The Little Black Book for Girlz

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