This is one of a long line of common phrases in sex education and sexuality messaging people, including people I think of us allies, use that I deeply dislike, like "preventing teen pregnancy." Let me explain why, working backwards.
That's usually followed by "then you should have sex using safer sex and contraception." Or -- and usually addressing both those things -- "then you should at least be responsible."
In some respect, that's fine. Now, not everyone needs contraception, either because they don't have a partner with a radically different reproductive system than them or they're not having the kinds of sex that can create a pregnancy, so that doesn't always make sense. But for people choosing to have any kind of sex, we're 100% on board with the sentiment that all of us -- no matter our age -- should be engaging in sexual practices supportive of safeguarding everyone's best health, and in alignment with whether we do or don't want or are or are not ready for a pregnancy. This statement often tacitly or inadvertently defining all sex as opposite-sexed or as intercourse isn't okay, but overall, on the safer sex and contraception bit? I'm right there with you.
The "if you can't?" Not cool. We all can elect not to have any kind of consensual sex, sparing masturbation we may unknowingly do in our sleep, something that happens sometimes. Some people also do have earnest impulse control disorders, but those are disorders, and do not occur in the vast majority of people of any age.
If we have consensual sex it is completely within our control, whether we're 13, 26 or 63. There is no "can't wait" when it comes to consensual sex. To suggest there is is not only incorrect, as we have free will, it can also be rape enabling. It backs up those who excuse rape by saying they (or rapists) couldn't control themselves, that just they couldn't help it, that when they feel sexual they cannot stop themselves and every kind of garbage of that ilk that is an absolute, and highly convenient, fiction. People always can hold off on sex or decline sex unless someone is being sexually assaulted or abused, in which case the person doing the abusing is in control of what is happening, but the person being victimized is not because the other person or group has also taken control of that person in some way. If we are choosing to have sex, that choice in and of itself is one of responsibility, and if we're bearing our own and our partner's consent in mind, one is already being responsible.
Some folks say "don't" instead of can't. That's far better. There most certainly is a "don't want to wait," but there isn't a can't. Nearly everyone can. It's just that not everyone always wants to. Not only is that a more truthful framing, it's one which makes clear that active consent and decision-making, and owning your choices, is of great import.
This "can't" stuff also plays into the way people often misrepresent teen sexuality: something out of one's control or will, as about "raging hormones" (hormones with apparent superpowers that can compel the body to move against one's own will); as a burly, untamable, and usually masculine beastie that picks young folks up by the feet and shakes them until they don't have two pennies of sense left to rub together. I'm not about to argue that when sexual feelings first start to develop and flourish that they don't often feel heady, even unwieldy: they sure can. But that doesn't make them unmanageable or make any actions one may take stemming from them out of a person's control.
I will also argue this is somewhat situational -- not about people only of a given age, gender or marital status -- and that we know older adults also experience strong sexual feelings. In addition, I hear from a lot of young people worried something is wrong with them because their sexual feelings are not at the mega-hormone-madness level people say teenage sexual feelings are. Heck, maybe it's both a misrepresentation of young adult sexuality AND older adult sexuality. All the same, young people are capable managing their sexuality well, and also tend to do a better job with it in cultures that don't present teen sexuality like this. And if young people hear adults suggesting or implying that sexual feelings are not something in everyone's control, they also are more likely to a) fall for partners who coerce them by suggesting as much, and b) won't recognize or report sexual abuse when that's what's going on.
There's another big flaw with the general message here: "You should wait for sex, but if you can't, be responsible." Huh? If there's something we should do, and we're not doing it, we're probably not being responsible already: by definition and context, the term "should" here implies an obligation. If we are NOT making and owning our own active sexual choices, or if we "can't" have the ability to own our choices at all, and thus, are irresponsible by default, we are absolutely not being responsible. So, "If you can't be responsible... be responsible?" That's -1 + 1, which equals zero. It's null.
...until? Until you're married? Until you're in a committed relationship? Until you're older? How much older? By whose standards or what criteria? And why: what will one, three, five or ten years automatically provide just by having a birthday each year? (Or "until I can or want to deal with you being sexual, because I'd just rather not?")
Many people do have down that the "until you're married" part isn't sound. Not all of us have the legal right to get married to people we love, at any age. Some of us don't want to get married, or don't want to enter into marriages without a sense of whether or not we have a compatible sexual relationship with a given person first. Some of us are in all of those camps. Too, marriage does not mean a lack of STIs, a lack of unwanted pregnancies, a healthy relationship or a stellar sex life (even far-right folks even know this part, they just vociferously avoid admitting it). It never has. It doesn't still. And as we mentioned just the other day, through history, even for those who did/do marry, most people have had sex before marriage, especially if of people who marry, both were not very young teens when they did. Saving sex for marriage was never a realistic standard for most young adults, nor a common practice.
Long-term committed relationships have more positive outcomes for some people. Some people also have positive outcomes in casual or shorter-term relationships. For most of us, it's not a simple either/or, because it depends on the specific relationship or scenario and on what that person wants and feels best about at a given time in their lives.
Wait until you're older? How much older? Until it's legal? Think whatever we do about age of consent laws, that's pretty sound. But even in states where the age of consent is, say, 16 or 18, there are almost always allowances for same-age sexual relationships for those under that age. If it's not about the law, at what age does everyone, unilaterally, acquire the skills, resources and the right relationships and scenarios to assure, or at least strongly suggest, sex will be either devoid of unwanted outcomes or bear less risk of them, or be a positive? If, in reading this, you're not silent and have that one magical age handy for me, I need to assure you that I can't think of one single age, talking to people of many ages about sex, I have not had people report negative or unwanted outcomes with. I also have never seen evidence or data via study to show such an age exists.
We have do sound study that tells us things like that younger teens' expectations of sex often are very unrealistic, and that the youngest teens also report unwanted outcomes from sex or unhappy experiences more frequently than older teens do. We also have good data that shows us that for the youngest teens, sex more often is not consensual sex, but is rape, via either force or coercion. Data like that is critically important, and is good to share with young people when we're talking with them about sex, especially if they seem to specifically fit the picture of any of that data. However, there will always be exceptions, and often those exceptions are not about a few teens, but about a few million. Age-in-years also isn't all that's going on in those pictures.
Here's where both I, and Scarleteen as an organization, stand on this.
What we want is for everyone to only have any kind of sex -- be it intercourse or any other physically enacted expression of sexuality with oneself or a partner -- when it is what everyone involved in a sexual scenario: strongly wants, can and does actively consent to, feels prepared for and has the knowledge and capacity to have sex in a way that is physically and emotionally safe. We want this for everyone the first time they have any kind of sex, and then every time thereafter.
If "you should wait" means until all of THAT, then you betcha, we're on board. This is our goal for people of every age, and we don't think it's fair or reasonable to hold young people to different standards on this than we hold, or anyone else holds, older people (especially if you're going to say young people are less capable of meeting the standard than older people, but older people don't need to meet it once they are capable).
The kinds of things we know ARE likely to create positive sexual outcomes -- areas we can clearly see are where those positive outcomes most often occur -- are things like having an earnest and shared desire for sex with the person you're having it with, having knowledge about and access to sexual healthcare, safer sex tools and contraception; having the full legal right to and a sense of ownership of your own body (be that about the right to give nonconsent and consent or reproductive rights), having emotional support and acceptance from your community and culture, not feeling shame or fear about sex or sexuality; having a strong sense of self as well as a real care for others and feeling prepared for and at least somewhat skilled with the kinds of things sex requires, like communication, vulnerability, creativity, compassion, discovery and boundary-setting. There are people who are teens and who have all of those things sometimes: there are plenty who do not. There are people who are 20, 30 or 50 who do not: there are also plenty who do. While age and life experience can absolutely hone any and all of those things, a) it clearly doesn't for all people (if only) and b) some of those things can sometimes be easier for younger people than older people, especially if they haven't unlearned any of their intuitive skills with them yet
I know that there is no one broad group which people can be a member of that guarantees unilaterally positive sexual experiences or relationships with either unilaterally positive outcomes, or a lack of any negative outcomes. Everyone who works in sexuality knows this. Marriage doesn't do that, and it never has. Being of a certain gender doesn't do that, nor of a certain race or economic class. Being of a certain age doesn't do that, either, and also never has. Setting aside both the implicit falsehood of these kinds of statements, and the audacity of making them to members of a group which we are not members of ourselves, if we give young people the idea that getting married, having a partner for X-months or X-years or reaching some magical-age-or-other will immediately imbue them with all of the above resources, skills or scenarios, we aren't helping them any. At best, we potentially set them up for disappointment, but at worst, we may put them right in harm's way -- since those things alone do NOT protect them -- the very thing I think most people do want to prevent.
The other thing "wait until" can say as a message, intentionally or not, is that once anyone chooses to have sex, it's a Pandora's Box they have opened and can't shut evermore. Sexual choices are not just important or meaningful the first time we make them: those choices are always meaningful, we consider if sex is something that is right for us every time we do or don't choose to engage in it, and we all always have the right to change our minds and decline sex, even if we had it before. But a lot of young people don't know or feel that, especially with the other messages they get about how their valuation as people changes based on whether or not they have had sex or do have sex. I know, for certain, our allies don't want to enable that message to young people, but I worry some do because this messaging dovetails with that kind all too easily.
Shoulds are tricky when we're talking about sexuality, especially when making opening or general statements, rather than responding to someone's specifically expressed wants and/or needs. Given a rare few of us have been reared without pervasive shoulds when it comes to sex, or have been totally uninfluenced by a world which is rife with them, it's really easy to slip into saying "should" and we all usually have to work hard to avoid it. But I think we need to try.
When it comes to things like what kind of sex someone enjoys or wants, or to when sex will most likely be right for them (especially in a given situation when you don't even know what their unique situation is), "you should" usually means something more like, "I wouldn't," "I didn't," "I don't think you should because I didn't like that," "That didn't work out so well for me, so it probably won't for you" "I'd prefer if you didn't because what I want is..." "My personal values dictate..." or "Some person or idea who has more authority than you do says no."
This is a particularly problematic issue when adults are talking to young people, and all the more so when they're saying "shoulds" about nothing but age-in-years and personal projections. So often, adults have the idea that because they were once a young person of 13 or 19 or 22, they know all of how it is for young people of that same age. Even adults who once knew how full of baloney that was when they were teens.
For sure, those of us who are older were once younger. We were, however, our own younger selves, not the younger person we are talking with and about right now. We were also not our younger selves in the same time they are their younger selves. While some parts of a given experience they had may be much like one we had, they may experience that thing very differently, or have different outcomes than we did. For sure, age and hindsight gives us perspectives, and those truly are often valuable, especially if we're mindful people. But the idea that we know so much more than a younger person about their experiences, or what may be their experiences, just because of our experiences or our age isn't kosher. It is, in fact, is one of the ways that adults are often adultist. On top of that, we have adults who DID wait past X-age to be sexual with partners, and felt that was best for them: but not having had the other experience, they can't know what that would have been like for them. Then we have adults who had sex younger than they feel would have been best for them: they have a bit more information than the former group, but still can't know what starting sex at a different age would have been like. Having experience with something doesn't give us experience with not-something-else.
Nearly of my own consensual sexual experiences and relationships as a teen, including those when I was a young teen, were positive, enjoyable and loving and I didn't have the unwanted outcomes we've always heard will fall upon the heads of teens who have sex (likely because I did very well with safer sex and contraception when it was needed), save a broken heart a few times. No more achy-breaky than heartbreak I experienced from nonsexual relationships, though (actually, I think those heartbreaks were sometimes worse for me). I've heard from more than my fair share of adults my age or older who both don't manage their sex lives NOW as well as I did as a teenager and who are less pleased with their sex lives as adults than I was with mine as a teen. However, because my experience was like that at a given age does not mean I'm going to assume every other 15-year-old female-bodied person out there, at this point in time or any other, will have or will have had the same experiences I did. I think most people, including people whose politics are radically different than mine, would agree it would be grossly irresponsible for me to project my own experiences and outcomes unto any other young person just because they're the same age I was, doing the same things. And if that's so, those folks should also agree the same would be true had I had very negative experiences and unwanted outcomes.
My own experiences, like yours, may provide me perspectives (and also potential biases) I may not have had I had very different experiences. But it's my job to manage them and put them in greater perspective, to recognize they are individual, not universal, to avoid projecting and to figure that for any given teen out there who might have been just like me, there's one out there who is radically different, and for whom my choices at a given age would be a terrible fit, with very different outcomes.
If being older really makes us wiser, why do adults have such a hard time seeing when we're projecting this stuff unto young people, or recognizing it's often disrespectful? Many times that "should" comes from the I-did-this-I had-bad-things-happen place. I completely understand adults -- especially those who are parents or are mentors, teachers or other allies, rather than folks who don't have any real emotional investment in a teen or teens lives -- wanting to do what they can, within reason and with care, to help young people avoid harm or hurt. I think that's laudable and loving. However, a negative outcome happening from something we do at one age doesn't mean it'll happen to all people that age doing that same thing. We all need to think more deeply than this and present teens with thoughts of more depth.
I took a one-block walk to the park to play when I was seven, climbed on what looked like a jungle gym in an alley to me (it so wasn't) and I wound up slicing off half my hand, which left me with a permanent disability. Does that mean that it's a bad idea for seven-year-olds to go take a walk, and we can be sure of that because of what happened to me when I was seven? If I have had both positive and negatives with both serious and casual relationships, does that mean all must be good for everyone...or that none are?
Maybe you had intercourse with your boyfriend when you were 15. You didn't use birth control and became unwantedly pregnant, or a condom wasn't used and you got an STI. You didn't come into the relationship with knowledge about either of these things, nor sound negotiation skills or a real sense of self-esteem. You hid your sexual activity because per your religion, you were breaking the rules and sinning. Your relationship was also crappy, and the guy wound up leaving you, on top of everything. So, if you had had intercourse at 20, but all those other conditions were exactly the same, do you think the outcome would have been different? Doubtful. Just like if that guy had a mustache, things would not have been different with all the same conditions at the same age with a partner sans mustache. The problem most likely was not being 15. It was all the conditions of that equation.
There's often some coulda-woulda-shoulda going on here, too. A lot of people come of age with ideas of what "perfect sex" or "perfect lover" or "perfect first time" is. Many people have the idea that if they had just done X-thing differently, they would have had that perfect first time instead of the less-than-stellar experience they had. Certainly, we don't always all make the best choices and some different choices very much may have resulted in different outcomes -- because no, someone who had no sex at all would not have become pregnant, and someone who didn't choose a sex partner they knew was a jerk would have been less likely to wind up with a jerk-in-bed. But as someone who hears a WHOLE lot about that "perfect first time," including from people who followed all the given "rules" about what promises to make that so? I gotta tell you: if you didn't have it, one reason why was that, in large part, that "perfect" first time isn't real. It, like perfect lovers and perfect sex, is a fable; a fantasy. That's why it's so sparkly and shiny. Too, we can't ever know what outcome switching up one thing differently would have had, or what THAT change may have created. We hear a similar tactic in reproductive justice a lot, when people who are antichoice and regret an abortion they had say that they should have done adoption, that would have been so much less painful. Not only do they have no way of knowing that, that ignores the endless scores of women who HAVE surrendered a child and found it very painful. Grass, greener, other side: you know this one.
"Should" is a word that also has something to do with control. When we say "should" to someone -- especially without context, such as where someone tells us they want to have sex without a pregnancy, so we say they should then consider using contraception -- we suggest someone is obligated to make a certain choice. That's not helpful messaging if some of our intent is truly to empower people to make their own best choices, rather than to try and get them to make the choices we want them to for our own benefit or personal agenda (which can certainly include trying to rewrite or correct our own sexual histories). The phraseology here also suggests that responsibility is more about someone doing their duty, being a good citizen or a "good person," than just caring for themselves and caring for others: it's the latter motivation that's more likely to help people create and nurture positive sexual lives and relationships. Plus, messages of duty and/or obligation in regard to sex are particularly noxious for women, for whom much of the whole cultural history of sexuality has been about sex as a duty and obligation.
I would be so delighted if we could start to broadly hear a change in this messaging, especially from individuals or organizations I know or think truly want what is best for young people, which certainly includes, ideally, a reduction of negative or unwanted outcomes from sex, and also -- pretty please? -- some address of consent; which I also hope includes nurturing positive, wanted outcomes, like feeling good about one's sexuality, having a satisfying, beneficial sexual life -- one that includes pleasure and fun, not just not-pregnancy or not-STIs -- like feeling able to express yourself and your feelings with someone else authentically, like feeling alive in your body and feeling capable and respected.
I don't think we can't present sex positively and treat young people as capable while still sending strong messages about health and public health: in fact, I think without the former the latter will often be ineffective or have its own set of negative consequences, like fear, shame or feeling disempowered. If the messages we send young people about sex don't treat them with respect, aren't honest, don't address consent or make it sound impossible or inconsequential, don't treat the individual as an individual and shortcut complex issues, expecting them to approach sexuality any differently seems a strange expectation, indeed.
Here a few different alternatives to try on for size:
Of course, my favorite approach is avoiding generalized statements like this at all and instead having conversations where I can simply first ASK (or be told) if someone does or does not want to have sex right now, then give more information, and ask more questions, then tailoring what I am saying to what they state their needs and wants to be: if we start there, and work from their answer, it's pretty easy to sidestep all of the problems with these kinds of phrasings. I think it also makes it easier for us to focus as much on what we should be doing as we're focusing on what teens should.
That question probably either sounds like a really important one or a really stupid one, depending on your view. But I want the answer regardless, and am seriously tired of waiting for it.
As an organization that provides information on all methods of contraception and other aspects of sexual decision-making, we include talking about abstinence (or celibacy, or not having certain kinds of sex, terminology we prefer because they're more clear) as a method. We are supportive of our users who choose to be celibate, in whole or in part, as their method of birth control, just as we're supportive of our users choosing any other method of contraception. We know full well that there is no one best method of contraception for all people and would never suggest that there is.
For every other method, we provide perfect and typical use rates of effectiveness. Those are two pieces of information, combined with additional info on each method, we provide for those making choices about contraception; two pieces of information that play a big part in most people's decision-making process when choosing a method or methods.
That given, it really sucks that I can never provide a typical use rate for celibacy.
The people promoting abstinence clearly haven't wanted to study effectiveness and failure of abstinence as a method of contraception so we can all know what the typical use rates are. They want to frame it as contraception, which is already problematic, because contraception is defined as things we actively do or use to prevent pregnancy, not as things we don't do or avoid using: contraceptive reference books won't show rates for abstinence because people not having sex don't need contraception. But if you're going to put it out there as a method of birth control, you have to also treat it like one when it comes to the kind of study we have for all other methods. Alas.
For all the promotion of abstinence, we still don't have studied, published typical use rates for abstinence as a method: the rate that shows us, for every method of contraception, how frequently a method does and doesn't result in pregnancy when used by people in daily life.
But that doesn't mean we can't get a good idea of what that rate is ourselves. This rate won't be as sound as we could get with a specific study, but I think we can use plenty of data we have on abstinence, as well as on other methods and use of no method, to get a good idea of what typical use probably is.
Before I get started, let me explain what a typical use rate for any method is. This is confusing, even though it's referenced all the time for methods. What "typical use" means is that a group of people, in a study, are asked what method they used in the last year. They reply that they used X method. Then they are asked about if a pregnancy or pregnancies occurred in the last year with that method. A rate is then figured from that data.
We call this typical use because this isn't study done in a lab or in a way where we can have any idea of how well a given person was using that method: this is what people are reporting with uncontrolled use. Additionally, as you probably know, when someone says they use a given method, they don't necessarily mean all the time or properly. Some people may say they use condoms, and yet only used them once or twice in the last year, only put them on halfway through intercourse or didn't use them at all. Non-use, weird as it may seem, is factored into typical use for every contraceptive method's rates. And yes, ease of use or comfort with using is obviously part of that equation: in other words, if a method is really tough to use or access, that's going to be reflected in the typical use rate: it's harder to use some methods perfectly than it is with others. For instance, the Depo-Provera injection has a near-identical perfect and typical use rate, because it's pretty goof-proof. But the pill's two rates have just over a 7% difference between them; condoms' typical and use rates differ by around 11%: these methods are easily to mess up. We always have to consider how hard or easy a method is to use when looking at typical use rates, and the rate alone often tells us something about that.
Perfect use of abstinence, as a method of birth control, is, at most, not having any kind of sex at all in the year one is using this as a method, or, at least, not having ANY of the kinds of sex which can pose a risk of pregnancy. That's genital intercourse and/or direct genital-to-genital contact between two (or more) people where one has a uterus and fallopian tubes and the other has testes.
Perfect use isn't only having anal sex, nor is it mostly not having vaginal intercourse, but having it every once in a while. There is no technical virginity at play when we're talking about abstinence per the prevention of pregnancy. Typical use of abstinence, per the definition of abstinence, can only mean that you're not abstaining completely in that same year. While with most other methods, what's typical use and what's perfect can be a bit blurry sometimes: with abstinence from the standpoint of abstinence-as-contraception, it's crystal clear. Using abstinence perfectly isn't about what may or may not be part of your values around sex, it's about biology, not psychology. As well, we're not going to consider that condom use sometimes, but abstinence other times, should be factored into typical use rates, because adding a second method isn't factored into typical use rates for any other methods.
Okay, then. Here's sound and relevant data we can look at to help provide the answer to this burning question of typical use:
1) The typical (and perfect) use rate for using no method at all when having intercourse and/or other direct genital-to-genital contact between opposite-sexed and fertile people is 10 - 20%. (AHRP, FWHC, Contraceptive Technology)
2) The typical use rate for using natural family planning without another method as a backup, which includes abstaining from direct genital-to-genital contact and intercourse during fertile times as well as tracking fertility in at least one of several ways, is 75 - 80% (Merck, AHRP, FWHC, Contraceptive Technology).
3) We know that most people, on the whole, have sex. And that the vast majority do and have always done so before or without marriage, and the majority, regardless of orientation, will have sex that poses a risk of pregnancy. The average age of first marriage right now in the states is 26-27. By ages 22-24, 92% of women have had vaginal intercourse (Mosher, Chandra, & Jones, 2005).
Abstaining from intercourse or other genital-to-genital contact before marriage is something very few people have ever done. "Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003," (Lawrence B. Finer, January/February 2007, Public Health Reports) found that even among women born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage. Using data from several rounds of the federal National Survey of Family Growth, Finer found that by age 44, 99% of respondents had had sex (intercourse), and 95% had done so before marriage.
It's stating the obvious, but we also know that pregnancy being unwanted or untenable isn't something that only happens to nonmarried or unmarried people. In the United States, over 30% of unintended pregnancies occur to married women (Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, Stanley K. Henshaw, Family Planning Perspectives, Volume 30, Number 1, January/February 1998). So, if abstinence is framed only as a method to use until marriage, and once married, those who chose to use abstinence both no longer abstain from sex and do not choose to use other methods of birth control, we can apply the typical use rate for using no method to married people who are not abstaining, but are also not using any other method.
4) For the first time in ten years, after consistent decreases since the 70's, unintended pregnancy rates for teens are up. Abstinence-only got it's start in the states in 1996, but only began to become as widespread as it did...umm, around 10 years ago. That may be coincidental, but probably not, especially since abstinence-only education programs not only state abstinence until marriage is the only acceptable choice, they often state that other methods of contraception are ineffective (which is a pretty wacky thing to do when your method has no published typical use rate), and other countries without these programs aren't seeing this kind of increase. Experts on teen pregnancy, contraception and sexuality near-unilaterally agree that abstinence-only education likely has played a key role in this change.
5) Studies which have been done about those who pledge abstinence have found that those who pledge abstinence do not have intercourse at lower rates than those who do not pledge, nor do they have lower rates of pregnancy and STIs. Based on interviews with more than 20,000 young people who took virginity pledges, one study found that 88 percent of them broke their pledge and had sex before marriage (Brückner H, Bearman P. After the promise: the STD consequences of adolescent virginity pledges. Journal of Adolescent Health 2005; Bearman PS, Brückner H. Promising the future: virginity pledges and first intercourse. American Journal of Sociology 2001). Bearman did also find that in his study, those who pledged often delayed vaginal intercourse, some for even as long as as 18 months. Now, for those who do NOT have any kind of sex which poses a pregnancy risk (important, as "sex" in this case doesn't include anal intercourse) for one full year, abstinence would be 100% effective. However, that's not typical according to studies as a whole.
A study by Janet Elise Rosenbaum, PhD, AM (Patient Teenagers? A Comparison of the Sexual Behavior of Virginity Pledgers and Matched Nonpledgers, PEDIATRICS Vol. 123 No. 1 January 2009) found that teens who pledge to abstain from sex have just as much sex as those who don't, and that those who pledge not to have sex until marriage don't wait longer to have sex than those who don't make that pledge. Pledgers did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex. Fewer pledgers than matched nonpledgers also used birth control and condoms in the past year and birth control at last sex. She also found that five years after the pledge, 82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged at all. Central to the information we're looking for, on typical use in a year, "pledgers reported an average of 1.09 past-year vaginal sex partners, 0.11 fewer than nonpledgers." In other words, on average, those who report using abstinence are not using abstinence perfectly each year.
Rosembaum's study was fantastically done, by the way, with a far sounder and stricter methodology than the Bearman and Brückner studies. She even ensured, via 128 different factors, that her samples of those who pledged and those who didn't had similar attitudes towards sexual activity to begin with.
Lastly, of the ten studies identified by the Heritage Foundation as providing proof that their respective programs reduced early sexual activity, nine of them failed to provide credible evidence that they delayed the initiation of sex or reduced the frequency of sex ("Do Abstinence-Only Programs Delay the Initiation of Sex Among Young People and Reduce Teen Pregnancy?," Douglas Kirby, Ph.D, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy).
Here are a few of the studies on abstinence (mostly on ab-only sex ed programs) and reports on them:
If you want to look at what's published by those who strongly support not just abstinence, but abstinence being put forth as the only right method of birth control, I'll give you a few links. I would, however, encourage you to consider that the studies above do this funny thing where they create and explain a methodology, something you'll note tends to be conspicuously absent from the links below. You also may notice that some of them report things from other studies linked above which are dubious, incomplete or suggest the studies were incorrect without putting forth any sort of sound critique, or offering up their own controlled study.
I want to make a distinction between abstinence-only education and programs and abstinence used as a method of birth control. Because of the billions of dollars which have gone into ab-only education (more money than has ever gone into developing or honing any birth control method), and the breadth of what ab-only programs can impact, including STI rates and GLBT invisibility and discrimination, much of the study and reporting we have on abstinence is about abstinence-only education or pledge programs. By all means, some people choosing abstinence as a method are doing so via abstinence-only or abstinence-pledge programs. Some people are choosing abstinence based in moral or religious beliefs. But not everyone choosing to be celibate or abstain from sex that poses the risk of pregnancy is a member of any or all of those groups. There are also people who choose to be abstinent for other reasons and with different motivations, and they may well present very different outcomes.
But let's get back to the main question at hand. Considering all that data, what is the typical use rate for abstinence at preventing pregnancy?
At first glance, the rates for natural family planning/periodic abstinence may look plausible as the typical use rate for abstinence. However, FAM/NFP is a method all by itself of which abstinence is only one part. Someone who was using abstinence as a sole method isn't using NFP/FAM: if they're not doing any kind of fertility awareness, they're only using abstinence. If they are doing any kind of fertility awareness, they're using NFP/FAM, not abstinence. Using NFP and FAM, includes, and is centered around calculating fertility in some way: either by the calendar method, or more efficiently, with daily tracking of cervical mucus and/or basal temperatures, then fertility predictions based on charting one or both over time. That's not part of how abstinence is defined.
However, in that method there is a shared motivation to those using abstinence, which is the motivation to abstain from sex, even though it's not a constant. I don't think that typical use rate is irrelevant, because motivation isn't irrelevant in typical use, and NFP rates do give us some information on abstinence: but it's also only part of the picture.
Given the study we have on abstinence shows us the amount of sex and lifetime partners had appears to be no less than those who don't report using abstinence as a method, we can presume that when it comes to figuring out the typical use rates, we're not considering a group of people whose sex lives -- when it comes to having sex, and to frequency of sex -- are that different than we'd find when considering any other group. In other words, if someone who is using abstinence doesn't use it perfectly, but typically, meaning they did not abstain from sex or the kinds of sex which have the potential to create a pregnancy, and we are ONLY considering abstinence as a sole method, not other methods they may use (which would then be about rates for combining methods), then they may be the same, practically speaking, as those who do not use any method at all.
It may be sound and accurate to state that the typical use rate for abstinence as a sole method is probably the same as the typical use rate for no method: 10-20%. However, I'm not willing to dismiss that intention of use, and motivation to use, is a factor in the use of any method, including abstinence. I also can't dismiss that rates for NFP, while they involve a built-in backup method abstinence alone does not, do also take some abstinence into account. Using abstinence sometimes in a year, but not all the time or for the whole of a year, is consistent with the studies we have on abstinence, and what I hear from young people who have been using it as a method or taken a pledge.
My theory is that the typical use rate for abstinence is the average of the typical use rate for using no method at all, and the typical use rate for periodic abstinence, which lands us at a rate of 42.5 - 50%. I may be overly generous in that estimate, but I don't think so. If you think I am, and want to play it as safe as possible, then you'll want to consider it to be the 10-20% figure, instead. (I'd also be really interested in reading your own comments on this, and seeing your own theories.)
Even with that potentially generous estimate of 42.5 - 50%, abstinence has the lowest effectiveness rate in typical use of all methods. That's important information for people considering any method to have, especially if this method is touted as being foolproof by someone who says condoms, with around an 85% typical use rate, are said to never or only infrequently be effective.
For the record, I know that some people have a beef with abstinence being assigned a 100% perfect use rating, arguing that even in perfect use, all other methods fail. I don't share that beef. The complaints about that claim are usually a) that we have no studies to show that (I disagree: we have plenty of study to show how pregnancy happens, so can know clearly that with no sex, it won't), b) that plenty of people don't understand what perfect use of abstinence even means (yes, but plenty of people don't know that for all methods), and c) that we know full well abstinence fails (true, but in typical use, since perfect use means not having sex, so unless you're counting Mary and Jesus, who we're told abstinence failed in perfect use, it's 100% in perfect use). The reason all other methods fail even with perfect use is that those perfect use rates still include people who are having genital intercourse: perfect use for those methods does not require or account for a lack of any intercourse whatsoever.
When I'm doing a contraception consult with someone, be that online or in-person, a tactic I often suggest when choosing a method is for people to figure that as someone who is getting good education on using a method with me, but also has a harried life like anyone else where we'll goof things sometimes, they'll probably wind up with an effectiveness rate somewhere between perfect and typical use. So, for example, if we were taking about the pill, used alone, I'd ask them to think about if 96% effectiveness (the average between perfect and typical use), was a rate they felt comfortable with. If it wasn't, then I'd bring up both other methods which are more effective as well as how combining more than one method can increase effectiveness. For example, even with just typical use for both, adding condoms to the pill would net them 98.8% protection.
So, I'd pose the same proposition to anyone considering abstinence as their sole method. If perfect use is 100%, and typical use is, in fact, 45-50%, then we're talking about an average between them of 72.5-75% effectiveness at preventing pregnancy. Are you okay with those levels of protection/risk? If so, okay: I'm not going to say that's not okay for someone who tells me that's a level of protection they're okay with, just like I wouldn't for any other method. (But if, for instance, I see someone at one of the clinics or other sites I do consultations for, or on the site, who is saying they're okay with it, but either keeps having pregnancies they don't want, or keeps freaking out worrying about pregnancy all the time, I am going to suggest they rethink, since it seems clear they're really not okay with it, after all.)
If you're not okay with that level of protection against unwanted pregnancy, and want a higher one, then just like with the consideration of any other method you have two choices: you can either choose a more effective method, or you can combine abstinence with a second method. In practice, what the latter would mean is that if there are times you choose not to abstain, and you want to prevent unwanted pregnancy at those times, that you use a second method of contraception, like a condom, a pill, a ring, an injection, withdrawal or natural family planning.
I also want to share an observation about celibacy as a method that I've made over the decade-and-change I've been doing my job. What I've observed is that celibacy seems to be more effective at preventing pregnancy for those who choose it without making pledges to g-d some other authority figure, or making a big to-do about it and without feeling that it is their only right, moral, or religiously-sanctioned contraceptive choice to make. If a study was done which compared those making abstinence pledges until marriage versus those people choosing celibacy for now, without those kinds of conditions, I think we'd find the latter group had lower rates of pregnancy and more positive sexual outcomes. I don't think we'd see, as we did in the Rosenbaum study, the latter group outright denying they had chosen to be celibate, either. The people I've spoken with in work and in life who just choose not to have sex, or certain kinds of sex, as a way to prevent pregnancy (or just because they don't want to have those kinds of sex), and do so feeling they'd be supported if they chose a different method, seem to be pretty relaxed about it, and not at all ashamed or defensive around that choice. They also don't seem to make that choice out of fear.
In other words, I think if the folks pushing abstinence so freaking hard would stop pushing and shoving the way they do, and would treat it like any other method, giving every method the respect and plausibility they give it, doing studies on it like the kind done with other method, including providing some studied typical use rate, not only would the typical use rate of abstinence likely be higher in time than I theorize it is now, the rate of unwanted pregnancy -- something they say they really want -- would also start declining again, the way it was before the advent of abstinence programs. There are other potential bonuses with that change of approach: for instance, treating abstinence differently would support more folks who want to decline sex for any number of reasons in doing so better, would likely help get our STI rates down, would result in less shame and fear (which never helps with sound decision-making, sexual or otherwise), would address people who can't get married at all or just don't want to, and a whole plethora of positive outcomes. If what many abstinence-proponents tend to say they want -- lower STI and unwanted pregnancy rates and happier, healthier people -- isn't a pile of hooey to mask a religious or political agenda, they'll hop right on board with that.
But I expect to be waiting as long for that to happen as I expect to continue waiting for them to give me a typical use rate.
P.S. Should you read this and strongly disagree with my theory, thinking abstinence as a method is far more effective in typical use, I encourage you to lobby abstinence organizations to do some actual study on typical use of abstinence as a method. I would far rather have sound data from study on typical use to post here, too. The only reason I'm doing this the way that I am if that I've got no other options, and I don't find "?" an acceptable permanent answer for an effectiveness rate for any method of contraception. Especially one that's gotten billions of our tax dollars, so goodness knows they can certainly afford to do the studies.
Thanks to Dr. Logan Levkoff for letting me toss these ideas at her and for her helpful input!
This is the first time I'm writing explicitly about issues around sex and sexuality, and as per usual, I’m writing in a gender-focused way – specifically men and masculinity. I’m having a bit of a look at how understandings of masculinity impact on sexual identity, expression and practice.
Talk, images & representations of men and sex are (without a shadow of exaggeration) EVERYWHERE in culture and society, (at least the English speaking cultures I'm familiar with). These representations are on TV, film, print media, music, billboards, books, spam folders, in fact pretty much the entire internet, video games, etc. We're all pretty aware of those representations, and even quite savvy and critical about some of these representations. Representations of male sexuality are more than just these explicit and often quite twentieth century forms of representation. Other forms may occur in interaction and conversation (or the absence of) with friends, family, casual acquaintances, people we meet in bars, politicians, community leaders, etc. In general we are less aware of this sort of representation as it's more casual, more personalised and more intimate, and because of this, more effective in influencing our ideas and understandings of sex and sexuality.
One recurring and dominant theme in our understanding of male sexual behaviour is the idea of the male "need" for sex. The common narrative for this concept of men's needs is one based on some sort of biological imperative, be that a study about some fundamental wiring in a male brain (or genitals) that requires men to regularly engage in sexual intercourse to maintain physical well-being, intimate relationships and a healthy sense of self. Or perhaps it is some essential part of the male brain, left over from our ancient forefathers - for whom constant procreation ensured the survival of the familial line, if not the entire species. If you look around, this sort of story is very common, from relationship and sex advice columns, to scientific journals, to the average persons understanding around male sexuality.
Now, it should be pointed out very clearly that I am by no means a scientist, nor even am I particularly well educated on scientific language and discourse, but what strikes me again and again is the frequency with which cultural understandings of sexuality, are reinforced and legitimised through this language of science. Discussions around physiological and psychological meanings of male sexual practices are conflated into discussions that relate to the culturally embedded ideas and concepts around masculinity. One example of this often almost imperceptible segue from science to culture is around discussions about gendered difference in arousal patterns. I’ll paraphrase the narrative this conversation often takes: “Because of differences in brain make up, males get aroused much quicker than females and male arousal is triggered primarily by visual material, whereas female arousal takes longer and requires multiple sensual stimulations.” Now already in this example we can see cultural understandings of gender creeping in. In the context of arousal (and in many other contexts) masculinity is seen as active and direct, while femininity is characterized as passive. Males get aroused, females are dependent on a number of environmental facets for their arousal. In this sort of narrative female arousal is often seen as a response to male arousal. As in man becomes aroused, proceeds to make woman aroused. This type of scientific or pseudo-scientific explanation of arousal as gendered reinforces the dominant social and cultural understandings of gender roles. Talk around male sexual “needs” also feeds into this discussion, in that it prioritises male sexuality over female sexuality, through the legitimising language of science.
The medical condition with an evocative name and a whole heap of extra cultural baggage - “Blue Balls” is another good example of how medicine being used to reinforce dominant cultural ideas. Now at this point I think I should point out again that I have no medical expertise, but I do have access to the internet (which, while no substitute for the real thing is very handy). Turns out, blue balls is more properly known as vascongestion, (a swelling of tissue leading to increased pressure) specifically in the genital area, which can cause discomfort. That’s about it; it isn’t life threatening or anything like that. And, here’s the bit that surprised me – women can get it as well (though obviously the nomenclature is less apt). I’d be willing to bet that while most readers would have heard the term “blue balls” and would have some level of understanding of what it meant, that it can effect women would be a surprise to most of you. Anecdotal evidence and a quick search of “blue balls” on the Scarleteen message boards suggests that the medical condition of blue balls is actually used by males as a way to pressure partners into sex, a desire given weight and gravity through a medical condition. Using a condition like blue balls to pressure your partner into sex is one clear and explicit example of how science and medicine are part of a broader social and cultural understanding of male sexuality and sexual practice. How we understand blue balls also highlights the close (almost inseparable) links, socially and culturally between three distinct things; erection, ejaculation & orgasm. That the connection between these three things has become so normalised, that it is (I would say) odd to think about an erect penis without ejaculation further demonstrates the great influence of cultural and social discussions around what constitutes ‘ normal’ sexual behaviour or practice.
Men don’t need sex. Not in the sense that there is some essential difference between men and women that requires men to engage in partnered sexual acts with greater frequency, for fear of dire results. Any discussion along this vein, from partners, peers or the broader community is continuing a much longer discussion which privileges male sexual desire over female, and one that perpetuates problematic gender stereotypes. Representing male sexual expression and practice as coming from a place of ‘need’ is to represent heterosexual sexual practices where the male participant is active, and primarily interested in his own sexual requirements (or “ needs”), relegating the female participant to a passive role. Another way of describing this understanding of sexual practices would be that (hetero)sexual intercourse is where the man acts upon the woman, and to deny the legitimacy of female desire and sexual expression. This is not an understanding of sexuality or sexual practice that I like, or indeed think is good. For me sexuality and sexual practices are expressions and acts of desire and of intimacy building, shared equitably and respectfully. The conversations we have about sex should be had in these terms, we need to remove the divisive and harmful language centered around male needs from our discussions of sexuality, especially male sexuality.
This piece also appears at my personal blog Critical Masculinities, which mainly consists of me writing about what masculinities mean in culture and society.
Am I/is he/is she/is this/are we normal?
As anyone who works in sex education or sexuality can tell you, when it comes to the questions people ask us, variations on the theme of "Am I normal?" reign supreme.
I just spent a half hour going through our advice question queue, doing a search on each page for the word "normal." At the moment, we have around 55 pages of unanswered questions. There's five to fifteen questions on each page. I found only two pages where there was not at least one question with the term "normal" in it; where the heart of the question wasn't "Am I -- or is he, she or ze -- normal?"
Some questions about normality are really about health. That's a little different. Of course, from my view, that's also less about normal and more about healthy. If, for instance, someone has delayed puberty but no health issues they need to address causing it, then it doesn't really matter if it's normal because that person is healthy and not in need of healthcare or lifestyle changes to support health. Maybe someone's uterus is radically different than the uteri of most other female-bodied people, or someone's penis is bigger or smaller, but again, more times than not, those folks may or may not be exactly "normal" but they're healthy, so it's all good. We may have a disability that is exceptionally rare and thus, not normal by definition, and it may also present health problems so may not technically be healthy, but in cases like that, what's normal doesn't matter: what matters is finding a way for us to be comfortable, be supported and accepted and to live a life we want and enjoy.
What I'm mostly (though "My body looks like X, is this normal?" falls under this, too) talking about here is this kind of concern about normalcy:
Is it normal for me, as a woman, to be attracted to other women? Is it normal for me, as a man, to only be attracted to women? Is it normal for me not to feel attracted to anybody? Is it normal my boyfriend is excited by doing this, that or the other thing with his ejaculate? Is it normal I fantasize about this, that or the other thing and find it exciting? Is it normal if I reach orgasm from this thing? How about this one? Is it normal I don't reach orgasm from this thing that someone else does? Is it normal I don't reach orgasm yet at all? Is it normal I orgasm easily? Is it normal it's tough for me to reach orgasm? What's the normal amount of time to wait for sex with a partner? Is having sex with a partner on the first date, in the first week, in the first year normal? Is it normal for me, as a girl, to want to have sex? Is it normal for me, at 13, to have sexual feelings? Is it normal for me, as a guy, not to have interest in sex? Is it normal to watch porn? Is it normal for a guy to say no to sex? Is it normal for a girl to say yes? How can we have a normal sex life? How can we be like normal couples? Is it normal to laugh during sex? Is it normal to cry after orgasm? Is it normal to feel good about sex? Is it normal to feel bad about sex? Is it normal to only reach orgasm by myself? Is it normal to only reach orgasm with a partner? Is it normal to masturbate? Is it normal to masturbate if I'm a girl, if I'm 14, if I'm not ejaculating, if I don't get off, if I do get off, if I have a sexual partner? Is it normal to feel nervous about sex? Is it normal not to feel nervous? Is wanting sex twice a day, every day, once a week, a few times a month, once a year, once every decade, or never normal? Is it normal to like this kind of sex? Is it normal not to like this kind? Is it normal to feel a lot from this kind of stimulation, but not that kind? Is it normal to only want casual sex? Is it normal to only want sex in a marriage? Is it normal for my love relationship not to be sexual? Is it normal for me to have so many questions about sex and what's normal in the first place?
The answer to any of those questions and others like them can vary. The answer may be yes, maybe, not really (which is the least common answer of all), I don't know, and, most often, that it sounds like that's normal for you right now, or has been normal for you so far. "Normal according to whom?" is another common reply. "No," when it comes to questions like those, is never the answer. However, no matter what the answer is, they all beg the question, "Why does normal matter?"
Understand that I totally totally get how important being normal can feel for people, especially for younger people who often feel they don't or won't fit in anywhere and are concerned sex will be no exception. Working with people and sexuality for as long as I have, I absolutely recognize that there are many people who feel it's critically important their sexuality and sex lives meet the real or perceived standards of others or culture-at-large (whatever the heck that even is).
While I get that intellectually, I only kind of get it from an personal standpoint. I myself figured from a very early age onward that I was a weirdo in general, probably not normal, and that my sexuality and sex life was likely no exception. And I decided not to give a hoot and just let my freak flag fly, especially since it all felt great to me and people I chose to be sexual with, and I had little respect or care for most "norms" I met and many of the people who promoted them. Of course, the irony is that in hindsight, doing that job I do now, I know full well that for as much as anyone is normal, I was and am normal, too, even in my weirdness.
Doesn't that sound so super exciting? I sure hope in my life I can reach the amazing goal of being approximately average. Who needs world peace, the end of global hunger, to develop the cure for HIV or to win a Pulitzer when we could accomplish that? Sorry, snark attack. I'm done now.
That definition makes clear that the idea of normalcy in sexuality is an oxymoron. Because there is no average for all people. Not even an approximate one. When it all comes down to it with sex and sexuality, because of how diverse we all are, either everyone is normal or no one is.
There is no one sexual normal: nor for men, not for women, not for those who are or identify as neither. Not for straight people or queer people, married people or not-married people, young people or old people or any other group of people there is. Anyone who tells you there is either doesn't know much about human sexuality or wants you to think they, you or others are normal or abnormal because of some kind of personal agenda.
Another definition of normal is "conforming with or constituting a norm or standard or level or type or social norm; not abnormal," which I think is more often what a lot of people are concerned about with sexuality. But that's also problematic. What's a social norm? More specifically, how big is the social group making that a norm? For anyone making a norm, what's their criteria in doing so? How broad has their study been on what everyone does/is/feels, if they've done any real study at all? Why are they saying something is normal: is it because they really think it is, or just because they badly want it, or themselves, to be? Are they saying something is normal in order to educate and inform people to earnestly help better their lives, or to try and control people for their own benefit? What about the fact that so often, people who are loudest about what is or should be "normal" are people for whom that given standard isn't even what's normal for them? (I'm talking to you Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, Mark Foley and all the myriad folks out there like you.)
I have something really important I want to tell you. Based on everything I know, from the many years I've worked in sexuality now, from my own life, from the lives of people who I have been close to sexually, or who have talked with me about their sexualities and sexual lives, one of the biggest favors you can do for your sexual self, any sexual partnerships you may have, and for people as a whole, is to stop asking that question. To learn to say "To hell with normal."
We do have a few pervasive, worldwide social norms: one of the biggies with sex is an intense concern about being normal. That pervasive norm (and a few others related to it) also has a pervasive consequence, which is that a whole lot of people's strong concern about normalcy and trying to meet standards of normalcy tends to get in the way of people having sex lives and sexualities they feel good about, that are really for and about them, and that result in satisfying lives and experiences. Going batty trying to seek out or be what's sexually normal often results in feeling like an outside in your own sexuality, like you aren't connected with it at all, like you aren't at home in it, like it's an empty room, than it does in finding sex and sexuality to be a place of joy, a place of richness, to be a place you feel at home in, alone or with partners.
The sooner you can get past worrying about if you're normal or not, the sooner you can start discovering what your unique, own sexuality is like and what you really want from it. The sooner you do that, the sooner you'll be able to create and experience a sexual life that's really a good fit for you -- not anyone else, you -- and to a level of comfort with your own sexuality that will feel good to you, physically and emotionally. Ask any sexologist or sex therapist for a second opinion on that: I can assure you that they'll concur.
We've said it before, and we'll keep saying it: what's most normal and most common in sexuality is diversity.
Any ideas anyone may have that there is one default sexuality or sex life, one set of sexual things or ideas that most people -- or all people except you -- idealize, want, experience, enjoy or sign unto -- are incorrect. It's normal to have a range of emotional and physical reactions to all kinds of sex as well as to not-sex-at-all. It's normal for people to be sexually attracted to any number of different kinds of people or to not be sexually attracted to people. It's normal for people to like all kinds of sexual things and dislike all kinds of sexual things by themselves, with a given partner, or full-stop. It's normal to masturbate or not to. It's normal to have sexual feelings or desires at any given age, it's normal to want this much sex or that little. It's normal to have a wide array of sexual fantasy. If something is normal for a person of one sex or gender, it's normal for a person of another. It's normal to say yes to something sexual and normal to decline. It's normal to orgasm and not to orgasm. It's normal to feel excited sometimes and normal to feel bored to tears at other times.
With anything like that, given things may be more or less common either for all people, those of a given gender, age, orientation or some other exceptionally broad classification of people, those of a given community or peer group, but if they are happening to you, for the time being or for your whole life, they're your normal right now. And I swear to you, that really is all that is truly relevant and all that's earnestly productive and beneficial to you and everyone else.
If you feel you must, you can still ask me if you're normal. I'm not saying what I am because I need you to stop asking. But I'm going to keep giving you the same answer. I'm going to keep telling you that there are few things under the sun when it comes to sexuality that only one person in the world thinks about (or doesn't), wants (or doesn't) or enjoys (or doesn't), and that if you're feeling the way you are, having the experiences you are, and all of that is real to you, that it's normal for you. And that question is also going to keep you stuck in the same place: there are far more interesting questions to ask which will elicit far more useful answers.
Sex and sexuality are "normal" in that they are, in all their diversity, as well as in their absence, one common part of most people's lives, and one common part of who nearly all of us are. But we can never say any one given thing is normal or abnormal because to do so would also be to say that there is one kind of sexuality or sex life, one kind of sexual experience or desire, which is "approximately average" for all people. That's something any of us who have worked in sex for a while, and who considers all the information we take in about it with as little bias and projection as possible, knows just isn't true or real.
You don't have to be normal. No one does, and everyone has stuff about themselves or their sexuality that one person or another would not consider normal, because not only does sexuality widely vary, so do people's opinions about what is and isn't normal. If you find yourself in any kind of sexual situation or partnership where your "being normal" is way important to you or someone else -- where it's far more important than being yourself -- you're probably in a situation or partnership that just isn't a good fit for you.
All you have to be, or strive to be, is comfortable with who you really are sexually, and to honor and respect who anyone else really is. If we're talking about your sexuality or masturbation alone and it feels physically and emotionally good to you, chances are very high it is all good. No worries. If it doesn't, either you just need to try something different, or look into, sometimes with help, why you feel bad. With sexual partnerships, same deal: does what you're doing, or how you've both framed this, feel physically and emotionally good to you and that other person (or people)? Okay, then. And if not, it's time to do some talking, make some adjustments (physical, interpersonal and/or mental) or reconsider if a given situation really is the right one for everyone involved in terms of what they want, what feels right to them, and where they're at right now.
It stands to mention that if you have the idea that who you are sexually, or what you like or want, is something you are convinced absolutely no one else in the world will share or understand, you should know that that is profoundly unlikely: if there's something you like, while not everyone may like it, at least one other person does, too. Probably way more than just one. By all means, in some cases, finding sexual partners or partnerships that are perfectly compatible, that are a really good fit for both people can be tougher than in others (and that also can change: we may be very compatible with one person for years, then have changes one or both of us experience change that fit). But at the same time, it's often harder than the world makes it sound for anyone to find others with whom they have a great sexual fit, and all the more so when we're also trying to seek out sexual relationships that also are a good fit in other ways; that are bigger relationships than primarily sexual ones, and where we're compatible in every way possible.
It might help to think about the people in the world you admire most. It's likely that a big part of why you do is that there is something exceptional about them: something different. Maybe they had a challenge or adversity they have faced remarkably well, better than a lot of other people have. Maybe they're different in a way you can relate to, and they don't hide that difference or act like there's something bad about being different in some way. Maybe they have asked something of themselves or others that is more than what people will usually ask. Whatever it is, it's unlikely that you feel inspired by someone else because they're just that normal, just so awesomely homogenous. When you like or admire other people, the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about how cool they are probably is not "Wow, they are so totally average!"
So, let whatever it is you think may be your freak flag fly. If you don't, how will someone else like you (or not like you, but who benefits from knowing you), who thinks you're amazing, ever find you? People talk about sexual risks all the time, but all to often they leave out what it means to take a risk of being ourselves, and that that risk -- which risky like anything else -- is mostly likely to result in positive, wanted consequences and results, not negative things we don't want.
Sex and sexuality is supposed to be about personal expression: it's a way of exploring and expressing who we and others are, what unique alchemy we make and relationship we have with a partner or partners, and it's a perpetually unanswered question because every time we ask it in each experience, we're never exactly the same person twice, and our sexuality is ever-evolving, just like all of who we are. If it was a place best suited to all of us being exactly the same, to never changing or doing anything differently, I assure you that we all would have gotten really bored with it a long time ago.
Now if you're asking me, this is something we should strive to do in every aspect of our lives: to be as much of who we uniquely are not just in sex, but in everything. Sex and sexuality is a good place to get some experience accepting you and others for who we are, and being as authentic as you can. But it's also a place where trying to be like an idea of everyone else, trying to meet a given standard or worrying more about what's normal than what feels good for you and what feels like it's really about you, is particularly poorly suited, especially if you want a sexuality and sexual life that are anything but...well, approximately average.
Which I don't think anyone at all -- even someone who asks if they're normal -- really wants.
Nearly a month into 2010, we hope your new year has been and continues to be happy, healthy, and all-around awesome. Have you set any New Year Resolutions this year? We have and would like to share them with you!
Over 1000 Scarleteen users are doing just that! Since December 19th and as of yesterday, 1001 visitors to the Scarleteen website have voted in the poll: Which of these is the best sexuality-based New Year's resolution for you? A lot of people will choose resolutions, such as exercising more, getting better grades, and quitting smoking. Those are all noteworthy goals, and big accomplishments when realized, but how about aiming to exercise safer sex all the time, acing a “quiz” of your own anatomy, and quitting bad body image and sexual shame? By setting a sexuality-related resolution, you’re focusing on an important part of you that often doesn’t get the attention (or praise!) it deserves.
THE RESULTS! We’re going to share the results here along with some recommended reading and some teen sex and sexuality-related statistics from the Guttmacher Institute, the Bureau of Justice, Outproud/Oasis, and ChildTrends Databank. All text and statistics following the “Did you know?” heading are directly quoted from the page on what Scarleteen Is.
BE HEARD! In addition to casting their vote, many Scarleteeners have also explained their choice. We encourage you to scroll down to read their resolutions after crunching the numbers.
The poll offered 13 sexuality-based New Years resolutions to choose from: Improving body image and ditching sexual shame came out on top with 18% of all votes. Enjoying oneself more got second place with 14% of the vote, while using birth control or safer sex practices better and seeking out truly desired sexual relationships tied for third place with 11% each. Here is a more specific and all-inclusive break down of the results:
1. To improve my body image and/or ditch sexual shame 18% (182 votes)
Did you know? The National Eating Disorders Association estimates that 81% of 10-year-olds are afraid of being fat and between 5-10 million girls and women and 1 million boys and men are struggling with eating disorders including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, or borderline conditions.
One author reports that at age thirteen, 53% of American girls are "unhappy with their bodies." This grows to 78% by the time girls reach seventeen (Brumberg, 1997).
For further reading, we recommend: An Immodest Proposal and Seven Ways to Love Your Body
2. To enjoy myself more 14% (144 votes)
Did you know? For many teens, sexual information is more often given in a context of sexual entertainment, peer-to-peer bragging or flirtation, and these approaches not only often result in inaccurate information, but in enabling a context of sexual commodity, shame or pressure around sexuality, as well as sexual stereotypes and cultural ideals or collective cultural fears. This given, our approach at Scarleteen is to be friendly and personable, rather than cold or clinical, but to come to sexual education and information in a professional, respectful way, with care for diverse boundaries and viewpoints.
For further reading, we recommend: 10 of the Best Things You Can Do for Your Sexual Self (at Any Age) and Yield for Pleasure
3. To better use birth control or safer sex practices 11% (106 votes)
Did you know? Of the 18.9 million new cases of STIs each year, 9.1 million (48%) occur among 15-24-year-olds. Although 15-24-year-olds represent only one-quarter of the sexually active population, they account for nearly half of all new STIs each year. Half of new HIV infections (about 20,000) each year occur among youth aged 15-24.
Of the approximately 750,000 teen pregnancies that occur each year, 82% are unintended.
For further reading, we recommend: Safe, Sound & Sexy: A Safer Sex How-To and Birth Control Bingo!
3. To seek out the kind of sexual relationships I truly want 11% (113 votes)
Did you know? By their 18th birthday, six in 10 teenage women and more than five in 10 teenage men have had heterosexual intercourse. More than one-half of all teens ages 15 to 19 report engaging in oral sex (55 percent of males and 54 percent of females in 2002).
For further reading, we recommend: Ready or Not? The Scarleteen Sex Readiness Checklist, Supermodel: Creating & Nurturing Your Own Best Relationship Models, and Sexual Negotiation for the Long Haul
5. To learn more about my own sexual body and self 10% (105 votes)
Did you know? Knowing, too, that the reality of the way youth most often gets sexuality information -- peer-to-peer -- we do our level best to both moderate discussion to help aid youth in learning how to inform each other better, and do what we can to empower youth to research smartly, ask questions, avoid stereotyping, and communicate with and educate one another with sensitivity and compassion.
For further reading, we recommend: Pink Parts - Female Sexual Anatomy, Man's Best Friend - Male Sexual Anatomy, and With Pleasure: A View of Whole Sexual Anatomy for Every Body
We're glad this day has rolled around again, and always glad to have the opportunity to keeping talking about the essential human right of reproductive choice. Perhaps obviously, we're less glad that any of us still have to work so hard to support reproductive choice and justice, or to need to explain that it should simply be self-evident.
This year we'd like to highlight some of the many articles, blog entries and advice answers we have at Scarleteen on abortion, other reproductive choices and reproductive justice. The Blog for Choice question this year is "What does Trust Women mean to you? The links below reflect that well.
But in a word, to us, it means exactly that: that as individuals who are members of a collective, and as an organization, we trust women.
Women aren't our only readership or userbase here at Scarleteen, but female-bodied and/or female-identified people make up a majority of our users. We give the sexuality information we do in the way we do, including information on all kinds of reproductive decision-making, because we trust that our readers will make their own best choices when provided sound information to do so with and support, respect and faith in their sexual and reproductive decision-making. One reason we work so hard to do our best to help our users make their own choices without just telling them what choices we feel they should be making is because we trust women. If we, or anyone else, are telling a person what we think is best for them, based solely on our own beliefs, rather than listening to them express their feelings and their reality and then helping them to identify, clarify and enact their own best choices based on their feelings and their reality, we aren't trusting them. Nor are we treating them with respect.
We trust that women know, as women always have known, what is best for themselves and their families at a given time. We trust that women know and understand themselves as best they can, and are the sole experts on themselves. We trust that women, the only ones who should be in the position to have any say about what happens to and inside of our own bodies, can and will make our own best choices when fully allowed to make and supported in making those choices; when provided the unquestioned right to do so by the people around us and the systems and communities we live within. We trust women with choices just as much as we trust women with children, and expect the same of anyone who states either women or children are worthy of respect and basic human rights.
We trust and value women's hearts and minds just as much as we trust and value women's bodies. We don't see how anyone who says they love, care for or respect women can possibly do anything else.
I've been waiting to be done with the accounting and for some larger donations to come in after the end of the year I knew were arriving to tell you what I'm about to say. I didn't want to be hasty with it and list an amount that was less than was actually raised, but I also needed some final verifications and tallies to be sure that I wasn't hallucinating.
Scarleteen's fundraising goal for the end-of-year appeal we began in early November was met. That's something that has never happened for us before.
Not only did we meet our goal, everyone's donations and grants substantially exceeded our goal.
We set a goal of raising $24,000 in two months. With all the dust settling, it appears that over $32,000 was raised, surpassing our goal by over eight thousand dollars.
(You see why I was sure I had lost my marbles completely and had taken up residence in Lalaland now, right?)
Before this last fundraiser, the most we had ever raised from a single online fundraising appeal was around $6,000. This fundraiser raised over five times greater than that amount.
I'm honestly speechless -- a rare event in my life, as anyone who knows me well will tell you -- and hardly know how to begin to thank everyone.
While, by all means, between this and our other grant, we remain at a modest budget compared to other similar organizations, we are a profoundly cost-efficient organization and there is a LOT we can do with the kind of budget we're now walking into 2010 with, a budget that is around twice the budget I expected us to have to work with. The prospect of a year where we can work without worrying so much about thinking we're getting by, then getting whacked with something that puts us in the red is a godsend. In fact, in the middle of the fundraising period, I had two computer deaths over here at the home office. That usually would have been a crisis of epic proportions, but it was amanageable because there were the funds to avert that crisis and replace some equipment.
The idea of starting the year knowing that we'll be able to work on everything we hoped to is incredibly exciting. I'm greatly looking forward to getting things like Find-a-Doc going, to training more peer sex educators, to improving our mobile performance and to better serving some of our more marginalized populations.
On top of the financial boon, I also have felt the support of all of you strongly in this. Feeling so supported by the people and communities we serve, care about and respect is an incredible feeling. During the course of this fundraiser, I got to read some amazing and deeply touching things people said about how Scarleteen has helped them or those they care about over the years, about why Scarleteen is so valuable and worth supporting. I can barely express what that meant to me, and how good it made me feel about what myself and all of our staff and volunteers do.
So many of you donated -- over 400 of you. So many of you blogged, tweeted, sent friends letters, mentioned our appeal on social networking sites and did all you could to get the word out. We got help and support from our teen and young adult users, from our now-grownup-but-once-teen alumni, from our current volunteers and those who have since moved on, from teachers, parents, guardians, siblings, cousins, mentors, librarians, doctors, nurses, sex bloggers, sex educators, healthcare staff, the pro-choice community, abortion providers, doulas and midwives, religious leaders and teachers, political bloggers, feminists, the disability community, GLBTQI activists and advocates, counselors and therapists, tech developers... you name it, someone gave us a donation or helped to solicit support from others.
I have absolutely no idea how to thank everyone who participated in any way, and particularly those who participated in every way they could, enough. Before this level of kindness, love and support, I can only stand humbled and completely overwhelmed. You are our s/heroes, and because of you, we're sitting at the start of what looks to be a wonderful, inspired and stable 12th year for Scarleteen.
All of the young people who rely on the information and support we give them thank you. All of our staff and volunteers thank you. The world we are so determined to create in which sexuality and young adult sexuality is healthier, happier and more whole thanks you (in advance). As founder and director of Scarleteen, I thank you from the very bottom of my heart. I hope all of you can have a clear sense of the enormous gift you have given Scarleteen and myself: it is boundless and it is an amazement. Thank you.
This morning I had class at 7:45 am, which is brutal since A) I live way off campus which means that I have to get up more than 15 minutes before I need to be there, and B) I left campus last night around 10 pm. Also, I had not had any coffee (devastating, in my case), so as a result, during the break I ran over to the nearest cafe to grab some. While I was in line, a (white) person that I had never before seen in my life, walked up to me and asked me if I was Chinese. My immediate reaction was "uhmm, what?", while I tried to process this stranger in front of me, asking this randomly intrusive question without having had any coffee in my system. The kid held up a Chinese language workbook. "I need help with my homework, and I was wondering if you speak Chinese." he explained. I (politely, mind you, though it took a lot of restraint) told him no, I'm not Chinese and don't speak it.
I tried to process the situation over my cup of coffee, during the last remnants of my break. Why did this guy assume that I was Chinese? Why did he think it would be okay to intrude into my life, on this assumption, and ask if I could do his homework for him? Basically, why did he think that I was there for his benefit, void of my own interests, privacy, and schedules? In one word, and to simplify the situation down immensely, it was because of race. As a person of color (POC), I can testify to the numerous instances in which a white person has put their interests before mine, assuming that they will naturally come first. It's not always a conscious thing, and it's not always malicious. But it happens, everyday and all day. In this case, it was particularly blatant, because the person was asking me specifically about my race.
This brings us to a very specific category underneath the white-people-putting-their-interests-first umbrella: white people assuming that it's okay to inquire about (or hint at, or flat-out assume) a POC's racial background. One of the most common, and clumsy, ways this is done is with the "So where are you from?" question. Innocent enough, on the surface. But when asked to a POC, it often means more like, "I can't place you and that makes me uncomfortable." Even if the underlying motive is pure curiosity and nothing else (which it usually isn't), the asker still assumes that this is information that the askee is willing to share or talk about with them at that time and place. Having been asked this question many times and talked to other POC who have had similar experiences, the question evokes a feeling of not belonging, or even of being forced to choose sides (for those who are mixed race or racially ambiguous). The hesitation in sharing one's racial identity isn't so much about stubbornly refusing to disclose personal information (although for many, this is among their valid reasoning), and more about wanting to avoid stereotyping and categorization. My racial identity is something that I've struggled with for a while now. I've changed my articulation of it and my attitudes towards it, and in some regards, come to a fuller understanding of what it means to me. But it's still a very complicated and somewhat raw issue for me, and not one that I'm usually interested in delving into with people who I'm not close to (much less not acquainted with at all) for fear of where the conversation will go.
The other aspect that his comment hit on was the fact that people generally have a difficult time discerning physical differences between people who are not of their own culture. Hence, you have white people thinking that "all Asians look alike", or even more grievous instances like the 1980's Charles Stuart incident, in which a white man (Stuart), blamed the murder of his wife on an unknown black assailant. The police investigated and arrested a black suspect, who supposedly fit the description, only to find out that Stuart himself had killed his wife and made up the story to cover his tracks.
And yes, people of all races and color assume things about everyone. But I think that when white people do it to POC, it's all the more damaging because it reinforces the white supremacist histories and continuing racism within our society. It is also generally more damaging because of the institutional racial privilege (benefits that people receive due to their race, on a systematic, nation-wide scale) that exists in our society, causing the assumptions of white people about POC to have a much more detrimental impact than vice versa. The moral of the story is that all assumptions are bad, but not necessarily equally so. It takes a nuanced understanding of race (and other social categories such as gender, nationality, ability, sexual orientation, etc.) to be able to read and interpret these situations thoroughly, and to keep from overstepping other people's boundaries.
I know it's only so much consolation to you right now, but the older I get, the more I notice how much easier having a positive body image becomes. I know that's clearly not the case for all older women: after all, plenty of women my age and older are getting sliced, diced and Botoxed to within an inch of their lives. However, it's also not just me. I often notice that women I'm friends with also seem to have a good handle and perspective on their body image, despite the diversity of our bodies. Usually a much better one then they had when they were your age.
But you know, what I wish I knew then that I do know now is that most of my body image is totally up to me. Just like it is now, so it was when I was in my teens: I have control over how positive or negative it is. And that's something you'll find many older women wish they had known back when. You don't have to wait until you're in your 30's, 40's or beyond to get to a better place with yours. You can start doing that right this second, and I'm hoping we can help you out with that some here.
When I was young, I rarely heard older women talking positively about their bodies. There were a few exceptions, but for the most part, what I watched and heard about from older women growing up was how fat they were, how they needed to lose this many pounds, how this thing or that one didn't fit them (and how they needed it to), how what they looked like was making them miserable; how what they ate, if anything, resulted in their misery. Of course, what was really making them miserable was what was coming OUT of their mouths, far more than what was going on.
I wasn't helped by all those negatives. But I was helped by the positive messages I did hear, and also by the messages I heard that were simply real and truthful, even if those older women weren't yet in the best space, but they at least made clear they were trying to get there by self-acceptance, rather than self-torture or conformity.
So, because so often here we hear from users struggling with body image, I wanted to pass on a little holiday gift to you. I asked a few of my friends in their late twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and up -- who are also a range of shapes and sizes -- if they'd pass on what they've learned and where they're at right now with body image to share with you. Here's what they wanted to say:
Alison: As a teen, watching my friends w/ eating disorders, I made a conscious decision to accept my body as it is. It hasn't always been easy, but making that commitment to myself is one of the best things I've ever done, and I continue to strive to live up to it.
Danya: The more time you spend thinking about how your body looks, or what you've eaten or haven't eaten, or any of that stuff, the less time and brainspace you have to think about and plan your creative work; notice inequalities and plot revolution; pay attention to what other people need and respond to that; feel your feelings; come up with big visions, schemes and plans; meditate, pray, or otherwise feed your spiritual side; or do any one of a million other things that can help you enact your potential in the world. When you catch yourself going there, think about what else you could be doing with that mental space, and USE IT.
Linda: I have always had the ability to look at my body in a mirror and see at least one good thing that I like, usually how narrow my waist was-instead of dawdling too much on having a wider behind than most. I have been every size there is, and it's always come down to how it feels to live in my body. Is it comfortable to move? AS a teenager, I always thought I had to be a specific size, and wasted too much time worrying over not being able to buy the "in" styles. Then I started being more creative about what I wore, or got pants tailored to fit my smaller waist etc, and wow did that help. I wish I could tell my teen self how beautiful I was. At 15 I actually said "I will probably never be prettier, and sadly, I am the least likely to recognize that fact". I had already noticed how women talk about their bodies as they grow older, and everyone said they were really perfectly themselves as a teenager but failed to stop and enjoy it. Dancing NIA is awesome for body self esteem. I highly recommend it!
Amanda: I had a pretty good body image in high school. I didn't understand why fashion magazines seemed to obsess over back fat and arm fat and FAT. Life seemed too short to worry about those sorts of things. Then I gained weight and it was a struggle to not obsess. And then I realized that the power I had as a teen had little to do with my size (I certainly wasn't thin) and more to do with how I felt and carried myself and I just try to recapture that feeling. When I hear women talking shit about their bodies, I just want to remind them that fat does not equal ugly. There are so many people that prove this on a daily basis. And then I try to show them Joy Nash's "Fat Rant."
Amy: As a fat woman (who has been fat my whole life!), I can say that every minute of every day is a struggle. A struggle to accept what I look like, a struggle to shout down and shut up the voices inside my head AND outside in the world AND in every piece of media I see that tell me I am ugly, bad, greedy, gluttonous, asexual, unloveable and less than human because of what I look like. It was a struggle when I was a teenager, and it's a struggle now, and so far, that's never changed -- and I'm sad that I don't have any better news than that. There are days when I AM able to shout louder than the negative voices, and I can dress in clothes that I like and go out into the world and feel powerful and capable and worthy and talented, regardless of my weight. There are other days (when I get "moo'ed" at walking down the street, or read personal ads that say "No fatties", "Please be thin -- sorry, but overweight girls gross me out") when I retreat into the house and can't face the world anymore.
The best I have come up with so far -- regarding how to live in the body I have, in this world as we know it -- is to appreciate my body not for what it looks like, but for what it can do. I'm grateful that it has supported me and remained functional through an amazing amount of stress and pain and crap. :) I'm grateful that despite my weight, I can MOVE - I can walk FAST, I can walk FAR, I can do yoga, I can stretch, I can lift weights...I am a fully-working person (and there ARE THIN PEOPLE who can't say that, dammit!). And the times when I feel best about myself -- when I really do feel connected to my external self in a positive, caring way -- are when I'm exercising. When I'm walking on a treadmill, or ellipting, or hiking...when I feel my muscles moving, and my own sweat and breath...I realize that THIS is what a body is.
It is ANATOMY, it is BIOLOGY, it is CHEMISTRY. It is not APPEARANCE -- or at least, it shouldn't be. The idea of beauty is so insanely subjective, so random and ineffable, that it's utterly f*cking ridiculous for our culture to label our three-dimensional flesh-and-blood "houses" that do so much for us as beautiful or not. So, I try to remember that. I try to care more that my body works than whether it's meeting a beauty standard.
But it is hard. It is never less very very hard.
Priscilla: I spent my teen years thinking I was fat and gross. I often wish I could tell my teenage self that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her. One thing that helped me to get to a better place, actually, was going to clothing optional events. I saw a lot of women's bodies and realized that my body was just fine, that beautiful bodies came in lots of shapes, and that I shouldn't compare myself to women in porn or in fashion magazines because they were not the average and they were airbrushed all to hell. For most women and girls today, the only naked bodies they ever see are in porn, so they compare themselves to an unrealistic standard.
Erika: It's much better NOW at 48. Main reason? I finally got fitted, and now have bras that FIT. 34 FF: delicious! And I adore my ass. Gawd, I sound narcissistic.
Samantha: I think it was some time in my 30s, when I heard the (source utterly forgotten at this point) quote "You're the only person you're going to wake up with every single morning of your life." That made me really think about whether or not I was un/happy with my appearance because of me, or due to outside influence. And since this is the only skin I'm gonna have this time around, I'd better damn well get to loving it and understanding it, no matter what else is going on.
So I tried to be more gentle and forgiving toward my body on days when it felt bloated or slow: there was a reason for that after all. And I've kept trying to do that, and remind myself that overall, this body has been awfully damned good to me through the years, it deserves more appreciation than I've been kind enough to give it at times.
Also, figuring out how to wear clothes that fit properly! Neither too large, nor too small.
Mary: I've had endometriosis since I was 13, with extremely painful periods, and always felt that my body was punishing me for being female. It wasn't until I was much older that I decided to treat it as a disease instead of as "just part of being a girl."
For me, hormonal treatments are the answer; for a lot of women, surgery to remove lesions is the answer. Finally being pain-free has made me start to really like my body and feel good about being a woman. The moral is: illnesses of the female body aren't curses or our special lot in life; they're just illnesses requiring medical treatment, and it's important to keep searching until you find a treatment that works for you. We deserve to be as healthy as anybody else does.
Nancy: Think about what your body can do, not what it looks like. Your body is designed to move through space and propel you through your life. Your legs and thighs hold you up, so you can dance and shake your tail feather. Having just seen "Fela," an amazing celebration of movement and body diversity, I'd recommend African dance, which embraces power, agility and all body forms - not skinny and weightless. Embrace the space that you take up in this world!
And here's my own two cents: when I was younger my mother would put these images on the fridge which were intended to inspire her not to eat. (Starvation diets were all the rage in the 70's and 80's: not like we've come that far since then.) The one I remember most was of a fat, mostly naked woman who had covered herself in cake and garishly colorful makeup. She was laughing and smiling, and appeared to be having an outrageously good time, seeming to have no idea or care that for some women like my mother, she was an object lesson of some kind, a warning to other women.
Comparing the image of that woman, and her relationship to food and her body, with the image of my mother -- who rarely, if ever, looked happy with herself, who felt that food was her enemy (she's since gotten over it, by the way), left me with a very different takeaway than it left my mother. My mother looked at that woman and herself and saw her nightmare. I, on the other hand, looked at that woman and saw a joyous, fleshy lady who made life, the body and food look like the best party ever. If I had to pick a body image role model of the two of them, I would have picked the woman in that photo, hands down. She was the one with a healthy body image and a healthy relationship to food. She was the one who was clearly happy and who clearly felt good about herself. I loved seeing that lady on the fridge: she always made me smile.
I've had some times in my life where I was so poor I had to skip meals, sometimes for more than one day. Not only did that wind up impacting my health (two of my internal organs eventually gave up the ghost and landed me in the hospital at death's door because of it), it's something I can never forget when I'm not in that position and I can eat. I love food, and it loves me back: it nourishes me and keeps me healthy and vital, plus, it's freaking delicious and an amazing sensual experience to eat. I'm always grateful to be able to put fresh, delicious food on my table and to have the time and the privilege to savor it. There were times in my teens that due to the words of an abusive stepparent about my body that I tried very hard to love food less, to get thinner, thin enough, I hoped, to stop the jeers. I'm lucky to have come out of that with the chutzpah and self-worth to reclaim a positive body image, but when I think about the times I did really let those nasty messages sink in, I feel pretty angry with myself. I want to go back in time and deliver a comeback a lot like one Carrie Fisher shouted out recently:
"What the @#*! do YOU look like?
I know I don’t really have the right to ask……I’m a public figure——Ive made an unspoken contract to keep that figure slim…….but still, I find myself wondering…….See, I think the folks that insult & mock celebrities who DARE to pack on ten pounds or—–God forbid——MORE than ten!…..I would think it only fair that they post a photo of themselves along with their poisonous observations! And you know what else would be SUPER cool??? Their IQ! ALL the numbers! An approximate count of Weight AND wisdom!"
In my adult life, at around 5'4, I've weighed everything from 120 to 185. At 120 I was skeletal, and I looked freaking scary. I only weighed that little because I could not afford to eat. I'm not a small-boned or small-muscled gal: I come from hearty stock from all sides of my genetic spectrum. 120 is NOT a healthy weight for me, not at all. At 185 I was depressed: not because of my weight, mind -- I weighed what I did because of my depression. I've felt best in my body when I weighed around 155, at the time that I was able to teach and train in a sport that I love for an hour and a half three times a week, and when I ate like I was fueling a small country. When I was at that weight, due to all that boxing and kickboxing, my body shape -- which is often the relatively rare hourglass shape we so often hear is THE timeless ideal when I don't train so hard -- was hardly the typical feminine ideal: I had forearms like Popeye, my breasts shrunk considerably, and my already substantial thighs got even bigger.
Go figure that the weight I felt best at happened to be the one when my personal body was at its healthiest and I was also doing all the things I loved to do with it the most: not the weight or shape where I was closest to popular beauty ideals. Not when I wasn't eating. Not when I was most focused on what it looked like rather than what it could do.
It might also be helpful to know that besides the time when I was so thin because of being sick, people I know seem to guess my weight wrong all the time, thinking I've lost weight when I've gained, or gained when I lost; thinking I weigh 140 when I'm 180, or 170 when I weigh 150. (When I hear women talking about needing to lose five or ten pounds, I can't help but wonder where they got the idea anyone could even see that kind of difference.) There are times I thought I looked like hell that I heard how sexy I was, and times I thought I looked amazing when no one else seemed to notice. Other people's perceptions of our body are always going to vary, be more about them than us, and often will have little to do with any kind of reality. If I tried to base my body image on what other people thought and said, I'd feel a lot like taffy being made; pushed and pulled in 57 different directions all the time with no solid center.
One thing I think can be really tough about body image when you're younger is that so many of the beauty ideals out there feature young people. It's a lot easier to look at those ideals and try and find how you measure up, because those folks are at least your age. When you get older, you get even further and further from those ideals, so it can become easier to care less and less about them as they clearly are just not about you. I can weigh whatever I do, look however great I look, but I'll be 40 next year: I cannot possibly look 18. And I don't want to: I want to look like me. I did the hard work of living past 18, so I've no shame in having an almost-40 self to show for it.
The truth is, those ideals aren't accurate for most of us no matter how old or young we are, no matter how tall or short, how fat or thin, how black or white. The fact that many models are around your age may be the only thing you have in common with them. Actually, that's not true: if you're eating disordered, feel totally controlled by what others think of how you look and are constantly at war with your body, you probably have that in common, too.
Here's the thing: when I accept and embrace my body -- no matter what I weigh, what shape I'm in, if I'm sick or I'm well -- I enjoy my body. When I put it down, pick on it, analyze every inch of it, consider my appearance as a combination of flaws and perfections, think about how it could look better in this way or that one, focus on my disabilities instead of my abilities, I stop enjoying it as much and being fully present in it and in my life. I start to other it when I do those things, which is a pretty crazy thing to do about something that isn't separate from me, but an integral part of all of who I am and all of what I do.
My body can't be my enemy, because my body IS me. If I forget that, I also tend to get my priorities skewed, and invest more energy in my appearance -- which even on the days when I think I am seriously hot stuff, offers me little of value -- and less in the whole of my life that really makes me feel good about myself; really benefits me and everyone else I interact with. Even the activities that are really mostly about my body tend to be less fun if what I'm focused on is what my body looks like instead of what it feels like and what I feel like in it.
My best advice is to do the best you can to make sure that anything about your body is really about your body: not about someone else's or your ideas or ideals about other bodies. If you're having any kind of sex, be sure it's sex about you and your body. If you find clothing that really catches your fancy, see how it feels to you on your body, rather than looking at how it looks on the person in the dressing room next to you or the mannequin at the front of a store. Pick things to do with your body that feel like the right things, that feel good -- physically and emotionally -- rather than focusing on if you think -- or think others will think - they look good. If you feel better, happier, more free, dancing in a way that makes you look like a floppy, wet noodle than you do when you look like you're giving a lap dance, pick the noodle-dance. Those happy feelings have more staying power than what you look like in a given moment.
And remember that there's nothing you can ever do to have the same body, look the same, or be the same weight or shape all of your life. Like every other part of our lives, our bodies are in a constant state of change, be that what we weigh, what our hormones are doing, if we have wrinkles and grey hair or not, if our boobs are up here or have moved down there, if we've been pregnant or not, if we've become disabled in a way we used to be abled. Body image issues you have at 15 may be something you get over with the passage of time alone by 40... just in time for some new issues you didn't see coming. If you don't take the time and use your energy to really deconstruct and discard all the crap that feed your young adult body image issues, you probably won't be able to handle the second or third round any better. So hopefully you'll work right now to acquire both some wisdom and profound impatience with putting so much into things that offer you so little. Doing that sooner rather than later will let you ditch a lot of these worries that will keep you from the best stuff in life and from fully experiencing how great the best stuff is (and yes, that includes sex: if you hate your body, no matter how good you think sex is now, wait until you see how righteous it is when you love the skin you're in).
I've met women who started their body negativity young and held unto it for years, some for decades. But one resounding thing I hear from women of all ages, when we finally do get past all of this -- and if we have lives we earnestly enjoy and fully participate in, we do -- is a big-time anger at how much time we wasted getting there.
If you have body image issues now, I beseech you: do what you can to get over them yesterday. In some ways, it's tougher when you're younger, but in other ways, it's easier: after all, while age tends to help women flip the world off more, we also live in a world where youth is considered beauty. If you're in your teens or early twenties, this is probably the closest you are ever getting to mainstream beauty ideals, no matter what you look like. If you invest energy now in trying to meet those ideals and cling to them, things probably won't get easier for you as you get older as they have for many of us: they'll get harder. And you'll waste more of your life, miss out on more of the good stuff while you're drowning in this crap that benefits you and others in no way whatsoever. We can't expect to feel anything but empty if we put our hearts, minds and energy in empty places.
As you can hopefully see just from the words of women on this page, it's not how well we do or don't meet beauty standards or ideals that best determines our happiness with and our love of our own bodies and selves: it's how little a hoot we can learn to give about them.
I've wondered, with a lot of women's sexual issues, why I'm so passionate it? I am not on the pill, and somehow, I don't think we'll ever be at a point that condoms will be banned, and in the event that any store pulled a CVS, I like to think I'd have the ovaries to look the cashier dead in the face and say, "I would like a size x box of brand y condoms, please. Thanks." This is passing over the fact that most health clinics are well stocked with condoms. Banning condoms is just not happening. It's marginally more likely that women will be barred from buying them, and that too, is highly unlikely. And then even if that did happen, I'd probably don baggy clothes and wear a hat and forego the make-up and beautiful perfume and tell them my name is Virilus Andro Maximus and buy those things. Then I'd offer to do just that for other women for a price, and make some money on the side.
Every three years, I buy a dose of emergency contraception, which, knock on wood, won't actually be useful to me, until it expires, then I replace it (when I'm not actually in need of it). Back in the day, when the FDA knew damn well that it was perfectly safe and effective but was still not approving it for over the counter status, I was a high schooler. I was angry at lawmakers, of course, but I was also wondering, "Why don't sexually active girls just get a prescription from their doc beforehand, fill it, and stash it to have at the ready if and when they DO need it?"
And in the event that I had sex with a man, AND my birth control method failed AND emergency contraception failed and I found myself facing a pregnancy that I wanted to abort, well, I have money stashed away for emergencies. Now that I'm 23, this is moot, but as a minor, even with a mother who disapproved of premarital sex, I didn't have to worry about restrictions on minors, because my mother's maternity trumped her sexual values. I also lived in the suburbs of Washington, DC, so I could easily go to the city or to Maryland via mass transit. And as I'd given thought to what course of action I'd take if I got pregnant when I was thirteen, and continued thinking about it, and was damn sure that I'd haul ass to terminate ANY pregnancy that my (non-existent) lover and I didn't deliberately create, I also wouldn't get guilt-tripped out of having an abortion. All of this was passing over the fact that I was not sexually active to begin with. (All that time I WASN'T spending having sex, I was spending thinking about these hypothetical questions.)
The point is, it would be easy for me to believe that I had no dog in this fight for a woman's right to choose.
Wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
Restricting women's reproductive choices is based on a view that women are only good for incubating, birthing, and raising offspring. The woman who has an abortion, even if, like most women who have abortions she already has children that she loves dearly or will eventually have children that she'll love dearly, is an affront to traditional notions of femininity simply because she didn't embrace the prospect of maternity. She went against the role that the patriarchy had assigned to her.
This is one step removed from dictating to women not to have non-procreative sex with a man (completely passing over how those who think this way probably look down even more on non-heterosexual relationships). This is one step removed from proscribing ANY non-procreative sexual expression, including masturbation. It's one step removed from punishing completely asexual women, for failing to give birth, because that too is tantamount to failing to be a child-bearer.
It's also only one step removed from vilifying any behavior at all that doesn't fit into a very narrow mold of traditional femininity. I don't know about you, but I want to laugh at crude jokes (no, not rape jokes), I want to watch South Park, I want to be good at math, I want to argue, I want to wear pants some days, I want to hear people say swear words, I want to be a nerd, I want to earn an income, I want to be able to admit freely that I do in fact use the bathroom. Etc. Restricting other women's access to reproductive health services is not far removed from restricting my own right to do any of the above or even to write this very essay.
Being pro-choice is about a whole lot more than just abortion or even birth control for that matter. Even if the question of abortion access is completely moot to you, even if you're married and your husband got a vasectomy, even if you're asexual, it still behooves you to care about access to abortion just because it's a proxy for the place in society of anyone who isn't a cis-gendered, heterosexual man.
Just a helpful reminder from Feminist Law Professors if you're looking for tips on how to prevent rape.
We agree with them that these ten tips absolutely, positively can prevent many sexual assaults without fail.
1. Don’t put drugs in people’s drinks in order to control their behavior.
2. When you see someone walking by themselves, leave them alone!
3. If you pull over to help someone with car problems, remember not to assault them!
4. NEVER open an unlocked door or window uninvited.
5. If you are in an elevator and someone else gets in, DON’T ASSAULT THEM!
6. Remember, people go to laundry to do their laundry, do not attempt to molest someone who is alone in a laundry room.
7. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If you are not able to stop yourself from assaulting people, ask a friend to stay with you while you are in public.
8. Always be honest with people! Don’t pretend to be a caring friend in order to gain the trust of someone you want to assault. Consider telling them you plan to assault them. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the other person may take that as a sign that you do not plan to rape them.
9. Don’t forget: you can’t have sex with someone unless they are awake!
10. Carry a whistle! If you are worried you might assault someone “on accident” you can hand it to the person you are with, so they can blow it if you do.
I do love the ladyblog known as Jezebel, especially for the posts that take down ladymags. Today's fun involves the January 2010 issue of Cosmo. I DNW to link to Cosmo, so I'm going to link to the awesome Jezebel takedown instead. So the "new" (????) male sex habit that can HURT a relationship? Chronic masturbation apparently. Because a man's hand provides more friction than a vagina.
From the Jezebel entry, which quotes the original Cosmo article (again, DNW to link to it):
In the January 2010 issue of Cosmo, sex therapist Dr. Ian Kerner reveals: "The bad economy is leaving a lot of guys without jobs, so they sit at home, bored, and start masturbating more often." Ladies should really police their man's masturbation habits more closely, since there's a good chance he's developing a "solo-sex problem" and will soon be unable to climax during intercourse because "a man's hand can provide a lot more friction than a vagina." So now in addition to other women, we have to fight our boyfriend's right hand to keep his attention?
You know what I love more than the posts themselves though? The comments. And commenter i.m. writes:
03:26 PM
"A man's hand can provide a lot more friction than a vagina."
If men's hands were better vaginas than vaginas, then...I mean, please, this is stupid. I can't even make a joke, this is so stupid.
Spot. On.
Being as pensive as I am, I feel like expanding on that.
If men's hands are better than vaginas, why do men "need" to get laid? Why do men "need" to sleep with every woman alive? Why do the truckdrivers in India who spread HIV "need" to keep visiting commercial sex workers? Biological need? When men's hands provide a better feel, at least on a purely physical level, than a vagina? What the hell?
And that brings me to the biggest bone I have to pick with HIV education programs aimed that are abstinence-based - they're usually aimed at wives to stay faithful to their husbands, and they promote repudiation of prostitution, but they NEVER call into question the entitlement that the men who actually BUY the services of prostitutes feel that they have for said services of prostitutes. And all this when their own hands would probably do the job better than a prostitute, to say nothing of the way the risk of STIs and the moral squickiness of cheating on your spouse while you demand absolute chastity from that spouse both drop down to zero when it's your own hand. All right then.
Originally written for The Guardian, condensed version can be seen there.
In 2008, over 5,000 UK women under the age of 20 had an abortion that was not their first. As was made clear by the alarmist headlines following the publication of those numbers, this is a big concern for the public.
A woman’s reproductive life often spans 30+ years. Around 1/2 of all pregnancies in the US and UK are unplanned. Contraception isn’t used or used properly. It fails sometimes even in perfect use. Female fertility peaks between the ages of 19 and 24: the reason we tend to see the most abortions (and pregnancies) in that group is because it is the most fertile group having the most sex. (Piccinino, LJ, Mosher, WD. Trends in contraceptive method use in the United States: 1982-1994. 1998. Family Planning Perspectives. Vol. 30(1): 4-10 & 6, Table 1) The UK teen pregnancy rate is the highest in Western Europe: six times higher than the Netherlands, nearly three times higher than France and more than twice the rate in Germany.
In 2008, nearly 33% of all UK terminations were not first-time procedures. Under 18’s had 1,452 “repeat” terminations. Women 18-24 had 21,443 terminations that were a second or third; those 20-29, 16,734 repeats, and for women over 30, 23,804. As it is in the US, the group with the highest rate of repeats is women over 30. As it is in the states, half those women are likely already mothers.
I don’t get the concern about abortions, specifically. No matter what choices we make with it, pregnancy has the capacity to radically change our health and life. Pregnancy itself is a potentially dangerous health event: 40% of all pregnant women have some sort of health risk. 15% of those risks are potentially life-threatening. The rate of risk and complication with delivery is 8-10 times higher (and higher still for the youngest women) than for legal, first-trimester abortion. The maternal mortality rate in New York state dropped 45% after abortion was legalized in the U.S. Safe, legal abortion isn’t the health issue: unintended pregnancy is.
We should all have women becoming unwantedly pregnant as our deepest concern, no matter how a pregnancy ends.
What most influences unplanned pregnancy? People shagging in ways that matchmake sperm and egg, which most do and historically will have done by the age of 19 or 20. Whether reliable contraception is used correctly and consistently. Poverty is a huge factor, as is the sense of reduced self that often results from poverty, like the sense or reality that motherhood is an attainable goal while other goals are not within reach. Rape and other sexual abuses and unhealthy relationships, also whoppers.
What can be done? The UK plans to respond to this in exactly some of the ways I'd suggest. Lucky Brits! When I think the U.S. government should respond a certain way, they have an uncanny habit of doing the opposite.
Provide better sex education, information about and access to contraception: The 2008/2009 Opinions Survey Report shows only 57% of UK women 16–19 using contraception, a lower rate than all other ages. Only 11% of young people in the Netherlands don’t use contraception: their rate of STIs and unwanted pregnancies is impressively low. 11% vs. 43%: that’s major.
Women need access to comprehensive, unbiased information about all contraceptive methods, addressing all as viable while making clear the differences in effectiveness and proper use. Women need that information at school, at home, in the media and from healthcare providers, including those providing care with pregnancy, whether it ends in abortion, miscarriage or birth. The youngest women use family planning services less than older women, and are often scared to ask for them. It’s vital they’re offered these services without finger-wagging. Women need information about and access to contraception before they need to use it, not after.
Many women won’t know about all options, how to use them properly, or which methods will suit them best without thorough information that puts an emphasis on them as individuals. For instance, young women nearly always ask for (or are rotely given by healthcare providers) the pill, but oral contraceptives are less effective for teen women than for older women: some data shows a failure rate as high as 20% for young women, with a risk of failure as much as 55% higher for those under 20 as those older. (LM Dinerman et al, Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Med, 149(9):967-72, Sept 1995. MD Hayward and J Yogi, "Contraceptive Failure Rate in the US: Estimates from the 1982 National Survey of Family Growth," Family Perspectives, Vol 18, No. 5, Sept/Oct 1986, p. 204; J Trussell, B Vaughan, Contraceptive Failure, Method-Related Discontinuation And Resumption of Use: Results from the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, Family Planning Perspectives, 1999, 31)
We must work hard to provide marginalized women contraceptive information and overall support services: the poorest women, the youngest women, women of color, refugee women, homeless women, abused women. These women have a higher risk of unplanned pregnancy because they are the least well-served and the least visible.
Assure thorough information is provided during an abortion visit: Women who don’t want to become pregnant again should be offered an in-depth contraception consult during their abortion visit. Women can often start reversible long-acting methods – an injection, implant or IUD – before they leave the clinic. Providers should make clear women can easily become pregnant post-abortion and ask about the dynamics of their sexual relationships. IPV rates in the UK are high: women in abusive, controlling relationships, particularly the youngest women, have higher rates of repeat unwanted pregnancies.
Talk about combining methods: Combining two forms of contraception provides no less than 92% protection from pregnancy in typical use and no less than 98% in perfect use. If we want to cut the rate of sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancy, we must make clear that consistently backing up any method with condoms radically reduces both STI and pregnancy risks.
Increase awareness about emergency contraception: Only 14% of UK women 16-19 reported using emergency contraception in 2008. Less than 1% of women knew it could be used up to 5 days after a risk; only 49% knew it could be used up to 72 hours. 6% of UK women thought one dose of EC could prevent pregnancy until the next menstrual period (it can’t). Many young women do not know they can get emergency contraception through the NHS, not just family planning clinics.
Men need accurate information on contraception, too. Partner contraceptive non-cooperation is a problem, particularly for the youngest women who are still working on their dump-that-chump-skills. Beyond the impact abusive or careless partners have, even caring men can inadvertently sabotage contraceptive efficacy or use. That Opinions Survey Report included a study on male knowledge that makes clear men need more contraceptive education. Only around 30% knew long-acting contraceptives were more effective than other methods.
UK men reported they always used a condom only 3% of the time. To be an effective sole or backup method, condoms must be used correctly and consistently. Make sure men know that they also are entitled to prevent pregnancies they do not want, and have methods they can use themselves to exercise their reproductive rights. We need to do a better job making sure boys and men understand they are as responsible for their sexual choices, including prevention of unwanted pregnancy, as women are. We don’t do women or men any favors by accepting or enabling double-standards to the contrary.
Think (and talk) differently about teen sexuality: Most young people will -- as they always have -- be sexual with partners. The approaches to teen sexuality with the best outcomes accept this rather than trying to deny or eradicate it.
When we give young people a message their sexuality is something shameful they need to fear or hide, they hear it. They become afraid and less inclined to ask questions or for help, to be honest about what they need and what’s really going on with them. In the Netherlands (last time, I promise): they don’t treat teen sexuality as we do in the UK and the US. They don’t present young people’s sexual partnerships as a terrifying if but as an acceptable when. When reared with a clear cultural expectation they will seek out sexual partnership and an equally clear expectation they will handle sexual partnership ably, young people often will, in fact, do just that.
Just like anything else, all of sexuality has a learning curve. As with, say, cooking, driving a car or writing pieces on huge topics in less than 1,000 words, few begin their sex lives savants. We can’t expect young people to magically be better at this than the rest of us, especially without our help and support. Should we want them to be better at it all than we were or are, we can’t keep doing the same things we know full well have always failed them.
The holidays are here and you know what that means! Well, if you're a person of color in an interracial relationship, it may mean having to sit through yet another uncomfortable, racially-charged conversation with your significant other's fam. I know I have, and December's barely here. When your significant other's (SO) parents tell you that they wished they had an African American relative in their ancestry, just to spice things up a bit, and then correct themselves to say that, really, any person of color would do--you've got a problem on your hands. Or when they joke about how they "thought you were Mexican" when you're Japanese (both are comments that I've encountered in the course of my dating history), playing on the 'they all look alike' myth, haha--Not. So while one of the best parts of being in a new relationship has been being made a part of my SO's family, the hardest part about being in a new (interracial) relationship is the culture shock of getting to know the people who your partner calls family.
Where does the problem arise? Often, it's as simple as being the only non-white person within a family of white people. I'm already the outsider, being slowly and somewhat clumsily drawn into their cohesive family--on top of that, I'm the racial outsider as well. Because of our different upbringings, we have different cultural experiences to draw from. When they do things together, like go to a tree farm to cut down a Christmas tree, or go to an All-American high school basketball game where the men are the ones playing ball and the women are the ones cheering them on (two things I never did when I was growing up), I feel like I've walked into a J. Crew catalog or a TV sitcom or something. In those moments, I feel apart from everyone there who know the ins-n-outs of cutting and trussing a tree or what cheer to say when. I have to shake myself and remember that my narrative is just as valid and valued as theirs.
Other times, it happens when I'm the only non-white person and we start talking about something related to POC. I think that I've rarely felt so much like a POC until a white person brings up race. Then I spend the rest of the conversation on my toes, at the tip of my chair, worried that someone will say something messed up, and worried that I'll be faced with the choice of speaking up and offending someone (and not just anyone, but my SO's second cousin Polly, or whoever) or keeping silent and letting the racist comment go unacknowledged. In other settings, where the people I would be challenging are my age and my peers--not the relatives of my SO--I would be less hesitant to speak up. But somehow, speaking up for myself against his family seems like I'm not only challenging one of them, but the whole collective unit, which is much more daunting.
I'm still working on speaking my convictions, even though it's intimidating, because that's what's most important to me and hopefully to you too. Remember, you have no duty to stand by and be offended because of some obligation to your SO. A good partner would want you to be comfortable and be able to be yourself. It helps to talk to them and communicate how you're feeling, otherwise they may have no clue that you're angry or uncomfortable. If it's their family that's being offensive, then it's their responsibility to do something about it too, whether that be talking to an individual family member, speaking up in a group, supporting you, or all of the above.
Ultimately, YOU are not the one who needs to change. The people who are spouting racist comments are the ones who should be changing their ways and accommodating to you. Good luck!
I get the impression that some, if not many of of our users think that condom failure rates are the same as condom breakage/slippage rates. In other words, think that when we explain that in typical use, condoms are 85% effective, that means that 15% of condoms break.
It doesn't: that is NOT what those rates mean. I hate for anyone to be presuming it is and to panic about a potential pregnancy via condom use because of that misunderstanding.
When we say condoms are effective 98% of the time in perfect use, that means that 2% of women using condoms (or, 2 out of every 100) as a sole method perfectly -- as in, following all the directions, including proper storage of condoms -- each year become pregnant. When we say they are 85% effective in typical use -- the way most people use them, which includes storing them incorrectly, putting them on wrong or too late or not using them at all -- that means 15% of women using them that way become pregnant in one year. People often forget that typical use rates for any method include people who really just aren't using that method: that some people who, when asked, say condoms are what they use as a method, have times when they simply aren't used, period. Same with typical use rates for the pill and other methods.
But condoms actually don't break very often, particularly when used perfectly. Here are a few quotes on that for you (bolding mine):
"Condoms hardly ever break if they are stored and used correctly. Studies show that latex condoms break only about 0.4% (4 out of 1000) of the time during the first five uses, and polyurethane condoms break 4% (4 out of 100) of the time during the first five uses." - http://www.youngwomenshealth.org/malecontraceptives1.html
"Men attending 3 sexually transmissible disease clinics and a university health service in Sydney were given a questionnaire asking how many condoms they had used in the past year and how many broke during application or use or slipped off. Respondents were 544 men aged 18 to 54 years. Of these, 402 men reported using 13,691 condoms for vaginal or anal intercourse; 7.3% reportedly broke during application or use and 4.4% slipped off. Men having sex with men reported slightly higher slippage rates than those having sex with women. Breakage and slippage were unevenly distributed among the sample: a few men experienced very high failure rates. A volunteer subsample reported 3 months later on condoms supplied to them: 36 men used 529 condoms, of which 2.8% broke during application or use and 3.4% slipped off. Many of these failures pose no risk to the user, especially those occurring during application, as long as they are noticed at the time, but failure may discourage future use." - from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8476971
"In an effort to define condom performance in a group of monogamous couples typical of those using condoms for contraception, we conducted a clinical trial of a single brand of lubricated condoms (Durex Ramses). A total of 4637 attempts to use the condom were evaluated. Six breaks occurred before intercourse (nonclinical breaks), and 10 condoms broke during intercourse or were only noted to have broken upon withdrawal (clinical breaks), resulting in a nonclinical breakage rate of 0.13% (95% confidence interval, 0.05-0.28%), clinical breakage rate of 0.28% (0.15-0.48%), and a total breakage rate of 0.41% (0.25-0.64%). The rate of complete slippage was 0.63% (0.42-0.90%), and total failure (clinical breaks plus complete slips) was 1.04% (0.76-1.37%)." - from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9306027
In other words, the rate of breakage/slippage is far, FAR lower than many think or assume, and is a much different figure than rates of effectiveness in typical or perfect use. A condom can break or slip off in EITHER kind of use, and is much more likely to with imperfect use, yet still, breaks and total slip-offs are actually pretty rare.
Want to be sure you're using condoms properly? Check it out: Condom Basics: A User's Manual. Remember that when it comes to preventing pregnancy from a condom failure, the key is using them correctly AND consistently: from start to finish, every time you have intercourse.
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