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.