the ACLU has an epiphany; genessee county has syphilis.

i don't mean to be an ass. but i've been saying we need to "abstain from abstinence" since i first got interested in sex ed. so when i read something like this:

These models not only operate in our opponents' materials, but in ours as well. Sometimes we evoke them in a defensive manner. Other times we adopt them uncritically - for example, when we use the term "abstinence" to show that we too think teens should wait to have sex. Because of its connection to the EXTERNAL FORCE model of sexuality, we do ourselves and the young people we care about no favors by using the term abstinence.

it doesn't exactly change my life. still, it's good to see an organization as prominent as the ACLU taking steps to move away from the idiotic language of abstinence when talking about sexuality. if you've ever felt skittish about ragging on abstinence, you should give it a read. while mostly intuitive if you're coming from the left, it's still interesting.

for the more, shall we say, experienced among you who are looking for a more thorough takedown of abstinence-only rhetoric, check out this post that came up in my google alerts this morning [god, i love my google alerts].

and something a little closer to home: apparently the syphilis outbreak in flint, MI is not exactly tapering off as planned [from RH reality check]:

In August with the number of confirmed cases at 70, GCHD spokesman Mark Valacak told RH Reality Check the outbreak was waning.

But now, nearly three months and 39 cases later, the department is ramping up education and outreach again. At least five of the newly diagnosed cases were congenital cases — found in newborns — Valacak said.

correct me if i'm wrong, but the education initiatives surrounding the outbreak sound kind of disparate:

Valacak said the department is working hard to raise awareness. It is doing this through a combination of public relations moves, such as posters and signs on buses, as well as outreach to the ob-gyns. The department has also trained outreach workers to go out and work with sex workers.

it seems like they can't quite decide who to target here. they're doing outreach to MSM, young people, pregnant women - and still nothing. i can't help but find myself repeating that old planned parenthood mantra: real sex ed saves lives.

how teen pregs-savvy are you?

from dr. joyce brothers in tuesday's seattle post-intelligencer: how much do you know about teen pregnancy?

i managed 6 out of 7. shame on this aspiring sex educator!

news out of milwaukee.

obviously i should be spanked for my blogging truancy, but moving right along to the reason i was compelled to write is the news out of milwaukee that teen pregs between the ages of 15 and 17 has dropped to a 28-year low of 50 per 1,000 [still well above the national average, 22.0, but down from 95.8, the high water mark from 1991].

notice i didn't quote the article. go ahead; notice. i think i mentioned in a previous post that i don't like the essentialism that surrounds teen pregnancy. i don't think it's good that we as a society have decided to problematize these girls, question their morals or their upbringing, label them an "epidemic". the goal of eradicating teen pregnancy assumes that none of the young women who got pregnant wanted to become pregnant [look up arline geronimus's weathering hypothesis before you yell at me for this one.].

now, i'm not holding my breath waiting to hear news about a teen pregnancy prevention program that tries to get to the bottom of these desires in a compassionate, culturally competent way. i get that i'm in the minority on this one. but this assessment of the drop in teen pregnancy was just offensive to me:

A variety of explanations - including awareness campaigns, greater use of condoms, less sexual activity and welfare reform - all may have contributed to the drop, experts said. [emphasis added]

oh, really. but wait, there's more!

The numbers dropped a little over the next few years but hovered around that rate until about 1996, when federal welfare reform legislation created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which promoted work and marriage and tried to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies. Participating minor teens had to live at home with a parent or guardian and were limited to 60 months of assistance.

In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Works program and its predecessor, Pay for Performance, already were in place.

i certainly can't speak to the efficacy of the wisconsin works program, but i can get pissed that we're praising TANF for the drop, since this particular piece of legislation is what ushered in the era of abstinence-only programs that my generation has come to know and love [title V, what what!]. its moralizing and heterocentricity are blatant, as you can probably tell by the emphasis on MARRIAGE and not having babies outside of MARRIAGE, not to mention the requirement that pregnant teens live with their parents [can anyone spot a problem with that?]. i have to wonder who decided to put this into the article in the first place, since the graph that accompanies this article shows not one but two spikes in the teen pregnancy rate since '96. oops.

now, after all that ranting and raving, what i really wanted to draw attention to was actually this article about a peer education program that probably had a lot more to do with the drop in the rate of unwanted teen pregnancy.

Some local teen pregnancy reduction efforts are based on the premise that youths listen to their peers more readily than they listen to adults, especially when it comes to sex.

So when a group of peer educators at Pearls for Teen Girls heard the news that Milwaukee's teen birth rate had hit a 28-year low, they felt proud.

"I feel like our work is actually paying off," said 17-year-old Shaqueda Jenkins, who works with the youth development organization.

Jenkins is one of 11 Pearls for Teen Girls program participants and alumnae - teenage girls and women in their early 20s - who carry a message of sexual health and abstinence into middle and high schools and YMCA sites around the city.

The evidence-based curriculum they use, called Making Proud Choices, works to reduce youths' risk for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases through discussion, games and role playing.

The United Way funds Pearls for Teen Girls' sex education programming, with annual grants ranging from $30,000 to $50,000 in recent years.

now, i know that there are only 11 of them and they they couldn't possibly have single-haldedly lowered the teen pregnancy rate in milwaukee. but everything in this quote is awesome - an evidence-based program, adequately funded, with trained, local people doing the educating. full disclosure: i love peer ed programs, so much that they'll probably be my primary research interest in grad school next year [assuming i get in...]. i mean, really, what makes more sense to an adolescent than talking someone about sex who's like your older brother or sister, but smarter? the article goes on to talk about how these types of programs create a safe space for participants, which in turn leads to honest questions honestly answered:

An important component of that education is creating a space for honest dialogue and not judging the younger girls they work with, she said. That blame-free environment allows them to effectively counter the myths girls bring into the classroom: that they can't get pregnant if they have sex underwater or while they're menstruating. They talk about how to use condoms and other contraception, and how to resist pressure to have sex.

no scare tactics, no hellfire and damnation, just dialogue. imagine something like that being efficacious.

win! [in the UK, anyway]

some news that made my heart beat a little faster, from the guardian on wednesday:

Sex education is to be made a compulsory part of the national curriculum in primary and secondary schools under government plans to cut teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

A new personal, social and health education (PSHE) curriculum, expected by 2010, will include compulsory sex and relationships education as well as better advice warning children against drugs and alcohol.

Children will learn about body parts and the fact that animals reproduce from the age of five, puberty and intercourse from the age of seven and contraception and abortion from the age of 11.

Schools will not be allowed to opt out of the rules but the government is promising separate guidance to faith schools, which could find elements of the new curriculum at odds with their spiritual beliefs.

The schools minister, Jim Knight, said they would still have to teach the curriculum - which includes contraception, abortion and homosexuality - but will separately be allowed to continue to teach religious beliefs about sex.

Knight said he wanted all schools to teach children more about sex in the context of relationships, including marriage and civil partnerships, and to promote abstinence.

imagine that, teaching your beliefs alongside the facts rather than substituting dogma in where science ought to be. sounds like... evidence-based practice? something we really don't quite have a handle on. and it seems their boy scouts are going to be getting some sex ed, too. sweet.

more sex type news:

- i managed to hit most of the things on karen rayne's checklist for sex [with one glaring omission], but it certainly would've been nice to have in advance.

- a message from young women to sarah palin, who says she "doesn't know" if people who attack abortion providers are terrorists.

as promised, a feature on mrs henderson presents, the movie sex forum screened [possibly illegally?] last week as a part of our body- and sex-positivity theme semester. the point, i guess, was to get people thinking about bodies as art, nudity in a non-sexual context, that kind of thing. the end goal is for people to perform in an end-of semester revue, "it's my body; i do what i want," using their bodies as a medium of expressing themselves. burlesque, one-acts, monologues - the whole bit.

anyway, i thought a movie with lots of boobs on stage with a smattering of penis, would get us off to a good start. and i was right! the movie is really really entertaining, but the end was perfect. there's a clip of it here, and it's quite good, but if you think you might ever see the movie and don't want to ruin the end for yourself, the gist of it runs thus:

After my husband had died, I decided to put on a nude revue. As long as the windmill exists, there's no need for a sad little postcard hidden under the bed, is there? But I do know this: that my desire to present this gift to our young men has not been wrong. If we are to ask our youth to surrender their lives, then we should not ask them to surrender joy - or the possibility of joy! And, if along the way, we cause too many people to congregate in the street, who gives a fiddler's fuck?

bodies aren't shameful. bodies are nice. they're something to be enjoyed. premaritally, even. stay tuned for more on the subject of bodies, including a discussion/review of courtney martin's "perfect girls, starving daughters." spoiler alert: it's good.

epic fail.

i mean, "hiatus." that's what it's called when you dispense with frivolities [read: fun things] in your life in order to dedicate the paltry amount of attention that you have in a million directions at once. or do we call that "college"? i'm so confused.

anyway, lots and lots and lots of things have gone down since i wrote last but most of them are kind of old news. making women pay for their own rape kits? pshhht. what, do i think you were born yesterday? certainly not. even mccain's belittling of the "health" exception has been so widely reported on for the last two days that you don't need to hear it from me.

so i'll stick to what i do best: sex ed stuff, which doesn't get as much play when kindergartners aren't involved [who knew?]. so good news first! it seems the folks in gloucester, mass have decided to distribute contraceptives in school [looks like the community didn't go for the whole limited education thing]. parental consent is required - just like it is for sex. am i right? so we'll see how that goes. i'll be interested to follow this story more, though we probably won't hear much about it if things go well.

RH reality check has a really great [dare i say comprehensive?] rundown of the presidential candidates' positions on sex education. i'm pretty savvy, and you're probably pretty savvy [or on your way to becoming so], but maybe you should let your more conservative friends know who the real extremist on sex ed is, according to a recent poll in parade, among others. why do so few people support ab-only? oh, i don't know, maybe because it doesn't work.

in other news, the european council of the EU decided this summer to focus on girl children. the full summary is here, and there's a synopsis of the main points here. unfortunately this "focus" doesn't include any bite in its bark, at least not for the time being, but when i'm not busy being cynical, i think instead that the fact that the three main indicators the EU chose to use as a metric were sex and relationship education, healthy body image, and reducing disparities in educational accomplishments. GOOD. CALL.

speaking of body image, i have lots of things to say about a really excellent movie my forum screened last night on that topic, among others, but i'll save it. until then, if you live in california, vote no on 4 and 8. and if you don't live in california and you can spare a few dollars to a cause that needs them more than obama, you should donate.

this is why i'm taking a break from campaign coverage.

as much as i like to be informed, this shit is really not improving my quality of life. this is mccain's newest attack ad on obama. make sure you're paying attention because i doubt you're going to want to watch it again.



OBAMA WILL GIVE YOUR 5-YEAR-OLD AIDS.

i mean, what? first, the ad has conveniently forgotten that obama voted for, rather than sponsored, the bill. the ad also fails to mention that the bill is not a mandate for comprehensive sex ed, but rather requires certain topics to be covered, namely STI prevention, when they are age-appropriate. which is not in kindergarten, as it would be both confusing and largely irrelevant.

but the part i'm fucking pissed about is that the program in question aims to teach kids about good vs. bad touch and let kids know that strangers shouldn't be groping at their privates. we're not talking a lesson in gross anatomy. we're not talking about throwing condoms at small children. the program, at this level, is about your kids not getting molested. which it seems like people could agree on, but i don't know; i'm a liberal and i eat my pie in the sky.

the only take-home point i can really take from a rational analysis of the facts here is "john mccain: enabling molesters since 1982". and honestly, that's about as factual a statement as any that were made in that fucking ad.

it's taken this to get me to donate to obama [as i don't exactly have a job], but i'm going to. and i'm also foregoing campaign coverage until the first debate [in all of two weeks; i am such a hardass]. anyone care to join?

of course.

my computer would get stolen right before teen pregs blew up every single media outlet in the country. not to mention the annual siecus profile on sex ed and ab-only programs in the country [the news is deliciously bad; i recommend giving it at least a glance].

anyway, i'm still sort of getting things back together here, but this is just sort of a "no, my head didn't explode due to all the news on my very favorite subject in the entire world" kind of psa.

"limited education" [i kind of hate everyone today.]

watching gloucester implode has become a pathetic spectator sport of sorts. first the principal of the high school where 17 girls got pregnant this year resigns, now the town is calling for the mayor's head. who will they blame for the traditional media's tragedy of the summer next?

from the looks of this article, which is actually about how 60% of new jerseyans think teen pregs is a problem all of a sudden, i'm guessing their shitty sex education program isn't going to become a player in the blame game. in fact, one resident, kelly kovaleski, had these words of wisdom to share with us on the subject of education.

"I think in general it's good, but I've seen situations where it's gone to extreme with things that are inappropriate. It needs to be limited education."

inappropriate? like if someone showed your high-schooler how to properly put on a condom and reminded them that, when used properly, they are 99% effective at preventing pregs and most STIs? there's a scandal for you. also, i can't believe someone actually said the words "limited education with a straight face. i'm going to go out on a limb and say that an excess of sex education is not what got these girls pregnant. but no, the issue is actually specifically framed as not an education issue. can you guess how? i'll give you a hint: it's an error of omission.

William A. Cardone, Toms River Regional schools' assistant superintendent, said the state Education Department mandates teaching of human sexuality and family life, and the district begins talking about family life issues in the elementary grades.

um, right, cardone. by which you mean "this is a penis and don't freak out when blood comes out of your vagina." the truth is, you can mandate sex ed all you want, but without a mandate that contraception be taught, there's no guarantee you're learning much of anything. the gender-segregated, opt-out permitted, "maturation film" cardone mentions pretty much proves my point, i think.

so anyway, who does kovaleski blame for pregs fest 2008?

"(Celebrities/Hollywood) absolutely have an influence on kids," she said.

of course. jamie lynn spears inspired all of these girls to get pregnant. why didn't i think of that?

shit really went down in the UK this week.

lots of good stuff this weekend.

first, an article that showed up first in the tennessean and then got picked up by no less than the chicago sun-times with this idiotic headline: "surprise! no-sex pledges work: study" you know, no matter that, in general, this has been disproven over and over, no matter that the pledges were somewhat effective only with teens who already wanted to remain abstinent for other reasons. true love waits! obviously! this headline is totally accurate and everyone should know that virginity pledges work for everyone. every single person ever. and people wonder why we have such a high rate of teen pregs. you either get nothing or you get drivel that is completely free of nuance or useful information. traditional news blows.

this week across the pond, 30,000 scottish girls will receive the HPV vaccine without any accompanying education letting girls know that this doesn't protect them from pregnancy or other STIs. this is all thanks to the catholic church - yes, scots health and education leaders actually had to sit down and get the church to sign on to their plan. gag me with a spoon. buried in the middle of the article was this gem:

Many sexual health experts believe it is essential to give out safe sex advice alongside the jab to make it clear they will remain at risk from other STIs including HIV, chlamydia and gonorrhea. More than half of the 5,000 female chlamydia patients in Scotland last year were under the age of 20.

really? you think so? call me crazy, but i think it's a good idea to let girls know before they're sexually active what this vaccine does and [perhaps more importantly] doesn't do. i mean, until about 5th grade, i thought babies came out of your butt. i don't think there have been any longitudinal studies done yet, but i can't imagine that there's any evidence that 12-year-old girls are going out and having sex just to test out their vaccine. i'm up-to-date with my tetanus, but you don't see me going out stepping on rusty nails.

in other UK catholic news, catholic action UK reports on an apparently controversial specal education program being piloted in northern ireland:

Children with learning difficulties should be shown explicit images of intercourse as part of sex education, according to a radical new campaign by the Family Planning Association. The FPA's 'It's My Right' campaign has produced a CD-Rom to be used by special needs teachers and school nurses. It features explicit images of sex and masturbation. 'It's more explicit than mainstream sex-education,' said Audrey Simpson of the FPA. 'But you need to be quite explicit, otherwise you create confusion,' she claimed.

this leaves me thinking two things. first, how is it anything short of discriminatory and neglegent to oppose this? it's not like you can deal in winks and euphemisms with people who are developmentally disabled [one could argue that you can't really do that with middle-schoolers either, but that is neither here nor there right now.]. you'd rather turn a blind eye and let these people get sick or pregnant and no tknow what's going on? sounds like loving thy neighbor to me. and second, as someone somewhere pointed out this week, did we forget somewhere along the line that sex ed is about sex? i mean, sure, it can be about delaying sexual initiation, it can be about preventing pregnancy or STIs, it can be about saying no to bad sex, but it's still about sex. i think this is a good example of how much we lose sight of that in these moralizing times.

drew sent me this study to break down - the gist of it is that some british people did a study of - gasp! - 100 women and found that hormonal contraceptive use leads women to choose different men than they would if they were ovulating regularly. i actually saw [and consequently dismissed] this story about a month or so ago, but here's my two cents again: it's crap. taking its subtitular claim ["the contraceptive pill could lead to women choosing the wrong partner"] seriously requires that you believe that women choose their partners by the smell of their immune systems alone. they try to scare you by saying that "partners with different genes are also less likely to experience fertility problems or miscarriages," as if taking the pill is going to make you want to fuck your brother or something. overall, it's just another not-so-subtle jab at contraceptive use, not to mention alarmingly heterocentrist - no mention of women who like women [at least not in the article; i wasn't able to find the whole study]. anyway, that's that.

things that don't surprise me.

in the wake of all this HHS birth-control-is-abortion bullshit, isn't it a comfort to know that the number of women seeking birth control services has increased over the past decade? and that adolescents have played a significant role in that increase? and that the bush administration is as out of touch with reality as ever? HHS secretary michael leavitt has since started trying to sidestep all the rancor that's been set on him, though he's doing a poor job of it. his line right now follows:

An early draft of the regulations found its way into public circulation before it had reached my review. It contained words that lead some to conclude my intent is to deal with the subject of contraceptives, somehow defining them as abortion. Not true.

The Bush Administration has consistently supported the unborn. However, the issue I asked to be addressed in this regulation is not abortion or contraceptives, but the legal right medical practitioners have to practice according to their conscience and patients should be able to choose a doctor who has beliefs like his or hers.

someone should probably remind leavitt the basics of morphology and syntax: you can put words together, but that doesn't make them a sensical utterance.

from the land of, "no, really?", a panel at the american psychological association concluded after two years of study that abortion does not, in fact, cause the crazy. which is evidently the same damn thing they decided in 1990. but they couldn't just come out and say, "no, fuckwits, there is not one ounce of evidence that abortion causes much more thanguilt at being so relieved." oh, no. this is what they spun us:

“The best scientific evidence published indicates that among adult women who have an unplanned pregnancy, the relative risk of mental health problems is no greater if they have a single elective, first-trimester abortion or deliver that pregnancy,”

so, you won't go crazy if you're over the age of 18 and only have one abortion within the first 12 weeks. if you're 17? week 13? abortion number 2? the APA is making no guarantees. what i want to know is, did they just not include women under 18 in their study [which is hilariously short-sighted], or did they just not have the balls to say, "signing your 16-year-old's consent form will probably incur less mental harm than forcing her to bear a child she doesn't want." i'd like to read more about teens' post-abortion outcomes. so, if any of the handful of people who read this come across anything, feel free to send it my way.

in other unsurprising news, guttmacher reported that teens are confused about sex and don't necessarily see abstinence and sex as mutually exclusive. so much for shoving the party line down our teens' throats [the upward trend of teen pregs isn't exactly a vote of confidence for them either, as i've pointed out before.].

and now for something that actually made me happy: the democrats' party platform. not only did they strike out the wimpy "safe, legal and rare" nonsense, they also specifically included comprehensive age-appropriate sex education. be still my fucking heart. there's more in the RH reality check report here.

finally, i discovered google alerts today. look out, world; whenever there's a mention of sex education or teen pregnancy, i'm going to know about it. hot.

thinking about boys.

okay, first of all, i am late as all hell in posting this because i had my wisdom teeth out on wednesday. this half-done post has just sort of been languishing in 'drafts' since monday night.

anyway, i would be remiss if i didn't remind everyone that international AIDS convention in mexico city, which is pretty important, happened last week. i highlight it because an HIV-positive thirteen-year-old gave the keynote, and because the cdc recently said, "oops, the rate of new HIV infections in the US is actually about 40% higher than we thought." anyway, our adolescents our hurting. young people account for 40% of new infections. there's plenty of coverage of it at RH reality check, and there's a good piece up at the guttmacher institute about integrating HIV prevention into regular primary care. common sense stuff, but it's good to hear about someone trying to get it done.

BUT, this is all secondary [since i can in no way cover it as thoroughly as other places can] to something that piqued my interest as i was scanning through my google reader last week. i'm pretty sure the video was originally posted on feministing, and it's also here in case you can't watch it embedded below.



so, disney is destroying not only our girls, but also our boys, by putting forth an unattainable ideal of masculinity that our boys will aspire to forever and ever.

full disclosure: in answer to the questions the author poses at the beginning of his video, i watched a lot of disney movies as a kid and i know all of the 80s and 90s "golden era" soundtracks by heart. however, having taken a great many sociology and women's studies courses, i have seen these films picked apart and spliced back together to show how racist or sexist they are. many of them are compelling. his isn't.

first of all, i don't think the movies he chose made his point at all well. the male characters the author rails against are mainly villains - gaston and scar, most notably. beyond that, mr incredible and the emperor are supposed to be assholes before their respective transformative experiences. why does it even make sense for boys to emulate their behaviors when they get them in trouble? gaston is disgusting; scar is a fucking murderer. the last thing any 6 or 7-year-old boy wants is to get in trouble [talk about emasculating]. the only one that really works is hercules, and i mean - it's a babyfied greek myth that had one really good line ["somebody call IX-I-I!"]. i guess demeaning it doesn't make my point any stronger, but it does show how far the author is reaching with this stuff.

and obviously i am no apologist for disney and the eisners, but i don't think the blame for the ills of my generation and the generation coming of age now can be placed so squarely at their feet as it often is. much is made of what disney movies "teach" our children, which is kind of a horrifying concept in and of itself. movies? teaching? doesn't what we learn have to do with more than animated song and dance? i'm willing to bet that the way you see your parents interact [or not interact] has more to do with shaping your ideas about the way men should interact with women. if you want to argue for disney as a reinforcer of traditional gender roles, hegemonic masculinity, and what have you, then fine. but don't pretend like this analysis is getting us anywhere.

i actually think the disney movies of my childhood are worth keeping and/or reclaiming [i.e. proper contextualization, discussing generalizations, and remembering that these are fairy tales] mostly because of our boys. the author of this video focuses on men, but the whole point of this decade of movies was that the princesses were the main characters. sure, they did their damsel-in-distress thing and had their heterosexually-ever-after ending, but that doesn't discount their value, at least not to me. belle was the shit. which is why i'm convinced that a boy identifying with a female heroine, even if she's two-dimensional in places, seems like a valuable exercise, doesn't it? rather than bitching about the villains no one cares about in the end ANYWAY, why not discuss that? talk about ways to encourage boys to aspire to character traits rather than getting bogged down in gender on this issue. there's so much potential for positivity here - imagination, storytelling, song and dance. is it nitpicking through something you love only to make yourself feel guilty? i'd much rather think about my prospective male children learning all the words to "under the sea" the same way i did [gleefully.] and comfort myself with the notion that i do not, in fact, take my feminist cues from disney.

teen moms.

totally not broaching a controversial subject here or anything.

actually, this isn't the time [braindead from GRE this morning] or place do this issue justice, but i did find something new that i wanted to share: girl-mom.com. it's a website devoted to "support, community, and education for young mamas." i really like the mission statement at the top of the website:

Teenage pregnancy is not a "crisis" or "epidemic," like so many people would like us to believe. The only true epidemic associated with teen pregnancy is the overwhelming and universal lack of support available to young mothers. The only true crisis is the denial of the fact that teenage girls can be, are, and always have been, both sexual and maternal beings, with the capacity to love, procreate, and nurture.

We love our children fiercely. We protect and care for them like any mother, of any age, would. Through Girl-Mom, We hope to slowly show that to the world.

Girl-Mom in no way encourages teen pregnancy, as some critics have implied. Girl-Mom encourages mothers. We encourage all young women who have chosen to become mothers. We encourage all young mothers to stand up for themselves, to fight for their children, to empower themselves and to defy the notion that being young means that you are unworthy of parenthood.

in the old days, before i read arlene gerominus, i thought i might spend my days doing teen pregs prevention outreach in the community somewhere. turns out, geronimus argues, for some people - low-income women of color, black women in particular - the teen years are the best ones to do your childbearing. how is this possible? a variety of structural reasons. what it boils down to is that many of these young women aren't going to college. some can't even finish high school without having to hold down a full-time job. if these women are going to have kids, biology is going to kick in sooner rather than later, while they still have support networks to depend on at least in part for financial assistance or childcare. it's the weathering hypothesis. google it.

obviously, it doesn't always make this much sense. many women who become pregnant in their teens don't have anyone to turn to. some are not so jazzed about being pregnant, but others are, and this is not as irrational as many think. well-meaning ivory tower feminists can preach about the benefits of education and "going places" in the world by postponing childbearing, but the reality for many women is that they aren't exactly movin' on up to the east side. teenage childbearing is a much more complicated issue than we often make it out to be. i'm sure many of these young women would argue that the problem they have with their "situation" has a lot more to do with the dearth of affordable healthcare and childcare and general support than with the children themselves.

i'm not saying we should give up on helping all young women [and young men, for that matter, since reproductive health is everyone's responsibility]. i will always advocate for education and outreach, as well as services for teenage mothers who want to get back on the career/education track. but these women are amazing [seriously, read some of this stuff], and they deserve respect, not pity.

it's funny how nothing is ever as simple as it is in high school. sometimes i think naïveté was a blessing that peaced out far too soon.

[note: here is what i think i'm citing: A. Geronimus, "On Teenage Childbearing and Neonatal Mortality in the United States," Population and Development Review, 13:245-279, 1987. but i could be wrong. i can't seem to find my coursepack... and yeah, i know it's old, but it's still relevant]

a load of et cetera.

anyway, while we pave the way for our already-maybe-increasing teen pregs rate to toss that 'maybe' by the wayside, britain proposed legislation last week to make sex education compulsory [every time I read that, a little part of my brain has an orgasm]. not only that, but they're making multiple age-appropriate curricula for kids as young as 11, and on through high school. see, britain has a pretty high teen pregs rate, kind of like another country I could mention. the only difference is that instead of basing their $50 million a year federally funded program on fear, shame, and misinformation, britain has taken a different tactic: they did some research, found that teen pregs was up, chlamydia was up, and [surprise!] kids want to know about sex. so what are they planning to do about it? ignore it and continue to cram dogma down the throats of their youth?

no.

"we must have consensus that good sex and relationships education is essential if we want our young people to live free of disease, have reduced pregnancy and abortion rates, and experience fulfilled sexual lives as adults."

imagine that.

like everyone else ever, I will also point you to violet blue's post at RH reality check on the five things the next president needs to do about sex ed. it is sheer brilliance.

in other news, the guttmacher institute recently released a fact sheet on young men's sexual and reproductive health. it looks at a variety of factors from 1991 to 2007. surprise surprise! the downward trend in high school boys' sexual experience that we'd had going [57% in 1991 to 49% in 2001] is no more [50% in 2007]. could this have anything to do with how badly we're failing them on sex ed? there's no longer a gender disparity in the receipt of sex ed, but there's been a sharp decline in the percentage of students who receive information about contraceptives and proper condom methods. even talk about HIV/AIDS is showing a slight decrease. what the fuck is wrong with these people? and we're showing quite a racial disparity in our already-shoddy birth control instruction - 33% of blacks and 45% of hispanic young men receive it, compared to 66% of white males.

boo.

and finally, from the purity files, two quotes from a couple of stories I kept unread in my google reader for 10 days just so I could make everyone else lose their appetite. time magazine ran a glowing review of a purity ball last week, and the author lovingly recounted this charming anecdote:

"They gave her a charm for her bracelet--a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. 'On my wedding day, he'll give it to my husband,' she explains. 'It's a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I'm supposed to be loved.'"

gross. and this quote care of Janice Turner, who teaches "power of purity" classes in Alabama [thanks, feministing]:

"girls give in to sex not because they want sex - it's like a hug. if they can get that from their fathers, they won't need it from a boyfriend."

you love it.

nothing gets me going like bullshitting about abortion.

after having been absent for quite some time due to the internship from hell, I am pleased to say that I’m back, and better than ever, given the abundance of news about adolescent sexuality, reproductive rights, and sex education lately. actually, it's not the news itself that's better, it's just that there's a lot of it, and it's kind of like crack for me. that said, let's dive in.

I really hope I'm not anyone's primary news source on this stuff [links on the right do a much better and more timely job], but just in case I am, there's been quite a to-do in the department of health and human services lately. you've got hella thorough coverage on RH reality check, and a good overview on NYT , but in short, the HHS has leaked an unabashedly pro-christian, anti-choice, anti-science piece of proposed legislation that would require all federally-funded health programs to say that they won't refuse to hire providers based on their opposition to abortion. why, you ask? well, gosh darn it, they're concerned about doctors' and nurses' and pharmacists' itty-bitty feelings, and they think these 'conscientious objectors' deserve some protection. now, I could get into how little this has to do with conscience and how much it has to do with turning every woman who doesn't agree with you, who doesn't want to bear children for the fatherland, into a second-class citizen. I could get into how ridiculous it is that the government is asking health programs to set aside ideology for the sake of non-discrimination on this end when it simultaneously supports individual pharmacists who refuse to provide emergency contraception based on their personal ideas about right and wrong. the point is, HHS doesn't give a shit about being sane. the authors seem to think they make perfect sense and mention derisively that some states have passed laws requiring pharmacists to fill scripts for plan B, AND I QUOTE, "despite religious organizations' objections to the abortifacient nature of the drug." can anyone see where this pseudo-science bullshit is going?

it beings us to the second part, the less obvious, more sinister part, the part of the proposal where the HHS basically says, 'conception? implantation? we can't seem to get a straight answer from those pesky scientists! so, we don't care about where the majority of americans stand on this issue], we're going to let THE PEOPLE decide what an abortion is.' I am not lying. page 17, line 5 says, "the conscience of the individual or institution should be paramount in determining what constitutes abortion, within the bounds of reason." like the kind of reason this crazy train's been running on so far? according to the proposal, the kinds of 'abortion' these stellar potential women's health employees can object to includes "any of the various procedures — including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation." for now, that includes all pills [especially POPs], IUDs, and of course, EC. but if this became law, how long until someone declared that they would no longer contribute to mass genocide by handing out condoms, thus preventing the union of spermatozoon and oocyte as god himself intended?

as a side note, RH reality check claims [though I couldn't find the language in the proposal, but I still have some catching up to do] that this proposed regulation would remove all federal funding from subsidized birth control. as if the DRA didn't fuck teens, college students, and low-income women over enough, this is just icing on the 'family values' cake.

my favorite part, though has to be this little winner, which comes near the conclusion of this little slice of women's rights hell: "an underlying assumption of this regulation is that the health care industry, including entities receiving [HHS] funds, will benefit from more diverse and inclusive workforces." because you know what a woman seeking birth control really, really wants? someone telling her she's going to hell. what do you mean you disagree? why can't you respect diversity?

good times on that front.

the only sane thing i've ever read in the WSJ

most of my "readers" [aka, my boyfriend and like, two other people] aren't regular readers of blogs about reproductive health [even though you should be], so i'm just going to assume you haven't seen this video. relish those eight awkward, awkward seconds of silence, one and all.

but my favorite part about this isn't even in the video - it's this interaction between mccain and a WSJ reporter about his votes on requiring insurance companies to cover birth control [props to RHrealitycheck for contextualizing the madness]:

When McCain was asked for his position on the issue, he said--with a nervous laugh-"I certainly do not want to discuss that issue."

The reporter pressed. "But apparently you've voted against--"

"I don't know what I voted," McCain said.

The reporter explained that McCain voted against a bill in 2003 that would have required health insurance companies to cover prescription birth control. "Is that still your position?" she persisted.

During the awkward exchange, with several lengthy pauses, McCain said he had no immediate knowledge of the vote. "I've
cast thousands of votes in the Senate," McCain said, then continued: "I will respond to--it's a, it's a..."

"Delicate issue," the reporter offered, to a relieved laugh from McCain.

"I don't usually duck an issue, but I'm--I'll try to get back to you," he explained.

i guess he just couldn't decide whom to pander to this time. anyway, there's a load of crap in the comments about how obama never gets asked any hard questions about this kind of stuff, which i guess is why obama is still fielding complaints from all sides and issuing press release after press release about his response to question about late-term abortion.

and then i remembered that i was reading the comments page on the WSJ. right.

more funding for sketchy ab-only groups.

i had to put off blogging a little longer than i'd hoped, and as such, one of the things i wanted to write about - hymenoplasty among some muslim women in europe - has already been so thoroughly and skillfully blogged about on feministing, dkos, OBOS, and the like, that you don't have to take my word for it on how twisted our patriarchal obsession with virginity is. karen rayne actually has a pretty excellent piece on virginity over at her blog on adolescent sexuality. good stuff.

anyway, i did want to cover something that didn't get nearly enough play, as far as i'm concerned. i picked this up over at RHrealitycheck [link on the right]. in a nutshell:

"[Best Friends, a]n organization that promotes sexual abstinence for teens received a federal grant of over a million dollars, twice what it had requested, despite the skepticism Department of Justice staffers had about the group and the fact that it refused to participate in a congressionally mandated study."

best friends received this grant in spite of the additional fact that they ranked 53rd out of 104 grants in the category they were competing for. so what gives?

dollars.

i know; it's like they can't even keep things interesting. best friends president elayne bennett just happens to be friends with the chief administrator of the office of juvenile justice and delinquency prevention [OJJDP], j. robert flores. flores and his cronies attend best friends fundraisers on a regular basis, according to the article, and while they're eating, drinking, and ensuring that the teen STD rate will be 1 in 3 by the next time the CDC puts out a report, organizations like the rape abuse and incest national network [RAINN] get nothing.

but, i mean, RAINN is only the nation's largest anti-sexual assault organization. and one of its top-ranked charities. but that's it.

nothing to see here. move along.

a shitty article about some important findings.

i caught this article from the washington post on feministing this afternoon: apparently the CDC did a longitudinal study on teen sex and condom use and found that the former is heading up while the latter is at least leveling off, if not heading down.

while not wholly surprising, this is still pretty big news, which is why i thought my eyes were going to roll right out of my head when i read past the lede. in some kind of warped attempt to be "balanced," the wapo actually gives credence to the idea that this is all caused by that liberal media messing with our traditional family values.

"Others blamed the onslaught of movies, books, advertising and cultural messages that glamorize sex.

'It's highly ironic this comes out right after the launch of the biggest movie of the season, which is 'Sex in the City.' The No. 1 movie that all teenage girls want to see right now is 'Sex in the City,' ' said Charmaine Yoest of the Family Research Council. "Our culture continues to tell them the way to be cool is to dress provocatively and to consider non-marital sexual activity to be normative."

they also conveniently forgot to mention that the $126 million allocated for sex ed this year is ALL for programs that teach to the federal A-H definition of abstinence-only education [which is here if you want to read its scary backwardness in detail]. wapo makes it sound like we've been pouring a bunch of money into teaching kids about sex but, darn it, they just won't listen. i'm also fairly certain they have their numbers wrong, since in 2007, the government $176 million on these programs without this supposed $50 million increase congress is working on.

way to go, guys. can't wait for your fair and balanced coverage of this as it continues to crash and burn in the faces of the family research council and its diaspora.

congratulations, it's an increase in your premium!

follow this convoluted game of hot potato that this NYT article highlights in its health section today if you can:

it's no secret that cesarean sections are on the rise and have been for the past couple of decades. we're up to 31.1% now, according to the article. and while we aren't denying that it's an important piece of obstetric technology [my brother wouldn't be here without it], many feminists decry elective cesarean section as a symptom of the technologization of childbirth and the objectification of the female body. after all, a c-section is a major abdominal surgery.

and, as such, it happens to be very expensive, bringing us to the point: the subject of the article was denied health insurance because she'd had a c-section. they call it a "pre-existing condition" doctors, meanwhile, have been passing off the surgery as consequence-free, since it takes less time for them and makes the hospital more money.

but it looks like all's not lost. some companies will still cover you if you've had a c-section - for a price. "Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, which has about 300,000 members with individual coverage, used to exclude repeat Caesareans, but recently began to cover them — for a 25 percent increase in premiums for five years. Like Golden Rule, the company exempts women if they have been sterilized."

great.

so we have obstetricians blaming insurance companies for exploiting and/or discriminating against women who've had c-sections, and we have insurance companies blaming obstetricians for overusing the surgery, but neither group has much to say on the subject of the women they're fucking over.

this quote from Pamela Udy, president of the international caesarean awareness network, pretty much sums it up: "Although many women who have had a Caesarean can safely have a normal birth later, something that Ms. Udy’s group advocates, in recent years many doctors and hospitals have refused to allow such births, because they carry a small risk of a potentially fatal complication, uterine rupture. Now, Ms. Udy says, insurers are adding insult to injury. Not only are women feeling pressure to have Caesareans that they do not want and may not need, but they may also be denied coverage for the surgery."

so, once again, women are caught in the crossfire.

wsj: you're not helping.

saw this on the wall street journal today. apparently some social conservatives are pretty riled up over grants for their ab-only programs getting denied, which they say is “'weakening' the president’s policy supporting abstinence training as vigorously as contraception efforts, 'with concomitant harm to American youth.'"

now, the point of this article is, as the title reads, "disquiet on the right: a danger for mccain." which is true enough, but is that really an excuse for not pointing out the glaring inaccuracies and flaws in the logic of this group? for example, the article reads, "many social conservatives believe that abstinence training has led to a drop in teen pregnancies and contributed to a decline in abortion rates," which is great and all, but it happens to be false. teen pregs rose between 2005 and 2006 for the first time since 1991. it was big, huge news. cecile richards was on cnn and everything. so, what the fuck?

but the worst part is, that's not even a quote [even though i'm sure a lot of the people who signed this letter are laboring under that misimpression]. that's what the author wrote. and i certainly don't go to the wsj looking for my daily dose of liberal news, but - talk about ignoring the facts. that's sure to convince the collective youth of america to keep it in their pants [i mean, it's worked so well so far, right?].

that whole revolution thing.

i didn't manage to catch vh1's sex: the revolution the first time around, early last week - it didn't help that there was pretty much no coverage of it anywhere. my assumption is that it was neither groundbreaking enough nor offensive enough to warrant anyone's attention. i only watched the first half hour, which didn't tell me anything i didn't already know: the 50s and early 60s were sexually repressive, put an inordinate amount of emphasis on female virginity, and scared people into thinking that if they treated sex as anything other than anathema, their children would be nothing more than a bunch of morally corrupt syphilis carriers.

i taped the rest, though - all 3 and a half more glorious hours - so i'll be sure to mention it if i ever make it through. if anyone's seen it [or if anyone reads this...], be sure to let me know.

in other news, if you want to see all the reasons ab-only sex ed sucks in one nicely done letter to the editor, you should check this out.

because every 16-year-old girl should know she's worthless without a man.

so when i say that crappy sex ed [or no sex ed] basically amounts to school-sponsored sexism and the perpetuation of traditional gender norms, this is what i'm talking about.

i caught the link on feministing. the gist of the article is that the principal at a catholic all-girls high school in staten island decided that the girls can't attend the junior prom without a date. more specifically, a "male escort". the principal ran reporters off school property and told the students not to say a word. not only is this rule straight out of the 19th century [obvious], it also effectively alienates any students who'd rather take another girl to prom. what could have been a romantic, liberating night for these girls is reduced to nothing more than a depressing sham of heterosexuality.

now, i can't say for sure that this high school has crappy sex ed, but it is a catholic school, so it's pretty safe to say that there's not a lot going on beyond "your virginity is a precious gift," or maybe "you're a dirty toothbrush." i'm certainly not saying a lack of dialogue about sexuality is the only thing driving this, but it certainly makes it that much easier to keep backward policies like this in place.

feminists hate moms.

this isn't exactly on the topic of sex education, though i do hope to cover teaching feminism in sex ed in a later post. however, since my feminism informs all of my work in sex ed, this riled me and i thought i'd share. i barely caught this latest argument against feminism when i saw a letter to the editor about it in today's cincinnati enquirer. the letter which was a tepid response at best, responded to a "your voice" column by an ohio university student that ran on mother's day.

for anyone lucky enough to catch it in the sunday paper, i'm sure it provided several great talking points for brunch. i was nearly ready to quit after the first sentence: "in a world of feminism and women's rights, mothers are devalued and underappreciated." that's right, ms. graham, it's certainly not because mechanisms of patriarchy are in place in every aspect of our lives. mothers are devalued and underappreciated because feminism has TOTALLY TAKEN OVER. this must be why women still make less than men for the same kind of work, why we have no paid maternity leave, and why women are abused and raped and then doubted by the justice system that purports to serve us. oh, how this article makes me long for the glory days of the 1950s when everything was simple.

but it gets better. "in a feminist world," writes graham, "you don't get to choose," since "feminism denies the right of a woman to actually have a child and have as many as she wants." i must have missed this somewhere in my 7 or 8 women's studies classes. i guess i'll have to either revise my plan to have three kids or tear up my feminist membership card, since "in America, the ability to prevent pregnancy has overwhelmed society, so much that women who choose to have more than two children become stigmatized and outcast as religious fanatics." though, it's funny, because last i checked, our ability to prevent pregnancy wasn't exactly overwhelming, as half of all pregnancies are unplanned but only half of these end in abortion. teens aren't doing such a hot job of preventing pregnancy, either, but that's another tirade for another time.

i'd go into graham's logic that sexual liberation means "being able to sleep with as many men as they want with as little emotion as possible" and that the "high standard of mothering ... was created by experiencing that kind of motherhood" and not by the long-standing patriarchal tradition of denigrating women by erecting impossible standards, but everything sort of falls apart there. i'm not really sure how she came to her ultimate conclusion - that feminists hate mother's day.

it seems too easy to note that she cites no sources for any of her sweeping generalizations about feminists, contraception, and the mothering capabilities of women's studies professors, but she's a journalism major, so it kind of makes me want to punch her in the face. fitting that such a poorly written, ill thought-out would end up in the enquirer. this is the stuff i come home for - i mean, it's certainly not to see my mom, because, as a feminist, i hate her and would never want to celebrate the way she raised me to effect social change where i see injustice. certainly not.

lock up your kids.

it happened while i was working at a christian camp. i've always been a sucker for irony.

hovering between freshman and sophomore years of college, i had absolutely no life plan beyond vague notions of studying french, which was the primary reason i found myself back at the summer job i held down during high school, "doin' it for the kids," as they say. i spent the bulk of my days playing four-square with 7th-graders and thinking about my boyfriend, who was 300 miles away.

it happened by accident. about midway through the summer, one of the girls came up from taking her swim test and i told her to make sure she took her wet bathing suit off so she didn't get a yeast infection. and then -

"what's a yeast infection?"

seriously? these pubescent girls had no idea about the inner workings of their vaginas. obviously they didn't have a mother who constantly walked around the house naked and showed [yes, showed] her how to put a tampon in at age 8. i gathered them up and did them the biggest favor of their young lives: let them know that your vagina has to be able to breathe to do its thing.

they were awestruck. it was time for dinner, so i said, "well, that's your lesson of the day" and thought no more of it.

the next day, one of them came up to me and said, "so what's our lesson of the day today?" getting about 5 hours of sleep a night for a month kind of wreaks havoc on the short-term memory: i had no idea what she was talking about.

"you know, the bathing suit thing, from yesterday?"

they wanted more. and i, being born with a rotten anti-establishment streak, was more than happy to provide it to these girls, the majority of whom went to catholic school. so every night, just before lights-out, i would tell them something else. we talked about periods, tampons, boys - anything i could think of that would be interesting to them but wouldn't get me fired if one of them happened to let slip to their parents. on the last night, i let them ask me questions. "does semen really come out at 60 miles an hour?" one of them asked. the cabin erupted in giggles.

of course i had no idea [in case you're wondering, it's true], but the fact that they were comfortable enough to ask me that remains one of my proudest moments. and the more i thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed to me that they didn't know anything about this stuff. there was certainly no lack of curiosity, but these girls lacked basic knowledge about their bodies. most of the girls i know who've started their periods at camp get this constant deer-in-the-headlights look until their mom invariably comes to whisk them away and "clean them up".

i decided at the end of that week that i wanted to be a sex educator, and i haven't looked back. unlike many of our esteemed legislators, i've worked with kids, and they are not the pristine, asexual little angels we so often make them out to be - and that's not necessarily bad. the bad part is the whole "don't ask, don't tell" thing we've got going on, promoting unsafe behaviors by omitting anything resembling empirical information and reinforcing traditional gender stereotypes. it's no fluke that the teen pregnancy rate is up for the first time since '91 or that 1 in 4 teens has an STI.

rant, rant, rant. anyway, that's me.