our help right now... Jump on the karmic bandwagon, and do your thing, woooo :-)
If you are NOT on facebook, email me (link on my profile) and I'll set the reading up for you with Channing. I see the future, and it has SEX ED in it!
15-year-old Katrina Mather has calculated that the opening hours of her local sexual health clinic in the UK give each young person in the area access for under 15 seconds per month.
A survey by the UK Youth Parliament (UKYP) of over 20,000 young people published today highlights that more than 50% have never been taught about pregnancy in school and wouldn’t know where to find their local sexual health clinic. Effective condom use is also not being taught to more than half of the students in the UK, and most find their sex education to be disappointingly inadequate.Findings from the survey are published in a report entitled “Sex & Relationships Education – Are You Getting It?” being launched today at the House of Commons. Other findings echo those found in other studies across the globe: that we aren't teaching youth about relationships, the things they find meaningful and that most young people find their sex education to be woefully inadequate. When will we start to believe them, when they have been telling us for more than a decade that we are doing it wrong?
The Christ over Rio de Janeiro is showing profoundly more compassion for the people of Brazil than Pope Benedict has of late, but thankfully, the government of Brazil is doing a much better job. Brazil joins other progressive mostly Catholic countries in developing a plan to promote sexual health in its citizens : it has handed out more than 250 million free condoms, and just announced that it will provide birth control at 10,000 pharmacies across the country for only $2.40 a year. It already provides a limited number of free vasectomies, and will be increasing the number substantially as well. The Pope has publically spoken out against the move by Brazil and other countries that are following suit.
As Marty Klein over at Sexual Intelligence notes: "Increased access to contraception invariably enhances everyone's health, lowers infant mortality, increases lifespans, and raises incomes. " It's time for the church to recognize the harm it is inflicting on people's lives with its rigid, outdated and dangerous social policy in regards to sexuality and reproduction.
Brazil has 21.2 million people between 12 and 18 years of age, representing 12.5 percent of its 174 million inhabitants, according to A Voz dos Adolescentes (The Voice of Adolescents), a report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Clearly specific strategies need to be adapted to address the needs of this population, and this is an important step in creating a sexually healthy population.
Here in the province of Quebec in Canada, the government essentially eliminated sexeducation from the curriculum, effective January 1, 2005. Instead, teachers are supposed to "infuse" it throughout the curriculum. French teachers are being given workshops on how to do so, to date English teachers are not. It's not a mandated thing, it's really up to individual schools to apply as they see fit. As you can imagine, most teachers don't feel comfortable teaching sex ed, so if it isn't a requirement, it isn't going to happen. In Canada, most students already report less than two hours of sex education throughout their entire high school career. This move makes safe spaces for youth to have meaningful learning about sex education even more diminished.Quebec, incidently, has the highest rate of youth having unprotected sex in the country.
One of the activist community groups that is doing something positive and proactive about this in Montreal is Head and Hands, who are introducing The Sense Project into schools this September. The Sense Project is going into several Montreal area schools and will be delivering sex education programs taught by trained community volunteers, and will be training youth to be peer sexualities educators as well. They're doing a fantastic job, and this is really important work.
On July 15th, The Sense Project will be launching The Birds and the Bees - A Sex Ed Zine as a fund raiser and awareness project. All you Montrealers, come out to the Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent) to show your support for the healthy growth of sexual health education in this province. Doors open at 8 pm, and ten bucks will get you in AND a copy of the new sex ed zine, with all proceeds going to The Sense Project.
Some of the featured lineups on the evening's roster of entertainment include:
- Performances by People for Audio, Nightwood, City of a Hundred Spires and Anti-School Year
- A panssexual kissing booth
- Circus acts
Come out and show your support for this important cause! See you there :-)
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Thanks to the bloggers at Feministing for posting this. Once again, the litmus test is: Can you imagine this advertisement being done with a little boy/young man? Would that be weird and offensive? Kind of just like this is? :-/ I need to find something to post about positive gender messages, this is just depressing. If you have any ideas, please let me know in the comments section... *sigh*
Because I am a Girl: The State of the World's Girls, is the first in a series of global reports on girls to be published over the next nine years by Plan UK. Timed to be released on the United Nation's International Day of the Family, it warns that the Millennium Development Goals agreed by world leaders are likely to fail girls living in poverty. Global statistics highlighted in the report paint a bleak picture of some of the challenges facing girls and young women growing up in the world's most impoverished regions:
Girls aged 15-19 account for 50% of victims of sexual assault worldwide
Birth complications and unsafe abortions are the leading cause of death for young women aged 15-19
Seventy per cent of the 1.5billion people living on less than a dollar a day are female
Stunted growth in estimated 450million women as a result of childhood malnutrition
Approximately 7.3million young women are living with HIV/AIDS, in comparison to 4.3million men
Two thirds of 15-19-year-olds newly infected with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa are female
Sixty two million girls are out of primary school
Thanks to the astute writers at The F-Word for letting us know about this. You can check for news updates relating to the status of girls at the Plan UK or you can download the report.
A friend from highschool (circa 1981 or so, say about grade 9) recently tracked me down on Facebook for the sole purpose of reminding me of a song that I despised when I was 14. "Hey!", he said, "Remember that song, 'Baby Makes Her Blue Jeans Talk' by Dr. Hook? Wow, did you ever hate that song! It made you crazy back in highschool!" And then, just to reinforce my memory of how much I loathed it, he sent me the above You Tube link, an unfortunate reminder of the low cultural and production values videos could have when they first came on the scene.
This video is creepy beyond belief, and although it's meant (I think) to be an amusing and light-hearted take on sexuality, it sends some pretty disturbing cultural message about desire, sexuality and what it means to be masculine or feminine. Okay, so that was more than 25 years ago, what relevance does it have now?
I'm posting some of the comments left in the past few weeks regarding this video as well. Yes, a couple of people expressed disgust at the stalker mentality, but some pretty angry and misogynistic things get said as well. I left the posters online ids in because when people post publically, I believe they are accountable for things they say. Such as...
yahman03(2 months ago) Yeah, this is back when they knew how to make a pair of jeans that flattered a woman's figure, and women dressed like women, not this "guy fit", "boyfriend" jeans crap, or this low-waisted hip-hugger sh** that makes a woman's waist "muffin top" over the top of a pair of low jeans that are about 2 sizes too small. Women need to get away from dressing like men or wearing clothes that make them look like pigs.
raredvdworldwide (9 months ago) This chick's butt is so hot, she makes women, dogs, midgets, child tourists, senile old men and even blind guys drool! Definitely a fun bit of early 80's silliness.
mzwere1 (4 days ago) Yeah, I've heard rumors to that affect but have'nt seen any evidence locally. Just the same old ugly crappy jeans, flat hair and a generally slovenly attitude. I have'nt seen a decently dressed girl in years. Back in this video's time at school if girls weren't wearing tight jeans they usually wore nice dresses or skirts with high heels. They just seemed to take more care in their appearance back then.
Now, I recognize that comments on YouTube are not necessarily a good cultural or intellectual mirror, and that the feeling of anonymous authorship may make some who lurk in the shadows feel like they can make comments that they would never actually say out loud...but it's worth thinking about this: When women (and men) fit into dominant discourses of what it means to be feminine or masculine, they get kudos and admiration. When we challenge or repel those ideas of how to be a woman or a man, or redefine ideas of beauty, desire and sexuality...we are quick to fall out of favour and sometimes risk the threat of violence and hatred directed toward us.
I was reminded of this in some pretty toxic ways when I happened on a photographic study on different body forms of nude women. Someone made an admiring comment about the set of pictures of a very heavy woman, prompting this response (I'm not including the woman's picture, because I don't want to associate her with this kind of hatred and toxicity).
mAgNUS Buttfoorson on April 16th, 2007 2:02 pm Jesus Leroy Christ dude what is wrong with you? You wanna know why people must be so mean? Because the human body was never supposed to get like that. Ever. She is a testament to the extreme level of sloth and stupidity achieved by homo sapien sapiens. Scratch that you’re the testament; she’s just some stupid fat bitch who should be shot and used to feed half of Africa for the next decade. That fucking sow and her cellulite cankles represent everything that is wrong in the universe and beyond. She’s the reason the cosmos sat down with God and hashed out the very notion of disease fueled slow deaths. See what she’s on up there? The wood? That was some guys house before she rolled in there. If there is any justice in this world or the next this very woman will slip on her own oozing lard and fall out of a window straight onto you and anyone who shares your obviously tainted bloodline.
I would say this is just an isolated case of a hateful, ignorant freak. Except it's not. Most of the comments that followed (by a variety of different posters) were along the same line, some even making death threats directed to the woman and the fellow who said he admired her. Times haven't changed so very much since the Dr. Hook video came out. Foucault had it right...step outside the dominant ideas of acceptability when it comes to body and sexuality, you'll get some sharp discipline to get back in line and play nice with the hegemony.
Mon May 28, 1:28 PM WARSAW (AFP) - Poland's child rights ombudsman said on Monday she was investigating whether "The Teletubbies," the British television show for infants, promotes homosexuality. "It would be good for a group of psychologists to talk to children about this. We need to examine this. If inappropriate attitudes have been promoted, we need to react," said Ewa Sowinska. In an interview with the weekly news magazine Wprost, Sowinska said the character Tinky Winky was in the spotlight. The plump purple creature is considered male due to his relative height, but carries a handbag. "I have heard that this could be a hidden homosexual insinuation," said Sowinska. Poland's deputy speaker of parliament Ludwik Dorn, a conservative Catholic, reprimanded Sowinska, telling her to avoid public statements that could make the ombudsman's office look "ridiculous," said Dorn's spokesman Witold Lisicki.
***
Whoops. Too late. You already look ridiculous. No word on if Polish authorities plan to cruise gay bars on the lookout to see if they can uncover Tinky Winky in drag or not...
When Jerry Falwell made the same offensive and absurd statement back in 1999, it prompted a group calling themselves the Krewe of Falwell to come up with the inspired costumes (above), resulting in their winning first prize in the group competition for 'best mask' at the 35th Annual Bourbon St. Awards at Mardi Gras . Note where the television would normally be on the tummy of the *real* Tinky Winky is now the mugshot of Jerry Falwell. Which I guess would make them Televangelist-Tubbies...
An award-winning ad by Belgium condom makers, Zazoo ,another innovative and nicely done creative advertising campaign using wit and humour to get people thinking about sexual and reproductive health.
A nice edit of retro sex ed films, from 1950 to about the mid 1970's seemingly pulled together from materials that are now in the public domain. Interestingly, the treatment about masturbation is more open than many programs now, particularly the animated piece from the seventies. Discourse of pleasure and the erotic are usually avoided in formalized sex education programs, with a few interesting exceptions. Interestingly, it's the thing that we avoid most as adults in talking about sex with youth, and one of the things young people say over and over again they wish we would be more honest about.
I've been a big fan of the way many Planned Parenthood affiliates have been getting their messages out for a while now, engaging in culturally smart and interesting advertising. The above billboard is part of a campaign launched by Planned Parenthood in Regina, Canada after their city was rated as having the highest rate of chlamydia in the country. The idea of getting information out regarding sexual health to adults as well as youth is an important one that community HIV/AIDS have been working on for a while, and is starting to build momentum.
(Many chapters of Planned Parenthood now call themselves part of the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health)
To celebrate the release of the new Spidermanmovie, Marvel Comics released limited edition statues of some of the characters, including this one of Mary-Jane in a thong suggestively washing Spidy's super-underpants. Boring.
Much more interesting, however, is the parody beside it.How does that part of the Spiderman song go? "In the CHILLof night! At the scene of a CRIME! Like a STREAK of light! He arrives just in TIME!!" Well, a streak of somethin', anyway...Looks pretty freaking ridiculous when it's a man, hmmmmm? We get so used to women being represented in highly sexualized images that we (often) don't think anything of it. The quick and dirty litmus test for sexism? If the same messages seem improbable and strange when applied to men, you might just be looking at a social construction of gender that needs to be examined more closely.
A study called Not Yet Equal: The Health of Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Youth in B.C. has found some interesting, if counter-intuitive, outcomes in regards to the sexual health of young gays, lesbians and bisexuals in that province. According to the principal investigator of the study, Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc at U.B.C., non-heterosexual youth there are three times as likely to be involved in a pregnancy than their straight counterparts, raising some interesting questions about why people engage in the sexual behaviours they do. Dr. Saewyc speculates that these findings, although seemingly contradictory to sexual identity, also point to young people attempting to secure socially acceptable identities (i.e. motherhood and fatherhood are generally viewed more favourably in mainstream Canadian culture than being gay, lesbian or bisexual). This would certainly be an interesting area for further exploration, and may have important implications for sex ed strategies in teaching gay, lesbian and bi youth.
The study, done in collaboration with the McCleary Centre Society (a B.C. based organization that encourages participatory research with youth in regards to youth health), collected data from 74,000 teens between grades 7-12 in 1992, 1998 and again in 2003. Another concerning finding from this study that should be explored further includes the percentage of young lesbians who said they had encountered physical violence (45%, up from 27 in 1992). Good sexualities education would cover identity discussions, relationship behaviours and why we choose the sexual behaviours we engage in. Young women in particular tend to describe sex as "just happening" and often don't take any agency for their choices. This is a dangerous position to be in, because sex that "just happens" without planning and agency is often unprotected sex. Opening up these conversations is an important and necessary part of helping youth understand and engage with their sexualities.
You can download the Not Yet Equal: The Health of Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Youth report here
An insightful video by Sex Etc., an organization promoting comprehensive sex education for and by teens. Youth activism around sexualities often presents a very authentic look at where we could do better as adults, and in this video, they discuss the failings of abstinence only educationand the ways it puts students at risk. They have a great youth-friendly website and cover everything from emotional health to questions about sexual health. They frequently put out a call looking for young writers to contribute. Check out the good work being done by Sex Etc.here
For a long time, Western religion has advocated a split between body and mind; the body has traditionally been viewed as something that pollutes the purity of the mind or soul. In this time of HIV/AIDS however, it is possibly very important to be able to convey that the purity of one's mind is lined up with a body purity. A fascinating new movement has started emerging in the U.S. to demonstrate that both body and mind are in agreement - at least when it comes to the sexuality and virginity of young girls in certain evangelical Christian circles. A new twist on abstinence rallies, father/daughter purity balls have been staged for the past seven years or so. Girls as young as six and young women into their mid-twenties go to a "purity ball" with their fathers (or uncles, or grandfathers), in an elaborate and formal affair that has many appearances of a wedding celebration.The father (or stand in) pledges a 'covenant with God' that he will protect the purity of his daughter and that of generations to come. The girls and young women will often silently affirm their pledge to purity through the ritual of laying a white rose at the foot of the cross. Pictured above is a "purity dance" with the symbolic bride and the girls demonstrating through dance their devotion to remaining chaste until marriage. In true capitalist fashion, there is a whole market industry around purity ball kits (don't ask), prom-like pictures of dad and daughter on their date, and the cost of the event which can run a cool hundred bucks per father/daughter.
I'm trying to make sense of this phenomenon, and attempting to look at it with a kind of detached cultural interest (without much luck). I recognize this is a hyper-response to a commitment to abstinence (albeit in highly gendered terms) I just can't get beyond the fact that the father/daughter thing regarding her sexuality is more than a little creepy, and am disturbed by the lack of voice of the young women who are participating. I understand this is a traditionalist backlash, and that women's sexuality is always one of the first things to be contained, owned, subdued and controlled when it feels like culture is shifting and challenging the status quo. Still though...not seeing any "mother/son" purity dances coming up. And doesn't an "Oedipal Ball" sound like a grand idea? Slouching teenaged boys shuffling around and dancing in formal wear with their mothers or grandmothers while their moms pledge to keep an eye on their sons' sexual purity (and that of grandsons to come, uh, I mean...in the future.) Yeah. I thought so. Not bloody likely.
(For some smart commentary on the purity ball "survivor" kit, see this brilliant post on Feministing. Or, if it all still seems too strange to be true, you can see what Wikipedia has to say.
Although the clip above is an amusing look at one of the struggles sex educators might have, the reality of many teachers who teach sex ed not being trained (or being uncomfortable with the material) is hugely problematic. Many of the moral wars fought around sexualities education focus on the regulation of language, concepts that speak to generations of controversy, hetero-normacy and social control. In Queens, New York, an administrative rule in place since 1987 banned the words abortion, masturbation, birth control and homosexuality from being discussed in any context in classrooms, and was still in effect up to a few years ago. Concern about the way curriculum is languaged not only originates with parents and moral activists, educators sometimes protest as well. Teachers at an Oshkosh, Wisconsin elementary school in 1994 felt uncomfortable with the prospect of discussing proper genital names with their students. The educators complained to their board, resulting in the words anus, penis, genitals, urethra and vagina being removed from the curriculum. I don't know what they replaced them with, but I'm certain it would make for a very odd sex education.
Most universities do not offer training in how to teach sexualities, leaving many educators in the uncomfortable position of Peggy Hill in this clip. In Quebec Canada, sex education has been removed from the curriculum entirely in a formal context, with the Ministry of Education suggesting it should be infused through the curriculum instead. Except, that it's not happening. Without formal curriculum requirements, most teachers will not opt to teach sex ed. Not only is it uncomfortable, but there is so much we don't know even as adults. Pop quiz:How do you catch (or prevent) Hepatitis "B"? Can you give your partner genital herpes if you have a coldsore? Where exactly is the vas deferens, hmmmmm?Yeah, I thought so. It's not an easy subject to teach. Not only do you have to be up on all the technical aspects, but in order to teach it well, you need to have done some pretty serious reflection on your own sexual biography, fears, interests and desires. And that can be a pretty intense mirror to look into. Giving teachers guidance, training and support is the first step in giving kids a meaningful sex education.
In winter of 2004 (for a very short time) same sex marriages were being performed in San Francisco until a court order forced the city to stop. Someone came up with the brilliant idea of anonymously sending flowers and expressions of love and suport for couples waiting in line at the court house. For those who couldn't afford the average $50 a bouquet cost being charged by florists, activist Darren Barefoot established Flowers for Al and Don, and managed to raise a mind-blowing US $14,312.68 from 894 people . When the court order stopped the marriages from continuing to be performed in the city, the project was shut down. The picture above is a self-portrait by Pike who participated in handing out the flowers, and a couple of shots from the project. What a lovely expression of solidarity and support. Flower activism! It's a travesty that this is even an issue of contention, and stunning that three years later we are still debating if people who love each other should be able to get married. One of the gaps (okay, chasms) in sex education is exploring what loving and being loved by another means. We need to focus less on thegenders of partners, and teach toward being good partners. (photo source: from the link below)
If you'd like, read more about Flowers for Al and Don or...to read messages from those who were surprised and delighted with flowers as they waited to get married, you can do so
In 2002, a group of young women who were involved with the drop-in centre at St. Stephen's Community House decided to put together an honest, no-holds barred book for girls and young women about healthy sexualities. The result is a fascinating, frank and authentic look at sexualities as experienced and interpreted by young women, in their own voice. The most recent version of The Little Black Book for Girlz : A Book on Healthy Sexuality was published in September, 2006.
This is a really excellent resource for groups working with youth around sexualities issues, and is an empowering realization of a project that will have an enduring shelf-life of informative sexualities activism. Not surprisingly, whenever young women are public with affirming their power in relation to sexuality, they have attracted conservative rage like this nasty report from the Institute of Canadian Values posted in a scathing press release last year. Of particular outrage for these groups was that St. Stephens, a phenomenal community resource that provides social care for a wide range of people in the Kensington Market district of Toronto, had received government grants for this work. Issues of youth sexuality always generate fear and loathing from traditionalists, and this book was no exception.
Unsurprisingly, the story that was picked up by mainstream media was the controversy it generated, not the publication of the book itself. Furthermore, much of the outrage of the book was an outcome of people confusing it with a publication with a similar name that was being used in classrooms in Manitoba. The Manitoba document, also entitled 'the little black book' covered some issues of sexualities, but also bullying and financial responsibility for young people. The Manitoba publication was being used in classrooms, but the book from St. Stephen's is not (yet) officially on any school curricula in Canada. Despite the controversy, sexualities educators and medical practitioners praise the book, which includes useful, accurate and youth-accessible advice on things like how to use a dental dam, or stories of how individual young women have navigated bisexual and/or lesbian identities. The Little Black Book for Girlz is published through Annick Press, and is available through Amazon.ca for $9.95 CDN.
If you'd like to take a peek at the contents, you can check it out here
The following quotation, attributed to Dennis Altman, is an interesting way of conceptualizing the politicization of AIDS activism.(I have been unable to locate the source, if you know it, I would love to be able to attribute it.)
"Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases"
Always innovators when it comes to sexualities education, a clever and amusing commercial from Planned Parenthood, (Canada ) that is enjoying a lot of attention on YouTube. (Ed.note: many chapters now call themselves the Canadian Federation for Sexual Health, in Quebec it is called the Quebec Sexual Health Network.)
Back in 1976, when a couple of nuns loaned habits to a couple of nice gentlemen in Iowa who were performing in the musical The Sound of Music, it is unlikely they considered the act to be the birth of what would become an international culture-jamming queer protest movement. Three years later, those same men dressed in their nun garb and wandered around some of San Francisco’s nude beaches, turning heads with the unlikely combination of nuns smoking cigars and carrying machine guns. After capturing the attention of the media and the public during a few more appearances at sporting events, the Sisterhood of Perpetual Indulgence was formed and immediately started recruiting new members. Their first fundraiser was held in 1980, raising money for gay Cuban refugees. By 1982, their activism had started focusing on the troubling and worrisome ‘gay cancer’ that would become known as AIDS; the Sisterhood distributed information to the gay community and started fundraising to raise funds to fight the disease. Thirty years later, the Sisterhood’s brand of carnivalesque resistance continues to inspire performance art protest, art installations and community activism internationally. With more than twenty “convents” established throughout the USA, Scotland, Colombia, Uraguay, Australia, Germany, the UK and Switzerland, the movement has become a formidable force for AIDS fundraising and awareness. They offer grants to other organizations doing activist work, and continue to charm and enlighten crowds with their irreverence and wit.
You can pray your soul silly by visiting the Sisters here
The ACT UP Oral History Project is a compelling and provocative means of documenting the experiences of the surviving activists who took part in creating awareness and social change regarding HIV/AIDS issues from the mid-eighties onward. This blurb, taken from Oral History site describes the project's intent and why documenting this social movement is crucial in understanding the place of AIDS activism in today's context.
The purpose of this project is to present comprehensive, complex, human, collective, and individual pictures of the people who have made up ACT UP/New York. These men and women of all races and classes have transformed entrenched cultural ideas about homosexuality, sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art, media, and the rights of patients. They have achieved concrete changes in medical and scientific research, insurance, law, health care delivery, graphic design, and introduced new and effective methods for political organizing. These interviews reveal what has motivated them to action and how they have organized complex endeavors. We hope that this information will de-mystify the process of making social change, remind us that change can be made, and help us understand how to do it. (ACT UP continues to fight to end the AIDS epidemic.)
This is an amazing resource for anyone interested in early AIDS activism, and organizations/individuals working toward social change. More than 60 people were interviewed for the project; Five minute video clips of the interviews and free full-text PDF files of every interview in its entirety are available for immediate download. Check out this phenomenal site
"If you are a girl; it will not feel very good - if you are a boy; it will be over so fast you won't know for sure how it felt. " The above is an excerpt discussing how teenagers will feel after their first sexual experience, from an online teen sex advice column by Michael Hardcastle (source can be found here: http://teenadvice.about.com/library/weekly/aa051500b.htm)
He goes on to state, "For boys, the "first time" is a sort of stepping stone to manhood, a sign that you are well on your way to being a real man. For girls, visions of the first time are often clouded with ideas of romance that are more based in dreams than in reality." Unfortunately, this discourse of regret, trauma, and lack of desire are probably among the most common ways to describe first time sexual experiences of young women in the public sphere. Although undoubtedly some women's first time may, unfortunately, be negative and cause for regret, there exists a huge chasm between the way first time sexual experiences are discussed for (and by) men and women. In the second part of this advice, Hardcastle likens a male adolescent's first time as being a rite into manhood. Too bad for those poor, confused, distant from reality teenaged girls. Those dumb girls are in for a rude awakening, aren't they? *sigh*. Not only is Hardcastle certain that "it will not feel very good" emotionally for girls, but because the line between fantasy and reality is so dim for us gauzy, ethereal creatures we are really better off sticking to our romance novels.
Note to Hardcastle: Pleasure and desire are absent discourses in many "first time" stories told by young women, not because most women experience trauma or regret, but because it is a safe and acceptable sexualized gender story for girls to tell.
Fortunately, some groups are trying to change the stories that are okay for girls and women to tell about their sexual experiences. AVERT.com (AVERTing HIV & AIDS) has created an online space for youth to discuss their first experiences, or reasons why they decided to wait. Interestingly, some young women actually engaged with personal agency, made decisions about when to get sexually involved and with whom, and enjoyed it. In this story related by "Parisa", not only is she convinced that she was sure she wanted to go ahead with intercourse, she confirmed with her partner that he did as well.
"Soon enough we were completely naked... he looked me in the eyes and told me he loved me more than anything in the world. then he kissed my forehead and asked me if i really wanted to go through with it, he didn't want me to do anything i regretted. I said yes, wholeheartedly, without an ounce of doubt in my mind. Then i asked him if he was sure he wanted to go through with it as well. He kissed my on the lips softly and said he wanted me to be his first and last. He wasn't an idiot though, he was very careful and made sure he brought condoms... and i highly reccomend using condoms because fearing pregnancy is the worst feeling in the world. So anyways... he slipped on a condom and we started making out again... we had a hard time getting it in the first time so i got on top to make it easier. The first time it only went in about half way. It hurt so bad beause he bought "non lubricated condoms", so we gave up and went out bought different condoms and came back and did it again... this time it went in all the way and didn't hurt quite as much. He was soo worried about me the whole time though, he kept asking me if i was okay and telling me that he loves me... he also kept getting worried and asking me if i wanted to stop. But anyways... this site helped me make my decision and i don't regret anything. Just make sure you know you're giving it up to the right person...." Even as adults, we often make wrong choices or have regrets about our sexual experiences. But oh, it's so lovely when it's fun, safe and our choices are made from an empowered place. Here's hoping for more of those kinds of stories.
Sexualities education is so much more than the old movies we saw in school. Culture is one of the greatest pedagogues of sexualities education going; we get our messages of what it means to engage with gender, power, sexualities and desire from a constant stream of cultural messages. Sometimes we challenge, resist and disrupt those messages in some really interesting and creative ways. This blog is an attempt to understand and document some of the texts that are challenging and redefining the way we think about sexualities education, both in formal and informal contexts...or not.
