Just a reminder: September 25th is the last day to submit public comment on the proposed HHS regulations which are not only superfluous, but more importantly, would limit access to reproductive healthcare (and other healthcare) services in the U.S., particularly for those who already have the greatest limitations to care.

It’s so important to have public comment on this, so if you have not done so yet, take a few minutes tonight and be sure to get something in, even if it’s just a very polite way of saying “Go to hell.”

Here’s mine:
I am writing to urge you to stop efforts to block women’s access to basic reproductive health services.

I understand that the proposed regulations that the Department of Health and Human Services released on August 21, 2008 expand existing law to allow more health care providers and institutions to refuse to provide needed care.

As written, the regulations could allow institutions and individuals — based on religious beliefs — to deny women access to birth control and permit individuals to refuse to provide information and counseling about basic heath care services.  Moreover, they expand existing laws by permitting a wider range of health care professionals to refuse to provide even referrals for abortion services.

For those of us working in healthcare, the onus is on us to choose a clinic or an area of practice where we know we want to provide the healthcare services offered to clients, and which we feel is in alignment with our personal values or religious beliefs.  It should not be on those seeking needed health services.  It is our responsibility — and we have the greater agency as as workers — to seek out the work we want, and leave the work we do not want, or do not feel we can live with, to those who are supportive and can honor any given job description.  It is also our responsibility to take a job earnestly, not disingenuously.  In healthcare, we have an extra responsibility, which is to put our clients needs and their physical health  — not our ideas about their spiritual health — ahead of our own, and to care for them in the way which is best for them, objectively, rather than in the ways we feel would be best for us, or feel our religion would mandate.

Since this proposal has come to light, I have looked for any evidence that it is in response to a mass of healthcare workers voicing complaint and finding they are incapable of doing the very jobs they have agreed to do.  I have found no such thing.  I have also found Mike Leavitt’s responses to the concerns of many with this proposal to be disturbingly dismissive, belittling and out-of-touch.  The notion that low-income people can (or should have to) simply and easily choose a healthcare provider whose religious beliefs match their own, as Leavitt has flippantly suggested, is a stunning display of ignorance about the realities of public healthcare and those in need.  The Department of Health and Human Services is the principal agency we have for “protecting the health of all Americans and providing essential human services, especially for those who are least able to help themselves.”  That does not mean those who work in healthcare: it means those seeking and receiving healthcare.  The head of the HHS blithely stating he is privileging providers over patients seems effectively to be saying that he has no real interest in doing his job or serving the population he has sworn to through his appointment.

That given, I simply can only reasonably deduce that this proposal is one last gasp from the Bush administration to try and limit or remove more of our reproductive rights.  This appears to be nothing more than one more back door through which those who want to control women — rather than to provide healthcare, which is not to be confused with morality lessons — and put our health at risk can creep in under the false pretense of self-protection.

I work for two different reproductive health organizations, with populations who would be the most impacted by this policy, should it be approved: with teen and young adult women, with women of color, with low-income women.  At both, I see daily how — already, without these new regulations — lack of access to reliable contraception and reproductive health services and accurate information has a negative impact.  I see it with the clients who come to the clinic I work at, where we provide abortions and other reproductive healthcare services: a great deal of our clients arrived there because their access to contraception and sound information on contraception was limited or absent. For a nation who endlessly states it wants nothing more than to limit abortions, policies like this have a funny way of showing it.  I see it with the young people I counsel every day who often go without reliable contraception or sexual healthcare because of discrimination they face from healthcare providers, ignorance about contraception due to the limitation of their providers, or valid worries that they will be refused care or service, or given morality lectures rather than healthcare.  For a nation which states it wants its citizens to be as healthy as possible, and who want its youth to thrive, proposals like this appear to stand in a strange conflict with that aim.

I do not need to work for either of these organizations: I have far more choice and agency in where I work and what job I do than I  — or others — do when it comes to healthcare, particularly as an uninsured person in the United States who relies on sound public healthcare.  Should I ever forget that, I think it would be sound to suggest it was time I found another profession and that I consulted my conscience.  It is a cruel irony to have this proposal state to be about provider conscience, when, in fact,  it appears to be about suspending conscience altogether.

My clients cannot exempt themselves from their healthcare needs: I can exempt myself from a job I do not wish to do, or set aside my own personal beliefs to honor those of someone in need of care who has every right to receive it.  If I am in earnest about wanting to support reproductive health in my work, should I find myself unable to do the work or put needed care first, exempting myself from it would be the only sound recourse.  I should say the same about the federal government and this proposal if it truly supports our health. At a time when more and more Americans are either uninsured or struggling with the soaring costs of health care, the federal government should be expanding access to important health services, not undermining existing protections or interfering in programs that have successfully provided services for years.

For certain, freedom of religion is an essential part of the foundation of this nation: however, separation of religion from public law and policy is the other vital half of that equation, and required for that very freedom.  For all of our citizens to have the liberty our constitution assures, it is necessary that no one set of beliefs or values be privileged, nor exercised at the cost of another person’s health.

For years, federal law has carefully balanced protections for individual religious liberty and patients’ access to reproductive health care. The proposed regulations appear to take patients’ health needs out of the equation.  I urge you to restore this important balance and protect access to basic care for the millions of Americans who depend on federally funded health care services.

Thank you for your consideration,

Heather Corinna
Founder and Director, Scarleteen.com
CONNECT Program Director, Cedar River Clinics/FWHC

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

After this post, you may not hear from me for a little while, given I’ll be out of town, yet again, when really, I’d like nothing more than to just grab a very fluffy blanket, my itchy puppy (that’s not a euphemism), and the nice pile of books I’ve been fascinated with lately. But alas.

When I return, I really need to get back to some visual and multimedia artwork, because my mind is begging me for it, so what I’ll likely do is get started on the full wall project I took photos for in Chicago regarding some of my history, and brainstrom text for each one by one in the journal. I haven’t used this as the creative workbook it’s often served double-duty as for me over the years in some time, and it’s high time I revisit that potent use. I also am beyond behind with photo processing: I have a good six or seven beautiful portrait sessions lying in wait, and you know, right about now, I could use pictures without words for a while.

However, now that I’m nearly finished with it, I have to take a minute to rave and then rave some more about Janice Irvine’s Disorders of Desire: Sexuality And Gender In Modern American Sexology. I swapped my very worn copy of bell hooks’ All About Love for this with my mother’s partner, and it was a very awesome swap (especially since I’ve read that hooks so many times, I can nearly quite it verbatim — that book is the best treatise on love ever written, as far as I’m concerned).

It’s exceptionally rare for me to find books that are really about the sort of work that I do and the history of the sort of work that I do. However mixed my feelings were through parts of the film Kinsey, for instance, I was in tears throughout just because it was so bloody nice to feel addressed, and to see some attention paid to this work. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: working in sexuality is seriously isolating, especially in this culture, with the groups I serve, and when the work you do isn’t “sexy” or entertaining. (And even then, nearly ANY sort of sex or sexuality worker is usually very isolated and very marginalized, but that’s stating what should be mighty obvious.)

But what’s fantastic about the Irvine book is that it focuses in great depth on how much all of sexology, sexuality reserach and sex therapy and education has been strongly biased due to the fact that it has been address of all genders which has been dominated and formed by one: men.

Really, when it all comes down to it, when we’re talking sexuality exclusively, rather than reproductive health, up untl the last twenty years — and really, more like the last ten — it is a field that has been completely male-dominated. Sure, Virginia Johnson was female, but she was in a very secondary position as an assistant to William Masters, and he ran the show, big-time. Shere Hite did work before the last twenty years, but in sexology her work was largely discounted because of her sex, because what she found did not support the status quo and because of what were seen as methodological problems (which, from what I can tell, was actually just her getting called on some of the same sorts of flaws male researchers had in their work, but she was being held to a higher standard because she had to prove her right to do the work simply because she was not male). It’s easy to forget that over just the last ten years, an awful lot has changed as far as women finally having some influence and part in sexology. For instance, I could have sworn Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography had been around for slightly more than ten years, but I just started rereading it again and lo, it was published in ye olde 1999.

It’s always been a bit of a strange balancing act for me to do the work I do and find the space between what is seen as the medical-credible, as well as sexological “standards” and what either clearly or probably are aspects of all of that which are so influenced by gender bias and heterosexism, and where the direct and cumulative observations one makes having done the work oneself through simply stand in total conflict, as do things when you consider the context and the biases afoot. And in this field, as with many, we often see the “science” or the medical speaking over the populace they’re supposed to be serving, stating that what the populace reports to be for them simply isn’t so because the science says otherwise.

I answer sexuality questions nearly every single day, and read personal testimonial and narrative on sex nearly every single day, and have for nearing ten years now. If I was reading, say, in 1965, women saying what they did then (when given the space to say so safely, which was infrequent) and still do now, about the fact that vaginal intercourse alone is not physically satisfying for a majority of them, the “science” would have stood in direct conflict to the women it was supposed to serve, largely because that “science” was dominated by a group of people for whom that was an unacceptable answer, and whose studies were completely skewed by their bias, and whose solutions to that “problem,” when it was recognized, were — as most things are — all about doing anything and everything to preserve the status quo, which, at that time (as if often the case now) were to be sure the nuclear family, the male-female unit and “normal” gender roles were protected. If I were to have said out loud that this conflict existed, or pointed out bias, I would have been laughed out of the room and ripped to shreds publicly.

Most of us know about turn-of-the-century approaches to women’s sexuality, but don’t know, or pass by, the fact that even less than twenty years ago, the new version of nymphomania, sex addiction, was defined as affecting women who did such clearly outrageous things as masturbate, use personals ads, have one night stands, prepare for sex (as in, clean one’s bedroom, choose to wear certain clothing), or engage in sexual fantasy. (Suffice it to say, this behaviour in men did not class them as sex addicted.) And of course, the opposite end of the spectrum, frigidity, would include things like not having an interest in, or satisfaction with heterosexual intercourse, not having sexual desire to a degree that matched that of a male partner, having body image issues, etc.

In other words, there’s often been — and often still is — no middle ground when it comes to women’s sexuality from a medical perspective, and often a clinical sexological one: too much desire is a disorder, too little desire is a disorder, and the criteria for both often overlap, resulting in no healthy manifestation of women’s sexuality whatsoever, save if it is in agreement with whomever the man in question — husband, doctor, greengrocer — just happens to be and whatever he happens to want.

Without digging deeply into the history of this arena, people often forget that even the gender essentialism we see in so much general and sex information now, and what we’re told are male and female diferences and male and female needs arose from gender theorists and sexologists with a huge bias (and too, funders they were trying to keep), and for whom it was an absolute given that one essential part of being a normal male and a normal female was being heterosexual, and that that given strongly influenced every assumption and conclusion drawn on top of it. One of the tragedies of this was that a focus on gender roles in the first place was bastardized from feminist theory, but the way it was applied in sexology was often to do whatever could be done to safeguard sexism and heteronormativity. Grr.

Without examining the history of sexology and sex therapy, we forget that a whole awful lot of it has been outright abusive to women: sex therapy in the 70’s into the 90’s often involved “prescribing” sex with one’s therapist, for instance, or group sex sessions without any foundation of healthy limits, boundaries and negotiation (or even the desire for group sex on the part of the patient).

Like it or not, accept it or not, it’s pretty well documented that sexologists during the second wave of feminism more often than not absolutely reviled the feminists pointing out these flaws, and contributed plenty to the idea that feminism was, in and of itself, anti-sex, because so much of it protested not sex itself, but the way sex was being presented and prescribed by sexology, the media and the medical — all male dominated — at the time. This, for the record, is one very substantial reason why much of second wave feminism is very wary of sexology as a whole, and it’s hardly an invalid concern. I’d say it took me more than a few years to really get that.

And boy, howdy: you want to look at a woman that could stand to toss out her well-worn .45 of “Stand By Your Man,” take a hard look at Virginia Johnson — I knew enough of some of the pretty creepy ways she’d (well, both of them) operated — like with their programs to “cure” homosexuals — but Irvine had some pretty choice quotes in there from her from conferences that seriously made my skin crawl. Johnson seems to me to have been aware that without the wagon she was hitched to in terms of Masters, she wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on, since she could easily see that the few female contemporaries she had who were trying to work without a man or a male organization behind them were quickly silenced and mocked. It strikes me as a pretty classic example of the struggle so many women deal with in anything when it comes to the rock and a hard place of supporting other women without winding up unsupported yourself. I’m not about to let that sort of thing go unquestioned and unobserved, nor say that I think tossing other women under the bus because they’re putting the man who you’re dependent on in some sort of quasi-jeapordy is by any stretch okay, but I do think it’s helpful to take stock of some of WHY this so often happens, especially with work in such male-dominated fields.

(I’m reminded, actually, of the female staffer for Girls Gone Wild who is quoted in Levy’s Female Chauvanist Pigs, who said things that felt flat-out harrowing to me when it came to the utter lack of care and concern for other women, who also clearly seemed to see herself as being in a struggle for their own survival — which she’d justify this with — even if that’s not really the case. The difference between good money and a shitload of money is not an issue of survival, folks.)

It’s been interesting to read this book, because some part of me had actually forgotten why, when I started developing Scarlet Letters in ‘97, and tried to focus on sexuality and eroticism in the latter half of my college years in ‘90, it felt like such strangely uncharted terrain, and like I just couldn’t find that information I wanted and needed. Why, in so many ways, it felt a whole lot like shouting into a void. At the time, not having enough of the background and history, I just assumed I was being a dolt and not looking in the right places: at first, it just didn’t even occur to me that much of the information I was looking for just plain didn’t exist, or that the reason why what I could found seemed so conflicting and unrealistic because there was no woman’s voice at all in the vast majority of the information about women. When I found out that the reason I wasn’t finding much was that there wasn’t much there to find yet, it was pretty shocking to me.

And it has been SO FREAKING REFRESHING to read this book because these are issues and problems I think about and talk about all of the time, but given how specialized a discourse they are, half the time no one else knows what on earth I’m going on about. It’s a dream to have someone else not only addressing this, but going over my head with it at times, and talking about facets of it that I wasn’t yet even familiar with: I relish opportunities for beginner’s mind, and am so grateful when they fall into my lap.

Things HAVE gotten better, for sure. But honestly, I get frustrated in this field a LOT, because in some many ways, they still aren’t very good, especially when it comes to women’s sexuality, and to sexuality or identity that is not heteronormative, gendernormative or heterosexual. I still see a majority of young girls being advised on sex by men, without a real effort made to understand that they are reared as and live as girls — if I hear an older man tell young women even one more time how much better casual sex would be for them than a serious relationship, totally dismissing their greater physical risks as well as the cultural climate they live in that punishes them profoundly for anything other than sex in the context of marriage or “serious” romance — and not mentioning, of course, that such a choice also benefits men — I swear, I’ll scream. I see them furnished with information that came primarily or solely through a male lens, and same goes for reproductive health and public policy on women’s reproductive health and rights, without any real examination of that fact, nor an urge to better balance it. Ridiculously, one often has to explain and defined why this is all so problematic, when were the shoe on the other foot, no explanation would be needed, as it would be a very easy — and equally valid — outrage. Can you imagine how men as a class would react if all of most of the information about their sexuality was coming from women, filtered through women, and women were setting up or enabling a system to be sure to keep their voices OUT or muted so that the information (and our unquestioned positions as Experts) could be sure to suit our agenda and personal sexual desires first and foremost, and their sexuality framed in such a way to be sure it always met our needs first?

I still see sexuality information for anyone who isn’t heterosexual prefaced endlessly with statements to us, from straight people, that it is OKAY (with them) that we’re not straight. Phew! We were so worried there for a minute! Sexuality information for anyone who isn’t gendernormative or even biologically XX or XY basically still mostly puts everyone in a space where we still have to choose within a binary system, even when the mere existence of anyone at all who is not gendernormative automatically renders that system meaningless as a default or a given. (I’ll give you that that’s a difficult one to practically handle, mind, and I know I haven’t got it anything close to down either, but when not only is the effort TO move away from that not made, but a lot of effort is put into making damn sure we remain there — heck, there’s a quote from John Money in DOD where he flat-out says that without a binary system of gender, the world would literally fall apart — I still get to bitch, even if I haven’t perfected the approaches yet myself.)

I’ve been asked more than once why I don’t just go and get a medical degree, to up my credibility. Beyond the fact that that’s a pretty silly thing to suggest to someone who is already poor, the fact of the matter is that I don’t want one, largely in part because I know full well what that experience would likely be like for me. For starters, most general and even OB/GYN programs have sexuality segments that, at most, are a few weeks long, and which involve a curricula of books which I have already read: my sexuality library is massive. I know that in many ways, med school for someone like me would be an agonizing process of railing against the machine for a piece of paper which would likely only put me in more debt, and give me no new practical options: I have no interest in directly practicing medicine, in being any more involved in the western medical system than I already am, and in being given a credibility which, while accepted by many, is strongly suspect in my book, because of a lot of the issues Irvine has brought up in DOD. I also know that right now, I’m doing exactly what I need to be doing to be best qualified to do the sort of work I do: I’m having one-on-one, unhurried, in-depth discussions with my “clients,” I’m reading a vast array of material at all times from a diverse group of perspectives, and I’m working in the field doing my level best to observe daily to find the needs had and then serve those needs, not as I determine them, but as those in need are directly expressing them. It’s pretty amazing, really, and the ‘net, of all things, really was the great open door I thought it might have been way back when when it comes to women’s sexual narratives and those of young people: there are certainly still big barriers to that online, given, but I’m not sure any other media has provided as many opportunities in this regard.

In short, over the last ten years, I’ve been getting the best kind of education possible in this arena, an education that I feel in many ways, is ideal and should be at least part of what the “credible” folks are getting to. But as it stands, that’s not often the case.

This book has also served as a really nice reminder for me that I really like the work that I do, quite a lot, and I like the way I am able to DIY it. I’m pleased as punch to be able to do it the way that I do, and what gets me the most down about it isn’t the work itself, but the external problems with it: the culture, history and (what should be) support systems that don’t support it or outright protest it, the problems I have in getting paid, and the fact that it’s very frustrating for me both for myself and for the people I serve that there are so many needless and destructive barriers to finding and getting real, inclusive and unbiased information, even from my back end (no, not THAT back end) here. The last few days, I’ve gone ahead and let myself get back in the groove of doing my job for as many hours as I want to — and this may sound silly — without feeling like I can’t answer question after question and read piece after piece when that’s the work I love to do because I’m not making ends meet with it at the moment. Ms. Irvine was a big help with that, so my hat’s off to her.

(What else has been on my bookshelf lately? As I said, I’ve been revisiting Natalie Angier’s — has anyone read The Canon yet? — going over Toni’s Cycle Savvy, and also getting started with Courtney Martin’ sPerfect Girls, Starving Daughters, which so far, I think is utter brilliance and right on target. Coincidentally per this entry, in her introduction she says that she feared people wouldn’t find her qualified simply by taking the time to observe and listen to tons of women in her life and outside it, rather than getting the piece of paper to be a body image or ED Big Person With Big Paper. Maybe it’s the ex-Montessori teacher in me speaking, but I am so troubled by the process of mindful observation somehow being tossed out of the credible pile, when, in fact, that is what”’scientific” data is supposed to largely be in the first place. It’s also troubling to me to hear casual discussion of how meaningless observation is because of biases or carelessness when, in fact, one can practice observation as a viable skill, and be mindful of biases to take them into account. We’ve got to be awfully careful not to toss the baby out with the bathwater, especially since without first-person reporting and credibility, and sensitive observation, we wind up with exactly the sort of fine messes I’ve been prattling on about.)

posted in Heather Corinna, soapbox, feminism, women, sexuality | permalink | comments (7) »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Cross-posted at the Scarleteen blog.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, what about them?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having GOOD sex was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(This one’s for Andrea, who asked. Slight swerve form the ongoing topic, but only barely.)

Why I Stopped Putting All (or most) of My Efforts into Erotica and Decided the Revolution Didn’t Hinge on That, Groovy as That Would Have Been. (I really wanted to work “On My Summer Vacation” into that, but alas, it just wouldn’t happen.)

So, Scarlet Letters has just been sitting for a really long time now. (And I haven’t been able to actually touch it or have it forward elsewhere in part because it was important it stayed as-is during the ACLU/COPA case.) I’ve okayed a couple of reprints on some of my photographic and written erotica, but per the written, I haven’t done anything new or particularly wanted to. With the photography…well, I’ll get to that.

I also haven’t done the constant networking I used to do with other women working in erotica and pornography, in part because there are fewer of them (when we’re really talking women-owned, women-centered, women-directed) than ever. And yes, I know that some younger women think there’s a surge of it online these days, but I assure you, it ain’t nuthin’ compared to what we had going around 2000/2001.

I’ve declined, over the past couple of years, a lot of offers for features/joint projects in the arenas of porn and erotica. I’ve even gotten to the point with features on my photography where if the approach is, at all, to have me presented as a pinup or a babe, it’s just not workable for me.

In a word, I’m outta much of this arena, or, what is generally defined as this arena. How it’s defined and how limited I feel that is an entry or twelve for another day.

Now. There are first some secondary reasons for this.

• Some of the why of this is simply that Scarleteen just took the heck off (ST gets a minimum of twenty times the traffic anything else I ever did did, even during the best years), and because I’m an activist at heart, so when a need expresses itself very loud and clear, that’s where I’m going to go. And that one shouted out way louder than any “needs” anyone ever had for women-centered erotica/porn.

• Another part of why is that set a standard at SL that we would not publish crap. That even if it meant skipping deadlines, or publishing less, that what we did publish needed to be exceptional, original, and of real quality. And as the years went on, we found that we just kept using the same artists and writers again and again because (and any erotica publisher or editor worth their salt, and being honest, will tell you this) the vast majority of what we got in was mediocre at best, and the Worst Shit You Ever Read/Saw at worst. And it gets really, really depressing (or, at a minimum, bloody boring) seeing what even the smarter, more creative eschelons of the populace define as sexy or erotic.

(It’s amazing, really, how sex can make everyone so stupid. Even really good authors and artists sometimes, who rock any other subject, can suddenly turn into the worst hacks on the planet when they tackle sex in their art.)

• USC 2257 didn’t help. While I often prefer suggestion to explicit work, our editorial policy had always been to really look at things artistically, and judge them on that merit, so that included all kinds of work. A big, big deal to me when it came to working in women’s sexuality is, was and has always been that privacy for women is a huge issue. So, the last thing on earth I would do is cooperate in compromising the privacy of female subjects in any photographic work.

• It also stopped paying even its own meager bills. After the first year or so, for a good, what, four years? Something like that… we did pretty well with CPM banner ad contracts for Scarlet. Between 2000 and 2002, for a woman-owned and run business that did not compromise itself in any way, or get into bed with anyone it didn’t want to 100%, I did pretty darn well. Again, at the time, there were enough other people and companies with the same aims, so while finding harmonious adverts wasn’t easy — bear in mind that woman-centered and focused means that 99.9% of the types of ads available to sexuality publications were big fat nos to us, because we didn’t want to have misogyny or male-directed sexuality on the site — but I worked it well enough for a while there. Then there were less of us. Then the bottom dropped out of the web, period. Then there were less still. Then, just not enough to have it be workable at all.

• We could probably have paid more bills — obviously — if both the publication and myself as its editor were willing to play something close to the more acceptable part when it comes to marketing sexuality. If I/we had been willing to talk like porn stars, to have less personal privacy, to hold the poses, always wear the heels and lipstick, “oh baby” somebody, set politics aside, care less about quality and more about quantity, and get seriously into bed with the male-run or driven affiliates and publications. But I wasn’t, and we weren’t. For me, I’d always said when I started doing work in sexual media that if it didn’t feel true to me, I wasn’t going to do it. If it conflicted with my personal/political ethics, I wasn’t going to do it. And if I just plain did not feel 100% okay about something, I wasn’t going to do it. And in time, part of what has happened is that it was that or let Scarlet and most of erotica period sit on the shelf until we could figure out a different way. Those pressures got greater, while at the same time, I began to feel like in some respects, I needed to be more cautious about what I/we were cavalier about, even considering that I was rarely calavier about anything. At this point, even with my own site here, I’ve since accepted that to do what I want to do with writing and art, I have to have zero reliance on the small funds it generates anymore, and NOT try to have it make more money, because pretty much anything that would guarantee better subscription sales would also guarantee lesser creativity and authenticity, and it’s just not worth it for a few hundred extra bucks a month.

I’ve also since worked on accepting that the comfort and security of any one “camp” is a luxury which someone who aspires to be a truthful revolutionary cannot afford.

You just can’t be authentic or nurture authenticity and autonomy in your life and your work when you always have to check in with someone else’s agenda — even if it’s the same as, or similar to, yours. I need room to be critical of any given media or issue, in whatever ways I feel critical and want to express that, and I don’t have enough room if I have to worry about betraying one camp or another.

Which is part of why it’s sitting. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m still thinking about it. I think I know a good way it can go at this point, but I want to do it right, so I’m taking my time.

Those, believe it or not, are but the smaller issues. Here’s the big one, and it’s no happy ending.

Ultimately, this is the conclusion I’ve reached, which of course seems way more obvious in hindsight, as most things do.

Women can’t possibly reclaim pornography — which is an expression of sexuality — before we’ve reclaimed sexuality, period.

That is a logical given. And we have NOT, in my mind, “come a long way, baby.” We’re a long, long way off.

(Before you go there, I don’t think porn/erotica of any type cannot make the same kinds of strides TOWARDS women reclaiming/owning our sexuality the way something can like, say, Hanne’s upcoming book on the cultural history of virginity, the cessation of rape or getting EC freely and easily available to everyone. Entertainment of any type is obviously powerful in many ways, but unless it accomplished aims like that through it as a channel, it’s power — however far its reach may be, and however much it enthralls — is far more limited. Most of what is produced as sexual entertainment, as compared to even mediocre films in every other genre, is what Olson Twins films are to Thirteen.)

While I think we can absolutely take steps, and while I think that some of us can get decently far with this individually (especially women who can have the most distance/respite from the usurpers of their sexuality, individual and collective), I’m afraid I think that at this point, most of what we can do is to provide band-aids until we’re just plain not living under patriarchy anymore. Not just in sex: full-stop.

(While I’m going off like a rocket and probably pissing people off anyway, I may as well say that I’m of the mind right now that anyone who thinks we’re even close to reclaiming or discovering our sexuality is either naive — as I was — delusional, or pretty self-absorbed. The assumption or assertion that a given women’s sexual behaviour must be 100% authentic to her just because she’s female — which oddly, usually also comes from people who will talk a bluew streak about how men are sexually conditioned, something I guess somehow women are immune to? — is as intellectually anorexic as the assumption or assertion that any choice any of us women make is feminist because we’re female.)

That isn’t so say that band-aids aren’t a good or needed thing. Much in the same way that Affirmative Action is a band-aid until (oh, salty optimism abounds) people aren’t racist anymore, I absolutely think all the reclaiming and rediscovering (and in the case of women’s sexuality, so much of it isn’t re-anything so much as trying to really find it for the first time) one can do is a Very Good Thing, and is really, really important. By all means, I think that we and women before us working in this arena have actually made some incredible strides that I wouldn’t ever dream of dismissing or discounting: even if it’s just individually rather than collectively. But even when those strides are made, they still often can’t benefit a great many women — a majority of women — because there isn’t an allowance made for them in their/our lives and world.

I mean, even if we reduce things to a lowest common denominator – okay? — it’s only so useful to know where your clitoris is and what it does if a) you weren’t reared with and/or aren’t still surrounded with a culture, community or relationships that shame the hell out of you (or cut your clit off, or stone you, or rape you) for touching it and/or b) partners who will be all that interested in it beyond figuring it might be a good way to get you to say yes to the sex they want if they pay a minimum of attention to it.

(Some time back, there was this new miracle cream — right here in the states where apparently everyone knows all about the clitoris now and thinks it’s the shit — that came out for women designed to increase arousal, right? It apparently had these totally amazing ingredients that would just drive every woman wild and make her a wailing walrus of love. The instructions explained that for the cream to work, it had to be, I kid you not, “rubbed on the clitoris for ten to twenty minutes.” I don’t think I need to expand on that one, do I?)

Maybe in my case some of it is that focusing primarily on YA sex education feels like I can accomplish this better, since most of my “students” aren’t set in their socio-sexual conditioning or attitudes yet, and if so, certainly not as solidly as people older than them are, just because of the passing of time spent under seige. That makes me feel kind of lousy sometimes, like I abandoned women of my generation or older, but I’m often pragmatic in my activism: above all else, I just want it to be effective.

I got tired of watching people come into this genre anew saying they had the best of intentions, asking for my help, getting it much of the time, and then either jumping ship when it didn’t make them oodles of dough, or selling myself and other women out to net the cash. I got tired of seeing male-owned orgs give their sites a female face or front and saying they were women-run or about women because some male pornographers/venture capitalists figured out that they could benefit off of the backs of women this shiny, new way, while the guys were setting the direction and making the big cash. I got tired of listening to men and women alike talk trash about women in porn or sex work, and either treat them like commodities or speak on their behalf — discussing negatives OR positives about the experiences they haven’t actually had themselves — without invite to do so. I got tired of listening to women outright bullshit about doing things for other women in their porn/erotica when it was so freaking obvious that that was not their concern: it was just popular to say, got you more approval from women, and made it easier to sleep at night.

I am still so goddamn tired of reading comments from men at women’s sites/blogs who work in sex and ID as feminist where the men cannot shut the hell up about what GREAT feminists they are, ever telling a woman who is questioning her feminism or choices not to…

…because their feminism does not challenge these men at all, it benefits them, and only for that reason.

Note to Guys Masquerading as Pro-Feminist Men: it is NOT feminist or pro-feminist to aim to silence the thoughts in a woman’s head. Just sayin.’

I got tired of some of us working so effing hard for so damn little and getting shit from all sides for it. I’ve talked about this before, but it is seriously draining to have porn-people and male culture demonize you because you’re apparently in bed with radical feminists, while radical feminists won’t quit with how in bed you are with the guys. Hell, in high school and college, when everyone accused me of being in bed with absolutely everyone, at least they they were right AND I got to get very well-laid all the time. I got tired of people trying to manipulate me into doing something for their ventures — work they’d sometimes, without informing me, put in a context that was totally abhorrent to me — by playing on how I “owed” something to women, because they knew I actually gave a shit, when they really just wanted to use my name (something which a few people seriously overestimated the power of, big time) to make some cash or feel important.

I got tired of noticing that when I really pushed the envelope, and really did what I felt was challenging, original and outside-the-box (as it were) work when it came to photography, people sometimes got angry with me, and when I did light and fun or…well, let’s be honest, work that was fluff or just fell short of what I’d hoped, people loved it. If I’m really reclaiming — and people really want that — and I’m really expressing my sexuality as a multi-dimensional whole, then when work I do didn’t/doesn’t meet someone’s ideas of what they want to see or are comfortable seeing that should NOT be a conflict. And if — as this has happened — I decide to shoot a series in the shower where I am processing a rape flashback, or share actual sex I am having with the actual latex barriers I use to avoid chlamydia of the throat, or shoot subjects I think are beautiful who don’t fit a certain body ideal, or the sex I have with a girlfriend doesn’t look or sound like girl-on-girl porn people should NOT be sending me angry or whiny letters or cancelling subscriptions if, in fact, they support reclaiming and earnestly exploring women’s sexuality, because ladies and germs, stuff like this is part of that gig.

I got really tired of seeing what I was told was reclaiming which looked so incredibly similar to how men have presented sexuality or women’s sexuality (hate to say it and sound like a straight-girl basher, but when I did see what seemed like successful reclaiming, it nearly always came from dykes. You know, the kind who learned to have sex with each other from each other, rather than from porn).

I’m not immune from that either: some of the reason I shoot and publish a bit less than I used to is that I found even for myself that reclaiming is a lot of work. If I didn’t put a good deal of thought into it, if I rushed it out, if I didn’t try really hard to see/think/feel differently (or make a point of questioning what seemed different on first glance/imagine), if I couldn’t view my own work really critically, I discovered on second glance that even what I thought was my reclaiming sometimes looked quite alarmingly, frustratingly, like rehash. And this even coming from me, who’s done her dyke-time, who seriously could give two shits what men think of her, her body or her sexuality, and who had all kinds of diverse sexual conditioning and counterculture and blah blah blah. You get it.

(I also got tired of feeling so damn bitter all of the time and feeling so alone in it. If you’ve gotten this far into this entry, you may also have some idea of how tired I was of the way I was making some of my friends and colleagues feel when I went on about this stuff.)

Point is, women reclaiming sexuality under patriarchy is exactly akin to people of color reclaiming their culture and identity under white supremacy: you are incredibly limited, at best, in what you can do, and that really is just that.

Not a very hopeful sentiment, I know. And it’s some of why I feel like a real asshole sometimes, and let me tell you why.

I HAD some older feminists almost telling me this almost verbatim when I started working in that arena. I’m stubborn, sure, but generally I really am very good at listening to a wealth of perspectives, and to respecting those of people who have done longer time on this earth than I have. I was never one of those folks who thought that if every woman could have a really good orgasm, the whole world and all of culture would change: I can be daft sometimes, but I’m not THAT daft. But for whatever reason, I really, really, truly thought that not only could we forge some really important cultural changes by getting our sexual expression out there, by all sisters-doin-it-for-themselves-ness when it came to sexual media, I just for the life of me could not wrap my head around the fact that a LOT of other things needed to happen first before we could not only forge those changes, but before we could even do the kind of work that could possibly create them.

Lemme tell you something: eight years of sex advice letters en masse, mostly from hetero women, and sometimes from men, will teach you a thing or two about what state of affairs we’re really in when it comes to this.

I think some of the rift created between myself and some other feminist women years back had to do with two misunderstandings: one theirs, one mine.

• Theirs was that I did not think every other aspect of women’s equality and work for that equality was important (and that some of them just didn’t really get what I was trying to do, or didn’t think my efforts were especially valuable). I did, I always have: it’s just that I earnestly thought — and given the caveats above, still think to a degree — that women’s sexual equality and identity was ALSO important, and that I could do the most effective work there, and make real strides doing that.

• Mine was that I thought I/we could do a lot more in that arena than I now think we can, and also that what some of them were trying to tell me — that I couldn’t hear — was that making changes in those other areas of equity was ALSO work for sexual autonomy and ownership; that it’s a lot more likely for larger, more tangible, basic changes to create improvements in women’s sexuality and the room all of sexuality makes for it than the other way around.

I think that is most likely correct. (And, of course, that hardly means you can’t still have your orgasms while you’re doing that other work.)

None of this is to say I plan to stop the work that I’m doing right now and have been for the last few years. I think that everything I do right now is important, and I’m feeling very good about the new projects — like the AGA — which I’ve added to the roster in the last year. I think my direction right now is a bit more sound and well-rounded than it was at other times. But that also means that I have to be careful about easy distractions and careful about not undoing my own work with other work.

It means that all of the work I do in sexuality, women’s sexuality and feminism is a lot harder than I’d like, hurts my brain and heart a lot more, and demands a LOT more of me. It means that I have to come at this stuff from both angles: I have to find ways to work on the sexuality aspects while also still working on the bigger context our sexuality lives within. I have to remind myself incessantly that if any of this seems like a no-brainer, it’s probably just me being lazy or wanting to take the easy way out.

But, more challenging as that is, it feels better to me. It feels more right, it feels more productive, it feels more truthful.

That’s probably more than you wanted to know, Andrea, and others of you who have asked over the last year or so, and likely way more than anyone who didn’t ask me about it wanted to know, but there it is: ashamedly, that’s the short version. Would that it were the streamlined one. Per usual, when there aren’t easy answers, there are rarely easy explanations, either.

P.S. For the Greek/Latin scholars out there, or other words of wordsmiths, I still need a word to replace pornography to better describe what I aim for in visual work: I need a word for sex and women, and I need a word which describes not visual entertainment or the intent to create arousal, but visual art/exploration of sexuality and women.

posted in Heather Corinna, soapbox, feminism, sex/life, pornography |