In case you haven’t noticed in your Internet travels, we’re getting towards the end of our big end-of-year fundraising drive for Scarleteen.  This drive is crucially important for Scarleteen as an organization and for myself as its executive director and lone full-time staffer. I haven’t blogged about it here yet, because I was holding out for this week.

From Friday morning through Sunday night, two awesome donors will be matching funds raised up to $2,500.  As of right this second, we’re at 1/3rd of our goal, which we have raised since releasing our appeal a little less than one month ago.  I’m hoping that over the weekend, we’ll be able to make some serious headway: while we really need to reach our goal, even if we can raise $2,500 to have it all matched, we’ll be past the halfway mark, which will also make a tremendous difference.

So, I’m including our appeal here.  You can check in with our meter on the site to see how we’re doing on the home page for the appeal here, if you like. If you can give during this time period, that’d be absolutely fantastic: same goes for getting the appeal out in front of more eyeballs.  Thanks so much!

You probably know Scarleteen has been the premier online sexuality resource for young people worldwide since 1998. We have consistently provided free inclusive, comprehensive and positive sex education, information and support to millions for longer than anyone else online. We built the online model for teen and young adult sex education and have remained online for nearly eleven years to sustain, refine and expand it.

What you might not know is that Scarleteen is the highest ranked online young adult sexuality resource but also the least funded and that the youth who need us most are also the least able to donate. You might not know that we have done all we have with a budget lower than the median annual household income in the U.S. You might not know we have provided the services we have to millions without any federal, state or local funding and that we are fully independent media which depends on public support to survive and grow.

You also might not know Scarleteen is primarily funded by people who care deeply about teens having this kind of vital and valuable service; individuals like you who want better for young people than what they get in schools, on the street or from initiatives whose aim is to intentionally use fearmongering, bias and misinformation about sexuality to try to scare or intimidate young people into serving their own personal, political or religious agendas.

To try and reach our goal, we’re asking our supporters to consider a donation of $100 or greater. If that isn’t possible for you, whatever you give will still help and will still be strongly appreciated. To donate now, click on one of the links below. If you’d first like more information on why we’re setting the goal we are, what Scarleteen has done in the last year and during the whole of our tenure, our plans for 2010, and what the scoop is with our budget and expenses, keep reading.

Ready To Donate Right This Very Second?

• To donate to Scarleteen by credit card, online check or via a PayPal account: click here and choose the button at the top of that page for the donation amount and style you prefer.

• To donate by check or money order directly to Scarleteen: make checks payable to Scarleteen and send to: Scarleteen, 1752 NW Market Street #627, Seattle, WA, 98107.

• If you would like your donation to be tax-deductible: you can donate through The Center for Sex and Culture, a fiscal sponsor of Scarleteen online here (scroll down to the option to donate to Scarleteen on the left side of that page). To mail a tax-deductible donation, make your check out to The Center for Sex and Culture, writing “For Scarleteen” in the memo. Mail that to: The Center for Sex and Culture, c/o Carol Queen, 2215-R Market Street PMB 455, San Francisco, CA, 94114. They will send a written acknowledgment of your donation to you for tax purposes, and will send us donations made to them on our behalf after deducting a very reasonable percentage.

• However you choose to donate, if you want to be listed as a donor on our site, please send us an email to let us know how you’d like to be acknowledged.

Want some more information? So far, in 2009 Scarleteen has:

Had around 1 million overall hits to the site each day from an average of 25,000 unique users daily. Scarleteen has a very high page-load rate as compared to other websites: on average, our users load 3.5 pages each when visiting Scarleteen. Since 2006 alone, our site has had over one billion overall hits and nearly 70 million page loads.

Currently, Scarleteen is the #1 ranked site by Alexa for teen sexuality education/information and for general sexuality advice for users of all ages. It is ranked 27,823 of all websites internationally, and is ranked 11,210th in the United States (on 10/12/2009). Our core users are international, 15-24 and diverse in their race, gender and sexual orientation. To see some of our user testimonials, click here.

To find out more about our educational philosophies and model, you may want to read Scarleteen Is…, What Is Feminist Sex Education?, On Innovation and Inclusivity in Sex Education, A Calm View from the Eye of the Storm: Hysteria, Youth and Sexuality or look at our general about page. If you’ve never taken the time to just look around the site as a whole, please do!

Engaged in over 4,000 conversations with young people on our message boards, providing them factual and friendly answers on contraception, sexual anatomy, safer sex, sexual health, masturbation, interpersonal relationships and other related topics; helping them through struggles like pregnancy scares or unplanned pregnancies, STIs, sexual harassment, rape and intimate partner violence or abuse; talking them through relationships and breakups, family conflicts, gender, sexual identity or body image issues and their sexual decision-making; discussing political issues pertinent to sexuality and youth rights. Most posts at the boards are answered within a few hours, some within minutes. Many of our board users return to the boards again and again for more help, to engage in deeper discussions or to talk with or support other users.

In total our boards have over 43,000 registered users who have posted over 60,000 topics: all have been answered by one or more of Scarleteen’s staff and volunteers. Our boards are fully moderated and a safe space for young people. To help protect our users from potential harassment, they may not share personal information like full names, e-mail addresses, messenger or social networking handles or personal webpages. Managing and moderating the message boards often requires the bulk of our staff and volunteer time.

Answered nearly 100 column-length young adult questions in our Sexpert Advice section, which is also syndicated weekly at RH Reality Check. There are around 900 Sexpert Advice columns in total published at the site. However, our advice queue typically has over 500 questions waiting for answers. In order to catch up with this backlog, we need the funds to acquire more staff to handle the high demand for the longer, in-depth answers our advice column provides and our users are seeking there.

Generated fresh static content. So far this year, we have posted 42 blog entries, half of which were penned by young adult volunteers, and have added more than ten new full articles to the site. Some of our most recent articles include Positively Informed: An HIV/AIDS Roundup, Boys Do Cry: How To Deal With a Breakup Like a Man, An Immodest Proposal, Chicken Soup for the Pregnancy Symptom Freakout’s Soul, Let’s Get Metaphysical: The Etiquette of Entry, Give’em Some Lip: Labia That Clearly Ain’t Minor and Love Letter. We have also added several new youth-written articles this year, and updated several existing articles to be sure our information is accurate and timely.

Excluding the message boards (where there are tens of thousands of pages), Scarleteen currently contains around 1500 pages of content: articles, advice answers, blogs, external resource listings, polls and more. We are not able to pay authors for articles, though we often are queried by authors we’d love to hire who have great ideas. An increase in our budget would allow us to provide more new articles and to further diversify Scarleteen’s editorial voice.

Received media coverage: In the last year, Scarleteen was mentioned by/in Salon, Glamour, BUST magazine, Medill Reports, TIME Magazine, City on a Hill Press, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, Utne Reader, CBS News and other outlets. To see some of this and more media coverage for Scarleteen in previous years, click here.

Provided direct community education and outreach: In the last year, Scarleteen director Heather Corinna gave talks to sex education students, sex educators and sexologists, youth and/or their allies via presentations at or for the University of Texas (NSRC Regional Training), the sex::tech conference, the American Medical Students Association, Harvard College, the NARAL Youth Summit and Garfield High School directly reaching around 350 total participants. In addition, through the CONNECT program for Washington Corinna currently directs through Cedar River Clinics, direct to-youth sex education was provided on an ongoing basis both to Cedar River young adult clients and homeless teens in Seattle at Spruce Street SCRC, a secure residential shelter. In 2010, Scarleteen will inherit the CONNECT program and continue Seattle-based direct outreach. We also have plans to continue providing information and education both to youth and other educators via conferences, summits and other public outreach opportunities nationally. In addition, with the help of a student intern, Scarleteen is preparing four informative pamphlets for print and distribution to clinics, schools and other groups which serve young people on sexual readiness, consent, managing sexuality after rape or abuse and on how to be queer and trans friendly.

New at Scarleteen in 2009

In 2009 we ran a pilot program to train young adult peer sex educators online. To find out about that program and see what trainees had to say about their experience click here. We want to provide two more sessions of the training for 60 trainees in 2010. We have also just debuted a new SMS service for young people to text sexuality, sexual health and relationship questions to us and have them answered on their mobile phones. For more information on the text-in service, click here. As with all of our services, both of these new services are provided at no cost to youth.

Goals for 2010:

On top of continuing the existing services we provide, we would like to continue to grow, adding new sections, functions and levels of service.

• Find-a-Doc is a user-fueled database we’d like to build to help young people find the in-person sexual and reproductive healthcare, counseling, LGBTQ support, rape and sexual abuse survivor support and other services related to sexuality they need. Unlike many adults, young people often lack the ability to get a recommendation from a friend: many of their peers and partners do not often yet use or know where to get these services, either. Some do, but are reluctant to disclose they have used them. This database would allow a user to enter one of these services they have used and would reccomend to another young person. Scarleteen staff will validate the service/provider by phone before publishing the listing. Our users in need of these services will be able to search for these services by choosing the type of service they are looking for and entering a zip code.  They will also be able to read comments from others who have used these providers/services to help them make their best choices in care. Find-a-Doc has been on our list of to-do’s for two years now, but the budget has not yet allowed us to pay a tech developer what would be needed to build it.

• Improved Mobile Performance: More and more users are accessing the web via their mobile phones.  While Scarleteen is currently browsable via mobile, it is not optimized for that use.  Site improvements for mobile use can help us expand our reach and the ability of users to get to us exactly when and where they need us.

• Volunteer stipends: Our volunteers are an integral part of Scarleteen. Most of them are young adults themselves, and having peer or near-peer voices and perspectives on the site is crucial to keeping Scarleteen youth-centered and accessible in tone for young people. Not only do our volunteers have their own valuable experiences in working as volunteers, they help keep parts of the site running smoothly and assure our users who are asking for one-on-one interaction get it from caring, compassionate and informed people. And the longer we can sustain a volunteer, the more skilled they become. Beyond slathering them in thanks and providing them skills and training, having some reasonable stipends is one way we can help retain the volunteers we value so much.  For more about our volunteers, as well as more about our executive director, Sexpert Advice authors and guest authors, click here.

• Scarleteen would like to increase our traffic and our reach. Increased reach not only means more young people getting the sex information they want and need, it also can help support Scarleteen by creating greater opportunities for fiscal sponsorships and advertisers. Scarleteen has never purchased any kind of advertising to let young people know about our services. Given that all of our traffic has been via direct referrals and word-of-mouth, just imagine how many youth we might be able to reach with other means of promoting the site. We would also like to serve our global reach better by adding more sexual health resources specifically tailored to our users in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the South Pacific.

What We’ve Got & What We Need: As of November 1st, 2009, Scarleteen has received approximately $42,000 in grants and donations, the bulk of which has come from a single private grant. Only around $8,000 of that total has come from individual donations, $3,000 of which was from a single donor. To meet our needs for 2009 and the start of 2010, we need $70,000 in total financial support. Our goal now is to raise at least $24,000 in the next two months to meet our needs and cover the costs of 2009, as well as to walk into 2010 on financially healthy footing.

Beginning next year, we will require a minimum annual operating budget of $75,000 and the revenue to support it. While that is a substantial increase from our existing budget, it is essential: our existing budget cannot adequately sustain our staff or the organization as a whole. That new minimum budget is also still incredibly low: it accounts for the site running at a total of around $200 a day to provide all of the services we do to all of the young people and their allies who use them.

75K is exceptionally cost-effective and reasonable for the level of service we provide, especially compared to other organizations and initiatives, including those which do not match our reach and our level of direct-service. To find out details about our budget and expenses, and to compare them to other budgets and expenses of both similar and opposing sex education initiatives, click here.

As you can see, we need your help.

Please make a donation if you are able, and consider the value and level of the services we provide to young people in doing so. A $100 donation can pay a major chunk of our server bill for a month, or half the monthly cost of the SMS service, or, can fund any kind of use of the site, including one-on-one counsel and care, for around 10,000 of our daily users. However, we would very much appreciate your a donation at any level.

We’d also be grateful if you’d share our appeal with your own networks to broaden ours, and let the people who care about you know why you care so much about us.

In advance, we thank you for all you can give us and all you do or have done in support of Scarleteen.  We fully intend to keep doing all we can to give just as much back.

Once More with Feeling

• To donate to Scarleteen by credit card, online check or via a PayPal account: click here and choose the button at the top of that page for the donation amount and style you prefer.

• To donate by check or money order directly to Scarleteen: make checks payable to Scarleteen and send to: Scarleteen, 1752 NW Market Street #627, Seattle, WA, 98107.

• If you would like your donation to be tax-deductible: you can donate through The Center for Sex and Culture, a fiscal sponsor of Scarleteen online here (scroll down to the option to donate to Scarleteen on the left side of that page). To mail a tax-deductible donation, make your check out to The Center for Sex and Culture, writing “For Scarleteen” in the memo. Mail that to: The Center for Sex and Culture, c/o Carol Queen, 2215-R Market Street PMB 455, San Francisco, CA, 94114. They will send a written acknowledgment of your donation to you for tax purposes, and will send us donations made to them on our behalf after deducting a very reasonable percentage.

• However you choose to donate, if you want to be listed as a donor on our site, please send us an email to let us know how you’d like to be acknowledged.

If you would like to support us in some other way, such as through advertising, sponsorship or by volunteering your time or if you have any questions about donating, we’d love to hear from you.  You can contact us via e-mail here.

P.S. If you’re curious about how I’m doing, this is me in a nutshell: I have the working-too-long-on-fundraising crazies.  My main computer here kicked it a few weeks back, and thankfully I got a good deal on a new system, but am still switching everything over, which is the pain that stuff always is. (And means the new photo work I have ready will still be a wait, as I will now need to learn and use a whole new application for the site here.) The dogs are getting along swimmingly.  Blue and I are happy as clams, even though it is freezing cold in this house and we rarely see one another without hats on, that given.  I’m overworked, but what else is new? I need more coffee, but what else is new?

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, events, education, workworkwork, a boy named Blue | permalink | comments (2) »

I’m up all too early because I head back to work in-clinic today in order to start a new part of the CONNECT program.

Basically, I’m bringing sex ed and CR into the clinic, giving women in the waiting room an option to come sit in the cozier room with me and other clients to do Q&A and discuss all things sexuality, reproductive health, sexual health, abortion, relationships, the works.  Hopefully, I can find a way to do this so that I don’t seem like a clown sent into the old folks home: I need to figure out a way to invite them in where I’m not poking my head into the waiting room, hawking my wares with a “Yo, sex education is in the house!”

All the same, I’m excited. It feels like a first day of school: I even have some new school supplies.  This is one of the first things I proposed to diversify the works and help our clients when I took over directing the outreach program.  If all goes well, they stand to learn a lot, I stand to learn a lot, and I think it could be a truly marvelous thing.  Plus, I have really missed being in the clinic over the last monthish, and I’m really looking forward to giving my co-workers big, bear hugs.

In other news, I am hoping to present a panel with a group of fine, fine women at the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival and I need your assistance.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, sexuality, events, shameless self-promotion, education, workworkwork | permalink | comments (4) »

Here are the details, by the by, for my two public San Fran events next weekend. I cut and paste the blurbs that Carol wrote directly because…well, she always makes me sound better than I do myself.

The first is a more casual reception:
Friday, August 8, 5:30-8 pm — SCARLETEEN RECEPTION: MEET HEATHER CORINNA

Join us in welcoming Heather Corinna, sex educator and activist, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, and author of “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.” Heather, via her superb website Scarleteen, serves tens of thousands of teens and young adults internationally every day, making sure they have a trusted place to ask questions they can’t ask anyone else. Heather will catch us up on the history of Scarleteen and we’ll give her some much-deserved love! If you’ve ever thought about volunteering for the site, come meet Heather and talk to her about it.

No charge, but we will gladly accept donations and split them between the Center for Sex & Culture and Scarleteen! CSC now accepts Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, as well as personal checks. At the Center for Sex & Culture (room 1), 1519 Mission near 11th.

The second is more of a discussion and presentation:
Sunday, August 10, 2-4 pm — HEATHER CORINNA SPEAKS OUT! YOUTH, SEXUALITY, AND SEX ED

Join Heather Corinna, sex educator and activist, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, and author of “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College” for an afternoon discussing young adult sexuality and inclusive, feminist, comprehensive sex education for teens and young adults. Find out about the current state of YA sexuality and sexual health trends, needs and issues from someone who serves tens of thousands of teens internationally every day, and discuss your own needs and concerns in addressing, parenting, mentoring and supporting this important population.

$5-20 sliding scale, and we will gladly accept donations and split them between the Center for Sex & Culture and Scarleteen! CSC now accepts Visa, MasterCard, and Discover, as well as personal checks. At the Center for Sex & Culture (room 1), 1519 Mission near 11th.

posted in Heather Corinna, events, shameless self-promotion, travel exhuasts me, workworkwork | permalink | comments (1) »

Not much to see here, but if you’re in Minneapolis, I’ll be back there for a photography project for Elise at Fourth Street between the 17th and 23rd of June.

Because I will have to have at least one of my cameras fixed for the event (and because Yelehneb was awesome enough to give me a coupon for a repair as a birthday present), even though I’m still behind on editing, if anyone local there wants a photo session, I can probably fit one or two in so long as they’re during one of those weekdays and clients have a space for us to work in, rather than something I need to arrange.  As well, while at 4th St. I can do author photos for anyone attending who needs something new, and I’m happy to be flexible with rates.

Suffice it to say, I’ll also email friends this week to set some time up.  I don’t know for the life of me how Minneapolis wound up feeling like home when I only lived there six years, but it did, and I still miss everyone there ferociously.  I am also very much looking forward to some swarthy, muggy Midwest summer.

Whoever said summer actually happens is Seattle was a big ‘ol liar.  Summer is when you SWEAT like nobody’s business, not when it’s okay to go without a sweater.

posted in Heather Corinna, photography & art, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (1) »

I had an abortion in my early twenties.

It was not easy to afford. I was working sixty hours a week, in a fledgling business with a lot of overhead expenses. I was fresh out of a college education I had paid for myself, and was also caring for a parent at the time. There were no resources through public health in Chicago I could use to help with the expense. My partner was pitching in for half, but all the same, coming up with four hundred dollars was an additional struggle during an experience which was already challenging without any financial issues at play.

That four hundred dollars seemed like a whole lot then. But when it all comes down to it, it’s very little, and what I had to do to come up with it was so small in comparison to the experiences other women go through to obtain their abortions right now.

I had the luck of knowing almost right away that I had become pregnant. Plenty of women don’t find out before their sixth week, like I did. Given how many have irregular menstrual cycles or skip periods with birth control, don’t experience morning sickness or other early pregnancy symptoms, or are in such poor health already that feeling ill is normal, plenty don’t know until their seventh week, their twelfth week, even their twentieth week. For those women, an abortion isn’t going to cost four hundred dollars, but eight hundred, twelve hundred, even two thousand dollars or more and some only find that out once at the clinic. I had the privilege of being able to not only know I was pregnant very early, but the ability to raise money in a short enough period of time that I could get an early abortion which only cost that much. Some women know as early as I did, but are unable to raise the money for an early procedure. For them, every extra week it takes creates a new hurdle as each extra week also elevates their cost, as well as their distress by pushing them closer and closer to the point at which a termination will no longer be an option.

I had the luxury of having a provider a mere three miles from my apartment. But less than 15% of women in the United States have an abortion provider in their county, let alone a ten-minute bus ride away. Those women also have to factor in the time and cost of travel, lodging and meals into the already costly expense of their procedure.

I was able to have an early, first-trimester abortion so I also only had to be at the clinic for a few hours on one day. I did not have to risk my job by needing to take a week off of work for a procedure I probably couldn’t tell my employer about without risking biased treatment ever after. I did not have to worry about having even less money than usual because I needed a week off without pay. I did not have to push myself to get right back to work when I really should have been resting and risk my health in order to make up for the money I spent on my procedure.

I was a working adult, not a teenager: I had my own source of income to help pay for my abortion. I had working friends who I could ask for funds and support. I didn’t have to consider asking my parents, knowing it could compound my trauma and potentially put me at risk of being held back from getting a termination, nor did I have to face those I asked for help denying me funds because they figured I deserved the “punishment” of a child for having sex, having my birth control method fail, not knowing how to use it, not having one at all, or because I had a partner refuse to use a method or cooperate with mine. Because I was employed, period, I did not have to worry about being able to eat or pay my rent that month due to the cost of the abortion sapping all of my funds.

I had my partner’s support and was financially independent, so I had no reason to be concerned with that partner freezing me out of shared bank accounts to pay for my procedure, or refusing to help me with travel to a provider. I did not have to worry that disclosing to a partner or parent that I was pregnant, and that I needed help financially to obtain an abortion, might put me at a possible or known risk of abuse or assault. Because I was living in a city where my reproductive choices were largely supported, I did not have to try and hide my pregnancy or my abortion, or spend extra money to get a ride from a friend, take a cab a town or two over to use a different pharmacy for my medications.

Coming up with the money I had to was also easier for me because I was childfree, unlike the majority of women who have abortions. I wasn’t having to scrape by to support two or three children at the time while also paying for my procedure. I didn’t have to arrange or pay for child care during and after my abortion.

I had a place to stay after my procedure, and lived with a person who was safe for me, so I did not have to worry about my safety during a time that is critical for self-care to prevent infections and complications, or that my lack of money would prevent me from being able to stay somewhere safe during and after my procedure. I could also afford the medications I needed to manage my cramps and to help prevent infection, and could afford to feed myself the day of and after my procedure.

And because I had the means and the support to budget for and use two sound methods of contraception after my procedure, I did not have to go to sleep at night knowing that it was likely I would have to wind up having another termination to go through and pay for, another unwanted pregnancy, very soon after dealing with the one I’d just gone through. I could afford both getting my methods of birth control and paying for them over time.

Many women do not have these abilities, privileges or luxuries. Many either may not be able to have a wanted or needed abortion at all — they may not earnestly have the real, practical right many of us still do of reproductive choice — or they may risk being unable to have all that is needed to make an abortion truly safe and sound, physically and emotionally. Some will put themselves at tremendous risks to try and raise those funds in ways which are unsafe and emotionally traumatic. Some who cannot afford a wanted abortion will seek to self-abort or otherwise endanger themselves. Some will instead have to continue an unwanted pregnancy and deliver a child who is not wanted and who they cannot afford to sustain or nurture, from pregnancy through the whole of that child’s life.

Any of us who has been pregnant knows that what choice we feel is right for us with a pregnancy is not minor: it is essential. Pregnancy is major, and how it impacts our lives, tremendous. Being unable to make our own right choice, to only reproduce and remain pregnant when it is what we want, right for us and when we feel it is right for any child we might bring into the world is tragic and inhumane. As it is, even when we can manage the cost, we have to face protests and challenges from individuals and governments to our essential rights, judgment everywhere we look about a decision no one but we can determine is appropriate, all while often straining to keep our lunches down and continue, uninterrupted, the hectic pace of our lives.

In an ideal world, every woman’s right to choose would be completely supported, and every woman’s knowledge of what was right for herself and her offspring would be respected. Women would have no trouble at all finding all the financial, practical and emotional support needed to only reproduce when that was exactly what we wanted.

We don’t live in that world. We live in a world where, at best, abortion is merely tolerated, and rights expressly for women and children, which primarily or solely impact women and children when granted, are granted as if a great favor is being given, rather than an equal and inalienable right. The political climate we live in now has been doing more and more to keep the legal right to abortion from being practically useful: our right to abortion is only so meaningful when the barriers to it continue to grow. We live in a world where most women make less on the dollar than most men — and where seeking legal protection against that discrimination is still often viewed as frivolous — despite often having a greater financial burden to begin with. We live in a world where many Medicaid programs and private insurance will cover Viagra (even for sex offenders), but not abortion or birth control. Where many women have little or no consistent access to reliable, affordable and safe methods of birth control and plenty have partners that do not support use of those methods even when those women can afford and access them. We live in a world where those who most often tend to find themselves in the most need of an abortion and with the most limitations on getting one are not only women, but women of color, women in poverty, women who were not born (or are not yet) U.S. citizens, disabled women, women with addictions, women who are legal minors, women who have been or are raped, assaulted or abused: women who are marginalized and who have less privilege beyond simply being women.

I cannot imagine having to sneak across state lines so I can obtain an abortion without my father forcibly dragging me out of a clinic as he did two times before. I cannot imagine how, with three children and a coming eviction, I could possibly save for a procedure. I cannot imagine having to have a three-day termination while my only home was a bench on the street, or at home with a partner or family member I knew would beat me when I returned there. I cannot imagine feeling I had no choice but to remain pregnant and deliver a child I strongly suspected would be born profoundly disabled because of a drug addiction I was trying to break free of. I cannot imagine having just emigrated and finding myself in the position to have to pay for an abortion while working for a wage that is a human rights violation in and of itself. I cannot imagine the two-week waiting period advised to abstain from vaginal sex after an abortion to prevent infection seeming a practical impossibility because without engaging in sex work during that period, a woman cannot support herself or her family. I have met the women who have been in these situations and others like them, and have seen a profound helplessness and desperation that no woman should have to experience during an already difficult time.

But I have also met these women and literally watched some of that helplessness dissipate; seen their worries interrupted by an exhale of relief when I can offer them financial help with their abortions.

Cedar River’s Women in Need fund helps to cover the costs of abortion, lodging, transportation, childcare, meals, pregnancy testing, ultrasound and contraception for women who cannot afford or completely cover any or all of these things, even after exhausting every resource they’ve got. The National Network of Abortion Funds has listings for our fund as well as other funds like it you can either use for yourself, refer other women to, or help with a donation. It doesn’t take much, either. The medications needed after a procedure are often less than $20. Meals for a couple of days, $25. Three months of contraception, $75. Lodging for a night, around $100. Enough to cover the portion of a procedure a woman can’t, that $400 that seemed so tough for me to save up, but which is comparatively miniscule.

Because I work part-time for Cedar River, because we serve women from several states and more than one country and also include terminations beyond the first trimester, because we’re one of the last remaining independent feminist women’s health centers in the states which offers abortions, and because we’re having a benefit for our fund on Monday evening, I’d like to ask you to contribute to ours. I’ve administered some of these funds myself, and have spent time with some of the women who need them: I know, first-hand, how important our fund is, what a difference it can make and how it positively impacts the lives of the women we can help with it. I have watched women who would otherwise have been unable to make the choice they know was right for them, or who could not have had what they needed to assure all aspects of their procedure was safe have that ability due to our WIN fund. I give to it myself via a percentage of my paycheck every two weeks, and while I certainly need the income for myself, giving what I can to that fund is something I feel is very important and a really small sacrifice. Of course, some financial help with an abortion does not usually have the capacity to fix everything wrong in a woman’s life, to wipe away inequities and hardships which are bigger than all of this. In some ways, it’s a band-aid, but it can be one critical in keeping a deep wound from getting even deeper; causing further infection in an already fragile balance of well-being and survival. At the times I administer that fund to a client, it’s amazing to see, directly, how my small contribution can sometimes literally change the landscape of a woman’s life, both through being able to make the choice she knows is right and needed, and through being shown a much-needed kindness, sometimes for the very first time.

If you’re in or near Seattle, our benefit tomorrow night for the WIN fund begins at 5:00 at the Karma Martini Lounge & Bistro (where I also had my book release party last year), on 2318 2nd Avenue in Belltown. You can have a few drinks with us and donate there, and hear a little more about what this fund does. Or, you can donate through our website here. Again, if you’d like to give to an abortion fund but prefer to give to women in your area or some other specific area, or even start a fund in an area where there is not one yet, you can take a look at a listing of funds like ours here through the NNAF.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, activism, feminism, seattle, events, abortion | permalink | comments (5) »

…and nearly just as soon as I’m back, I’m off again.

Thanks to the National Sexuality Resource Center and SFSU, I’m heading to San Francisco tomorrow for a few days to accept my Champions of Sexual Literacy award, do a couple events including telling my (beyond undramatic) coming out story on stage and giving a talk at the Center for Sex and Culture on YA sexuality and sex education issues. As an extra bonus, I’ll be fitting in two photo sessions, one with a longtime reader and another with Melissa, catching up with Carol and Robert, who are two of my favorite people in the entire universe, and hopefully also getting a chance to see Anne and Cathy, because it’s been too long, dining at the Millennium, which is basically where vegans go to die when we have been VERY good, and my editor and I will finally get to have all those glasses of wine together that we wanted so badly throughout the process of producing the book.

Of course, I had the best of intentions in the days between coming back from Victoria and leaving for SF when it came to getting a ton of things done. Very, very few of those things are done. My primary interest while back home was staring at the wall, eating, and taking several hot baths.

But this is it, for the most part: after the San Fran trip, I won’t have to do any traveling for a while. The weekend after next, my sweetie was a total peach and arranged for a weekend away for us — and with the dog, no less! — in Port Townsend for us here.

The Victoria trip was fantastic. Sarah is the absolute best, even though I think we both needed ice for our jaws after yapping for three days solid. The events were both very packed and very awesome. And on the ferry home, as it turns out, I found myself seated next to an older couple, and in no time at all, we discovered that we had quite the thing in common: she was a member of the Planned Parenthood board in Long Island, and I do what I do. So, pencil in three more hours of breakneck gabbery.

I’ve made it no secret here that I’m not a fan of public speaking. Really, a big part of the reason why after many juvenile and adolescent years of hardcore musical training, I pretty much ditched it as something I was going to do as work, full-time, was because while I loved (and still do) making music, I never liked performing. It was never awful, but it wasn’t something I enjoyed, either. For a long time that was the same story with the public speaking, until a handful of years ago I became downright phobic about it, for no real rhyme or reason. The mere thought of it would make me nauseated and clammy, and in the actual doing, my voice would never stop shaking, my knees would feel like they were going to fall out from under me, and I was having to keep myself from puking or wetting my pants the whole time. The only thing I looked forward to with it was the talk being over.

It got so bad that a few years ago, I was invited to be featured in this amazingly high-profile feminist conference, and while I was so honored, and so badly wanted to do it, I ended up declining because I was relatively certain I’d just never come out of my hotel room to give the talk. Mind, it didn’t help that I was told half the university and organization REALLY wanted me to talk there and half REALLY did not, but still, my issue, and a really serious case of disappointment-in-self.

However tired I am, and however much I just want to sit in front of my fireplace for several months without leaving, one huge benefit of doing all these book events over the last six months has been that I feel okay about public speaking again. I mean, I’d still rather NOT be doing it, but once the first few minutes are over, I’m okay, and it’s no longer terrifying. That’s a pretty serious boon.

I am still nervous enough that I get babbly.

REALLY babbly.

I’ve come to the conclusion that since everyone listening always looks mighty entertained and very alert, that must be okay, but I still feel like a bit of a dolt about my mouth running five feet ahead of the rest of me most of the time, and seeming to have limited control of what comes out of my big yap. Am I an educator and an activist, or am I a clown? Dunno, but at least no one ever looks bored.

While I was in Victoria, Sarah and I filmed a segment for a documentary that is centered around a male photographer who does vulva photographs in the interest of improving female body image. While I’m not exactly the most excited ever about most projects that are male-led in order to help save us women from our own crappy self-image, the guy’s heart certainly seems to be in the right place, and the photo work is pretty decent.

We watched the current edit of the documentary before going to film, and both were commenting — in good spirits, but still — on some of the level of batty of some of the female experts on there. Betty (Dodson) is always batty, and in such a lovely way, but still, yanno… batty. There was some other woman whose batty was far less charming, and just plain kooky and counterproductive in my view, going on about how you could tell what the inside of a woman’s vagina was like by the appearance of her external vulva.

(Umm, yeah. She didn’t suggest that she made a habit or even an occasional practice of actually putting her hands into women’s vaginas for these theories, personally or professionally, but I was so wishing I had met her in person so I could drop my pants, ask her to take a look and make her prediction, then ask her to lube up, go on in there and find out if there was any truth in her vagina…psychicry? Psychicness? I don’t know what the term is for the act of being a psychic: whatever it is, that word. I also had a moment of feeling incredibly glad I wasn’t dating women at the moment, because I would SO have wanted to make a game out of this and see if I might become a vulva psychic myself. For all I know, that gig just might not leave me broke like this one does. Imagine how many parties you could book! It’s totally better than some guy pulling rabbits out of hats.)

So, we go to film, and one void we noticed in the edit we saw was that there was a lot of talk about poor body image coming from porn. That’s valid, and I certainly think it can be an issue, but if you start and stop there, I think you miss a LOT of other important issues and a big part of the picture. Women suffered with poor body image, and especially poor genital body image, well before mass-produced porn — and with the wide availability of amateur porn, and self-made porn, while I think porn can play a big hand in problems with sexual self-image, sexual gender roles, and with overall body image, I’m not so sure that it’s the right place to pin poor genital image for women on, since if they’re looking at more of the DIY or amateur stuff, most of those performers have not had labiaplasties. Many with breast implants, to be sure, nearly all very femme, and the endless lack of body hair, but to my understanding, labiaplasties? Not so much.

Anyway, we’re gabbing about this, together on screen, and discussing the fact that because the male genitals are so externally visible, that men have the benefit of being able to just walk into a group shower or locker room and see a wide array of penises. Without having a same-sex lover, or other opportunities to see real genitalia that require a lot more intimacy and another person’s permission, men often get to see a pretty wide range of penises and testicles. Because most of the female genitals are hidden, women don’t have that opportunity. Very few women who don’t have same-sex partners or become gynecologists and obstetricians will ever have ANY opportunity to see what a vulva besides theirs looks like in-person, and that lack of genital visibility (and scent, and taste, the works) is one very practical, and really, unfixable, reason why so many women have no idea if their vulvas are “normal,” and what the range of female genital appearance really is.

I’m a talker-with-hands. If my hands aren’t flying wildly everywhere, my mouth is probably shut. So, in discussing this, we both — unaware the other was about to do this — pantomimed what one must do to get a good look at a vulva by making a movement with our hands and fingers in front of our faces, as if we were doing the world’s smallest inverted breaststroke.

It was at that moment that it became quite undeniable that we, too, are those batty ladies.

That’s okay. I mean, I know I am already destined for extreme batty-old-ladyhood. I’m looking forward to it, and I may as well practice now and get good at it so that I can be an Olympic bat later. And when the subject is sex, if you can make people laugh, you can help people feel a lot more comfortable about everything, so it tends to be a help to be weird and goofy. It also makes me feel much better about my spaztastic mouth and my flying hands when I do public talks: if everyone else who does this kind of work for a while eventually becomes pretty loony, it therefore may well just be a job requirement.

See how that amazing logic works? I have just turned my lack of cool eloquence and controlled, professional speaking into a marker of acheivement! Go rationalizing, go!

And with that, I’m off to pack and prepare to go be batty for a few days, with the hope that at the very least, I can pony up and not be a complete loon while accepting my award. Doubtful, sure, but a girl can dream.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, women, sexuality, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (3) »

Just flying through here while racing to get ready for an early morning trip to Victoria tomorrow.

(Again, for those of you nearby, I have two events up there, and the 411 — does anyone really say that anymore? — on them can be found here.)

Per usual, everything feels last minute even when it isn’t at all, I am navigating through endless piles of laundry, rushing to get other work done before I go, taking notes in the middle of everything for the workshops, and doing everything I can to be sure I remember all but the one Very Important Thing I will inevitably forget.

Seriously, this much travel was SO much easier back in the day when I had a van that was basically my home on wheels. I miss that stupid metal box more and more as this year wears on. Plus, I am at a point where I expect the teenagers of the world I’ve been flitting all over the place to advocate for to send me a thank you card as big as the Empire State Building.

Or a giant, fluffy Mighty-O donut I can lay my weary head on, munching while I snooze. Whichever.

This frazzled gal is much better speaking with images at the moment than words. See y’all later in the week.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, events, travel exhuasts me | permalink | comments (1) »

Last night, I was over at the Copper Gate (my new favorite bar) drinking a more-then-generous amount of made-in-Ballard aquavit with my friend Ben, when I stepped outside to have a smoke.

I pulled one out, lit it up, and with my exhale, glanced across the street and saw Jesus Christ waiting for the 18 bus.

That is exactly what happened, in my mind, at that moment, without any question.

As in, “Huh. Well, whaddya know, it’s Jesus. Waiting for the bus. Cool. Hope he knows where he’s going: that route’s a bitch.”

I had a very brief moment, then, of wondering if I was supposed to say something, maybe wave, maybe offer him a smoke. Maybe tell him to get on the bus to freaking Canada, fool, because if he stays in the states, he’s going to get string up by some of his own followers in no time flat, or find himself ministering to his fellow prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. (Maybe, some other part of my mind thought, the sorbet arrived since I stepped out here, and it’s getting mushy right now, which would really suck.) After my initial moment of just being very pragmatic about it, see, I had to wonder if my quiet acceptance wasn’t the proper response, since everything I have ever read or heard from people who felt they had seen Jesus tended to be much more dramatic. The sky wasn’t even cracking open or anything, nor did I feel saved. I felt a little chilly and wished I’d brought my jacket out, and I really wished I could be having my smoke indoors where it was cosy and there was grain alcohol nearby. If I was going to get saved, you’d think I’d at least get to finish my cocktail.

But before I could consider that further, a passing pair of headlights illuminated the figure a bit more, showing me that what had initially looked like a long, muslin gown was really a pair of very loose pants and a very loose shirt, which actually did vary slightly in tone. The John Lennon spectacles weren’t a giveaway, since I’d not have been surprised at all if those were Jesus’ eyewear of choice. The long hair didn’t help, either. But in that moment, I realized that I hadn’t seen Jesus. I’d seen some teenage kid on his way home whose Mom would likely offer him a sandwich when he got there before yet again begging him to get a haircut for the 387th time this week.

Throughout all of this — which, of course, happened very quickly in my head — Ben was standing next to the mute friend I’d become, so when I’d come to, I had a bit of explaining to do.

Here’s the thing: I’m not a cynic about people’s mysticism or religious experiences.

I don’t exactly take many of them at face value, without question and a generous application of reason and logic, but I also do figure that the world’s a weird place where just about anything can happen, and where weird things often to, especially to me, almost daily. So, if it turned out that say, we all found out some day that everyone who had said they saw Jesus or Elvis (including those who conflate the two) really had, I’d be somewhat suprised, but I’d probably accept it pretty quickly. I did an awful lot of LSD in my youth: I am well-practiced in the art of adjusting my reality very quickly, and tend to gladly welcome giant shifts in my universe with a big grin and a wild clapping of hands. I dislike flying largely because it feels so strangely static for so long: I’m the only person I know who hates flying but immediately feels almost 100% about it all when there’s turbulence.

So, the fact — for that brief moment — that I was seeing Jesus didn’t really phase me. Mind, I often tend to have that response with celebrities of any stripe: I always think I’m going to spaz out like a lunatic when I meet them, and lo, I usually just wind up being quite casual, to my great surprise.

(There is a lone exception to this. When I lived with Michael, because he and Pete Seeger worked on books together, Pete called our place with some frequency. And every single time I picked up that phone and it was Pete, I could not even stammer out a single word before passing the phone — and I really, really tried to — not even a “Just a minute, I’ll get him” or even a monotone “Please hold.” It was a god calling the house, for crying out loud, and committed folkie that I was, I could not even for a half a second, feel worthy of speaking to Pete Seeger. I’m sure he thought Michael either lived with someone hearing-impaired or just with the rudest person on the planet.)

Years ago, through a strange confluence of events and a very bizarre connection (which took place with me doing a reading for him on the phone mere minutes after breaking a molar in two, that was fun), I went up to New York to spend a few days with Anton Fier, who was interested in seeing what we might write together at the time, and in me possibly doing some spoken word for him. Long story short, crazy weekend, very intense bonding, but record companies and contractual matters suck eggs. During the daytime of that visit, he went to the studio while I stayed at his place and wrote my little heart out to see what I could come up with for him (it was great stuff, and I’m still pissed we couldn’t do anything with it).

With some reticence, I’d agreed to answer the phone for him and take his messages while he was gone. I’m one of those ADHD types who has the hyperfocus, rather than the distractibility. If I’m in the zone working on something, someone can stand right next to me talking and I will often neither see nor hear them. So, when the phone rang at a point in which I was in the thick of my words, the following happened.

Ring, ring!
Me: Hello.
Them: Is Anton around?
Me: No, he’s in the studio today, leave a message?
Them: Sure, just tell him Iggy called.
Me: You got it.
CLICK.

Grumbling at the interruption, I grab a piece of scrap paper and a pen, and I start to write: Anton: Igg—

At which moment I realize, fuck me, that I was just on the phone with Iggy fucking Pop, and I treated him like a telemarketer. When I gave Anton the message later, I asked if that was THAT Iggy, to which he nodded while I proceeded to kick myself repeatedly.

Now, I elect to think famous people probably prefer this sort of treatment, say, to some woman screaming “HOLY FUCKING CHRIST YOU’RE IGGY FUCKING POP!” Iggy, Jesus, whoever, right? But I do usually tend to wish later that I hadn’t been SO casual or blithe. Or downright rude, as the case may be.

And I’m afraid I have to admit, now, that even if it really had been Jesus, I’d regret not having some good gab with Iggy more than not having same with the son of god. Or maybe, just like some of the Elvis-Jesus conflators, I’m more inclined to think Iggy is Jesus than Jesus himself, which seems plausible enough. But then, I guess a lot of things do to a person who sees Jesus waiting for the bus and worries about her melting dessert.

* * *
Just a quickie for those in the Pacific Northwest: I have a few events coming up soon here in Seattle as well as in Victoria, B.C.

October 1st: S.E.X. Reading/Q&A
7:30pm, The Collard Room, Swans Hotel: 506 Pandora Street at Store Street, Victoria
Free admission, all ages

October 2nd:DIY erotica workshop
7:30pm, Camas Collective Books and Infoshop: 2590 Quadra at Kings, Victoria
Self-identified women only, $10 suggested donation
Advance tickets at: http://www.sexedexchange.org

November 3rd: “Be the Media” panel at the NARAL Youth leadersjip Summit, University of Washington. This is still firming up, but to my understanding I’ll be leading an interactive panel for young women about feminist media critique.

I’ll also be in San Francisco to accept my Champions of Sexual Literacy award on the 11th, but I’ll have a little bit of time in there through the 14th. I have not had any events set up for me in San Fran, so if anyone would LIKE to set something up — a reading/ Q&A with the book, a joint gab session for adults or teens or both, even an afternoon for a photo session (my photo session time has been nabbed already) — please drop me a line soon. I’ll want to see a couple friends while I’m there as well, but I also have time for an event or two, especially since that’ll pretty much be the end of promotional events for me for a while (thank christ… and the bus he rode out on).

posted in Heather Corinna, subconscious life, s.e.x., events | permalink | comments (4) »

Since my day began with yet another vet visit and yet another staggering vet bill, there’s really no sense in not going ahead and writing about one of the not-so-great parts of my Chicago trip, since I’m in a pissy mood already.

(Just so no one worries overmuch, Sofia isn’t on her deathbed or anything. The current diagnosis is that due to being exposed to fleas and now-verified mange, she had to both deal with the parasites — and now my cat has to be treated, too — AND the allergic reaction she had to them, and now also, apparently, that allergic reaction has stirred up her food allergies, so she has to have a food switch as well. At the moment, rather than itching herself into a frenzy as she has been, she’s sacked out on the sofa looking very comforted by a huge dose of antihistimines, which I really hope keep working, because the vet says if not, it’s on to cortisone injections. All this with the dog who has never had a single health issue. When it rains…)

I want to open this up by noting that both the book events I had in Chicago, even though one had some serious badness, were easily the best book events I have had so far. Both were apparently record-attendance events for both shops, which made me feel tremendously good. Both had incredible people at both of them who were a joy to meet, and who I felt very lucky to count as supporters and readers of mine.

At the Women and Children First event, we had a wonderful event coordinator and a very nicely diverse turnout. They’d told me that they never did so well with teen-specific events, and so we’d jointly decided to bill the event as a sort of remedial Sex Ed 101 for people of all ages, as well as a signing. In opening the event, I briefly explained what I do when it comes to Scarleteen, what S.E.X. covers, and also gave a relatively short list of what sorts of topics I could answer questions on. My list was essentially this: puberty, all-gender anatomy, sexual orientation, gender identity, birth control, safer sex, sexual response and function, masturbation, partnered sex, general relationships, body image, sexually transmitted diseases, all aspects of human reproduction, reproductive options and other related topics. Overall, I feel like I gave a very clear impression that I was addressing practical, tangible issues rather than theoretical or academic issues.

Most of the audience seemed to grasp that easily, including the handful of young adults that were there, the wonderful older male gay sexual health advisor, my parents and my mother’s girlfriend, the couple friends I had in the audience, a couple grad students and…well, almost everyone.

The only two people who either could NOT grasp that or who perhaps simply did not WANT to grasp that were two middle-aged, white, hetero men in attendance.

Now. For all I know, one or both of these men read me here. If you are one of these men and are reading, and feel I am somehow misrepresenting you…well, that’s kind of too bad, since what I’m about to say here was the impression everyone else there seemed to be left with, too, especially since I could see all of their faces throughout. If I hurt your feelings in any way, know that is not my intent, even though I do intended to be rather direct, and don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be.

I also want to say that one of these men announced publicly about 2/3rds of the way through the event that he had a social disorder. While I still think it was possible for him to behave differently than he did in many respects — or if he absolutely could not, to exempt himself from situations where he cannot control his behaviour — you have to give someone credit for not only being aware of that sort of disability, but for being somewhat accountable for it. Especially since the other man in the audience clearly ALSO had a social disorder — one profoundly worse than Man One did — but I don’t imagine that for a minute he would have even considered that he did, nor that if he knew he did, he would have chosen to behave any differently if behaving differently was an option for him.

Both men seemed to show up with an agenda, to the degree that one even came with prepared notes. Both men didn’t seem to care, at all, that a) they were in a women’s space, and b) there were younger people and younger women in attendance for whom the way each spoke most of the time was seriously disrespectful, purposefully intimidating and big-time inappropriate. And you know, when someone who thinks it is appropriate to sit in a group and talk easily and shamelessly about lubing up for anal sex, fisting or get in-depth about what an HPV wart looks like thinks you’re talking inappropriately, you know you’ve pushed one hell of an envelope.

Both men clearly didn’t want to talk about ANY of the subjects listed, nor let anyone else talk about them, myself included. Both men repeatedly and relentlessly spoke over any and every other audience member.

Man One, with the social disorder, basically was entirely focused on pornography and seemingly on having sex with every woman in the room that evening. I knew it was bad as it was, having watched almost every young woman in there try to get away from him, and having moved away from him as he followed me around the store before the event myself, but only in seeing that a young woman who attended the event who had briefly blogged on it note that she was asked for a lock of her armpit hair by this guy did I realize how bad it really was with him in that respect.

My father is one of those guys who, when introduced as my Dad to who anyone who meets and likes me, people seem to imprint on as surrogate Pop almost immediately. I was pretty well-adjusted about this in my youth, but I confess that there was more than one time in high school when I’d get all happy that a friend stopped by, then feel resentful when they made clear they had come because they needed to talk to my Dad. Harumph. Anyway, at some point, one of the staff there had apparently given my Dad a big bear hug and a kiss on the cheek, after which Man One came up to him, pointed at the woman, and asked my Dad how he could get “one of those,” for himself. I’m not sure what exactly my Dad said to him in response, but the look of disgust on his face was pretty palpable.

Man One would not stop talking about porn throughout the event: in fact, that is all he talked about, ad nauseum, both before the event to me, and during the event, to everyone. At one point, he sat listing all of his favorite porn sites (stating the .com at the end of each very oddly) to a totally unreceptive audience, and when I made clear after a few that I was sure we all got the picture, he kept racing to try and get to the end of the whole list, which he had written down on notecards. I was this close to asking if he got some sort of commission. It was my mother, this time, who asked him to please, for the love of gawd, freaking stop already. I watched a row of teenage girls in the front get more and more uncomfortable the more he went on: it was agonizing, and I did all I could to give them an “I’m terribly sorry” look.

Later on, he also asked if it wasn’t simply inaccurate to say that women didn’t like spending loads of time looking at naked men in print and online porn to the exact same degree men do at women. I informed him that first of all, there were plenty of men who didn’t like looking at women sexually at ALL, plenty of women for whom the inverse also was without appeal (and have I mentioned lately how tired I am of feeling like in nearly every conversation to be had about sex, I must step up and be the Heterosexism police?) as well as people of all stripes who aren’t regular porn users, period. I also let him know that most of the information and statistics we have on this — he seemed to imply that it was some sort of women’s conspiracy that stats always show the primary users of porn as being male — come from the porn industry itself, who tend to be pretty exacting with their statistics, since they’re in the business of making money, so knowing who their primary clientele is is no small matter, nor are they likely to misrepresent the marketing stats, since there’d be no benefit to them in doing so. Unfortunately, letting that question — I should have known better — in started the list of porn sites again, as well as him telling us he was going to share a personal anecdote. Seeing the faces of every single person in there still green from the existing oversharing, I tried to move on to someone else. Very, very quickly.

But alas. Up steps Man Two.

Actually, he was already standing. The event had several long rows of chairs, which everyone there had been sitting in from the start. I too, was sitting rather than standing (something I prefer at events, period, especially events about sex where I’m billed as an expert: I feel like someone in that position standing makes it feel intimidating and power-lordy). But not Man Two. He had been standing in the aisle between all the rows from the minute one, moving closer and closer to me the whole time with a silent scowl on his face while I answered some anatomy of the clitoris stuff, some basic safer sex procedure stuff, some developmental puberty stuff, some how-to-address-how-virginity-makes-some-people-feel-lousy stuff and some issues about HPV and age-matters with the vaccine. I’d asked him twice to please sit down, as had the staff. No dice.

Once he began talking, he kept moving closer, getting louder, and as time went on, I watched spittle form in the corners of his mouth, and his fists clench and unclench. He first started talking by cutting off a male college student, no less — who was a hero of the revolution for bringing his two younger sisters to the event, knowing they had zero sex ed in their family — who just wasn’t clear on what STIs he may or may not have been immunized for, and who also was interested in the status of HPV vaccination for men. I can’t say whether it was ironic, blind and careless, or just plain mean-spirited, but he interrupted that guy, who was visibly Asian, by barking out at me:

“Why does everyone blame the white man for racism?!?”

Umm, okay. We weren’t talking about racism. At all. All night. And, I’m thinking that at that moment, it was a pretty obvious answer since he’d just silenced a person of color right there in that room with his own white, male mouth. Of course, I almost wanted to ask whose fault exactly he thought racism WAS if not the fault of white people, and the whites with the most power, because I was really dying to know this fascinating theory he had, but suffice it to say, I was not about the humour this guy in any way. So, instead, I just calmly said that that wasn’t a topic we were discussing, nor one I felt was relevant to the book and the event.

My response didn’t result in much. He kept moving forward, spittly-mouthed, forehead-sweaty and clenchy-fisted, going on about this. Then there was some intermediary diatribe about how — and put in exactly this language, knowing he had teen girls sitting right in front of him — everyone just wanted to fuck 15-year-old girls and his 15-year-old daughter, but not him. I actually didn’t hear the bit about a daughter in there, my family only mentioned that later. I’m glad, because I don’t think I would have been able to not look beyond horrified at the notion of this poor kid who got stuck with this jerk as a father.

Again, the louder he got, the more I continued to ask him to sit down. And still, he’s not sitting, and still, he’s spitting. Then he starts in on why does everyone blame the white man for everything bad.

I was thisclose to telling him that if right now, anyone WERE blaming the white man for the badness, and the white man they were blaming was him, that would be BECAUSE IT WAS HIS FAULT. I considered telling him that while he couldn’t change his race, nor his sex (well, he could, but I don’t see this guy even remotely wishing he were female), what he COULD change, and what was most likely his biggest problem, was the fact that he was a giant horse’s ass. And that people who may have blamed him for being said ass were likely putting the blame where it belonged, and if he did not like it, not only could he choose NOT to be a giant horse’s ass, we’d all give him a freaking medal for making a different choice at that point.

But you know, there you are, in a public group. You watch the public group get more and more uncomfortable, half of them earnestly looking like they just don’t even feel safe anymore, and you watch them look to you to fix it, knowing that a lot of them want you to say exactly what you’re all thinking because this jerk has effectively terrorized the whole room. But you know, too, that telling someone any of those things publicly, if you did, would primarily be for you, not them, since calling them out that way is likely only going to make them both feel even worse about themselves and everyone else and behave even more badly.

So, if you’re me, the best you feel you can do is to tell him that again, this is outside the scope of the book, that this is a sexuality education book that addresses bigotry a bit, but doesn’t get into any sort of blaming, and that no one in the room is blaming anyone for anything right now (even though they’d have every right to). And then you tell him, more strongly than calmly this time to SIT DOWN. He keeps talking, so you say it AGAIN. This still doesn’t get through, so you then try being a little more direct and say it’s clear he is making every single person in the room grossly uncomfortable, but before you can get that out of your mouth, both of your parents, from opposite sides of the room, take flank positions and ALSO tell him to sit down. Then the staff try and tell him to sit down.

It is at this point that I finally just cracked up laughing, watching the bizarre circus that is sometimes my life, and did a little “Ladies and Gentleman, meet my parents…” which everyone in the room thought was just me being funny, and that the two people in the room I gestured to were just acting like parents, but were not actually my parents for real.

(My mother’s girlfriend later remarked that that was likely in part because when you look at both of my parents, while I may physically resemble them both in part, one wouldn’t assume I’d come from some soft-spoken, but very professional-looking now-blonde, or from some gangly, skinny old Italian. I’m not sure why not, but there you go. She also observed that she thought that some of why these guys went so batty was that they were expecting something from me that wasn’t there — that I was supposed to be, in their minds, some sort of femme fatale, or ball-busting dominator, rather than the short, funny and damn-patient chick in ratty jeans who talks about sex like she was talking about the weather. Who knows.)

Believe it or not, he did finally sit down, but in near-perfect unison, both Man One and Man Two piped up to say they EACH had “anecdotes” they wanted to share with the group. I think at that moment the collective imagination of everyone in that room about said anecdotes made us all wish there was some sort of soap we could use inside our heads.

Thank CHRIST that a half-second later someone else raised their hand so I had someone to call on. For the rest of the evening, the best I could do was look at both men with their perpetually raised-hands, letting them know that I saw that, unsurprisingly, they were not anything close to done, but that as far as I and everyone else was concerned, they’d said MORE than their fair share.

* * *

Honestly, the thing that grated my cheese the most about all of this was that, from everyone’s observations as well as my own, both these guys came into the event with an agenda. Both came in seeming to feel that they needed to tell all of us how it was, and that we were some sort of threat to them. Into an event at a women’s bookstore which has been hanging on financially by a thread, where most of the audience was some sort of minority, be it by age, sex, race or sexual orientation, all talking about sexuality for another marginalized population. In other words, how on earth we could have been any sort of threat to either of these guys, even if we’d have wanted to be, is completely beyond me: I’m not sure there was a single person in there with that power, nor that desire.

I’ll tell you, two, that having survived a couple assaults and stalkers, as well as being someone who has taught self-defense, that my radar is exceptionally good for predatory people. I was exceptionally glad that I was not taking the bus or the el home alone as I would have if I’d still lived there, because I can nearly guarantee that without a doubt Man Two — and possibly, though less likely, Man One — would have been the sort to follow me home.

Some of why behaviour like that pisses me off so freaking bad — beyond the fact that it also resulted in me losing my voice for the rest of the weekend, and feeling like I’d been run over by a Mack truck — is that for fuck’s sake, they were both validating the exact things that both seemed to be saying they did NOT want people to think about men. There were some awesome men in the audience, but those awesome guys are NOT the men anyone was going to leave that event remembering, because the other two made that completely impossible.

More importantly, one of the many reasons that I choose to struggle to keep serving the populace that I do is that shit like this is very real and very common in terms of this populace — teens and women. Interpersonally, politically and educationally, publicly and privately, in everything from their sexual healthcare to trying to negotiate sexual activity they are shouted down and yelled over just like this. We can talk about exceptions to the rule all we want — and by all means, should note that there nearly always ARE exceptions — but this still IS the rule. It’s also a fine example that someone doesn’t have to be the numeric majority to do that: there were but two of these guys, and at least 25 of the rest of us (and I say “rest of us,” because the only other people in the room who were male were — and it was made clear to me by them that they were — either gay or bisexual, of color or homeless), and yet they still found the way to dominate when no one else was fighting them FOR dominance, nor was that anything resembling the vibe of the room. They still attacked, still walked in on the offense, when there was absolutely no cause or reason to: when they were in no danger whatsoever, when there was less than zero threat to them of any sort, save the threat of someone else getting to take their turn speaking about their own issues or questions.

And for crissakes, you’d think, you’d hope, that one could at least be given a vacation from this sort of shite when you’re doing a mellow event, at a mellow women’s space that’s making room for everyone. But you can’t, and perhaps can’t all the more, because I think sometimes that that in and of itself is perceived as a threat: that women could have a space that IS ours, and have the “power” to invite anyone into that space with the understanding that they are expected to behave like guests and expected to make the same allowances.

And I know, we’re so often not supposed to say things like this, but the trouble is that the reality of these situations bears itself out time and time and time again. To pretend that it doesn’t, or to not speak about it (or feel we’d better not, or to be kind must not) is to deny that reality and to choose to be silenced. Like it or not, if you don’t get it, a scenario like this is a big part of why women want exclusive women’s space sometimes (however you define what women’s space is and who it includes): because every now and then, we’d like to be able to speak and talk without being shouted down as most of us so often are, especially if what we want to say either is — or is simply deemed to be — less important than or in conflict with what the men in the room determine so.

(It feels stupid I even have to say this, but just ’cause: does that mean that ANY white, middle-class hetero male is like this? No. Nor does it mean that had another shown up, he would have behaved this way. But this was the actual situation at hand, and these actual situations happen a’plenty.)

Interestingly, I think it’s the first time my mother has actually understood what parts of my job are like, how much of it flat-out stinks, and how small the payoff is so often for me. As we were driving home, she seemed to first be operating under the assumption that something like this never happens, and I let her in on the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time with what I do, in a lot of different contexts. It happens on the message boards, it happens in my email box, it happens with events and talks I give. In talking to straight, white male colleagues of mine who do similar work about these sorts of things, I have yet to have a single one express that this sort of thing EVER happens to them (not saying it doesn’t, just saying that of yet, no one has reported it to me), while other women I know in the field have stories like this in spades. In fact, much as I hate to say it, of the handful of hetero male sexologists I have met face-to-face all but one or two have not hit on me, made salacious comments to me (or about me, to a partner when I stepped away), or seemed to have even the smallest iota of real respect for me and my work beyond how it or I might benefit them personally. Last year, I had to tell a male colleague in the field to stop asking me to do his work for him (for his profit, and for free on my part) at least five times before he stopped, and even then, he literally sent ANOTHER man to harass me to do something for him. Only in saying to said other man that this was at the point of harassment which I was about to take action with did it finally cease.

But I digress.

My mother was pretty mortified, and since that event, has asked how things are going with the book and Scarleteen in every conversation, whereas she used to ask me about it maybe once a year, tops. Oddly enough, one of the lone positives from the whole fracas was that I actually got to see my mother seriously stand up for me in public — which has not happened in my recollection since 1976 — and not because she felt she was supposed to, but because she wanted to. I also think she grew some respect for me that she didn’t have before.

Perhaps most noteworthy, however, is that my parents cooperated with something. MY parents, who I don’t think have cooperated with anything since 1969, when I was conceived.

My father, of course, was not that shocked: he knows the deal. And my father, of course, made new friends that night, and is now paying attention to the event listings for WCF and asking me about them in terms of if I think he should go to make sure there aren’t any jerks in the audience harassing the two staffers who adopted him. I’m sure there could be all sorts of analysis, gender-based and otherwise, on what my parents each took from the event, but I’m fresh out of analysis today.

The event did sell out of all their cartons of books, though, to the point that they ended up buying the three copies I had with me from me, and sending a few sad folks away bookless. And, of course, we all got to leave with whatever our own oh-so-entertaining versions of the story were, though I think the girl who got asked to give over armpit hair got the shortest end of the stick.

This wasn’t the book event that broke the camel’s back or anything: like I said earlier and in another post, there were actually some other very positive experiences there, and it really was fantastic to be able to have an event in a shop I hold so dear. But I’d already decided that week that after the couple workshops I’d committed to in Victoria for October, and the San Fran trip that same month, that I’d be taking time away from promotion. Not only am I out of funds for it, I’m out of “on” for it, especially since big social events drain the hell out of me to begin with.

And to be honest, those two guys did make me want to take a break all the more. I loathe that result, as it makes me feel like a wuss, but it is what it is. It’s one thing to deal with this stuff online, but it’s entirely another to deal with it up in my face, and that filled my limited quota of it for a while.

I’m also done with it right now, because the far more attractive prospect of friend + bottle of wine just showed up on my door, which beats out pretty much anything, but most certainly kvetching further about this crap.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, s.e.x., rantapalooza, events | permalink | comments (6) »

I don’t want to deal with the bad parts of the trip just yet. I still feel a little shellshocked about it, to the degree that when telling my Dad just about the car accident on the phone today, and he started talking about lawyers and all that, I completely snapped at him, which is something I very, very rarely do. Yesterday, today and likely for the next couple of days, I just want to enjoy the bliss that is being back in my own place, in my own bed, with my own dog, and with the ability to almost completely control who I see and deal with in a given day without any wild cards. For the most part, I’m curling up under the covers like a kicked puppy.

I also don’t want to talk about the shite because there were some really good things amidst all the yuck.

Like, for instance, getting to spend the day with one of my favorite living contemporary artists, including a lot of walking, touring her around the Art Institute, a lovely dinner at Reza’s, and hours and hours of nonstop conversation and mutual admiration. We also planted a tiny seed for a possibly great idea in the not-at-all-near future, and not only is it a good seed, it’s plain old wonderful to be planning something with someone as overextended as myself who completely gets that saying you want to do something a year or two down the road with them is not only not unreasonable, but ideal. Laurie is so very many kinds of brilliant and glorious, and if I hadn’t have started that first full day of the trip with her, I may well have lost my mind before it was over.

The Early to Bed event was absolutely fantastic. We had parents, sisters, a clergy student, an adolescent public health administrator, teachers and friends of teens, all clearly there because they all gave that much of a shit. One thing I’ve been coming to realize a lot lately in terms of the struggles I’m having with Scarleteen is that it isn’t problematic just because I work with sexuality. It’s also — and perhaps just as much — because I work with a population that, for the most part, no one, sparing companies wanting to gather teenage cash, could care less about. If I did the kind of work I do for small children with cancer, rather than with teenagers with pregnancies or STIs or body image or gender dysphoria or sexual trauma or just plain agony, I’d be in a very different place. So, when I find myself in a room full of people all dedicated to doing what they can to be supportive of teens and do what they can to help them out, it’s very feel-good for me. That event ended up tackling some serious topics, but also being more stand-up comedy/put-people-at-ease Heather than the WCF event later in the week (and I’ll get to that event at a later date).

The winner of the best exchange for the evening was a mother asking if she needed to be concerned about giving her 12-year-old too much information. To give an example, she described hearing her and a friend getting into a giant argument in the basement, and had gone downstarirs to see what the fracas was about. When she got downstairs, her daughter, in a huff, said, “Mom, is it ANAL sex or ABLE sex?” My response (before I addressed the larger issue of TMI and why it’s really not something to worry about in this regard), was that it likely depended on who was having it, really.

Extra bonus? My Aunt Ginny showed up. I told a few people there that night about the fabulousness that is my Aunt Ginny, but for y’all in the cheap seats, I have loved this woman since the first time I met her when I was around seven years old.

She’s an aunt by marriage, in my mother’s side of the family. Understand that my mother’s family — especially my now deceased grandparents — was incredibly traditional and insanely stifling, on top of being abusive. Even at that young age, it had already been made very clear to me that I did NOT belong. In fact, in looking through family photos with Mark at my mother’s house last week, I found a photo of me at around 2 or 3, on the farm, with my mother seeming to introduce me to a black sheep. If that photo had had a word blurb, it would have said, “Heather, meet the black sheep. Black sheep, meet Heather. I think you’ll get along famously: you have a lot in common.” It’s one of the most symbolic childhood photos of me I’ve ever seen.

There was a family dinner that night, and I remember all this to-do about some big scandal with my uncle’s new wife. The Very Big Deal? That she MADE him do the DISHES. Gasp! (I didn’t get it, for the record: while I have plenty of valid beefs about my childhood and upbringing, one I do not have is that we had very fluid gender roles between my folks, to the degree that my Dad was the stay-at-home parent in my early childhood, and my mother the breadwinner.)

This given, even before she showed up, she seemed very, very exciting, and very appealing, since I’d already figured out that anyone my grandmother and grandfather really didn’t like was usually exceptionally cool.

When she finally appeared, she showed up in this somber, sober house of buttoned-to-the-chin people in these crazy black lounging pajamas with feather boas at the cuffs, crazy black hair all over the place, and sat telling off-color jokes to a completely unreceptive audience for the whole of the evening. I was in LOVE with her: she was the first woman I had met in that family who I wanted to be when I grew up. (She tells me that the feeling was mutual: she saw a wee ally in me right off the bat, and ever since, if one of us gets stuck at a family gathering without the other, we’re seriously bummed.) She’s also one of these women who seems to excel at absolutely everything, even though she is fickle as hell. She’ll decide she’s going to do something career-wise totally out of nowehere, with no background, wind up doing better than the folks with the background, and just when she’s peaking, she gets bored and moves on: it’s like she’s managed total non-attachment, effortlessly, to the stuff most folks are highly attached to. Plus, she’s the mother of teenagers who are actually bummed out when they can’t hang out with her: talk about an anomoly.

Last she told me, she was thinking about starting a heavy metal band next. I can’t tell you how much I love the idea of a metal band made of fifty-something suburban mothers: I want to hear a handbanging, screeching anthem about menopause or grocery store parking lot traffic so badly, it makes my uterus ache.

So, Ginny showed up, and we went out for drinks after the event with she, my friend Erika, a friend of hers, and one very awesome event-goer.

Who, FYI, I filled in on something Very Important to Know about book events, and that is this: there are two kinds of people who wind up at drinks or dinner with you after events. There are the one or maybe two people who are so cool you invite them along — that was her — and then there is the one, and it usually always seems to be one, who not only do you just find at the table with you without having invited them at all, but who is inevitably the absolute LAST person from an event you’d invite. Now, I’m not sure there was even anyone at that particular event who would have been in that latter group, but I’m glad we avoided that all the same, especially since NOTHING ever seems to make those people go away. NOTHING.

We stayed out late. Very late. By the time Ginny came back with me to Erika’s (after winning every woman in a ten-mile radious over completely, as is her way), it was 2:30 in the morning, and after she passed out face-first on the couch, Erika and I stayed up until four. The only downside to the evening was that for the first time since I moved away from Chicago, the whole evening left me feeling very homesick (and a little tipsy, but that part was nice).

Let’s see, what else…?

Millennium Park for an afternoon with my Dad. I ended up tearing up watching so many happy kids play in the fountain, in part because something else I’ve realized lately is that unlike when I was doing classroom teaching, I don’t really get the good stuff with the bad stuff in terms of my “students.” I mostly get the crisis, their hardship, their agony. For sure, I do get to see them often feel better about it, and feel better over time, but it’s incredibly rare for me to get ONLY the happy bits without the awful ones.

Much-missed time with my mother’s partner, who somehow manages to be one of the most brilliant women I know — and who also works in a challenging arena: she’s a Holocaust scholar — but also the most hilarious. To whit, after the WCF event Friday, we met Mark (who came into town a handful of days after I did) at an Italian banquet hall doing karaoke in La Grange, where my mother now lives. Until you have seen a Kenosha-bred, polish-sausage eating, femme in a butch body (her self-description), doing Baby Got Back flawlessly, with drunken suburbans fawing all over them, you haven’t seen nothin’.

Some time with my mother was good: but that’s more complicated and for another entry. same goes for time with my sister and some of my mother’s family.

At the WCF event, not only do I believe I have started a new friendship with an exceptional woman, one of the attendees came up afterwards to get two books signed and explained to me — while apologizing for it, of all things — that I was the role model and shero of she and her closest friend in college and grad school, and that my work had inspired them beyond bounds to work in this field. It’s not so much what she said, but the look on her face when she said it. There’s something amazing that happens sometimes when you’re just as touched to meet and connect with someone else as they are with you, for entirely different reasons, and she made my whole week, easy.

Just because it deserves a second mention: my mother’s partner. Baby Got Back. Don’t believe me? Ask Jen (who it was also so wonderful to see: it had been too long).

I also went to Chicago with a photo project in mind. The plan was to take photos of places which were important — good stuff, bad stuff, the whole gamut — in my childhood and adolescence. Given how much places change, and knowing already that a few locales of import already were going to look very different, my goal was/is to take photos to build a large wall piece of many small photos, posted with (and I still need to figure out how to engineer this) brief summations of what happened there, and why that given place was important.

In doing this, I had to go to a few very difficult places to revisit. But the biggies were the hair salon where the man who cut our hair molested me at 11, and then the site where I was gang assaulted at 12. Before I’d moved from Chicago, even driving by those places was beyond difficult, and often resulted in me breaking down a few blacks later, feeling fearful and traumatized all over again.

But this time — perhaps I’ve simply had enough time or distance — not only did I not break down, but I was even able to stand right in the parking lot, right where I was assaulted, without tears, without feeling scared or triggered. In fact, I felt incredibly strong standing there, as if a car could even pull in and hit me and it’d bounce right off as my feet and legs were firm and unmoved. It was an unexpected response: I’d prepared myself to feel very upset and vulnerable, and it just didn’t happen that way at all.

In addition, I got to see the house that was my hell, where I also had expected to respond badly. But the house that was so awful for me clearly had a loving family living in it for whom it was now a haven. There were beautiful, joyful chalk drawings all over the sidewalk, and things left astray on the walk, in the accepted disorder of a creative, lively childhood, which made clear that the life being lived there was a good one. It felt like what had since been lived there had somehow washed away the badness, which left me feeling just a few more steps closer to free.

Also? BOTH my parents came to the WCF event. Both of them being in the same place at the same time is an incredible rarity, and while I accepted from childhood that I was never going to have that thing where both your parents were in any way a unit or pair, that it can happen at least every decade or so, even in a limited context, with limited contact, is a luxury and a gift.

I got to see my favorite ex, his kids and his partner, who I like a whole lot, twice, once by myself (though I nearly slept through it, since it was the morning after the night out with Erika and Ginny, where I couldn’t determine if I was hungover from the booze or from my aunt), and once with Mark. That second visit, they’d caught a small mouse in their house. They’d named him Springy, due to how he kept bouncing in the big jar they had him in, but I felt more comfortable calling him Mr. Springy, since I felt it was a bit presumptuous to be so familiar with him when we’d only just met. Since Judy was heading out to Michfest with the girls the next day, and had no time to get out of the city before to set him free, I took on the job myself, knowing there was a forest preserve by my Mom’s on our way back. As it turned out, we went in the wrong entrance, which was labeled as government property only. Mr. Springy and I had a small moment, and I felt certain that he was well up for not only going out on his own in the woods, but infiltrating the government at the same time. I expect great things from him: fight the power, Mr. Springy.

In Ohio, I got to meet both one of my longtime Scarleteen volunteers as well as one of our most active All Girl Army bloggers, both of whom drove some distance to see me, and both of whom were just as exceptional as I had thought them to be. While I can’t exactly call it a perk, upon leaving the coffeehouse for a smoke, I had a man on the street feel the profound need to invent a song and then loudly rap it, singing the praises of my ass. Really, I don’t even think he meant to be lecherous (my backside has inspired — if you can call it that — some odd behaviour from people for a long time, many of which found themselves clearly infected with, and rather embarassed by, Tourette’s), but I did have to explain that no, I didn’t want him to stop because I was ashamed of my bottom, but because I would rather that it wasn’t brought to the attention of the whole of lower Cincy at the moment.

Seeing Mark’s family was also a big perk: I really couldn’t ask for a more loving adjunct family. It was also a perk to see his old Appalachian grandmother: the lady loves her Bible, but she’s also a serious spitfire, and she likes to wink at me a lot.

Best conversation of that family dinner? One of Mark’s brothers was talking about how his little dog Randall had saved his life by barking right before a truck nearly ran him over.

Grandma: Well, I know what saved your life.
Brother: What?
Grandma: Jesus. Jesus was looking out for you. Jesus saved you.
Brother: So, Jesus speaks to Randall. Awesome.

* * *
Those’d be the highlights. I’m sure I’ve missed a few things in there, but in less than an hour, I’m heading out with Fish to go and see Patti Smith, which is just the very thing for me right now (please: as if it ever couldn’t be). A goddess-in-the-flesh (and homage to black sheep everywhere), a good friend and a couple of cocktails will do me quite nicely.

posted in Heather Corinna, family, surviving abuse, s.e.x., women, events | permalink | comments (5) »

I am finally on my way home at the moment, which is a very good thing because I desperately need a vacation from my vacation.

Lest I give the wrong impression, the trip wasn’t really intended to be a vacation, so it’s fair to say that it was unrealistic on my part to expect one. It was intended to be a trip primarily for book promotion, but with places chosen for that promotion where I could spend time with friends and family and — I’d hoped — I could also get a little R&R.

About that.

I can’t even figure out where to start with this one.

Do I start with the honor killing drama — nope, not kidding — that ensued in Chicago on the one day I’d decided to schedule nothing at all and just have some downtime with my mother and her partner via her college friend, and how our day turned into the three of us scrambling to help this woman? Or, perhaps, with the two men who came to the feminist bookstore event, one with enough of an agenda that he actually had notes prepared, and another whose spittle I watched accumulate in the corners of his mouth, while he raised his voice, clenched his fists, barked at me relentlessly about why I blame him for everything (this nonsequitur in the midst of my merely trying to answer some poor 21-year-old kid’s practical question about confusion on what STI vaccinations he may have had) and refused to sit down? The Minneapolis bridge collapse on the second day of my trip? Maybe I start by explaining that one peril of doing what I do is that even when not at promotional events, nearly everyone will drag you aside to make their sexual confessions to you, including your family members? On the other hand, it’d be a highly dramatic entrance to instead start with the car accident Mark and I got into when a woman ran a red light and flung our car (Mark’s new car, I should add, the one he was supposed to be driving home on Monday, so now lord knows when he can come back or how) across a few lanes as we were on our way to the airport, where I was no less than completely elated — and obviously, rather delusional in thinking the state of Ohio would let me leave — to finally be going back home?

I’m far too sleep-deprived to figure this out right now. I’m okay — and Mark is okay — but I’m sore, pissed and very, very sleepy. So much went on, and my head is so foggy, that it’s looking like the only thing to do is to divide the (mis)adventure into parts once I get home. Or a couple days later, after some therapy (AKA, cupcakes, pug-hugs, a glass of wine and a date with my vibrator). And sleep: precious, precious sleep. I can at least be sure that for the next few days, it is highly unlikely I will have any insomnia to deal with: it’s hypersomnia I expect to battle, and I intend to wave my white blankie flag gladly at the first sign of its troops.

Ideally, I’d start by sleeping on this first flight, since we woke up at 2:30 this morning eastern time, after a luxurious three hours of snoozing, for the two-hour drive to the Lexington airport to catch this 6:30 flight. Alas, the way the flights worked out, I’m on this puppy for only an hour and a half, then to Detroit, then — and I expect all my fellow smoking readers to gasp in horror alongside me — unto a nearly five-hour flight to Seattle.

Suffice it to say, I’m trying to save my sleepiness up so that I can use it for as much of that flight as humanly possible because if I’m not unconscious on that flight, I may well chew my way through the seat in front of me.

Or maybe not. I am so beyond ecstatic to be heading towards my own bed, my dog, my garden and some seriously being-left-the-hell-alone (though given how things have been going, I’m trying to maintain a certain nonattachment to ever actually getting back there). That isn’t to say that amidst all the mania, there wasn’t some good stuff in there too, there was. I’d just really, really and truly, had loved to have one single day over the last eleven that was a) anything even slightly resembling relaxing, and b) without even the vaguest whiff, let alone the ripe stench, of any sort of drama whatsoever.

Thank christ that I had some very key boons throughout:
1) I had a housesitter who went SO far beyond the call of duty — including staying on extra with no notice whatsoever — and who I trusted so implicitly that I didn’t have to worry a single minute about the dog, cat, garden or anything else that lives in our place.

2) Within a mere 24 hours of leaving, it appears a bunch of misogynist assholes felt the profound need, as usual, to plaster the Scarleteen boards with spew at myself, the female volunteers and the female users there. I only found this out via a Google alert to a user’s blog, took the most cursory glance at the disaster before I shut my laptop, and decided that for the whole rest of the trip, I was simply going to let my volunteers do their job, hope the site didn’t implode, and walk the fuck away from the thing full-stop for the whole of my trip. Which I did.

3) My two book events were actually the best/busiest events I have had so far. Both sold out of all the books, to the point that the WCF event bought three extra copies from me I had in my bag to sell more, both packed the places, and despite the bitter men who decided to try and make me their personal whipping boy, both were really solid events that I deeply enjoyed most of, even though by the second one, I’d broken my voice and sounded like Tom Waits as an adolescent boy for the remainder of the trip.

4) The Detroit airport has a bar: a bar where one can smoke. There’s not a whole helluva lot of good things I can ever think of to say about Detroit. Now I’ve got one.

And they’ve just announced that we are now getting ready to land so that I can put my bottom in that bar, where I fully intend to have a very large cocktail at an hour of the morning where I’d otherwise only be drinking if I had gotten started doing do the evening before. Then again, in Seattle time, I woke up when it still was the evening before. Bottoms up.

posted in Heather Corinna, apropos of nothing, events | permalink | comments (3) »

There’s little better for an author then having an event at not only your favorite bookstore, but at the bookstore that you truly came of age in, where you’d sit for hours reading, and was your best home away from home. It’s amazing for a feminist to have an event in a place where you started doing your cornerstone reading in feminist theory, and which has provided a haven for feminist women, activists and authors for nearly the whole of your life. Same goes for coming of age queer and confused and having a haven where you knew you could sit with your hairy pits and your stompy boots and read your Adrienne Rich, your Rita Mae Brown or your Curious Wine, all while crushing on the gorgeous woman who always saved you the books she knew you’d like, without anyone looking at you funny.

So, I am beyond elated that I have a book event at Women & Children First on Friday evening, August 3rd at 7:30 (5233 N. Clark St., In Andersonville, on the north side of the city). We’re doing this as a remedial sex ed Q&A for women of all ages, since I have so many adult readers who benefit from the kind of Sex 101 I give at Scarleteen, and since so much basic sex ed is really not about women, and in addition, certainly not often inclusive of women who sleep with women, and also not very informed by feminist approaches and a holistic viewpoint on sex. I imagine, given how events with me usually go, that it’ll turn into a pretty cool bit of CR and roundtable discussion on women’s sexuality. (I also expect to tear up the minute I walk in the door, so bring me some tissues, if you would, please.)

The extra on this is that my fave bookstore in the world has also been in a tough financial pickle — laregly due to the fact that they helped make the neighborhood they’re in so much more awesome that now they can barely afford the rents there — like most feminist bookstores have, so I’m happy to do anything at all that I can to keep them around, even if I live across the country and can’t enjoy their stacks myself anymore.

So, please come if you’re nearby, and please tell as many of your friends in Chicago as possible about the event. For anyone who comes themselves or is telling others, I encourage everyone who has some books they’ve been meaning to buy lately to wait until that event and please buy them at W&CF: they need your business, and we all need them. They’ve been supporting women’s work for close to 30 years now, and so long as they stay afloat, they’ll be doing it for many, many more.

(Also? I can’t eat them anymore myself, alas, but if you aren’t often in Andersonville, know that if you decide to make a day of it, or arrive very, very early — they close at 2:30 — and are hungry, that Svea, right across the street, has the best swedish pancakes you will ever eat in your life.)

Don’t forget, too, that if you’re in or near Chicago, that if this event doesn’t work for you, I’ll be at Early to Bed on Tuesday night, the 31st, doing an event for parents and allies of kids and teens.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Happy!, feminism, events | permalink | comments (0) »

Just to keep y’all up with upcoming promotional book events:

In Minneapolis:
Sunday, May 20th, 3:00 - 5:30 PM
Minnesota Book Release Party!
@ The Bryant-Lake Bowl (in the theater)
810 West Lake Street, Uptown Minneapolis
(If we run past 5:30, we’ll just move the shindig to the bar.)

Thursday, May 24th
Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, 7:00 PM
4755 Chicago Avenue South, Minneapolis

And a reminder about tomorrow evening’s soiree here in Seattle:
Tuesday, May 8th: 7:00 - ?
The S.E.X. Book Release Party
Karma Martini Lounge & Bistro, Seattle
2318 2nd. Avenue, Belltown (206) 838-6018

I’ve since been informed by several natives here, for the record, that many Seattleites would die of shame from having public sex question Q&A, so I’m going to wing it, but my planned approach at the time being is just to work the room and let people ask whatever one-on-one.

Amazon.com finally got the “search inside” stuff listed on site, too, which is awesome since folks can finally get a good idea of how very much it’s not just a reprint of the site: I’d say that only about 50 pages tops are rephrasing or reprinting of site material.

You’ll be oh-so shocked to know I’m in the midst of a busy few days here. Just spent all of yesterday with a friend’s teenage daughter in need of some support, have lunch with a reporter from the P-I today, have to go get some supplies for tomorrow night, do a pile of luandry, finish a graphics job for mark, finish a pile of graphics for the Scarleteen upgrade and prepare myself not to be a complete spaz at the event tomorrow night (which I was feeling very chill about until I found out newspaper photographers would be there, alas).

* * *
On a not-really-related note, I was reminded last night that the older I get, the more and more mushy what “sex” is defined as for me gets.

For instance, I can’t figure any other way to define those evenings we head up to bed wanting to have sex, and end up pretty much just rolling around naked, whispering a lot of sweet nothings, stroking various parts (which may or may not be genital), but without any eye on orgasm for either party. Because we leave the scenario with the same glow on, with the same heightened intimacy, with the same feeling of having taken time out to deeply connect. Given, we also leave it with a few more brain cells intact than some of the other varieties, but I don’t think that changes anything.

Related to that, though certainly less erudite and potentially TMI, remember those little “Love is…” cartoons? Couldn’t help but think last night, as we began our snugglesex, and both discovered as Mark rolled around on my back that a few glasses of wine had left me uncharacteristically burpy (I generally can’t burp, no matter how hard I try — been the case my whole life, which was very frustrating in childhood when great status was affixed to being able to belch operatically on a whim). This resulted in rolling burps being pushed out of my system, and my partner effectively burping me for ten minutes by bellysurfing my back.

Love may not be doing that for someone else, but I don’t know what the hell else on earth could have caused both of us to actually find that charming and cute rather than utterly mortifying.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, my fine romance, s.e.x., events | permalink | comments (4) »

Mark your calendars, Seattleites!

The S.E.X. Book Release Party
Author reading, live sex and sexuality Q&A and book signing
Tuesday, May 8th: 7:00 - 10:00, all ages/ over 21 after 10:00

Karma Martini Lounge & Bistro, Seattle
2318 2nd. Avenue, Belltown (206) 838-6018

They have great food and munchies (including vegan options, and they’ll be adding a few extra to the menu for this event) & drinks. Their apple martini is the best I’ve ever had — none of that gross neon green pucker stuff: it’s got beautiful, fresh, muddled Washington apples. Yum.

Hope to see plenty of you there! The whole place is ours for the night as we fill it, so feel free to bring a guest or twelve!

P.S. If any readers want a copy of the book for a review anywhere they write freelance, let me know, and I’ll get Avalon to send you a copy.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, s.e.x., seattle, events | permalink | comments (11) »