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.