In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: Sex

Newsflash: Abstinence-Only Ed Misleads

Thanks, WaPo, for this shocker:

A government Web site intended to help parents and teenagers make “smart choices about their health and future” includes inaccurate or misleading information that may alienate some families or prompt riskier behavior, according to a team of medical experts who reviewed the material.

Three physicians and a child psychologist analyzed the Bush administration’s 4Parents.gov Web site and concluded it made many incorrect assertions about condoms, sexual orientation, single-parent households and the dangers of oral sex.

My anger, of course, is not directed at the Washington Post, but at the cretins who continue to peddle this crap to kids. Abstinence-only education is packed with lies — isn’t this about the 10,000 article we’ve read about how it “misleads” young people? It’s about time we started giving young people accurate information about sex and health — you know, something akin to “education.”

Sex makes you happy

File under “Duh.” But it’s good to know that having a lot of sex will make you happier than having a lot of money.

Posted in Sex

Pro-Life? Go fuck yourself.

You know it’s a bad day when Dan Savage is totally and completely wrong. A young woman writes in:

Q. My boyfriend and I are 18, and we’re in love. We’ve been together for almost four years. He recently decided that he is against abortion, to the point where he won’t have sex with me unless I agree to have the kid if I get pregnant. I told him there’s no way I can agree to that. It’s my choice what I want to do with my body, but he says it’s his choice if he wants to stop having sex with me because he disagrees with my views on the matter. (Which is something he read in your column, BTW.) Where do I go from here? I can’t be celibate until I’m ready to have a kid. But I don’t want to break up with someone I love because of a sincere moral disagreement. What now? —ONE BOY’S GIRL YEARNS NERVOUSLY

And Mr. Savage answers:

A. As a general rule, OBGYN, fertile pro-choice girls shouldn’t have premarital sex with controlling anti-choice boys. But you love him, and sometimes love makes exceptions. So if you do stay with him, and you agree and/or pretend to agree to his conditions, and you get pregnant, and you do decide to have an abortion, what the hell is he going to do about it? Lock you in the trunk of his car for nine months? Whatever you tell him now, it will still be your body and your choice then. Use condoms, take the pill, get a diaphragm, cross your fingers, and fuck his brains out.

Sure, he has a point — her boyfriend can’t exactly force her to give birth (although in many states, her parents certainly could have before her latest birthday). But I think the larger question is, is there a problem with having sex and being in what is apparently a serious relationship with someone who doesn’t believe that you have a right to your own reproductive functions? And if you love someone, is lying to them about what you’ll do in case of pregnancy really the best option?

My rule: don’t do it with someone who thinks they own your uterus. Don’t have sex with conservatives. Don’t even consider exchanging body fluids with anti-choicers.

Thy Virginity Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks.

From the Catholic Church’s press release factory, we have an update on federal funding for abstinence-only sex education programs, titled To Abstain or Not to Abstain.

On June 9 the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies approved an increase of $11 million in abstinence funding for fiscal year 2006, which would take the overall sum to $115 million. A press release issued the same day by Abstinence Clearinghouse, a nonprofit educational organization based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, welcomed the decision, even though the increase fell short of the $39 million boost sought by President George Bush.
…
“Promiscuity keepers, like SIECUS and Advocates for Youth, would have people believe that teen sex is normal, safe and healthy,” explained Unruh, “but science does not support these claims.”

This has got to one of the hackiest bits of “journalism” I’ve seen in awhile.

You don’t have to be a heathen like me to understand that comprehensive sex education programs are not endorsements of promiscuity. In fact, I would think it to be quite the opposite. Arming young adults with the facts about disease is kind of like a military boot camp under a Republican President: You know you’re eventually going to go to war, so it’s best to learn how to survive.

That’s not a particularly germane analogy, so I think it’s time to play the word game. My first contribution, to counter the “promiscuity keepers” canard, would be to call the abstinence-only crowd what they are: the Pro-STD Lobby. Any other suggestions?

Sex ed, ’50s style

Not only are young people today getting indoctrinated with abstinence-only miseducation, but the videos they’re watching in health class come from the days of the Feminine Mystique.

(Let me quickly add that this article is kind of irritating. I’m pretty sure it’s written by the same woman (if I remember right) who wrote the “Is Feminism Dead?” article for Time Magazine a few years back, and it gets a little condescending).

During the 50-plus years that sex education films have attempted to decode the mystery of adolescence, their informational content has remained relatively unchanged. In current versions, nods to the apparent sophistication of today’s young people are rarely invoked. Although 12-year-old girls today often dress as if they were college freshman during sorority rush week, the films confine themselves to the subjects of growth and menarche, never dealing with sex beyond a discussion of its clerically prescribed purpose — health education as if determined by the marketers of American Girl.

The consistency of the message, educators believe, reflects the fact that even in a culture where young adult novels include explicit references to sex, children’s ignorance about their own bodies has not diminished over time. Similarly, parents seem as reluctant to initiate the necessary conversations as they have ever been.

Of course, we can’t write an article on adolescent sexuality without referencing this apparent trend of younger girls dressing like sluts. But it does make some important points about films from back in the day… which, unfortunately, are still true of modern sex education:

“Traditionally,” said Rick Prelinger, an archivist who has collected sex education films over the years, “the boys’ films speak of pleasure and the girls’ films speak of puberty as a set of conditions to be endured.”

Geeks Do It Better

Something I’ve been saying for a long time:

When it comes to the between-the-sheets aspect of the relationship, Carroll agreed that a girl couldn’t do much better than a less-than-perfect male specimen. “We’ve all been to bed with the guy who is worried about what he looks like, checking the mirror before he gets in bed,” she said. “The nerd, gloriously, stunningly, perfectly, is into the woman. That right there is very stirring, sexually.”

via Shankar

Posted in Sex

Becoming Orgasmic

I find it funny just how much I enjoy science blogs, especially since I can’t grasp the basic rules of science. Nonetheless, this is one reason why the sciences appeal to me so much: Becoming Orgasmic — A Chat With the Director of the Kinsey Institute, Dr. Julia R. Heiman.

It is surprising that the same kinds of arguments are made even though they don’t hold water. The same kinds of accusations are made about what is good and bad about sex research even though we need to know more for everybody’s sexual health to have a society that works well in this area. We’re not very good in that in the United States. We have a very high teen pregnancy rate. We’ve got a relatively high STD rate even though it has dropped a lot. These things shouldn’t be happening in an industrialized country that has good information available to it. That those messages that would protect people don’t have an easy forum can be frustrating

Read the rest for an engaging discussion on sexuality and sexual behavior wordwide.

via Becky

Love is the Drug

Grace Jones had it right:

In an analysis of the images appearing today in The Journal of Neurophysiology, researchers in New York and New Jersey argue that romantic love is a biological urge distinct from sexual arousal.

This research specifically covers infatuation, the time period in which one may actually devote 3-4 hours developing the perfect mix tape to snare one’s beloved.

It is closer in its neural profile to drives like hunger, thirst or drug craving, the researchers assert, than to emotional states like excitement or affection. As a relationship deepens, the brain scans suggest, the neural activity associated with romantic love alters slightly, and in some cases primes areas deep in the primitive brain that are involved in long-term attachment.

…This distinction, between finding someone attractive and desiring him or her, between liking and wanting, “is all happening in an area of the mammalian brain that takes care of most basic functions, like eating, drinking, eye movements, all at an unconscious level, and I don’t think anyone expected this part of the brain to be so specialized,” Dr. Brown said.

This could explain why I find Bill O’Reilly smarmily attractive even if I wouldn’t touch him with a ten thousand-foot pole. But Keith Olbermann, baby. Keith is my Other Boyfriend.

Did I just say that?

Posted in Sex