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?
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.
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.
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.
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]
