Yesterday at the clinic I got wedged in the middle of a client’s abusive relationship.

It was pretty clear even from watching the goings-on in the waiting room that something was not at all right. She was dressed like she’d been scraping by, yet he was dressed like he was going for a job interview. He gave us her ID and insurance card because he was the one who kept hold of her purse. When she came in for her labs, he used that time in the waiting room to try and woo other women. (I found out later that while he was the one pushing for abortion, one of his wooing tactics was apparently to tell the women in the waiting room how much he didn’t want his wife “to kill our poor little baby.”) She also clearly, from her body language, did not want to be at the clinic. She had a do-rag she kept pulling down over her eyes, she was all curled into herself, but she also looked very irritated and upset.

We have a section of the intake form which asks how sure someone is of their decision to terminate, and she’d marked she was unsure. Those charts are more often given to me, in part because I’m trained for options counseling, and in part because they tend to be more difficult sessions, but I’m usually okay with that. When I get that on a form, I usually start with a discussion about that before I do anything else.

She told me firmly that she did not want to terminate. She had kids from a previous relationship, had never had an abortion, never wanted to have one.  She had been married to this man for a year, and described a very textbook pattern of the cycle of abuse. We discussed how the lone conflict she was having — the only thing which would incline her to choose to terminate of her own accord — was that she knew full well that having a child with this man would tie her to him. I talked about the realities of this, about legal help, about how it was a big issue, even if she could get a divorce and help keeping him from her and a child, a person obsessed with control tends not to be someone who gives up easily, so she would have to be okay with possibly fighting legal battles for years and years. All the same, in our conversation, it because clear that while she still might consider a termination given the permission to evaluate it for herself, she had been forced to be there by someone else that day — she was physically pushed into the car that morning and driven to the clinic — and so terminating that day was off the table so far as our polices go and her wishes went. I discharged her, making clear that should she make her own choice to terminate, she could reschedule for another day.

In trying to assure that going home not having terminated would not compromise her safety, I talked a little about shelters and ways to taxi her out potentially without his notice. What she just wanted was just somewhere inside the clinic to sit for a bit, gather her thoughts, ready her resolve, so I arranged that for her in another area of the clinic. I really thought she needed to get to a shelter, but obviously, I can’t usurp her choices that way. Unfortunately, when she stepped outside to smoke, he’d been circling the clinic and found her, and I was notified that there was a bit of an altercation outside. Looking at the security cameras, he kept blocking her path on the sidewalk, and wasn’t yet pushing or hitting her, but it didn’t look good. I was asked to go outside and help escort her into the clinic and to ask him to leave, making clear that we’d call the police if he came back into any of the waiting rooms.

And here’s the part where I found myself sucked into the vortex of another planet.

When I circled around to them, greeted her by name and motioned with my arm a bit protectively around her back for us to walk back into the clinic, and we tried to go in, he stepped in front of me, as well. He stepped in front of me, arms waving as if flagging down a driver who has come to help you when your car has broken down — as if clearly, I was help en route for him — and said, “She won’t LISTEN to me!”

It wasn’t just what he said, but the way he said it; the way he said it with this confidently held belief that I was on his side, that her disobedience was preposterous, and that, of course, her compliance to him would have been my primary or sole concern. I had to fight off the very nonproductive urge to say something to the effect of, “Oh dear! She won’t listen to you? That’s not right at all. Why don’t us uppity little ladies just sit down and you can tell us how it is since we’ve clearly lost our marbles all thinking for ourselves. I just don’t know what’s gotten into us. I am so sorry. Daddy knows best!”

Instead, still trying to get us both past him and back into the clinic, I said, very firmly, “I don’t care. I am taking her inside where she is safe, and you need to leave.”

He then said, “But she’s my WIFE!”

Resist sarcasm, Corinna, as it is not at all likely to de-escalate squat. Also? Do not stand there slack-jawed and silent because you can’t believe someone is trying to have this conversation with you at all. So, instead, again firmly and clearly, “That is not meaningful to me. I am taking her inside where it is safe, and you need to leave.”

And it isn’t meaningful to me, personally or politically, but it’s particularly devoid of meaning in my book when it’s obvious that the person telling me it is has acquired a wife the way one acquires chattel, and sees her likewise. You can have a marriage which is a partnership, but marriage alone does not partnership make, and I care about if someone has an earnest partnership, not a legal shackle to someone else as their personal property. I don’t give a rat’s ass what papers you have, what ceremony you’ve had, what promises you’ve made or what you call someone: what I care about is what is enacted and actionable. You can call it marriage all you want, but when what it is is bondage, putting a pretty, legally-sanctioned name on it doesn’t change a damn thing.

Then, clearly not having absorbed the general sentiment that we’re all just heartless babykillers (though most likely only because he sees us as people able to get him what he wants: I’m sure if he had wanted her to stay pregnant, we would have been Satan’s handmaidens), he tries a new line.

“But she SMOKED a cigarette today while she was PREGNANT with MY child!”

Oh, well THAT is a totally different story! Because of COURSE the damage a fag is going to do to a fetus so, so far surpasses a woman having you make her reproductive choices for her. Because of COURSE when you scheduled the appointment FOR her last week, you knew, being omniscient and omnipotent, she would have this cigarette today and thus make sustaining a pregnancy completely off the table, which I’m sure whatever you do to her at home can’t come close to comparing to. Because of COURSE your deep and utterly selfless concern for the fetus usurps her own life. Because of course, if a woman has done anything less than perfect pre-natal behavior we are morally obligated to terminate her pregnancy against her will. Duh!

He starts to ask if I asked her about that. I make clear that what goes on with a client and us is private, I can’t talk to him about her medical history or health, and that, again, I am taking the client inside, he needs not to block us or try and follow, and that if he persists, we will call the police. He is starting to sputter why at me, and then even goes so far as to make a move where his hand is starting to raise in my general direction.

I tend to react to anything like that, at this point in my life, with a reflexive look which I’ve determined, the times I’ve been physically threatened since I left home to get free of that in my teens, gives a crystal clear impression that laying a hand on me would be a Very, Very Bad Idea. For all my self-defense training, I never even really get a chance to use it, because the look always comes first, and it’s been 100% effective over the years. (I wish I could make it in the mirror to see what it looks like: I’m curious. Alas, I can’t do it on purpose, or at least I don’t think I can, because nothing I do when I’m trying looks all that intimidating to me, especially since it’s also usually happening several inches to a foot lower than the person I’m giving it to.) He lowers his hand very quickly, I swoop us both around him and get her inside, he tries to follow. Someone else’s boyfriend or husband tries to do him the profoundly undeserved service of being a brother helping another brother out by making clear that he really needs to go back outside because he’s about to find himself in serious shit if he doesn’t.

There’s more to all of this — it’s a very long story, aspects of it can’t and shouldn’t be disclosed, and this whole incident had legs and took up half my day. I’m not happy with how it resolved itself, if you can even call it that. She rescheduled for next week to terminate, clearly pressured again after several more bouts with him in the parking lot, thanking me the whole time tearfully for trying to help, telling me it isn’t what she wants to do, and wound up quasi-electively leaving with him (I say that because he had a pretty firm hold on her arm, and he looked like the cat that ate the canary), but the whole situation was such that our hands were tied, and since she was discharged and did go outside again and go to him, and they were leaving, there wasn’t anything we could do. I would have written down his license plate number — since we did make clear to both of them that he may not ever come to the clinic again, and police will be called ASAP should he do so — but he didn’t have any on the car. I will probably be her counselor if she shows up for next week’s appointment, and will have to try and suss all of this out again, trying to help her figure out what she wants or needs to do knowing that in the situation she’s in, whether I like it or not, what he wants is going to have an influence I can only mitigate so much. I’m trying to think of a small token to have for her if she shows up again: I’m thinking she might need some Maya Angelou.
Obviously, I was left after the whole thing feeling both rather unhelpful and helpless, my heart aching for this woman, but I also still just had this profound feeling of total sci-fi. That guy didn’t know me. He had no idea that I interpreted his words and behavior as completely sinister while, to him, they were sacrosanct. But I know me, and anyone who knows me even thismuch would know that saying the kinds of things he was saying, trying to sway me the way he was was so completely ridiculous as to — were the situation not so sad — be knee-slappingly funny. Again, were I not so outraged for this woman, I would have laughed myself, and amidst all the adrenaline, when he first opened his mouth at me I did have to fight off laughing outright. If we can (even though we really can’t) take out all of the ugly in this, to anyone who knows me, a person talking to me like this, asserting this kind of shit to me presuming I’m on board, is earnestly silly beyond measure.

By my perspective, it was this level of total delusion that his words were meaningful, that his control over the woman he was married to was sovereign and that I’d recognize that which struck me first and foremost. I couldn’t believe, through the whole exchange, that it was happening, that this guy could not know that he was trying to speak a language to me which was a long-dead language that even if I recognized some of the words, didn’t mean shit to me.

That was immediately followed by the not-at-all-laughable feeling that it was not entirely delusion, not outside my frame of reference, anyway, and what I will and will not tolerate or enable in my own life. Clearly, in order for both of them to be at this point, this crap had been working on this woman for some time, and was likely working for him in one or both of their extended families, in the community they were in: after all, in our session it seemed clear that no one had made any kind of motion to help this woman before or acknowledge that this guy was very bad news. When we talked about him, the way she was telling me about this had a certain certainty on her part that I’d think she was crazy and that he was reasonable: that I was supportive of her pretty clearly came as a total surprise.

(I should add, as an aside, that some of that might be my color. The clinic staff are very diverse, but unfortunately, all of us who counsel right now — who often have the most in-depth conversations with clients about their trickiest stuff — are white. So, I’m often not surprised to have women of color warm more slowly to me, be more cautious at first, and, understandably, be reluctant at first to trust that I’m in their corner.)

I managed my clients the rest of the day, but it wasn’t easy. I got a ride from work to a spot downtown a mile or two from the stop for my third bus, and took a long walk there, fighting tears. Sitting on the packed, rush-hour bus on the way home, I was not only still fighting tears, I felt pressed in on all sides by people, in dire need of more air, open space and ideally, the opportunity for a good, loud primal scream. I dove into some bell hooks, but I couldn’t stay with it all sardine canned like that. I stopped at the market on the way home, picked up a bottle of wine and some things so I could have a good meal, got home, had a yawp and a good weep, took out the dog, than parked my tucas on the porch with a hefty glass and Flannery O’Connor. I needed me some Flannery: I needed her beautiful darkness and her realness all at once, the way she shows up the facades of people. I needed her to give me empathy. Mark came home, and listened to the whole saga and gave me a much-needed hug. I sat this morning for a while: I breathed it all in and out. I need some extra time for myself at some point in the next couple days — which won’t be easy, given it’s Mark’s birthday today and festivities are afoot, I have a march tomorrow, and work that needs be done before Monday — but that’s okay.

* * * * *

I also have a bit of a Buddhist conundrum about scenarios like this when it comes to how I approach, manage and experience them.

In so many ways, I am loving the work at the clinic — even when things happen like this — because it is such an amazing and constant exercise in compassion. It is nothing close to easy: it’s sometimes very tough (especially when sometimes, you have to remain compassionate with a client when they are not extending you the same compassion), but it’s a nourishing, life-affirming challenge. I certainly have a similar dynamic with Scarleteen, but it’s a little different. Not only is it virtual, but if something shakes me up, stirs me, overwhelms me, I can step away from it for at least a few minutes, if not hours, gain some composure, and come back to it on my own time. I don’t have that luxury in my counseling office: the person disclosing to me, letting me in, is sitting right in front of me, and their need is intensely immediate. I also have to address those needs knowing that a) they need to be able to move through the clinic at a decent clip so they, other clients and staff don’t have to spend all day there, so I have to try and be efficient in how I address them, and b) I will not likely have another opportunity to help this person again. This is probably my one shot.

Here’s the kicker, though: in any aspect of healthcare or counseling, from a professional standpoint, you’re supposed to keep this given distance, not get too stirred, too invested, etc. That approach runs solidly through care-based services. But as a Buddhist — and as someone trying to remain devoted to helping others in heart, mind and body — striving for distance (not nonattachment, distance) in order to cope, stands counter to my practice, and in my mind in order to best connect with clients/readers/users/the-universe-en-large, I have to remain pretty open. When a client is upset, and I am troubled by their troubles — while still keeping my own shit together enough not to make them feel guilty or like they need to take care of me, and keeping it together enough to do my job for them — this clearly is and has always been a comfort for them. I have a tough time believing that when you feel you have been marked by a great tragedy that for a person you disclose that to not to express a deep and real empathy for you, to express feeling some trace of that tragedy in a very real way, is a comfort.

There’s obviously a balance to be struck. You still need to do your job and you need to be a support, not just a co-griever. You need to instill a sense of faith in that person that however upset you also may be, that you are capable of being unattached to your feelings enough to help them when they can’t help themselves. If they feel out of control or incapable, you need to be someone they feel is in control and capable. You need to be able to still do what you can do for them while being open enough that part of the help you are giving them is being someone — sometimes that only someone they have yet encountered like this — who feels their pain and is unhappy that they have been wronged, traumatized, shafted. And of course, you need to be able to do all of this and find a way to preserve enough of yourself and your own emotional equilibrium to still start each day whole and end it the same way.

When I hear noises from anyone that I or my kind of approach gives too much, opens too much, doesn’t distance enough, doesn’t shut down enough, should strongly consider putting a larger shield up, my first reaction tends to be repulsion. I feel like there is a certain arrogance in the idea that self-preservation must always come first, as if we had any way of determining that somehow our self has greater import or meaning than someone else’s self. (Mind you, I think I’m a bit passively suicidal sometimes, but I figure it beats being the actively suicidal I was when I was younger by a serious long shot. This may color my views here.) I know that in part, that kind of directive comes from a place of care, perhaps the same kind of place that mine is coming from in trying to put others first myself: people say that to me because they care for me. But I also can’t help but think that some of it comes from a place where I’m effectively being asked to follow a certain status quo as to not threaten or usurp it: if we don’t all agree that the self always comes first, even if making it secondary, temporarily or permanently, might help someone else, that we then make it harder for those who want or need it to always rule all to feel as comfortable doing that. That sounds a bit pious to me, but I don’t know how else to express it. Thing is, I’ve been going about helping and counseling the way I do it for many years now, and I have my own way of managing it. Clearly, I can handle it without burnout better than most since I’ve got some serious staying power, and I still very much like doing what I do. My way seems to work for me and feels authentic to me — and is also in line with the kind of person I want to be, the kind of life I want to live — and I’m the expert on me.

I came to the practices I did because they make sense to me, and they run through everything I do in my life, including work. I’ve never been able to — or wanted to — separate my politics, my ethics, my spiritual life from my work, or set them aside somehow, and I’ve tried very hard to only choose work and work settings where I don’t have to do that. I often approach people very vulnerably, with a great deal of openness. It’s gotten me hurt before, for sure, but I think that the benefits have far outweighed the harms. Yesterday was a hard, hard day and parts of it were painful and very frustrating. But at the same time, yesterday, amidst everything else, I did get to share more than one moment where I was able to do anything at all to help someone feel a little more empowered and a little more cared for. But I do sometimes feel a little alien, both at the clinic and en-large, when it comes to all of this stuff, particularly when it comes to the harmony and cacaphony of all of it with my practice. I need a new sangha, I think. It’s tough to find something I can actually get to here without a car (good lord is this city car-centric), but I think it’s time to renew my efforts.

I’m rambling. I’m seeking out a balance and a clarity with this which I’m finding difficult both to do and to express. I’m glad for the opportunity, but it is a lot to try and sort through in the breakneck pace of my life these days, and I’m certainly not going to sort it out before I head back to the clinic on Monday.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, women, rantapalooza, workworkwork, heart work | permalink | comments (10) »

My lone wish for tomorrow is that it ends on a better note than this.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, rape, rantapalooza, in which I throw up in my mouth a little | permalink | comments (0) »

One of the things that has a great influence in both how I enact sexuality education and how I conceptualized my approach from the get-go is my background with teaching in the Montessori Method.

Overall, the primary way Montessori works is this: as educators, we observe our students, and based on our observations of what their self-directed interests, skills and questions are — basically, what they’re drawn to in terms of what activities they choose for themselves and what activities and areas they express interest in — we choose what materials to make or find and to present to them. In doing this, we’re also trying to help students learn to be observers, as well as working to empower them when it comes to trusting their own interests and instincts and to be self-motivated and self-directed, rather than reliant on — or vulnerable to — others to give them directives. Montessori teachers see ourselves more as helpers, as guides, than as directors or founts of knowledge. We see our students as the real directors, not us: it’s our job to follow their cues, not teach them to obediently follow ours. The underlying principles of Montessori are all about liberty and freedom, without which one cannot achieve, develop or experience self-discipline or learning. Montessori wrote that, “Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.”

Particular areas of what we call absorbency — times during which a person is most able to learn something and can most easily and enthusiastically absorb information — is also something we pay close attention to and bear in mind. The big deal that identifies a time of absorbency is when a person is both expressing a strong interest in a subject or area of development and is just starting to use and hone those skills: ages 1-3, for instance, as children are learning to speak and are fascinated with language, is usually the time of the greatest absorbency for language. If we help children be exposed to and learn language then, not only is their mastery best, they usually can also learn more than one language, more easily and ably than they will be able to during other times in life.

It doesn’t take someone with Montessori training or keen observational talents to identify the fact that when it comes to human sexuality and sexual attitudes, the minds of adolescents and pre-adolescents are greatly absorbent. Because part of identifying what and when to present certain things has to do with when a person is starting to use what they learn, we can easily spot adolescence as a great time for sex education. In working with young adults, while I’m not really getting in on the ground floor since so many sexual attitudes are learned in childhood, I’m still in early enough so that our readers can get help forming healthy habits and attitudes at a dawn in their sexuality and during a time when they are very absorbent. I’m not just working with them just so that they can use this information and these skills now — after all, some of them want the information now, but don’t intend to, or are not, putting all of it to practical use, while others are becoming or already sexually active — but so that they can have them early, available to them for the whole of their lives.

Young adult sex education isn’t just about young adult sexual activity, just like young adult education in mathematics, social studies, physical education or language isn’t just about their use of those skills now. We teach these things with the understanding and expectation that they will be useful and needed now and later or now or later.

Most teens have an expressed interest in sexuality, and feel and express a need to find out about it now, which makes now the best time to teach it. When children and young people ask us or each other questions about sexual anatomy, sex, and sexual relationships, when they are starting to consider how sexuality will be part of their lives and what they want from it, they are communicating clearly to us that they feel a strong need and desire to learn and want our help. Even if you’re not a Montessori-enthusiast like myself, this idea is woven throughout nearly any educational approach you can think of.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why or how people can selectively forget that what we learn about sexuality is information most of us will need for the whole of our lives. When we learn about sexuality, we’re not just learning for what we need and will use right at the moment we are learning, and no matter when or in what context we have a solo or shared sexual life, that activity itself cannot teach us all we need and want to know, nor can learning only through sexual activity later tend to result in sound sexual, physical and emotional health.

I confess, I quietly slipped out the back door years ago when it came to doing adult sex education, because I often found it deeply depressing and frustrating. We all know it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and it is often just as hard for adults who have firmly established certain sexual attitudes and behaviors to change them after ten, twenty or forty years of thinking and/or doing things differently. I heard so much “But my husband just won’t listen when I say this doesn’t feel good for me: I’ve told him a thousand times,” or “My wife just won’t believe that how I feel is normal and common,” or, “But we’ve never used birth control so he can’t understand why I need to now and just won’t do it,” some days — so many firmly cemented attitudes and practices making so many people unhappy and unhealthy that I felt helpless to counter — that I just had to step back from it in order to preserve any sense of sexual optimism about the world at large.

In my job at a women’s clinic, where part of my counseling is to try and help my clients who want them to find and use sound birth control methods and safer sex practices, and to have sexual lives which are truly beneficial and safe for them, I hit the wall of this daily, both with them and with their partner’s compliance. With some women, we have to have a conversation as to how she is going to convince — not request, and know that request is all she needs make — her partner that he is not entitled to sex with her at any time and will, indeed, need to withhold from sex with her for two weeks after her abortion to prevent her from getting an infection or complication. Plenty of those clients will express a strong feeling of hopelessness, or a history of failed attempts at changing established norms of behavior, when it comes to their ability or the ability and willingness of their partners to change those habits and attitudes. I know, plainly, that had many of my clients and their partners learned these behaviors, in terms of their physical health and their social relationships, and started out with inclusive, factual and compassionate sex education earlier that these situations would be far more rare.

Those clients are lucky to even have an opportunity to get some sex education later in their lives: there are not many avenues for older adults to become sexually educated (which explains why we see some of them come to Scarleteen for help in their twenties, thirties, even in their sixties). When I hear those who protest young adult sex education in high school and college, I’m often left wondering where, exactly — if indeed, as many express, young people will all just elect not to have any kind of sex until they are older — they think older adults are going to get that education. Last I checked, major corporations aren’t giving sex education seminars to their employees, and many general doctors, like many people period, remain uneducated on, and uncomfortable discussing, sexuality.

That isn’t to say educating older adults is an impossible task, but it seems a needless challenge when we have the opportunity, as educators, as a culture, as communities, to teach sexuality and sexual health way before that time, when absorbency is far greater, and when a person is either in the dawn of their attitudes and practices, or is able to start learning them before they’ll apply them at all. What we establish early as norms, and hear pervasively as norms, is incredibly sticky. We know that when someone learns to do something incorrectly or incompletely, that the longer they go doing that thing that way, the tougher it becomes over time for them to learn differently or to add on additional steps and skills. This is true with sex as much as it is with anything else.

The practical application of all of this aside, I’m never going to be able to let go of the idea that without liberty, real learning — learning, not indoctrinating — can’t happen. If in any of the ways I educate, I seek to hinder or protest that essential liberty, I’m not only hindering learning, but the quality of life of my students, and it is my job to very carefully consider how I educate through that lens. It is not my place to tell my students or clients when to have sex, how to define their own sexuality, to tell them they are good or bad people based on their sexual desires or choices, or to tell them that they do not need to know the very things they are asking me to inform them about. I cannot ever call myself an educator if I purposefully slam the door of knowledge in my student’s faces because I, not they, feel that it’s for their own good.

Rather, it is my place to observe be responsive to the cues they give me in terms of what they need and want from me to help them learn about sexuality and sexual health, and to give them as wide an array of factually accurate and inclusive information, resources and discussions as I am able so they can create lives where their sexuality is part of their liberty; where the attitudes and practices they develop are in as best an alignment as possible with their and their partner’s unique set of needs and wants. It is my place to share with them as much of what I learn and know as I possibly can when they invite me to. This is part of why I feel so blessed to be able to educate in environments which are completely drop-in and also very one-on-one — or without my intervention at all, unless it is asked for — where even the onset of the education I provide isn’t determined by me, but by my students or clients themselves, and where every person I interact with is able to expressly ask me or my co-workers for exactly what they feel they need, rather than what I or others determine is right for them.

It is my place to allow and encourage the opportunity for them to draw their own conclusions, and to provide an environment for them where they feel they have the inarguable right to use that information however they please without my value judgments. It is my place to make clear to them that questioning my authority is always acceptable, that while I do my best to be as educated on these issues as possible, I am not infallible, without my own biases which inevitably will occasionally leak through, or somehow representative of one universal truth, and when they have questions or doubts, it is my place to direct them to other sources of information besides my own.

Every now and then, when doing an interview or a press piece, I’m asked why I give the information I do with the approach that I do, and if I’d ever consider doing it differently. And every time, I make clear that I walk into each day ready to do it differently, because if my students and clients — through my observations of them and their direct requests — asked me to, felt another approach would be more helpful, or showed me that the way I am doing things is not helpful for them, and is not what they needed, I would be obligated to adjust my approach based on my own educational ethics. Were I shown that, say, my students and clients were all made happier and healthier in the whole of their lives by only ever having sex within heterosexual marriage, only having sex for the purposes of procreating, or in going without sexual healthcare and birth control, even if that conflicted with what I have found keeps me happy and healthy, by all means, I’d have to seriously consider that. But again, I’m a trained observer, I observe daily, and that’s not something they express or I see. I do not tend to hear that knowing how to use a condom, how the sexual response cycle works, how to negotiate sex with a partner, how varied human sexuality is or how to prevent unwanted pregnancy at any age has done a person emotional or physical harm: I, do, however, hear and see the inverse daily. I do what I do the way that I do it because I do my level best to base it on mindful observation with the aim of being a partner in the learning of others, not a director or a dictator.

Like much of my father’s family, Montessori was an Italian Catholic, and designed her educational model during a historical time when sex education wasn’t an issue on the table. The only sex theorist she even had to draw from was Freud, whose ideas on infant and child sexuality — sensibly so — she rejected. She did however address that sexuality was a particular issue for adolescents, and one which can be so encompassing and distracting for them that adaptations may need to be made in their education — such as allowing them more physical activity during the day. I can’t know, ultimately, what Montessori would have felt about sex education as it is today overall, save that it does seem to me to be part of Practical Life (the area of the classroom and materials in Montessori that focus on care of oneself, others and the environment) for older students. We can glean some ideas based on how she felt about education for ages 12 - 18 (see From Childhood to Adolescence for more on that). She felt it vitally important to recognize those ages as a passage into adulthood — not an extended childhood — to help students of those ages to feel capable and able. She emphasized adolescents’ need to separate from adults, rather than to be dependent on us or exploited by our determination of what is right for them based on our ideas-in-hindsight of what would have been right for us. She protested the notion that we need to save them from themselves, and worse still, try to do so in a way which is purposefully misleading and a barrier to freedom, motivated by the idea that the ends, however deceptive and controlling, justify the means. Fascism is incompatible with learning and liberty: this is why Montessori left her home country in the 1930’s.

She would have been very much opposed to any kind of education — sexual or otherwise — which denied what we observed in our students, denied the needs our students express and demonstrate to us; which was based in ideas of controlling their behavior by making them fearful of life and others rather than providing them with the information and tools they need in order to exercise their liberty to make their own choices and to follow their own interests and development.

Uncannily enough, Montessori once wrote something else which seems a sound representation of our current conundrum with approaches to sex education in the States. It was this: “The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.”

The inverse of that statement defines abstinence-only approaches to the letter. While good and evil is not a dichotomy which particularly speaks to me — few dichotomies or binaries do — ideas of good and evil, rather than ideas about liberty and learning, are foundational in abstinence-only education approaches and arguments against honest, factual, inclusive and comprehensive sex education. That simple sentence can tell us much about the flaws in a lack of sex education or abstinence-only sex education and the idea that the only way we can help protect people from activities which can carry risks is to keep them from them, teach them that they have no real means of managing them, or to urge them to be inactive — in both how they behave sexually and how we educate them sexually.

It shows up the red herring in the proposition that abstinence-only “sex education” is sex education at all, due to the approaches it takes, the purposeful misinformation or incomplete information it provides, and the place of control and withholding — a place with no allowance or respect for liberty — it’s all really coming from. It demonstrates an awful lot about if denying young people free and factual information and real opportunities for learning is really about health and well-being or really about being “good.”

(cross-posted at the Scarleteen blog)

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, rantapalooza, sexuality, education, workworkwork, heart work | permalink | comments (2) »

(Heads-up: parts of this post are fairly explicit when it comes to detailing rape and abuse.)

One of the more interesting (and by interesting, I mean ridiculously ignorant) responses I have seen in a few places discussing the I Was Raped project and my input was my statement on the news that the first time I was assaulted — at the age of 11 — I did not know what had happened to me and was without any language to even express it.

This is being met with some measure of disbelief by a few folks, or the assumption I was on drugs or had been drugged or that I was simply stupid. My personal favorite was that I’m a young girl who only called my rapes rape after being brainwashed by Jennifer and feminism, a newfangled notion she apparently just clued me into. Who knew I was such a late bloomer, and that I was somehow able to grow up in the 70’s in a progressive Chicago neighborhood with a single mother, an activist father, and managed to never hear about feminism? Wowza.

I think people forget that in the early 80’s and before, we were without SO much awareness about rape and all other kinds of abuse. (And other things: I also had attraction to women before then, and a girlfriend before I knew bisexuality was a term for what I was. I was actively dating both men and women for a few years before, as detailed in one of my teenage journals, there was an entry that simply says, “Huh. It seems that I’m bisexual.”) That’s hardly to say we’re living in an acutely aware world now, but that things really have changed pretty substantially in a relatively short period of time. I was an exceptionally intelligent child, in many ways precocious, and also being a compulsive reader, I knew a whole lot about a whole lot, including having some knowledge and understanding about sex.

However, even for plenty of people who know something about sex, who are smart and relatively informed, figuring out what sex is and what rape is aren’t so easy, particularly when you’re raised female. Even if we look at classical literature - much of Greek mythology, all sorts of folktales, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Bronte Sisters, you name it, and this was the kind of reading I did as a kid — it doesn’t take a genius to notice that usually, when rape happens, it’s often presented as sex or, at best, “sex by force.” It’s rarely, if ever, called rape. In that literature, in religion, in common parlance, in romance novels, in films, in family gossip young women have for eons been taught, more than not, that we are passive sexually, that sex for us is something a person “takes” or we “give” (rather than as something shared), and that often enough our sexual awakening is supposed to be about men deciding to indoctrinate us. Many of us were, have been and still are taught, overtly or covertly, that rape is only rape — and even then may not be — if we’re screaming no at the top of our lungs, if there is a knife at our throat, a scary-looking stranger who is scowling (not getting off and smiling or laughing), a dirty alleyway. Even then, we hear about what women in that situation did to deserve it, ask for it, incite it. As I’ve said before, with my rape that came closest to that, at the age of 12, I heard that kind of backlash from the mouths of the police.

My first assault happened with a man I trusted — my family trusted — the man who cut our hair for years. When he asked me to go back into that shampoo room with him, I earnestly thought nothing of it. When he told me how pretty I was getting, I was marginally uncomfortable, but then I always had been with compliments. When he started getting closer and closer to me as he said this, then started talking about my breasts and my legs as he backed me up against the wall, I became very quickly and acutely uncomfortable, but I was taught by one of my parents and all of her family that you trust adults, and that’s just that: that when you feel uncomfortable around them, you don’t yell out or tell them to get out of your face, or tell them how much their breath in your face makes you want to throw up. I was taught that it was more likely I would misunderstand the well-meaning actions of adults than be correct in knowing when they were doing something wrong. When his hands went everywhere he could possibly put them, I was in such a state of shock that this was happening to me. Part of that was that while I had developed a bit early, for the most part, I did still feel pretty childlike, and what was going on very much did not feel like what happened between an adult and a child. Another part of that was that from everything I knew, this was not unlike how, when sex happened, it was described. I didn’t want it, I didn’t feel aroused — I felt incredibly repulsed and before I walked home, wound up throwing up in the alley several times — and yet, it’s not like anyone had ever talked to me about how sex was supposed to feel, emotionally, or like I hadn’t seen enough representations of sex where it clearly was not about the woman’s wants, initiation or boundaries. What I was looking for, later that day and for years afterwards, was a rationale of why that happened to me, how, somehow, something I said, did or wore would have given the impression I wanted that or was available for that. For a couple years, I blamed my developing body: pulled hair out of it that had grown in, tried to make it go back to my childhood body, cut it up with a razor.

I did not tell a soul what had happened to me then. I was cut off from my dad at the time, and I was living in a household with a stepparent who was verbally and emotionally abusive, and who, since I had started puberty, had used that to humiliate and torment me. One of his favorite taunts during those years was to tell me, in lurid detail, how he might cut my breasts off. I think it’s also entirely possible — remember, these are memories which are now 27 years old and which are also made murky by a lot of trauma in a short time - I was worried that having my stepparent know this man had done this to me would give him or any other man the feeling they could do the same. Telling my mother would have meant he was told — my privacy was never respected in that home (the only place I could assure that was a closet I rigged to lock from the inside, where I spent a whole lot of time for a few years), and I was often treated as the interloper to what would have been, apparently, an otherwise idyllic existence. I had no idea what telling anyone else would mean, but I didn’t think it would be helpful. I was already a bit of a misfit at school and we had just moved, so all my friends were very new friends — and didn’t want to say anything which would cement my status as a freak further.

Again, there wasn’t any precedent for this back then, when it comes to telling. There were no talk-TV shows, no magazines, no books, not hotlines, no PSAs telling you to tell, or letting you know that telling could be a big help. There were only an onslaught of messages telling you to shut your trap and pretend nothing happened. My clear assumption at the time was that I must have done something to deserve this or make this man think I wanted this: I was often blamed for so much I did not do in my childhood that I had no reason to think otherwise. I was used to being found at fault. I wasn’t about to tel anyone about this thing which felt so wrong and get sorely punished for whatever I did.

There’s something else people seem to forget. I was more educated in many ways than a lot of girls my age, but I work in sex education right now, not in 1981. And every single day we get questions from people of a wide range of ages, from a wide range of nations, who very clearly would not — or do not - know, either. We hear from people who do not know the names of their own body parts, or do not know what the most “basic” forms of sex are. We hear from people all over the globe in their teens and twenties who do not know the basics of reproduction, or when sex has even happened. We work with a population who is frequently told that ANY sex is wrong for them, and so they tend to expect sex — wanted sex, sex of any kind — to feel wrong. We hear from people all the time who have been forced into sex or other kinds of abuse and do not know what happened to them; know that it was rape or abuse and it was not something they asked for or are responsible for. In other words, things have improved, but we still have a loooong way to go, and there are lots of things which inhibit people from knowing they have been abused which have little or nothing to do with rape at all.

Back when I was running my alternative pre-kindergarten and teaching in other classrooms, the few times I had a student I discovered was being abused in some way, figuring it all out was very tough, because children normalize whatever their normal is, and they are also very easily manipulated by abusive adults into believing that when they say a given thing is okay, that it is okay, even if it hurts, even if it doesn’t feel right, even if every part of them initially — in time that intuition is often worn down to nothing — knows it isn’t okay. I had a student once with a babysitter who, as it turned out, had a husband who punished the children they cared for by burning their mouths with a lighter (you can guess, sadly, when this all played out, how little happened to this man — as I understand it, the only consequence of all of this was that the woman doing home daycare got a limit placed on how many kinds she could have, and stupid DCFS told them who made the report, so the child and his mother were harassed by phone at their home for weeks by these people). I only found this out after my young student had told me all day his mouth and throat were sore. I had given him water and juice, and finally took him in the bathroom to look back in his throat… and saw that the roof of his mouth was literally charred black. I knew well enough by then that you have to be careful how you talk to kids about this stuff — again, it’s very easy to lead or influence them — so it took everything I had to try and ask questions cool as a cucumber when I was mortified and heartbroken, knowing something awful had happened to this child. In asking where he’d been lately, what he’d done over the last few days, he finally volunteered, with a shrug, that “Maybe that happened when Mike put his lighter in my mouth. He does that sometimes.” He said it as if he were saying, “Maybe I’ll have eggs for breakfast this morning.” Mike put a lighter in his mouth, sure, and it later came out that Mike liked to physically “discipline” him in other ways, but Mike also played ball with him, told jokes, was his friend. These kinds of situations are confusing for children, confusing for teens, confusing for adults.

See, sometimes we don’t know we’ve been abused because the person who raped (or otherwise abused) us isn’t supposed to be someone who can harm you: a boyfriend, a teacher, a parent, a clergyperson, a friend. If people who are supposed to care about you, who say they care about you, who others you trust invest trust in assaults you it surely must have been something else, because people you love aren’t supposed to do you harm. Sometimes we don’t know because the person who is assaulting us tells us, quite plainly, while they are doing so that we like what they are doing, that everything feels so good, that we are so special, that they are our friend and would never hurt us. They’re smiling, the way we see them smile all the time, not looking scary or yelling or calling us bitches or sluts. Sometimes we don’t know because what we are told or shown in sex and what we are told or shown is rape so closely resemble each other: my personal feeling over the years is that one thing that makes healing so hard for a lot of survivors is that so much of the consensual sex they are having is still pretty rape-y in a lot of ways. Sometimes we don’t know rape was rape because we have heard so much more about how women are temptresses (or, for male survivors, how men and boys always want any kind of sex from anyone) who lead men into the things they do to us, who cause men to lose self-control — this kind of talk loomed large among my mother’s Irish Catholic parents, for instance — or we hear about how dirty and filthy and bad we are from birth, no mater what we do or don’t do, no matter what is or is not done to us by others.

Let’s also not forget that often, our psyches do us a profound favor with traumatic events where they can kind of turn off and tune out our minds so that our memories of a traumatic event are murky and even nonexistent. This is not some kooky idea people came up with in order to prove imaginary traumas, it’s something very well documented, and one very typical aspect of PTSD. In my case, while I remember much of my first assault very clearly, my second is one where a whole chunk starting where I was forcibly grabbed and pulled into the van and ending where I somehow had gotten myself back into the bathroom of the ice rink where I started, shivering and shaking and bruised, is just missing. I’m very well versed in this point of therapies for missing memories, things like RMT, and of the big flaws in them. Before I even knew how flawed approaches like that could be, I had no interest in trying them (and the one therapist I had who I stuck with in my teens was very down-to-earth and never suggested them): I never wanted those acute memories, nor did I, personally, need them to know what happened to me and to work through it. All the same, when you have memory loss with trauma, it can make figuring out what happened right at or around the time it did a challenge, especially when you factor in the very typical desire for denial of trauma.

One of the biggest bummers of the last couple of weeks is that I wish so many of these conversations could have been had only with rape survivors, in spaces that felt safe, where survivors could really talk and where those who were not could just freaking listen. Every time I read one of these bouts of en masse ignorance, it was usually dovetailed by comments about how we don’t need rape awareness, how everyone knows all they need to know, and how anyone who wants to talk about their rape can with no problems and full support, which is an obvious and sad irony. If we didn’t need that awareness, survivors would feel and earnestly be safe to share their stories and all the prototypical myths — like the idea that everyone knows when they have been raped and knows that’s what to call it — wouldn’t be anything we still had to counter. If people could just listen to survivors — and put aside that sometimes, what we have to say is going to make people feel uncomfortable and is going to challenge certain worldviews profoundly — we’d have come a lot farther by now both in reducing rape and in having a better environment for survivors to heal in. It’s really tough sometimes to even figure out which is more traumatic: a rape itself, or the aftermath of rape, living with rape, trying to work through it all in a culture which is so hell-bent on enabling rape and blaming or silencing survivors.

So, no: I didn’t know that two of my rapes were rapes for the first few years after them, or even when they happened. I wasn’t drugged for any of my assaults, nor was I on drugs or any other substance. I have never been stupid a day in my life. They were not wanted, consensual sex which I only decided to call rape when a bunch of feminist women brainwashed me. I was not atypical in this respect, even though my not-knowing isn’t universal, either. The biggest reason I didn’t know is that, like many, many people then and many now — including some getting the message loud and clear from some of the discussions which have happened over the last couple of weeks — I was taught in a million different ways not to know.

posted in Heather Corinna, activism, rape, surviving abuse, body/mind, rantapalooza, online life | permalink | comments (3) »

CHOOSE WIFE.

That was a sign being held up by a protester in front of our clinic this week. Two words, but they speak volumes. (Though I confess, it took me a little while to get pissed, because I couldn’t stop saying it in an Elmer Fudd voice for a few minutes.)

This has been one of the biggest blind spots I’ve had to contend with when it comes to both working in sexuality education and working in women’s health, and with women’s reproductive choice. There’s a very pervasive idea out there — and boy howdy, does it serve the agenda of the far right — that somehow, getting married fixes absolutely everything for women when it comes to unplanned pregnancy, sexually transmitted infections and just about anything and everything you could think of when it comes to sex, sexuality and reproductive health and choice. That married people — but more to the point, married women — don’t need sex education, don’t need birth control, don’t need abortion, don’t need sexual healthcare, don’t need to know about their bodies, don’t need safer sex, don’t need to know sexual negotiation skills. Women, if you want to be protected and safe, get married. That’s what’s been said to women for most of our history, and despite knowing better now — especially if you provide any of the above services and happen to notice that married women are among the clients you serve — it’s still what is said to women daily and incessantly.

I’ve talked before about the flaw in that logic when it comes to STIs. Historically and currently, marriage, in and of itself, does not and never has offered protection from sexually transmitted infections, especially when you consider not only what the rates of infidelity are — particularly among men, who more often transmit disease to their spouses, simply when we’re talking about the physiology of sexually transmitted infections — and as well, when you consider that most people will have had other sexual partners before marriage, and how many people (again, especially men) never get STI screenings, and also don’t use latex barriers consistently, or at all. I’ve talked before — and you hardly need me to deliver this news flash — about how anyone with ears and eyes knows that marriage does not guarantee a safe or satisfying sex life. I’ve talked before about how given domestic violence rates, the notion that women are guaranteed lifelong safety, on every level, simply by getting married is an incredibly cruel piece of propaganda.

There’s not likely a woman in the world who needs me to tell her that getting married does not mean that birth control is no longer needed or wanted at times, or constantly — remembering that funny little factoid that not all women or couples want to reproduce at all — or that getting married does not mean a woman thus wants to spend the rest of her reproductive life pregnant or risking pregnancy. Getting married doesn’t necessarily provide even the woman who DOES love being pregnant and does love rearing children, who wants to be pregnant and parenting every waking minute of her life the financial or practical means to do so. My mother grew up with two parents in an Irish Catholic family: she has eight siblings, and would have had more save one stillbirth and a couple of miscarriages. Mind, her mother hardly had a choice in when she got pregnant, or when she had sex, but still. Anyone who wants to tell me I just don’t know what I’m talking about and what nirvana it is to be a kid in a household stretched that thin can bite one of my grandmothers dry Bisquick-and-water biscuits (and be unable to afford the dental care needed to repair their chipped teeth, too).

Even most conservative women know these truths. They too, are either using a method of birth control, or if they are not, are trying to just avoid sex to try and prevent pregnancy. Very few women in the world with any real agency are choosing to have ten children, and to be at constant risk of pregnancy, unsure when they’ll be pregnant again at any time. Conservative women come into clinics for abortions who make very clear that they do not believe in abortion, all while choosing to have one. For those most vocal about how not-okay with abortion they are, when a clinician tells them that IF they are really not okay with it, they can’t perform a procedure for them, the outrage is often astounding. (Because, of course, abortion providers are supposed to be just DYING to give everyone on earth an abortion, since the aim is apparently to wipe out the human race and make millions from abortion procedures, so we are never, ever supposed to say no to anyone. After all, we’re supposed to be lying when we say that we’re committed to women, committed to their choices being choices they can live with: when we show up that untruth, the antichoicers get mighty pissed.)

I’d posit that a lot of conservative women have the best of all possible worlds. They can malign or try and limit sexuality education, birth control and abortion all they like, even very publicly, even fight it actively, and yet, it’s still there for them — for now, and tenuously because of their efforts to make it so — when they need it, without judgment, and most of them do use at least some of these things. They can benefit from the feminist movement when it comes to getting them out of the house, allowing them the ability to be public spokespeople, to be politically visible, and reap those benefits while denouncing their source. They can even beg off sex to prevent pregnancy by being able to say they are so, so tired from doing the things in a day that only movements they oppose have allowed them to do. They can also cheerlead marriage and abstinence even if their marriages are a mess and they didn’t abstain from sex themselves. They don’t have to be consistent or truthful in any of this, because they know they can rely on our consistency, and the truth of our commitments.

From what I can gather by polls at Scarleteen over the years, as well as the daily conversations I have with teens and young adults there, around 30% of our users are not yet sexually active. Plenty have no intention of becoming so any time soon, and plenty are, in fact, right now waiting for marriage. (Some of them are even swift enough to know they may well change their minds about that later on, but acknowledge that even if that’s how things work out, this is their plan for now.) What they’re doing, see, is this crazy-smart thing we call preparing for the future. They know that someday they likely will become sexually active, and that at that time, they’re going to need to know about their bodies, about how to work sexuality out alone and with partners, about birth control and/or safer sex. They’re looking this stuff up now, asking questions now because they both know they’ll need it later and because they are curious about it now. Some of them WILL be people’s wives or husbands later, but most are smart enough to know — smarter than some of their elders in this regard — that that doesn’t mean they won’t need to have an idea about using birth control or how to take care of their sexual health. I feel pretty confident saying that most teens would do this — including those who do become sexually active in their teens — but many don’t simply because having the information in advance isn’t an option for them, and they don’t know where to find it.

As a former — though it still informs the way I educate — Montessori educator, it’s a very big deal to me to try and educate in such a way that I am teaching what I am in the windows in which someone’s mind is absorbent, or for you non-Montessori geeks out there, at the times when a person is in a stage of development where a given set of skills or knowledge are most likely to be learned, and a natural curiosity is most prevalent. For instance, the usual window for language is, not surprisingly, under the age of six. Children under six can often become bilingual or trilingual without even trying, just by listening and being talked to in several languages, simply because that time is when they’re forming most of their basic language skills and when doing so is so gangbusters for them. And one of the ways we, as educators, determine windows of the best absorbency is simply by watching and listening to our students: they tend to show us or ask us, pretty directly, when they want to learn something. Of course, when it comes to sex education, that can be tricky simply because so many young people have been shown by so many that it’s just not okay to ask questions about sex.

In the same vein, it’s no big shocker that during the big peak of physical and emotional sexual development, young adult minds tend to be particularly absorbent to sexuality information. For sure, if they are or are becoming sexually active at that time, that information is all the more essential because it has a very immediate and practical application. But even for those young adults who are NOT yet sexually active, even for those few who WILL not be in any way sexually active until their twenties, this is STILL a great time to teach them about it because they are so absorbent, and also because it’s obviously ideal to educate someone about something they will need before they actually need it. There’s a reason we try and do Driver’s Ed before someone is ever behind the wheel, after all, and why people who start factory jobs with big, sharp machines are given training first, rather than just being told to blindly try it out, see what happens, and hope they don’t lose a limb.

Again, I’m going to state the obvious. Speaking as one longtime sex educator, the idea that I somehow would profit from someone getting a sexually transmitted infection is hilarious. No one is going to donate to Scarleteen because what I do results in greater levels of infection. I bust my arse trying to do everything I know or suspect will be effective to reduce rates of STIs. Really, either way, profit isn’t my motivation, because I’d be a moron if I hadn’t figured out by now that no matter how great a job I do, I will rarely get paid, and when I am, I should never have any expectation that I will be paid at a rate at or much higher than your average high school kid working at the drive-through gets: in a good year, I tend to make around the minimum wage. If I wanted to work in sex ed for money (and had no problem leaving my conscience at the door), I’d work for the abstinence-only faction. THAT is who has been making the big bucks in sex “education” over the last ten years, kids. Leslie Unruh, for example, as executive director for the Abstinence Clearinghouse, reported compensation in 2004 at $109,920. In the same year, her reported compensation as executive director of the Alpha Center — a CPC — was $57,547. That’s an annual personal salary — not a gross for her organizations — of almost $170,000. I haven’t done my taxes yet, but for my sex ed work — at Scarleteen and with the book — I’d estimate (and I just took a closer look) that my personal salary for 2007 is going to have been somewhere around $16,000, if that, and I likely work more hours than she does, no less. Without the one larger private grant I get (knock on wood), I just couldn’t do this as a job at all anymore — in 2004, the same year Unruh was raking in the big bucks, that huge profit I was making from sex ed was a big, fat $7,026 — and it’s been crystal clear over the years that how hard I work, how many people I educate, or how good a job I do has little to no bearing on if I get paid and how much. No matter what, this girl just picked the wrong side of the wrong fence, and it is THAT which influences my finances.
I’m sure I’d horrify Wendy Wright and her ilk and perhaps even prove the link she’s reaching for: after all, I now am not only a sex educator, I also work at an abortion clinic. Surely, this has been a very crafty plan on my part. Work like the demon I am in sex ed for ten years, talk myself blue in the face about safer sex knowing that all sexy talk about condoms and Chlamydia is only going to make teens want to race out and have sex even more (Herpes sores, in case no one told you, are all the rage now, because with all that public hair removed, you’ve got to have something to decorate your vulva with, after all), know that those young girls with the STIs will get pregnant because of them, which assures that they’ll wind up for an abortion at my other job. And don’t you think for a minute that given the lousy pay, I didn’t negotiate in advance for a steep commission from all that new business I’m going to be bringing them. I’m no fool.

(Ten bucks and two doses of EC says that at some point I find what I just said there quoted out of context in some conservative blog or book.)

But what Wright and the woman standing in front of our clinic doesn’t seem to realize is that our lobby isn’t overflowing with nothing but teenagers and fallen, unmarried women. Married women are in there every single day, some even with their husbands sitting right beside them. Some of those couples are military, flag-waving, apple-pie baking, churchgoing folk. Why on earth would they be there?

It’s a stupid question, and we all — even Wright — know the obvious answer. Because there is NO woman on earth, no matter her age, marital status or station, for whom it is always the right time to be pregnant and no child on earth for whom it is always the right time and environment in which to be born and raised. Women like Wright, of course, are likely planets away from families who can barely afford to feed themselves, let alone more — or any — kids. Most women who come into the clinic do already have at least one child. I saw someone just last week who already had two, and whose biggest concern about having an abortion was that it would impact her fertility, because while there was just no way she could afford to remain pregnant or have another child now, she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t want to have another somewhere down the road if things improved. She “chose wife,” and yet, there she was. A lot of women who get abortions do use birth control, and plenty correctly — this business about BC not being 100% effective isn’t a fairy tale. This one, though, not only wasn’t, she didn’t know how to. No one had ever taught her how, discussed her options, or even let her know that if she wanted to keep using natural family planning as she had been, there was a far more effective way to do that than the calendar method.

Suffice it to say, an abortion clinic doesn’t profit from STIs. That’s just silly. But it also doesn’t exist to profit from unwanted pregnancy. When I took this other job, for certain, some of it was financially motivated. I was working full-time and still having a helluva time paying my bills, despite already being without things many people have: a car, a house they actually own or are in the process of buying, health insurance. And this other job will help me pay my bills, but only because I live so leanly to begin with. Your average pencil-pusher makes more on the hour than most of us at the clinic, just for sitting in a cubicle and clockwatching every day, and he’s also not risking being shot or bombed, nor is he likely responsible for anyone’s physical or emotional health. And if suddenly there were methods of birth control that were 100% effective, totally safe for, and affordable and available to everyone (and you can tell me complete abstinence is when a) people stop having a libido and b) men stop raping women or obligating them to have heterocourse), if suddenly there was no more unwanted pregnancy, ever, I can assure you that not a single person at the clinic would shed a tear and be upset that the part of our job that is about providing abortions was over.

The thing that gets me the most about this “Choose Wife” stuff, whether it’s on a sign in front of my workplace or on the nightly news is that I have to also hear strong statements — from these same mouths — that women are no longer mere chattel. And yet, it is also stated or implied that once/if a woman marries, there’s just no need for any of these discussions about birth control, choice or sexual health because part of marriage presumably still requires a woman to forfeit all of that agency to one’s husband, or somehow removes a woman’s desire to have any of that ownership over her own life and body. Suffice it to say, it also — so far as I can make sense of it — implies that these children we’re told are SO important, are so UNimportant as to disregard their quality of life, whether we’re talking about having the means to feed and clothe them or we’re talking about assuring that they grow up without one or both of their parents resenting the hell out of them, telling — overtly or covertly — them HOW much they gave up to bring them into the world. Gee, thanks, Mom: lucky me.

I’m a blunt gal. I’m not going to say that some people’s opinions don’t horrify the hell out of me, they obviously do, particularly when they seek to make those personal opinions public policy. However, even with the seriously scary stuff, I prefer it straight up.

If you just think, as a woman yourself, that it’d be best for women to be without options anymore, for women’s lives to revert (and when I say that, I’m not even talking about all women: for the poorest women and women of color in many areas, marriage never even pretended to offer financial security, stability or safety) to being about nothing but preparation for marriage-and-mothering-as-career, then just freaking say it, and out of both sides of your face, please, with baby food in your hair and in your sweatpants, not a $500 hairdo and a Brooks Brothers suit. If you want to say that comprehensive, accurate sex education benefits no one, then you’d best start planning now for how you’re going to cover it up when your perfect teenage kid who has pledged abstinence gets knocked up, or winds up with PID due to an untreated STI from their new husband — who wanted to marry them, so he must have been a good guy, and who said he loved God and was waiting until marriage, so he must have been — an STI they didn’t even know they had since marriage = safe sex and no one who waits for sex until marriage needs regular pap smears and STI screenings. If you think, as a woman, women should have no choice as to when they have sex, when they become pregnant, if they remain pregnant, if they parent, then just say so and mean it…. which means you’re going to be saying it to a house full of whining tots, not on the evening news, not in your new Random House book; not with your sign you can somehow afford to stand holding every day in front of clinics where women are working, plenty to support the freaking kids women have already, plenty to support women just like you on the day you show up there, talking about how against abortion you are while you’re there getting one.

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

I sure wish I could croon that yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away, but alas, yesterday was a day from HELL.

I’m not writing about every item on my list, but to give you the highlights:

We don’t have houseboys in this house, we have a housedyke, and it’s me. I am usually the fixer-of-broken-things in our household. It’s actually not a role I like that much, butcha know, for the most part, I’m the one who knows how to fix things more often, so I’m stuck with it for now. Chalk it up to growing up poor, living on the fringes and having to learn to fix things because no one else is around or available. The cable modem, per usual (though it more often does this only when Mark is using his computer, but he wasn’t home yesterday), would just not cooperate and kept going down, taking ‘net access and phone service with it. I had a joint radio interview last night, and since Bellevue is a schlep for a car-less gal, was going to do it by phone, so it was a race against the clock. Also had to deal with a faucet issue outside, and then, in the midst of a rush to get a bunch of linens and towels done for Briana and The Baby Liam, our washing machine went kablooie. With a ton of water and towels still in it.

I unplugged it, restarted it, turned the fuse on and off, disconnected and reconnected the hoses, tried every setting….the works. I also tried yelling at it, shaking it and kicking it twice, but all I have to show for that is a sore toe. And as it turns out, we bought those used through our landlord, so any repairs are on us. Great. This is the first time I have every had laundry inside a place I lived, and I suppose I’m now paying the price (though I have had similar adventures with machines in laundromats, so). Or not: I have no idea what the price will be, but I probably can’t pay it, which is especially precious since there isn’t a laundromat anywhere remotely near here.

I found out I need scrubs for the new job like, yesterday, which is not so doable. I ordered some online where I could find them at a discount, but lord knows when they’ll get here. And new-job expenses are always a frustration: you take an additional job because you’re broke, but so often forget that with many jobs, for a while there the costs of travel, uniforms, what have you, end up draining your finances more. Never a good time, that.

I had some yuck to deal with at Scarleteen, too, my dog is becoming itchy again (poor kid), the house is a disaster since Mr. Price and myself have both been running so ragged with so many jobs, my backdrop stand in my studio fell on my sore toe, I burnt my hand on the stove, I felt disjointed and stressed during the radio interview. Part of why is that I believe that I was drunk-dialed by not just one but BOTH of my parents (funny that for all they don’t have in common, both love their vino). My Dad called slurring, and then just before the radio spot, my mother called elated about a bonus she’d gotten at work, but it was a kind of elated that I don’t usually hear her having without the Chardonnay.

And then there is this. Sigh. Right after what was said and posted in this video, and not shortly after the hate mail onslaught from some adults (not teens, nor even parents of teens, thanks) I had to deal with for a while thanks to this, which quotes from Shalit’s recent book, all of which pretty seriously misrepresent what all of them are talking about by shortening the whole list to two items and adding some implications which aren’t there.

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

Anyone reading knows this, but a) Scarleteen is for folks of all genders and orientations as is that checklist, b) we have more than that one item on the list of emotional factors, and c) one of the opening lines which has always been in that list is that sex does not equal maturity. All that plunging-fun business also isn’t mine: that’s even a little too obscene for me. Plus, a readiness checklist I’d write for expressly meaningless encounters would be a bit different than the list we’ve got. I’d be sure to include the requirement for a full lobotomy, for instance, and maybe the preferential selection of sexual partners in the thick of a midlife crisis or men who go virgin-hunting. But then, I might be jaded.

All the same, I do try and be a bridge-builder rather than a bridge burner as much as I can. I have some very huge problems with some of the things Wendy Shalit has to say — or, more accurately, just how they’re framed. All the focus on “good” girls and “bad” girls strikes me as keeping a dichotomy alive rather than getting rid of one, the endless focus on appearance seems seriously counterproductive, so much of it is framed as if everything to do with women, especially when it comes to sexuality and love, is about men, and for more reasons than I can count, framing everything as okay once marriage is involved really bugs me, and not just because I’m queer, nor just because I don’t personally feel that marriage as an institution empowers women. You’ll see where I exempted myself in the comments on that first link, and that’s because I am not going to have a conversation amidst men not only telling women what’s okay or feminine for our bodies (and lordy, how Toni would cringe if she saw herself being quoted by that guy in there in that way), but presuming that married women don’t need birth control because it’s all married women want to be pregnant all the time or risk pregnancy all the time.

All the same, I really hate false divisions, and I particularly resent someone creating them with my work, using misrepresentation of what I do or have written again and again because it nets a response they like, for their own aims. Seeing that video really made me angry, especially with the “teddy bear” comments, since I talk a LOT to young people about how BOTH “slut” and “prude” are crappy things to call anyone, and about how sexual readiness shouldn’t be seen as a status item, or a mark of maturity or immaturity. I explain often how plenty of people my age and older have times in their lives when they’re not ready for sex, or it’s not something they want to do for a while, and how that’s not about age: it’s just about how full our lives are and where we’re at in them. Saying we imply that anyone not ready for or interested in any kind of sex is lesser — especially given how many times in a day we explain that no one should ever feel sex is any sort of requirement — is either dishonest or incredibly careless. Continually talking about how we’re only talking to young, heterosexual women — especially given the language we/I use is very clearly inclusive save in pieces when we are very clear what group we’re speaking to — strikes me as an intentional way to make what we do seem to be something it is not, to serve her own purposes (which has also been an issue before elsewhere).

Anyway, at some point, I am going to just have enough and call this sort of thing out, but too, I often feel like there’s never any harm in trying to engage someone who isn’t doing same for you, and in simply asking for some consideration that the divides they see are divides they’re making themselves. Sex makes everyone feel vulnerable, those of us who work in sexuality are more than used to the fact that no matter what we say or how we frame it, people’s buttons get pushed and very few people can really see sex and sexuality outside binaries, dichotomies and all kinds of hierarchies. That’s just an unfortunate given.

I do actually get some of what I think Wendy Shalit is trying to do with her work, I do get the impression she means well for the young women she writes for, and were it framed differently, made in any way inclusive (per orientation, gender and gender identity, relationship models, spiritual belief systems, etc.) less heterosexist and entitled, and by pitting girls against each other less, I might be more convinced by some of it. While there is plenty she says that I have big problems with, I really DO think there are a few points on which we might intersect, even if we would posit different solutions to and sources of those issues more than a little bit differently. And I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect her to even publish my comments, and I was impressed that she did at all. Maybe I’m just being an idiot, because for all I know, she did so without constructive motives. Obviously, I have no way of knowing, especially when someone has been what seems — she’s a smart, educated woman — to be purposefully misleading as a habit. But I had a little behind-the-scenes bridge-building elsewhere this week that caused me to feel a bit more optimistic than I might otherwise, so who knows. Don’t go to “Why bother?” if you would on this. I’ve had egg on my face from trying to find middle ground with people and ask for them not to slander or misrepresent me or my work before, and if I wind up all eggy again, I’ll live. Apparently it’s good for one’s complexion, anyway.

All the same, most of the comments there make my blood boil, and that will be the end of any conversation there I have there. I am not going to sit and listen to how risky abortion is (particularly while omitting that pregnancy has always posed far more risks), how marriage magically makes a need for birth control or sexual readiness/consent vanish, or how when women want to control our own fertility, we’re somehow denying our own gender. If I want to read about that stuff, I’ll go reread The Handmaid’s Tale, where at least Margaret Atwood scares me in a way about all that that’s compelling.

In the midst of that I discovered that the version of the readiness checklist she linked to was on a website served in Israel which has stolen ALL of an old version of Scarleteen, changed some text, including the copyrights, and coated the pages with Viagra spam (how this was mistaken for a Google cache, I couldn’t begin to tell you). So, I got to spend several hours spending several case and desist letters which so far, have netted me nada. The name, address and phone number on the domain registration are fraudulent, the host in Israel is not responding in any way: it’s a freaking disaster.

Oh: and everyone and their uncle kept calling through during the radio interview, cutting off half of what I was saying.

By the time Mark stopped home briefly before going out to edit again, I was livid with all of life, and also just lost it, and wound up spilling out a bunch of issues with us that have been real problems for me in one long rush. I was not happy about how it all came out in one fell swoop, but at the same time, lately we seem to have ten minutes a day to actually communicate, so it often feels like I either just push things out, or I let them sit for weeks or even months at a time. Not really great options there. And given the timing of things, we’re not going to have any time together to talk more for close to three weeks: from houseguests now through the week and a half he’s going back home for his holidays, which really stinks.

Thankfully, I don’t have to be back at the other job until Monday , which is good because the last thing I want to do is go in there all frazzled and irritated. I get to finish cleaning and doing some work today, as well as packing up some prints and presents to ship out. Thankfully, too, I get one of my closest friends today and that dear little boy I can’t wait to see and make more forts out of blankets with.

And if nothing else, there is coffee, my sleepy, snorty dog, the piano, Villainess bath scrub and hot water, all of which I’m going to need for a little bit once I’m done freezing my hands by wringing out all the soaking, cold, wet towels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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