I read about this site in a book that I’m currently reading. I thought I’d check it out for myself. I think the content of your site is terrible. You think that you give teens all the information that they need so they can make informed decisions about their sex life. What bologna. The only decision that teens need to make is to not have sex until they are married. Certainly we all need to be informed about our physical health, our bodies, and how to have a healthy sexual relationship. But what about talking to teens about abstinence? And not even for religious reasons. But because it’s physically healthier to have only one sexual partner for a life time. No STDs etc. It’s emotionally healthier to have one sexual partner for a life time. You talk about separating sex from love. What terrible advice for anyone. Sex is love. Sex should be the most high expression of love. Not just some way to get your jollies. No wonder society is going in the crapper if this is the advice we are giving our children and teens. - Carolyn

You know, sometimes, I think the people who send me emails like this forget that this is my job: that I am an international sexuality educator for my living, and what I know about the sexual realities of people — more often from their own tongues than from any other source — and what your average layman knows are not likely to be at the same level. I don’t expect someone who isn’t a full-time sexuality educator to have the same level of knowledge about sex and the realities of people’s sex lives as I do, just as I don’t expect I could have the same level of knowledge about apples, however much I have loved and enjoyed them, as someone who has grown groves and groves of apples all their lives has.

But I do expect someone to afford me the respect — especially given how long I have done my job for, and for so little personal benefit — of not telling me things which anyone for whom this is a longtime job would know to simply be patently untrue, and expect anyone investing the time to send me a complaint to do their homework, even if it’s just earnestly reading my own work. (I also expect people to be a bit more realistic in assessing what power I have when it comes to the downfall of civilization, however flattered I may be at what they sometimes imply is my great and omnipotent power, but that’s beside the point. )

I don’t get letters like this every day, but I have had a recent rash of them, due to the recent release of Girls Gone Mild, by Wendy Shalit. In her book, Shalit culled a few select bits of the Sex Readiness Checklist here out of context, including ditching the opening material of that piece, to draw “her own” conclusion about those bits that nearly WAS my opening material.

“Scarleteen offers a “sex readiness checklist” for young girls to help them gauge whether they should plunge into the fun. Among the items: “I see a doctor regularly,” and “I have a birth control budget of $50 per month.” The emotional readiness a girl should demonstrate is “I can separate love from sex.” Shalit notes, “Those who can separate love from sex are mature, like jaded adults. They are ready to embark on a lifetime of meaningless encounters.”

In fact, Shalit argues, all of this advice and deprogramming aimed at women is necessary because women do not by nature thrive on casual, meaningless sexual encounters. They crave emotional intimacy and fidelity — desires the women’s magazines are at pains to quash in the name of maturity.” - Mona Charen

It very intensely misrepresented the content and message, likely because it was important to provide an “enemy” in order not only to make her points (and to give the impression they were ONLY her points), but to make it HER point so we could stay all cozily us vs. them about all of this, which is a pity when so many of us on all “sides” share the same concerns. Perhaps ironically, we’ve actually gotten more criticisms of the readiness checklist from folks Shalit would likely consider her enemy because it asks a good deal of people, far more than a gold band around one’s finger. I’ve had adults say, “Well, I don’t have $50 a month,” or “I can’t talk with my partner about sex,” to which my response is that from all I know, in the work I do, if they DID have all of those things in place, their sex lives would likely be healthier and more satisfying for everyone involved. It’s a long list, that page, because sexuality and sexual partnership are complex and multifacted. neither are binary nor simple, and we have far more than two choices — do it or don’t — and far more than two contexts in which to make those choices — married or not married — and most of us have to make those choices far, far more than once in our lives, and every time we make them is just as important as the first or last time we did.

Like I said, it’s an odd take on an article whose first five solid points, bulleted clearly include that the ability or choice to have sex does NOT equal maturity, but then, all in all, an awful lot of adult takes on young adult sexuality are pretty darn odd, which is one of many reasons why we try and keep most of the volunteers at Scarleteen in the same age range as those we serve. Considering that there is a plethora of items on the list about emotional readiness which were intentionally omitted, not merely the one listed, it is — as is much of this sort of take on comprehensive sex education — purposefully misleading. It’s a larger point for a later day, but it should be added that the conclusions strike me as odd, as well. They certainly don’t speak to scores of heterosexual married women who, for the life of them, can’t figure out why being married hasn’t equaled meaningful or satisfying sex for them, as they’re promised it will by people like Wendy, Carolyn and Mona. They also don’t speak to the scores of people who are and have been having sex they experience as meaningful outside the context of marriage. The list is also represented as only being about girls, when, in fact, it’s designed for use by all genders. But when these conversations hinge only on marital or premarital sex, they always leave an awful lot out of the picture.

So, let’s ditch all of the party lines and the oversimplification and really get down into the nitty-gritty for a change. So often, I see these conversations start with “Tell them to wait until marriage,” and end with “But preaching abstinence doesn’t work,” as if that were a productive discussion or somehow all there is to it. Every day, I see teenagers and young adults who know there’s more to it than all the adults who claim to know better than they do. Suffice it to say, brevity will not be the spirit of this piece.

I and my volunteers talk with (not to or at, if I’m doing it right) young people about waiting until they are ready for partnered sex every day at Scarleteen. Young adults also electively read any number of static articles that I have written or provided for them at the site, based expressly on their own needs and their own desire to read them. I talk with them, one-on-one, as well as in group discussions, about an awful lot of things, and when I do, they — not I — are usually those initiating the discussion, and the discussion we have is based around what they are asking me for, and what they express their feelings and experiences to be, to me, not what I decide they are, for them, or based on my own. I’m an alternative educator, and my methods come from methods I used in the classroom when I was a general educator: methods derived from or like those of John Holt, Maria Montessori and A.S. Neill. I do an awful lot of observation by reading their own words and interacting with them — affording them the respect of valuing their words, not second-guessing them — and what I tell them and write for them is based on those direct observations of them combined with observations of broader cultural topics, issues and trends, and what information they are directly presenting a clear need or desire for. I pay close attention to what results I have over time, since a great many of our “students” stick around, many even coming back as full-fledged adults, either for more information or because they want to help others the way they were once helped here themselves. Really, Scarleteen is a pretty substantial study in how this all works, because at this point in time, we’ve served millions of teens and young adults — most of whom found us themselves, by choice — so we can get a pretty darn good read on what works for our users and what doesn’t. The vast majority of email and feedback that I get from young adults usually simply starts with a capitalized THANK YOU. Often, it’s followed by many exclamation points. This comes from all genders, all orientations and it also comes from young adults who do and those who do not choose to be sexually active.

When I or my volunteers do have discussions with them about waiting for sex, it’s based on clear signs of a lack of readiness — like those on that checklist, or issues brought up in this piece, or this one, or that one, or this or this — and/or on that given young person voicing that they, themselves, do not FEEL ready (or do not feel partners are), or are not feeling good about the sex that they’re having or being asked for.

In those discussions, I do all I can to provide tools for determining both readiness and a real and realistic desire for partnered sex which can be used by as diverse a population as possible, applied to as many different situations as possible, and which I know, both from our users experiences, as well as from sound and reliable broad study, over time, HAVE really proven to be effective to best safeguard their physical and emotional health, and to best assure that sexual partnership and their own sexuality is most likely to be beneficial and positive for them and for us as a global culture. When I do have those discussions, unless they bring it up themselves, marriage or sole partnership — or waiting for that per sex, as if we could guarantee either — isn’t part of the equation, for a whole host of reasons.

For one, the teens I talk to are not all heterosexual (nor am I, the person talking with them and who you’ve emailed, thanks). Some of the teens I talk to have been sexually abused or assaulted and weren’t even given having one “sexual partner” as an option. The marital status of the young people I counsel is also a non-issue for me, as a sexual health and sexuality educator, simply because we know, historically and from current data, that while limiting partners (though not necessarily to one), as part of safer sex practice (which also includes barrier use and testing, something which often very much falls by the wayside or is altogether absent in most marriages) makes a difference, that neither hinges on marriage, nor has marriage ever unilaterally offered people — especially women — the kinds of protections against STIs, unwanted pregnancies, sexual disappointment or sexual or emotional health which its proponents like to pretend (or wish) it does. That doesn’t even touch on the matter of me not wanting to push anyone into a very intense and binding legal contract with another human being so they can get laid the “right” way, nor the fact that plenty of people have very much WANTED one lifelong partner, only to simply have that person, or any one person, abandon them or in no way treat them like a bonafide partner.

It’d be one thing if abstinence-until-marriage approaches earnestly worked, and by worked, I mean DID not only result in people forestalling sexual activity and ALSO “worked” when it came to having positive effects per unwanted pregnancy and STI transmission and also did, in fact, leave people feeling better about their sexuality as a whole, through the whole of their lives. But we know that it doesn’t. We’ve historically seen far better results with the advent, increased education about, access to and legalization of contraception, with the development of safer sex practices, greater awareness and protection given when it comes to rape and other sexual abuses, acceptance of sex in far more contexts than heterosexuality and marriage, and with work to advance and support the equality via gender, race, orientation and economic class.

However, even if it did work — and worked better than all of those things, which is salient since abstinence-approaches often are at odds with many of those matters, and our federal money to abstinence-only programs right now not only limits how much we can do those things practically, but takes funding away from many of those arenas to operate — “wait until marriage” doesn’t include everyone in the first place (heck, it sure wouldn’t have included me), so it practically cannot even be unilaterally applied, and there are also other issues at hand.

For instance, a majority of our global and local STI epidemics have started and proliferated among married couples, largely because a) marriage or sole partnership in and of itself does not mean bacteria and parasites (they don’t look at people’s ring fingers before leaping in, they’re crafty, but not that bright), b) some sexually transmitted infections — including one of our most prevalent — are not first contracted via sex and c) a marriage contract not guaranteeing fidelity, by any stretch of the imagination.

To state that if everyone only had one sexual partner there would be no sexually transmitted diseases is entirely inaccurate: if in doubt, talk to an epidemiologist. To state that marriage — or virginity — protects people against STIs is also to ignore or dismiss entire continents and large countries right now — if you can’t deal with talking about these issues in Africa (especially since they tend to show up some of the dangers in conservative thought about sex and sexually transmitted disease), then you might start by just looking at some of Mexico.

The night before her wedding, a girl kneels down to pray. She prays for 3 things:
“Dear God, please make my husband faithful to me.
“Dear God, please keep me from finding out when he is unfaithful to me.
“Dear God, please keep me from caring when I find out he is unfaithful to me.”
- Joke told in Degollado, Mexico, summer of 1996

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep on saying it: we have a pretty funny habit in the States to try and dismiss or revise history, including our history with STIs (and let’s not even get started with the times we have used STIs and other infectious diseases as biological weapons). We have a “chastity campaign” — what we used to call abstinence campaigns — to thank for one of the first big waves of STIs in the states, of syphilis and gonorrhea, which occurred among married people first, due to every other countries soldiers in WWI being given condoms, knowing full well that no matter what you told them, they were going to cheat on their wives. But in the U.S., because as is the case now, somehow we convinced ourselves that “Just say No” was a workable, more morally sound option, it was OUR soldiers who came back home giving their wives the wonderful gift of VD — we DID learn our lesson that time — a very different approach was taken with WWII, with much improved results. You can guess, too, how much the shame and “You bad, bad boy!” attitudes about extramarital sex contributed to a lack of prevention and testing — which have always safeguarded everyone far greater than marriage contracts — to, as is so again now, an increased spread of disease, and greater complications from sexually transmitted infections which went undiscussed, unknown and untreated.

With around 1/3rd of just U.S. women alone who abort now being married (and abortion, through much of history most often being MORE prevalent among poor, married women who already have children; abortion historically has often been more about economic class and poverty than anything else,) we know that marriage in and of itself does not prevent unwanted pregnancy. With spousal and partner rape being far more prevalent than stranger rape, and domestic violence effecting a minimum of 10% of the population in America alone — and let’s not forget that for pregnant women, a leading cause of death is homicide by a spouse or intimate partner, and that around 1/3rds of all homicide cases with a female victim are at the hand of an intimate partner or spouse — we know that marriage does not, in and of itself, protect anyone from emotional hardship or pain, nor guarantee a healthy, happy and mutually considerate and beneficial sexual or emotional life.

It also always seems to be diminished or dismissed that we all have only so much control over if we have sole sexual partnership. Not even bringing rape and sexual abuse into the equation, from a sexual health standpoint, any time any of our partners takes another partner — including the no less than 25% of married men and 15% of married women in the U.S. alone shown in nationally representative samples who do so extramaritally — we have no longer had one sexual partner from an infection and disease standpoint, and we have no longer been in a lifelong monogamous relationship from any standpoint. Marriage or the promise of lifelong sexual partnership does not come with a guarantee. This is a particular issue when we’re talking about very traditional marriage approaches which often have pretty serious sexual double-standards, as well as in approaches to marriage in which one or both partners are considered property of any sort, sexual or otherwise. Suggesting that in those scenarios sex is healthier for both partners, and more likely to have positive results is simply ridiculous.

With my mailbag, anytime I’m doing heterosexual adult sex ed, it’s overflowing with letters from married adults, usually women, who are seriously unsatisfied with the sex they’re having with their spouse, in both the physical and emotional departments. In fact, one of the reasons I stopped doing sex ed for older people and decided to focus on young adults was simply because it was incredibly depressing to read my mail. Denying that these people are real and exist is futile: just take a look at book sales for sexuality self-help books for marrieds. Someone is buying them, after all, and it sure isn’t those of us who are not married — why would we care?

What might someone who is adamant that saving sex for marriage and only having sex within marriage tell the woman who writes in after 20, 30, 40 years of marriage, who internalized all of this hype about marriage guaranteeing a positive result when her husband is sexually abusing her or even “just” having sex with her in a way that has nothing to do with her own pleasure, comfort or with love? Little or nothing is going to change in most cases once a dynamic has gone on for so long, so besides telling them to leave — which isn’t something social conservatives are likely to suggest — what would you say? Do those people not exist? Are they imagining sexual and interpersonal problems, and if so, how are we defining what is problematic, and whom are we privileging in that determination? What do we make of elderly people who tell us that they DID have but one sexual partner in their life time and that it was NOT emotionally or physically satisfying for them, and did NOT result in their sexual health and happiness (translation: have you talked to even one grandmother about sex honestly, ever)? Do their experiences not matter or are somehow invalid? Might we even take an extra step and consider the fact that after just a couple of times with a partner sexually, we can generally get a good read on what our sexual dynamic with them will be like?

Is it, somehow, practically better to wait until after signing a binding contract, especially in communities or systems where dissolving that contract in unacceptable, to find out that your partner could give a hoot about the other partner’s needs, wants, limits, about their own anatomy and sexuality, about what roles are going to be in play? Implicit in the “saving sex until marriage” argument is the notion that a marriage is and must be a sexual relationship, and that that is no small part of that relationship. If it’s important and reasonable to find out in advance of marriage, for instance, that a potential spouse is kind to children or capable of resolving a financial conflict without striking anyone, how is it unimportant to try and determine in advance if the sex you’re signing up for, feasibly, the whole of your life, isn’t going to consider you, or your own separate sexuality and body, as a valid and equal part of the equation? I’m not stating everyone need do the opposite here as some sort of essential edict: I’m not saying that premarital sex is going to guarantee health or happiness any more than forestalling sex until after marriage is. However, I am saying that if you’re going to make sex something which is about marriage, and which marriage is about, suggesting that such a critical and large element should be a complete surprise, knowing that partnered sex does carry so many physical and emotional risks — and knowing and applauding how very binding a marriage contract can be — is a pretty bizarre suggestion if you’re going to posit that it is in the better interests of women.

As well, until we can NOT have marriage be both exclusive AND about the sexual ownership of one person by another — and that does not mean monogamy, per se, as that is only one approach to monogamy — I don’t think we can even have aspects of this conversation. Until marriage law unilaterally and internationally not only does not privilege one group of people over another, but also one partner OF a marriage over another, stating that it is sexually most healthy for anyone to forestall sex until they marry is lunacy. Much of the underpinnings of these arguments for sex-after-marriage not only dismiss the exclusivity of marriage, and the numerous places — including some parts of the U.S. — where the gender of a partner gives them lesser rights in marriage, but they also often champion very traditional gender roles/status and religiosity in marriage, two issues which have been shown in many studies on marital sexuality and relationships to play a part in greater sexual and general dissatisfaction and health.

Marriage is no safeguard of sexual health. It is more difficult for married women to negotiate safe sex and condom use than it is for single women. - part of “The Lancet’s” Sexual and Reproductive Health Online Series

Here’s one bit that no one wants to talk about: the part where half the time someone is telling you it’s better to wait, that same person is a sexual non-entity in their marriage. That during all of this all-about-love sex, often enough, one partner is hammering away on — not with — the other while that other is harboring silent resentment and some pretty deep disdain or even just resignment, not love. One partner has sexual wants and needs which not only won’t be fulfilled, but which the other partner refuses to even address or uphold as important. That in many, many male-female marriages, sex — as it culturally has been for most of our history — still starts, stops and ends with the only one partner’s genitals, and not even the whole of his genitals, at that. This is not an absolute: there, too, are marriages where these are not issues, but these are common issues and complaints which create real conflict with the idea that marriage = sexual health and happiness, especially when we’re talking about women, but hardly exclusively for women.

We often hear that it’s so important for a child to have a same-sex role model or a parent of their same-sex around. But most of us are not so foolish as to dismiss that WHO that person is and what they are like is no minor factor. Having a same-sex parent around who is a terrible parent, a poor role model or an awful person isn’t likely to net positive results, and we can generally agree that in those cases, it would be better NOT to have that person around. When it comes to marriage or sole partnership, stating that having that relationship in and of itself is going to be beneficial completely ignores and denies that the quality of that relationship or marriage, and WHO your spouse or sole partner is matters a great deal. How could a sole partnership or lifelong marriage with a lousy partner somehow net more positive results than having, say, four utterly amazing and wonderful partners?

So, people can keep saying marriage or sole partnership affords physical and emotional protections, and is more likely to create a healthier, happier sexuality all they want, but reality — sometimes even their own married reality — often flies in the face of that assertion, and quite profoundly.

* * *
An aside: I’m really bothered by what’s intimated about love in the email up top there. You know, PLENTY of married people, and plenty of people who love one another, DO have sex sometimes when it’s just or primarily about “their jollies.” If we care about and respect the person we’re doing that with, and their “jollies” are as important as our own, and if love is all its cracked up to be, then it shouldn’t be at all problematic for us to have sex as the same sort of fun sometimes — or even always — that we have playing a game of touch football, or sharing a joke, with a partner is. Obviously, we have a huge cultural mandate that says that for married women, still, sex is about duty and obligation and while it may be about male jollies, his are always privileged over hers, and we have, as ever, a huge cultural problem, still, with honoring pleasure and supporting sex AS pleasure and joy, especially if that is “all” — because these things are so meaningless, apparently — it is about.

Suggesting one be able to separate sex from love isn’t about saying that sex shouldn’t be loving, or that there is some sort of extra status when it is not. That suggestion is about realizing that sex, in and of itself, can’t create love that isn’t there already, nor repair it, and that we need to understand that sex is NOT always an expression of love, and certainly not when we mean “love” in the way many young people understand it and have been sold it, which is more about romance or possession than respect.

* * *
I often feel like supporters of abstinence, when talking to sex educators, forget that most of us who work in the field, and are bringing far more than out own sexual experiences, that of a few people we know, and what we read about in disreputable media sources, know a lot more about people’s sex lives than the average joe. I used to do a lot more adult sex ed than I do now or instance, and I know full well, from what married people have told me and asked of me, that while it has net positive results for some it has been negative for others. We regularly get advice queries at Scarleteen from unhappy, unhealthy young adults who waited until marriage, and of late, the numbers of those queries have been increasing pretty vastly. For sure, it needs to be noted that people who are 100% satisfied with their sex lives are not going to be filling my mailbag, and that’s the case with the waiters and the non-waiters alike. but the point it, that just like NOT waiting has been positive for some and not for others, the same can be said for those who waited.

Really, you don’t even have to have the gig I do, or read/counsel as many people as I do to do the math, here. Perhaps my circle of friends is simply more diverse than those who write me these sorts of letters, because even just among the people I have known in my personal life, when I’m off-duty, I know that both of these two choices (for those for whom they are available AS choices), sex-before-marriage or sex-outside-marriage, and sex-after-marriage and only until marriage, net some pretty widely varied results between people.

Nearly two-thirds of teenagers think teaching “Just Say No” is an ineffective deterrent to teenage sexual activity. - Roper Starch Worldwide, Teens Talk About Sex: Adolescent Sexuality in the 90s

What else do I know? I know that a majority of people telling this generation to wait until marriage didn’t wait themselves, and that the age of first intercourse or first sexual experience has been slowly climbing downward since the turn of the century — not just of late — which is likely due to many changes, including access to effective contraception, women being ever-so-slightly more allowed to even have and drive a sexuality of their own, lower age of physical sexual development, an increase in leisure time, delaying marriage until later ages, and a great big list of issues, many of which are positive changes.

Sure, some of these abstinence mandates are just sanctimonious blather, but some of it is based on the strange logic that says “I Did X and I wasn’t happy with the results, so one must need to do Y to get the right results.” That’d be sensible in an equation in which there were but two options, but that’s something we can’t say about sexuality and sexual partnership.

This is also about hypocrisy and awareness of projection. I have not only had more than one partner in my life, I have had far more than one partner. My circumstances, personality, and the unique conditions of my upbringing and time and place were such that I’d expect that a majority of the young adults who read Scarleteen would be gobsmacked if I shared how many partners I’d had before I was 20, because for most of them, their situations differ in many ways from my own. I also know from listening to and working with them that what worked for me likely wouldn’t work for a majority of them; what was positive for me then may not be for many of them now. Certainly, I make a darn good guinea pig when it comes to showing how well safer sex works, and that it’s totally possible to have more than one partner and feel great about it and be a happy, healthy person. Certainly, I could compare my one set of experiences to those of any other one given young women who waited until marriage for sex, and had but one partner who is sitting nursing the STI she isn’t supposed to have, who is feeling terrible about sex, and who isn’t sexually happy or healthy. In doing so, I could easily draw the conclusion that I sex before marriage with multiple partners in one’s teen years must be the right choice, and hers the wrong one. But not only would doing so be beyond unintelligent and socially irresponsible, it’d be idiot logic.

Because I am aware that my positive or negative experiences are just that, mine, and that I am not Everywoman, and because I am also aware that we, as people, have a strong propensity to project our own experiences unto everyone else, to be a socially responsible sexuality educator and a good teacher, I’ve got to do my level best to be responsible enough not only to qualify my experiences as being mine, and I need to make sure that I’m also not being a ginormous hypocrite. For me, personally, to tell any one of them that there is one choice that is best for all of them, knowing full well — especially the older I get and the more I know myself — that it by no means would have been the best choice for me (or heck, just not having made that choice myself, so having no idea at all what results it would have had) would not only be complete bullshit, it’d be incredibly disrespectful, and not just because it isn’t my job to tell them what choice to make, nor do they often ask me to make their choices for them (and when they do, I decline).

Additionally, one of the toughest things I experience in doing my job is remembering to try and always keep in check that generational differences — even just by one generation — are often far wider than we perceive them to be, especially from the vantage point of those of us who are elder, and feel we have already lived the experiences the generations younger than us have had. We haven’t, see: we’ve had our own adolescence, and there may be some commonalities, but our adolescence is just that, ours, and there often tends to be less commonality than we’d like to think. I often feel like when I may err, I likely err on the side of conservatism or overprotectiveness, which is saying a lot for an anarchist, feminist, queer rabblerouser like me, but I think it’s something that’s always very easy for any of us to slip into, even when our intentions really are good.

If, indeed, sex is love, than the way we sexually educate also has to be loving and thus, full of respect. It’s not sensible, no matter what, to dictate or cheerlead a choice for someone else just because we know or suspect it was/would have been the right choice for us, but it’s beyond insult to do so when we have absolutely no way of knowing what that choice would have been like for us whatsoever, or when we’re flat-out lying. Given the statistics on marriage and marital sexual dissatisfaction — especially per issues of lack of orgasm and sexual arousal among women, widespread complaints of a simple lack of affection among partners, sexual obligation, prolific complaint from all sides about vaginal intercourse being more often unsatisfying than not, female complaints about the frequency of sex being determined only by the male partner’s libido — and given the proliferation of those pushing abstinence-until-marriage with unfounded promises, an awful LOT of people are knowingly lying to our youth.

A survey by Northern Kentucky University revealed that 61 percent of students who made abstinence promises broke them. And of those who said they kept their pledges, 55 percent indicated they participated in oral sex. The survey queried 597 Northern Kentucky students, 16 percent of whom made pledges not to have sex until marriage. The study noted, however, that pledge-breakers delayed sex for a year longer than nonpledging teens–until an average of 17.6 years old. But pledge-makers who became pledge-breakers were less likely to use protection, such as condoms, when first having sex.

Heck, even if abstinence-until-marriage DID result in all the things it claims to and really COULD include everyone, while I’d be fine getting behind it, I’d still be honest with the youth I counsel and tell them that myself and others didn’t do that and are still having positive results.

We can certainly see negative the results, and the purposeful dishonesty, with a lot of abstinence-based approaches. One very common facet of abstinence-based sex education is fear. I talk to an awful lot of youth who have been reared with this stuff daily, and from that work alone, I can assure anyone, with great confidence, that this approach isn’t making them any smarter, nor is it resulting in any of them having healthier sex lives or feeling any better about their sexuality: it’s resulting in most of those I have encountered being incredibly scared and also incredibly challenged in things like limit and boundary setting, safer sex practices (which, to work, need to be used with ANY new partner for at least the first six months, even in marriage), birth control negotiation, acceptance of personal sexual orientation, a real understanding of the sexual and reproductive anatomy, as well as realistic expectations for what sex is once they do choose sexual partnership. I have young adults literally terrified to shake someone’s hands for fear they have recently toileted, and could thus cause a pregnancy. I have young adults so completely sold on the fact that so long as everyone is in love, or says they love them, or marries them, that the betrayals they experience when sex very much is NOT love in the kinds of relationships they’re assured it will be cause them incredible emotional pain. I have students of abstinence-only programs in droves who have so taken to heart that intercourse is the only real sex, and that that’s where the big risks lie, that almost daily, and sometimes more than once a day, we have to explain that even if one doesn’t include receptive anal sex or giving oral sex as a loss of virginity, that doesn’t make them automatically physically or emotionally safe.

For a lot of teens, even if they DO intend to wait for sex — be it until marriage, or by some other criteria — they come here or come to me because they need, and are asking for, someone to tell them not just the facts — the real ones — but that they are OKAY, they are still or will still be good people even if they do choose to have sex outside some sanctioned context or other. And sometimes, that they aren’t insane in noticing that everyone telling them to be abstinent is often talking out of both sides of their face. Too, adults forget that young adults don’t need us to tell them what is going on with themselves: they know better than we. A lot of this focus on yelling in everyone’s face to wait for sex is good, old fashioned sex panic, because plenty of teens ARE waiting, because they WANT to wait. Some are waiting for marriage, some are waiting for a certain amount of time to pass in a relationships first, and some have other criteria for waiting — for all or certain kinds of sex — entirely. half the turn-off many teens have to abstinence approaches is because they feel like they’re being falsely accused of having or wanting sex when they flat-out don’t.

Look, if this “wait-until-marriage” stuff really DID work, so far as earnestly reducing rates of STIs and unwanted pregnancies, as well as guaranteeing that partnered sex and interpersonal relationships were always or even almost always a positive for all those who wait, AND it didn’t usually include gobloads of misinformation to incite fear into the burgeoning sexuality of those it addressed, I’d sign unto this in a heartbeat.

It’s my job to do what I can to do my level best to have partnered sex and sexuality become as positive an experience for everyone, with as few negative consequences as possible. Needless to say, if all my job needed to consist of to be effective was me saying “no,” it’d sure make my life a whole lot easier, and my workday a lot less stressful. Heck, I could easily cut my work hours down to almost nothing, simply by developing a nice auto-script to just say “wait” to everyone writing me a letter. But my job has NOT been made any easier by abstinence only approaches. I have more misinformation to correct than ever before, coming from more and more sources claiming to be credible, and backed by people who really SHOULD be trustworthy. For a while there, it used to be that most sexual information was spread peer-to-peer, but now we’ve got it coming right on down from our governments, who carry a high credibility, however undeserved. I’ve got good girl/bad girl good boy/bad boy stuff to deal with that my parents thought finally, thankfully, ended with their generation. Over the years, our traffic has only increased and increased — despite us still never having done any advertising — which not only creates more and more work for me, but costs me more and more to host. Suffice it to say, every time I file my taxes I am even crabbier than most because I know that I am literally giving money from the little I make to mandates which create more work for me and which cost me money to try and repair. I am having to fiscally contribute to a system which I professionally protest, and which does harm to those I seek to help. Given that this wave of abstinence-only began in 1996, and it’s now more than a decade past, if it was working, and it was so positive for everyone, I think it’s reasonable to surmise that I should be having less and less work over the years, don’t you?

With letters like this one I usually end up scratching my head wondering why, exactly, it’s so difficult for us as a people — because this isn’t a behavior that only belongs to conservatives — to simply accept that when it comes to sexuality, it’s often a multiple choice test in which there are an awful lot of combinations that can be the right answers, an awful lot of the SAME combinations that can be the wrong answers, and it’s not the answer which dictates which will be right or wrong, but the individual involved and their very specific situation. This isn’t rocket science: this is simple observation. Let’s say Carolyn DID wait until marriage for sex, and Carolyn is pleased as punch. I didn’t (nor did I even include ideas about marriage in any aspect of my sexuality or sexual decision-making), but I’m sitting here happy, healthy and satisfied, too.

So, who’s right, then? We both are… per our own, and only our own, choices All we need is but one — and suffice it to say, I’ve had far, far more than that — letter from someone who DID wait for marriage or lifelong sole partnership and did NOT have the promised positive results, or one person who did NOT wait and has had positive results, to know that the idea that any one choice is best for everyone is flawed.

And this is why it’s so vital to just freaking quit it with this one right choice mishegoss. Not just because it doesn’t work, and because it isn’t sensible, but because it doesn’t honor the individual in any way, nor honor our diversity as individuals with widely varying sexual wants, needs and desires. Sure, there are some basic issues we really can apply to everyone — issues of consent or of sexual health, for instance — but hinging anything on something so also varied as marital status, sexual orientation, gender or age has shown us up historically, time and time again, as at worst, a grave error which does great harm to many, and as an utter waste of time and energy, and an incredibly effective distraction, at best. This is a distraction in that it very much does keep us from having to look at, address and try and develop strategies for sexuality issues which impact everyone, married and unmarried alike, issues which we often prefer to avoid or deny: sexual abuse and rape, domestic abuse, unwanted pregnancy, reproductive rights, homophobia and sexism, ignorance about sexuality and sexual response, the gross inability to sexually communicate, the works. This “one right choice” stuff is especially pernicious when addressed to women (and not only is most casual discussion on this issue about young women, most abstinence-only strategies make it very clear that sexual policing is the responsibility of women), who have spent nearly the whole of human history having our sexuality and sexual choices mandated and dictated to and for us by someone else.

We KNOW a lot of what works: we do, whether we like it or not, or feel comfortable with it or not. Sexuality education IS still a relatively new endeavor, and we are all still very much learning how to do it. I’m not comfortable all of the time either — who is when it comes to sex? — nor can I say that I am 100% certain 100% of the time that my approach with any given person or group is the right one. But I know that I’m a lot more comfortable wondering, questioning, and feeling out what might or could be right than I am when I’m somehow completely certain that I’m absolutely correct about a topic as huge, as loaded and as diverse as human sexuality.

We do, however, know that giving people as much accurate, unbiased, inclusive and compassionate about human sexuality as we can has helped people to figure out what the best choices they can make for themselves are, even when they make mistakes. We know that when we have seen board declines in rates of unwanted pregnancy — such as one we saw here in the states between 1995 and 1998 — it has resulted from comprehensive, not abstinence-based, sex education and from greater availability of effective birth control methods, and that areas with only abstinence-based sex education don’t tend to show the promised positive results (not counting the undeniable positive of activists like Shelby Knox who step up in those areas, mind). We know both because they tell us it helps them, and because since we have started to do so, we have seen some important changes more broadly. We know that doing so in a way in which we do our level best to honor the diversity of those choices, to do so without privileging ANY one choice is not only the way that information (which you acknowledge is vital) is best heard and absorbed, as is the case with any kind of real education, it also, just in that respect, gives people something many people and our culture, historically, something which they are rarely given and which may be, as far as I can gather, the single most important thing anyone can have for a healthy sexuality: a positive acceptance of their sexuality and the clear given that their sexuality is theirs to own and inhabit — not mine, not yours, not anyone else’s.

See, I — we — can’t do that if and when we tell someone that any one choice is the only right choice. If and when we say or mandate that, “the only decision that so-and-so needs to make is…”, particularly about a population which we not only are not a member of, but one whom we have any power over (and we’ve plenty), we are usurping that person’s or population’s full ownership of that decision.

I got another letter (it’s been a doozy of week for these) from a woman telling me that I just do not tell girls to say no to their boyfriends often enough. Not only do I often feel like that’s what I spend half of every day doing with new users, that letter, like the one from Carolyn, like many of these kinds of sentiments, speaks volumes. If we really are — really and truly — invested in helping young people to make sound choices, and in them having a healthy, joyful and fully-autonomous sexuality and positive sexual relationships, then the way we educate them has to be in support of them actively making those choices, has to be primarily concerned with enabling that process, for them, not in directing it. Because when we seek to direct choices, not inform them, we enable exactly that which I hear folks like this saying they want to cease. Whether it’s me, a boyfriend, or someone else, telling someone that there is only one sound choice for them based on our ideas, our wishes or our experiences, and abusing the influence we know we have with them to do so, isn’t loving or respecting them, nor is it educating them.

Even if there really was any ONE right age to have sex at, one right type of relationship to have it in, any one right way to have sex, the very moment at which someone else tells you what YOUR right choice must or should be, it doesn’t really get to be your choice anymore. It’s theirs, and for all the big talk about sex being love, denying someone’s full ownership of themselves and their own sexuality isn’t loving. The very minute that we present anything in a way that is knowingly dishonest and seeks to prevent individual critical thinking and decision-making, we are not acting out of love, but out of control, which in and of itself, makes love — in sex or anything else — impossible.

(Crossposted to the Scarleteen blog)

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, feminism, women, rantapalooza, sexuality, education | permalink | comments (9) »

So, up to ten miles round-trip now: I spent an hour yesterday afternoon sitting under a highway bridge at my mid-point near UW.

This is goodness. My hamstrings and quads currently disagree, but what the hell do they know?

It’s really good for me to do my daily sitting out of doors, rather than indoors, and attaching it to movement in some way. It always has been, really. In fact, at the first meditiation community I ever went to in Chicago, I had someone next to me complain once that my bouncing on my feet was bothering them. I resisted the urge to tell them that I knew I wasn’t moving the floor, that they weren’t supposed to have their eyes open anyway, so there, and that meditation is supposed to be all about working to tune out outside static and get in harmony with your surroundings, so they should consider me their special helper then, shouldn’t they? SNAP!

I resisted that urge because any of those comments and most certainly the snap would have been even less appropriate than the initial complaint, but also because I didn’t want to be the snappity-snip in the middle of a giant group meditation, which has absolutely zip to do with my spiritual growth and absolutely everything to do with preferring someone else be caught holding the asshole bag, by the by.

I’ve generally done better with walking meditation than seated. I’m not looking forward to the couple of months here where biking isn’t going to be an option often, but hey: it’s at least a shorter period of time to be away from it than it was in the midwest.

I realize, too, that my best meditating in this new ritual happens twice. It happens once when I take my sitting break at a mid-point — especially with things for my eyes to take in and associate, I’m such a visual learner — and the happy lasts the rest of the ride home, but even more so, it happens the first few minutes I get on my bike. I’m not thinking about the challenge of the hills, I’m not thinking about if it rains, I’m not thinking about where I’m going to go, and I’m not worried yet about being hit by a car: I’m just flying down the street feeling the breath in my lungs, the strong force of my body, and the wind on my face. I feel freed. I’m not thinking about anything but those moments for long enough that I can’t determine when they start or they end.

I think doing this is also me making a certain peace with Seattle that’s been slow to grow. I don’t dislike it here, not at all, but it very much doesn’t feel like Home. I’m not sure it ever will, not completely, and that’s okay — the landscape is just so different than the one that registers as home in my head (which is odd, because I feel very at home in Mexico, even without that registry). It’s beautiful all the same, and it’s certainly home for now. Given how slow everything often seems to be to warm here, perhaps that’s as it should be; that I should be as slow to warm to it and it seems to be to me.

(I’m keeping a photo journal of sorts of some of these sessions here for me to have a handful of visual koans for myself — my bike is being my self-portrait stand-in, it seems.)

* * *
So, for the first time I know of as of yet, I missed out on a big opportunity because I’m not someone’s mother. A production company for a big TV studio contacted me about needing a teen expert and wanting me, but that the gig required said expert being a Mom.

I walked out of my office after this brief conversation and into the kitchen, where Mark was hanging out. I very calmly, but with great resignation, voiced that I’d apparently passed the age where I was going to get penalized for BEING someone’s mother, and entered into the one where I was going to get penalized for NOT being someone’s mother.

I had to wonder if at any point there is an age for women where it’s neither considered too early nor too late for to be mothers when it comes to our careers and our market value.

I’m thinking not.

* * *

I talked to my father on the phone yesterday, who I didn’t know had climbed on a group bus to from Chicago to go protest for the Jena 6 two days ago: he’d just gotten home when I called. Not only am I supremely impressed he was able to battle his worsening agoraphobia to do that, it also makes me really happy.

I know, I know, activism is always supposed to be primarily about whatever cause or group or person you’re being active for, and I agree. But in my father’s case, especially since he feels so useless so much of the time, him being able to essentially do something that was like the civil rights movement work he once did, something he feels so strongly about, and something that made him feel so useful, is a really big deal. Him giving up the $50 that’s very little to others, but a big lot of money for him, to go is important. And it was a great experience for him, being able to go and step up, and also just being able to talk to other people on the bus there and back to whom it all matters. He sounded so happy, so energized.

We have had strange conversations about racism, my father and I. Not so strange, all things considered, but they’re sometimes not what one’d expect from a guy who once took fire hoses in the face to combat racism, and who ditched what easily could have been his best romantic relationship to do that work. He’s very anti-affirmative action, for instance, primarily because he feels like it’s asking my generation to “pay” for something that other generations did. I disagree with him on this point, I always have. For starters, I don’t feel like we’re paying for anything, that there is any sort of price I pay for affirmative action at all: while I don’t have a lot of privilege, I am visibly white, and even with things like affirmative action, privileges are and have been extended to me that are not and have not been to those of color. I don’t see anyone of color taking anything away from me with it, and I also feel like any band-aid we can have while the still wide-oepn wound of racism remains fresh and bloody is important. Really, I could care less about it from my vantage-point: it doesn’t hurt me in any way at all, and even if it did, I’m aware enough of the privilege I do have that when my privilege increases someone else’s burden, I want to do what I can to bring that in better balance. I’ve learned this from a lot of people and places in my life, but it’s odd to be pointing this out to a man who may well have been the first person to teach me to do that. Let’s even say that somehow, policies like affirmative action actually made it so that we whiteys were on the bottom of the olde race hierarchy for a time (yeah, I’m laughing, too): we’ll freaking well live. Everyone else has for a damn long time, after all.

Besides, it’s not like people of my generation are not still doing exactly the things that make affirmative action needed. Oh, if only.

My Pop is often of the mind that the playing field is somehow already level.

Mind, the neighborhood he lives in, the one we used to live in together, is over 80% of color. It’s also exceptionally dangerous, being one of the biggest gang neighborhoods in Chicago, and also THE place for metric arseloads of dealing and prostitution (yes, you’d think he’d realize that that alone should be a big, neon sign that the playing field when it comes to race is hardly level, but alas). White people TIPTOE through that neighborhood unless they’re cops, and no one with half a brain is going to be spouting racist bullshit on a regular basis over there, but only because of a fear of being directly hurt for doing so. He VERY infrequently leaves that neighborhood.

By virtue of barely being off-street, my father also looks that part. In other words, many of the same kinds of biases racist people have against people of color come into play with homeless people, so. I was trying to explain to him on the phone that when I find myself in spaces and situations where no one knows who I am, what my background or beliefs are; when all they can see is what sex I am and what color, I hear this crap a’plenty. When Briana and I were at the State fair in MN during my last visit, we got a serious doozy, as an example.

We saw a bathroom where the line wasn’t too bad, and while neither of us had to go, I figured it was best to go in advance so that when I was about to wet my pants, I wasn’t going to have to stand in one of those lines. So, in line we went. In a few minutes, two or three pre-teen black girls stepped out of the line for a minute, and walked past us, pretty clearly to go see what was taking so long and how bad the wait really was. When they turned around, they appeared to be doing that little bob one does when one has to pee like a racehorse. I asked if they had to go pretty bad, and got given the “ohmygodohmygodI’mgoingtopeeonthefloor” look we all get when we’ve hit that point, and so just said they could just take my place in line, since I really didn’t have to go, anyway, and certainly not that bad.

Behind Bri was a perfect blond woman with her perfect blond children in her perfectly shiny stroller and her perfectly shiny clothes, and the moment I did that, I heard her say, quite audibly, “What is this, affirmative action?”

I made a point not to turn around, because I just did not know what would have come out of my mouth if I did. Bri did turn, and shot her a look, because she then said (not at all apologetically), “I’m sorry, I’m a redneck.” Because that justifies everything, you know. Without the look, she likely wouldn’t have said anything at all, and part of saying what she did was based on her presumption that everyone around her was also racist, because most of the people around her were also white. So comfortable is someone like that in that, that they WILL say something like that, loudly, nearly anywhere because they’ve no reason at all to fear that they’ll be unsupported in their sentiments or be harmed in any way for them.

So, I’m telling my Dad this as an example, and explaining that of COURSE she would not have said anything like that if the girls I let go ahead of me were white. Or her kids. She likely wouldn’t have said anything at all, really. I told my Dad about the time Mark and I were at that B&B in Whiterock, right after Katrina, and how the older Canadian woman who owned it with her husband literally asked me, in absolute seriousness, why “those” people ever “chose” to live in that area way back when in the first place. And how I sat there, floored, trying to drop clues about the history of slavery and the legacy of poverty and the boon of being with one’s family in the hopes that with one, two, maybe even three, she’d realize what freaking stupid things she was saying sooner rather than later. I dropped a lot of clues, and some not so hinty-direct statements. She never got it. We excused ourselves from breakfast early and got the hell out of there.

Oh, I have stories, we all have these stories. But I don’t want to sit recounting them: they’re just too maddening, even to me.

My father just kept saying to me, the other day, that he just could not, would not, believe things were still like this in 2007. He finally at least said that he just didn’t want to. I tried to explain that my impression with this generation in particular (high school and college-age right now), was that I’m seeing a lot of hardcore resentment amoung plenty of youth when it comes to racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, ableism, the works. Plenty seems to feel like and express that asking them to take stock of their privilege and consider it when dealing with others is something they are entitled NOT to do (yes, I know, it’s such an obvious symptom of the thing that it’s not even ironic: it’s plain old literal), that they should not HAVE to do (because it’s such a strain on them to act and speak with compassion), and that I’m a big old asshole for even suggesting they do. So much of the ugly history of racism isn’t something many even know or care to know, and for those who do, it often seems very far away, when it’s really only-yesterday stuff, and in many ways, still-today stuff. I could go on about this for a solid year, really, it’s one of the toughest parts for me of working with young people right now, but the point is, his awareness of this isn’t so great.

My Dad is also all about everything really boiling down to class issues: I got my first socialism from him, to be sure. In some respect, I agree with him, but in others, I really don’t. (And we’ve had similar discussions about sexism.) Mostly, I don’t think we can untangle all of these things so easily, especially given the ways they intersect, and for whom they intersect most. But perhaps more to the point, I don’t find that most people are sophisticated enough, or maybe more accurately have the desire or the interest in deconstructing and examining all of this enough — because when you do, of course, you have to take more personal responsibility for certain things — to be able to even make those distinctions. Plus, it can be about class all it wants, but we still have to acknowledge that not only are more women and more people of color lower-class, but that the impact of classism is greater when you’re dealing with compounded minority.

I also have to remember, though, that my father was and has been exceptionally depressed that all the activist work he did was for naught in many ways, and that that’s a big driver in these discussions and feelings. The civil rights movement absolutely did some good, but it didn’t erase racism: the friends he had who lost lives or health in doing that didn’t lose them for nothing, but they also didn’t lose them for what they’d hoped for. The anti-war movement with Vietnam was important as hell, and made some difference, but here the hell we basically are again, all that history forgotten or dismissed. He didn’t change the world, and he really, really wanted to: he sacrificed a lot trying. It’s very hard for my father to have to deal with the fact that, for instance, racism is still alive and well and not just living in Lousiana and Alabama but also in Maine, New York and Seattle. It’s hard because of what it means about the world, but it’s also hard because of how it makes him feel about himself.

* * *
I’m finally putting up a few new photo sets today, and making more headway in my backlog. The sets going up later today include a set of photos of a transgender friend currently IDing as genderqueer: I’ve been dying to do some transition photos of someone for a long time.

It was her idea to do a series in which she was in her clothing of choice, nude, and then in old boy-clothes. I thought it was a brilliant idea, and I’m pleased as hell with the results. But I’m very glad she suggested it, because it’s not something I’d have felt at all comfortable in suggesting to her myself, much in the same way that I wouldn’t for a minute feel comfortable suggesting that a cisgendered woman pose in stiletto-heels and corsetry and makeup, even if I had some brilliant creative intent, if dressing that way would make that woman feel terribly uncomfortable and put in a drag she didn’t like (and as far as I’m concerned, it’s drag no matter who’s got it on — some folks just happen to like being in drag). As it was, seeing how Amy looked, mood-wise, in the boy clothes, I was RACING to take those shots: it was earnestly painful for me to watch her face kind of fall.

Per the final results, I hate to talk over artwork, but I think the images are incredibly telling. I did almost wish that I had had an assigned-sex woman who doesn’t dig girl-drag to do a sort of mirror of them — one in her regular clothes, another nude, and another in say, hardcore Victorian garb or, say, head-to-toe fetish latex blah-de-bah. But another day (and again, she’d probably have to volunteer to do it herself: I’d just feel so ooky asking someone to stand around like that who didn’t want to).

Next up, finishing Becca’s pregnancy shots as well as my first shots of baby Odin, who is — of course he is — cute as the freaking dickens.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, home, family, photography & art | permalink | comments (0) »

I have two pleas for cash and/or help for everyone this morning, both things I think that everyone, of every conceiveable stripe, can get behind.

The first came through my email box from the Feminist Majority Foundation this morning. Here’s the email, with some extra information I’ve tossed in to round things out (in italics):

I am writing to ask for your help with a dire situation for women and girls in Afghanistan. One in six women will die as a result of childbirth or pregnancy-related complications. Maternal mortality rates in Afghanistan are simply unacceptable.

What are those rates? According to UNICEF, about 120 to 600 out of every 10,000 Afghan mothers (numbers vary by region) die while giving birth or because of related complications. To put that into perspective, here in the states, the maternal mortaility rate is around one in every 10,000 now. The infant mortality rate in Afghanistan is also one of the highest in the world.

I don’t think that this readership needs me to explain that there’s just no bad in midwifery. While often we hear that prostitution is the world’s oldest women’s profession, that’s a pretty substantial blurring of the truth: it’s midwifery (duh). Midwifery — obviously — not only is vital when it comes to healthy pregnancies and deliveries, but also for educating mothers on doing what can be done to keep themselves and their infants healthy after birth. Suffice it to say, midwifery in any case, but certainly in third world nations, also provides women with a way to connect with and aid each other, which is perhaps secondary, but incredibly critical for any oppressed class. This training also provides education for men on how to be supportive of trained midwives, to boot.

Experts believe that the most effective strategy to reduce these needless and tragic deaths is to train more midwives to assist in pregnancy and childbirth. For only $3,000, a new midwife can be trained in Afghanistan. One midwife will in turn be able to promote the health and well-being of countless Afghan women and their new infants. This is extremely important in a country where the healthcare system in most provinces has been devastated and is not functioning. Electricity and supplies are often scarce. Many medical professionals have fled the country. Most Afghan women, even if they are pregnant, have never seen a doctor. Family planning is rarely available.

And all of this is under U.S. watch — after we promised to provide Afghanistan with a “Marshall Plan” and to free Afghan women.

Understand that despite the promise of that plan, Afghanistan received less assistance per capita than did postconflict Bosnia and Kosovo, or even desperately poor Haiti, according to a RAND Corporation study.

We have an opportunity to help Afghan women and girls by providing funding to train midwives. Please, donate now — as generously as you can — to help train a midwife in Afghanistan. Your support will save lives.

Half of your generous contribution will go toward a midwife training program run by the Shuhada Organization — an Afghan women-led non-profit organization, founded and led by Dr. Sima Samar, which operates hospitals, clinics, and schools in Afghanistan.

This is a pretty amazing organization. And if, for whatever reason, you don’t want to donate to the FMF to help with this issue, but still want to help, you might consider donating to Shuhada instead.

The other half of your contribution will support the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls. Our public education campaign works to increase funding and resources for Afghan women-led non-profit organizations, as well as education and health programs, and to provide support for some 25 Afghan refugee women a year to attend college in the U.S.

Please, while this email is in front of you, make as large a donation as you possibly can. The lives of Afghan women and girls depend upon it.

To donate through the FMF, click here.

Next up: While I was in Ohio, we spent an evening out with Mark’s brother Andy, who is an utterly amazing and visionary public school educator of special needs, middle-school inner-city kids in the worst part of the Kentucky/Ohio border. If I’m recalling the conversation correctly, around 70% of his students wind up in the criminal justice system in adulthood without intervention and education, and these are the kids of kids (especially given many of them aren’t white) that conservatives in that region label “dead-end” kids and would just throw away. He’s come up with this insanely smart mixed-age classroom idea for this year (and there I sat, the ex-Montessori teacher, smirking to myself to see another inner-city teacher, like Montessori herself was, come to that conclusion), as well as an additional system that I won’t recount here yet so that he can get it all implemented first. We were talking about how vocabulary is a real problem, and I had an idea that I think might be helpful. Yes, I was the materials-making queen when I was a classroom teacher: it was one of my favorite parts of teaching. I love this sort of brainstorming.

Know those word magnets you can put on your fridge and make silly poetry and the like with? What if those were made to be far bigger, so that they could live on a magnetic-paint wall, the kids could see them easily from pretty far away, and also enjoy the fun, oversized nature of them? You put basic words in there to make basic sentences with, but you also put some synonyms and antonyms in there too, with more complex words. So, let’s say that one kid has already used the word “good,” and another kid wants it for their sentence, so a teacher can easily pull out the word “beneficial” and explain it means the same thing, giving the kid a way to learn some good vocabulary actively and organically, as well as without feeling like he or she just got lectured or schooled.

I’m going to talk to Andy today about the best way to get donations to him — suffice it to say, their budget is beyond dismal — and will add that information when he does. But I also thought I’d pool all of you to see if anyone worked at/owned a print shop, or knew anyone who did, to see if we couldn’t find a shop willing to donate the printing of these full-stop, or provide a discount in creating them.

Addendum:I have had some awesome users with some excellent ideas that are totally doable for this for Andy, sans donations. Thanks so much, y’all!

(More from me later on other things, but just wanted to start the day with these two items: they’re important.)

posted in activism, feminism | permalink | comments (6) »

I sent this in response to the New York Times piece published last week regarding abstinence-only education. Alas, I didn’t hear back from them, so I offer it up here. I feel it’s vitally important to get as much informed commentary out there on this issue as possible right now, especially considering the recent continuance and increases given to abstinence-only funding.

Re: Abstinence Education Faces an Uncertain Future: July 18th, 2007
To: oped@nytimes.com, letters@nytimes.com

There is sound reason to question any approach to one of the most diverse arenas of human behavior which privileges one set of choices over another.

By putting virginity — a concept few teens and adults can even define; one which also leaves gay, lesbian and transgender youth, as well as sexual abuse survivors, out in the cold — in a cagematch with being sexually active, we make teens feel even less capable of figuring out what choices are right for them. Since partnered sex is always about more than one party, enabling young people to make independent choices based on their individual needs, limits and boundaries should be our greatest concern. It does “rule” for any person to feel comfortable with the choices they make about sexuality, but only so long as their choices – whatever they are — are made with accurate and inclusive information which allows them to consider sex through their own intellectual, emotional and moral compass.

There IS nothing wrong with being a virgin, and there isn’t anything weird about choosing to abstain from sex.

There also isn’t anything “weird” or wrong about choosing not to.

By stating that sex before marriage is the unilateral ideal, and the only sound, morally acceptable sexual choice, we affix more guilt, shame and confusion to sex, which is so overwrought with it already. As it is, weighty matters of popularity, normalcy, social status and peer acceptance, conflicting messages from parents, partners and the media about sexuality all cause young people to feel pushed and pulled in radically different directions when it comes to sex. As parents or mentors, we know that it is vital for youth to develop autonomy to resist external pressures: why further institutionalize this tug-o-war and suspend that logic when it comes to sex?

Abstinence-only programs are rife with misinformation on safer sex and birth control, sexually transmitted infections and the relationship realities of a diverse population. They enable the worst of traditional gender roles, in which boys are often represented as mindless, libidinous beasts for whom the girls — whose interest in sex is represented as solely emotional (and heterosexual) — are the sexual gatekeepers.

And we’ve learned this lesson before: during the first World War, all other nation’s soldiers were given condoms; ours, a “chastity campaign” instead. The result? The United States — at rates exponentially higher than those other nations — experienced its first big wave of sexually transmitted disease when our soldiers came home and gave their wives gonorrhea and syphilis. Marriage didn’t protect those couples from STIs or negative sexual consequences: abstinence approaches put them in harm’s way then, as they put couples in harm’s way now.

Even for those who wait until marriage for sex — and for GLBT youth, that could be a lifelong wait — they STILL will need sexuality information. While marriage may have the power to do some things, it lacks the ability to instill couples with information on how to practice safer sex, use birth control, have mutually satisfying sex together that is truly about both parties; to discuss sexual limits, boundaries, desires, wants and needs openly and informedly. And as anyone who works in any arena of education knows, when we learn certain skills and information influences how likely we are to retain it and best apply it throughout our lives. We would recognize a clear problem if we were not teaching language in the window in which children are doing their key language development: we should see the same problem when we are not teaching sexuality basics — knowing that like language, we do not just teach for now, but for lifelong use — during the time when that development is prime.

While over the last decade and a half, the age of first intercourse and teen pregnancy rates have declined, that trend began with the rise of comprehensive sex education and better access to birth control, and has not further decreased since 2001. We also need to take into account that rates of other sexual activity which carry just as much emotional risk, and often as much STI risk, have NOT declined. In the United States, people between the ages of 15 and 24 continue to be those with the highest — and most rapidly rising — rates of infections; our rates of STIs in young adults are substantially higher than rates in nations who provide comprehensive sexual education and better access to sexual healthcare services. Of teens who report saving sex for marriage, it is only a rare few who mean ALL sex: for most, it means forestalling only intercourse, and for many that is still not delayed until marriage. Considering the median age of first marriage is now around twenty-six, we can easily suss out why that’s not a surprise.

I have run Scarleteen.com, a comprehensive young adult sexuality education website, since 1998, which sometimes sees as many as 30,000 users a day. Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in newcomers to the site reporting participation in sexual activity like anal sex. Often, teens engaging in unprotected anal sex or oral sex will report doing so because, according to the sex information they have, it is less risky than vaginal intercourse and will also leave their virginity intact. Many of those teens have not learned how to say no to those activities when they want to from abstinence-only sex education. “Just say no,” doesn’t teach us much about “Maybe,” or “I need to find out more about our risks first, see if we can take care of ourselves in a way that’s smart and safe, talk about it more, and then see how I feel.” Whether someone is single or married, has one partner or five, they need to learn how to have conversations about sexuality that are far more complex than no or yes.

The most pervasive messages of abstinence-only education — and its logical and practical flaws — have been heard loud and clear, filtered through teen minds the way any of us filters anything: with only the information we have at hand. We know abstinence-only approaches just don’t work and never have worked, and any of us past our teens knows why. If we keep the real-life experiences we know are realities and the sexuality information most of us now have as adults from teens, some won’t know why this doesn’t work, but many will find out that it doesn’t: the hard way.

Comprehensive sexuality education includes information about abstinence. But it also includes discussion with teens about what it means to be emotionally, physically, interpersonally and materially ready for any sort of sex — not just heterosexual. It includes all of the accurate sexuality and sexual health information all of them will need — including GLBT youth. While comprehensive sex education serves both teens who abstain and those who do not, the idea that comprehensive sexuality education will result in youth having sex they would not be having otherwise is as flawed as suggesting that lessons in U.S. history about the founding of the nation will encourage young children to immediately try to organize a genocide of indigenous people.

Whether a young adult chooses to have sex or chooses not to have sex, it’s their choice to make, not ours. If adults, with a political power they do not yet have, are making any one choice a mandate, not an option, then no matter what they choose, teens aren’t making a choice at all: we’re making it for them – and we’ve been making it poorly. One can only hope abstinence education faces an uncertain future, because as of right now, it’s set up millions of teens with a decided and intentionally ignorant uncertainty in an area of their lives we should all want them to be as certain about as possible.

Heather Corinna
Editor & Founder, Scarleteen.com
Author, S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College

(Cross-posted at the Scarleteen blog.)

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, soapbox, sexuality | permalink | comments (2) »

I had a bit of an epiphany the other day. Well, an epiphany for me, anyway: it may well already have been obvious for others.

I’ve been trying to do this thing for myself, at least once a week, where for around a half an hour, I just allow myself to accept and entertain the possibility that I might not be able to keep doing the kind of work that I do. I’m not doing this to be morbid, but rather, in the hope that if things do get to that point, it’ll be easier for me to deal with if I’ve come to some small level of acceptance in advance.

I’ve been reminded lately, that eleven years ago, I wasn’t in a dissimilar position than I may find myself in soon again. Having to close the crunchy, indie Kindergarten I’d run for nearly five years really gutted me. On the last day of school, I threw a big party for all the current and former students and parents, because I wanted the kids to have something happy to part with, not sad, but that day, every five minutes I had to walk away, go into the alley, and sob. I gave away most of our materials to the kids, partly out of generosity, but partly because I knew if I had them around, I’d look at them all the time and torture myself.

I had to do that largely because financially, there was no way to make things work without it a) either becoming unaffordable for parents because I needed extra space and help or b) seriously killing me because 80 hours a week on your feet, with no assistants, a majority of which were spent managing a group of small children is just something you can only sustain for so long. I even saw it coming over the last year, had tried various things to make it workable, but I was so in love with the job and the idealism of the thing (it was a vegetarian school, we had a kickass parent community, even including our own food co-op, we were trying to raise kids compassionately and peaceably, etc.), that I didn’t really visualize my life without it.

So, when the inevitable happened, it was really awful. I was beyond depressed for months, I felt like I’d lost this huge part of myself, and like I’d lost family, and to boot, I just felt like a complete failure (which is kind of a silly thing for someone twenty-six who started her first indie biz at 21 to feel like, but I had no hindsight at the time). So, if I get to a similar space again, I want to do everything I can to try and be smarter about it this time around and try and do some things to preventatively manage what would be a very serious heartbreak of an even greater magnitude.

On to my epiphany. A friend messaged me when I was in the midst of one of these meditations/visualizations, and made some noise that it wasn’t the best time to talk to me (I sit and weep when I do this: that’s fine, it’s catharsis, but it’s not pleasant to be around), but not enough noise, really. Truth is, I want to talk about this stuff with people, I just feel like a perpetual downer these days, and feel really guilty about burdening people with it. And so it got brought up, my malaise with this, and she mentioned that I couldn’t be a failure because many people consider me a (s)hero.

Forgive my bluntness — she did, she’s a peach, and she gets it — but being a hero to someone or even a lot of someones rarely pays the rent or puts food on the table. And right now, and at my age, I’d honestly easily give up any hero-status I may have for some form of reliable paycheck. I mean, it’s really nice, I’m not a complete asshole, nor an ungrateful louse, and it does makes me feel good about myself and what I do/have done.

But here’s the thing. I’ve come to the conclusion that much as is the case with artists, where they and their work are usually considered most valuable when they’re dead, that with actvists – and what nutjob decides to be both, anyway? Erm… – we are often considered less valuable, less heroic, if we have even the basic creature comforts that everyone else does. In a word, I think that people perhaps often confuse heroism with martyrdom.

I’m no Catholic nor a Christian. I’m Buddhist: our goal is to certainly accept that we all suffer, for sure, but we try to work to reduce the suffering we and others experience, not to elevate or celebrate it. I mean, I think Jesus was an incredibly cool guy, one of the all-time-greats, for sure, but I don’t think he died for anyone’s sins en masse or that his death or the way he died is anything to celebrate or idolize. I also have a really hard time believing that anyone would seriously ask someone to crucify them, even if they were batshit crazy or just totally worn out with being the Messiah (well, maybe that one I believe). I think he got screwed by a jealous ass and that that seriously sucks. And if that isn’t what happened, and in fact, Judas really was following Jesus’ directive, then it’s Jesus who was the ass, because that’s a fuck of a cruel position to put a friend in, man.

But enough about Jesus: let’s talk about me.

Well, in a minute. Instead of Jesus & Co, — and I’m hardly comparing myself to these folks, just looking for activists people know to talk about — I’m thinking about people like Aung San Suu Kyi, and the fact that from, where I’m sitting (which is not in Burma, so if I’m being inaccurate, please correct me), it appears that only after she was put under house arrest, and thus, laregly unable to continue to do the amazing activist work she was doing, did she get the big street cred and awards. Certainly, refusing to leave the country, which would have given her freedom, was an incredible protest all by itself, but so was the work she did which led her there in the first place.

I’m thinking about Martin Luther King, and the likely reality that had he not been assassinated, his profound achievements not only would have been less recognized, but in no short time whatsoever, the fact that he cheated on his wife, that he wore nice suits, or that he didn’t have to put his life at huge risk anymore would have overshadowed his incredible accomplishments.

I’m thinking about Phil Ochs, Nelson Mandela, Alice Paul, Medgar Evers, the current Dalai Lama, Harvey Milk, the works. And what I’m thinking is that without their martyrdom and their profound suffering (far more than mine, obviously; I’m just kvetching about having big troubles paying the bills and not having a segment of the population think I’m some sort of child predator: I’m certainly not grappling with being shot or imprisioned for years and years), their heroism wouldn’t be held up so high.

And I’m thinking that is complete and utter bullshit.

I’m thinking that that complete and utter bullshit has something to do with why on earth I keep finding it so hard to make ends meet when someone working at a fast food restaurant the number of hours I do often, say, has some sort of vehicle, and someone who sits on their arse in a cubicle all day getting paid for forty hours, with benefits, but really working maybe 20, is doing far, far better in just having some basic stability, security and quality of life than the both of us.

It’s become pretty clear to me over the years that a lot of people just figure that anyone who does any sort of activism, especially if they do it for their living, has made some sort of intentional choice to barely scrape by — or chose that because we somehow are trying to show others we’re better people than they are by scraping by — or somehow deserves to live poorly or at higher risks because we chose not to have “real” jobs, even if our work benefits those who have those “real” jobs, or fills in the gaps because those with the “real” jobs don’t have the time or wherewithal to tend to the stuff we are. There absolutely is plenty of commentary out and about which clearly states that full-time activists deserve to stay poor and struggle because we chose the “luxury” of doing work that we feel is universally important rather than the hellacious torment of a corporate job.

It seems clear, especially if I pay attention to what others say about people like me, that if I wrote my missives from a comfortable house that I owned, or had a car I drove around in, or talked about the kids I can’t likely ever afford to have at this point, by some, I’d be less of a hero; less of an activist.

It seems clear that if I didn’t sit here perpetually whinging about how much it sucks that forty is flirting with me and no matter how hard I seem to work doing things people say are important, I can’t squeeze even a dime for it from the majority of folks who talk about the value of what I do, I’d be less of a hero. That I’m considered more of one because someone can look up my woes about healthcare without insurance, see how low and exhausted I can get, how tough it is for me to get real credibility, or look back and read about the winter I had to post online to ask for someone to donate a coat for me for the winter because it can get just that bad. And that’s freaking lunacy.

This, for the record, is not intended to be any sort of guilt trip. Rather, this is me simply acknowledging pervasive attitudes that exist, and trying to desconstruct them in the hope of perhaps changing them, or at the very least, accepting them better than I do now. I’m trying to suss these things out because I’m in a space where I’m trying to look the life I have now square in the face and see if there is any chance of continuing to do things the way I do them — or continuing to be a full-time activist at all — but to also have some hope of some semblance of a basic, comfortable life. I’m wondering if the sort of attitudes I’m talking about aren’t a big (maybe the biggest? Maybe not?) barrier to that, because if they are, then it seems to me that I need to accept that there is only so much I can do to change them, and more realistically consider what I might need to do — not for the world-at-large, but just for myself — in that context.

Look: I grew up with the sorts of people I mentioned above as my heroes and sheros. When my friend I was talking to asked me who my own heroes were, I admit, I was loathe to roll out the list, because when you look at it, it seems pretty clear that from day one of my life, the role models and idols I’ve chosen aren’t just activists, but also martyrs. It’s entirely possible that I, too, am influenced by that conflation and confusion, even if I abhor it; even if I’d by all means prefer that more of my heroes were still alive than dead young and early, that they lived much more comfortably than they did. (Mind you, I’d rather have grown up with those folks as my role models than the vapid celebrities so many young people hold up, but still, it begs an important question about idols and role models.)

However bitter a pill it is to swallow, I’m glad, at least, that my brain is going to these places, because I very much need to think about them, very seriously, and pretty much now. It’s gotten pressing to do so financailly, it’s gotten pressing to do so emotionally, and since I’ve also found myself with a bonafide life-partner, there is that on top of it all. By all means, Mark knew pretty well what he was signing unto with me and what I do, but I also don’t want my work, my life, and my fallout from both to cause him suffering. There’s this activist/social work trap you can so easily fall into where you’re so invested in making huge groups or classes of people feel better, have better lives, so focused on the big picture that you get myopic about your own life, your own betterment, and with making sure the people closest to you are also okay, and that you’re not only helping them, but not making things WORSE for them by working so much to make things better for others (it’s something I also see a good deal of in feminism, too: there are some incredible activists who are doing great things for women-at-large, but who sometimes seem really inept or careless when it comes to maltreatment of the women right next to them). I’ve found myself in that place before with work and my interpersonal relationships and my own life, and I do not want to land there again.

I’m not sure what to do with this particular epiphany, where to file it, or where to go from here just yet. I’m just at the starting gate of sorting it all out, after all. So, I’m more aware of what part of this is likely about, acutely aware that I think it’s crap, and obscenely aware that I don’t want a cross on my back, because that’s just plain fucked up.

Well, you gotta start somewhere.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, rantapalooza | permalink | comments (5) »

Sorry, more questions, still no answers!

(I’ll get back to actual entries any time now, really, I promise, including the magic carpet ride my dental hygenist in Minneapolis sent me on. But until then…)

• When I was in Minneapolis, doing my event for the GLBT youth center, I got a handful of questions about sexuality pertaining to infibulated women. This isn’t a shocker: Minneapolis has, for some time, had a substantial Somali and Ethiopian refugee program, resulting in a substantial Somali and Ethipian population there. I did know the basic answers to the questions, but I’d very much like to do an FAQ piece for Scarleteen answering questions not about the issue of FGM, but specifically address practical issues (orgasm and sexual response, healing from genital trauma, ways to respond to long-term health problems, etc.) for women and partners of women who have been genitally mutilated. However, I don’t feel right as a white woman who not only has not survived FGM, but who doesn’t live in/come from a culture or community in which FGM is prevalent. Might any of you know a woman who might be up to collaborating on this with me who does come from one of those perspectives?

• Over the last few years, I’ve noticed at Scarleteen that an awful lot of the worst (as if there were anything less than worst, but you get me) of our incest and friend-of-family rape cases arise from Austrailia and New Zealand. Are any of you better versed than I — and know decent sources I could look at — in terms of incest and friend-of-family rapes in those countries? More specifically, I’d like to have more than the basics I do on the justice system and incest, et al, on how social services generally responds (and what victim rights are), on basic cultural dynamics in terms of social and familial attitudes around incest and rape. (Stephen? Beppie? Kat?)

• Book events! I need to do them! Much to my dismay, I’ve started to discover that Seattleites are big, stuffy prudes, unless you’re approaching sex in a way that’s funny-ha-ha, all about the surfacey bullshit, or are a pro-domme. One big bookstore here even had the stones to tell my publicist that they “didn’t have an area private enough” to do an event with me. Did they think I was going to take my pants off and SHOW everyone sexual anatomy? I mean, I can see that Ann Rule has an event there (who, by the way, I’ve been known to read for a guilty pleasure; I’m a criminiology geek when I have three seconds of free time to read something besides work books, so I’m not dissing Ms. Rule). Is she going to be reading? Does she not need a more private arena to read about serial killing? Aren’t they worried she might give a demonstration? Ugh. So, save one event I got started cultivating yetsterday with a local book store (gods bless Ballard), I’m up empty. Suffice it to say, most of the rest of the world is pretty closed-mouthed, too. We knew full well from the start — it was glaringly obvious during the years of publisher-hunting — that a lot of people would be bloody terrified of this book, but it’s no fun to have it hammered home these days.

I’ll be taking some time over the next week to get this stuff together in a more formalized way, but really, I can be creative about this. For instance, if you’re in WA, Portland, Victoria or Vancouver, it’s easy for me to get to: want to link up a group of parents informally for some gabbing on how to deal with parenting and approaching sexuality with kids and teens? Want to have a sex educator over for a group of teen girls in your community to have an accurate gab-session? Heck, have a table for sex Q&A at your next office party? I’ll do it, man, just give me a shout. Very little is too weird for this gal, as is likely obvious by now.

• I also know I asked this before around a year ago or so, but I only got a response from one person, who never connected with me via email. I really, really, REALLY need to get connected with at least a couple other people who have to rape or abuse counsel, and do the sort of highly emotionally difficult work every day I do — it’s not every single day that things are so loaded, thank christ, but it’s close. And it’s getting more so: Scarleteen and myself have been around solidly long enough, and have established a certain feeling of safety for users long enough, that over the last few years, I wind up dealing with rape and abuse more and more often. Certainly, I’ll do it — I always move first to get survivors to seek out good hotlines and in-person counseling, but they usually stick around for support with me and our volunteers — it’s needed, but it also certainly isn’t what I’d choose to do or what I was prepared to do so much of. Some days, it completely wrecks me emotionally: it’s always particularly tough with hotline or ‘net hotline work because there’s only so much you can do.

(Over the last two months, we’ve also had a couple of abusers post, looking for sympathy. Poor them, they didn’t KNOW their silent, prone, half-asleep girlfriend didn’t want sex or poor them, their girlfriend DESERVES to be hit in the face, so it isn’t really abuse, you see. Don’t even get me started on what it was like to be around me on those days, and how frustrating it is that an IP address and email isn’t enough to file a report on these assholes.)

So, readers: do you do any work like this? Do you know anyone else who does who could also use an extra person to sit and unload it with? I don’t need the connection to be one way, or all about MY stress, I just need some like-minded (or rather, like-worked, if that’s even a real phrase, and I suspect it is not) people to chat with about this stuff.

And those’d be my shout-outs for right now: my apologies for them being so all about me. Also in the all-about-me category, beyond really great reviews in Bust and Bitch, there have been some really nice blog mentions/reviews of the book this week. C.K. made my day, and then a day later, Laurie Toby Edison made it even better, especially since she and Debbie paired my review with a review of one of my best friend’s books — a real perk, since Hanne and I miss working together (though each of us had a lot of back-and-forth while we were each working on these books, and each star in our dedications and acknowledgments), so it’s uber-cool when our stuff gets put in the same pile so we can kinda feel like we are again.

(P.S. thanks to my eBay tutorial volunteers: I’ll be pinging you today.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, activism, surviving abuse, seattle, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (11) »

Tain’t nothing like a hard-won win for civil liberties before you’ve even had your first morning cup.

FINAL ADJUDICATION AND ORDER THAT BASED UPON THE FINDINGS OF FACT AND CONCLUSIONS OF LAW DETAILED ABOVE: (1) THE CHILD ONLINE PROTECTION ACT, 47 U.S.C. 231, IS FACIALLY VIOLATIVE OF THE FIRST AND FIFTH AMENDMENTS OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION; AND DEFENDANT ALBERTO R. GONZALES, IN HIS OFFICIAL CAPACITY AS ATTORNEY GENERAL OF THE UNITED STATES, AND HIS OFFICERS, AGENTS, EMPLOYEES, AND ATTORNEYS, AND THOSE PERSONS IN ACTIVE CONCERT OR PARTICIPATION WITH DEFENDANT WHO RECEIVE ACTUAL NOTICE OF THIS ORDER ARE PERMANENTLY ENJOINED FROM ENFORCING OR PROSECUTING MATTERS PREMISED UPON 47 U.S.C. 231 AT ANY TIME FOR ANY CONDUCT. THIS IS A FINAL ORDER AND THIS CASE IS CONCLUDED.. SIGNED BY JUDGE LOWELL A. REED JR. ON 3/22/07.

Know what that is, my friends? That is myself, my fellow plaintiffs — and specifically, myself, Salon and Nerve; stated to have standing and a credible fear of prosecution — and our fantastic ACLU lawyers and support staff soundly kicking government ARSE.

At issue in this case is the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act, 47 U.S.C. §231 (”COPA”) and whether this court should issue a permanent injunction against its enforcement due to its alleged constitutional infirmities. COPA provides both criminal and civil penalties for transmitting sexually explicit materials and communications over the World Wide Web (”Web”) which are available to minors and harmful to them. 47 U.S.C. §231(a). After a trial on the merits, for the reasons that follow, notwithstanding the compelling interest of Congress in protecting children from sexually explicit material on the Web, I conclude today that COPA facially violates the First and Fifth Amendment rights of the plaintiffs because: (1) at least some of the plaintiffs have standing; (2) COPA is not narrowly tailored to Congress’ compelling interest; (3) defendant has failed to meet his burden of showing that COPA is the least restrictive, most effective alternative in achieving the compelling interest; and (3) COPA is impermissibly vague and overbroad. As a result, I will issue a permanent injunction against the enforcement of COPA.

Not bad news to get first thing of a morning. Not bad at all.

P.S. I really appreciate some of the issues that were brought up within the pages of the decision, because it brings some things to light that need very serious examination, and which are near and dear to my heart. For instance, this text about the issue of how minors are defined could be something pretty darn awesome to reference when it comes to young adult rights, and not defining teenagers as children: As discussed by the Third Circuit, defining minors as “any person under 17 years of age,” creates a serious issue with interpretation of COPA since no one could argue that materials that have “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” for a sixteen-year-old would necessarily have the same value for a three-year old.

There is also a lot of address in that decision which makes clear that we really need to stop conflating pornography and any address or examination of sexuality or the body, as well bringing to some light the inherent classism of requiring credit cards to verify age (especially since they aren’t even useable for that purpose: a credit card account doesn’t list the age of it’s holder, so requiring a credit card doesn’t discriminate by age, it discriminates by economic class), and the issue of the government usurping the roles and choices of a parent.

P.P.S. I’m really tried of people — from the left, from the right, from the center — calling this “the porn law.” Half the deal with the judgment was that the COPA was overly broad, and would criminalize all sorts of content that dealt with sexuality or the human body, so citizens reducing it to the lowest common denominator are doing the same stupid thing the government tried to do. (To boot, porn profiteers not only didn’t win this case, they weren’t even testifying for our side: if you understand what COPA proposed, and you understand the big biz of porn - or just the basic given that anyone who is not a potential buyer is not a wanted vistor — you understand why a porn profiteer wouldn’t have any problem with it at all.) Of course, by the same token, that sort of broad brush used by anyone and everyone — especially when we recognize that most of our current administration is no more intelligent than our general populace — does stand to make all the more clear how problematic something like the COPA would have been.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve also already read more than a handful of conservative outcries to this ruling because it means that all of America’s children will continue to be “exposed” to homosexuality. So, plenty of barely-informed folks may think this is all about making sure they’re able to keep getting as much porn as they like, but there was so much more riding on this that that, of far greater import. No one’s life will be grossly impacted by not getting as much porn as they’d like: the same can’t be said for not getting education, information and visibility.

The way the COPA was structured was based on what general “community standards” would find obscene, and if you think that porn would go in that pile before realistically sexually informing teenagers, before resistance TO porn (for bigger reasons than sparing the poor, wee children’s eyes) and other status-quo beloveds, before discussion and presentation of any kind of homosexuality and bisexuality, you gots to be kidding yourself. Bear in mind, too, who would have had the big money and the agency to fight a COPA ruling if it came to them. The heads at Hustler, Penthouse, Vivid, Bang Brothers and the like wouldn’t have spent a single day in jail, they’d have just written a check for the fines — if they even had to do that — and gone on with business as usual. Someone who does what I do and got whacked with it? Scarleteen would have just been off the map, period, and not having access to anything close to that kind of money, this gal’s butt would have been in jail, for at least six months, and while tens of thousands of teens each day would have been without a source to find out about their real bodies, or how to deal with a pregnancy, online pornography-at-large would have been sitting cozy and warm at home, no problem.

Anyway, it makes getting this — Plaintiff Heather Corinna is a writer, artist, sex-educator, and activist whose primary presence on the Web consists of Scarletletters.com, Scarleteen.com, and Femmerotic.com, “each of which deals with issues of sex and sexuality with an explicit focus on challenging and combating the sexual oppression of traditionally marginalized groups.” — into the public record small all the more sweet. Such a pity legal decisions like this one never end with the nice “Neener neener,” you’d really like them to.

This, from Judge Reed, came darn close, though: “Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection…”

Addendum: Oh, good LORD. Not that I expect anything different from Morality in Media, but this is just priceless.

“While this may come as a surprise to some federal court judges, many parents are overburdened and tired. Many are naive. Many don’t want to be overly strict, like their parents were. Many are ‘technologically challenged,’ like me. Many don’t speak English. Many have physical or mental health problems. Some neglect and abuse their own children.

Overburdened? Umm, since when was parenting mandatory? Oh, right! Since conservatives have done and continue to do everything they can to keep women from having a choice as to whether or not men have sex with them, from having any and every birth control method possible easily available to them (and access to materials and healthcare that tell them how to use those methods), and to keep women from having the right to terminate pregnancies. Silly me!

And, uh…okay, so we need to engage in censorship to help abusive parents protect their kids from sexual material, rather than putting efforts into protecting them from those PARENTS? We need to do everything we can to limit everyone else’s speech to help those pitiable, tired, burdened parents who can’t be sussed to BE parents? And English-speaking is now an issue? Wasn’t the conservative concern with this supposed to about keeping kids from seeing images of breasts, vulvas and homosexuals? Since when doesn’t the visual translate?

But even assuming that every parent with one or more computers in the home used filters at all times on each computer and even assuming that filters blocked all pornography and could not be circumvented by tech-savvy children, there would still be a huge problem — namely, as children get older they increasingly have access to the Internet outside the home.

As children get older and spend less and less time in the home that is because they are becoming ADULTS, you giant buffoon. But per usual, be sure and make this about pornography, and say the word pornography as much as possible to keep those parents terrified so they’ll behave the way you want them to.

…When it comes to ‘cyberspace,’ the federal courts think it is up to parents to keep children away from Internet pornography.”

Believe it or not, that was stated as a complaint. Of course, the beauty there is that conservatives want the feds to parent for them only in the way they would parent themselves if they could be bothered to do so, if they were not so “naive,” so “technically challenged” (love that one: so, we’re to believe your six-year-old can figure out how to work the net to find all the porn, but you can’t?) and so full of mental health problems. When the federal courts think it should NOT be up to parents per the ways their children are publically educated in many respects, particularly when it comes to sex, then the complaint is the the feds are butting in.

Yeah, well….neener neener.

posted in Heather Corinna, aclu, copa, Scarleteen, activism, Happy! | permalink | comments (14) »

This is cross-posted from the All Girl Army. I wanted to toss it here just because it’s so eerily timely, and as a reminder that it’s Women’s History Month. It was written for a younger audience, but I love talking about women like Woodhull so much — though not enough to rewrite a whole piece for a different audience — that I couldn’t resist spreading the love.

A woman is running for president. She advocates for fair labor practices, social welfare programs and women’s rights, but is also a maze of contradictions — she is anti-abortion (as are most at the time), but pro-free love; a eugenicist, but also a civil rights supporter and socialist; a suffragist and a spiritualist. She has worked as a stockbroker, a lobbyist, a businesswoman and a newspaper publisher. She is both admired and despised by many. Nominated as her running mate is an African-American man.

No one really thinks she will win. However, everyone who nominates and supports her, including she herself, feels that it is important a message be sent to the U.S. government that it is time for a woman in government and in the White House.

During her run, personal — rather than political — attacks are made on her from all sides, in all the ways women who threaten the status quo, women who dare, are typically attacked: she is painted as a witch, a bitch, a prostitute, a woman of “loose morals.” Her politics and platform are not what are critiqued: she is a woman, and so it is her person which is maligned and demonized. She is purposefully scandalized by people — primarily men, or women acting as protectors of men — with power to prevent her, and any other woman, from having any chance at all.

Sound kind of familiar? But, see, it isn’t 2007. It’s 1872.

This isn’t Hilary Clinton. It was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to try and run for President of the United States, before women had even secured the right to vote.

“I am well aware that in assuming this position I shall evoke more ridicule than enthusiasm at the outset. But this is an epoch of sudden changes and startling surprises. What may appear absurd today will assume a serious aspect tomorrow. I am content to wait until my claim for recognition as a candidate shall receive the calm consideration of the press and the public.”

Nominated as her running mate was once-slave, abolitionist leader and incredible orator Frederick Douglass. Woodhull was nominated by the Equal Rights Party, an offshoot of Susan B. Anthony’s National American Woman Suffrage Association (but eventually shunned by Anthony for her outspokenness). By today’s standards, her political stance would be a mix of libertarian and socialist platforms: women’s right to vote, work, love and marry freely; nationalization of land; cost-based pricing to reduce excessive profits; a fairer division of earnings between labor and capital; the elimination of exorbitant interest rates; human and civil rights; freedom of speech and a free press.

Woodhull grew up poor, with very little education — over time, she educated herself — and was married at 15 to an alcoholic doctor, who exploited her background as a spiritualist, and her talents as a persuasive speaker to sell his folk medicines. She’d also worked as a cigar girl (read: prostutute) while married. Flying in the face of convention as she would for nearly all of her life, she divorced around a decade later, remarried and settled in New York, where, since joining both the Suffragist Movement and the Marxist International Workingmen’s Association, she began a salon where she’s intellectually spar with other radicals of the day. Shortly thereafter, Victoria would become the first woman to establish a brokerage firm on Wall Street, which is how she first gained the attention of Susan B. Anthony, who applauded her achievements for women’s equity in this regard.

“Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.”

In 1870, Victoria and her sister Tennessee established Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, a controversial journal which in its six-year run, established a very wide readership, and included brave exposes of capitalist swindles, as well as discussion of women’s rights, civil rights and labor issues.

In that same year, Victoria announced her intent to run for President of the United States, and she would be the first woman ever to do so, even though women would still not even have the right to vote for another fifty years.

“I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.”

In fact, in 1871, Victoria appeared before the House Judiciary Committee — and was also the first woman to ever do that, too — to deliver a speech on suffrage. Her strong argument was that women already had the right to vote, since the 14th and 15th amendments granted the right to all citizens. While this speech did not secure women the practical right to vote by Congress, they were strieed by her speech, and in addition, she caught the attention of some of the most influential feminists of the time: Anthony, Mott, and Cady Standon, all of whom — at the time — admired Woodhull, and welcomed her into the Suffrage Movement as a leader. Public speeches and performances of Woodhull’s met with full, jubilant crowds and, by many, for a little while, she was seen as potentially THE woman to secure women the right to vote and change the landscape of women’s rights substantially, because of her incredible speaking skills, her compelling arguments and her bold audacity.

But she wasn’t loved by everyone, and support for her would dwindle quicky and cruelly. Some feminist women, for instance — and many men — mocked her on the basis of her support of free love, the idea that people should be free to love whomever they may (protesting against arranged marriages, loveless marriages, marriages of convenience, as well as the gender divides between men and women in regard to marriage and love), for however long they liked, not have to exlusively be with one person for the whole of one’s life, and that the goverment should have no place in romantic, sexual or family affairs. Ironically, Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of her worst detractors, even going so far as to create a graphic novel parodying Woodhull as a vapid, immoral libertine who knew nothing about women’s rights. All the while, Beecher-Stowe’s husband, a reverend, was himself having an illicit affair.

Woodhull soon found herself evicted from her home. Her daughter was viciously harassed in school. She lost important clients. She and her newspaper had exposed two meaty scandals — one on a stockbroker who boasted about the young girls he sexually exploited, and onother on the Reverend Beecher’s affair — and were sued for libel (calling a woman a whore or an adulterer were perfectly acceptable, even when inaccurate: exposing a man for same, even when accurate, was not), which also resulted in death threats, threats of blackmail and the confiscation of all the newspaper’s property. Woodhull was painted as “Wicked Woodhull” or “Mrs. Satan,” by the public, maligned massively as a shameless Jezebel, a brainless twit, and the underminer of all things moral and good.

If you nominate a woman in the month of May,
Dare you face what Mrs. Grundy and her set will say?
How they’ll jeer and frown and slander chattering night and day;
Oh, did you dream of Mrs. Grundy in the month of May?

Yes! Victoria we’ve selected for our chosen head.
With Fred Douglass on the ticket we will raise the dead.
Then around them let us rally without fear or dread
And next March, we’ll put the Grundys in their little bed. ~ the 1872 Campaign Song for Woodhull

As if all of that and more wasn’t enough to thwart her attempts for the presidency, just two days before the election, Anthony Comstock, under the Comstock Laws — laws which also, at the time, kept information on birth control from being distrubuted, and would also criminalize Margaret Sanger as well — arrested, charged and imprisioned Woodhull for sending obscenity-by-post for the Beecher expose.

What little chance Woodhull might have had — even at just completing her campaign, though it stands to mention that the Equal Rights Party was the largest third party of that election year — were gone. Ulysses S. Grant won the election, Woodhull became ill after her release from prison, went into seclusion, and in the final issue of her journal, backpedaled in support of marriage. She spent the rest of her life trying to earn some measure of societal respect, and eventually married again, becoming a Lady to the Baron she wed. While she made some humanitarian efforts over the rest of her life, it is unfortunately safe to say, they killed her feminist spirit.

Bear in mind, that in 1872, at the time of the election and her arrest, pending all of her other achievements, Woodhull was only 34 years old.

Most likely, however prepared Woodhull was for the ridicule she said she expected, like so many women before and after her, she wasn’t prepared for how extensive and how destructive it could be, to herself, to her family, to women as a class. She had stated in a speech at one time, “I am subject to tyranny!” Perhaps she didn’t realize how subject — or perhaps she did, equally likely, and took the risks she did anyway, knowing their value and import. The way things went for Victoria Woodhull is often the way things go for feminist women, for women who dare: it is a hard, but clear, reality, that the price of even our small gains is often terribly high, and quite often, even when we fail, we will be maligned, punished and ridiculed for even making the effort to try. The discomfort fighting for our equality may create may be so strong as to quite literally wear us out. To make those efforts all the same, no matter the contradictions, no matter the flaws, no matter the failures, is worthy of recognition, visibility and admiration, and Woodhull is one woman in history of so very, very many who all too often goes unseen and unsung.

Regardless, Woodhull left us several vital legacies. Regardless, Woodhull made very real strides for women other women before her had not made, and was very clearly a woman well ahead of her time. Victoria Woodhull and I have some critical things in common. Victoria Woodhull and I also have some vast differences and conflicts. All the same, Victoria Woodhull has my respect, my awe and my sincerest gratitude. Just knowing about her bold spirit emboldens me; just knowing about her endless efforts, how far and wide she reached, how much she gave to the things she held dear, and what grave risks she took inspires and energizes me.

This is the legacy of women’s history, and our history needs be seen, heard and celebrated.

My first introduction to Woodhull was at the age of 13, when I was doing a paper for my social studies class on muckracking (I think I even have that paper in some box somewhere), and as is often the case with women in history, my teacher had no idea who she was, and I had to dig deep in the library to find her myself: far, far deeper than I had to dig to find out about men who’d done even half of what she had. This is all too often the case with women’s history, even with women who have made amazing achievements. All too often we and everyone else know more about men who have done little to nothing of note than we do about the women who have shaped and challenged the world. The invisibility of our history — especially the history of women who have challenged the hegmony, rather than enabled and supported it — is part of the oppression of our class.

This month, each of our bloggers and board members will be writing an entry for Women’s History month, one for each day, to make this wide legacy of women in history, feminist historical events, strides and wins visible and tangible. We are asking each of them to pick a woman or an event led by women, to benefit women, in our global history to highlight. How they choose to do so — and what they choose to highlight — will be as individual as they are.

Should you need a few more words to motivate, I leave you with one last passage of Victoria’s: “If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it. “

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, feminism, women, history | permalink | comments (1) »

A brief interlude to send a few more thanks for folks blogging about and helping out with Scarleteen fundraising efforts — in no particular order: edwarddain wrote this GORGEOUS entry here, we’ve got Miz Daisy Cutter here, Kythryne and Amy did an awesome thing over here, Amanda wrote a zinger of an entry, and also thanks to Figleaf (who I’ve started reading off and on lately, I dig his style), Pescana, faymar, Naamah and Cecily. More thanks to everyone: right now, we’re just over half of our fundraising goal for this push, which is awesome, and all thanks to people spreading the word this way.

I’m hoping for a fairly mellow weekend. I just spent the last 36 hours or so fending off a rabid pro-lifer across two of my sites (must be that time of the month), and am bitter and exhausted, but glad to see that (knock on wood) she appears to have become quickly bored, or perhaps, with the weekend here and her working spouse around, needed to actually take care of her precious children, rather than harass myself and a couple of someone else’s children at Scarleteen. I do have most of the posts filed away for a later date, however, for what will make a fine study in the 24-hour life cycle of an anti-choice escalation.

On the upside, no telling if it’ll pan out or not, but the last time I flew my Dad up here, we got him an application for low-income housing up here. Given they sometimes have waiting lists as long as two years, we weren’t all that hopeful for an immediate answer, but lo, an opening in one came up yesterday, and I’m going to check it out for him Monday morning.

The Low Income Housing Institute here is a very, very cool thing. I particularly appreciate them trying to build in nice neighborhoods: all to often, people underestimate or just don’t understand the effect living in a ghetto has on a person. It’s hard enough to barely get by, and to live more-than-leanly, but to have to do it in a neighborhood where you get mugged all the time, where your safety is a 24/7 concern, where it’s just as dangerous to walk during the day as it is at night, where street prostitutes are getting beat on my their pimps right out your window every night is just beyond, especially as years go by. My father has now been mugged nine times in his life. He has all of about four teeth left in his head.

I can’t live like that again, myself, and I didn’t deal with it even half as long as my father has. I actually had to ask Mark (Seattle is the only city he’s lived in: he grew up in suburban Ohio) to stop talking, even casually, about moving to L/A. or New York on a whim, in part because we just bloody moved. But mostly it’s because when I moved from Chicago to Minneapolis/St. Paul, I got used to not having to worry every night when I went to bed about break-ins, not having to step over drunks in my lobby in the morning, not finding human waste literally steaming on my doorstep, not having cats to deal with mice and rats, or having to walk from the el or my car with my keys splayed through my fingers in one hand, mace in the other, in a constant state of on-the-alert. When I left Chicago, I was living in a tiny basement barely-apartment with a concrete floor, one radiator on the ceiling which didn’t provide me any heat at all, a stalker, no security, and with my van getting broken into about once a month. All this for a rent that was not dirt-cheap, and only because the oweners of the house were doing me a very big favor in letting me live there to keep me from winding up on the street after an eviction from another place before, a place I lived through the previous winter in without electricity and gas, and where I ate maybe once every two days, for a period of several months.

Had I stayed living in and like that, I wouldn’t have known the difference in any tangible way, but since I didn’t, and close to ten years now have passed since I did, I just can’t go back. I don’t want to, and I don’t want anyone else I care about to have to live that way, either.

My Dad loves to walk: walking has always been his solace, and that he can’t even do that to find peace is grotesque. The place I’m seeing on Monday is on the top of Queen Anne Hill: it is in a gorgeous, safe neighborhood, and this particular building is only open to seniors and the disabled, so I’m hopeful. It’s a much-sooner opening than we expected — April — and unfortunately, that possibility had my Dad a bit panicked. Living in crap really sucks, but it’s also familiar at this point, and you know how it goes, especially as it gets earlier: sometimes the hell you know feels safer than the heaven you don’t. Plus, we’ve always had these issues with his pride and my caring for him. Way back when when I ran the school and I was taking care of him, it hurt his pride, especially when I had to foot all the bills, which I get, but at the same time I feel like there must be some middle ground between his pride and self-worth and his safety and my sanity.

We shall see: he may not even get this one this time around anyway, but there being an opening this soon makes it at least feel really possible that sometime in the near future, both of us will have to worry a lot less, and things can potentially be a lot better for my Dad.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, home, family | permalink | comments (3) »

To keep the steam in the current Scarleteen fundraising and awareness push, I wanted to republish a piece here which Hanne Blank and I wrote together about five years ago. Sadly, nothing has changed to make the piece any less relevant, and in many ways, the changes which have occurred have only made it all the more so. Hanne and I haven’t had any time of late to work on any joint pieces, and hopefully we will again soon, because when you put us in a bottle and shake us up, we make a fantastic cocktail, so enjoy. Additionally, Hanne just got the first hardcover versions of her new book this week, which I can’t encourage you enough to get your hands on, because it is groundbreaking, heart-wrenching, so very much needed and an all-out amazing piece of work.

The Spanish Inquisition. The Salem Witch Trials. The Red Scare and the McCarthyism that followed. Widespread allegations of ritual abuse and child abduction. The purported existence of huge quantities of child pornography. Reputedly rampant pedophilia (used incorrectly as a euphemism for child molestation). Teenagers reportedly having untrammeled, promiscuous, prolific sex, resulting in huge numbers of unmarried youth pregnancies, skyrocketing STD rates, and countless ruined young lives. Many sensible people can look at the first three or four items in that list and see they were based in fear, stereotyping, political powerplays, and plain old hysteria. Somewhat more savvy folks will look at that list and recognize that all of those issues, right down to the feverish headlines in your evening paper, are coming from much the same place.

Yes, we’re serious. There’s just no evidence that says otherwise. In fact, there is a clear lack of evidence that things like ritual abuse and abduction, child porn, and pedophilia are taking place at anywhere near the rates that have been claimed for them. But just as there have been those who’d have reported their own mothers to the John Birch Society for joining a neighborhood barter circle -­ if Mommy is a commie, then you gotta turn her in, you know -­ many people are buying into our current hysterias about sexual abuse and youth sexuality with a similar fervent desire to rid the world of perceived threats, coupled with a similar absence of critical thought.

Hysteria vs. History
When we look in the mirror as a culture, our tendency toward hysteria always seems to hover in our communal blind spot. We’re not very good at seeing when groups with a political or social agenda are manipulating us with fear, often the unreasonable, irrational fear of the taboo. During the Salem witch trials, it’s quite clear that the members of that Massachusetts community felt that their fears ­- and their actions ­- were completely reasonable and sensible in light of the threat they perceived themselves to be facing. With hindsight, we think that burning people at the stake is just a little extreme, and that the threat of witchcraft is perhaps not quite so significant as all that. These days, we find ourselves facing a similarly pitched level of hysteria and carefully-inculcated terror in regard to youth sexuality… and similarly, we may be in grave danger of seeing our misperceptions and extremism only in hindsight.

As we should all be aware from thousands of years of human history, youth sexuality ­- and by this we mean sexuality of those under what is the current legal age of majority in the United States, in other words, eighteen years of age — poses no real threat to us when it is entered into and developed responsibly and compassionately. It is, in fact, biologically inevitable that we develop sexually at puberty in physical ways. Historically, the advent of sexual activity, both masturbatory and partnered, has generally been assumed to be a natural adjunct of this physical development. Almost all cultures, whether primitive or modern, devise social structures and meanings around both the physical process of sexual maturation and around sexual activity.

Some cultures, at some times, do this well, with an eye toward self-determination, individual sexual desires and wills, and an acknowledgement of the power, responsibility, and, yes, pleasures of being sexual. Others don’t do as well. Right now, ours is doing a pretty piss-poor job… and we’re betraying our own shortcomings via the smoke and mirrors of hysteria.

The Current Status Quo
When we stigmatize, manipulatively hamper, misunderstand, mistreat or intrude upon the flowering of anyone’s sexuality for our own aims, we create real problems. When we attempt to define what any individual’s sexuality “should” be, rather than creating a context of informed choice based in an awareness of cultural issues, biological facts, and our knowledge of tendencies and patterns of human development, we create a poisonously Procrustean bed. When, out of an interest in furthering religious or moral agendas, we force our children into this bed, not only do we do so in direct violation of their best interests, but in direct contradiction to the kinds of education, support, discussion, and understanding our children are telling us very clearly that they want and need, we create real problems.

When it comes to America, a large segment of our culture is clearly doing just that. All of it potentially affects those under the age of legal majority; some of it is targeted specifically at them. Here are a few examples:

• Since 1996, there has been no federal funding for non-abstinence-only sex education teaching or curriculum development in the public schools. Only abstinence-only (or, as SIECUS calls it, “fear-based”) sex education is permitted if the school is to receive federal funding for its health education programs.

• Increasingly, federal, state, and local healthcare initiatives and policies are based in, and used to promote and enforce, anti-choice policies. Examples include restrictions on public funding being used for abortion, private health insurers’ refusal to cover contraception and/or abortion services, restrictive parental consent laws for minors seeking abortion, and so forth.

• The concerted efforts of the conservative right to overturn Roe v. Wade in the USA have even extended to an imperialist effort to control freedom of speech and freedom of information worldwide: the infamous January, 2001, “global gag rule.” (Note: this was written well before the SD ban and all the other recent efforts to impede choice.)

• Millions of public school students are, with full federal and state approval, being taught transparently biased, manifestly inaccurate, and medically unsound information about their own and others’ sexuality. Sex Respect, a popular abstinence-based sex ed text used in many public schools, states that premarital sexual activity results in such simultaneously vague and foreboding problems as: “Increased incidence of cervical cancer, risks associated with use of contraceptives and abortion, guilt, doubt, fear, disappointment, self-hatred, stunted growth in personal identity and social relationships, and being fooled into marrying the wrong person.” (Sex Respect Student Workbook, pp. 36-37; Teacher Manual, p. 42.) Sex Respect’s information is likewise inaccurate and offensively biased in the extreme on many other subjects, for instance, homosexuality, bisexuality, and AIDS: “AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), the STD most common among homosexuals and bisexuals, kills by attacking the system that defends the body against infections.” (Sex Respect Student Workbook, p. 41.) “Research shows that homosexual activity involves an especially high risk for AIDS infection. In such activity, body openings are used in ways for which they are not designed. During such unnatural behaviors, additional damage is done to blood vessels and other body parts.” (Ibid., p. 52.)

It is apparently by such methods that we are as a culture purpose to save ourselves from the perceived threats and evils of sexuality -­ and particularly, our children’s burgeoning sexual maturity, awareness, and desires.

Not too surprisingly, whenever an effort is made to resist or even rebut these kinds of maneuvers, the response -­ loudest and longest from those trying hardest to shove their control, disinformation, and manipulation down our collective throats ­- is a shocked, horrified hue and cry, replete with calls for censorship and rallying against freedom of the press. Public libraries have been threatened with having their funding yanked if they do not filter Internet access. And the recent outcry against the publication of Judith Levine’s new book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (University of Minnesota Press), complete with demands by right-wing protesters that the book be pulled prior to distribution and that the press be given a thorough administrative audit (or was that shakedown?) to assess whether the Press was utilizing sound judgement in accepting the manuscript for publication, certainly smacks of something decidedly more rabid and less rational than civil or intellectual good-citizen concern.

Our culture is well into full-fledged hysteria mode when it comes to sexuality, and particularly the sexuality of those under the age of eighteen. Even liberals and progressives, who tend to at least try think about such issues separately from issues of political dogma and religious propaganda, can sometimes be heard saying that while they disagree with some or all of the various ways in which our sex lives are being forcibly molded and censored and our reproductive freedoms challenged, we do have to deal with “the real problems,” swallowing whole the FDA-approved concoction that insists there genuinely is a problem with youths knowing about and experiencing their sexuality and/or engaging in sexual activity.

In the realm of sex “education” disinformation, we’re currently in a very similar place to where we were back during the First World War. As part of a WWI “chastity campaign,” “social hygienists” pushed the military to ban condom distribution among US troops, while all other countries involved in the war freely provided their soldiers with condoms. Guess whose troops had the highest rates of syphilis and gonorrhea of all those in Europe? Guess whose troops brought the disease back to their wives? Guess whose ideas — that condoms weren’t helpful and could be replaced by abstinence, and that marriage provided a safe haven from sexually transmitted disease — were proven, without a shadow of a doubt, to be both fallacious and deadly, providing our young nation with its first serious nationwide wave of sexually transmitted diseases and infections? That’s right, baby, Uncle Sam’s.

We’ve been here before. We know the kind of head-in-the-sand attempts to eradicate problems through misinformation and censorship or by pretending we can just moralize them out of existence doesn’t work. Just as smart people learn from their errors; cultures and countries that have wisdom and real care for their populations shouldn’t make these kinds of deadly mistakes twice.

Listening To Youth and Looking At Ourselves
At present, neither of us have children of our own. We’re honestly too busy working with thousands of other people’s children, attempting to provide sexuality information for which there is a dire and volubly evident need. But we do see many of the effects that abstinence-only sex education and the general cultural messages being sent to today’s youth about their sexuality can generate. What’s more, we see them in a far more candid arena than most folks who aren’t high school students get to see on a regular basis.

What do we see when we look at the thousands of teens who’ve populated the Scarleteen discussion boards and sent us thousands of e-mails for the past three years? Well, for one thing, we see an enormous number of teens having what we call “everything-but sex.” This means exactly what it sounds like: “dry” sex or frottage, manual sex, oral sex, anal sex, partial vaginal penetration: anything and everything one can think of that is not transparently penis-in-vagina intercourse to orgasm, which is what these youths’ abstinence-only sex ed curricula tell them qualifies as “sex.” Much of this sexual activity — and let’s face it, this is a hell of a lot of sexual activity — takes place with any safer sex methods in use whatsoever. Nor are most of our youth getting regular sexual healthcare or STD/STI testing, often because they have no access to this kind of healthcare without their parents being involved. Most of these teenagers and young adults don’t initially perceive the risks inherent in what they’re doing, because school and other sources repeatedly tell them that if they are monogamous (as they are led to believe all married couples are… again, despite very clear evidence to the contrary), which they interpret as not having more than one partner at any given time (despite the fact that many youths have multiple partners in a succession of fairly short-term relationships), and if they or their partner have not and do not engage in penis-in-vagina intercourse, that they have no STD/STI or pregnancy risk.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. We see youths either contemplating or sometimes actually performing genital mutilation on themselves because they are not informed as to the range of what the human sexual anatomy can actually look like, and furthermore, short of surfing porn sites online, they have no real way of finding out. We see all too many teens whose body-image and self-image is based almost entirely on whether or not someone else currently finds them sexually attractive. Sure, we can blame Britney’s bellybutton, the ad industry, and Hollywood for some of that… but perhaps it’s also worth considering that when we as adults obsess endlessly about teen sexuality, and turn it into the only teen issue on which we focus, that we might be telling young people in a rather direct manner that sex really is the only thing that matters in their lives, and that their sexuality really is just about all we notice when we notice them at all?

We see young adults in emotional pain because their budding relationships are dismissed by the adults in their lives as juvenile and thus worthless, immature, and undeserving of support, counsel, and care. We see thousands of sexually active adults who receive none of the sexual health care they need, often because their parents are under the illusion that their immaculate offspring are somehow miraculously asexual (one wonders: do these parents not remember what life was like when they were in high school, at the very least what their own desires were like?). Most of these teens also do not use reliable birth control methods, but not because they don’t care, think they’re immune to pregnancy, or can’t be bothered. No, they aren’t using reliable birth control because they’re terrified of what might happen to them if they get caught using birth control, if their families discover that they are having (or even thinking about having, or intelligently planning for) sex when they’re supposed to be abstinent, waiting for marriage, or simply “too smart for that sort of thing at your age.” For similar reasons, we also see queer youth becoming more and more isolated despite the fact that culturally, we are supposed to have begun becoming more accepting of numerous orientations and sexual identities.

Of course, this kind of thing doesn’t only happen in the realm of sexuality. Efforts to manipulate teenage thought and behavior have backfired on us in other ways. For instance, so many teens have had “Just Say No” pounded into their heads growing up when it comes to illegal drugs that many of them are convinced that legally sanctioned toxins ­ alcohol and tobacco ­ are naturally safer than those which are presently illegal. Many youths are condescended to, belittled, and told they’re “too young and too immature” so much of the time that they’ve fully accepted the debilitating notion that in their mid-teens, they are incapable of anything beyond (and have no reason to look for more in live than) some boring, unchallenging homework, a few sullenly-performed household chores, and hanging out at the mall. For lack of alternatives, many teens buy into the ultimately destructive values we hand down to them as a culture: mass consumer consumption and object accumulation, unhealthy and codependent relationships, low expectations of themselves and their achievements, and self-absorption. Massive sexual shame and misinformation are, in some ways, just another part of the heritage we’ve handed down along with our supposedly venerable “Family Values.” Abstinence-only sex education is a great education — if your goal is to assure that today’s young people have the same endemic sexuality problems, sexual health crises, lack of reproductive freedom, distorted body image issues, homophobia, sexism, and crappy sexual double standards that their grandparents’ generation did.

“But wait,” we hear you stammer. “What about what we’re told are the “real problems” of escalating teen pregnancy and STD/STI rates, permissive sexuality without morals or ethics, sexual molestation and abuse of minors, and the ‘breakdown of the family?’”

Well, what about them?

Teen pregnancy: In 1960, pregnancy rates for young women were as follows (and given the stigma placed on unmarried pregnancy, greater then than it was now, reported rates may have been significantly lower than actual rates): 175 births per thousand for women aged 18 - 19, 80 births per thousand for those aged 15-19 and 40 births per thousand for women aged 15 - 17.

In 1997, unmarried pregnancy rates for the same age groups were 80 births per thousand in the 18 ­ 19 age group, 55 births per thousand for women ages 15 - 19, and 30 births per thousand for women aged 15-17.

The Centers for Disease Control, whose figures are cited here (and these figures are representative of those found by a number of similar studies) note that the decline in those rates came from a combination of decreased sexual activity plus an increase in the use of condoms.

Teen unmarried pregnancies are not at a record high, but quite the opposite. We are at a record low for unmarried teen pregnancies, and save a small upsurge in 1990 that momentarily broke the steady decline (a blip that never even came close to flirting with 1960 rates), we’ve been on a clear downward run for the past 50 years. While a good part of that decline can accurately be attributed to the advent of longer-lasting birth control methods like Depo-Provera and Norplant, and to greater use of condoms, it can also be attributed to delaying some forms of sexual activity.

Delaying certain forms of sex, or delaying partnered sex entirely, is not necessarily be a bad thing. In fact, freely chosen celibacy can be a very positive experience. Unfortunately, some of the reason teens may choose celibacy now is simple fear.

There is the valid fear of STDs and STIs, including HIV, yes. Fear of disease is quite rational and sensible. But disease fears are often more extreme than they need to be when young people are not furnished with accurate and comprehensive information about disease transmission, risk, infection, and prevention. Current (abstinence-based) sex ed is in no way designed to combat unreasonable fear, but to inculcate and nurture it.

Beyond fear of infection, there is also a resurgence of the gutwrenching fears that were familiar to our mothers in the 1950’s, when many women married out of fear of being known to be sexually active outside of wedlock: fears of pregnancy and of social stigma. These fears are not simple things, and their fallout is not simple either: rushing into marriage simply because it provides an outlet for sexual desires and feelings or because of an unplanned pregnancy, high anxiety levels causing stress-related illness (such as ulcers or anxiety attacks, usually seen primarily in older adults), poor body image, feelings of sexual shame and guilt, and appallingly low incidences of seeking out good sexual information, advice, and health care are all some of the consequences of this kind of fearful relationship to one’s own sexual self. This kind of thinking also creates an inevitable and hurtful dichotomy for those who do not wish to marry (or who do not wish to marry young). And it creates an insurmountable wall that casts out anyone, gay, lesbian, or transgendered, for whom fully-sanctioned married heterosexuality is not an option.

In all honesty, teen pregnancy is not, in and of itself, a problem. Female bodies in mid-to-late adolescence are perfectly capable of — and in some ways better suited to — healthy pregnancies and births than women in their later twenties, thirties, and beyond. For centuries, teen pregnancy was not only not a problem, it was the norm. There used to be a word for women who were still childless in their late twenties, and that word was “barren.”

In our current culture, teen pregnancy is a serious issue due not to what human bodies do quite adequately, but because of social and economic factors: a lack of medical and other care and support for young mothers and mothers-to-be (especially if they are unmarried, poor, non-White, or all three), the stigma laid onto to teen pregnancy which makes women less likely to seek out or expect any care or support at all, and a lack of economic and social support for young women who, married or not, become mothers (where is the affordable daycare so that young mothers can complete schooling in the same percentages as older, wealthier mothers go back to work and continue their white-collar careers?).

Lest we be misunderstood, we’re not saying teen pregnancy is an ideal that should be promoted. But it doesn’t have to be made the ordeal that it is. Part of that is providing adequate services and supports to women who choose motherhood. And part of that is also ensuring that women have the ability to choose whether to become pregnant, and should they become pregnant when they do not wish to be, that they have the ability to choose whether or not to bear the pregnancy to term. As sub-optimal as the conditions may be in many ways, we in this country do (for the time being, and technically if not always in actual fact) have the right to reproductive choice. And we should be protecting that right and encouraging its use — in terms of contraception availability, abortion access, and prenatal and child care and support.

There’s no real reason not to. We can go over and over the old tired cant about teens not being emotionally ready for sex, let alone childbirth, but very young women have not only had sex but borne and reared children competently for thousands of years. Certainly, if we insulate our youth and treat a 16-year-old like a 4-year-old, with similar levels of responsibility and expectation, we are going to rear children who do not have the emotional maturity either to parent their own children or to lead their own lives capably in other ways, like making sensible decisions about sex, contraception, or abortion. But this is not necessarily those children’s shortcoming, and it is not necessarily their fault: we’re the ones who raise them and educate them. Besides, preparedness for sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing aren’t issues that are limited to those under 18. We all know people, even in their thirties and forties, who are far less ready for these things than one might hope… and some of us might even, in our heart of hearts, be willing to admit that they might sometimes be us.

The real concern conservatives have with teen pregnancy is not a concern for teen health, general well-being or for the children teens may be having. It is instead largely a concern about abortion that is grounded in religious and political beliefs and issues of social control. It is a frightening thing for parents to realize that their children are growing up and may make decisions for themselves that the parents wouldn’t have chosen for them. And while those feelings are normal, and religious and political beliefs are often a part of who we are as social and cultural creatures, it is not the place of public policy or public education to create and enforce these agendas. It is not helpful, it is not ethical, and, moreover, it is not what is, in actual fact, desired by those whom it most directly affects. Numerous polls and studies show that the majority of adults, parents, teens and educators prefer comprehensive, fact-based sex education, and numerous studies and history show that that is the type of sexuality education which works most effectively on every important level, both globally and for the young adults individually. *

Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Infections: The STIs for which youth are presently at greatest risk, and which are most prevalent in US youth today, are not the STIs that are transmitted solely or primarily via exposure to semen. Herpes, Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and Chlamydia — the most prevalent STIs with the fastest growing rates in Western youth — are transmitted by skin-to-skin and mucous membrane contact, so simply abstaining from sexual intercourse or even using condoms does not provide adequate protection to anyone regardless of their age. Certainly, where skin-contact transmission is involved, it would actually be prudent to inform youth and others that abstinence from many different types (but not all types) of partnered sex would afford them the greatest protection.

But that is not the information teens are given. Instead, they are given the blanket answers that monogamy and marriage protect you from the risk of STD/STI infection. Condoms are still mentioned, but the effort to encourage safer sex practices like barrier use often seems pro forma; in fact, in current abstinence-promoting curricula, condoms are given far shorter shrift than “just say no” and “wait until you’re married” rhetoric, and the efficacy of safer sex is often challenged or described as dubious. At Scarleteen and on Planned Parenthood’s Teenwire, we see the “oh, but there are microscopic holes in condoms” myth repeated ad nauseam, relict of precisely such faulty information being passed on in abstinence-only sex ed classes. Teens are also told that condoms regularly break or fail… which, of course, they very well can if one does not know how to use them correctly. Other barrier methods, like dental dams and latex gloves, are rarely covered at all in most sex education curricula now. This is true despite the fact that repeated research shows that barrier use offers a fairly high level of protection from STDs/STIs for those who opt not to abstain. But if you’re being taught that the only sex that really qualifies as “sex” is potentially procreative, penis-in-vagina heterosexual intercourse to orgasm anyway, it rapidly becomes an article of faith that oral, manual, anal or “dry” sex should — logically! — be risk-free.

Since the advent of abstinence-only sex education, STD/STI infections have indeed been rising in one very pertinent demographic: teenagers and young adults. This is no small thing, nor is it likely pure serendipity. The data directly supports interpretations that make it clear that the STD rate is growing not because of a net increase in sexual activities but because of unprotected sexual activities.

The Age of Consent: We have no data to show that our increasingly restrictive age of consent laws — many of which will now make consensual activity between age-group peers a serious criminal offense that could end up slapping one partner with lifelong sex offender status — are beneficial to our youth or to our culture. Age of consent laws do not provide a meaningful deterrent to rape, sexual molestation or sexual abuse. Given that most teens are not even educated about their state age of consent laws or what they might mean, they also offer no deterrent whatsoever to consensual sexual activity between teens and/or young adults, despite the fact that some of that activity is currently illegal.

Age of Consent laws originally had a very clear purpose. With sound reasoning, they were introduced during the Victorian era as an adjunct to child labor laws as an effort to keep youths of all sexes from being forced into prostitution. Presently, the only clear message Age of Consent laws send — to youths and adults alike — is that the passage of a particular birthday confers some magical ability to give meaningful and informed consent to sexual activity, whether or not they have actually had any educational or emotional support, parental or other guidance, or any preparation of any sort whatsoever. The implication of these laws is that those who are below the local Age of Consent are unequipped to handle their own sexuality, while those over it automatically are. Curious, but then again, we assume the same thing about people’s fitness to vote, drive cars, fight in wars, and watch movies that have been given an R rating by the MPAA.

We have no evidence that Age of Consent laws assist in decreasing in teen pregnancy or STD/STI infection rates. Teen pregnancy and STD/STI rates in other countries ­ Denmark and Sweden, for instance, or Japan, France, or Germany — where comprehensive sex education, social and medical support for sexually active teens, and less restrictive age of consent laws, are far lower. It’s astounding to us that the United States government can look at the facts and still keep pushing abstinence-only sex education and “child-protective” (especially given that young adults are not children) sexual laws as it does. We clearly care a whole lot less for the actual health, happiness, and well-being of our youth than we do for a given set of mores.

What If We Cared?
If we cared, truly cared, we’d look at what other countries are doing that we aren’t; what is working elsewhere where we are very much failing. We’d allow young adults to complete high school earlier if they wanted to get out of grade school and into the workforce, vocational training, or higher education. We’d encourage them toward greater independence and agency, encouraging them to find real things to do with their lives and their very potent energy and talents rather than leaving them with nothing to do but hang out in malls and cruise around in cars. Being bored and underutilized didn’t do teens any favors in the fifties, and it isn’t doing them any now. Besides, busy teenagers certainly don’t have as much time for sex as bored ones, and while our interests in furthering the stated aims of conservatives in that department are rather miniscule, we do contend that giving teens more agency and more opportunity would enrich their lives by allowing them to feel as competent and capable as they are. As it stands now, the resounding message we send our youth is that until the clock strikes 12 and they’re 18, they are incapable of anything but making a lot of mistakes and killing a helluva lot of time.

And that really is the crux of the matter. On the one hand, people complain endlessly about our self-absorbed youth culture, about what we perceive as their apathy and carelessness. On the other hand, our culture has very carefully and purposefully molded them to be precisely those things, all in the name of ease of control. And you know, it’s easy to pick out the conservative motives for all this — it enforces religious doctrines, it entrenches traditional sexism, classism, looksism, ableism, and racism, it makes it easier to spend less money providing social services and devote more money to accumulating wealth and status — it’s a bit more complicated to assess why many moderates and liberals, like many of our readers here at Scarlet Letters, often find themselves unquestioningly accepting the very same paranoid rhetoric and baseless assertions about youth and sex.

The answer is really fairly simple. As adults, we can often be open to new ideas, exploring numerous concepts, even exploring beyond the traditional limits of sexuality in very positive ways. But being able to conceive of our own sexuality positively does not necessarily mean we are skilled at stepping outside of our culture, and it doesn’t make us immune to hyperbole, scare tactics, skillfully-manipulated statistics, political railroading, and our own (often very genuine and very well-meaning) protective instincts toward the children and young adults we love and care for. Let’s face it: some of the vistas that are conjured up before us are bleak as hell. They’re scary. They’re supposed to be. And even the staunchest progressive can fall into the trap of believing something because he or she is direly afraid it it might just be true. And so we step under the all-encompassing, all-suffocating canopy of fearful hysteria.

But prevention of access to information, scare tactics, and the insidious disinformation of abstinence-only sex education really aren’t the answer. We assure you, as educators who have dedicated years of pro bono work to the sexual well-being of people of all ages that if we thought for a minute that preaching abstinence to the exclusion of all else would make every young person safe, if it would render them sexually, physically and emotionally healthy and help with the global problems of STD/STI infection, overpopulation, and infant health to boot, we would do so immediately. But we have at our fingertips — as does anyone with access to the Internet, a public library or two, and a world full of teenagers — a world of evidence, a lot of history, and plenty of very real youth to listen to and observe daily that tell us plainly that this is an approach that is both ineffective and dangerous.

If parents truly are serious about moral and religious sexual values needing to be taught at home and not at school, all they have to do is belly up to the bar. They can have the conversations, allow for those discussions, and give their children real facts (and in some cases, learn the real facts and sexuality basics themselves) so that they can have those discussions intelligently and soundly. Saying “my child shouldn’t be given this information because s/he will never need it” is simply silly. If a given student who learns about how to practice safer sex really doesn’t ever need that information, well then, by golly, they’ll simply never use it. It’s not all that unlike algebra that way: if it doesn’t prove applicable in your life, you are entitled not to use it.

Information itself doesn’t pose a mortal threat to morals… and if it does, it might be worth asking why those morals are so delicate and easily fractured. Likewise, it might be worth asking if those values ­ and the fear, hysteria, disinformation, and hypervigilant control used to enforce them on our youth ­ are more valuable than the youth themselves, and the quality and integrity of those young people’s lives, sexualities, and psyches… and our own.

These are good questions, good questions indeed. And like you, we’re waiting for some good answers.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, soapbox, rantapalooza, sexuality | permalink | comments (2) »

At some point, I need to make a list I can keep handy online with happy-making things for those times when I sink low enough that it’s not easy for me to remember what those things are. Sort of an “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass,” but without the having-to-break-anything bit.

When it’s the right time of year, anything to do with the garden helps. Thankfully, I was reminded this weekend of one of the reasons I was glad to move here. Spring in February? That’s the stuff, man. Saturday I was able to work out some angst by ripping up all the dead plants covering the new sprouts, and Sunday we found time to get to the nursery so I could get some new plants for the year. Given last year’s Big Tomato Mushfest — my impression is that it’s just too mild here to for the bigger puppies to grow to their best potential — this year I’m going for mostly herbs and flowers, with a few cherry tomato plants and then the berries: the two blueberry plants I put in last year have hopefully cross-pollinated to keep warm and will result in some big, juicy beauties. I also had a little splurge which involved bleeding hearts (which I have loved since I was a child, but never grown myself) and narcissus.

I’ve also determined that whenever possible, if I can find around two hours or so in any given day to do some yoga, then go whack off, then take a hot bath, and then a long walk, that everything feels a whole lot better for the rest of the day.

One of the beauties of BPAL is that because there is no immediate gratification when you order, given it can take a few weeks for Beth to concoct her artistry, a few weeks later you get a very nice surprise in your email letting you know that pleasant, smelly things are en route to you when you’d forgotten you even ordered them. It would be even better if my beloved Geek hadn’t been a limited edition, but on the other hand, sampling new stuff is a cheap thrill, and since the scents I care for tend to be more boy-flavoured or unisex, if something doesn’t work on me, chances are always good it’ll work on Mark.

My piano, as ever, remains a fine source of solace. Last night, it was a Tom-Waits-a-thon. I try not to let the once-operatic diva in me who used to have the crystal voice be disturbed by the fact that the older I get, the more I sound like Tom doing falsetto. On the other hand, back in high school when I had to sing opera half of every day, I was always irritated that I didn’t have the right voice for jazz: guess I got what I wanted.

Buffy. Over the past three days, I indulged in a marathon. Season Six, if you’re curious. I needed something to indulge my bitterness.

But this should probably top the list. It had us both laughing so hard last night, and unable to stop replaying it, that we ended up nixing sex we’d been nuzzling our way to because we knew too well that one of us would end up shouting “I’m a munchkin!” at the worst moment possible.

* * *
I think I may hate my new camera. Not sure yet, but so far, I’m just really wishing they hadn’t stopped making my last one, because it’s so much nicer to me.

* * *
In spite of my needing some respite time, the fundraiser for Scarleteen is still going on, so a few more shoutouts to folks who have blogged for it: Bitch, Jane, Dacia, Columbine, Irmelin, DivaMommy, Debbie, Jenny, Ariel and my dear Mr. Price (who only lives on MySpace, and yes, as a cultivator of much web snobbery, this is terribly embarassing for me — I often ask, beg and plead with him to drag his cute ass outta the web gutter, but to no avail). Thanks, y’all.

(For the curious, donation-wise, as of right now we’re close to about a third of what I hoped we could raise this time around: so long as things keep chugging along, combined with the grant, we may just be able to get to where we need to be to tackle this year’s expenses.)

* * *
And now comes my big bummer of a question (this is not about me personally, I promise, so no worries). To my readers and friends out there who work in alternative health — in bodywork, naturopathy, chinese medicine, nutritional health — if you’ve got any decent background in managing breast cancer, could you drop me a comment or an email? I was even certain this weekend that I had a reader who worked in an alternative clinic in Chicago, but for the life of me, I couldn’t remember who it was. Anyone local or nearby Chicago — or who could give me any resources there — would be a double bonus. Bless.

If that paragraph gave you a yucky thud, again, I refer us all back to this.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, home, Auntie Heather's Helpful Hints | permalink | comments (6) »

When I was a teenager, having sex wasn’t really part of my rebellion.

Having GOOD sex was.

Now, I know that I’m kind of not supposed to even say this stuff out loud, especially within earshot of anyone under 18…or 21 or 29 or whatever this week’s proper age for sexual activity issued forth from our oh-so-moral government is per being an unrepentant tramp. Don’t suppose age matters here: it’s pretty clear there’s not any age or station at which it’s acceptable per the Bushies to be a woman who enjoys sex on her own terms and happily has plenty of it.

I know that admissions like that sometimes have the effect of diminishing my credibility in the eyes of some as a young adult sex educator. As I understand it, if you had really great sex as a teen (or a grown woman, or a lesbian or a gay man or anyone not over 50, heterosexual and married), and worse still, lots of it, you somehow lose (or never had) the ability to think critically and soundly, to have any sort of objectivity whatsoever, and thus, would obviously advise every teenager you meet to go do exactly what you did, covering them with your icky, infectious slut-bugs. You are one dangerous, contagious harlot from whom all good children who would become good adults should keep their distance.

To perhaps the surprise of exactly no one, if you were one of the ten people who held off on sex until you married at the now-average age of 27, or had really lousy teenage sex with catastrophic results, that gives you extra credibility if you’re the kind of sex educator that is telling them to stay the heck away from sex and their sexuality at all costs.

But I wasn’t ashamed of it then, and I work hard to keep any other teenager from being ashamed, so I’m certainly not going to be ashamed of it now.

Being sexually active in my teens wasn’t about pissing my parents off, or gaining social status, or meeting some sort of status quo (especially considering that while I wasn’t out for a few years, my partners were not simply male, and this was the early-mid-eighties, before anyone gave you points for macking down with other girls, to say the least). The sex I was having wasn’t merely two-minute intercourse, I wasn’t in partnerships where my body or self was dismissed or treated like a receptacle, I wasn’t feeling ashamed of how I or my genitals looked, being coerced into one-sided sex I didn’t want, or only wanted the emotional or social benefits of, and figuring that getting little to nothing physically out of sex was worth the other benefits it might have offered, or that the sex would eventually net me care from partners I wasn’t already getting.

Instead, I was almost always having sex that made me feel really good, where I had lots of good orgasms, where I could laugh with my partners at our fumbling when we fumbled, where my morning-afters left a perpetual grin on my face, rather than the look-away-I’m-hideous grimace of ashamed regret. I did a darn good job in choosing sexual partners who were kind, caring people that earnestly liked me — and vice-versa — and who had mutual pleasure and care in mind.

Mind, it was the 80’s, and I also did plenty of things that I wouldn’t encourage other teens to do, both sexually and in conjunction with sex, but in many ways, I feel I have positive sexual experiences to thank for not only getting me through the awfulness of much of my teen years, but for setting me up to continue to have great sex throughout my life, and to feel really good about my sexuality and the self it’s a part of.

Due to the negative parts of how I came of age in the house I was living in, due to the sexual abuses and harassment I dealt with, due to simply being a smart, sensitive gal who engaged in cultural analysis in her head a lot I got the message loud and clear that I was sexualized like nobody’s business, but that that sexuality wasn’t supposed to be something I owned. It was supposed to be something used against me (and I was just supposed to take it like a girl), or used to gender, commodify, devalue or objectify me. Thankfully, I also got a few opposing messages that all of that was completely screwed up, and thankfully, the context of my life as a whole equipped me with the tools to know how messed up those attitudes and cultural edicts were.

I didn’t have sex — with guys, with girls, with myself — to make anyone else mad or uncomfortable, or to follow somesome’s orders that I should. I had sex to claim and reclaim my own body and sexuality, to remind myself of all the good stuff about it, including that sex was supposed to make me feel good and be something I wanted and initiated. I had sex to find out what sex was, the ways I liked it, what part it played in my life and my identity. I had sex because I was a poor kid with a lot of pans in the fire and it’s a totally affordable vacation where you can fit in an awful lot of relaxation and de-stressing in very limited periods of time. I had sex because I wanted to have sex and I liked having sex. I had sex because it felt great, it was one hell of an adventure, and I discovered ways to be assertive in the rest of my life though the sex I was having. I had sex because in the romances and friendships in which I had it, it felt right, it increased intimacy, and it was one of many ways to get to know someone else and myself better.

In a word, I had sex for all of the reasons people have sex. Fancy that.

I know a big turning point for me in my sexual development, odd as it may sound, was the assault that happened at 12. Despite having to live in silence about it, despite it not being managed at all well, or even acknowledged as the hardcore trauma it was, despite having to work all of it out only in my own head until many years later when I found some support, I knew full well that it, and another abuse a year before, was NOT sex. I’m not even sure how I knew that, but I did.

I’m down with being a statistic: is it likely that some of why I had sex at an earlier age than many was because of abuse? Yes, I think it was. On the other hand, while there were also a whole lot of other reasons I did as well, even when we’re talking about the parts of my motivation to do so that likely came from abuse. And for those aspects that were motivated by abuse, it wasn’t primarily about my thinking my only use or was sexual, or about reenacting my abuse.

It was about rebelling against it: if I was going to be having any kind of sex with someone else, and they with me, it was going to be about pleasure, it was going to be about freedom in my body and theirs, it was going to be about joy and communion and natural curiosity, it was going to be something we liked doing on all levels; something which was emotionally, intellectually and physically satisfying for me and whomever else was involved.

And it was.

The older I get, the more aware I become that I had really good sex as a teen and young adult. In fact, now having spent many years talking with and listening to teens about their sex lives — even when their only partner is themselves — I know that by comparison, I had astonishingly good sex. Perhaps even more depressingly, I know from also doing work with adults that I had better sex as a teen than a lot of people have as full-fledged adults.

Mind, even with my burdens and my traumas, I grew up in a different time and place and environment than a lot of teens today.

I was primarily urban. My community was diverse, and no one viewpoint about anything (or looked any one way), including about sexuality, was dominant. No teacher or guest speaker in my school ever came in to tell me that I would die if I had sex, or become an unsavory, unsticky piece of tape who couldn’t properly bond to other people because I was having sex. I had a level of confidence, reslience and self-assurance that resulted in any of my peers calling me a dyke or a whore or a slut (which didn’t often happen) being told to get stuffed, and my not taking any such jibes to heart.

I left one home early on (and spent the last year barely there no matter what it took to avoid it), and had a measure of autonomy and responsibility to manage a lot of teens even then didn’t, and now still often don’t. I had jobs from an early age, I made many of my own clothes, I fed myself, I got myself around the city on my own on public transportation, I paid for much of my own basic care, including some of my schooling, and in general, the frivolities of my teenage life were balanced out by an awful lot of responsbility, so sex wasn’t the first place I needed to be accountable and in the driver’s seat.

I knew where the sexual health clinics were, and I used them vigilantly, and with community support in using them. I very rarely took risks in terms of protecting myself from pregnancy and infection, and no one was trying to scare me away from those protections. Because I spent much of my youth in the hospital my mother worked in, very comfortable around doctors and nurses, I was always fine with asking my sexual healthcare providers questions, and I had the benefit of knowing the right language to ask them in — and a comfort with that language — so I could net real answers. There was sound sexuality information on bookshelves at both my mother and father’s apartments, in my school libraries, in my public libraries.

I had one parent who was 100% fine with the fact that I wasn’t heterosexual, who was wonderful to any girlfriends I brought home, and who never gave me any idea there was anything wrong (or even unusual), at all, with being queer. That same parent also sent really strong messages about my claiming ownership and responsibility for my sexual choices autonomously. I was never the girl who’d have to ask a partner if they had a condom or birth control, and be at anyone else’s mercy as to what they’d try and get me to go without using. I was the girl who simply pulled whatever it was out of my purse, handed it over, gave no indication to the recipient whatsoever that sex without was optional, and in meeting any resistance to being safe, tended to merely shrug and voice that no sex was going to happen then, and that was cool with me.

I also had no illusions about the fact that sexual violence and abuse was widespread, and that bad things absolutely could happen to me, and — having a more cynical view in many respects than many my age — with my luck, probably would, especially if I didn’t walk in every door already standing up for myself. I had a defiance and an anger about a lot of my life that was a very real gift in this regard, as it was — and still is — in many others.

I also had some measure of comprehensive sex education growing up.

Given, it wasn’t exactly queer-inclusive, but it sure wasn’t queer-negative, either. It didn’t quite tell me how to enjoy myself during sex and didn’t address any of my abuse, but it also didn’t tell me sex would kill me on first contact, even if I protected myself, that I needed to get married to have it, that birth control (safer sex wasn’t an issue yet: thank heaven for having a parent working in AIDS care before most of the world even knew AIDS existed so I knew about that) being effective was just a myth or that if I did become or was sexually active, I was the human equivalent of an overused kleenex. The cultural sentiment was such that I could even ask a teacher I respected for help or advice, and that adult could give me support and information without fear of losing their job.

* * *
Imagine, if you will, how things might have been for me in different circumstances. In say, the circumstances of many teens today.

It would have been very easy for me, and far more typical, for instance, to have developed a profound sexual shame and low self-esteem that would have been easy for others to exploit given some of the abuses I lived through, had I only heard opinions and information which enabled or encouraged those results. It would have been very typical for a girl like me, survivor at an early age, who grew up with one strong set of very negative messages about my terrible, awful growing-into-womanhood body, to not be so resilient and defiant, especially with the pervasive messages of the media, the Girls Gone Wild commercials, the capitalizing upon teenage sexuality while at the same time denying it outright, the en masse weight loss mania, the commodification of girl-girl relationships, the endless hard-sell of heterosexism and that one right man as the answer to everything. Even if I hadn’t have been a survivor, all this crap would have had a profoundly negative impact on me.

With the continued suppression of, and resistance to, a lot of feminist politics and the cultural revisitations of the ideal woman-as-eunuch, or woman-as-property, imagine how much more difficult it would have been for me to assert myself when it came to my sexuality: both in simply honoring its totally healthy, normal desires and in negotiating sex with partners. Imagine how doggone ashamed I might have been with myself, even for the sex I was only having WITH myself. Imagine what I might have thought of the men and the women I had sex with. Imagine how I might have felt as a sexual abuse survivor. Imagine how on earth I could have managed to be that girl holding out the condom and holding her own.

Being a low-income teen, had I not had — as a majority of teens right now do not — access to affordable, accessible and nonjudgmental sexual health services, I’d have had a lot of questions that went unanswered that very much needed answering. I may well have gone without the birth control and safer sex I needed, the annual screens and exams, and I may not have had access to medically accurate sex information at all. No sense in pussyfooting around: if I had been even half as sexually active as I was then just without that one thing, chances are quite excellent I’d have been long dead by now.

Once I switched over to my arts high school, I was in a completely GLB-friendly environment, to the degree that I’d call it GLB-celebratory: had I stayed in public high school, had all my immediate community been wary of queerness at best, and homophobic at worse, things would not have gone so well for me. Had I not had some good role models around me, some awesomely strong, outspoken women and some fantastic old queens, that made clear that my sex, gender, orientation or desires didn’t make me inferior, sullied or shameful, I would not only have been a very different person then, I would be a very different person now, someone who loved and accepted herself and everyone around her a whole lot less.

In a less diverse environment, without a wide spectrum of beliefs and attitudes available to me, try and figure out how I could have really found out what I really thought and felt about my sexuality and my sexual life, explored freely enough to find out what identity was authentic to me, and what it was I really wanted for myself, to fulfill my needs, not just the needs and wants of others. Had I not had at least one family member where I could be completely honest about my sexuality and sexual life, who supported my choices and helped me learn to make them responsibly AND had I been reared in an environment where other support wasn’t anywhere to be found, where would I have turned to to find it? (P.S. This is also a good wonder to have if you’re wondering how it is so many younger teen girls get hooked into iffy relationships with older men, because guess who has NO problem endorsing and supporting their sexual maturation?) When I did just plain screw up, how might I have dealt with it and learned from my errors if there wasn’t at least one person who I knew loved me who could also tell me that it was okay to screw up sometimes?

What if I had not been reared with my inquisitive spirit nurtured? Without it being a given that I was not only allowed to, but encouraged to, ask questions about anything and everything, including my own body, any aspect of sex, sexual politics and mores? Had I instead been raised with much of that purposefully stifled, unless what I thought fit someone’s agenda, who might I have become?

Hell, how might I have been able to have the focus, confidence, energy and time to devote to all my awesome achievements of my teen and young adult years that had nothing to do with sex if I’d been a teenager today, just trying to navigate my way through the jungle of sexuality?

* * *
See, all of the things I had going for me are things that many teens right now do not now have. Plenty of them have exactly none of these things.

My challenges aside, let’s take a real look at all of those benefits I had, and bear in mind that even with them, I was still left wanting when it came to sex education and to sexuality support. If I still felt I needed more, if I could have benefitted from better, then you’ve got to ask yourself how on earth we or anyone else expects a lot of teens and young adults right now to come out healthy and whole with how little support so many of them have to be healthy and whole, sexually and otherwise.

I seriously don’t want Scarleteen and my work to be the only thing out there for them, and thankfully, it isn’t, even though sex education like this remains in serious danger of extinction. There are parents out there who rock it with sexuality support, information, and providing great environments for their kids when it comes to sex. There are other organizations which support and distribute sound, comprehensive sex ed. There are schools bucking the system, and there are communities stepping up to the plate. Not enough of them, if you ask me, but they are out there.

But I like to think that over the years, myself, the volunteers and the users have figured out a way to provide something that is quite unique and very sorely needed: something bigger, even, than just a good sex ed class or one supportive person. Basic, accurate sexuality, sex and sexual health information is critical. But so is a positive, wide, diverse and shameless context for it.

I think it’s vital to have an environment for sex education which feels comfortable, personable and also respectful; which answers questions but also asks them, making clear that sexuality isn’t simple and that its influence on us as individuals, in our relationships and in our communities and culture is vast. I think it’s essential to have sex education which dares youth to take very real ownership of their sexuality, as individuals and as a collective — perhaps in a way we don’t even know to exist yet in our world — and busts its ass to give them the tools and support to do so.

When I did the acknowledgments for the book — which, suffice it to say, went on for an age, like everything out of my mouth tends to — the very last sentence is this: “To that girl I once was, here’s that book you wanted. Sorry it took me so long.”

In many ways, this can also be said for Scarleteen.

I didn’t really mean to make something for who I was: in many ways, there is plenty at Scarleteen I did have, and which would have been superfluous for me. On the other hand, there’s plenty there I really could have used, such as opportunities to process my sexual abuse and what it meant to me to be a survivor, or having other peers around in different places to talk to who were queer, without worry of my conversations about those issues quickly finding their way through the gossip mill of my immediate queer community. Gender was also a real issue for me: it wasn’t until college, and many years of trying to fit a very femme mold that just wasn’t me, that it was ever strongly suggested to me that gender was about choice, not biology or what ideals were pushed on me. That’s one I’m still working my way through, and feel I have wasted an awful lot of time struggling with, that I could have used to a much better end. Had someone let me know earlier on that I had more choices than ingenue or femme fatale, it would have been pretty life-altering.

During the times when I had trouble rectifying my enjoyment of sex with the occasional feeling that that’s all I would be seen as sometimes, having someone to talk to about changing some of my choices or the way I made them, and about how to analyze the real root of those feelings would have been a real gift. As one of the only teens I knew as sexually active as I, having others around who were more expert, who could talk me through a pregnancy scare, scenarios when I wasn’t sure what I wanted my boundaries to be, some of my conflicting feelings about my female body or my queerness? This would have been seriously nice. Having someone with some distance from me, who I didn’t have to worry about disappointing, to call me on my shit when I did do things sexually that were just plain stupid, or put too much stock in my sexual life or identity also would have been a real bonus. And I’ll tell you right now, that as the primary sexual advisor to most of my friends, they sure would have benefitted if I had had a source like Scarleteen to send them to, especially on those days when I was so damn sure I knew all there was to know, and on the days when they believed me.

If a teenager like I was could have found these benefits in this and more, it should be painfully obvious that a majority of teenagers today need it more than ever: especially if they’re going to be having any sort of sex (and most are), and all the more if we have any care about the sex they’re having actually being any good, in every way it can — and should — be for everyone, at any age.

(Super-duper thanks to everyone who has blogged today for Scarleteen, to those donating, and in advance for those whose entries are forthcoming: not only is it a great big help to us, but now that things have started winding down for me this week, I’ve really been enjoying reading some of what’s out there.)

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, soapbox, body/mind, sex/life | permalink | comments (1) »

I don’t want to hold out too much hope, but it’s looking like a very strong possibility that after I finish the pass pages I got given back for the book between today and tomorrow, after the parade of houseguests comes to an end, and now that I’m done with pretty much all the setup for this spring’s Scarleteen fundraising push, I may actually just get a whole day off.

Like, the kind where I don’t even have to do five minutes of ANY sort of work, not the kind I usually get, which is several hours of work, but a few hours of downtime. The kind where I can sleep in and not even check the email first thing when I wake up. Where I don’t even have to run errands. Where I can maybe start planning the garden for this year, take my dog out to a park, get a bike ride in if weather permits, take a long, long bath, and worry about no one’s needs but my own. Self-employed folks know all about this, the elusive myth of The Real Day Off. They know what I’m talkin’ about.

In any event, on top of getting back here to just talk about daily life schtuff, I will be doing my own blogging to try and raise funds for Scarleteen tomorrow, but for those of you not on my email lists, I wanted to get the basic information out there if you’d like to help (and I’d love it if you would: just blogging about sex ed and Scarleteen is really effective, since the more folks that do it, the wider our net spreads so that donors aren’t the same folks every time). For those of you who already got this, my apologies:

* * * * *
I am writing you to ask for your help in a fundraising effort for Scarleteen we will be kicking off on Wednesday, February 14th.

Our most successful fundraising has always happened as a result of viral, community efforts online, and Id like to ask for your help to raise funds in this manner again next week. Word-of-mouth has been our best pal at Scarleteen: we serve tens of thousands of users every day, and we’ve never even had to run a single paid advertising campaign. Fundraising efforts also are most effective this way: when supporters of Scarleteen have blogged, posted at message boards or emailed en masse within their own networks to promote Scarleteen and to help raise funds it’s resulted in our best fundraising.

Scarleteen.com has been and remains a vital resource for young adults of all genders and orientations since December of 1998.

While since our launch then, other young adult sexuality sites have also come into being, I still feel that Scarleteen in particular serves needs which no other online resource does. For instance, there is no other website which is as fully inclusive of GLBT youth as Scarleteen is, and no other website which, while still serving immediate crises needs, engages users in ongoing, in-depth and informed dialogue about their sexuality and other related issues in such a holistic way. Because of Scarleteen’s heritage, the teens and young adults who use the site also express they experience a trust in us which enables them to ask questions they might not otherwise, and high-risk youth often disclose information about their risks more often than at other sites, allowing us to do our best to connect them with resources and services that protect them.

• For more on Scarleteen’s approach to sex education, go here.
• For more general information on Scarleteen, read up here.
• For information expressly for parents, check this out.

One of the big bonuses of blogging/writing to raise funds for Scarleteen is that it also raises awareness about the critical cultural need for sound sex education at the same time. Often, adults aren’t aware of how little comprehensive sex education teens are getting, for instance, or what abstinence-only sex education even entails. Or, how much of the sex information young adults get comes through unreliable sources such as peers, partners, pornography and general media (including arenas of media and entertainment which capitalize on misrepresenting teen sexuality). Or what the realities of teen and young adult sexuality even are right now: all too often, we assume that our experiences as young adults in this arena are unchanging universals, rather than an experience with some universals yet many variants, a good deal of which are highly influenced and steered by the immediate and ever-changing environments in which we come of age. Given how many of us would prefer to simply forget about the harsher, more difficult aspects of our adolescence, we’re also often prone to selective memory when it comes to sexuality in our formative years.

Some topics you may consider writing about to raise funds and awareness are:
• Your personal experiences with sex education — good or ill — and how you feel that has influenced your sexual life and well-being. Posts like this can be particularly powerful for scarleteen when they come from a perspective of someone who we include in our education efforts, but which other programs or sites often do not: gay, lesbian or bisexual perspectives, those outside binary gender identities or outside gendernormativity, women, abuse survivors, those in alternative relationships, etc. If you’re someone of the age where Scarleteen was who provided your sex education, even better!

• How your sexuality — any or all aspects of it, positives and negatives — effects and has effected your life and/or identity as a whole.

• If you’re a parent, teacher or mentor of youth, teens or young adults, you can speak to your ideas/experience as to the import of comprehensive, inclusive sexuality education for this generation.

• The politics of sexuality education, young adult sexuality, women’s sexuality, sexual health or general sexuality, particularly in the United States.

• The perils of abstinence-only or much abstinence-based sex “education,” including purposeful misinformation and hyperbole, sexism, homophobia, gender inequities (for instance, young women are often given a clear message they are responsible for sexually policing both themselves and partners), lack of support for preventative sexual healthcare, sexual shame and body negativity.

When writing, blogging, emailing about these issues, it’s generally most effective to conclude with a pitch to donate, and a direct link to our donation page.

The following links provide supporting information, graphics and links for fundraising:
• Graphics for your blog, site or emails to promote Scarleteen and fundraising for Scarleteen are available here and a few more will be added over the next week.

• Here you’ll find a page explaining how we intend to use funds raised which you can link to and see for your own reference.

• Here is the page listing key issues pertinent to how we approach sex ed at Scarleteen, including extensive statistics and demographics.

• We’ll also be running a special area of the message boards for the fundraiser over the next few weeks. That area is at the message boards here and is also linked from the front page. It will include testimonials from Scarleteen users, so you can see what value they find in the site, as well as discussion topics relevant to their experiences with sex education, sexuality and related topics, other ways to give time, money and energy to support healthy young adult sexuality and well-being, and, just for kicks, an area of the boards where adults can come ask our users sexuality questions and test their knowledge. Too, we’ll add a thread for bloggers to either add their entries or link to them (so long as the sites/entries are appropriate for minors, please). Some of this area of the boards will be open to unregistered users, so feel free to come participate!

• I’d also like to ask you to consider making a donation of your own if you are able. This year, donors who give over $75 will receive a signed copy of my forthcoming young adult sexuality guide, S.E.X., mailed directly to them in April when the book is released.

(And by all means, feel free to circulate this information as you’d like.)

Thanks so much in advance for doing what you can to help, whatever that may be.

Without the support of so many of you over the years, there’s no way we’d still be around. In the macrocosm, everyone’s efforts to help sustain us truly have helped more young adults than most of us can fathom. On a more personal level, this work has turned out to be the most enriching — albeit some of the most difficult — work I have done in my life, and everyone’s faith in me and in the aims of this work have been invaluable.

Thank you!
HEATHER CORINNA
Founder & Editor, Scarleteen.com

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, sexuality | permalink | comments (0) »

Someone really needs to remind me that it is vital — not merely for my work, but for my sanity — to talk to like-minded women doing the kind of work that I do.

I just got off the phone with the magnificent president of this organization, and this project, who just added this project to their roster, and I feel like I just got out of a cool lake on a too-hot day, man. Amazing the difference a half-hour conversation can make.

I think I often forget how fringe people like me really are until I connect with others in the same or similar position, and then I hear that instant connection we have, and I remember, quite profoundly. Such a treat to be able to connect that way, to race to support each other’s work, and just be able to talk to someone else who loves all the obscure authors no one else even knows about who write about the kind of issues I work with, who I don’t have to explain the pertinent issues to, and who just plain Gets It.

A nice shot in the arm for me, too. I am hoping to be able to bust out a bunch of materials in the next week so that we can do a big Scarleteen fundraising and awareness drive on and around Valentine’s Day, so I needed the boost.

* * *
On an entirely different topic, this commercial?

This PSA is dirty, dirty pool, especially for those of us dog and animal people who ALREADY feel terribly about animals stuck in shelters or without homes. Hell, I can’t even ever let myself volunteer at a shelter because I know full well that I’d have dogs coming home with me nightly. I don’t even let myself get off at the bus stop that’s near the shelter here, even when it means I have to go several blocks out of my way: it’s just not safe for me.

It’s that “I know I am a good dog,” line which is the absolute worst. To the point that when I saw it, it caused me to burst into tears (which I just did again, in watching it so I could link it), clutch my dog (who was looking at me like I’d lost my mind and squirming to get the hell away from her deranged owner) and then race to the computer because I needed to see many pictures of happy dogs posthaste.

Sure, it’s obviously an effective ad, and sure, Pedigree clearly has a great agenda with promoting shetlter-dog adoption. Here’s hoping it helps.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate them and think they are a very bad dog right now. No biscuits for them.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, rantapalooza | permalink | comments (5) »

I’ve recently been unable to put down The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler. (It’s a tough month for my bedside table, which has had to bear the physical and emotional weight of that book, as well as bell hooks’ All About Love: New Visions, Jackson Katz’s The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature.)

Even though every single first-person story in it makes my heart hang heavy, even though if I read it at night, I have to fight off the urge to allow myself to cry myself to sleep. It’s important. So important.

I was just mentioning today to one of the amazing young women at the All Girl Army, blogging for choice today, that while it is, absolutely, positively vital to talk about backalley abortions, to talk about what abortion was like before Roe vs. Wade (and what it still is like in areas where abortion is illegal or inaccessible), it’s equally important to talk about what choice as a whole was like and still IS like, even with the help of Roe and other supports. I think many often forget or simply don’t know the combined impact Roe vs. Wade,Title X and other feminist initiatives had when it came to reproductive choice no matter the choice a woman made. More accurately, no matter what a woman did or what was done TO her when she became pregnant before she had any sort of choice.

Before (and in some cases, still well into) the mid-seventies, we all too often forget that most women simply didn’t have any real choice. We all too often forget that decisions like Roe vs. Wade protect us because of the choices many of us still don’t have, and the world we live in which still threatens or refuses us all or some of those choices.

No choice for a safe, legal abortion.
If a woman was able to access abortion and got very lucky (or was simply very privileged), then she could contact, get to, and pay for a private — albeit illegal –abortion, done in sanitary conditions, by a doctor or nurse, under great secrecy. Those women were few and far between, to say the least. And even those women, in the “luckiest” conditions, often had to go back home, do all their grieving alone, suffer any side effects in secrecy and silence, and if they became ill due to the abortion, often did not or could not seek out care.

As for the rest who wanted or needed abortions, but who didn’t have the connections or the means for a safer illegal abortion, I think by now most of us — especially those who read women like me — have a pretty good idea as to what backalley abortions or self-attempted abortions were like. The tools of these abortions were knitting needles, coathangers, scissors, sticks; bleach, whiskey, turpentine or gunpowder douches. Women who got backalley abortions were often blindfolded so as not to be able to identify their abortionist, driven to remote areas, passed person to person. Many women who died from illegal, unsafe abortions slowly bled to death, in terrible physical and emotional pain, utterly alone: many were silently, slowly and painfully dying or becoming seriously ill while going to school, working their jobs, or sitting at the dinner tables with their families. That’s pre-Roe abortion history about as condensed as it gets, friends: that’s the light summary.

No matter the type of abortion, before Roe, as many as 1.2 million illegally induced abortions occurred annually in the United States and as many as 5,000 to 10,000 women died every single year following illegal abortions. Nearly four times as many women of color died as white women. That figure doesn’t account for injuries, physical as well as psychological, both of which were vast. No matter the type of abortion or the type of woman, nearly ALL of those women still suffered alone. They did not have support groups for abortion, nor any cultural sentiment which allowed them to feel any grief (rather than guilt), they did not have sound (if any) aftercare, they did not have any context to talk about their feelings or experiences, they often did not even have the allowance to say, out loud, to anyone, that they had an abortion or had been pregnant.

No choice to safely abort, but also no choice to parent, or no choice not to.
For those who either did not want to or simply could not access any means of abortion… Just in the few decades before Roe, around one and a half million women were sent away to maternity homes and tricked, coerced or outright forced into giving their babies up for adoption.

Some of these homes were okay enough places to stay (however much a place can be “okay” which robs you of a child you gave birth to and wanted), but some were not a far cry from — nearly identical to — the Magdalene Launderies. Women staying in them were hidden and isolated from everyone but the other women in the homes, shunned by their families (and sometimes the men who got them pregnant in the first place) and often during the rare times they could leave the home, they would be easily identified and harassed in the streets: insults and/or vegetables hurled, the works.

Like women who aborted during this time — and in my eyes, this is all the more painful — these women had to leave the homes after giving birth and pretend they had never been pregnant, that they were never mothers. Some of them would have contact with their infants for months in the home before having them ripped away from them. Women with postpartum depression had zero support. Women whose whole lives had been shattered were totally unacknowledged. Open adoptions arrangements (however flawed they can sometimes be) were not available: the rights of birth mothers were preciscely nil. If and when they were at all visible, these women were often disdained by their families and communities. But for the most part, they were and are often still, invisible mothers, invisible women. Too, we have plenty of history of mothers giving birth and being forced to give up their children to other women in their families: married sisters or aunts, even their own mothers, after which the mother of the child would be forced to spend her life pretending that she was sibling or cousin to her own child.

Of course, we also have the myriad women who did not want to remain pregnant and parent, but who found themselves forced into parenting, and often, unwanted marriages as well. For whom having to get married, bear a child and parent was ordered as punishment for being wayward (for as well all know, much like HIV is Gods punishment for being a deviant — even if you get it as the straightest, most vanilla person there is — pregnancy and parenting is Gods punishment to women for not keeping themselves chaste).

My mother was one of those women. Abused, lambasted, shamed by her family and told she had no other option but this to even attempt to redeem herself in their eyes, that of God and those of the whole world. (As one of “those” children, let me tell you from a child’s perspective how much fun it wasn’t to grow up looked at by a strict Irish Catholic family as the accidental, half-blood-Dego bastard child who carries the shame of her mother in every pore of her being: to be told, quite incessantly, that you were an accident, a punishment, an extension of sin. Or to reach an age where you’re well aware that your mother is working double and sometimes triple shifts, and you’re all barely scraping by, all because of you, a fact which the family who PUT her in that position reminds you of frequently.) This is some of what happens when choice is thought to stop at sex alone, if choice was even an issue WITH sex, especially when you consider how very many of these women were raised with the mutually-exclusive notion that they were both supposed to police men AND somehow also defer to them.

There are vast and varied tales of these scenarios. For women of color, while there were a scant few homes that catered exclusively to them, they just plain weren’t white enough for the maternity homes, so however horrendous an option that was, even that one wasn’t available; both per finances and connections (as well as due to racism from providers) private, safer illegal abortions weren’t optional, either. For the most part, women of color were those whose choices were the most terrifying sort of backalley abortions or forced parenting, ready or not, wanting or not. Bear in mind, too, given rates of incest, how many women were forced to parent the children of their fathers, brothers, uncles, and how many children grew up in these scenarios.

So, we then also had millions of “fallen” women forced to be mothers, often without the means for prenatal care for themselves or their babies, often pushed into greater poverty than they already lived with, often pushed into marriages that were unwanted, unhealthy or abusive.

And no choice to become pregnant or not.
I feel like what also often gets lost in abortion and choice debates is any address of how much sexual responsibility is and always has been put, disproportionately, on women. This is particularly of import for the youngest women, who obviously, I have great personal concern with. Teen women are incessantly blamed for not properly policing their male partners: especially when those male partners are same-age, but even when those partners are full-fledged adults, even sometimes when they are far older and predatory. Abstinence-based sex education makes this girl-blaming a critical part of their curriculum. Last I checked (which was very recently) at least 25% of the youngest teen women report that their first sexual experiences were coerced. The greatest rates of rape are — and generally always have been — to women under 18. And in many cases, as with sexual crimes so much of the time, these young women are held partially or even entirely responsible for being victimized. Bear in mind that many of these young women are reared with the same-old antiquated ideas about whose fault it is when they’re coerced into sex (theirs), or become pregnant (theirs), and pushed into one choice or another that they wouldn’t choose if they really had all the options available to them — including access to EC, thank you very much — and told that the person fully responsible for living with whatever “choice” they get is, guess who, them.

Let’s also remember that around 32,000 pregnancies as a result of rape occur every year just in the United States right now: I do not know what the rates were in the decades before Roe. Assuming the rates were at least the same or similar, though they were probably higher, that’s at least 32,000 women a year — more than die from breast cancer every year; only about half that many people die from drunk driving accidents annually, so where’s our PSA and OUR special fundraising wristband, right? — with NO choice as to whether or not they became pregnant, and no choice as to what to do about it. That’s tens of thousands of women every year with NO real reproductive choices whatsoever, and yet, often held responsible, in part if not in full.

Even when we’re not talking about rape or strong coercion, let’s not pussyfoot: women have intercourse they do not want to have ALL the time, every day. Out of feelings of obligation, out of a need to keep the peace, out of a need to feel, or assure a partner is feeling, “normal” per heteroseixst or gendernormative dictates and ideals, out of a need to keep a partner around so that they and/or their children have some means of survival and shelter.

Often, these same women cave when it comes to birth control due to a partner’s urging — it’s okay, you don’t have to use the condoms tonight, or okay, you’re so sure withdrawal works and you’ve worn me down arguing, or okay, you want to have intercourse RIGHT THIS MINUTE so I won’t go put the cervical cap on, or okay, I ran out of pills because the pharmacist didn’t have any this week, but we can do this anyway. Often, these women become pregnant, and these scenarios do not constitute full choice, no matter what spin you put on it.

Mothers STILL tell daughters that it is their duty to acquiesce to their husbands with all things sexual, and to service their “male needs,” whatever those may be. I have users at Scarleteen who have been reared with these attitudes with some regularity, and they are incredibly difficult to unlearn, especially when they continue to be surrounded by them in their communities and closest relationships.

Access to birth control, too, we often forget, was still incredibly limited pre Roe, and is a major factor in choice issues. When the pill came into circulation in the 60’s, half the states in the US only provided it for married women. Well before then, the Comstock laws made access to other birth control methods illegal. Before 1960, the vast majority of citizens had only condoms — which, without the male partners support, were useless — and withdrawal, which we know to be about as close to useless as it gets, and which also relies on male cooperation. And yet, when pregnancy occurred, it was often still thought to be the woman’s fault: her fault if she couldn’t “control” her male partner’s sexual advances, her fault if her male partner refused to use a birth control method, or she couldn’t access one that worked for her. This is history that is insanely pertinent right now, as things like the Global Gag Rule, Title X cuts (my clinic here sadly is shutting down this month), limiting access to EC and attacks on choice persist. The same people and forces who seek to limit or remove access to safe legal abortion, and thusly regress all the choices we have, are most often the same people seeking to limit access to contraception or contraception education, especially to those most at risk and with the least agency: the youngest women, the poorest women, the most marginalized women. Access to birth control is STILL a serious issue and a serious problem in this regard: the increased access we see has not by any means fully extended itself — or anything close — to the women who need it the most, and for whom even with legal abortion, even with changes in adoption, even with better welfare and treatment of single mothers, have far more limited choices than women with greater privilege.

Let’s not forget…
That tied up into all of this is also access to reliable, accurate and unbiased information about birth control, reproduction and sexuality as a whole. That’s not just a women’s issue, by any means, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that while lack of that information does everyone harm, men and women alike, it ultimately harms women the most. Everyone is harmed by sexual shame, by a lack of understanding of their own bodies and health — and that of sexual partners — by purposeful misinformation about sexuality and sexual and reproductive health. NOT everyone will become pregnant because of it, get cervical cancer because of it, wind up in rape or coercion scenarios because they don’t know the warning signs or are told to disregard them, or be unable to make a sound reproductive choice when pregnancy occurs that is best for them. (And that’s not even touching on issues of intercourse or other sex under obligation, sound counsel, prevention and address of sexual abuse, understanding of how women’s sexuality even works, the whole bag.) These things will happen to women, who even just by sheer biology, whether we’re talking about pregnancy or cervical cells, bear the greatest burdens when it comes to sex and the opposite sex.

In a culture/community/relationship or under a system which does not support an equality of full reproductive autonomy and agency, it is a given that sexuality and reproductive information will follow suit, and either protest that full autonomy or undermine it, and often quite intentionally.

Choice isn’t just about abortion.
Reproductive choice is an octopus of an issue. It’s not only an issue of sex and gender, but also one that strongly involves race and class.

Real reproductive choice includes a woman’s inarguable right to abort, parent or give a child up for adoption 100% informed, willing and able, as well as support for any and all of those choices, the choice to prevent pregnancy with safe, easily accessible and affordable birth control, the choice to have sex at all, and, by extension, the ability to obtain reproductive healthcare and sound information on reproduction and sexuality and most of all, to be held to sexual responsibility which is fair, sexual mores which are realistic, inclusive and not laden with sexism, and to live in an overarching environment which honors and safeguards a woman’s right to real and complete ownership and care of her own body and everything within it.

What you see here is about as abbreviated a take on these issues as it gets. However thick this text, it’s a serious condensation of this issue. What Roe vs. Wade did and does, what all the additional laws, policies and initiatives which support its principle do, is far, far greater than allowing access to merely abortion. We allow anyone to take Roe and everything related to it away — we even give an inch when it comes to this — we aren’t just removing access to abortion: we are removing a critical element of the whole of reproductive choice. Roe is foundational in many, many respects (when you really start to look at how much was built off of it, or arose because of it, it’s truly dizzying). You remove that row of bricks at the bottom of a building, you remove the stability and integrity of the building entire, and it will crumble in time. This is an absolute given, not theory or hyperbole.

This is the case whether you have never had an abortion or never intend to have one. This is the case whether you have had or do have the agency to make whatever choices you want, and may even still with regressions to choice policies, be it due to your sex, color or class. This is the case no matter which of those women above your mother was, or even if she was none of those women at all: this is the case no matter how it is you’re rearing your daughters. No matter how affected or unaffected you think you’ll be if that building built on Roe ever crumbles, you and your sisters will be buried alive in it, most likely just as we were before.

And as far as I’m concerned, if there’s even just one woman in the world who doesn’t have ALL of these choices, all of these aspects of choice? Then there’s no woman in the world who’s really got’em. Considering that even with Roe, even with policies that support choice there are still myriad women without them, both globally and right here at home, the fact that anyone still needs to defend or explain the importance of and need for Roe, today or any other day, to anyone at all, boggles the bloody mind.

Blog for Choice: Lots of people are doing it today, however. I’d encourage you to do so, or to avail yourself of their words, and by all means, as ever, to do all you can to work for choice in every way you can.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, feminism, sex/life, Blog for Choice | permalink | comments (0) »

Excuse an interruption to the pornography discussions with a few administrative notes and requests:

1) For those who have wanted a feed of the journal, it lives here.

2) I put a note up about this at Flickr, but while I am here, I am DESPERATE for photo subjects in and around Seattle. Per usual, I primarily shoot women, and if nudes are the order of the day, I only am comfortable right now shooting women, female couples, or gay male couples. Also per usual, I’m very much interested in women on the margins in terms of who tends to often be least visible: women of color, or size, older women, disabled women, etc. Nudes or eroticism are never a requirement with me: it’s all about capturing my subject in what is most expressive and true for her, however she feels most at home in her skin. I prefer to shoot out of doors, or in a location the subject likes as opposed to in the studio (especially since my loighting setup blows right now), but shooting here (I’m in a very easily accessible area of Ballard) is also always an option. If you or someone you know thinks you might have interest, drop me an email.

3) For those of your with sites currently linking to journal.html can you update those links to journal/ for me? Thanks!

4) In finishing the resource list for the book, I’m coming up short in a few areas. For instance, my contraception references are really quite clinical. Does anyone have any books they’ve liked and used that are more down-to-earth per contraception resources? Also interested in suggestions per body image, self-esteem, male sexuality, safer sex, and sexual orientation from a braoder perspective than that just aimed at GLB’s. Cheers.

P.S. My big crush right now is the PATHWAY act. I’m really, really curious, if this passes, if it might finally involve a revisitation of the ERA. But I don’t want to get too optimistic: a bill finally recognizing the realities of feminist thought and observations when it comes to HIV is cool enough as it is.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, photography & art | permalink | comments (5) »

While we’re on the topic (and people are still rocking the comments from the last entry, and I am actually getting more editing/biblio work done today), it occurred to me last night as I laid in bed reading a Starhawk novel and feeling a bit ashamed about it that…

Utopian novels are pornography for activists.

Don’t get me wrong: I actually think Starhawk is an incredible woman who is really inspiring and has a great take on…well, everything. And she’s not a bad novelist, not at all: I like her style a lot, and I liked her books a lot. Still do, in spite of myself.

But, in explaining to Mark that while I felt the need for a novel — having over-read work-related stuff and nonfiction lately — I wasn’t in the mood for say, Vonnegut, I summed up why The Fifth Sacred Thing and Walking to Mercury had express appeal as being because “queer crunchy granola ladies try and save the world, have many challenges, but ultimately, succeed due to butt-busting, queer crunchy granola awesomeness.” I can’t fathom that part of the motivation to write utopian novels, and to read them, is not to validate our idealist fantasies.

In other words, my butt-busting, queer, crunchy granola-lady self just needed some activist porn.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, home, pornography | permalink | comments (4) »

I can earnestly say that testifying in a federal court, to a federal judge, with the ACLU and against the United States government was not only utterly painless, it was really, really quite enjoyable. It’s like being wary as hell to get on a big scary rollercoaster, going on anyway, getting kid of sick but having a really good time all the same, getting off, and begging to get right back on again.

I’m employing some tact in the following portrayal of my testimony, believe it or not. I feel it’s a bit inapporpriate to take the “I kicked the government’s ASS!” approach right out here in the public eye. Oh. Oops. Anyway.

I can say that while providing vitally necessary testimony, which no other plaintiff but me could have provided (which is pretty dam cool, right?), to help protect our first amendment rights, I not only got through it and didn’t bungle anything at all, I — merely in being truthful, brave, and in being myself — totally, utterly kicked righteous ass and had a profoundly good time doing it.

I expect to be nervous with all things home-leavy and public-speaky, because I always am, and the fact that my left thigh was covered in hives the night before I left for Philly last Tuesday appeared to be clear evidence of this. I never get hives.

The the flights were utterly unremarkable and painless, to the point that somehow, by the second flight, I forgot I was a smoker. (This happened twice this trip: and I have no explanation for this whatsoever: I could more easily find a fine explanation for a Mystery Spot than I could for how a 25-years-addict forgets she is one.)

It wasn’t until Wednesday afternoon, several hours before my evening prep for the trial the next day that I started to realize that I wasn’t actually at all nervous. By the time Thursday morning rolled around, after I had woken from having almost zero sleep and my babymaking dream (we have now named the infant in my dream Slimerella: when you don’t intend to have kids of your own, you forge attachments to the symbolic ones, I guess); as I was walking the eight-block dead-girl-walking trek to the courthouse with Ben, my ACLU lawyer and the brother I really should have had, who found my dream highly entertaining, I felt just fine.

For those new to my adventures, I hatehatehatehateHATE public speaking. Doing it makes me weak in the knees, lightheaded, and totally nauseated. More than once during a speaking venture, I have nearly fainted, and more than once I have almost wet my pants. Hours and sometimes days before a public speaking engagement I am a completely neurotic mess who spends all her available time praying for every kind of natural disaster to prevent the engagement from happening. I have turned down — to my great shame — a couple of gigs I was really honored to be asked to do, which would really have benefitted me, because of this stupid phobia. Needless to say, then, I fully anticipated it hitting me like a bag of rocks when the public speaking I had to do was to defend the constitution quite literally in front of the ACLU and the federal government, the latter of which I had a very healthy fear of instilled into me by my commie pinko father at a very early age, drills to hide from them should they come for us and all.

During this walk, I wondered if maybe going without sleep, food and even coffee was why I felt okay. Or if I had someone just become completely delusional per the import of what I was about to do. Or if the orgasm I had the night before had made me just that stupid.

As I entered the courtroom, anticipating that the nerves would finally, hit, they still didn’t. I gotta tell you, though: if ever in doubt that we live in a very rich country, check out a federal courtroom. Swanky business, this.

So, the day’s testimonies start. First up was this intensely wonderful school librarian as an expert witness on filters and how they — and bonafide guidance and supervision — work just fine if someone wants to be sure minors don’t have access to certain content. This woman also got in a closing statement that was the Rocky moment of the morning. I had to remind myself that this wasn’t Norma Rae, and standing up and cheering was not appropriate.

(Iris Tava Smathers) I think the
4 best filter is librarians and teachers and parents who pay
5 attention and who talk to kids and say, you know, this is
6 good information. Here’s how you decide what’s good
7 information. Here’s how you decide what’s not going to
8 accomplish your task. And there are things that are bad
9 decisions for you to look at. But I think you need to, I
10 think you need to tell kids why and, you know, teach them to
11 reason because if we throw up a lock on the door and they
12 don’t know what is on the other side, when they get into a
13 position where they have to be on the other side, how are
14 they going to navigate if they don’t have those skills. And
15 I think that is my job and a teacher’s job, and then
16 hopefully the parents’ jobs to teach them to discern in cases
17 like that.

I heart librarians this much. Always have, but my adoration exponentially increased that morning.

Then came (sorry, expert witness-guy) a bunch of insanely boring testimony explaining filtering software for PDA devices. This would have been the one period of time in which I did start to feel the profound lack of caffeine and nicotene in my system.

And then came me. And I still felt fine. I went up, I sat down in a very cooshy chair (though I’d not advise, should you ever find yourself in this position, wearing double-lined wool trousers when sitting for some time in a leather chair, just FYI). Before I was supposed to, actually: I underestimated the importance of standing formally while putting my hand on the Bible, possibly in part because the one in the drawer at the hotel had the traveling dildo on it, so it seemed pretty casual to me.

The judge had a great vibe. I adore my ACLU lawyer, and we’ve had these conversations for a couple of years now. So, during his questioning, I blame my unfamiliar feelings of calm and competence on familiarity.

Most of them. The spelling of things out loud occasionally got me flustered, because I had traumatic spelling bee flashbacks.

17 A I operate Scarleteen.com, Scarletletters.com.
18 Q Maybe you should spell each one when you mention it for
19 the first time.
20 A Sure, scarletletters is S-C-A-R-L-E-T-L-E-T-T-E-R-S.COM.
21 Then there is also Femmerotic.com, that’s F-E-M-M-E-R-O —
22 yeah, see, spelling bee — E-R-O-T-I-C.COM. And then
23 heathercorinna.com, spelled like my first and last name. And
24 allgirlarmy.org.

I wasn’t as witty in this trial as I was in my deposition last year — mostly because I was not as nervous, and thus not suffering from verbal diarrhea, and because it’s a lot more formal a setting — but I did get a few zingers in, and had a few priceless moments (which don’t translate as well in court reporting, sans my imitable charm):

12 Q Why did you decide to publish scarleteen online instead
13 of in a print magazine?
14 A I can’t for the life of me figure out how I would be
15 allowed in a print magazine to publish scarleteen.

A much better answer, I’d say, than “Are you high? What effing country do you think we live in, anyway?”

7 Q Do you believe any of the contents on scarletletters,
8 scarleteen or femmerotic might be prohibited by the act?
9 A Absolutely.
10 Q Why do you fear that?
11 A Because even as I function under the Government that I
12 live in in this country, they have made clear that the sex
13 information that I give to teenagers isn’t what they want in
14 schools and isn’t what they’re willing to pay for. So, if I
15 were to (define) community standards just as my federal
16 government and no one else, I’d be told right there and then
17 that what I do is inappropriate and not sexually appropriate.

Take that, federal government!

5 Q Would scarletletters link to a site like hustler.com?
6 A No.
7 Q Why not?
8 A Because I don’t want to. Because a lot of what is done
9 at hustler, to me, is not sexy, it’s sexist and misogynist
10 and it doesn’t support my goals…

Take that, Hustler!

21 Q And is the journal section ever sexually explicit?
22 A Not often, but every now and then, yes.
23 Q And why is it sometimes sexually explicit?
24 A Because my life isn’t always sexually explicit.

In retrospect, a better answer might have been, “Because I have sex sometimes. Don’t you?” However, I was trying to be good, and mind my lawyers comments to me from an earlier date that unlike most of my life, what was most important was the earnest, true answer, not the most clever earnest, true answer.

3 MR. WIZNER: Your Honor, at this time, plaintiffs
4 would like to move exhibit 42 into evidence.
5 THE COURT: Any objection?
6 MS. ULRICH: Your Honor, defendant has an objection
7 to just a few of the pages. Specifically, defendant objects
8 to page 1 and page 2. These pages are blow-up images that
9 appear elsewhere within the exhibit. The image on page 1 is
10 a duplicate of page 17 and as the witness explained, page 17
11 is how that image appears when somebody clicks on the link.
12 The image on page two is a duplicate of a photo on page 26.
13 And it’s defendant’s position that those other pages are more
14 representative of the actual images on the website. And so,
15 defendant does object to pages 1 and 2.

Let the record show that this was a discussion about a photo of my breasts, being held up and on video screens while I was both attempting to still appear professional, and not take a woman objecting to my breasts for the first time in my life personally. I have never had a pet name for my body parts, but I’m seriously considering calling my tits Exhibit 42 from now on.

25 Q Have you ever considered using an age verification system
1 for scarleteen?
2 A No.
3 Q Why not?
4 A Because it’s like saying I’m running a coffee shop, but
5 I’m turning away people who drink coffee. I can’t serve my
6 user base that I’m intended to serve if I put that up there.

Maybe I was starting to want that coffee after all.

17 Q What would you do if COPPA were to take effect?
18 A It really depends on, it depends on the site. You know,
19 I’d say I’d move to Canada, but I said that when Kerry lost,
20 too. And here I am. So, it’s a hollow threat coming from
21 me. You know, so given, I probably wouldn’t do that. You
22 know, in scarleteen’s case, I would keep doing exactly what I
23 do. I’d feel like I was at risk. I’d know that I was
24 choosing to take those risks.

That was the big laugh of the day, even from the judge. I’ll be here all week. Nah, scratch that: after this, I am so outta here.

(These portions are from the cross-examination by the Department of Justice lawyer)

8 Q And Plaintiff’s Exhibit 42, page 9, is the splash page
9 for femmerotic, is that correct?
10 A It’s a bad scan of the splash page, but yes.

Hello, my name is Heather Corinna, and I’m an annoying little perfectionist.

10 Q If you have photos on Femmerotic that show — would show
11 people having sex, those would be for subscribers only,
12 correct?
13 A It really depends on how you define sex.

Watching the straight people in the room try and work that one out was pretty amusing.

(For the morbidly curious, here’s the whole transcript of the day, by the way.)

Here’s the thing. When the cross started, this is where I figured I’d muck things up, talk too much, annoy the judge, forget the decorum, say something totally idiotic, like “Yes, I recognize Exhibit 42, I’ve seen them every damn day since I was 11.” My inner prankster also kept wanting to do something like plainly say “Frootloops,” to a yes or no question, or to pretend to break down and confess that I was a dirty, dirty lady who suddenly realized the great error of her ways in corrupting all the wee children, just to see what would happen.

The DoJ lawyer was the same woman who deposed me for an ungodly number of hours (which translated into around 260-some pages of transcript). We’re all still a little bitter about that. I didn’t dislike her at all during that deposition, save that she was making me stay answering questions that seemed redundant and foolish to me, when I really wanted some air, a dirty martini and a smoke. But I was so frazzled that day, I couldn’t see anyone’s strategy.

This time was different. From the minute she came to the stand, whether it was so or not, I got the distinct impression she thought she was smarter, more powerful, than I was. Again, fact or fiction, the effect this had on my was apparently quite visible. Mark said that my whole body language shifted: from sitting prim and upright in my chair, to leaning back, opening my arms and clearly sending out, “Oh THIS is how you want to play it? Well, you just bring it ON” vibes. I realized in that moment that this was just like boxing, and that my boxing partners have usually been larger and stronger than me, still never knocked me out and I’ve always been able to throw them off balance. I imagine the pinstriped vest I was wearing and that body lingo may have made me resemble an old school mafioso, especially since my lawyer made some offhand remark at dinner later about me and bloody horses heads.

Setting aside my cement shoes, here cometh the cheeseball bits. I need schmaltzy theme music: I need violins, dammit!

Did you ever read The Monster at the End of This Book? You know, the Sesame Street book where Grover is terrified of that monster — mortified, fearful throughout, knowing one is at the end — but he discovers at the end that the monster is just loveable, furry Grover? That’s how I felt about the federal government that day. There’s something really awesome about being an activist and suing the U.S. government. It is a substantially groovy thing. And it’s even better when you’re up there, doing it actively, with them in the room. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life mastering bravado, I am the macha queen in many respects when it comes to that. But when bravado translates into balls-out brave in a context like this, it is an intensely empowering thing. It’s seeing the Grover behind the monster, and having moments where you feel like it’s YOU no one is seeing the Grover in. Feeling the feds intimidated by you, when you always felt so under their thumb? This is FABULOUSNESS, especially when you’ve worked as an activist for a really long time, and your winning moments are few and far between, and buried underneath an awful lot of frustration and helplessness.

When I finished, then we all walked out into the break room, I got loads and loads of judos. I was so damn high on myself that I couldn’t even take a compliment properly. “You are a rock star,” got responded to with “I KNOW!” “You were awesome,” with “You bet your ass I was…..umm, oh, thank you.” I was tempted to ask at a certain point that everyone stop paying me compliments, because it was inflating my ego in a way I was not accustomed to and clearly unable to graciously manage.

And I couldn’t. I’d turned some sort of corner. It’s so weird, really. I wasn’t actually prepared for this particular feeling. That’s not to say I didn’t know I was doing something really important, I did. But in my mind, no more or less so than what I do every day: I think what I do every single day is just as important as this was.

So, it’s a little confusing to me as to why I feel so….different. Pardon my sounding cheesy, but I haven’t really had any time to myself since this happened to even really process it, and I suspect the delay in that may have upped the ante here.

(Which I hope also excuses my behaviour at the shoe store down the street the other day. I was returning a pair of clogs I bought one size too small — not my fault, though, the shoe-fitter needed to have told me about how to fit them properly — and the owner looked at the bottoms and said, “Oh, you wore these outside?” To which my response was, “To defend your freedom of speech, buddy! You could BRONZE those shoes!” As it turned out, I think he was more inclined to make my exchange because the shopgirl overcharged me than because of my totally uncalled for snippy retort. Thankfully, jumping right back into mounds of editing and fixing my umpteen mistakes is very humbling.)

Maybe I feel like this because something I’ve done — and a something that is about the value of all the work I do, and the vital need for it — feels earnestly recognized for a change. Maybe it’s because I don’t often get the opportunity — the gift, really — to do the important things I do and have a roomful of people I respect witness and applaud that so directly. Maybe because given the medium in which I do my work, the effects aren’t really something I see very directly, and so seeing it, feeling it, was pretty unusual. Maybe it’s because more often than not, other people have more faith in me than I have in myself, and having a moment where I understood why they have that faith, and had it for myself for a change, was pretty intense.

Or maybe it’s just because I kicked the government’s ass.

posted in Heather Corinna, aclu, copa, activism, soapbox | permalink | comments (12) »

First day back.

Much grogginess from wearing oneself out amidst three different time zones, five flights in six days, and coming back home to have several crises plopped on my plate while I also am now in the last nine days of finishing my book edits and additions.

I have a bunch of meetings and catchup this morning I am racing to do, all while still on my first cup of coffee, but later today, will fill y’all in on the tales from Philly.

Long story short? I ROCKED it. Even by the much higher expectations the ACLU had for me than I had for myself. Quite frankly, I’m not even sure who inhabited my body while I was up there on the stand, but whoever she was, the girl was golden. (I’m told the transcript of my testimony should be up by the end of today.) Unfortunately, I know for sure it was me back in my skin the next morning when Mark and I nearly missed our flight due to oversleeping and waking up still as drunk as we were at 4 AM the night before.

More news later today or tomorrow. More coffee — much more coffee — now.

posted in Heather Corinna, aclu, copa, bookish bits, activism, home | permalink | comments (2) »

I wouldn’t call what I had the other night a meltdown. Meltdown equals some sort of crying or wailing and the strong desire to consume a lot of tequila and play Joni Mitchell all night on an out-of-tune piano.

I suppose, despite it sounding flip, what I had was instead a sort of existential crisis.

In a word, I am feeling very concerned about the book. I am not concerned about the edits: those continue to go really well, my editor continues to rock the house, even to the degree of, in places, allowing me to be a bit bolder in some not-so-popular statements which my previous editor would NOT have supported. Even to the degree of sending me a book full of recipes for vegan cupcakes. I am also — so far — not concerned about the marketing issues. When I came into this agreement, I was very firm on some title (nothing cutesy, nothing too woo-woo, salacious or attempting to be outr? or purposefully provocative) and cover (NO photographs, no objectified women/teens, no “token” couple illustrations, given that unless you had ten couples on there, you’d likely be stuck with young, middle-class, white, pretty as the only representation) issues, which my editor backed me in 100%, and she is all kinds of scrappy. You can never control, entirely, the art department and marketing, but I feel pretty confident I’ll be supported in my limits. I’m not even all that concerned about it doing well financially/sales-wise or not: it’d be great if it did well, both for how much I think it’ll benefit the readers, and because making a little money after six years of working it would be swell, but my world will not end if it happens to bomb, especially since at a certain point, I managed to get decently unattached to the idea it’d ever find a publisher ballsy enough to put it out there at all.

None of that stuff or anything like it is my big worry.

My big worry is that I will fuck this up. That what seems dead-on to me misses the mark. That everything I thought I learned from, effectively, millions of Scarleteen readers over the years, and tens of thousands of emailers and board posters, is somehow wrong. That I’m either talking over or under their diverse, collective heads. That it’s too late, in the world where they grew up fed on Girls Gone Wild, cosmetic surgery as a change of clothes, and crappy gender roles that somehow have made a comeback since 1955; where 80% of girls who are sexually assaulted by their partners continue to date them, where the best a lot of these kids feel they have to look forward to with sex is maybe an orgasm and maybe a partner they can have some small measure of trust in, to really do something good for them. That something this one kid needs the most will be the thing I forgot or didn’t have room for. (And I have this new weird niggle where I feel like part of this has to address the teen that was me: like this has to somehow make things better for her in this regard which is… well, it’s a good thing I’m not in therapy right now, because that’s so textbook it’d put a therapist right to sleep.)

That I will blow what really is a unique and amazing opportunity. Few writers with a first solo book know their audience is already alert and listening before their book even gets advance press, let alone hits the shelves. I already have my readership, internationally, in droves. I already have the best targeted marketing possible, and since I built it, I don’t even have to pay for it. More to the point, I already have the trust and faith of my readers.

Which means that they have given me the opportunity to make a profound difference in their lives and in the world, and I am starting to feel profoundly fearful that someone, some way, I will waste that opportunity and not do the very best I can for them, and that their trust has been sorely misplaced.

Okay, it may as well be said, because we all know this about me already. I have a severe heroine complex. I know, I know. I have absolutely put a lot of responsibility for the world on myself, by myself, and while I certainly don’t think it’s up to me to save the world alone — or that I even could, or that absolute physical and emotional sexual health and well-being worldwide could fix all that’s wrong in the world — a lot of the time, I take more responsibility as one person than is probably sane.

But lord gawd, if I didn’t think it could make a really big dent, there’s no way I would have worked in almost nothing BUT sexuality for the last eight years. I mean, sure, I can be a horndog, but not enough of one to work as hard as I have for so little, be as isolated from every camp possible because of it as I have been, and sacrifice some of the vital things in my life I have to do this. I can’t tell you how many times over the last couple months of burning the candle at both ends with this, the ACLU case and then everything else I already do I have sat sighing with a great big miss-on for my Montessori classroom of yore, wistfully wishing I could be giving a simple, totally uncontroversial lesson in math with the red rods instead of explaining other sorts of rods entirely, and with a lot more at stake.

So, here I sit, right? I have this amazing open door. I have the goods, crafted painstakingly for years — years of writing and editing, years of broad, direct field research — and a great person to help me refine them even more and get them out there. And I really do have faith that if it were in any way possible to rear a generation or two with some WAY healthier attitudes and approaches to sex and sexuality, to their bodies, to sex and gender issues, to sexual orientation, to sexual relationships, it WOULD be a truly revolutionary thing, for all of us.

(But especially for them. The longer and longer I do the work I do with them, the more and more it emotionally burdens me and wears me out, the more I really, really want everything to be better for them in this regard. If a genie gave me three wishes, this would be one. Another would probably be for the ability to make my pug immortal. I’ll get back to you on that last one.)

It’s just that, you know, I get sent books on sex that come out for teens. And to say that sparing maybe one exception, to say I’m beyond disappointed most of the time is a substantial understatement. A lot of the time, I just want to throw the book against the wall, whether it’s because of sexism, heterosexism, a total mind/body disconnect, commercialism, a serious lack of respect for the readers and their intelligence, classism, what have you. People usually fuck this up, and that’s not just because some people are stupid. It’s because it is really fucking hard to get this right. Teen sexuality is a big-time sticky wicket, and all the more so in our culture and, from my vantage point, right now, at this point in time.

Given that, and given my various complexes, suffice it to say, I remain unconvinced that I, too, will not muck this up like so many other smart, kindhearted people have before me.

Fuck all, is that terrifying.

And I know, it’s also kind of stupid. I am as much an overachiever as ever, and thus, have in no way scrimped on research, fact-checking, and all the legwork to do this to the best of my ability. I have worked this field in a way I don’t know anyone else has. SO many people — and I’m mostly talking to myself here, to try and convince myself, but feel free to listen in if you want — have now read all or parts of this book in various stages. I have a nice focus group of ST readers on it again this time around. I’ve learned what I have per what to address and how to address it from what THEY have asked me — not what I’ve decided they need to know — and from answering them, en masse, for years. My editor has 100% faith in me. My partner has 100% faith in me, Some friends and colleagues — even some idols — I really respect and know wouldn’t do me the disservice of bullshitting me have 100% faith in me. So do these readers.

Why don’t I?

Wish I knew the answer to that.

I mean, look, I think this is probably healthy. I think anyone who really cared deeply would have this concern, and that anyone who didn’t have it likely doesn’t care as much as they should. I think my being this concerned about this will be one more thing to assure that this IS as great as I hope it can be, and do all I think it can do. I think: I also am a little worried that if these concerns escalate or go off course they might have the opposite effect of causing me to have my vision obscured by some sort of self-absorbed obsession with failure or anything less than utter heroism. I mean, I baked a pie the other night that didn’t turn out right by my standards, and despite the fact that I have anything even approaching a cooking blunder maybe once every year or two, I was totally annoyed with myself and apologizing left and right to everyone who just happened to be trying to enjoy my pumpkin-flavored self-assigned disaster.

Ai carumba. This? Right now? I didn’t need. I shouldn’t be surprised: I have an awful lot all coming together at once, and on the heels of some big changes for me, including living clear across the country and that Love of One’s Life thang kicking my rump in the (best, but) most alarming way. I’ve been so overcommitted and overworked that I haven’t been able to have any time at all to do any artwork. It should come as no great shock to me that with a project like this, all of my various complexes about responsibility, accountability, caretaking, adolescence, working-enough-to-be-found-worthy and overachieving would come to a big, puss-filled head.

I have the psychological equivalent of the world’s biggest zit, right on the tip of my nose, on the eve of the most important date of my life.

Isn’t that fitting.

(Other comments for this from the original html copy live here.)

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, activism | permalink | comments (2) »

If you’re going to reach out to support rape survivors voluntarily, we need to be supported no matter how we feel about our rapes; no matter at what stage we are at in our unique healing process. Not just when it makes you feel good about yourself.

A couple weeks ago, we had something happen at no consequences for the men, for instance. Or, when a rape was described, but not expressly called rape. The numbers ranged, given the study sample (its size, the particular group/class of men, the age of the men queried, blah blah blah), anywhere from 20% to 60%.

I’ve seen studies like this before: most of us have. These numbers don’t surprise me, nor do I generally leap to the assumption that they’re flawed studies because they show a high number. After all, an awful lot of us have been raped, sexually assaulted, coerced. Even just in my own life and work, I know a high number of rape surviviors. Generally, anywhere from 30% to 70% of us have been raped or sexually assaulted, sometimes higher depending on how you classify these things and organize your data. Surviviors know the sex of the person who raped us. It is no mystery to us, it isn’t a question. In the vast, vast majority of cases, men have raped us, whether we are female or male surviviors. That a lot of men do rape or would rape is not a surprise to us. It is terribly distressing — per our safety, our relationships with men, how sons are being reared, the toxic aspects of the culture men and women alike grow up and live in, toxic approaches to masculinity and femininity, the works — and it is painful and uncomfortable to know, but a surprise it is not.

The men — including an older parent of two adult children — who engaged in this discussion (and in discussions on rape states about perps I have read elsewhere) could NOT stop quibbling about the percentages and anything else quibble-able. It could NOT be 60% of all men, they said. And no, some of us said, it very likely is not, 60% came from X study, with X age group and this scenario. *I* would never ever rape someone, they’d say. No man *I* know would rape someone. Who’d have sex with a woman screaming at you to stop! (As if this described rape as a whole, or how most women respond when a rape is taking place.) Nice men don’t rape people, and we’re nice! they’d say. All the men I know are nice!

The quibbling went on, with those quibbling knowing full well (even if they didn’t care to be mindful about it) that survivors were reading, given we have a good deal of them at the forums, given they know the editor of the whole site is herself a survivor (one who, however, does not incite their pity, as I’ll discuss in a bit). Likely, they are not as acutely aware, if aware at all, that we’re used to this sort of quibbling, this sort of denial of our reality. That we’re used to hearing that men as a whole CANNOT be doing this: that something must be wrong with these facts, and generally, that something always boils down to us as victims in the end. We’re calling consensual sex rape, or we’re wearing the wrong thing, walking the wrong place, dating the wrong kind of guy (because, you see, all rapists are evil monsters recognizable to all of us in some magical way), not saying no loud enough, often enough, with enough conviction. Or, it’s someone else’s fault entirely, not the rapists. It’s our mothers fault for not modeling right or giving us too much independence. It’s our fathers fault for not protecting us. It’s the criminal justice system’s fault. Somebody’s fault, anybody’s fault, just not the rapists fault, because that might mean it’s the fault of an awful lot of men, or men as a class, or men as a dominant power. And that, for obvious reasons, isn’t so great to know as a man, even a man who doesn’t rape and has no desire to rape.

At this point, myself included, a couple survivors and bonafide supporters entered into the discussion (most stayed out, emailing me privately to express upset with the thread’s direction). I tried, calmly, cooly, to explain that no one was accusing the men there of being rapists or potential rapists. That while it was UNlikely any of them would NEVER know a man who did, would or could rape, that the men they felt they could trust in that regard were possibly trustworthy in that regard. But that actually, someone’s “nice” husband, “nice” neighbor or co-worker, “nice” dad or brother often enough DOES or WOULD rape. That some of us have been raped by a man who was “nice” in other respects, or who would rape us, but not his sister, daughter, wife, neighbor, friend. That some of us have, in fact, been unable to have anything done about our rapes, because we were disbelieved in being raped by this or that “nice” man.

In due course, I started to feel the anger leveled at us. (And it got to the point where I closed the thread, after getting a wave of nausea, after the older man went so far as to state that women could fix rape — and stop, in his mind, being rape enablers — by partnering with “nice” men like him, and breeding good sons who thus, genetically, would not be likely to become rapists, I kid you not.) I noticed what I often notice. All too often, as rape survivors, if we are pitiable; if we are depressed, sad, downtrodden, emotional wrecks, lonely, isolated, fearful, silenced: if we are in a phase of being — or have effectively be made entire — successfully subordinate by our rapist, by the aspects of rape culture we live in, then we can realistically expect a certain level of support from the men around us (though I don’t think this is as much of a given with male survivors).

This, too, should not be a surprise. Subordinated people are objects of pity, and subordinate women, especially, are to some degree celebrated for being such when our subordination is in line with the status quo, or it is sexual subordination of a variety which meets the needs of men. We do not threaten anyone, or their sense of power. We’re as gentle as kittens. No one is concerned about being harmed by us or losing priviliege because of us. We may rise to every small crumb of compassion or care. A Hallmark card, a hug and a “you poor dear” might be viewed as great tokens, and telling us we’re not ruined, spoiled, or sullied or that it isn’t our fault a gift of incredible magnitude.

But what about when we’re not “poor dears” anymore? What about when we want to take the proverbial Hallmark card, the pat on the head, and the so-sorry coos and shove them where the sun don’t shine? What about when we’re past that point: when we know it’s not our fault, we know we’re okay, we know we’re not lesser beings?

What about when we become angry? What about when we call — or your Dad, or your brother, or your best friend — out? What about when we start to catch on to the fact that you telling us we’re not “ruined” by some other man is still you, as a man, dictating what the bounds of our sexual or physical sovereignty are?

What about when we want to start to look at WHY this has happened to us, why it could happen again, why it could happen to our sisters, and some of our brothers, why we have to live in fear of this at all? What about when we’re ready to lay the blame on WHO has done this to us: who individually, who culturally, who as a group, and not be obtuse about their sex or gender (especially since, lord knows, they weren’t about ours)? What about when we feel utterly crazy because we’re eating post-traumatic stress for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and try as we might, it is infecting every aspect of our lives, and being told it’s okay is infuriating because we are NOT okay? What about when we want to talk about how effing pissed off we are to have to try and get back our hijacked sexuality, when we want one damn night without being woken by flashbacks or nightmares, to be free of being triggered by simple daily things, to not have to live among our rapists, to not have to be careful of how we talk about our rapes or our feelings to every bloody person we know because it might upset THEM?

When we get to THAT place, see, we no longer seem so harmless. (Because we aren’t.) If someone was supporting us to feel better about themselves, to feel like a good person, to amp their esteem, in this stage of the game, it stops being a feel-good endeavor. We are not cute, fluffy bunnies who have lost their mama to be stroked, who will snuggle back with a sad, but slightly contented sigh. We’ve had enough self-pity and self-blame for three lifetimes. We’ve had enough of people giving us permission to feel things when we should not need anyone’s permission in the first place. We may be far more critical, far more watchful, far more wary. We may even seem feral, fuming, volatile at times. If we didn’t report our rape at the time, we now might, and we might be reporting your best friend or another man you liked and respected, who you cannot believe would rape us. If we were silenced before, we refuse to be silent now. We may not want to take you at your word about how “nice” you are: we may even question why you need to keep telling us how nice you are in the first place, rather than allowing us our own judgment of your character and safety. We may want you to just leave us the fuck alone for a little while.

We may want to start investigating WHY it is that men perpetrate rape and in the volume they do: this is not an abstract for rape survivors (as often it is not abstract as to HOW many have been raped by men: when you’re a survivor who isn’t silent, suffice it to say, you tend to know more surviviors then most because they’re more inclined to confide in you as to being raped), or a maybe, since around 98% of our rapists were/are male, and we know this. Some of us would very much LIKE to forget this fact, but we cannot, even if we try. We are reminded in our dreams, we are reminded in our triggers and flashbacks, we are reminded in our bones and blood. We are reminded in your language, or the language of the men you and we both know. We are reminded in the way some men pass us in the street and evaluate us as they pass. We are reminded when any level of dismay or surprise is expressed when we decline sexual invitation or innuendo. We are reminded in aspects of male-dominated culture, and the behaviour of men and women alike under that paradigm. We are reminded every time someone makes a “funny” joke about rape, and we hear that undertone which acknowledges there is a power even in saying the word in our presence; in feeling able to even play with rape as a joke, because it has not been your harsh reality to be on the receiving end or live in fear of it.

When a person is traumatized, attacked, assaulted (or has those they are close to have been such), eventually, a person processing it, wanting to know the truth of it, is going to want to look into the big why of it, to start to look critically, to engage the issue intellectually, not just emotionally, or not just in a reactionary way. Of course, when we’re talking rape, that need can be even larger because all too often, we are told covertly and overtly that we were raped because of something WE did.

* * *

Some weeks ago, one of the AGA bloggers wrote a piece about how much she loves the freedom she feels in wearing short shorts. I ended up over here weeping unexpectedly, because — odd as it sounds, given my age and the fact that in many contexts I’m comfortable being seen nude — it finally sank in for me that the reason I do not and have never own a single pair of shorts higher than my knees in the last thirty years is not because they’re physically uncomfortable, nor is it because I have big legs I feel are unappealing in some way.

It’s because when I was 12 years old, after being stalked and then assaulted by a group of teenage boys on a hot August day in Chicago where I was a junior camp counselor, the police officer called to the scene told me, verbatim, that I really should not be walking around in “shorts that short.” Shorts I (obviously) remember quite succinctly, which were mid-thigh on me; perhaps a little tighter than I’d have liked, but I was in a growth spurt, and in my family, we wore clothes out until they just couldn’t be worn anymore. Shorts of the same type, fit and size which men and women wear on any given day. Shorts which did not have “fuck me” or “rape me” printed on their backside.

I was sitting on a curb, every part of my body sore and shaking, I didn’t even know WHAT had happened to me, because I just didn’t have the context for it, and I was in an absolute state of shock. No report was filed. No one offered me healthcare, and I was not given a contact to come back into when the shock wore off and I could figure out what exactly had happened. Instead, I was told, outrightly, that I needed to dress differently, and off they went. I was 12 years old, it was 1982, and a hundred years or so from me, other kids my same age flew up and down on the swings, feeling free.

I did not talk to anyone about that attack for at least another four years. I didn’t say a word about it, I didn’t write a word about it. Only one member of my family has any real awareness of what happened to me, and even then, since I felt unable to talk about it or ask questions — even to ask why it hurt so much to use the toilet — and wasn’t asked to talk about it or invited to ask questions, that awareness is profoundly limited. Even when I did start talking to one or two people about it, including my therapist at the time, it would be in vaguries or the most timid of suggestion (and it goes without saying that I am hardly a timid person). Often, that is still how I talk about it, even with those closest to me. There’s this feeling a lot of survivors have which is that everyone knows what happened to you, even if you tell know one; like your rape is written on your face in indelible ink. Some of that is projection: but over the years the conclusion I’ve come to is that some of that feeling comes out of the fact that so many people around you often DO know or DO suspect, but wish to enable your silence.

Even though at this point, I know full well it was not the shorts I was wearing, the fact that I, a young woman in the world, was unescorted in an empty room, nor that I didn’t scream enough, fight enough, look mean enough, say this thing or that one, look this way or that, there’s a 12-year-old girl that still inhabits part of my body and she totally believed that police officer, especially since his words echoed others she had heard about herself, her sex, her gender in her world.

Obviously, at this point, 24 years later, I passed that stage of subordination, as much as one can, anyway. But part of me was deep and unknowingly in it for a LONG time, and it had some effects that only by sheer luck were not absolutely disastrous for me. Obviously, I got to the pissed-off point and then some: obviously, I’ve done a good bit of healing for myself, sometimes with the help of others.

Obviously, my life is hardly ruined because I can’t wear a given style of clothing: however, my life is irreparably changed because I cannot even put on a given style of pants without feeling a very visceral fear, and without being reminded of that day and all the various ways it — and my other sexual assaults — have altered my life because other people have purposefully stolen my ownership of parts of my life and my body. My life was irreparably changed in creating a scenario in which aspects of what happened to me and my exploring them were so off-limits that even as someone who talks about rape almost daily, I could be unaware of something so obvious and simple for so bleeding long.

* * *

I think what gets overlooked is the hard truth that if a person, and for obvious reasons, especially a man, can ONLY be supportive of rape survivors when they are subordinated — when, effectively, they are not yet survivors at all, but absolute victims, for a rape never stops when the attack itself does — then he is, effectively, not supportive of that person so much as he is supportive of his or her subordination. This does not, in my mind, make him complicit in that rape, mind, but it DOES make him complicit in enabling rape culture. And it does not make him supportive of that person’s healing and survival, for it has thus been made plain he or she is preferred subordinate.

We have a long cultural history of women voluntarily tending to men who have been wounded in wars, as veterans, as civilians. While this is not an identical issue (as a class, it is men who have waged war, even if this is not the case for individual veterans: the same cannot be said of women per rape), in many ways, we survivors are those wounded in war, a war in which we are resisters rather than participants, in which we are civilian casualties, in which we are the spoils of war. When we care for those wounded by war, it is not, ideally, out of obligation or because it is required duty — we may even care for the wounded when we strongly protest or abhor war; we may do so while we too, lie bleeding, scarred, raped. It is not — when we’re doing it right, in my eyes — about our ego, or about being viewed as a nice person. We have done so, when we do so, genuinely, it is out of empathy and compassion, out of love and care for our brothers, as their sisters.

A bit of the trouble I see in some men dealing with survivors (whether they be female or male, in either case, a rape victim is generally seen/experienced as feminized) is the inability to see women as sister, but instead, to see them as daughters. In other words, there can be a certain paternalism which I feel really inhibits empathy and compassion. However fine a father-figure a man may be or consider himself, if he is father and we daughter, we are not generally on equal footing, but viewed and treated as something to take care of, out of a certain feeling of duty and even ownership, rather than as someone to care for as you would a brother. (And obviously, ownership is a big issue when it comes to rape; a big issue for a survivor and a perpetrator.) I think that this dynamic is part of men feeling betrayed when discussion of men-as-rapists is brought to the table, feeling women have disrupted or sought to disband their brotherhood by identifying their brothers — literally or generally — as rapists. It is thought, sometimes, that we cannot understand brotherhood, and yet, I feel quite certain we can and do: it strikes me that perhaps a reason it is thought we cannot is because so many men cannot or do not feel we are sisters, but daughters.

Point is, I understand — I really do — it being hard as hell to gain awareness of how many men rape. I know that it hurts like hell, I know that not a one of us does NOT want the truth to be what it is.

Mark and I had a big discussion on this issue some time back. Before being with me, he really didn’t have any real rape awareness, so suffice it to say, as it tends to be for anyone, gleaning that awareness was neither a fun nor an easy process. We had a talk one night in which his brain clicked stuff together as tends to happen, and he asked the proverbial question: if one on every three or four women have been raped, that means one out of every three or four men have raped, right? And you know, I argued that that wasn’t really accurate, but shaking that from his mind wasn’t (and sometimes still isn’t) easy. He has three brothers. Sparing me, all of his closest friends are male. So, he’s sitting there, in part angry with with me — and you know, it happens: we all know about killing the messenger, but some measure of anger with them is still normal. (Some.) He’s angry with me because he does not want to think any of his brothers or friends have or would rape, and I have brought that up for consideration, by virtue of them being male. I talked (and have since) about recidivism, about how rates often differ in different communities, age groups, what have you. However, recidivism and greater incidence in certain communities/groups doesn’t change that fact that while one out of every four men might not be rapists, even when we’re talking all men (rather than in this group of friends or that), the fact of the matter is that there are a LOT of men who have raped, do rape or consider raping.

(I really appreciate Ampersand’s — who is male, and it’s odd to me that I have to point that out a lot — approach to this, by the way. For the curious on what it would mean if one study done, in which 4.5% of several thousand college men in the U.S. reported they had raped a woman, was the accurate number, take a look. Even if in the U.S. alone, rapists were were *only* that 4.5% of men…

“4.5% of the men in the United States… translates into over six million men.

To paraphrase Tim Wise: In short, “only” 4.5% of the male population is a lot of people, so that even by the most optimistic assessment of how many men are rapists, there are literally millions out there who not only would but have raped a woman. When combined with those who are less vicious - those who haven’t raped, but would be willing to in the right circumstances, and those who would make excuses for why other men rape, it becomes clear just how real a widespread a problem rape and rape-supportive attitudes are among men today.”)

But see, eventually *I* started to get mad (and do still) at even having to have that conversation in that way, with anyone, where I have to talk about all the men who aren’t rapists when I want to talk about the men who are. I explain that I too, feel angry and betrayed by how many men rape, and since I’ve not only BEEN raped, more than once, but am at a vastly greater risk of being raped again than a man is of ever being raped (especially if he’s unlikely to do time in prison, he isn’t trans or gay, nor is he often feminized: and all of those are the case with the majority of men in the world), it makes me feel all the more crappy to have this awareness because it’s also about my personal safety, on TOP of being about the same emotional betrayal., especially when you consider that the vast majority of those of us who have been raped have not been raped by a stranger, but by someone we knew, and usually had some measure of trust in.

I love the men in my life, too. I trust the men I care for, too, and I hate the idea that there are some I perhaps should not give as much trust to as I do. While I don’t have a brother-by-blood, I have had and do have brothers in spirit, whom I have loved and trusted ferociously. Who, if they raped me or anyone else, would crush my heart, and make me question everything about the people I love and trust. During the years I was teaching, I had tiny boys I cared for and cherished every day, who I loved dearly, and who I never want to imagine could become rapists (or be raped, for that matter). I do not love men less than another man does because of my sex, or because some men have hurt me. It’s ridiculous to me that that is something I even have to say to anyone at all: that I have to defend my love for men, individually and as a whole, in order to be given any credibility or patience when discussing the great harm some of them do. (As if, if I did NOT love them, that would in any way change the reality than some do that harm? Love them or not, some of them rape. Again, I feel sure that there are women out there who did love or have since loved the men who have raped me. No doubt, some of those women would likely say that don’t know any rapists, even though they climb into bed with one every night.)

(For the record, Mr. Price and I have made an awful lot of headway with this issue: most of those conversations we had a year ago, and given they were conversations he never had, it’s really pretty amazing and seriously awesome how quickly he’s processed a lot of this. He’s even gotten to be a pro per memorizing rape and abuse triggers with me and warning me in advance if we’re in situations or settings in which he thinks or knows one might come up. He doesn’t seem to get angry with me anymore for discussing this stuff: if he’s not up for the discussion, he’s gotten to the point where unless it’s clear I just HAVE to get it out there, he’ll ask to opt out.)

And really — pardon my rambling — this is the sort of thing I feel the need to call out and address. Men: it’s understandable to feel hurt, angry, even guilty-by-association to a degree, at men who rape, at the culture which enables that. I get that. We get that. And I hate that any of us have to feel that way. I wish none of us — you, me, or anyone else — did.

But to be selectively compassionate towards survivors (or even those disseminating this sort of information), to attempt to negate our realities because you don’t like them or can’t wrap your heads around them, to find us more acceptable when we are less aware, less able to work towards our own survival, is NOT OKAY. Especially if you are telling us you’re being supportive of US. More than once, for instance I have heard men complain that a given rape crisis center did not hire male help, and that complaint generally ends with, “But *I* want to help!”

Hear that “I”? That I should be the big red flag that this is about you, not about victims or survivors. That I should be your hint that you’re probably looking for something that helps YOU, not someone else, especially when the someone else’s are asking you NOT to help right now. That I should tell you all you need to know about your ability to be supportive of someone else.

(FYI, I do get the why of most rape crisis centers not having men on staff. It’s pretty obvious, especially when you recognize these are women generally calling in immediately after a rape. On the other hand, I do have a bit an issue with not having transwomen on staff. That one I don’t get.)

Nobody ever said being supportive of rape (or other trauma) survivors was easy. We KNOW it’s not easy: we’re doing most of the work, after all, and we know how much it sucks, how troubling it is, how frustrating it is, how much you want to bash your head through a wall sometimes because you’d just really like a time to come in some conceivable future where you don’t have to keep working through this damn shit you didn’t ask for in the first place. We know how difficult our awareness of these things, emotionally and intellectually, can make some of our interpersonal relationships. We are keenly aware of all of this. And you — as supporters, as partners, as friends, brothers — are either up for it, or you’re not. But if you are up for it, if you want to be, if you need to be, if you’re telling us you are, you’ve got to be up for the whole deal, not just the parts that are easiest because we are most vulnerable and at our weakest. Not just the parts where we’re victims. Also the part where we survive, and eventually — hopefully — thrive.

During some of that, you’re going to have to back the hell off. During some of that, we don’t want to be hugged, and we don’t feel like “poor dears.” During some of that, we may call you out on some of your behaviours which we feel may or do enable rape or rape culture, or which are a blockade to our healing and dealing. During some of that, you’re not going to be able to get what you might want or need from us; you might need to adapt some of your own behaviours that you don’t really want to. During some of that, or at any point, we may even ask you to reconsider friendships or alliances with other men in your life who have raped, probably would rape, set off our radars, think rape is funny in any context or who act in such a way that we feels enables rape. During some of that, you’re going to need to do your own processing without us, and not put your anger, betrayal, sadness or confusion on us.

We survivors do, and usually have done, most of our processing on our own. Maybe we have had or currently have the help of therapists, counselors, formal or informal support groups. Maybe we’ve got wonderful friends or partners, and maybe you’re one of those. But our processing is still a largely solitary activity, and you’ll probably never have any idea how much of it we do or have done.

You need to process a lot of this on your own too, or with the help of people other than us. You need to become aware of your anger and upset when it comes to our rapes, rape in general, rape culture and your feelings about rape and you, and work at putting that in the right place. You need to be aware of when something is about your needs, and when it’s about ours, and do your level best to act in accordance with both, especially when you have the lighter burden. When our healing or processing creates issues or problems in our relationships with you, you need to be committed to jointly and individually exploring and helping to manage those issues soundly and maturely, treating us as equals, while also recognizing our limitations, just as we try and stay cognizant and respectful of yours.

You need to be aware, before you offer us help and support, if that offer is about helping us, or if it’s really about helping yourself. Some of us are, for the record, happy to help you deal with some of this: just not under the guise of it being about US, and generally, not when we are in the thick of a crisis ourselves. It is advisable, however, to ASK us if we’re up to that: we do not owe it to you or anyone else to help you process or make sense of rape because we have been raped.

One of the things survivors are victimized by in rape is a total lack of boundaries. In order to help us — and not victimize us further — you need to be sure not to some of the difficulty some of us have with enforcing/having boundaries for granted (when your boundaries have been profoundly violated, rebuilding often takes a long time); you need to create and respect limits and boundaries, ours and yours.

And we will thank you for your support, and generally be very grateful for it. However, you will not receive a medal for giving it to us, nor will we think you amazingly special for getting an A because the grading curve is so low. While we recognize that that support can be incredibly difficult to give, especially during the tougher bits, we also know it to be optional, and do not want to accept it out of any spirit other than your earnest care for us and our care for you. If you have the expectation of being celebrated or seen as some sort of saint for dealing with the likes of us, I suggest you bring with that the expectation of being told to sod off when we catch on to your real motives and don’t particularly appreciate them.

* * *

To those of you men out there who have done, currently or will do the whole enchilada when it comes to support, who are willing to look at the hard stuff, and help survivors manage it; who are even willing to self-evaluate honestly in this respect, including looking at how our subordination via rape and rape culture nets privilege to you as a class, thank you. For those of you who have stood by a woman in your life for all the aspects of her healing — even the stuff that made your life far more difficult or inconvenient, thank you. For those of you who support female survivors in their sadness, anger and evaluation and are also survivors yourselves, a double-thank you. That’s no small feat. For those of you who do work to promote awareness of rape and rapists, even if your personal safety isn’t at risk, thank you, especially those of you who have to deal with other men’s disdain or resentment towards you for doing so. For those of you who help surviviors in the way THEY want to be heped, and step back from the ways they do not, even if it’s painful for you to do so, thank you.

For those of you who are trying in this respect, but not quite there yet, thank you for your continued efforts. For those of you who know you just can’t do any of this or even some of it, and know when to step back, stay out of the way, and/or voice your limitations as needed, acknowledging them as exactly that, thank you. We can’t get it all right off the bat: I sure don’t expect you to.

No matter where you’re at in this spectrum, for those of you who even took the time to read this, even if I’ve made you angry or upset, even if you don’t like hearing my words and feelings on this (and doubly, if you questioned why it was me you were feeling angry or upset with), thank you for taking the time.

* * *

(For the record, some of this stuff is also applicable to women. However, I’d have a separate letter to write to women regarding dealing with rape survivors, especially since I’ve noticed some different issues that come up there, like feelings of being “left out,” like aiding in the protection of rapists, etc. and to boot, I simply do not see the same sort of fair-weather support among women anything close to as often as I see/have experienced it with men. But the letter for women is a letter for another day. Not for today.)

P.S. M., some of this is for you, and arose out of parts of our conversation the other night. Your recent trauma was not a rape, given, but it is comparable, to say the least. I said it last night, but I’ll say it again: cut yourself a break. Healing from this stuff can take an insane amount of time and energy, and that is tiresome and maddening as hell. I’m glad you were able to get a little mad last night. I’m here if you need to get mad again, even if it’s a million times more mad than last night. I love you, and I’m here whenever you need me to be, just ask, even for the ugly, painful stuff.

(The original comments for this post are here.)

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, rape, surviving abuse, soapbox | permalink | comments (2) »

Last week I was terribly unproductive. (This week has been much better: next week best be better still.)

Having my father here was just amazing. Per usual (sparing my annoyance at the television constantly being on, especially since I’m barely used to it being in my house, period), we got into a routine almost right away, shifted right into our usual comfortable dynamic, talked a lot, walked a lot, watched movies… and I tried not to cry too much.

It’s very rare when I wish I’d made different choices in my life. I generally feel very good about the ones I have made, and the sacrifices that entails — primarily financial — are ones I can live with.

But when it comes to my Dad, I find myself wishing I had found some way to have a livelihood that involved me having money. I HATE that I had to send my Dad back to the SRO in the ghetto-hell he lives in. I hate that while he was here, it was a luxury for him to be able to walk around feeling some measure of safety; to be able to sit on a porch outside at night feeling confident he wouldn’t be shot in the head. I hate that I can’t just fix that: it should be so easy.

Sending him back home last Wednesday night was just so hard. Both because I’ll just really miss him, and because I want him to have a better life than he has, and I feel like a rotten daughter to be able to help so little. (This is about the only reason I have any investment and hope in the book selling millions of copies from a monetary perspective: wishes to the universe it does if for no other reason than it giving me the ability to move my Dad here and into someplace safe. That, and I really, really need a part-time assistant: I just get further and further behind with everything with every passing month.)

It’s reruns for anyone who has read me for a long time, but my father and I have an incredibly unique relationship. He brought a copy of “The Ballad of Jack and Rose” with him for me to watch, because, while in many respects it is a highly bizarre movie, and not representative of us, he felt the dynamic and tone of the relationship between father and daughter in that film was us to a T (and was so excited about it, he wouldn’t be quiet through the film), and he was spot-on. Strange mirror to look in, really.

I was trying to explain to Mark that in many respects, our relationship is both more sibling-like, and more spousal than parent-child. Before you get the creeps (Mark was all, “Yuck!” until I explained what I meant by that), understand that what I mean by the latter is that we’ve always shared responsibilities; it’s always been presumed I was an equal partner in our relationship and the shared aspects of our lives. In some ways, that wasn’t so great, but for an exceptionally independent child, I’m not sure what else would have really worked, and I’d say that for the most part, that approach was and has always been ideal for me.

(Save that as a small child, at one point my father insisted he’d prefer I call him Dave, rather than Dad. I became quite confused, and asked if he wasn’t my Dad. He assured me he was, but would prefer I didn’t call him that because he didn’t want to be my capital-F Father. It’s cool to give your child credit for being a smartypants, but this concept was a bit evolved for a four-year-old, especially one who once tried calling her mother by her first name in front of friends and getting a VERY negative reaction to this, which she was NOT about to risk again. Suffice it to say, after seeing me terribly tangled in his sticky web of grownup logic, he accepted that he was getting called Dad.)

Unfortunately, in the middle of my Dad’s trip, my mother also sent an email that was pretty clearly an attempt at sabotaging or sullying my Dad’s visit. I’m 36 years old, and given all the other issues my mother and I have to resolve and ever grapple with, I really, really wish that she’d find a way to let go of the negativity about my Dad. They haven’t been together for 30 years now, after all, and while it was her first relationship, and sure wasn’t easy, she’s more negative about my Dad than she was about the abusive bastard she married afterwards who nearly turned her eldest child into a total vegetable.

The time before this that I saw my Dad in Chicago — when he was doing TERRIBLY, he’s been doing much better now, he looks in far better health, he’s not as close to being on-street again — I went back to my mother’s afterward, and we ended up getting in a terrible row about him. She’d asked if I was tempted to try and care for him, and I’d explained that of COURSE I was. I explained that even given the terribleness I’d weathered with her (which I have not with him) I’d feel the same way about wanting to care for her were she in the same position. I took the time to try and talk a bit even about how hard it was to have my two parents in such radically different positions financially and per their quality of life. And she started in with the sort of thing she’d say to me when I was a child, about how she knew him so much better than I did, blah blah blah. I was angry enough that I found the chutzpah to explain that at that point, I had spent DECADES close to my father… and she had not, so it was really ludicrous at that point to tell me she knew someone better she’d been with for a handful of years who I had spent far, far more time with in my life.

That, for whatever reason, seemed to sink in that time, to my amazement. So, I expressed that henceforth, I just could NOT listen to any more strife about my father, whom she hasn’t had to deal with at all, in any respect, since I left home in my teens, and that I really expected her to respect that, especially since I felt it was just really out of order to keep putting me in the middle of a one-sided battle (my father has never talked shit about my mother to me, ever, not even when it would have been totally valid) for the whole of my life, over someone I cared very deeply for.

I thought we had an understanding on that, but the passive-aggressive email I got belied that. It’s a tough spot to be in, because pretty much since birth, my father and I have had this Heather-and-Dad-against-the-world relationship that didn’t leave room for anyone else. Even before the awfulness in my mother’s house started, our relationship was very exclusive, and I think for my mother, it meant that she didn’t get the love she wanted or expected from EITHER of us. I can imagine that all dysfunction aside, and the fact that she very much really screwed me in ways she shouldn’t have back when, we made her feel very lonely. I can imagine that it probably hurts to see how much closer I am to him than I have ever been to her, but in the same vein, the opposite is true for my sister, so it isn’t as if she doesn’t have a close relationship with a child. And lord knows, if I had NOT had the relationship I had with my father I would have been a complete basket case, and someone unable to have any kind of relationship with anyone at all, let alone my mother. Of course, too, it’s not as if as children we choose which family we connect with and who connects best with us: that I’m more like my father than I am my mother, and always have been, is in large part, hardly something I could have controlled.

Barghblehgah. Family crap. Never easy to navigate, especially in any kind of public forum, but it’s not that much easier in my head, either. I still, two weeks later, haven’t figured out how to even respond to that letter. “For the love of Pete, knock it the fuck OFF already,” is about all I’ve come up with, and I don’t see that exactly netting the best results.

In any event, the visit was wonderful. I’m so, so grateful my father was finally able to get disability, because being able to see him having gained a little bit of weight, in clean clothes, knowing that however shitty the roof, he’s got one over his head makes all the difference. It was a real treat being able to make him beautiful dinners, share some good wine, take walks, watch him play with the dog, have us both smoke too much, talk too much, and watch Mark’s amusement at our doppleganger-like mannerisms and behaviors. That I got to also have Briana and The Baby Liam here in the middle of his visit just made it all the better, especially since my Dad has always had that awesome baby and kid magnetism that just makes kids happy to be near him. It was cool to watch him with a wee one: it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. All in all, the whole works was cool: even when it’s tough, even when we’re at some kind of odds, my Dad is someone I just never get tired of being around.

Thus, though, my lack of productivity in the days immediately following. It’s hard to have the people you care for so close to you and then so far away again.

I have to get started on some backlogged photo editing today. Among what needs to be edited, I was really pleased that my father let me take some portraits of him. He doesn’t really like having his photo taken, never really has, and he wasn’t the most cooperative subject, but it seemed like such a tragedy to do so much portrait work, yet have nothing (save one of the first photo portraits I ever did, actually) of the person who is likely the most important person I’ve had with me throughout my life. I didn’t get many, but the few I did just make me really happy.

* * *

I don’t believe it’s about concern for young women’s ability to follow the instructions for EC, as I said in a comment here to one of the AGA bloggers posts about EC:

Two years earlier in age, young women have, and are given, the ability to follow the directions for driving a CAR, on the road, with other cars. It’s also an easy okay that married women under 18 have the ability to REAR A CHILD. Our culture has ZERO problem with putting young teens on antidepressants or Ritalin, and no trouble entertaining the idea they can use those ably. Our culture has women under the age of 18 graduating high school, passing the SAT, readying to begin military service, college, job training. And yet, we’re supposed to believe that all of these young women could not possibly handle the complexity of the following instructions on the package of levonorgestrel: Take 1 white pill within 120 hours after unprotected sex and 1 more white pill 12 hours later.

And I can’t fathom that anyone in charge believes any of us are so stupid not to see the conflict in that.

* * *

* * *

P.P.S. Found a helper (thanks, William!) to help me shift the journal over to Wordpress, so hopefully, sometime soon, that’ll come together and make updating a fuck of a lot easier. This once-a-month stuff is just ridiculous.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, Mr. Price, family | permalink | comments (0) »