Joanna Connors has written an incredible article about her 1984 rape and its aftermath. While some parts of her story are triggering, it is well worth reading.

Colleges over the years have made many changes that to younger generations are seen as ‘keeping with the times’ while older generations looking back are finding themselves in a situation of slight culture shock. One of the newest decisions being made about the dormitories in the past few years have been that more and more colleges are allowing – believe it or not – coed dorm rooms.

If you asked someone living in the fifties about dormitories, members of the opposite sex were restricted from even entering one another’s buildings. A change in this decision was made during the seventies when many colleges began allowing students to live in coed dorms. Now the decision for many colleges has become an allowance for students if they choose to room with persons of the opposite sex.

Some parents are having a difficult time believing that the rooming choices are not about sex as often as they are about simply finding a friend that you’re close with and feel you’d be compatible as roommates. The number of students living in coed dorm rooms that are couples actually are outweighed by the number of students simply wishing to live with a friend that happens not to be of the same sex. As some students have explained, it’s really not about trying to prove a point to anyone or some type of a rebellion against parents to try and upset them. It’s honestly about what’s most functional.

Some of the parents questioned about the decision at schools where their children attend classes made comments about the lack of rational thought about living with a member of the opposite sex and not having a level of sexual tension present. Student responses turned up the fact that trust, compatibility and practicality all lent to this decision being one that if chosen can prove to work well. While some deans are more willing to side with students in this decision, others fight the decision that rather than being practical it raises some concerns about both what is practical and what is moral.

Where should the line be drawn? Well that answer honestly depends upon who you talk to. Many in the younger generations (whether they personally choose to room with a member of the opposite sex or not) tend to agree that it should be an option. Can some of the problems with roommate be solved if students were able to pick their closest friend of the opposite sex rather than rooming with their closest friends of the same sex? Many college students today believe that it very well could be the solution that’s been hiding all along. I tend to agree that it should be a decision made by the students that will be living in the dorms. College is a time of experience and learning, and learning happens best in an environment that one is comfortable in.

One of the things that has a great influence in both how I enact sexuality education and how I conceptualized my approach from the get-go is my background with teaching in the Montessori Method.

Overall, the primary way Montessori works is this: as educators, we observe our students, and based on our observations of what their self-directed interests, skills and questions are -- basically, what they're drawn to in terms of what activities they choose for themselves and what activities and areas they express interest in -- we choose what materials to make or find and to present to them. In doing this, we're also trying to help students learn to be observers, as well as working to empower them when it comes to trusting their own interests and instincts and to be self-motivated and self-directed, rather than reliant on -- or vulnerable to -- others to give them directives. Montessori teachers see ourselves more as helpers, as guides, than as directors or founts of knowledge. We see our students as the real directors, not us: it's our job to follow their cues, not teach them to obediently follow ours. The underlying principles of Montessori are all about independence, liberty and freedom, without which one cannot achieve, develop or experience self-discipline or learning. Montessori wrote that, "Discipline must come through liberty. . . . We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined."

Particular areas of what we call absorbency -- times during which a person is most able to learn something and can most easily and enthusiastically absorb information -- is also something we pay close attention to and bear in mind. The big deal that identifies a time of absorbency is when a person is both expressing a strong interest in a subject or area of development and is just starting to use and hone those skills: ages 1-3, for instance, as children are learning to speak and are fascinated with language, is usually the time of the greatest absorbency for language. If we help children be exposed to and learn language then, not only is their mastery best, they usually can also learn more than one language, more easily and ably than they will be able to during other times in life.

It doesn't take someone with Montessori training or keen observational talents to identify the fact that when it comes to human sexuality and sexual attitudes, the minds of adolescents and pre-adolescents are greatly absorbent. Because part of identifying what and when to present certain things has to do with when a person is starting to use what they learn, we can easily spot adolescence as a great time for sex education. In working with young adults, while I'm not really getting in on the ground floor since so many sexual attitudes are learned in childhood, I'm still in early enough so that our readers can get help forming healthy habits and attitudes at a dawn in their sexuality and during a time when they are very absorbent. I'm not just working with them just so that they can use this information and these skills now -- after all, some of them want the information now, but don't intend to, or are not, putting all of it to practical use, while others are becoming or already sexually active -- but so that they can have them early, available to them for the whole of their lives.

Young adult sex education isn't just about young adult sexual activity, just like young adult education in mathematics, social studies, physical education or language isn't just about their use of those skills now. We teach these things with the understanding and expectation that they will be useful and needed now and later or now or later.

Most teens have an expressed interest in sexuality, and feel and express a need to find out about it now, which makes now the best time to teach it. When children and young people ask us or each other questions about sexual anatomy, sex, and sexual relationships, when they are starting to consider how sexuality will be part of their lives and what they want from it, they are communicating clearly to us that they feel a strong need and desire to learn and want our help. Even if you're not a Montessori-enthusiast like myself, this idea is woven throughout nearly any educational approach you can think of.

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why or how people can selectively forget that what we learn about sexuality is information most of us will need for the whole of our lives. When we learn about sexuality, we're not just learning for what we need and will use right at the moment we are learning, and no matter when or in what context we have a solo or shared sexual life, that activity itself cannot teach us all we need and want to know, nor can learning only through sexual activity later tend to result in sound sexual, physical and emotional health.

I confess, I quietly slipped out the back door years ago when it came to doing adult sex education, because I often found it deeply depressing and frustrating. We all know it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and it is often just as hard for adults who have firmly established certain sexual attitudes and behaviors to change them after ten, twenty or forty years of thinking and/or doing things differently. I heard so much "But my husband just won't listen when I say this doesn't feel good for me: I've told him a thousand times," or "My wife just won't believe that how I feel is normal and common," or, "But we've never used birth control so he can't understand why I need to now and just won't do it," some days -- so many firmly cemented attitudes and practices making so many people unhappy and unhealthy that I felt helpless to counter -- that I just had to step back from it in order to preserve any sense of sexual optimism about the world at large.

In my job at a women's clinic, where part of my counseling is to try and help my clients who want them to find and use sound birth control methods and safer sex practices, and to have sexual lives which are truly beneficial and safe for them, I hit the wall of this daily, both with them and with their partner's compliance. With some women, we have to have a conversation as to how she is going to convince -- not request, and know that request is all she needs make -- her partner that he is not entitled to sex with her at any time and will, indeed, need to withhold from sex with her for two weeks after her abortion to prevent her from getting an infection or complication. Plenty of those clients will express a strong feeling of hopelessness, or a history of failed attempts at changing established norms of behavior, when it comes to their ability or the ability and willingness of their partners to change those habits and attitudes. I know, plainly, that had many of my clients and their partners learned these behaviors, in terms of their physical health and their social relationships -- and with women, particularly, we often see the most devastating results of not being supported in independence and liberty and how that plays out for many women sexually -- and started out with inclusive, factual and compassionate sex education earlier that these situations would be far more rare.

Those clients are lucky to even have an opportunity to get some sex education later in their lives: there are not many avenues for older adults to become sexually educated (which explains why we see some of them come to Scarleteen for help in their twenties, thirties, even in their sixties). When I hear those who protest young adult sex education in high school and college, I'm often left wondering where, exactly -- if indeed, as many express, young people will all just elect not to have any kind of sex until they are older -- they think older adults are going to get that education. Last I checked, major corporations aren't giving sex education seminars to their employees, and many general doctors, like many people period, remain uneducated on, and uncomfortable discussing, sexuality.

That isn't to say educating older adults is an impossible task, but it seems a needless challenge when we have the opportunity, as educators, as a culture, as communities, to teach sexuality and sexual health way before that time, when absorbency is far greater, and when a person is either in the dawn of their attitudes and practices, or is able to start learning them before they'll apply them at all. What we establish early as norms, and hear pervasively as norms, is incredibly sticky. We know that when someone learns to do something incorrectly or incompletely, that the longer they go doing that thing that way, the tougher it becomes over time for them to learn differently or to add on additional steps and skills. This is true with sex as much as it is with anything else.

The practical application of all of this aside, I'm never going to be able to let go of the idea that without liberty, real learning -- learning, not indoctrinating -- can't happen. If in any of the ways I educate, I seek to hinder or protest that essential liberty, I'm not only hindering learning, but the quality of life of my students, and it is my job to very carefully consider how I educate through that lens. It is not my place to tell my students or clients when to have sex, how to define their own sexuality, to tell them they are good or bad people based on their sexual desires or choices, or to tell them that they do not need to know the very things they are asking me to inform them about. I cannot ever call myself an educator if I purposefully slam the door of knowledge in my student's faces because I, not they, feel that it's for their own good.

Rather, it is my place to observe be responsive to the cues they give me in terms of what they need and want from me to help them learn about sexuality and sexual health, and to give them as wide an array of factually accurate and inclusive information, resources and discussions as I am able so they can create lives where their sexuality is part of their liberty; where the attitudes and practices they develop are in as best an alignment as possible with their and their partner's unique set of needs and wants. It is my place to share with them as much of what I learn and know as I possibly can when they invite me to. This is part of why I feel so blessed to be able to educate in environments which are completely drop-in and also very one-on-one -- or without my intervention at all, unless it is asked for -- where even the onset of the education I provide isn't determined by me, but by my students or clients themselves, and where every person I interact with is able to expressly ask me or my co-workers for exactly what they feel they need, rather than what I or others determine is right for them.

It is my place to allow and encourage the opportunity for them to draw their own conclusions, and to provide an environment for them where they feel they have the inarguable right to use that information however they please without my value judgments. It is my place to make clear to them that questioning my authority is always acceptable, that while I do my best to be as educated on these issues as possible, I am not infallible, without my own biases which inevitably will occasionally leak through, or somehow representative of one universal truth, and when they have questions or doubts, it is my place to direct them to other sources of information besides my own.

Every now and then, when doing an interview or a press piece, I'm asked why I give the information I do with the approach that I do, and if I'd ever consider doing it differently. And every time, I make clear that I walk into each day ready to do it differently, because if my students and clients -- through my observations of them and their direct requests -- asked me to, felt another approach would be more helpful, or showed me that the way I am doing things is not helpful for them, and is not what they needed, I would be obligated to adjust my approach based on my own educational ethics. Were I shown that, say, my students and clients were all made happier and healthier in the whole of their lives by only ever having sex within heterosexual marriage, only having sex for the purposes of procreating, or in going without sexual healthcare and birth control, even if that conflicted with what I have found keeps me happy and healthy, by all means, I'd have to seriously consider that. But again, I'm a trained observer, I observe daily, and that's not something they express or I see. I do not tend to hear that knowing how to use a condom, how the sexual response cycle works, how to negotiate sex with a partner, how varied human sexuality is or how to prevent unwanted pregnancy at any age has done a person emotional or physical harm: I, do, however, hear and see the inverse daily. I do what I do the way that I do it because I do my level best to base it on mindful observation with the aim of being a partner in the learning of others, not a director or a dictator.

Like much of my father's family, Montessori was an Italian Catholic, and designed her educational model during a historical time when sex education wasn't an issue on the table. The only sex theorist she even had to draw from was Freud, whose ideas on infant and child sexuality -- sensibly so -- she rejected. She did however address that sexuality was a particular issue for adolescents, and one which can be so encompassing and distracting for them that adaptations may need to be made in their education -- such as allowing them more physical activity during the day. I can't know, ultimately, what Montessori would have felt about sex education as it is today overall, save that it does seem to me to be part of Practical Life (the area of the classroom and materials in Montessori that focus on care of oneself, others and the environment) for older students. We can glean some ideas based on how she felt about education for ages 12 - 18 (see From Childhood to Adolescence for more on that). She felt it vitally important to recognize those ages as a passage into adulthood -- not an extended childhood -- to help students of those ages to feel capable and able. She emphasized adolescents' need to separate from adults, rather than to be dependent on us or exploited by our determination of what is right for them based on our ideas-in-hindsight of what would have been right for us. She protested the notion that we need to save them from themselves, and worse still, try to do so in a way which is purposefully misleading and a barrier to freedom, motivated by the idea that the ends, however deceptive and controlling, justify the means. Fascism is incompatible with learning and liberty: this is why Montessori left her home country in the 1930's.

She would have been very much opposed to any kind of education -- sexual or otherwise -- which denied what we observed in our students, denied the needs our students express and demonstrate to us; which was based in ideas of controlling their behavior by making them fearful of life and others rather than providing them with the information and tools they need in order to exercise their liberty to make their own choices and to follow their own interests and development.

Uncannily enough, Montessori once wrote something else which seems a sound representation of our current conundrum with approaches to sex education in the States. It was this: “The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.”

The inverse of that statement defines abstinence-only approaches to the letter. While good and evil is not a dichotomy which particularly speaks to me -- few dichotomies or binaries do -- ideas of good and evil, rather than ideas about liberty and learning, are foundational in abstinence-only education approaches and arguments against honest, factual, inclusive and comprehensive sex education. That simple sentence can tell us much about the flaws in a lack of sex education or abstinence-only sex education and the idea that the only way we can help protect people from activities which can carry risks is to keep them from them, teach them that they have no real means of managing them, or to urge them to be inactive -- in both how they behave sexually and how we educate them sexually.

It shows up the red herring in the proposition that abstinence-only "sex education" is sex education at all, due to the approaches it takes, the purposeful misinformation or incomplete information it provides, and the place of control and withholding -- a place with no allowance or respect for liberty -- it's all really coming from. It demonstrates an awful lot about if denying young people free and factual information and real opportunities for learning is really about health and well-being or really about being "good."

For years student at different high schools around the country have participated in Prom Promise (founded and organized by Nationwide) where they sign a card stating,

I promise not to use alcohol or other drugs. This is a promise I take seriously. It's one I intend to keep, for my sake and the sake of my friends and family.

Recently a school district has decided to take part in the sexual health protection of their prom-attending students as well.

As common tradition, many schools give out small gifts or gift bags to the students attending prom. This year, The Bisbee School District in Arizona voted four to one that included in their gift bags this year would be balloons, candies, picture frames, and you guessed it – two condoms.

It’s amazing to see that school officials are taking a mature and understanding approach to the topic of sex. Some parents were actually outraged by the addition to the gift bags, and that’s an age-old problem that we run into quite often every day. The school is not telling students that by giving them condoms they have to choose to have sex (just the same as quality sexual education programs doesn’t tell students to have sex), but rather offers them the tools they need to be safe with their own decisions of what is right and wrong for them at any given time.

Many adults have a difficult time seeing teens as people that do indeed experience the same feelings that adults do – and being ready for sex is something that can happen or not happen at any age with any partner. I think it’s great that the school district is helping the students to think responsibly about their decisions – and offering them condoms to use if they choose to have sex.

At the message boards, there’s been a lot of discussion about different programs that schools offer as their sexual education curriculum. Many users agree that their curriculum could have been better (assuming that they had a sexual education curriculum at all). This school is making a large step in the right direction in beginning to take a hands on approach to encouraging students to make safe decisions about their sexual health. Wouldn’t it be amazing to someday see some type of safety cards or condom cards on the walls with the Prom Promise cards where students will not only promise not to drink or do drugs – but also to make safe decisions about sex. I definitely think this decision is one other school districts should adopt.

I had an abortion in my early twenties.

It was not easy to afford. I was working 60 hours a week, in a fledgling business with a lot of overhead expenses. I was fresh out of a college education I had paid for myself, and was also caring for a parent at the time. There were no resources through public health in Chicago I could use to help with the expense. My partner was pitching in for half, but all the same, coming up with four hundred dollars was an additional struggle during an experience which was already challenging without any financial issues at play.

That four hundred dollars seemed like a whole lot then. But when it all comes down to it, it's very little, and what I had to do to come up with it was so small in comparison to the experiences other women go through to obtain their abortions right now.

I had the luck of knowing almost right away that I had become pregnant. Plenty of women don't find out before their sixth week, like I did. Given how many have irregular menstrual cycles or skip periods with birth control, don't experience morning sickness or other early pregnancy symptoms, or are in such poor health already that feeling ill is normal, plenty don't know until their seventh week, their twelfth week, even their twentieth week. For those women, an abortion isn't going to cost four hundred dollars, but eight hundred, twelve hundred, even two thousand dollars or more and some only find that out once at the clinic. I had the privilege of being able to not only know I was pregnant very early, but the ability to raise money in a short enough period of time that I could get an early abortion which only cost that much. Some women know as early as I did, but are unable to raise the money for an early procedure. For them, every extra week it takes creates a new hurdle as each extra week also elevates their cost, as well as their distress by pushing them closer and closer to the point at which a termination will no longer be an option.

I had the luxury of having a provider a mere three miles from my apartment. But less than 15% of women in the United States have an abortion provider in their county, let alone a ten-minute bus ride away. Those women also have to factor in the time and cost of travel, lodging and meals into the already costly expense of their procedure.

I was able to have an early, first-trimester abortion so I also only had to be at the clinic for a few hours on one day. I did not have to risk my job by needing to take a week off of work for a procedure I probably couldn't tell my employer about without risking biased treatment ever after. I did not have to worry about having even less money than usual because I needed a week off without pay. I did not have to push myself to get right back to work when I really should have been resting and risk my health in order to make up for the money I spent on my procedure.

I was a working adult, not a teenager: I had my own source of income to help pay for my abortion. I had working friends who I could ask for funds and support. I didn't have to consider asking my parents, knowing it could compound my trauma and potentially put me at risk of being held back from getting a termination, nor did I have to face those I asked for help denying me funds because they figured I deserved the "punishment" of a child for having sex, having my birth control method fail, not knowing how to use it, not having one at all, or because I had a partner refuse to use a method or cooperate with mine. Because I was employed, period, I did not have to worry about being able to eat or pay my rent that month due to the cost of the abortion sapping all of my funds.

I had my partner's support and was financially independent, so I had no reason to be concerned with that partner freezing me out of shared bank accounts to pay for my procedure, or refusing to help me with travel to a provider. I did not have to worry that disclosing to a partner or parent that I was pregnant, and that I needed help financially to obtain an abortion, might put me at a possible or known risk of abuse or assault. Because I was living in a city where my reproductive choices were largely supported, I did not have to try and hide my pregnancy or my abortion, or spend extra money to get a ride from a friend, take a cab a town or two over to use a different pharmacy for my medications.

Coming up with the money I had to was also easier for me because I was childfree, unlike the majority of women who have abortions. I wasn't having to scrape by to support two or three children at the time while also paying for my procedure. I didn't have to arrange or pay for child care during and after my abortion.

I had a place to stay after my procedure, and lived with a person who was safe for me, so I did not have to worry about my safety during a time that is critical for self-care to prevent infections and complications, or that my lack of money would prevent me from being able to stay somewhere safe during and after my procedure. I could also afford the medications I needed to manage my cramps and to help prevent infection, and could afford to feed myself the day of and after my procedure.

And because I had the means and the support to budget for and use two sound methods of contraception after my procedure, I did not have to go to sleep at night knowing that it was likely I would have to wind up having another termination to go through and pay for, another unwanted pregnancy, very soon after dealing with the one I'd just gone through. I could afford both getting my methods of birth control and paying for them over time.

Many women do not have these abilities, privileges or luxuries. Many either may not be able to have a wanted or needed abortion at all -- they may not earnestly have the real, practical right many of us still do of reproductive choice -- or they may risk being unable to have all that is needed to make an abortion truly safe and sound, physically and emotionally. Some will put themselves at tremendous risks to try and raise those funds in ways which are unsafe and emotionally traumatic. Some who cannot afford a wanted abortion will seek to self-abort or otherwise endanger themselves. Some will instead have to continue an unwanted pregnancy and deliver a child who is not wanted and who they cannot afford to sustain or nurture, from pregnancy through the whole of that child's life.

Any of us who has been pregnant knows that what choice we feel is right for us with a pregnancy is not minor: it is essential. Pregnancy is major, and how it impacts our lives, tremendous. Being unable to make our own right choice, to only reproduce and remain pregnant when it is what we want, right for us and when we feel it is right for any child we might bring into the world is tragic and inhumane. As it is, even when we can manage the cost, we have to face protests and challenges from individuals and governments to our essential rights, judgment everywhere we look about a decision no one but we can determine is appropriate, all while often straining to keep our lunches down and continue, uninterrupted, the hectic pace of our lives.

In an ideal world, every woman's right to choose would be completely supported, and every woman's knowledge of what was right for herself and her offspring would be respected. Women would have no trouble at all finding all the financial, practical and emotional support needed to only reproduce when that was exactly what we wanted.

We don't live in that world. We live in a world where, at best, abortion is merely tolerated, and rights expressly for women and children, which primarily or solely impact women and children when granted, are granted as if a great favor is being given, rather than an equal and inalienable right. The political climate we live in now has been doing more and more to keep the legal right to abortion from being practically useful: our right to abortion is only so meaningful when the barriers to it continue to grow. We live in a world where most women make less on the dollar than most men -- and where seeking legal protection against that discrimination is still often viewed as frivolous -- despite often having a greater financial burden to begin with. We live in a world where many Medicaid programs and private insurance will cover Viagra (even for sex offenders), but not abortion or birth control. Where many women have little or no consistent access to reliable, affordable and safe methods of birth control and plenty have partners that do not support use of those methods even when those women can afford and access them. We live in a world where those who most often tend to find themselves in the most need of an abortion and with the most limitations on getting one are not only women, but women of color, women in poverty, women who were not born (or are not yet) U.S. citizens, disabled women, women with addictions, women who are legal minors, women who have been or are raped, assaulted or abused: women who are marginalized and who have less privilege beyond simply being women.

I cannot imagine having to sneak across state lines so I can obtain an abortion without my father forcibly dragging me out of a clinic as he did two times before. I cannot imagine how, with three children and a coming eviction, I could possibly save for a procedure. I cannot imagine having to have a three-day termination while my only home was a bench on the street, or at home with a partner or family member I knew would beat me when I returned there. I cannot imagine feeling I had no choice but to remain pregnant and deliver a child I strongly suspected would be born profoundly disabled because of a drug addiction I was trying to break free of. I cannot imagine having just emigrated and finding myself in the position to have to pay for an abortion while working for a wage that is a human rights violation in and of itself. I cannot imagine the two-week waiting period advised to abstain from vaginal sex after an abortion to prevent infection seeming a practical impossibility because without engaging in sex work during that period, a woman cannot support herself or her family. I have met the women who have been in these situations and others like them, and have seen a profound helplessness and desperation that no woman should have to experience during an already difficult time.

But I have also met these women and literally watched some of that helplessness dissipate; seen their worries interrupted by an exhale of relief when I can offer them financial help with their abortions.

Cedar River's Women in Need fund helps to cover the costs of abortion, lodging, transportation, childcare, meals, pregnancy testing, ultrasound and contraception for women who cannot afford or completely cover any or all of these things, even after exhausting every resource they've got. The National Network of Abortion Funds has listings for our fund as well as other funds like it you can either use for yourself, refer other women to, or help with a donation. It doesn't take much, either. The medications needed after a procedure are often less than $20. Lodging for a night, around $100. Enough to cover the portion of a procedure a woman can't, that $400 that seemed so tough for me to save up, but which is comparatively miniscule.

Because I work part-time for the Cedar River Clinics, because we serve women from several states and more than one country and also include terminations beyond the first trimester, because we're one of the last remaining independent feminist women's health centers in the states which offers abortions, and because we're having a benefit for our fund on Monday evening, I'd like to ask you to consider contributing to ours. I've administered some of these funds myself, and have spent time with some of the women who need them: I know, first-hand, how important our fund is, what a difference it can make and how it positively impacts the lives of the women we can help with it. I have watched women who would otherwise have been unable to make the choice they know was right for them, or who could not have had what they needed to assure all aspects of their procedure was safe have that ability due to our WIN fund. I give to it myself via a percentage of my paycheck every two weeks, and while I certainly need my income, giving what I can to that fund is something I feel is very important and a small sacrifice. Of course, some financial help with an abortion does not usually have the capacity to fix everything wrong in a woman's life, to wipe away inequities and hardships which are bigger than this. In some ways, it's a band-aid, but it can be one critical in keeping a deep wound from getting even deeper; causing further infection in an already fragile balance of well-being and survival. At the times I administer that fund to a client, it's amazing to see, directly, how my small contribution can sometimes literally change the landscape of a woman's life, both through being able to make the choice she knows is right and needed, and through being shown a much-needed kindness, sometimes for the very first time.

If you're in or near Seattle, our benefit tomorrow night for the WIN fund begins at 5:00 at the Karma Martini Lounge & Bistro (where I also had my book release party last year), on 2318 2nd Avenue in Belltown. You can hang out with us and donate there, and hear a little more about what this fund does. Or, you can donate through our website here. Again, if you'd like to give to an abortion fund but prefer to give to, or help with, women in your area or some other specific area, or even start a fund in an area where there is not one yet, you can take a look at a listing of funds like ours here through the NNAF. For those of you who are minors and not yet in the position to donate, know that many of these funds also can use volunteer help as well.

In the last week, a congressional committee began -- finally! -- taking a real look at government-funded abstinence-only sex "education" programs which all of us who pay taxes in the U.S. have watched billions of our collective dollars be wasted on. For those of us who work we in comprehensive sex ed (many of whom work for a pittance because we can't get funding due to the ab-only mandates), some of which often includes cleaning up after the mess of abstinence-only problems, that waste is often felt even more profoundly. This week, this committee called on public health experts and some awesome young adults to testify and inform the issue with real experience, sound data and a clearer understanding of why abstinence-only education programs are not just not helpful, but can do some real harm. A couple of your peers have been doing excellent work in these House hearings to speak against abstinence-only sex education and make the need clear for accurate, comprehensive and inclusive sex education.

Shelby Knox, whose name may be familiar from the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox, is blogging on it at the ALCU's Reproductive Rights wing here. From that entry:

What did the secularized abstinence-only program for students in my school district look like? Well, it was taught by the same pastor who officiated at my religious purity pledge ceremony. Many of the students were already having sex and needed information to protect their health. But our teacher only mentioned condoms to talk lengthily, and inaccurately, about their alleged "ineffectiveness," explaining in graphic detail, and with even more graphic pictures, the sexually transmitted diseases students could get if we trusted our health to a “flimsy piece of latex.”

...But back in my high school class, where we were all too intimidated or embarrassed to ask for clarification, it seemed as if sex with a condom was equivalent to sex without one. Our teacher also touched on the ills of masturbation and warned against the dangers of homosexual sex.

One demonstration our teacher used left little doubt as to our worth as a future spouse or partner if we were to engage in sex before marriage. He would routinely pull an often squirming and reluctant, and always female, volunteer onto the stage, take out a toothbrush that looked like it had been used to scrub toilets and ask if she would brush her teeth with it. When she predictably refused, he pulled out another toothbrush, this one pristine in its original box, and asked her if she would brush her teeth with that one. When she answered in the affirmative, he turned to the assembly and said, “If you have sex before marriage, you are a dirty toothbrush.”

Max Siegel, an HIV-positive 23-year-old who acquired the virus from his first sexual experience, and who now works with the AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth and Families, blogged about it at Reproductive Health Reality Check here. From that blog:

More individuals have this virus now than ever before in history. Most children born with HIV no longer die; they grow into adolescence and adulthood. Within and outside of marriage, these young people must know how to prevent transmission of HIV to their sexual partners and how to protect themselves. Instead, abstinence-only disparages HIV-positive youth by suggesting they are dirty, dying, and unfit for love.

While most abstinence-only programs are more extensive than the class I experienced, they rely on similarly exclusive and stigmatizing messages that lack basic information about sexual health. What I experienced is a routine example of the messages of abstinence-only that children across still experience today. These programs ignore lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, who are at high risk for HIV, and use government dollars to condemn them. They also compromise young women's safety by portraying sexually active females as scarred and untrustworthy. From a healthcare perspective, it's essential that scrutiny of these programs focuses on the consequences of abstinence-only's condemnation of young people.

Some of you voice to us the frustration and anger you feel about these programs, both in the purposeful misinformation found in them and in the way they privilege certain types of people and certain types of sex, while disenfranchising and demeaning others. When you do that, we've heard some of you say sometimes that for all of your upset, you don't feel like your particular voice could be meaningful or effective.

So, I wanted to be sure that you got a look at two young people who have made clear this week that that's just rubbish, and that your voices, especially on this particular issue, are not only exceptionally meaningful but deeply important to have heard. You may not have the opportunity to speak at a hearing like this, but you can certainly write letters to your school boards, your congresspeople, your communities, organize peer outreach boards to talk to adults about this, actively challenge teachers and classmates in schools where you are getting inaccurate or discriminatory sex education or find other original ways to provide the perspectives which everyone who has anything to say or do on this topic very much needs to hear.

(Heads-up: parts of this post are fairly explicit when it comes to detailing rape and abuse.)

One of the more interesting (and by interesting, I mean ridiculously ignorant) responses I have seen in a few places discussing the I Was Raped project and my input was my statement on the news that the first time I was assaulted -- at the age of 11 -- I did not know what had happened to me and was without any language to even express it.

This is being met with some measure of disbelief by a few folks, or the assumption I was on drugs or had been drugged or that I was simply stupid. My personal favorite was that I'm a young girl who only called my rapes rape after being brainwashed by Jennifer and feminism, a newfangled notion she apparently just clued me into recently. Who knew I was such a late bloomer, and that I was somehow able to grow up in the 70's in a progressive Chicago neighborhood with a single mother, an activist father, and managed to never hear about feminism? Wowza.

I think people forget that in the early 80's and before, we were without SO much awareness about rape and all other kinds of abuse. (And other things: I also had attraction to women before then, and a girlfriend before I knew bisexuality was a term for what I was. I was actively dating both men and women for a few years before, as detailed in one of my teenage journals, there was an entry that simply says, "Huh. It seems that I'm bisexual.") That's hardly to say we're living in an acutely aware world now, but things really have changed pretty substantially in a relatively short period of time. I was an exceptionally intelligent child, in many ways precocious, and also being a compulsive reader, I knew a whole lot about a whole lot, including having some knowledge and understanding about sex.

However, even for plenty of people who know something about sex, who are smart and relatively informed, figuring out what sex is and what rape is aren't so easy, particularly when you're raised female. Even if we look at classical literature - much of Greek mythology, all sorts of folktales, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the Bronte Sisters, you name it, and this was the kind of reading I did as a kid -- it doesn't take a genius to notice that usually, when rape happens, it's often presented as sex or, at best, "sex by force." It's rarely, if ever, called rape. In that literature, in religion, in common parlance, in romance novels, in films, in family gossip young women have for eons been taught, more than not, that we are passive sexually, that sex for us is something a person "takes" or we "give" (rather than as something shared), and that often enough our sexual awakening is supposed to be about men deciding to indoctrinate us. Many of us were, have been and still are taught, overtly or covertly, that rape is only rape -- and even then may not be -- if we're screaming no at the top of our lungs, if there is a knife at our throat, a scary-looking stranger who is scowling (not getting off and smiling or laughing), a dirty alleyway. Even then, we hear about what women in that situation did to deserve it, ask for it, incite it. As I've said before, with my rape that came closest to that, at the age of 12, I heard that kind of backlash from the mouths of the police.

My first assault happened with a man I trusted -- my family trusted -- the man who cut our hair for years. When he asked me to go back into that shampoo room with him, I earnestly thought nothing of it. When he told me how pretty I was getting, I was marginally uncomfortable, but then I always had been with compliments. When he started getting closer and closer to me as he said this, then started talking about my breasts and my legs as he backed me up against the wall, I became very quickly and acutely uncomfortable, but I was taught by one of my parents and all of her family that you trust adults, and that's just that: that when you feel uncomfortable around them, you don't yell out or tell them to get out of your face, or tell them how much their breath in your face makes you want to throw up. I was taught that it was more likely I would misunderstand the well-meaning actions of adults than be correct in knowing when they were doing something wrong. When his hands went everywhere he could possibly put them, I was in such a state of shock that this was happening to me. Part of that was that while I had developed a bit early, for the most part, I did still feel pretty childlike, and what was going on very much did not feel like what happened between an adult and a child. Another part of that was that from everything I knew, this was not unlike how, when sex happened, it was described. I didn't want it, I didn't feel aroused -- I felt incredibly repulsed and before I walked home, wound up throwing up in the alley several times -- and yet, it's not like anyone had ever talked to me about how sex was supposed to feel, emotionally, or like I hadn't seen enough representations of sex where it clearly was not about the woman's wants, initiation or boundaries. What I was looking for, later that day and for years afterwards, was a rationale of why that happened to me, how, somehow, something I said, did or wore would have given the impression I wanted that or was available for that. For a couple years, I blamed my developing body: pulled hair out of it that had grown in, tried to make it go back to my childhood body, cut it up with a razor.

I did not tell a soul what had happened to me then. I was cut off from my dad at the time, and I was living in a household with a stepparent who was verbally and emotionally abusive, and who, since I had started puberty, had used that to humiliate and torment me. One of his favorite taunts during those years was to tell me, in lurid detail, how he might cut my breasts off. I think it's also entirely possible -- remember, these are memories which are now 27 years old and which are also made murky by a lot of trauma in a short time - I was worried that having my stepparent know this man had done this to me would give him or any other man the feeling they could do the same. Telling my mother would have meant he was told -- my privacy was never respected in that home (the only place I could assure that was a closet I rigged to lock from the inside, where I spent a whole lot of time for a few years), and I was often treated as the interloper to what would have been, apparently, an otherwise idyllic existence. I had no idea what telling anyone else would mean, but I didn't think it would be helpful. I was already a bit of a misfit at school and we had just moved, so all my friends were very new friends -- and didn't want to say anything which would cement my status as a freak further.

Again, there wasn't a precedent for this back then, when it comes to telling. There were no talk-TV shows (and I wasn't a TV-watcher regardless), no magazines, no books, not hotlines, no PSAs telling you to tell, or letting you know that telling could be a big help. There were only an onslaught of messages telling you to shut your trap and pretend nothing happened. My clear assumption at the time was that I must have done something to deserve this or make this man think I wanted this: I was often blamed for so much I did not do in my childhood that I had no reason to think otherwise. I was used to being found at fault. I wasn't about to tel anyone about this thing which felt so wrong and get sorely punished for whatever I did.

There's something else people seem to forget. I was more educated in many ways than a lot of girls my age, but I work in sex education right now, not in 1981. And every single day we get questions from people of a wide range of ages, from a wide range of nations, who very clearly would not -- or do not - know, either. We hear from people who do not know the names of their own body parts, or do not know what the most "basic" forms of sex are. We hear from people all over the globe in their teens and twenties who do not know the basics of reproduction, or when sex has even happened. We work with a population who is frequently told that ANY sex is wrong for them, and so they tend to expect sex -- wanted sex, sex of any kind -- to feel wrong. We hear from people all the time who have been forced into sex or other kinds of abuse and do not know what happened to them; know that it was rape or abuse and it was not something they asked for or are responsible for. In other words, things have improved, but we still have a loooong way to go, and there are lots of things which inhibit people from knowing they have been abused which have little or nothing to do with rape at all.

Back when I was running my alternative pre-kindergarten and teaching in other classrooms, the few times I had a student I discovered was being abused in some way, figuring it all out was very tough, because children normalize whatever their normal is, and they are also very easily manipulated by abusive adults into believing that when they say a given thing is okay, that it is okay, even if it hurts, even if it doesn't feel right, even if every part of them initially -- in time that intuition is often worn down to nothing -- knows it isn't okay. I had a student once with a babysitter who, as it turned out, had a husband who punished the children they cared for by burning their mouths with a lighter (you can guess, sadly, when this all played out, how little happened to this man -- as I understand it, the only consequence of all of this was that the woman doing home daycare got a limit placed on how many kinds she could have, and stupid DCFS told them who made the report, so the child and his mother were harassed by phone at their home for weeks by these people). I only found this out after my young student had told me all day his mouth and throat were sore. I had given him water and juice, and finally took him in the bathroom to look back in his throat... and saw that the roof of his mouth was literally charred black. I knew well enough by then that you have to be careful how you talk to kids about this stuff -- again, it's very easy to lead or influence them -- so it took everything I had to try and ask questions cool as a cucumber when I was mortified and heartbroken, knowing something awful had happened to this child. In asking where he'd been lately, what he'd done over the last few days, he finally volunteered, with a shrug, that "Maybe that happened when Mike put his lighter in my mouth. He does that sometimes." He said it as if he were saying, "Maybe I'll have eggs for breakfast this morning." Mike put a lighter in his mouth, sure, and it later came out that Mike liked to physically "discipline" him in other ways, but Mike also played ball with him, told jokes, was his friend. These kinds of situations are confusing for children, confusing for teens, confusing for adults.

See, sometimes we don't know we've been abused because the person who raped (or otherwise abused) us isn't supposed to be someone who can harm you: a boyfriend, a teacher, a parent, a clergyperson, a friend. If people who are supposed to care about you, who say they care about you, who others you trust invest trust in assaults you it surely must have been something else, because people you love aren't supposed to do you harm. Sometimes we don't know because the person who is assaulting us tells us, quite plainly, while they are doing so that we like what they are doing, that everything feels so good, that we are so special, that they are our friend and would never hurt us. They're smiling, the way we see them smile all the time, not looking scary or yelling or calling us bitches or sluts. Sometimes we don't know because what we are told or shown in sex and what we are told or shown is rape so closely resemble each other: my personal feeling over the years is that one thing that makes healing so hard for a lot of survivors is that so much of the consensual sex they are having is still pretty rape-y in a lot of ways. Sometimes we don't know rape was rape because we have heard so much more about how women are temptresses (or, for male survivors, how men and boys always want any kind of sex from anyone) who lead men into the things they do to us, who cause men to lose self-control -- this kind of talk loomed large among my mother's Irish Catholic parents, for instance -- or we hear about how dirty and filthy and bad we are from birth, no mater what we do or don't do, no matter what is or is not done to us by others.

Let's also not forget that often, our psyches do us a profound favor with traumatic events where they can kind of turn off and tune out our minds so that our memories of a traumatic event are murky and even nonexistent. This is not some kooky idea people came up with in order to prove imaginary traumas, it's something very well documented, and one very typical aspect of PTSD. In my case, while I remember much of my first assault very clearly, my second is one where a whole chunk starting where I was forcibly grabbed and pulled into the van and ending where I somehow had gotten myself back into the bathroom of the ice rink where I started, shivering and shaking and bruised, is just missing. I'm very well versed in this point of therapies for missing memories, things like RMT, and of the big flaws in them. Before I even knew how flawed approaches like that could be, I had no interest in trying them (and the one therapist I had who I stuck with in my teens was very down-to-earth and never suggested them): I never wanted those acute memories, nor did I, personally, need them to know what happened to me and to work through it. All the same, when you have memory loss with trauma, it can make figuring out what happened right at or around the time it did a challenge, especially when you factor in the very typical desire for denial of trauma.

One of the biggest bummers of the last couple of weeks is that I wish so many of these conversations could have been had only with rape survivors, in spaces that felt safe, where survivors could really talk and where those who were not could just freaking listen. Every time I read one of these bouts of en masse ignorance, it was usually dovetailed by comments about how we don't need rape awareness, how everyone knows all they need to know, and how anyone who wants to talk about their rape can with no problems and full support, which is an obvious and sad irony. If we didn't need that awareness, survivors would feel and earnestly be safe to share their stories and all the prototypical myths -- like the idea that everyone knows when they have been raped and knows that's what to call it -- wouldn't be anything we still had to counter. If people could just listen to survivors -- and put aside that sometimes, what we have to say is going to make people feel uncomfortable and is going to challenge certain worldviews profoundly -- we'd have come a lot farther by now both in reducing rape and in having a better environment for survivors to heal in. It's really tough sometimes to even figure out which is more traumatic: a rape itself, or the aftermath of rape, living with rape, trying to work through it all in a culture which is so hell-bent on enabling rape and blaming or silencing survivors.

So, no: I didn't know that two of my rapes were rapes for the first few years after them, or even when they happened. I wasn't drugged for any of my assaults, nor was I on drugs or any other substance. I have never been stupid a day in my life. They were not wanted, consensual sex which I only decided to call rape when a bunch of feminist women brainwashed me. I was not atypical in this respect, even though my not-knowing isn't universal, either. The biggest reason I didn't know is that, like many, many people then and many now -- including some getting the message loud and clear from some of the discussions which have happened over the last couple of weeks -- I was taught in a million different ways not to know.

Scarleteen is one of the longest running and most extensive comprehensive sex education sites for teens out there; over the last ten years, millions of people around the world have visited Scarleteen seeking- and hopefully finding- information and answers about sexuality.

Which, in fact, is one of the biggest hurdles that Scarleteen faces today in providing accurate and easy-to-understand information for teens and young adults: our visitors are from around the world.

It’s easy for me, a 20-something living in Seattle, to give advice partially drawing from experiences as a sexually active young adult and adolescent growing up in a middle-to-upper class environment. I had (and still have) health insurance and relatively easy access to contraception (the middle-to-upper class suburb is now a shoebox-sized studio apartment).

But what good does advice like “go to a doctor” do for someone who has internet access, but, cannot, for cultural reasons, dare go to a gynecologist or doctor? What about the uninsured young adult living in poverty? What about the non-native English speakers who frequent Scarleteen’s website- what can we do to help them?

The language barrier is more easily (in theory) solved than the cultural barrier that Scarleteen is faced with. Ideally, we’d have all of our articles (or at least the most essential ones) translated into various languages: Chinese, for one, and Scarleteen En Español. However, the task of finding someone adept at translation to volunteer their time is an incredibly difficult one.

It’s important to mention that Scarleteen’s volunteers are international; we do reside in more than one country, and each of us have our own unique backgrounds.

In the end, Scarleteen can only do so much: we can provide the facts and resources, but our website cannot replace dangerous stigmas and lack of medical treatment with access to healthcare and real-life acceptance and support.

We can build a cyberworld that’s a safe space- but our computer screens and internet connections are woefully inadequate when it comes to human rights.

I'll be honest: I don't approve of cosmetic surgery. I think it's incredibly important to love and accept our bodies for what they are, and to extend that acceptance to everyone's body. To my mind, surgically altering your body solely for cosmetic reasons is neither loving nor accepting.

Unfortunately,

Teen breast implants have become an increasingly popular cosmetic surgery within the last few years. According to statistics, the number of women under the age of 18 who underwent teen breast implants surgery more than tripled between 1992 and 2002. In 2002 alone 3,095 girls underwent a teen breast implants procedure, compared to 3,841 girls in 2003 who received teen breast implants. This is 24 percent increase in the number of girls who seek teen breast implants. --Board Certified Plastic Surgeon Resource

For the record, the FDA has age limits on both saline (minimum of 18 years of age) and silicone (minimum of 22 years of age) implants.

Given the above, I was very interested when I read one woman's reasons for wanting her implants out and how her implants actually made her sick.

For more information on implants, including the risks and side effects, Breast Implant Info has several factsheets and Our Bodies, Ourselves has a wonderful collection of links.

For more information about how to love your body check out these articles:
Life Lessons from the Third Stall on the Left
I hate my body, so I don't want my boyfriend to see it.
I Love My Breasts, Yes I Do, I Love My Breasts, How About You?

My plans for last weekend were pretty mellow: I was going to work on my taxes, do a little housecleaning, maybe get started on my garden now that the sun is back out, hang out with my sweetheart, finish some writing, practice piano and play some Scrabble. I was going to tend to myself, for the most part.

The weekend I would up having was quite a bit different.

Last Wednesday, I raced against the clock -- I had to go work at the clinic the next day -- to get everything up for our focus this month on sexual assault and abuse as part of Sexual Assault Awareness Month. That included getting together a page and other materials for the "I Was Raped" shirts which months back, I'd agreed to help Jennifer Baumgardner distribute as part of a project to increase rape awareness, both through these t-shirts and the conversation we'd hoped they'd start, as well as through her developing film of the same name, which will focus on first-person stories from survivors.

The New York Times first covered the project, using a photo of Jennifer -- which was appropriate, since this is her project. Then Gawker and Jezebel hit on it, using a photo of me in the shirt without my permission or even a request for it (and still have yet to respond to my requests to remove a copyrighted image they have no permission to use). A few more sites followed suit. Later on Friday, KOMO-4 news contacted me, telling me they were doing a story on it that night and asking for my participation. As is my general practice with television, I declined to be filmed, but did accept to have a phone interview.

Before that interview, the reporter and I had a discussion about using my image where I explained why I was not comfortable with my face being put on the television as a survivor. I explained that when I went to get coffee this weekend, I needed it to be up to me if I was "that woman who is dairy allergic, so don't forget, soy only," or "that woman who was raped." I explained that as a counselor for an abortion clinic half the week, I didn't want to make anything of my personal life so broadly visible that any of my clients might recognize me and doubt that it was their issues which were of the utmost importance in my office. I explained that choosing to show my face with this in one context is not permission for anyone to make that choice for me in others, and that I'm the expert on how much exposure I can handle and want. I was told they don't show rape "victims" faces on television, anyway (and then wondered, if that was so, why we were even having that conversation in the first place).

Apparently, they do, because my face was indeed shown on the news, coupled with the reporter saying I'd requested they did not show it. My words were edited massively -- as is to be expected -- and no information on the project was even given. The "I Was Raped" t-shirt was compared to t-shirts reading "Yankees Suck," and "Boys are stupid -- throw rocks at them." The story spread -- the tone of it intact -- and the video made its way to other stations, and then CNN. The story has spread very largely through the blogosphere, and with some notable exceptions, an awful lot of what's out there is full of a lot of misinformation about me and the project, and in some cases, some really inflammatory accusations. As of today, I'm about one for one between positive emails and negative ones, and while the positives are very positive, the negatives are really negative and many have been incredibly threatening and disturbing.

I've been accused of exploiting myself and other assault survivors just to make money, which would almost be comical if it weren't so vile. Scarleteen gets five dollars from any shirt sold. Five dollars, which to make, means not only my processing the order, packing it to ship, walking to ship them as well as doing all I've done to set things up to sell them, the crazy amount of extra bandwidth all the press has brought on (none of which I courted or chose), and all of this causing technical problems with the site, but also includes putting up with all of the crap which I have over the last handful of days. You'd think it'd be pretty easy for a person of any intelligence to realize that if it was about the money, I could do better by setting up a lemonade stand on the sidewalk, make the same dough, and do so without any sort of emotional stress or difficulty. And flatly, if someone doesn't want $5 to go to Scarleteen, I have no trouble sending it to a different organization which helps with rape prevention, awareness and healing. But since I'm also the one paying the bandwidth bills for all of this, doing a lot of the work, taking care of all the orders and shipping AND being the whipping boy of choice AND since Scarleteen does advocacy work in this area, I'm not sure what the big problem is.

I've gotten letters in my email box from those who came to Scarleteen and read some of our rape content, and felt the need to write me and explain to me all of the ways in which any given kind of sexual abuse was not actually sexual abuse at all, be it because the victim asked for it, because the victim apparently really wanted it but was just ashamed of their own desires, because when the victim is male they always really want it; how for "horny" teenage boys, raping is just something they do naturally, how all survivors need to do is find out what we did to get raped, make sure we don't do that thing again and move on, how in doing what we do at Scarleteen in the first place, we're setting girls up to be raped by encouraging them to be promiscuous sluts, or enabling rape somehow by educating youth on homosexuality.

I've had the great privilege of being patronized, with other victims, by non-survivors, "experts" on rape, or even other survivors letting us know what they think we need to be doing "for our own good," how they think we don't know how to protect ourselves, physically or emotionally, how much more it would scar us to take something "private" and make it in any way public...and how all of these concerns are OF COURSE about us, not about them. I have been told what my personal problems are, by people who know nothing about me, and about how I could do a lot more good if I did more meaningful things with my life than I do, or how, if I stopped doing the work I do now, went and took a corporate job, was able to buy a house and car, and then give money to an organization like...oh, the one I run, I could do more for other "victims." I have been told outright that while a given letter-writer cares for all other rape survivors, they do not care for survivors like me, and feel that it is perfectly appropriate -- nay, quite called for -- to shower me with abusive invective.

(Might there be some truth in some of them saying this could be traumatic for survivors because of what I'm dealing with myself and how I'm feeling right now? Maybe, save when you realize that most of this is coming from my being shown wearing the shirt in places that were not of my choosing, and where, following the choice they made for me, I have asked not to be shown. In fact, I think how I'm feeling says a whole lot more about how rape survivors are often seen as everyone's property -- since we've already been spoiled, see, already ruined -- than it does about how my choices to be public have resulted in my getting upset.)

I've read about how any survivor who wears this is being a terrible person to other abuse or rape survivors who might be triggered by it. However, I never see the same concerns voiced about, oh, many media representations of sex or romance, people verbally abusing their children in grocery stores, people who enforce ideas that sex is a duty people owe one another in certain social contexts, people using the word "rape" applied in scenarios like "The IRS just raped me," or... hey, wait! People deciding to verbally abuse a survivor because she breaks silence in a way they don't like or wouldn't choose for themselves. Just a word on that? I feel pretty confident saying that many of us who are survivors will not be triggered by another survivor saying he or she was raped, or having that voiced in a pretty sensitive way on a piece of clothing. More to the point, if you think this is the only way in any given day we might be reminded of our rapes, you've got to be kidding. The most benign aspects of daily life are often triggers: groups of men crowding close to us in a bus, the street we have to walk down to get home which was the one we were raped on, being quickly grabbed by the shoulder from someone who had no idea that was a trigger, a chair, a doorknob, a broom handle, someone's hand, a belt, a given way the light looks at a certain time of day, the smell of a cologne, the very skin we inhabit, or someone, perchance, saying something about rape to us like "Don't tell a soul."

I have, of course, had to deal with the nasty kinds of feedback we always get any time we talk about rape. I have gotten email which informs me that women are property and that women are raped because men are superior. I have gotten email that told me I am sexist because we largely address rape at the site of men and women which is perpetrated by men, not which is perpetrated by women (which is only because it is perpetrated by women so infrequently, and because we can only respond, in advice queries, to the questions which are asked: I assure you, I have not deleted or purposefully not published any questions about a person surviving a rape by a woman -- I simply have not yet gotten any such questions). I have gotten email informing me that I am making a "disgusting display" to get attention and pity for myself -- and to help young women, I am told, make false rape accusations -- by choosing to put my face all over the news (which again, was very much not my choice, but one made for me against my express wishes). I have gotten email which informs me that if I was raped, I clearly deserved it for being the terrible, horrible waste of breathable air which I am. Of course, I also got letters from people said they would have supported the work that I do and this project until they found out that not only was I, and the site pro-choice, but that I also am a baby killer who works at an abortion clinic (one such letter also informed me that having an abortion would only add to the trauma of a rape survivor, but going through pregnancy or becoming a parent before a person was ready would somehow be in no way difficult or traumatic). I read a thread discussing if I was "hot, for a rape survivor" or not.

For the record, the gender of those with those responses is mixed. These kinds of sentiments by no means only come from men (and when it comes to supportive responses, we've had just as many from men as from women). They come from every kind of person you could possibly imagine. This is one of the many reasons why those who have been raped often stay silent: we never know who is going to react to our rapes like this, and are well aware that it's possible the people we expect it from least may be the ones who react just like this. I can assure you, for the record, that of the people who have sent me the worst of this vitriol, around one of every two is someone who those who know them wouldn't even suspect the malice they usually keep hidden, save for people like me.

We've had server troubles all day which I've had to stay on top of when I still have things I need to do which I had planned to do this weekend, but could not do because I have had to spend most of it on damage control, sending requests to people to please stop stealing my face without asking me, correcting tons of misinformation about all of this flooding my mailbox, having to read through piles of hate to find emails from Scarleteen users we need to tend to, and having to try all I can not to have all of this wear on my relationships with people glad to support me, but who also have needs of their own, and things they need from me. Suffice it to say, since we have had many positive responses, many people want the short, and I wasn't prepared to have to be processing orders all weekend. I have also been reading the positive mails, which are great, but many of them also contain the writer's personal rape experience. That's not to say I am not open to being the person someone chooses to share with, and that I am not very glad if I can provide a way for someone to disclose, but obviously, reading those letters is not pleasant or cheerful.

Obviously, this wasn't my best weekend ever. Many of these responses and results obviously disappoint and distress me.

But what they don't do is surprise me. I've lived as a survivor for almost 27 years now, and I've worked in sex education, including in advocacy for survivors and efforts for prevention, for a decade. When I was a teacher, more than once I had to deal with the travesty that was the justice system for a student of mine who was being abused. I am used to people excusing away all manner of abuses, resenting the hell out of those of us who do our damndest to protest that, and am well aware that denial of abuse, and the amount of abuse which exists in the world, is alive and well and living...well, everywhere.

I am used to statements which start with, "If I was a woman and had been raped..." (as if men never get raped: but really, statements like this start that way because they're about how women should behave, period), or "If I was a rape victim...." or "If I had been raped..." and with the uselessness that follows all of them. Maybe it's time for me to start talking about how I might feel and behave were I a woman of color, were I a heterosexual person, were I a person of means, had I survived the Holocaust. Because, obviously, my ideas on how I might feel and behave in those situations would be so very useful, especially to those people who actually are members of those groups.

I am used to hearing that if I want to talk about my rape, if I make it important in any way, even for a limited time, that I haven't "moved on." I am used to hearing about how I deserved it, asked for it; I heard it from one of my rapists (and had I been fully conscious for one of my rapes, I am sure I would have heard it from more), I heard it from friends and family, I've heard it from others who are oh-so-certain they and my rapists have nothing in common. I am used to hearing that the difference between strong survivors and perpetual victims is this: if you never say a word about it, if no one around you even has to know you were raped, you're a strong survivor. But if you're upset, if you want to talk about rape or your rape, if anyone around you has to know what happened, then you're looking to stay a perpetual victim so that you can live a sweet life where everyone feels sorry for you. I am used to hearing that if I want to speak out about my rape, publicly or privately, that anyone who hears me is entitled to react however they would like, even if that means speaking to me in a way which is abusive, threatening, callous or cruel.

I am used to hearing about how any given thing about me is so awful or distasteful that nothing about me or what I do deserves any sympathy or, -- and more important to me, since I don't really need sympathy -- any kind of basic common courtesy or respect. Sometimes that's been because I'm queer, other times because I do sex ed, other times because I've had an abortion (and now, because I also work where they are provided), because I'm Buddhist, because I'm this age or that one, this gender or that, because I look this way or I don't look that way, because I don't have issues with nudity, because I'm sympathetic to a given group of people, because I'm loud, because I'm independent, because I have sex I enjoy, because I'm still alive. I am used to every kind of excuse imaginable at this point for why I don't deserve the same courtesies I have always extended to others.

None of these things are new to me, nor are they much different from what I have dealt with simply in my personal life when it comes to my rapes.

And I am used to hearing all of this so much, that while it never stops being hurtful, what it has long since stopped being for me is particularly powerful. Don't get me wrong: I have spent a lot of the past few days somewhat shellshocked, but that has more to do with the en masse onslaught and a lack of sleep than it does with any particular thing anyone has said or done. I know the place the craptastic stuff comes from, and I know that that place is one of fear, resentment, guilt, ignorance, violence or self-loathing. As much as I revile those things, as much as I want them gone, and as bad as they make me feel, I can at least identify them, and I know very acutely where my own bad feelings come from and, for the most part, how to deal with them. I can even look them dead in the eye: again, that's a survivor skill, too -- to survive, we all have to learn to do that expertly.

I'm also used to the fact that all rape survivors are different. We are not all the same, our rapes were not all the same, how we've processed them or reacted to them has not all been the same. I have had plenty of thanks for other survivors in my email box over the weekend, but I have also gotten emails like this:

"You are a sick fuck... and if in fact you were truely raped you would not be so fucking stupid to even want to do something so damn outrageous on wearing a shirt. And I wonder why you dont want to show your face. You are a sick individual and I am a rape victim and now a survivor but you appaul me on such a horrible suggestion on someone wanting to wear such a dumb remark shirt. If in fact you were raped, you are as sick as i could ever imagine. Of how you want to make money on it... this is not fame this is a sick person like you it saddness me to think there are people in this world like you . Playing on what horrific act of rape , how it kills a person day in and day out. We have to live with that horrible thought of it happening to us. And then we have people like you... SICK.. how do you get up and look in the mirror? May god bless your sick soul."

By all means, I feel the way that person chose to spoke to me was insensitive and cruel. However, I think that it's really important to remember that none of us lives in a culture conducive to healing, or in a culture which makes it comfortable to live as a survivor. We can't even trust each other, as fellow survivors (and when we're addressing a survivor who is same-gender, be we male or female, an awful lot of same-gender learned distrust is tossed in the mix, something often even more difficult for male survivors since their rapists were usually male as well), in our motives, in how our healing differs, in the different places we're at in it. Survivors are, justifiably, angry -- and also all sorts of people -- and can often enough direct that anger just about anywhere: that's how it is when you're so angry and so hurt and given so little support. I directed mine inward after I was assaulted, and doing that, on top of having my rape be a thread that wound through other trauma I was living with and trying to survive, nearly killed me and also set me up for challenges in my life -- as well as more risks of danger -- all of which could have been, if not avoided, strongly mitigated by being able to talk about my abuses, at all, and finding some kind of support. I don't like getting emails like that, to say the least, but at the same time, I have to take a breath, stop, and recognize that at the very least, someone just got some release of all of that anger, and while I don't think I'm the right person to direct it to, that that person was able to direct it anywhere -- to open up that pressure valve -- is a likely positive for that person.

It may well also be -- and pardon any pop psychology on my part -- that as much as I don't want this kind of visibility, that survivor does, and resents me for having what she wants. That's also valid, since we are made intensely invisible as a group of people, particularly if we become survivors, rather than remain victims. While if our rapes were in some way found horrific, we might get some media-based ambulance-chasing, once they're over, we're non-issues, and if there is nothing particularly noteworthy about our rapes (and for most of them, the general population will find nothing noteworthy about them), we'll rarely see address at all. In any case, victims trump survivors, and victims who arouse a pithy kind of pity trump all.

Or, this one: "No body in there right mind would believe that you're truly doing this to help other people. I'm a real survivor because I'd never broadcast or announce the horrible things that have happened to me. the only people who would wear that shirt are full of shit. NO BODY would wear that who's really been raped. But I'm sure a bunch of girls will buy it who want attention and want people to feel sorry for them. I do think this should be taken away from you and all the bullshitting bitches who pretend this has happened to them. Millions of women have suffered and worked very hard to over come what you are now trying to profit from. You should NOT be allowed to capitalize on other people's pain. And even if you were raped that shouldn't give you the right to profit from it. Did you know when you were raped that you were going to get paid for it? Or did that idea come later?"

What I hear in this -- once more, forgive me for being armchair -- is that this person needs to be validated in surviving, and needs to have someone let her know that however she speaks out of silence is okay, is brave, is laudable, even if it doesn't look like someone else's way. My impression is that she needs for her rape to be made important, because if it already really felt that way, I'm not sure why she'd put so much energy (I got three different emails from this woman before I blocked her address) into telling me how no one's story is true but her own or those which resemble hers. I hear that she is suffering, and I hear that she is tremendously, and probably righteously, angry. That doesn't mean I'm going to say she's not responsible for misdirecting her anger at me, because she is, and I've directed no such things at her or anyone else, but it is to say that I can only get so angry back at someone in this space. I know that space: been there, done that, and -- literally -- have the t-shirt.

Here's what we don't often see and hear in the various peanut galleries of the Internet: we don't see many survivors sharing the stories they have also shared with me both in my email box over the weekend and in other avenues I've had them shared with me in my life, both with work, and with the people who have personally disclosed to me over the years. I even got stories in my email box from survivors who were at sites talking about this, where so many people incessantly talked about how they were not silencing anyone, and yet, these people didn't feel able to tell their stories, or perhaps even share the mere fact of being survivors. people who send me email like the above aren't posting it in the forums or on the blogs: through the resentment, they also know I'm safe, or else I'd not be hearing this. Everyone else would.

Some survivors do want something like this. It's okay to want it, and it's okay not to, and wanting it or not doesn't determine who was and who was not raped. It's having been raped, only, which determines that. The two women above were raped. The man who wanted one of these and told me it was because of being brutally raped during time he spent in jail over a misdemeanor was raped. The woman who bought one because she was molested as a child was raped. The person who bought it for their partner who is working on acceptance of their rape was raped.

Saturday morning, I literally overheard my neighbors talking about the news story on the porch (and clearly not knowing it was their neighbor, who could hear them, they were talking about: Seattleites don't tend to be very familiar neighbors)

So, why would a survivor wear something like this? Obviously, I can't speak for anyone other than myself and for those who have talked about why they would. I've also already said a little bit about why I would here. One of the emails above asks how I look at myself in the mirror.

When the t-shirts got here, and I put one on to take a quick photo, checking in the mirror to make sure that despite the fact that I was two days late on washing my hair, I wasn't too disheveled, it was an interesting experience. It was like myself was telling myself a hard truth directly, but gently. With a quiet, but clear, understanding. Rape is something that those of us who are raped are told at every turn to doubt happened to us, to explain away with a rapist's "misinterpretation" of our nonconsent, to do our best to rid our memories of the experience, to the point that even someone like me, who also works with other survivors, who has done an epic amount of personal processing for over a very long period of time can have days and times where I, too, wonder if somehow, in some way, I managed to imagine what happened to me. Maybe that blood was from something else: maybe I just had hemmorhoids I didn't know about. Maybe that soreness is from falling off my bike and I just don't remember when. Maybe the reason I don't remember all of that assault isn't because I got knocked on the head, but because nothing actually happened. Maybe no one wants to believe me because I'm crazy, and this is all some sort of delusion. Maybe all of those body image issues, that overdose, all that poetry I wrote in my teens was about all that OTHER stuff, and that other stuff caused me to believe I was raped. Maybe when he shoved my head in his crotch, he mistook it for his own hand: maybe while I was choking on what he wanted and I didn't, he just didn't know I couldn't breathe. Surviving rape is a whole world of maybe, but maybe nots.

So, sitting there, looking myself in the eye in the mirror with that t-shirt on did cause me to cry, and even if I never wear it anywhere else, even though I have, at other times, been able to acknowledge and accept what happened to me, that moment was powerful for me. I deeply could look at myself in the mirror and accept the woman who is there and everything that made her who she is, even when some of those things are incredibly difficult and not things I wished for. I was proud of her, and she made me feel strong and able, both for myself and for the work I do where I need to help others find strength and resilience. I can do that at other times, too, but I'm always grateful for any new tool to help me do that, because some days, the ones I have don't work or don't take me to a new place.

Over the weekend, when I was talking to an old friend on the phone providing support, he said to me, "You know, you can take this. I know it doesn't feel good, and you don't want to, but the fact is, you can handle this." It might sound hollow, that, but the truth of the matter is that yes, I can. That woman looking back at me in the mirror could. If taking it wasn't something I thought might carry any benefits for anyone, not only would it all be even more upsetting than it already is, I wouldn't have had anything to do with this in the first place, or even have been public about surviving rape as I have been over the years. I didn't need to be as public as I have for myself: just telling people close to me and being able to sometimes speak through my art, for me, has been enough. I've been more public in the hope that my doing so will help other people be able to break silence, find strength, and be able to find whatever way is their way to healing.

The biggest bummer with things like this is that unfortunately, one very strong message the backlash sends to other survivors is that it is absolutely best they stay silent: because if they don't, see, if they speak up like I do, speak up in any way, this, too, is what will happen to them. Some who silence with ignorance, fear or guilt probably have no idea that this is a likely result: others, of course, very much are aware that they are silencing and very much intend to silence.

But here's the thing: something like this shirt isn't for every survivor, nor for any given survivor in every environment, on every day. I do a lot with my life, and my rape is not often at the forefront of any of it, but sometimes it is, and sometimes, it's helpful to others if I let it be, as much as I'd prefer not to. Being able to even just say -- even just to oneself -- "I was raped," is rarely easy, even though it does get easier over time. It still always hurts, it always infuriates, it always confuses, it always saddens, especially in a world which makes it so very hard to speak just that simple fact and to have it merely acknowledged. It is never easy, and it will never be easy. Saying it out loud, in any way, to anyone, is almost always scary, almost always risky. But for ourselves, and for others, when we can do it, when we are able -- and it's always okay when we're not -- it's usually, in my opinion, a worthwhile risk. While it means that we might open ourselves up to all kinds of garbage, it also means we might open ourselves up to the good stuff, too, to connections which are rare and unfathomably meaningful, to us or to others.

I won't be dishonest: I still want that other weekend that I was going to have back. I'd have preferred that weekend, and I really needed that weekend for myself. I spent a lot of time this weekend very deeply resenting feeling like I was pushed into the spotlight in a way I did not choose and I did not want: up until now, I've felt like the level of public I have been has been enough to make things better for enough people that something like this level of visibility wasn't anything anyone needed me to do. And yet, seeing all that I have seen over the last few days, I can only assume that I was wrong in that, since if things like this were not needed, I can't imagine I'd be seeing so much of what I had. We'd be past all of this by now, wouldn't we? So, if that's what needed to happen, and it did or could net anything at all positive, I can live with that. I can have that weekend I needed another time. I can move past my anger and resentment. I can make time up to my partner next weekend. I can have my life go back to being about all the other things it's about shortly. Again, I can take this: I may not want to, but I can.

There's no perfect note to end this on. I'm massively grateful for the support myself and the project have been shown by some. I'm deeply moved by the other survivors who have trusted me to share their stories, and to those who also have offered their care and compassion, and not just because you let me help you heal, but you helped heal some hidden parts of me I didn't even realize still needed healing. I'm deeply saddened, frustrated, shellshocked and worn the hell right out from all of the backlash -- and some of that is surprise in that I was more vulnerable than I thought myself to be and at the same time stronger, but also not as over my rapes as I have long thought -- but I'm just hoping that maybe at least some of it will result in something positive, either for survivors, or for the world that we live in when it comes to how survivors are treated, how rape is viewed and in terms of anything and everything which might keep it from happening to anyone at all.

And if, from a Buddhist perspective, there truly is no separation between the self and others, and I am seeing and hearing from so many people who clearly need to work through all of this chaos, who have all of this inside and around them -- and if the way I, myself, have been feeling has anything to do with anything -- then all of these last few days hasn't really just been about or for other people: it's been about and for me, as well.

So, as it turned out, and for as much as it sure hasn't felt like it, it seems I spent the weekend tending to myself, after all.

It seems appropriate to link this to Carly Milne's blogging project to benefit RAINN, and I'll write for that project a few more times before month's end. We've linked to RAINN and its services for years at Scarleteen, so it shouldn't be new to anyone, but to say it is a worthy place to support is a serious understatement. RAINN has made, and continues to make, great efforts for both rape prevention and survivor support, and if you have some extra cash -- especially for many of you who get tax refunds -- it's a fantastic place to put it. I know I certainly could have used what it provides, and many other survivors do as well.