I want to focus this entry on the second of the optional questions in the demographics survey. Of the 2,000 participants who completed the survey, this question was answered by 1,530. The question was this: Since using Scarleteen, which of any of the following has changed for you, and by how much?
We saw a couple comments at the end of the survey, from statistics-focused folks, concerned that our aim was to state that whatever improvements users reported were solely because of Scarleteen. That was never the intent.
The intent in asking this questions was primarily to get a picture of what, if any, improvements relevant to what we address here our users were experiencing which may have been due to using our services or may not have been. What we most wanted to see was not the areas where we may have done a good job or where our users already felt things were going very well for them, but areas where it would seem sound to say we currently are not having the impact we'd like to with positive changes. In other words, this question seemed likely to be most useful in identifying our potential weak spots, rather than our strengths, and could give us a clearer sense on how and where we should look most to improve our content and approaches.
We also figured we couldn't expect many users to be able to identity if positive changes or a lack thereof had to do with their use of Scarleteen or not, or, if it did, only had to do with using Scarleteen. We do hear from users in direct services, in email, and did from some in comments to this survey, about how they feel Scarleteen plays or has played a part in improving certain areas of their lives. Some of the answers to this question were, indeed, reflective of some of the positive feedback we get.
At the same time, some of these changes tend to happen for some people as they move through adolescence and into adulthood, regardless. So, in the interest of intellectual honesty, as well as supporting young people's agency, we've framed this the way we did and are now because while we feel it's fair to figure that Scarleteen may have had some of the impact reflected in the answers, as these are issues we work on with and for users, but we also don't feel it is sound for us to claim a given level of authoritative ownership or influence with those changes with a survey like this.
I personally feel some the more illuminating answers, the answers most useful to us as an organization always aiming to improve how we serve our readers and users, and always needing to identify where we could do better or need to work harder, were the ones where a good deal of positive change was not reported. Some of those answers were surprising to me and to the volunteers as well: without that feedback, our awareness of these possible weaknesses would have been much more limited. (Thanks, survey participants!)
Here's that data in text, with the highest percentage of answers to each question bolded:
My relationships have improved (1,452 answers): No change, 10.4%, a little, 10.9%, some, 21.0% (305), a lot, 15.4% (223), not applicable, 42.4%. Comments reflected that many of the users answering either are not in relationships or feel their relationships are already of high quality.
I feel more able to make and respect my own best sexual choices: No change, 3.6%, a little, 9.5%, some, 22.5%, a lot, 42.8%, not applicable, 21.6%.
I practice safer sex more or more consistently: No change, 9.7%, a little, 4.7%, some, 11.1%, a lot 19.7%, not applicable, 54.8%. Again, some of this is was spoken about in comments regarding not being in relationships, or safer sex seeming to be something participants were already excellent at. However, given that we know from other data sources and one-on-one conversations with users that many people have incorrect ideas about what safer sex is and how to do it properly, and given some of the answers below reflect a good amount of respondents not doing part of safer sex at all, this answer still concerns me.
I use birth control more or more consistently: No change, 13.1%, a little, 3.3%, some, 7.4%, a lot, 17.3%, not applicable, 58.8%. See above, though also bear in mind that around half of our users are not heterosexual and many have no need for contraception when they are sexually active.
I have sought out sexual healthcare: No change, 18.7%, a little, 6.3%, some, 11.3%, a lot, 16.8%, not applicable, 46.9% . Again, some of N/A being the highest answer here is about users who have not yet had life or health experiences that facilitate a need for that care. At the same time, this is an area where we have often experiences many users clearly in need of that care who avoid it, so, this set of answers is a concern.
I have been able to ask a sexual partner to get tested: No change, 20.5%, a little, 4.2%, some, 5.2%, a lot, 9.9%, not applicable, 60.2%. While yet again, some of this may be because there has not been a partner to ask, we do often experience users who feel they don't have to ask or feel testing isn't needed when it is, so this answer also raises concern.
I have gotten tested for STIs more often (or for the first time): No change, 22.5%, a little, 3.6%, some, 6.9%, a lot, 10.6%, not applicable, 56.5%. See above.
I feel more able to set sexual limits and boundaries: No change, 7.3%, a little, 11.0%, some, 18.9%, a lot, 33.0%, not applicable, 29.8%.
I feel more comfortable talking/communicating about sex:, No change, 6.0%, a little, 9.5%, some, 19.4%, a lot, 42.2%, not applicable, 22.9%.
I have worked harder to be sure I have a partner's consent with anything sexual:, No change, 9.6%, a little, 5.4%, some, 12.4%, a lot, 25.8%, not applicable, 46.8%. Again, some of this is likely about a lack of relationships. At the same time, this answer is a concern because we find many people's ideas of when consent is needed and what doing consent well entails are often problematic or one-sided.
My confidence/assertiveness has improved:, No change, 9.8%, a little, 14.3%, some, 21.9%, a lot, 29.8%, not applicable, 24.2%.
I feel better about my sexual identity:, No change, 7.9%, a little, 9.8%, some, 19.1%, a lot, 34.7%, not applicable, 28.5%.
I feel better about my body:, No change, 10.8%, a little, 13.5%, some, 20.7%, a lot, 29.5%, not applicable, 25.5%
I have come out (w/orientation or gender identity):, No change, 17.8%, a little, 6.6%, some, 6.1%, a lot, 8.2%, not applicable, 61.3%.
I feel stronger in healing from sexual abuse or assault:, No change, 11.5%, a little, 4.0%, some, 6.1%, a lot, 8.2%, not applicable, 70.2%. While we see a high number of users who have survived sexual abuse or assault coming to us for information, help and support, the majority of our users have not been sexually abused or assaulted.
I have recognized areas in my life/relationships I could improve/ where I want to make positive changes:, No change, 8.6%, a little, 12.3%, some, 9.2%, a lot, 29.0%, not applicable, 30.9%.
If in school, my grades have improved:, No change, 22.9%, a little, 5.2%, some, 7.2%, a lot, 6.3%, not applicable, 58.4% While many of our users are still in school, our general sense is that the majority tend to already be very high-achieving.
Here's a taste of some of the comments (including a couple which support why automatically associating positive changes to use of Scarleteen would have been problematic):
So, where do we think either we're probably doing a good job for our users, or where are they are experiencing improvements already? With self-confidence issues, healthy relationships, body image and awareness, empowerment around making one's own best sexual choices, sexual communication, and sexual or gender identity. This is all great news for our users, whatever role we have played in these outcomes. We intend to keep building on these positives with our content and current approach.
Where do we think we need to work harder, rethink approaches and start trying some new ones, or create more content that addresses certain needs? While we've a great deal of content on safer sex, testing and contraception already, it seems we could stand to have more, and to try some new approaches in those departments. In those areas, it seems like we also need to be doing more to help users feel confident communicating with partners about these express issues, such as by asking for or about STI testing with partners. We've already launched the Find-a-Doc database to help users with access issues that present barriers to them in getting sexual healthcare, but we can certainly pair that with more content about why and how to seek out that care, and how to feel better about utilizing it. We already have a good deal of content on consent, but only one piece that focuses solely on consent, and it seems creating some more content to support it could benefit our users.
The really good news is that if the positives have to do at all with what we do, then we already have some excellent foundation to build on when it comes to working on what we can do to help current users improve their lives in those other areas, where positive change was less reported. For those where a lot of those things were N/A, we also have the opportunity to expand and improve our content and approach before they get to a point in their lives where these issues are something they need to address and deal with. Our goal for those users is to work on those improvements to prepare them well for those issues if and when they do become personally relevant to them.
As with the previous set of data, we're very open to your feelings, thoughts and ideas around these findings. Stay tuned for the last bit of information we have from this survey, from the general comments section, and then my overall perceptions and thoughts about the study findings, including some intersections of the data I think are important to look at.
In my experience it feels like there are two crowds, those who are 'cool' and have frequent sexual activity, hookups etc both in and out of relationships (or at least portray themselves as doing so) and those who are 'pure' who have decided at this point to abstain from sex until marriage, who are frequently Christian or otherwise religious. I think there's pressure to fit into one of those groups, either to go out and have lots of sex or to not have sex at all. There is stigma from both sides to each other, the cool group think the pure group are 'frigid' and boring, the pure group think the cool group are disrespecting themselves and God or something along those lines. If you're not willing to put yourself in either box then you can cop it from both sides. And if you are out LGBTQ then chances of fitting in either group are slim to none. I'm not sure if this is how it is for other people but that's how it feels to me in the last few years.
That's from Caitlin, a member of our community at the message boards who's in high school in Melbourne. This came up in a conversation the other day, and I was really struck by it, how well she put it into words, and by how many young people I've heard express similar things. But there's something else that struck me about it, which I m usually struck by when I hear those kinds of sentiments.
In a word, that whole paragraph could have come out of my mother's mouth, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. I mean, to the letter, this dynamic is not one I grew up with myself in the 1970s and 1980s, but which my parents certainly did. If I called my mother up right now and asked her to describe the sexual dynamics and politics she experienced while in high school, what she would say -- and has when we've talked about this -- would be almost exactly what Caitlin, in high school now, said.
We are simultaneously bombarded with two conflicting messages: one from our parents, chruches and schools -- that sex is dirty and therefore we must keep ourselves clean for the love of our lives; and the other from Playboy, Newsweek, etc., almost all women's magazines, and especially television commercials -- the we should be free, groovy chicks.
That's from Our Bodies, Ourselves, by the Boston Women's Health Collective, in the 1971/1973 edition, penned by women in their twenties at the time.
But now and then aren't the only times this has come up, either. We've had waves of these kinds of push-me, pull-mes several times in the west over the last 100 years and more, with relatively few cultural breaks in between, particularly cultural breaks which were very widespread, rather than very local or quickly fleeting.
Public discourse absorbed both currents, the condemnatory and the celebratory, and new sexual conventions grew in tension between the old (Victorian) and the new, between the sexual proscriptions of authorities who sought to control sexual expression, and the sexual prescriptions of youth, who places sexuality at the center of youth culture.
That's from From Front Porch to Back Seat, p. 78, by Beth L. Bailey, who is describing changes in sexual mores in the 1920s in that paragraph.
The increased visibility of sexuality in the public sphere disturbed middle-class Americans, especially middle-class women, who had been entrusted with the guardianship of the nation's morals. In response to the movement of sexuality outside the family, these women sought to retain their authority over sexuality by organizing moral reform and social purity crusades... Other sexual reformers responded as well. Doctors and vice crusaders such as Anthony Comstock opposed abortion, contraception and the public expression of sexuality by demanding greater state intervention in the regulation of morality. In contrast, sexual radicals of the anarchist free-love movement rejected any state involvement in personal matters. By the end of the century, diverse reformers -- women, doctors, vice crusaders, free lovers -- engaged in heated debate over who should regulate sex: the individual, the family, or the state.
That's from Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, by John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, p. 140. That passage might sound familiar, like some things we see and hear now and have over the past ten years or so.
But the authors aren't talking about the last century in that paragraph. They're talking about the one before that, describing American sexual politics not in the late 1900s, but in the late 1800s.
I'm someone, due to my age and where and how I came of age, who doesn't feel like she experienced these kinds of dynamics in my teens and twenties. They were there, for sure, but it felt fairly easy to opt out of and avoid, and it seemed, to me, a very quiet periphery, even perhaps something just kind of dangling out the window of the past as it was driving away, not an ever-present din from my peers, parents or the media. It seemed like it was the property of my parent's generation and those before them, not to my own, particularly in the punk/new wave, queer and neo-hippie subcultures I spent my teens and twenties in. I certainly never would have imagined that those politics they lived through were not static -- that there were also periods where things weren't so like that -- but also that they were so very far reaching, and that this pendulum had been swinging back and forth in the west for such a long time. And would swing back to these kinds of sexual politics yet again.
I certainly recognize it as something many young people grapple with now, as it's voiced often, and is often a part of some of the sexual choices a person is trying to make. It comes up all the time around whether a sexual choice is a right one or a wrong one, especially according to others, more than oneself. It comes up around the expectations of partners, or worries about a partner's judgment about a sexual history, or a lack of one. It comes up as a barrier in communication about sex and sexuality between young people and parents. It comes up around access to STI testing and contraception and worries about privacy with either or both of those things. It comes up a lot when people express feeling like their sexual choices are also major identity choices: they they don't just dictate if they do or don't have any kind of sex, how or with whom, but who they are as people, and who others will see and treat them as as people.
I'd love to hear some of our readers weigh in on this; talk together about if you have experienced or do now experience this kind of dynamic, and if you do, how you deal with it and how you feel it impacts you and others. If none of this sounds familiar to you, and you feel like the dynamics where you are and have been have been wildly different, I'd love to hear from you, too. So often folks hear and read older people talking about all of this about young people. Far more rarely are people able to read (or take the time to read) young people talking about it themselves. As always, we're much more interested in how you feel things like this impact you than we are in someone else's third-party interpretation of your experiences and feelings.
If you're really up for a challenge, I'd love to hear about what you think could potentially break this pattern that just seems to keep coming back again and again and again.
What do you think could get people and culture to a place where no sexuality or sex life is a right one, a wrong one, or not recognized as any kind of sexuality or sexual life at all; a place where there's much, much more room for everyone, and much more respect for everyone's diverse selves and thus, diverse choices?
After all, the times there have been cultural shifts around these kinds of dynamics, the people who tended to conceptualize and drive those changes or different views weren't usually older people. They were most typically young people. So, just like there's a historical precedent for these kinds of dynamics, there's also a historical precedent for young people being the ones who envision and start to enact a different picture.
This entry is from Omnipotent Poobah, and part of the Scarleteen Blogathon
At the risk of dating myself – at least not in the eHarmony sense – I am from the sex education dark ages.
In my day, Just Say No was Just Don’t Say Anything. Moms and Dads, more often than not, didn’t have “the talk” because of their own shocking lack of knowledge or because they were too embarrassed. Teen pregnancy and sexual diseases were relatively rare. And gay kids? Well, they simply didn’t exist.
Sex ed was limited to the 6th or 7th grade when all the girls were herded out of gym class to see a film about “that time of the month” while the boys played baseball…in the winter. Many of the girls emerged from the film visibly shaken and, so far as I know, none ever revealed the true nature of the film to the boys.
Of course, that left teens to their own sexual education. And teens, as they frequently do, thought they knew more about things than any adult could possibly know. In those days, they unfortunately may have been right.
In an era before the Internet – and personal computers for that matter – there were few ways for kids to learn about sex or become more comfortable with their own sexuality except by repeating the same misinformation amongst themselves. As a result, many a young girl disappeared with an “advanced case of mono” before coming back noticeably thinner and much less fun-loving than before and sometimes boys dropped out of school because “the family needed the money.”
Because my wife and I came from that era, we pledged we’d treat our own daughter differently, even at a young age.
At four, she already had a concept – appropriate for a four-year old – of how pregnancy worked. The were no cabbage leaves or storks, only a frank discussion when she asked questions. That policy sometimes created some odd conversations with our first grader.
Daughter: Dad, do you and Mom have sex?
Dad: You know how sex works, right?
Daughter: Yes.
Dad: And you know you are our child, right?
Daughter: Yes.
Dad: Then what does that tell you?
Daughter: I guess you guys have sex.
When she became a teen and asked more adult questions, we continued our policy. We encouraged her to use sites like Scarleteen to learn more. We explained the pleasures and pitfalls of her nascent sexuality and told her it was okay to go to Planned Parenthood for birth and sexual disease control and we’d not question her about it. And, she did.
Today she’s equipped to venture into a sexual world with the knowledge she needs and Mom and I are both pleased and relieved.
From the mouths of Scarleteen and children comes modern wisdom.
I urge you to speak out about your own sexual education, see what others are saying, and support Scarleteen’s important work.
I'm 19 years old, and I've been dating a guy who's 22. We've been seeing each other for a long time, about a year or so. Recently we were having a close talk, admitting things to each other we hadn't told anyone before, and he admitted to me that he had experimented with another guy when he was 16 by having anal/oral sex with him. At the moment, I didn't act shocked or anything, even though I was going crazy in my head. I've never experimented nor have I wanted to with the same sex because I'm completely straight. It's been a month since this happened, and I feel as if I don't love him anymore. I don't want to move forward with this relationship and it hurts because he's perfect in every other way. Am I making a mistake by breaking up with him? I just can't stop thinking that if he were truly straight, he wouldn't have gone so far with another guy, or have been able to finish (orgasm) during the situation. I'm just really, really disgusted by him now. Please help if you can, I know this situation is really weird.
As someone who was all but completely celibate throughout high school and this was not at all by conscious choice, I can tell you that I often found it frustrating to deal with the fact that a lot of teenagers were under- or mis-informed about safer sex, that a lot of teenagers were sexually active, and that a lot of politicians and think tanks believed in stanching teenage sexual activity entirely. I was fourteen when I started listening to Loveline (though I didn't always agree with Dr. Drew) and it began my path of sex-pertise (as it were). I was eager to get informed.
© 1998 - 2011 Scarleteen/Heather Corinna. All Rights Reserved.
Best viewed with Firefox • Privacy Policy & User Guidelines
Subscribe to our RSS feed.