Sex – Page 50 – Feministe

Should parents be allowed to sit in on sex ed classes?

This woman tried, and was turned away. While I’m sympathetic to her cause — she didn’t want her child being misinformed by fact-deficient abstinence-only education — I think that as a general rule, it’s not a good idea to have parents in sex ed classes. In Washington state, sexual health educators are required to present their curriculum to interested parents prior to teaching it in the classroom; when I was an HIV/AIDS educator in high school, we had an annual evening meeting where we went over our entire lesson with parents who then gave us feedback or chose to sign their child out of class. So there is a state law here allowing parents to see what their kids are being taught. That’s important. But putting parents in a classroom where sensitive topics like sexuality are being discussed changes the dynamic of the room, and inhibits the free flow of conversation and question-asking. Kids aren’t going to want to ask certain questions if their best friend’s mom or dad (or their own parent) is sitting five feet away, listening to every word. So while parents rights are important, there needs to be a balance — and in my opinion, placing parents in the classroom during sex ed is intimidating and limiting, and not condusive to the kind of open environment necessary for that kind of curriculum. Thoughts?

Restoring virginity

Doctors who “repair” women’s hymens are being threatened, apparently, by people who judge women’s value by the state of their hymen. While the stereotype of someone getting this surgery is a veiled Muslim woman, that isn’t entirely accurate.

Young also said that it’s not just women with Middle Eastern backgrounds seeking the surgeries. There has also been an increase in the number of women requesting hymen repair from both the Orthodox Jewish and Christian fundamentalist communities, as well as from women of all nationalities who want the surgery as a sexual enhancement.

“Within the fundamentalist Christian population as well there has been an apparent recent movement towards ‘traditional family values’ and there is pressure put on women to be virgins,” Young said.

Hymen repair is “sexual enhancement”? That’s odd to me… I don’t really understand how having a piece of tissue torn is sexually pleasurable for anyone, especially when that tearing comes complete with blood spillage.

So what exactly is hymen repair?

Typical hymen repair surgery involves stitching the remnants of a torn hymen together and inserting a gelatin capsule that contains a blood-mimicking substance. After the hymen has been surgically repaired, a woman will bleed the fake blood the next time she has sexual intercourse. The surgery, which costs from $2,500 to $4,500, is performed on an outpatient basis. Healing can take from a few days to a few weeks.

Fake blood. How sexy. The article is interesting, but what nags at me is the fact that no one really discusses the real problem: the fact that women’s hymens are equated with their purity, value and general worth, and the fact that women are ostracized and sometimes even killed for making their own sexual decisions (or for having those decisions made for them). While I obviously don’t believe any doctor deserves to be threatened or killed for doing their job, I would hope that this problem is being more seriously attacked at its roots. And I would also hope that these doctors are offering their patients information about domestic violence and family abuse resources. If a woman comes in and is afraid of being beaten or killed for having sex, repairing her hymen isn’t going to solve the problem.

Feminists Hate Sex

Can a bitch get a break?

Why do so many women not want to call themselves feminists? I sincerely think it’s because the word carries the stigma that feminists don’t like bonking — least of all bonking guys.

If feminism wants its good name back, it will have to come up with a pro-sex, highly bonkable feminist spokeswoman, who is seen to screw guys, and to like screwing them. Often. A feminist who digs cock.

Ahem. Well, I can think of a few “bonkable” feminists who “dig cock.” But most of us sex-obsessed feminists have moved far beyond the heteronormative memes and refuse to play nice with the PR machine.

Adam Ash needs to pick up BUST’s One-Handed Read, among other feminist erotica, and rethink his thesis.

via Archaeopteryx, a brand new, kickass, feminist-minded blog by a grad student in the sciences.

Sex and the asexual girl

Asexuals are finally coming out. I can’t even begin to summarize the entire article, but it’s incredibly interesting; it seems that the discourse around asexuality is trying to walk a fine line where asexual people are validated, but where issues leading to asexuality can still be discussed and examined.

This website really stinks

Hah. Gotta love stupid puns about repulsive, sexist deodorant websites. I wasn’t aware that even deodorant could be marketed with such over-the-top sexism, but the Axe website proves that it can. You build (or “customize,” as they call it, kind of like a car) your “dream girl,” and Axe tells you what kind of body spray to purchase to snag her. Rad. Now, my slow dial-up connection was taking a few minutes to get me all the way into the site, and after about 30 seconds I asked myself, “Wait, why am I looking at an Axe deodorant site to customize my dream girl?” so I clicked out of the page. But not before I read the lovely “page loading” message:

Your desires are important to us. Please continue to hold. loading legs loading firm buttocks loading swan-like necks loading super-sized chest you could bury your head in loading moist pillow lips loading seductive haunting eyes loading naughty tongue…

I’m just gonna skip the usual deconstruction of this website because, really, it’s not that complicated to see what’s going on here: women, like cars and other things you “customize,” are things. They serve a particular purpose in a man’s life, and that purpose is sexual, ornamental or both. Plus, you should buy things. Things like Axe. Because buying things gets you more things.

So everything else aside, let me just add this: Axe stinks. Seriously. I’ve smelled it, and it’s nasty. I also have a (perhaps unfair, but now… maybe not) stereotype about the type of guy who uses Axe body spray — and it’s not appealing. And let me reiterate: It. Is. Smelly. No offense to any nice boys or girls out there who use it — but do you even exist? Are there nice, cool, progressive and socially conscious men and women who are purchasing and using Axe body spray, after their repulsive ad campaign and this inane website? Anyone?

Via Shankar at TK. Because for whatever reason, today I’m really feelin’ the blogs of conservative former NYU students.

Instructions and advice for the young bride

From an 1894 newsletter:

To the sensitive young woman who has had the benefits of proper upbringing, the wedding day is, ironically, both the happiest and most terrifying day of her life. On the positive side, there is the wedding itself, in which the bride is the central attraction in a beautiful and inspiring ceremony, symbolizing her triumph in securing a male to provide for all her needs for the rest of her life. On the negative side, there is the wedding night, during which the bride must pay the piper, so to speak, by facing for the first time the terrible experience of sex.

Read More…Read More…

More on Orgasm Science

The NYTimes has a review of Lloyd’s book that I wrote about yesterday, including a quote that greater clarifies her position:

Western culture is suffused with images of women’s sexuality, of women in the throes of orgasm during intercourse and seeming to reach heights of pleasure that are rare, if not impossible, for most women in everyday life.

“Accounts of our evolutionary past tell us how the various parts of our body should function,” Dr. Lloyd said.

If women, she said, are told that it is “natural” to have orgasms every time they have intercourse and that orgasms will help make them pregnant, then they feel inadequate or inferior or abnormal when they do not achieve it.

“Getting the evolutionary story straight has potentially very large social and personal consequences for all women,” Dr. Lloyd said. “And indirectly for men, as well.”

Thoughts?

And perhaps I can give Jam a forum to write a review when he’s done with the book… yes? Yes?

Ooh, Ooh, Eee: Orgasm Science

An article by the Boston Globe covers the scientific recognition of and the evolutionary arguments surrounding the female orgasm. A new book by Elisabeth A. Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution, “summarizes dozens of evolutionary accounts of the female orgasm – and knocks them all down. Like [paleontologist Stephen Jay] Gould, she thinks the female orgasm is purposeless, which is not to say pleasureless. And she extends the charge of bias, charging that too many scientists take the male-centered view that the female orgasm is closely linked to heterosexual intercourse and reproduction.”

For sex ed that works

Look to Dr. Carrera. Director of the National Adolescent Sexuality Training Center at the Children’s Aid Society, Carrera has been working with low-income young people, offering them comprehensive sexual health education starting at age 11 and going through high school graduation. The result:

We participated in a three-year independent evaluation of our program. Nine hundred forty-one low-income teens, ages 13 to 15, at 12 sites in seven U.S. cities, were tested against comparable teens in other communities. We found several statistically significant outcomes for the young people in our program: young women were better able to avoid coercive sex, SAT and PSAT test scores were higher, births among girls were reduced by 50 percent, sexuality-related knowledge gains were 83 percent higher, the percentage of girls using effective contraception was two times higher, and the onset of sexual contact was delayed.

And yet our government is still funding programs that reinstate ridiculous gender roles, tell young people that half of gay teens have AIDS, abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, and condoms don’t work.

The Battle Over Birth Control

Notice that the fight over women’s health has lurched from a strict focus on abortion to an ever-increasing attack on contraceptives.

Does the pill prevent pregnancy or terminate it? Conservative Christians in my town hand out flyers at the county fair declaring that all forms of birth control are abortive in nature. They are sure to set up a booth directly across from Planned Parenthood’s booth, the one that hands out information on how to be safe if one is to have sex.

Are condoms an effective barrier-method or does AIDS seep through the “tiny holes” in the latex? Our beloved late Pope endorsed the idea that condoms “have tiny holes in them through which HIV can pass,” and lovingly passed this information to four continents worth of churches, effectively confusing those who reside in areas of a global pandemic. Some of these are areas in which the greatest contibutor to health aid is Oprah Winfrey and extra funds are spent on coffins because they “never have enough.” Praise the lord.

Is giving teens accurate information about their sexual health, and access to the materials necessary to do so, tacitly urging them to, you know, do it?

As pharmacists are gain support in their refusal to fill birth control prescriptions, the right to this legal medication is usurped by our ability to access it.

“I am deeply concerned that they have gone further than I have ever seen them. This is far past a woman’s right to make decisions regarding abortion to the point now that it’s about their right to make decisions on contraception,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told Salon. Murray and her Senate colleague Hillary Clinton have blocked President Bush’s nominee to head the FDA, Lester Crawford, over his inaction as acting director of the agency to approve the morning-after pill for over-the-counter sale. An FDA advisory committee has given the drug overwhelming support as safe and effective, and Canada approved its nonprescription status last week. Publicly, Crawford says his indecision on the drug has nothing to do with ideology, but privately he told Murray it raises his concerns about “behavior,” apparently alluding to arguments that the pill will encourage promiscuity.

Crawford is clearly concerned about the behavior of rape victims, considering that they are the ones who suffer most from the lack of availablity to not only the medication, but medical centers who will prescribe it. And those harlots probably asked for it.

Opposition to Plan B is just the latest and most visible drive by conservatives to curtail contraception, according to Heather Boonstra of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research group for reproductive issues. “There’s a constituency out there that equates all contraception with abortion, and they’re organizing in concerted ways to denigrate it,” she says. That constituency includes a number of social and religious groups, but the one that takes the abortion-contraception connection perhaps the most literally is the American Life League (ALL), one of the largest antiabortion lobbyists. Founded 25 years ago, it claims 300,000 families as members.

“Many forms of so-called contraception work by preventing the implantation of an already created human being, and that kills a baby in the womb, and we consider that to be an early abortion,” says ALL’s vice president, Jim Sedlak. He says ALL’s main mission is to inform women that all hormonal birth control methods and the IUD “are actually causing abortions themselves” and to force manufacturers to put that description prominently on contraceptive labels.

ALL’s STOPP International campaign also seeks to cut government funding for Planned Parenthood, which it believes misinforms women about how contraception works. Sedlak says STOPP has been successful at the city level — closing over 100 clinics around the country in the last 10 years — and is now targeting state funding. He pointed to the Texas Legislature’s recent decision to cut Planned Parenthood’s state funding as one of ALL’s biggest victories. “It’s not as fast as we would like, but we’ll take it, and we believe it will have a snowball effect and that when people understand what they’re doing we’ll be closing clinics even faster.”

ALL’s three-stage action plan against Planned Parenthood is spelled out on their website.

Building community-based coalitions of churches and faithful citizens to oppose Planned Parenthood at the grassroots level
Training and mobilizing people to expel Planned Parenthood from their local schools
Empowering activists to strip Planned Parenthood’s tax funding at the state level

ALL uses excitable language in order to obscure that while Planned Parenthood advocates for sexual education, they are not literally in the schools. Hell, if you’re a girl in a public school health class, you’re lucky to find out that you bleed.

Where ALL becomes a formidable force is in attempting to bring in coalitions of “churches and faithful citizens.” With the current political climate and three years left under Dubya’s kingly reign, the religious right has nearly effectively hijacked the Republican party. By saying that PP is an organization that “only makes money when our young people are sexually active” obscures the fact that the majority of those who enter the doors of a free clinic are there for routine visits that often have little to do with sex, but with general health issues that go along with having icky ol’ girly bits.

ALL is not the only threat to Planned Parenthood’s funding. In every one of his budgets, Bush has frozen funds for Title X, the 30-year-old program that pays for family-planning services for low-income women. Susanne Martinez, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for public policy, says that although Congress has restored some of that money, this “assault on family planning” has crippled Planned Parenthood’s contraceptive distribution — about 95 percent of the Title X funds it receives go directly to that service. She is also concerned Bush has appointed to agencies like the FDA and Health and Human Services “people who have very publicly said they opposed the use of birth control for the unmarried. It’s something [Bush] has been doing in a very strategic way.”

Several other groups support ALL’s views and its mission. The Family Research Council joined Republican leaders last Sunday on a national telecast blasting the Democrats for blocking appointments of conservative judges who could decide key reproductive-rights issues. And while the conservative Concerned Women for America (CFA) says it does not take a position on contraception, it does oppose abortion and has been vigorously defending the recent drive by anti-choice pharmacists to stop distributing emergency contraception, which CFA considers an “abortion pill.”

I personally am a big fan of ALL’s Rock for Life campaign, because teens are stupid enough to buy any message packaged in the Xtreme. Look, there are free downloads! And a blog!

This may be the final proof that rock n’ roll is indeed dead.

But back to the behavioral business again, the kind of business that shows that abstinence-only programs were ordered to be rated by the CDC on attendance, not effectiveness:

The abstinence-only programs — which have largely replaced safe-sex education — have not only curbed the distribution of condoms and birth control pills in school health clinics, but have entirely banned information about contraceptives and sexual health. The nonprofit Abstinence Clearinghouse, which promotes such programs, says few could argue that refraining from sex is the only sure-fire way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. And it dismisses repeated studies finding that abstinence-only programs are ineffective in either delaying sexual experience among teens or protecting them from disease. So does Alma Golden, Bush’s pick to head the Population Affairs department, which runs the programs. “One thing is very clear for our children, abstaining from sex is the most effective means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, STDs and preventing pregnancy and the emotional, social and educational consequences of teen sexual activity,” she says on the Clearinghouse’s Web site.

Read that again. Abstinence-only programs “have largely replaced safe-sex education.” It makes my hair curl.

It seems as well that there is federal talk of moving abstinence-only programs into elementary schools, thereby exposing yet another hypocrisy in the fight against doin’ it and doin’ it and doin’ it well, safe, and healthy, considering that one primary argument against comprehensive sex education is that it exposes children to sexual themes they aren’t ready for. Kansas, in the meantime, is in a legal battle over the existence of Adam’s navel. In the children’s best interest, my ass.

Amanda asks, “If you get pregnant on accident, should you be allowed pain medication during labor? Or is that part of your sentence?” Of course it is. No matter that it takes two to make things go right. If woman should slip up and experience prurient sexual desire, she should be punished.

Welcome to America. Don’t let the sun set on your female behind.