So, here I be, trying out of of my resolutions and applying it to the journal. Don’t need to have huge things to say: just need to show up and say them.
There are some things that get said or asked at Scarleteen sometimes that really freaking break my heart.
• Teen women asking how they can “make their vaginas tighter.”
• The same said group often asking how they can make their labia smaller and remove all the hair from their vulvas without any kind of redness or bumps. (Catch a theme here? IOW, who are all these things for, exactly?)
• Worry that because someone you slept with didn’t orgasm once or twice, you must be tremendously unattractive and unsexy.
• In that same vein, focus on sex as product, not process. Especially when it’s so new and the process should be the stuff of awesome! Ack!
• Getting so caught up in trying to figure out how one identifies orientation-wise that it winds up being a thing of thinking, and stressed-out thinking, at that, rather than a thing of feeling and intuiting. Or just grooving on whatever feelings one has when one has them.
• Winding up with a major birth control or sexual health error or problem because Mom decided to give you her oh-so-great advice that a) was learned 25 years ago and b) wasn’t correct then.
• Mom or Dad refusing to believe that a young person wants a GYN visit well before sex (often just to ask questions about their bodies, get BC info in advance) and refusing them a visit because they’re sure they really are having sex when they’re not. Of course, the truly craptastic part is that if they really think they ARE and think it’s a good idea to have them be sexually active without healthcare.
• This is one of the absolute worst: when we get one of these teens who has more than their fair share of partners, but isn’t safe with any of them, often out of crap self-esteem. You talk up and down about safer sex, they blow you off or tell what you know are fibs about getting tested once a month. Then they start asking about this friend or that one with sores someplace, and it’s like looking into a crystal ball of an STI wave that’s likely about to hit all of this user’s circle, and them, any minute now.
• The rape and abuse survivors who were raped and abused by partners and either a) won’t leave them because denial is easier or b) make endless excuses for them now KNOWING it wasn’t okay to call names/hit/rape because denial is easier.
• The late bloomers who are just so convinced they will never, ever have a sexual life.
• The young women who report really blarghy an unsatisfying sex lives with partners earnestly trying to figure out what will make things better, but who refuse to masturbate or touch their bodies in any way with a partner.
• Okay, so, the young women who don’t masturbate and who are deeply upset about never reaching orgasm, period.
• Young men convinced that it isn’t that intercourse alone doesn’t usually result in orgasm for women, but that their penises are just too small.
• Young men who were SO in love going through breakups. This is one of my top heartbreaks. The girls in that space are painful enough, but they at least feel free to call up friends and sob to their heart’s content. The boys so often just go it alone and tough it out while their very tender hearts are shattered into teeny, tiny pieces. It KILLS me.
• And on that note, the boys who could be great same-age partners to girls their age who are dating these total idiots in their twenties who treat them like absolute garbage, but are “so much more mature.” (Ten bucks says they’d feel very differently if they had ever been treated to listening to the way guys that age talk about teenage girls when they a) think no one is listening or b) think it’s a fun way to try and lord over older women.)
• And the fact that I cannot deliver a kick to the shins of the aforementioned too-old-for-them-idiot-men through my computer screen.
• Reproductive healthcare providers or general physicians who scare young women off of long-term methods they feel strongly would be best for them because those docs either have biases or haven’t updated their education. Do they really feel okay about this after these patients wind up accidentally pregnant because they — as they told these docs — spaced their pills out all the time?
• Young people who don’t talk to us because we have extra information others don’t, or because we’re someone additional to talk to about sexuality, relationships or sexual health, but who talk to us because they simply don’t have anyone else to talk to at all.
• Girls hating on other girls so much that they don’t have a single friendship, and have only sexual relationships with guys which they try to have fit the friendship bill, and which never do.
• People so attached to gender norms and binaries — their own or someone else’s – that they totally reject what would be really great relationships, experiences or self-acceptance.
• Young people who take the stupid shit bitter or unhappy older people tell them to heart.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:41 pm
You just opened up my femoral artery on this one.
I have never even written a list like this down, because I get so upset I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’ve been on the soapbox, for so long, SINCE I WAS THEIR AGE, and you know what?
It’s worse. My high school years were like a feminist bohemian utopia compared to what I see across my street today.
The mainstream feminist movement (Emily’s List, et al) abandoned sex education and progressive sexual agendas, period…. the fundamentalists set the entire tone for the past thirty years, and pop culture/advertising took all the sizzle and turned into plastic sauce.
Do you want fries with that?
The first two things you listed, as I’m sure you know, didn’t exist in the 70s. And now it’s my daughter’s generation. Also the overly-neurotic “id” thinking you mentioned.
it’s harder to have an honest, down to earth, frank sexual discussion in “the public square” today than it has been in my entire life as an activist. The kind of stuff scarleteen and you do, Heather, it’s like the frickin’ Underground Railroad.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Susie: I absolutely, positively feel like it’s worse.
And YES on this: “The mainstream feminist movement (Emily’s List, et al) abandoned sex education and progressive sexual agendas, period…. the fundamentalists set the entire tone for the past thirty years, and pop culture/advertising took all the sizzle and turned into plastic sauce.” I’ve never seen that articulated that way and YES. Freaking yes.
And yeah, I know, items one and two are all shiny and new. Yay. Ugh.
Thanks for keeping me company.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:52 pm
I have two little girls, just babies really, who are growing into women before my eyes. (AT 4 and 6 mos they are not right now becoming women but you get what I mean). This — THIS is the kind of thing that terrifies me about raising girls. I am already far more factual and open with my 4-year-old than any of my friends. I will do all in my power to help her become a critical thinker about the girl-toxic culture we currently live in.
But I fear that the dominant culture will over-power my message and that my brave, bright 4-year-old who is 100% at home in her body right now will be hating it in only a few short years. We already talk about marketing and how colors aren’t for boys or girls but for everyone. And she’s taking karate, the only girl in her class! All of these things I hope are protective factors. But I still live in fear that it will be an uphill battle.
Thank you for what you do. Rest assured that I will be sending my girls your way when they’re old enough!
January 14th, 2010 at 8:57 pm
Christine: does it feel totally apeshit crazy to you to even have to have these discussions about how certain colors aren’t for certain genders when it’s not 1955?
Because that is how I feel so much anymore, and this is my JOB, rather than my doing parenting. I imagine it’s got to be infinitely more crazymaking as a parent right now.
I confess, this is one of many reasons why I didn’t reproduce. Health and other things aside, I felt like the only way I could parent (especially girls) and not lose my mind over things like this was to find a way to raise kids in rural France. Which none of us can afford, so.
January 15th, 2010 at 9:30 am
Parenting seems like such a delicate balancing act. My husband and I are committed to ensuring that our daughter (she’s 5 right now) has access to all of the information she needs. I’m already finding myself in conflict with other moms who don’t feel like their daughters are ready to know about their bodies or about the world their bodies will move through. A friend’s daughter started her menstrual cycles at 8 and neither of them were prepared for the questions and issues that brought up. At 5, my daughter is more informed about menstruation than my 11 year old niece who could start any time and whose class and team mates are already going through it.
If parent’s can’t talk to their daughters about this biological inevitability, how can we possibly hope that they will give them access to information about sexuality, etc…
January 15th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
My husband and I have decided not to have children, but I have 14 nieces and nephews with another one on the way. Seven of the lovely little ones are girls, and I am currently going to school to become a sex therapist. I try to be the fun Aunt Liz and am hoping the kids will come to me about sex and all the other things they feel uncomfortable talking to their parents about. I feel like I have a lot to offer this field. I would like to help people be aware of and comfortable with their sexuality and desires no matter their age. I know that many issues form from childhood and the experiences had there. This makes me all the more determined to be available for my nieces and nephews should they have questions they want honest answers to that are not biased by their parents ultra-conservative religion.
My parents never talked to me about sex or about menstruation or masturbation (which was forbidden anyway). I think if they had or been more approachable, then maybe I could have had a better chance to avoid some particularly bad experiences I had with sex and relationships.
January 22nd, 2010 at 10:37 am
The world is really messed up. I have a 2 year old daughter and we are very concerned for how she will end up thinking about herself as an adult. We want her to be secure in her own mind and body. We wish her to grow and be able to stand up on her own as a person.
At just 2 we already find ourselves telling others that the things they think are correct behavior and thinking patterns need not be pushed on our daughter.
We don’t want her to have all the zillions of hangups and shames the majority of the world seems to have to live with. It is a hard battle.
Rather than giving antidepressant drugs out to everybody in America we should be trying to figure out how to raise children that wont need them.