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) »

Yesterday, I got a wonderful phone call from one of my co-workers at the clinic, who overheard my voice on her television (people who only know of me online tend not to know that in person, people will usually say my voice is the most distinctive thing about me) during a replay of Friday night’s news segment on the I Was Raped t-shirt.

She noted that she thought it was really passive-aggressive and strange that right as the reporter said I did not want my face shown, they made a point of panning down a screenshot very precisely to my face and staying there. Glad, at least, to see that crapitude got noticed: I’m still reeling from it, honestly. I have had two more news stations contact me, and expect to have to again argue for the same rights to privacy other survivors are given; expect to have to explain that making oneself visible in one context does not mean anyone else is entitled to make me visible in others as they choose, not me.

She also just had some wonderful things to say about how she really appreciated having the opportunity to work with someone like me, how I make her think about things, how passionately I advocate for others. It was really cool of her to call me and also ask if I was taking care of myself, doing okay. Mind, I’m not thrilled that obviously, this is going to be something I’ll be dealing with at work. It’s not that my being a survivor isn’t a secret there among my co-workers: when I taught the self-defense segment, I made a point of telling the staff that I had both survived rape and assaults and also evaded assaults in my life, something I think is important to share when doing self-defense training. Rather, when I’m at work at the clinic, the clients are my focus, they’re all of our focus, and I don’t want to talk about me, there. I want to talk about them. I’m also really hoping I don’t wind up with a client who saw that segment and makes the connection: when they’re in my office, it’s their issues which should be in the forefront of their mind, not mine.

It’s also seeming like when my Dad comes in on Tuesday, Wednesday I am probably going to have to finally sit down and disclose all of this, not just the press stuff, but the initial rapes themselves. My father and I are and always have been so, so close, but this is one of the few things he doesn’t really know about me, save very vaguely. The reason I’ve never sat down and told him about my assaults wasn’t shame. Rather, the first two that happened happened during a rare period of time where we were not talking or seeing each other, first due to my mother not allowing us contact, then, due to my being very hurt that my father had broken up with a woman he was dating who I loved immensely. I’ve avoided telling him about all of this because I know that he is going to feel guilty, like this was his fault — most of my father’s dreams for what he wanted to do with his life and the world were not realized, and he’s very low about that. Being a good parent to me is pretty much what he considers his lone achievement, and he already beats himself up enough for not being able to protect me from my stepparent. In many ways, a lot of the tough stuff I have battled in my life has been so much harder than anything my father ever wanted me to have to go through, and I know he’ll also just be really sad. I know he’ll be amazingly supportive of me — he always is, no matter what — but he’s also going to be hurt, including hurt I didn’t tell him (even though I know he’ll also understand), and this just really wasn’t somewhere I wanted to go with my father yet, for a handful of reasons. To say that I resent being somewhat pushed into this position is an understatement.

Yesterday morning, I woke up, ready to have a new — better — day. While I was sitting on the couch checking email on my laptop, I heard snippets of conversation from the women on the porch next door that sounded remarkably like discussion about the news segment. I checked myself for a minute, thinking I was being a narcissistic arse, but then heard more clearly that yes, in fact, that is exactly what was being discussed. “I don’t want to have to know that about anybody if I don’t ask them,” was the last bit I got, after a good deal of “Who would broadcast they were raped?” So, I was a big baby about the whole thing yesterday and stayed totally in the house, having Mark get me my daily essentials (coffee, smokes, Mighty-O donuts), having a brief stop-by with Ben and Joriel, a long, cathartic phone conversation with my ex, boxing myself into a corner of my office behind piles of receipts for my taxes, and a mellow evening of hugs, movies and Scrabble with my sweetheart.

I’m not surprised about all of this backlash (and no, I still have yet to get a response from anywhere using my copyrighted image without my permission). I wish I could say that I was: really tired, really frustrated, and unprepared for how much of this I’d have to deal with, but not surprised. My favorite part are sites talking about it where you get to read people talking about what a sensitive group they are when, in fact, they’re about as Joe Average on this issue as it gets. It’s also pretty annoying that no one can freaking well read: the shirts neither profit Jennifer nor myself: most of the money paid for them will go to cover the costs of making them and making more, if people want them, and a very small percentage goes to support Scarleteen, which both supports and counsels survivors, and also works to do what we can to aid in prevention efforts, be that by talking expressly about how to prevent rape or by talking about what consent and real desire for partnered sex are, and how to communicate and interpret consent and desire. Suffice it to say, I’ll never stop wishing some people could hear themselves and recognize that talking about what “appropriate” responses are for anyone who has survived any sort of trauma has a whole lot to do with why rape is treated the way that it is, and also realize that being told in any number of ways to be quiet is something we have all heard before, not just from family, community, even friends and partners, but often from our rapists.

There’s a reason that I agreed with Jennifer that something like this t-shirt and the whole project could be valuable, and this is a big part of why. Yesterday’s email box was… well, it was something. I got called stupid any number of times, told I should be ashamed of myself at least once. I got messages making clear — again, this is nothing new to any survivor — that it would really be best if women like me would just shut the hell up and stay quiet. I also got a number of emails from other survivors with their personal stories in them, and thanks for doing what we are. Obviously, those weren’t things that cheered me up, as those stories are so painful to hear, but the fact that anything I do could allow someone who hasn’t disclosed to feel able to disclose in any way — even if it’s just to a stranger in email — is a good thing. Perhaps selfishly, I’m just really disappointed that when it comes to me, thus far, this hasn’t been, overall, a good thing. That may change in time, to be certain, but as of right now, I’m just feeling overexposed, very raw, and in some ways, very deeply angry. I’m okay with that to some degree if it does good: after all, I can take this stuff, and I have in other ways, other contexts before. I have made choices to be public about things like this in the ways I chose to, myself, both knowing that I can only control context so much and knowing that to help to good stuff happen, you do often have to put up with a whole lot of crap. I’m also aware that my expectations of sensitivity from others are often higher than is realistic: that’s very much not a new issue.

Not sure what today will hold, save more piles of receipts, another donut, some yoga and a lot more coffee. I’m also giving serious consideration to going back upstairs and climbing back into bed with Mr. Price who is still sleeping to grab a few snuggles and give a few back. And all of that is sounding quite lovely. Hell, any situation that has made doing taxes seem like a vacation rather than a chore can only be so bad, right?

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, rape, surviving abuse | permalink | comments (6) »

I am physically and emotionally exhausted. This front page and everything on it is why.

And now I seriously have to go to bed since I need to get up in just over five hours. Bloody hell.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, rape, surviving abuse, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (0) »

Two work-update quickies:

1.  RH Reality Check is now — as of today — syndicating my advice columns at Scarleteen twice a month.  I love them big bunches, and really appreciated their asking in the interest of getting more youth involved in reproductive and sexual health education and activism, so that’s exciting.  I’m also hoping my having some content there might help get some of our users at Scarleteen feeling more confident about getting involved in some of the discussions there.
2. I’m also the sexual health consultant for the upcoming orb28, a site I am SO thrilled is near to launch.  It’s from New Moon Media, the fantastic organization which publishes the magnificent New Moon magazine for and by girls, and orb28 will be an interactive site gearing to a slightly older audience than New Moon targets.   Feminist outlets for girls and teen women are so few and far between, and I think this is going to be a great one.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, Scarleteen, online life, workworkwork | permalink | comments (0) »

So, pretty clearly from the vibe and the lingo, a pro-lifer (and what sounds like an adult) just posted this question in the Sexpert Advice queue at Scarleteen.

Which is fine: I have a bit in my book on this, and have been meaning to have a piece up on CPCs at Scarleteen for a while now. I appreciated the reminder and the opportunity.

But I just have to wonder: what response did they expect from me? I kinda doubt they wanted to invite me to do an in-depth shakedown of the whole deal, but I can’t imagine, for the life of me, what else they thought I’d do, or how they thought any answer I’d give would someone send more women to them or be of any benefit to them. Did someone earnestly think I’d be all, “Oh, right! I totally forgot to include a link for pregnant women — especially poor women, teen women, and women of color who those orgs love extra-super-much — who want to be manipulated and lied to! After all, that’s a reproductive choice, too, right? Silly me, let me go fix that right now. Thanks for the tip!”

People are so freaking weird, man. Or stupid. Or both.

In other news, I am slowly on the mend. These antibiotics are hell on my guts, but finally, last night, my ears started going back to normal, I was able to stand (heck, even sit) for a while without wanting a five-day nap after, have the appetite for a real meal, take in a nice, deep breath without hacking up a lung, and not have to second guess that I’m semi-coherent, as I have been for days now.

In the ER the other night, when I got put in the room, I got told to take my top stuff off and put on a gown. So, I took it all off, knowing that if they were going to do a chest X-ray, I’d need to do that. When the X-ray tech came in, I asked if I should bring my pile of stuff, and to my ears, this was the conversation we had:

Him: Oh, good, your brassiere is off.
Me: Yeah, I figured it should be. So, can I leave my stuff here or should I bring it?
Him: It’s good you took it off, you can’t have one on for the X-ray. And you’ll want to have that for the holidays.

Which a) didn’t answer the question of if I needed to bring it, b) didn’t seem to acknowledge I said or asked anything at all, and c) made me arrive at the conclusion that I was either having some serious auditory hallucinations or this guy just was far more focused on the grave impropriety a bra-less holiday would be (maybe he had some kind of traumatic experience getting whacked with a merry, unrestrained boob one Christmas or something) than on anything else. However, I was left thinking that if the latter were true, and I really heard what I did, I don’t know why he wasn’t concerned about leaving said brassiere and it being stolen.

I was going to say “What?!?” but I thought it best I just let it go. I was either going to be told I was hallucinating or I’d have to hear about this holiday bra issue, and I wasn’t up to either possibility.

posted in Heather Corinna, reproductive rights, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (4) »

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) »

Phew! It took me months, and a whole weekend spent doing nothing (save one book promo event down the street) but this including pulling most of my hair out to edit it down to something resembling a manageable length, but sparing a graphic for it and maybe a few more final adjustments, it is finally freaking done. Writing that piece was harder for me in many ways than writing my whole book: it’s just such a broad topic, and it is so, so hard to approach men with it and walk the fine line between accountability and nonproductive blaming. I also went back and forth a thousand times about detailing my own rapes, but it just felt like disclosing them was important (even if it means, as it usually does when I disclose without being a weepy mess, that I’m likely to get at least a few emails telling me I deserved to be assaulted) when it comes to making readers who might feel vulnerable know that I’m vulnerable, too.

We do have substantial male traffic, so I’m hoping it does some good, and to boot, I can at the very least know plenty of female readers will see it and will get to have the rare experience of reading rape prevention materials that are about someone besides rape victims.

(FYI, I had a sidebar in there originally explaining that some couples like and both consent to dominance and submission play and that doesn’t mean we’re talking about rape since that activity is wanted and negotiated, and then gave a little airtime to talking about that it needs to be negotiated like anything else, not assumed, etc. I took it out just because it seemed obvious given the talk about consent before it, but for any peeking over at it who do D/S, can you let me know if you think it really needs be mentioned? Thanks!)

Hell, even if it does no good whatsoever, I am pleased as punch to have that stinker OFF of my to-do list at long last. Know how it is when any given thing just goes on and on, never finished, and how it becomes the most important thing to do in the whole world — even if it really isn’t — just because it’s so hard to finish or get started on anything else with whatever albatross it is putting it’s butt in the way of your brain fully focusing on anything else? That’s what I’m talking about. Now, would that it were the ONLY thing on my to-do, or rather to-finish list like that, but it was certainly the biggest and least pleasant, so that’s something.

Tomorrow — hooray! — I start two days of training and orientation for my new second (third? I have so many jobs, I don’t know which it is) job, which will likely also include a new Hep B vaccination, redoing/updating my very antiquated first aid/CPR and HIPAA schtuff, and, given what it’s like here right now, being very wet and cold coming and going. I also need to not make my workwear my pajamas, which means I must, as ever, face the terrifying laundry piles which I’ve become convinced must somehow be viral. I did give myself a splurge last week as a reward for getting this gig, and grabbed a new kata as well as this awesomely wonderful, toasty sweater (in black) here which just came today, so that at least covers the top of me. It’s the “no jeans” bit that’s going to be a tough order, as that’d be 95% of the pants I own and live in which are not pajamas. I’ll work it out, but the spoiled work-at-homer in me is a wee pissy at the moment, especially since there’s laundry involved.

I also had the first day with my new, fantastic weekly in-house volunteer last week, who got started on a Facebook page for Scarleteen (I can live with Facebook: I cannot and will not have anything to do with myspace) as well as a new call for writers. It’s so nice to have someone to help a little bit sometimes right here in the home office, who I can talk things out with rather than just typing them out, and cooler still, she was a once-upon-a-time Scarleteen user when she was younger, so she gets all of the import of what we do, which is a very happymaking thing.

Oh, and my editor wrote last week to let me know that the book is going into it’s second printing. Yay! But… she only got told after the fact, which means that it’s going into that second printing with the two very irksome art department typos. Boo.

Maybe I’ll name my next pet “Urethea” in honor of those typos, and with the wishful thinking that someday I won’t have to see them anymore save on met vet bills.

posted in Heather Corinna, bookish bits, Scarleteen, apropos of nothing, workworkwork | permalink | comments (4) »

The two panels I was part of at the NARAL youth leadership summit yesterday were pretty freaking awesome. It was SO fantastic to see rooms brimming over with women in high school and college full of enthusiasm, feverishly taking notes, having no trouble at all asking questions or inserting themselves into conversations.

For the Art as Activism panel, I sat with these two freaking brilliant women, and suffice it to say — though this is easier to explain to people who know me in person and are familiar with the fact that I’m very spaztastic in my energy — Christa and I immediately leaped on the notion that we have GOT to do some kind of work together, starting, like, yesterday. But cocktails first: always cocktails first.

The other panel I did was called “Be the Media You Wish to See.” I realized halfway through that clearly, I’d interprteted that as “How to Overthrow the Media.” I’m not sure that was what they’d had in mind. Now, I don’t think that was an unreasonable interpretation on my part, but when one of the questions that came up was how choice was represented in corporate OR mainstream media (I was all, “Whaddya mean OR?”), it became clear I might be on a slightly different wavelength.

So, per usual lately, when I heard my words starting to come out of my mouth — rather than, you know, having the distinct sense I was purposefully and intentionally forming them — I realized I was likely sounding a little outer limits. I started talking to the girls and young women (and a couple young men) about how they need to be dangerous — how it is seriously awesome to be dangerous — how the price paid in a country like we live in for taking big risks with activism and our words is so relatively small, even when the worst happens. How — in response to being asked if I thought we were going to see a change in how repro rights and women’s bodies and abortion was rep’d in the media — they’re poised to have things change but have got to just take the risks right NOW; that those big changes will only happen when they DO something. (I also brought up that there is this perpetual rift between older feminists and younger feminists where the elder feel like the younger aren’t doing enough, and how it’s pretty impossible to tell if that’s apt, or just projection, but either way, everyone has STILL got to freaking start acting up and making some noise.)

That was the point at which I made clear I knew I was getting a bit intense, but they were really receptive, so I went on. I talked about how we don’t hear young people’s voices enough, and when they really speak up, they get heard, often because the idea that they’re apathetic, self-absorbed, stupid, whatever is so prevalent. I mean, that’s an awful stereotype, but it’s one they can seriously use against the whole system to empower themselves. Crappy as stereotypes are, when your character and actions fly in the face of them, it can make it a lot easier to be seen and heard. I was all, “Fuck the mainstream media and trying to be part of it, make your own,” I went on and on telling them they were powerful. I probably said that a few too many times, really, but then, what’s too many times to hear you are powerful?

For sure, I got a bit kooky, but you know, it’s not very often that you get to do events with a room full of young people, especially young women, at an event because they WANT leadership roles. (Plus, given the panel before was three of us artists clearly pulling energy from each other’s kooky, the kook-factor was inevitable.)

It’s even less often that when you talk, it doesn’t have to be academic and dense, but rather, you can just wave your bloody-red pompoms made from a million tampon strings and cheer the hell out of a bunch of young women. Too, I keep feeling like I see this really weird sell for feminism or activism that tries to say that it’s great because it’s sexy, it’s cool, whatever. And it’s not. It’s not sexy or cool, and it won’t make you fit in. But since when was anyone ever drawn to activism to fit in, anyway? From where I’m sitting, the fringe benefits of being an activist have always been about rebelling, about opting OUT, dropping out, tuning out; about being a renegade, which sure seems a lot more interesting to both me now and to 17-year-old-me than being sexy or cool, eh? At this point, you can buy sexy or cool at Wal-Mart, for crying out loud. Their value is incredibly limited, often manufactured in sweatshops, and really quite cheap.

Despite my weirdness, it seemed very appreciated, and I had a DAMN good time doing it. I felt very, very energized leaving. Because of Scarleteen, so often the majority of young people that I encounter in a day are in some kind of crisis or confusion, empowered only after doing some work with them, so when I get opportunites to see a group of them with some real clarity, feeling that empowerment from the minute they walk through the door, my job being to amp what is already there — and in abundance — up? It was a real gift.

I had to go look it up, because after Ben dropped me off at home — we ate everything in sight at Wayward after he’d picked me up after my event — I kept having these snippets of words that were echoing my thoughts in my head, and I couldn’t remember whose they were, and I knew they were far too concise to be mine. So, I was not at all suprised to be reminded that they were bell hooks’ words, from “Teaching to Transgress,”

My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness.

Yes, yes, and a million kinds of yes.

This has been a week of some really cool women, actually. This week, Renee Walker and I also connected, and had a cool, quick gab session on the phone on Friday about ways we could join forces. As it turns out, her sister is a NARAL Washington board member, so I got to briefly touch base with her yesterday, as well.

* * *
I’ve continued to think on all the flaws — not like this is anything new — of the until-marriage stuff, and look at the commentary. One of the conclusions I’m coming to which I wasn’t quite at before was that even when you set aside the very primary issues — that we simply know that marriage, in and of itself, doesn’t create any kind of unilateral protections when it comes to general or sexual health, or emotional or sexual well-being, that not everyone can get married, even when you set aside that WHO one is married to, and what a given marriage is like is not a minor part of the whole equation — we’re still left with one very big problem.

That big problem is that in anything where there is more than one person involved, we cannot (I’d say should not, but when we’re talking about conservatives, that is very much a point where we are in no sort of agreement) control the other person or their behaviour.

We can’t say marriage is lifelong monogamy, or that we could make it so because we can only choose that for ourselves: we can’t choose it or control it in a partner. We can’t choose or control if that other person to BE married to sticks around lifelong or even shows up — a commentor brought that up again, and I’d mentioned it as well, but buried in a sea of text, alas. We can’t control or somehow pre-determine the previous history of anyone we marry or partner with, or somehow guarnatee anyone’s honesty who isn’t us.

Now, from a vantage-point of very traditional marriage, I understand personally overlooking this flaw, or not seeing it that way, when faith — as in, having faith in all things, and privileging faith over reason — is a very big deal. Trouble is that when we’re talking about sexual health, faith doesn’t cut the mustard, and it never has. I’d also posit that if, for either or both parties, or an overarching culture, control — not self-discipline, not self-determination, not harmony or comparrion — is a key factor in the idea that marriage can somehow guarantee sexual health or sexual happiness and satisfaction, then we’ve got yet another conundrum, because that’s something else we know has historically (and still) hindered, not helped, and often done outright harm, rather than given protections, people’s sexual health and sexual well-being.

Sexual health initiatives, to work, always have to solely or primarily be about, and start with, our OWN actions and choices, about what we can do, ourselves, with or without cooperation from anyone else, to protect our sexual health and honor our sexuality. It’s simply not doable to improve or protect our sexual health with things we cannot control, or by putting our health, happiness and safety in someone else’s hands. This is, of course — and I say this without judgment — going to be something that is very difficult to rectify if the meat or whole of the way you live your life is about trying to put your fate or your life into the hands of an entity you cannot even have a conversation with, and if greater moral value is put on being passive than on being active.

The email overload on this score has finally seemed to subside. Really, I don’t get whirlwinds of conservatism like this very often, it’s only once every year or so, sometimes less often than that. And again, when I do get them, they’re not from the actual youth and young adults I serve: if they were, if my own clients were telling me that what I was doing or saying was not working for them, obviously, I’d be sitting down and having some big thinks on how I can better serve them. But I don’t: we even regularly have a small base of youth waiting for marriage and they do just fine at Scarleteen, laregly because they are making that choice for THEMSELVES, not seeking to enforce it on everyone else, or on a population they aren’t even a part of.

When I get these kids of emails, they are only rarely from people who are even parents of teens. Most frequently, they’re from people who aren’t parents at all, and more often than not, from people who don’t even interact with teens and young adults in any way. If they’re parents, they tend to be parents of very young children. But mostly, from what I can gather, what most have in common is that they’re just not people comfortable with sexuality, their own or anyone else’s. You do a job like mine long enough, you don’t have to be psychic when you read or listen to someone talking about sex and sexuality to be able to suss out, pretty decently, an overall tone when it comes to what their sex lives are like. And overwhelmingly, I read a flat-line when it comes to sex with most of these folks. I mean, it’s easy to argue that there isn’t much or any value in sex simply being enjoyable or a good time when you have never had a good time.

It reminds me a bit of parts of growing up poor and among poor families. I know my mother got a good deal of this in her family: my father’s didn’t live long enough in his adult life to find out about them. And I’ve seen it in other poor families around, too, this weird idea that you want your kids to do better than you did, but either only so MUCH better, or only better if when it gets better for them, it gets better for you, too. I get the impression that the same goes with plenty of families, especially conservative families, when it comes to sex and relationships — that there is this personal agenda that isn’t just about faith or about real sexual health or real happiness, but about having a really hard time figuring out how you’d deal with it if your kids were so much happier than you were when it came to sex. Maybe that’s because they feel like their kids would start to really know how unhappy their elders were, and people don’t want that shown up? I don’t know: just thinking out loud, really.

I really appreciated Courtney Martin’s “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters,” and in one part of it, she talked about how her generation grew up with mothers who were encouraged to be Superwomen. She spoke to the conflict she felt with that — how while she heard her mother saying you can do anything, while Mom was trying to do EVERYTHING; heard her mother saying that being able to do everything she could possibly do every single day was the best thing ever, when she looked at her mother, what she saw was not a woman elated, but a woman completely exhausted. And I know, even just from listening to kids and teens talk about parents who are pushing the wait-until-marriage stuff, that they’re often seeing some of what I’m talking about here. They hear adults and parents saying everything about sex and love is so much better when done this one particular way, and even for the minority of them saying that who even did it that way, what they often see — which is not sexually satisfied, energized people — stands in great conflict with what they’re being told.

But it’s to the point where I’m wondering if I can’t just come up with a sort of pre-emptive note in our contact form that just read something like, Before emailing, please first go have an orgasm or two. Then take a bath, or maybe a walk or a swim. Cook something decadent, and eat more than you think you should. Have a glass of wine, or some amazing juice of some kind. Get the dirt on your hands, and leave what’s left under your fingernails there for the rest of the day. Dance like a dope or sing something much too loudly and slightly off-key. Give someone a big bear hug. Play hooky. Look in the mirror, naked, and say, with great conviction, “I love you.” If you really still need to send me that email, then be my guest.

All of which, come to think of it, sounds far more like what I should be doing on a Sunday morning than writing in my office.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, activism, Happy!, feminism, photography & art, women, sexuality, education | permalink | comments (5) »

Meanwhile, back at the ranch….

Despite coming home and finding a mailbox with a pile of reactionary wait-until-marriage stuff inside, our weekend away in Port Townsend was scrumdiddlyumptious. Photos forthcoming, but for the most part, our exciting locales were the big, fluffy bed, two overstuffed chairs beside a gas fireplace, and a large, jetted tub. I was able to get out early Sunday morning for a seated meditation on a cliff with a moldy bench overlooking the water and then take a brisk walk across the beach. Mark literally took five baths in less than 48 hours: I expected to feel his developing gills as we slept. Sofia clearly also needed a little vacation — all that itching and your people endlessly traveling is stressful for but a small pug! — as was apparent given that save maybe one hour of the whole weekend, she found herself a cozy spot amidst the pillows on one of those chairs and refused to leave.

Saturday was a sweet, all-day mix of various sorts of debauchery — including MST3K fore-and-after-play, which should be a suggestion for the teens I work with, really — and even just by mid-morning, I was relaxed enough to enjoy a very, very nice batch of big, wavy orgasms. Funny how it’s so easy to forget — even given my job and the fact that I remind people of this daily — that the more stressed out you are, the milder your sexual response tends to be. Even the really good ones aren’t as good as they could be if you could just freaking relax; really relax, about everything. Between the stress of all the travel and having to be on so much, the perpetual struggles to keep everything I do afloat and the stress of just doing my work, not having felt well for quite some time, the works, I knew I was tense as hell, but until a day when by where nothing felt at all stressful, I wasn’t aware of how tense.

At the cabin this weekend, I was also reminded that I’m never quite sure what sound sex toy etiquette is. In other words, if you’re in a place where they will or may show up while you’re out to tidy things up, do you have to care about toys and lube and gloves being strewn all over the place? Is putting them in one pile on the nightstand good enough, or are you really supposed to hide them, even when you’re paying to stay where you are? I get the feeling you are supposed to, but the minute I even start to do it, I so deeply resent feeling like I should that I never bother.

It’s really swell to be able to look ahead over the next few weeks — heck, the next few months — and know that I don’t have to go anywhere. That doesn’t come close to fixing all of my troubles, but it sure helps out an awful lot. I’m a homebody by nature: I ground at home. When I don’t really get to do that, and am in and out a lot, it makes everything feel even more unmanageable than it is. Seattle winters aren’t exactly fabulous (but thank christ, they are NOT Minnesota or Chicago winters), but I’m glad as hell that I can be home for the whole of winter and spring. Once I really get at least somehat caught up with my backlog of every kind of work, I’m hoping I can spend it catching up on the mountain of books I have half-read, do the last of the housepainting I still haven’t finished, and have the time to do some damn art. And sleep. Get lots and lots of sleep.

So long as we can swing it, I’m going to try and use my accumulated miles for Briana so that she and The Baby Liam can come up for a couple weeks around the holidays. Her living situation is scary right now, even to someone like me who knows from hardscrabble living, and she’s got a pretty substantial break from her culinary school, so not only being able to see them, but just being able to give them a break at no cost would be great. But even that doesn’t involve me having to go anywhere. I get to bring my family to my own front door.

The Babeland event, by the way, was crazy-packed, so I had to do more lecture than Q&A, which is very much not my preference. But it was still a good thing, despite the fact that almost half the place was full with community college students from a human sexuality class, some of whom informed me later that their prof was a pretty creepy bigot who clearly hasn’t read a single study ON sexuality that was published later than 1965, and who routinely lectures even his knowingly lesbian college students about abstaining until marriage. Apparently, this was the only decent part of the class so far according to them, and also according to them and the Babeland staff, the guy nodded off through half of it. I got to walk away with a new toy for my troubles, and I resisted the urge to be greedy, since I’ve been aching for this for an age (I know, I know, it’s leather, but it has laces and a STAR on it!), and also had more than one set of youth educators wanting to talk to me about what the right way is to kindly ask your students not to masturbate publicly. I had no good answers (besides my usual suggestion to just redirect them to something else, giving them the look that says you know what they’re doing, and it’s okay, but not okay HERE) for the couple who worked in a pool with jets: you can’t keep kids off of water jets, man.

My enthusiasm for my to-do list this week tells me all I need to know about how frazzled and overextended I’ve been. When I am earnestly excited to better insulate the house here (it’s a rental, yes, but if we get the heating bills this winter we got last winter we’re in serious trouble), clean the refrigerator (and only a little depressed at how empty it is), when I wake up in the morning elated that the day will be about cleaning my disaster of an office, when doing tax paperwork seems like a break, I’ve clearly been living in Stressville. Besides finishing a couple articles that have been taking way too long (in my defense, figuring out the best way to do an article about how not to be a rapist isn’t exactly a cakewalk), and answering some advice questions, I’m going to be mostly away from Scarleteen over the next week or two. I forget, sometimes, that I’m allowed to do that, and that when it’s not coming even close to making ends meet, it only makes sense TO do that. A cleaner, more organized office, for instance, equals a clearer mind to better figure out how to deal with all the challenges right now. More to the point, now and then, during the times when I’m really not being paid at all or barely getting paid, it’s sage to do other work that needs doing which I also don’t get paid for, and is far less stressful.

Plus, there was that one time where I decided to ditch everything else to clean out my closet and found $300, effectively getting paid more for cleaning than for working. I don’t exactly expect that to happen again, but I’m not going to rule it out, either. Really, given what a slob I am, I’d not be surprised if Mark started secretly stuffing bills into hidden places just so I’d clean up my crap. I DID find a mix tape yesterday from 1988, and nearly wept with the sweetness. Labeled “Obnoxiousness Found Us in Gillson Park, Illinois,” jointly by both myself and my best friend at the time, who always went nuts with the mix tapes for the long trips we’d take — in both senses of the word — I am greatly looking forward to popping it into the tape deck in Mr. Price’s office to see what’s on it. I predict plenty of Beatles, Jazz Butcher (and I also just organized a huge pile of JB CDs a friend and rare fellow fan of them made for me a couple years back, which are a major coup since most of their stuff wasn’t even on CD), Elvis Costello, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead, ska and 60’s surf rock.

I’m electing not to talk about the moment a hidden camera would have found me in this morning, belting out “Angel of the Morning” at the top of my lungs while organizing my studio shelves. because, you know, we really shouldn’t document these sorts of things if we want to be taken at all seriously.

(Though as an aside, a reader here gave a very generous donation this week, and I thank you soundly. That not only helps me to be able to toss some change at my developer so we can get some more of the upgrade finished, it also means I can finally go get new glasses, and thus end the nonstop tension headache I’ve had for two months because my prescription changed. You’re a goddess!)

P.S. In trying to finish that article on how not to rape and enable rape, I’m troubled that while we have one word, a very powerful word, at that, for a rapist, we don’t seen to have an equally powerful — and ideally MORE powerful word — for someone who is not just not a rapist, but the antithesis of a rapist. So, what’s the word for a caring, reciprocal sexual person or partner? It’s pretty darn tough to sell a concept when we don’t even have a word for it. “Lover,” alas, is terribly outdated and not something young people are even remotely likely to use. “Partner” isn’t just about sex, and as I was informed a couple years back when I accidentally outed myself to some of Mark’s film crew at 5 AM, it still primarily belongs to us queers. We could make “mutual” an honorific, but it doesn’t feel right. Might be some mileage in “accord” or “harmony,” but I can’t seem to land on it.

P.P.S. The mailbag still is out of control this week. My favorite this morning?

I was so sad when I was told about your website. Teenagers go to your site and find permission to have sex in any way they want. I am a chastity speaker and talk to teens a lot about the risks of STD’s. I know how faulty condoms are and even though people are using them STD’s are still out of control. I was so sad to read a lot of wrong information on your site. Condoms will not protect again many STD’s including HPV the most common STD today and one that can cause cervical cancer and possibly lead to death. You suggest that waiting until marriage to have sex is just not possible. It most certainly is and I hope that you will start giving teens more credit for having self control. We need to encourage then to aim for the healthiest life possible. Many people are dying because of sex but no one has died because they abstained until marriage. Please carefully consider the info you share and make sure it is accurate because so far a lot of what I have read on your site is horribly wrong especially as related to STD’s and condoms.

I really love it when people tell me what I do. (As well as the idea that it’s up to me or any other adult to give teens “permission” to have sex, while at the same time telling me I don’t give teens enough credit for making their own sound choices, while they’re asking them to sign a very binding legal contract to another person in order to even CONSIDER that choice.) It’s so helpful: how would I know otherwise? I’m the idiot savant of sex ed, see. I have no idea what I do or say: all these words and statistics and sources just come pouring out of me when I consult my Ouija board every time I answer a question. A few days later, I go look at what I have written and it’s an absolute mystery to me.

I figured the best I could do with that one was to very calmly just primarily direct her to actual, international sources of sexual health information. Probably she won’t use them, or even look, or will find some way to discredit them — even though the CDC is almost entirely in the administration’s pocket these days, so you’d think these kinds of folks wouldn’t write them off anymore. But she is an educator, and I suppose you do never know when you’ve gotten one who earnestly has their heart in the right place, but just has never been informed.

And to think, some folks call me a pessimist.

posted in Heather Corinna, Scarleteen, Mr. Price, home, apropos of nothing | permalink | comments (6) »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A survey by Northern Kentucky University revealed that 61 percent of students who made abstinence promises broke them. And of those who said they kept their pl