Some of our staff and volunteer's fave links and reading from our Facebook and Twitter feeds this week:
Stephanie's Fave: 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence:
The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women and the ensuing 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence are commemorated every year around the world to raise awareness and trigger action on this pervasive human rights violation.
This year, UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet unveiled a 16 Step Policy Agenda to address the issue. Ending violence against women is one of UN Women’s priority areas. UN Women also coordinates the UN Secretary-General’s UNiTE to End Violence against Women campaign and supports widespread social mobilization through its Say NO – UNiTE to End Violence against Women platform. In addition, UN Women manages the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women which commemorates its 15th anniversary in 2011.
Karyn's Faves: Abstinence education does not lead to abstinent behavior:
The study is the first large-scale evidence that the type of sex education provided in public schools has a significant effect on teen pregnancy rates, Hall said.
“This clearly shows that prescribed abstinence-only education in public schools does not lead to abstinent behavior,” said David Hall, second author and assistant professor of genetics in the Franklin College. “It may even contribute to the high teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. compared to other industrialized countries.”
Along with teen pregnancy rates and sex education methods, Hall and Stanger-Hall looked at the influence of socioeconomic status, education level, access to Medicaid waivers and ethnicity of each state’s teen population.
Even when accounting for these factors, which could potentially impact teen pregnancy rates, the significant relationship between sex education methods and teen pregnancy remained: the more strongly abstinence education is emphasized in state laws and policies, the higher the average teenage pregnancy and birth rates.
Personal Stories of Young People Living with HIV:
I'm Lilly and I’ve just been given my diagnosis a couple of months ago. I'm 20 years old and I don't know exactly how or when I got the virus as I have never had any distinctive symptoms or conversion illnesses however I have my suspicions on my first love boyfriend when I was 15. I have been with my current partner for over 3 years and until now had never used protection, I feel grateful that he is still testing negative.
My initial reaction to the diagnosis was complete and utter shock...how could I get HIV? How could this happen to me? I am going to die! Although I was reassured by my health advisor that there has been progress and I would live hopefully a \'normal\' life, visions of AIDS patients did not stop crossing my mind. I cried non-stop for the next few weeks, my appetite disappeared, I was not able to sleep, I did not want to go out, got severe headaches and basically wanted to end it there and then.
My partner has been great in helping me get through this time, I have not told my parents as yet out of fear that they will disown me, or worse, making their life a living hell. Although I still get times when I break down and cry, I am beginning to feel slightly stronger and more couragous(sic). I have joined a few support groups and have realised I am not alone, and this illness does not fit any stereotype- everyone is at risk, not just MSM, injecting drug users or people of colour.
On World AIDS Day, Remember Women:
Worldwide, 215 million women are not using an effective method of contraception despite the fact that they want to avoid pregnancy. The largest segment of these women live in sub-Saharan Africa and many are at risk of HIV. Women account for 60 percent of people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, and young women between the ages of 15 to 24 are up to eight times more likely to be infected than men of the same age.
December 1st marks World AIDS Day and this year’s theme is “Getting to Zero.” Much of this day will be focused on a celebration of new technology and science that can help prevent HIV through daily treatment and male circumcision. And we should celebrate those advances – but we should also not lose sight of women who need both family planning and HIV services.
Heather's Faves: Let’s get real: female sexual pleasure and HIV prevention:
My point in highlighting these particular experiences is clearly not to advocate for forms of sexual practice that may increase the risk of HIV transmission, but rather to encourage a broader and realistic conversation amongst researchers, policy makers and service providers around the varied ways in which young women define their sexuality and what they find sexually pleasurable. If our responses do not resonate with young women’s lived realities, they will fail. It is especially worrying that mistrust of African women’s sexual pleasure has become the default position in the HIV prevention world. There are hardly any interventions that are designed specifically to address young women’s sexuality in a positive and non-judgmental way and which acknowledge that some young women have sex because they find it pleasurable. Indeed, those of us in the HIV prevention world would do well to remember that sex is not always about danger and risk but is also ‘a positive and joyous experience’ for many people, including young, unmarried African women. In the mid-nineties, US anthropologist Ralph Bolton wrote a piece in which he lamented the fact that most HIV research had completely ignored ‘the joys of sex’. He identified twenty-six ways in which sex is a positive—rather than a negative—experience and these included: sex is play, adventure, transcendence, fun, fantasy, interaction, pleasure, liminality, ecstasy, experience, an expression of emotions and a source of meaning.
Play, adventure and experience were particularly strong themes in the narratives of the female students I encountered and yet, as Kenyan feminist scholar Mumbi Machera so poignantly asserted in Re-thinking sexualities in Africa, very rarely is ‘women’s sexual desire depicted as an autonomous gesture and as an independent longing for sexual expression, satisfaction and fulfillment’ in most of this literature. Surely, our reluctance and failure to acknowledge that young women are autonomous sexual beings must, at some level, impede our ability to effectively intervene with this population. The continued high rates of HIV infection among young women point to major inadequacies in current responses and these, in turn, can partly be attributed to the fact that many of these responses have been premised on the notion of women’s victimhood and lack of sexual agency. Examples include generic messages that are based on the ABC approach—abstain, be faithful and use condoms—which encourage young women to ‘say no’ to pre-marital sex or which focus on teaching women condom negotiation skills. These do not leave much room for individual choice and preference, and they do not resonate with the lived realities of those young women who prefer to ‘say yes’ to sex, or who may have successfully negotiated the non-use of condoms with their sexual partners. In fact, US scholars Jennifer Higgins and Jennifer Hirsch note that a few studies have shown that women - rather than men - are sometimes responsible for the non-use of condoms in relationships as they complain that condoms adversely affect their sexual enjoyment.
Adoption in the United States: Harder and More Complicated Than Most Believe But "Open" to Change:
Adoption has an abysmal and embarrassing history in the United States. The twenties saw Orphan Trains, where children (many of whom weren’t actually orphans) were placed into what frequently amounted to indentured servitude. The thirties and forties marked the emergence of for-profit adoption following the lead of the terribly corrupt Georgia Tann, who actively stole children from poorer families and placed them with anyone able to pay her high fees. The fifties and sixties constituted the “baby scoop” era, where young pregnant women were sent to maternity homes and subjected to emotional and financial coercion that denied their motherhood and assured them they would forget about their children soon after the adoption.
They never did.
From this history of corruption emerged the tenets that would shape adoption for following generations: a large amount of secrecy, an unhealthy dose of shame, and the belief that keeping adoptions closed was the best thing for all parties.
To all those men who don’t think the rape jokes are a problem:
I get it—you’re a decent guy. I can even believe it. You’ve never raped anybody. You would NEVER rape anybody. You’re upset that all these feminists are trying to accuse you of doing something, or connect you to doing something, that, as far as you’re concerned, you’ve never done and would never condone.
And they’ve told you about triggers, and PTSD, and how one in six women is a survivor, and you get it. You do. But you can’t let every time someone gets all upset get in the way of you having a good time, right? Especially when it doesn’t mean anything. Rape jokes have never made YOU go out and rape someone. They never would; they never could. You just don’t see how it matters.
I’m going to tell you how it does matter. And I tell you this because I genuinely believe you mean it when you say you don’t want to hurt anybody, and that it’s important to you to do your best to be a decent and good person, and that you don’t see the harm.
What was going on here at Scarleteen in the last week? Some snippets:
Some of our staff and volunteer's fave links and reading from our Facebook and Twitter feeds this week:
Rae's Faves: How Modesty Doctrines Made Me Hate My Body:
This isn’t a story about how modest clothes allowed me to “let myself go” and conceal a growing figure. It’s not even a story about how wearing modest clothes kept my self-esteem at rock bottom and thrust me into a too-close relationship with Ben & Jerry. It’s a story about how modesty doctrines impacted my mind, in ways that had real, negative effects on my body. Modesty was one of the reasons my defining relationship with my body became whether or not I was “fat.” Modesty was one of the engines that pushed me into a full-blown eating disorder. It’s not just a dress code: it’s a philosophy, and it’s one that destroys young women, mentally and physically.
Modesty taught me that my first priority needed to be making sure I wasn’t a “stumbling block” to men. Not being sexually attractive was the most important thing I had to consider when buying clothes, putting them on, maintaining my weight (can’t have things getting tight!), and moving around (can’t wiggle those hips, or let a little knee show). Modesty taught me that what I looked like was what mattered most of all. Not what I thought. Not how I felt. Not what I was capable of doing.
Stealth Shaming: What It Is, Why You Shouldn’t Do It, and How Not To:
The term “out” is of massive importance to queers. It is a term that describes how brave we are, how open, and most important how good we are at being us when everyone else insists that we shouldn’t be us. Denying blending trans people access to this term is identity policing in the worst way, and of course, it’s cissexist.
In a specifically trans context, to be out means to be honest and open about one’s gender identity. When a trans man tells someone he’s male, or walks into a men’s bathroom, or says, “From a guy’s perspective…” or does anything that indicates that he identifies as male, he’s out as a man. And he’s out. Full stop. He’s put his gender identity out there. The idea that he needs to add being trans to that as some sort of qualifier is a huge double standard. We don’t demand that all cis people come out as cis in order to be honest about their gender identities, even though it’s entirely possible that some of people in our lives whom we assume are cis are actually trans.
Karyn's Faves: Glee Teen Sex: Facts & Opportunities Using CDC vs. Hollywood TV:
Truth is, Hollywood is lying about teen sex. Big time.
New CDC research points to numbers that might as well frame Hollywood shows as a public health statistical version of ‘The Lying Game’ since TV consistently paints youth onto a recklessly bleak canvas of stereotyped imagery as impulsively hormonal lusty idiots …when the exact converse is true. Of those teens that have had sex, they did so using protection. And get this…according to the CDC, less than 43% of teens have ever had sex, meaning teenagers having sex are now in the MINORITY. (NYT/CDC) Contrary to “realityTV,” teen birth rates are down, based on data collected between ’06-2010. (and that worrisome ’05-’07 bitty bump that blipped up briefly slid back to decline and we are now at the lowest rates ever recorded in the US)
And yet, what are we seeing on teen shows? A gaping chasm between the reality of teens today and the “hot or not” salaciousness of bed-hopping flings, teen moms and baby bumps galore, sexting storylines, and fixation on appearance-based boinkability… We see consistent media depictions of a 24/7 teen focus on sex. Either overly romanticized with ‘gift giving’ overtones. Or under-handed, manipulative, sex as power tool.
What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex:
When Jamie Hubley was in Grade 7, teenagers on a school bus tried to stuff batteries down his throat because he was a figure skater. Jamie Hubley, as many Canadians sadly know, was the 15-year-old Ottawa youth who took own his life just more than a month ago. From what he wrote and what's been stated, he took this drastic and tragic measure because of depression, because he was the only openly gay student at his high school and because he had been the target of homophobic bullying at school for years. In his final blog entry, he expressed concern that life might not get better and that he could not endure the hurt for another three years.
It is difficult to know which part of the school bus batteries story is most shocking: the fact that the aggressors were teenagers bullying a seventh-grader; the sheer viciousness of the assault; the fact that Jamie was victimized because of figure skating and because of perceptions about figure skaters and because of homophobia; or the fact that he was on a school bus at the time, presumably surrounded by students who should have known something was wrong, and at least one adult who should have been informed and able to help.
Young, Gay And Homeless: Fighting For Resources:
“"The day after my 18th birthday this year, my adopted parent kicked me out," he says. "At the time, I was really infatuated with this guy, and she was listening to my phone calls. She started telling my family, 'He is this, he is that, he is gay,' and talking about me as if I wasn't part of the family."
Beaverly was lucky — he had friends whose parents were more accepting. He stayed with them until he finished high school. Now, in New York City, he is in emergency housing — only available for 90 days.
Vero's Faves: Sex Educators and the Politics of Attractiveness:
There are certainly some media “sexperts” (both female and male) who I am pretty sure are sexperts because they are conventionally attractive and willing to talk about sex. I say willing, but not necessarily well-equipped. And there are some who are smoking hot, in conventional and unconventional kinds of ways, and are totally well-equipped to be talking about sex in smart, helpful ways.
And it’s even trickier than that because there’s a balance. It turns out that if you’re a legitimate, hard-working, earned-her-credentials kind of scientist/sex educator like me – and yet conventionally attractive – media folks don’t always know what to do with you. Having served as a sex expert for several TV shows, I can tell you that the producers have sometimes struggled with how I look. In one episode, they wouldn’t let me wear my own clothes because they wanted to dress me in more professional, conservative and high-necked clothes so that I would look “less sexy”.
'I was lectured on my sexuality':
A few years back when my school principal became aware of my sexuality I was given a lecture about not publicly promoting my sexuality. I have not been successful in applying for any promotion since. I should be first in line because I am the most senior teacher in the school and I hold a Masters of Education degree. I have regular visits from the local priest to keep an eye on how I am teaching religion. No other teacher in the school gets these “visits”.
Most of my fellow teachers are not regular mass-goers. Their lives do not all fall into the norms of Catholicism when it comes to marriage. Yet they are not singled out like I am. The INTO have been sympathetic, but I was told that the school is not breaking any rules by enforcing religious practise on me or curtailing my freedom to discuss my life in the staffroom. They advised that I do not rock the boat.
What was going on here at Scarleteen in the last week?
Some of our staff and volunteer's fave links and reading from our Facebook and Twitter feeds this week:
Alice's Faves: Op-ed: Why Don’t Male Children Matter:
Girls are most often the victims of child sexual assault. When boys are assaulted, it is likely by men like Sandusky—mentors who prey on their vulnerability and to whom they feel loyal and thus unable to tell anyone what is happening to them. Because boys are considered less vulnerable than girls, when they do dare complain of abuse, often the assaults are minimized or dismissed. In the case of older children, there is a presumption that they are complicit in the assaults because of their budding sexuality, much like adult women are often portrayed as complicit when they have been raped. These cases are often represented as he said/he said and in the hyper-masculine world of sports, the victims lose.
Incurable Hippie's incredible list of disability and sexuality resources.
Karyn's Faves: Sex Ed's Straight Edge: Queering sex-ed can save lives:
Though learning about reproductive sex and associated health risks is a component of public education in most Canadian schools, the matter of whether there is discussion of anything other than non-heterosexual intercourse is still left to the discretion of teachers.
“It's all well and good to tell teachers to talk about queer and trans sex,” says Jamila Ghaddar, a sex education advocate with The Well LGBTTIQQ community centre in Hamilton, Ontario. “But who's going to support those teachers when they face backlash from angry parents? They know what the reaction will be, and they won't touch this issue with a ten-foot pole.”
The social and human impacts of teaching gender binaries and privileging heterosexual relations in schools are severe. According to the Gay and Lesbian Educators of British Columbia, nearly 40 per cent of gay and lesbian youth report dramatically low self esteem. The 2003 Centre for Suicide Prevention Alert reported that Canadian youth who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or questioning their sexuality are 3.4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers.
What We Can Learn From the Dutch About Teen Sex:
U.S. parents fear that sex is everywhere and they want to protect kids from it. I argue that you want to have a positive vision that you can lay out there, not a vision of keeping sex away from you. Because then, you have two options: either a very sensationalized unrealistic scoring type of mentality or no sex until marriage. Those are not two good alternatives.
“What if our kids really believed we wanted them to have great sex?” Vernacchio asked near the end of an evening talk he gave in January primarily for parents of ninth graders who would attend his sex-ed minicourse. “What if they really believed that we want them to be so passionately in love with someone that they can’t keep their hands off them? What if they really believed we want them to know their own bodies?”
Vernacchio didn’t imagine that his audience, who gave him an enthusiastic ovation when his presentation ended, wanted their 14- and 15-year-olds to go out tomorrow and jump into bed or the backseat. Sex education, he and others point out, is one of the few classes where it’s not understood that young people are being prepared for the future.
Vero's Faves: Shaming and taming teenage girls:
Look away now if you don’t like to watch the media revel in shaming young female celebrities. The above quote wasn’t lifted from of the plethora of “trash” mags, but rather from online site Jezebel, a site that claims to be offering “celebrity, sex and fashion…without airbrushing.” No airbrushing but, it would seem, with an extra dose of female venom – or, as we like to call it, fem-ven. Sadly, Jezebel is not alone in reveling in dishing up the dirt on young women.
Much of popular culture perpetuates the idea that young women can simply not be trusted, particularly if they have money, fame or any kind of power. Think everyone’s favorite targets; Lindsay Lohan, Miley Cyrus, Kim Kardashian… Going by all the recent reports which document young women stripping off and partying on, you would be forgiven for thinking that young women are simply out of control.
Think too of the more troubling way in which teen girls are presented by those who are supposed to have their best interests at heart. How many books on teen parenting have featured either surly looking misses with arms folded on their covers, or titles which claim to help parents “survive” adolescent girls (please note – girls aren’t carcinogenic).
The general consensus seems to be that girls are running wild and must be tamed, or shamed- stat!
Opinion: Attempts to discredit sex education in schools are outdated, misguided:
Opponents also attempt to discredit sex education by claiming that it undermines parents’ rights to educate their own children. George and Moschella mistakenly view parents as a monolithic group and neglect to mention polls that show that most adults support sex education programs by wide margins. They are also in for a surprise if they think their piece will galvanize parents to demand a more spacious “opt out” policy. Only a tiny fraction of parents in most school districts opt their children out of certain sex ed lessons.
New York City’s sex ed policy lets parents remove their children only from instruction about birth control and contraception, which George and Moschella argue is too narrow. I’m against any “opt out” provision, especially given that our children will inherit a world where STDs rage on. They must know how to protect themselves, and sex education is the first line of defense for public health. Most parents want their children to learn how to stay sexually healthy and understand that teachers can deliver unbiased, accurate information better than they can.
Heather's Faves: There Are Victims in the Penn State Tragedy, Not "Accusers" :
This language usage plays a powerful ideological function. Consider: the public is inclined to sympathize -- even empathize -- with female and male victims of rape, or prior to a finding of guilt of the accused/defendant, "alleged victims." Unless our psyches have been hopelessly distorted by misogyny or desensitization we not only feel badly about what has happened to them; we identify with them. Victim-blaming often distorts this sympathetic identification, but the sentiment derives in part from an understanding that "the victim could just as easily have been someone I love -- or me."
Referring to the victim as the "accuser" reverses this process. She is no longer the victim of his (alleged) attack. She is the one doing something -- to him. She is accusing him. In other words, she is now the perpetrator of an accusation against him. At the same time, he is transformed from the alleged perpetrator of sexual assault to the actual victim of her accusation. The public is thus positioned to identify sympathetically with him -- to feel sorry for him - as the true victim.
Every time a well-meaning journalist or commentator refers to sexual assault victims as "accusers" they contribute to this dynamic. They tilt the scales of justice away from victims and toward alleged perpetrators. The presumption of innocence for accused men -- and women -- is a critical feature of our judicial system. It represents a basic commitment to equal justice and fairness that is well worth fighting to preserve.
#NoShaveNovember Raises Hairy Gender Questions:
No one should be surprised at what is trending on Twitter. No one. While body hair has been discussed from time to time in the women’s movement, it hasn’t spread to the mainstream discussion. That’s because the progress that has been made for body image in the media has for the most part been about weight and body size. While weight and body size are important issues that must be addressed, they are not the only gendered issues around body image. I’m still waiting hopefully for the Glee kids to sing about leg fuzz.
Yes, there is increasing pressure for men to wax their backs and chests. And yes, men in fashion magazines often have trimmed armpit hair. Fashion tends to dictate what we should look like, and the appearance of hairless men in magazines is no exception. One could also argue that men’s garments are often less revealing, making shaving armpits or backs a moot point. So what’s the difference between the expectation of hairless men and hairless women?
"Eggsploiting" Young Women - What the Fertility Industry Doesn't Want You to Know:
Despite being someone who enjoys staying abreast of women’s issues, I was left stunned after a viewing of the provocative documentary Eggsploitation last week at the Capitol Building. In her documentary, Executive Producer, Director, and Writer Jennifer Lahl exposes the negative consequences of female egg donation which fertility centers all too often conceal from the public eye. Though not an expert on egg retrieval or the self-administered hormone injections, I knew female egg donation existed and has gained increasing momentum in recent years. I also recognized that the risks and possible complications for female egg donors were far more dangerous than those for male sperm donors. What I failed to understand about female egg donation is that the vulnerable women having their eggs harvested are all too often left anonymous victims in the process.
Exclusive: Breaking Bella—When Love Equals Violence:
Some people might say, so what? Life is violent. Childbirth, at the very least, is violent. And they’re right. Nobody would stand in line for hours in the pouring rain to see a movie in which every character floated around on an ambrosia-scented cloud and ate bon-bons until the credits rolled. But my point isn’t that this movie is violent; it’s that while Edward stares out the window and mopes and Jacob storms around in various stages of undress, Bella bears the brunt of the movie’s violence at the hands of the people she loves. This is the central message of the movie: love comes hand-in-hand with physical violence. We’re supposed to revel in Bella’s suffering; the bigger her bruises, the louder her bones crack, the better wife she is, the better mother, the better woman. Twilight’s audience skews young—there were nine-year-old girls in the theater with me—so what are they supposed to take away from this?
Those too young to have experienced a sexual relationship and certainly too young to have experienced a pregnancy only see the normalization of violence against a woman’s body. And when the movie ended, they cheered for it.
What was going on here at Scarleteen in the last week?
We do so much reading and outlinking in a given week through our Twitter and Facebook feeds, it can get dizzying! While it's not always easy to find great content out and about that addresses the issues we do well, we still always find plenty that catches our interest, or gets our support or a hat-tip from us. But not all of our readers use Twitter or Facebook, and we'd also like to start making sure to keep track of the bits and pieces each week we really appreciated or feel deserve a second look.
So, from here on out, every Friday we'll be rounding up some faves from an assortment of our staff and volunteers. Let's get this ball rolling!
Rae's Fave: Sex, Gender And Dancing With Chaz Bono:
Uproar has resulted from Chaz's appearances on Dancing With The Stars. I learned this first from my Facebook feed, where a woman I know, a diehard fan of the show, declared that she wouldn't watch it until "she" (Chaz) was kicked off. Chaz's transformation from Chastity upset her greatly, and she's not alone. The psychiatrist Keith Ablow has warned parents not to allow their children to watch Chaz, for fear that their developing, and thus vulnerable, gender identity might be disrupted. For the record, no evidence exists to suggest that watching a transsexual dance on television causes children any harm.
Although the word "transgender" is sometimes used to describe Chaz, the term "transsexual" is more accurate. Transgender people are born as one sex and identify with, act, and/or dress as the other. They haven't had sex-reassignment surgery, although some may go on to have it in the future.
The primary issue is of course people, not terminology: People like Chaz Bono, who have a right to transcend biology and to become, physically and emotionally, the sex they know themselves to be. And the rest of us too, who react to Chaz Bono's dancing presence. We can transcend an evolved tendency to think in fixed binaries, and arrive together at an acceptance of constructed sex as well as of constructed gender.
Karyn's Faves: Lesbian teen launches LGBT youth book project:
For LGBT youth, age-appropriate books about LGBT people and issues can be a lifeline. Not every school has the resources or desire to include such books in their collections, though. But 14-year-old Amelia Roskin-Frazee, an out lesbian ninth grader from California, founded The Make It Safe Project to solve that problem. The project gives free packages of LGBT books to schools that need them, and works to ensure the books will be readily available to students.
(P.S. Scarleteen will be donating books to this project, too! Three cheers for Amelia and her fantastic idea and activism.)
Recommendation: A Transgender Vagina Talks Back:
This is one of the coolest YouTube videos I’ve ever come across – I don’t know who this guy is, but he sums up so many of the odd, funny, awkward, self-contradicting sensation and thoughts that result from having a body that doesn’t match one’s identity but loving that body anyway. I’m genderqueer, not trans, but I still find what he has to say about what it’s like to have a vagina to be hilarious, heartening, and thought-provoking. I hope it brightens some other people’s days as much as it brightened mine.
Heather's Faves: #ThingsAYoungMomDoesntWantToHear:
When I was in high school, I was “diagnosed” with teen pregnancy a month after my 17th birthday. I say “diagnosed” because society promotes this idea that teen pregnancy is a disease - a contagious disease - and we must shun those infected to prevent it from reaching our own homes. Since then, I have been a witness to a condescending, disrespectful, and judgmental society that has pushed me to the edge… the edge of insanity. Contrary to popular belief, my teenage friends and peers weren’t very mean. But the adults in my life? The adults have scarred me in ways unimaginable. Recently, I have blogged on this topic… why do adults forget their manners and think it’s acceptable to tell me “You look too young to be a mom!” So I took my frustrations to the wonderful world of twitter yesterday for my 1800 followers to read...
The slow and uneven developmental arc revealed by these imaging studies offers an alluringly pithy explanation for why teens may do stupid things like drive at 113 miles an hour, aggrieve their ancientry, and get people (or get gotten) with child: They act that way because their brains aren't done! You can see it right there in the scans!
This view, as titles from the explosion of scientific papers and popular articles about the "teen brain" put it, presents adolescents as "works in progress" whose "immature brains" lead some to question whether they are in a state "akin to mental retardation."
The story you're reading right now, however, tells a different scientific tale about the teen brain. Over the past five years or so, even as the work-in-progress story spread into our culture, the discipline of adolescent brain studies learned to do some more-complex thinking of its own. A few researchers began to view recent brain and genetic findings in a brighter, more flattering light, one distinctly colored by evolutionary theory. The resulting account of the adolescent brain—call it the adaptive-adolescent story—casts the teen less as a rough draft than as an exquisitely sensitive, highly adaptable creature wired almost perfectly for the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.
Seven things Glee gets wrong about The First Time:
2. You can’t feel or understand passion until you’ve lost your virginity.
This is the Sleeping Beauty Theory, where Rachel needs Finn to ‘wake her up’ sexually by putting his penis inside her. Only then will Rachel become a sexual person, capable of sexual feelings and sexual musical theater acting. This kind of thinking negates the power of all the many and varied sexual experiences a woman might have that don’t require even the proximity of a penis.
What's Love Got to Do with It? Marriage, Tradition and Gays:
The idea that marriage is about love between two people is a modern concept. Love often had nothing to do with marriage. It was about politics, property, production, division of labor, and materialistic issues. For much of history, the ancients would speak of love as if channeling Tina Turner: "Oh, what's love got to do, got to do with it?"
When you consider that some of the first marriages in colonial America were between men and women who didn't know each other, you can see how love had little to do with it. For instance, "Between 1620 and 1622, about 150 'pure and spotless' women arrived in Virginia and were auctioned for about 80 pounds of tobacco to future husbands."
I've noticed that promoters of "traditional marriage" are the most misinformed, ahistorical participants in the debate. Much of what they claim is pure codswallop. While I can't dissect their mental processes, to the extent that they actually think about the issues, I suspect that some claims are not just fabrications but an intentional twisting of facts. This may not be true of rank-and-file "marriage advocates," but when it comes to leaders of the movement, I suggest that they are willfully ignorant or consciously dishonest.
The vision of marriage that they claim is traditional is uniquely modern and results from the influence of the Enlightenment, classical liberalism and the economic forces of modern capitalism. We are no longer primarily agricultural, so we no longer marry to preserve property; households are no longer centers of production, so division of labor is not beneficial. We have moved toward egalitarian marriages where woman are the legal equals of men -- a very nontraditional concept. These forces changed marriage substantially. What the right calls "traditional marriage" is not traditional at all, and most people, including conservatives, would not want to return to the past.
What was going on here at Scarleteen in the last week?
We're just getting caught up with the myriad of fantastic blog entries that are part of the blog carnival that's been going on over the last three weeks as an effort to help cultivate support for Scarleteen. We've been reprinting some entries here at our blog, and will keep up with that, but here are a handful we can link right to for you to take a look at:
From Cory Silverberg at About.Com:
Scarleteen does sex education from a social justice model. Whether it's an article on the site, a response in the forums, or a request for more information in order to refer a youth out, they acknowledge the multiple ways that youth are systemically denied basic rights and access to sex education and sexual health. It's not unusual for a question about, say contraception or sexual pleasure, to elicit an answer that accessibly and seamlessness weaves information about race, class, and gender, in with information about how to go about choosing and accessing contraception, or negotiating with a partner to have sex that feels good. Scarleteen never addresses sexual health in isolation, and in this way helps its users develop their own, more integrated understanding and experience of sexual health.
Scarleteen is beholden to youth who use their service, not funders who pay for it. This is mostly because Scarleteen has no major government or corporate sponsors. Their funding comes from individuals like me and you. There are pros and cons to this situation, but what it means is that the services they deliver are developed in direct response to what youth want, and not in response to what services might get funded. This isn't an either/or proposal, I myself am mostly paid by a very large corporation, but we need to support spaces like Scarleteen where discussions happen much more unencumbered by the process of funding and development which touches so much other social service work.
Lastly, Scarleteen delivers comprehensive sex education that is actually comprehensive. This too is tied to their lack of obligation to institutional funders. On Scarleteen conversations can actually be guided by users, not by internal rules about what is and is not allowed to be talked about. Whether it's information about sexual pleasure, sexual violence, or any kind of sexual choice, Scarleteen users get to direct the conversation, and the educators and volunteers will go where the users want them to go. But they go as educators. They are not friends, they are not parents, they are teachers. They are good teachers, which is what we all need, and what most of us lack.
Which brings me to the part about what we can do. We can make the Internet a better place for sex by having the kind of complicated, honest, direct, and challenging conversations about sex that they have every day on Scarleteen. We can also help by supporting the professionals (paid and unpaid) who are devoted to doing this every day, not just with the people in their own life, but with strangers who come to them looking for support. Like so many good teachers, the folks at Scarleteen are seriously underpaid, and the organization needs our support.
From Alizarene:
When I was 11, Mom gave me a pamphlet called "Growing Up and Liking It," which featured a dated photograph of a smiling blonde teenage girl in a blue dress on the cover. The pamphlet described menstruation and really seemed to push Modess ("rhymes with oh yes!") sanitary napkins, which no longer existed. Included in the pamphlet was an insert about bras. This was lavishly illustrated with drawings of fabulous, impossibly-stacked women wearing various bullet bras and did little more than cause me to want to become a fabulous, impossibly-stacked woman wearing various bullet bras. The menstruation information, however, was old news. They had already shown us The Film at school. And that, apparently, was all we needed to know about sex. Except they were skipping what seemed to be the most interesting part! I’ve always believed that innocence is underrated but probably not the most practical thing in the world. I was used to being The Smart Girl, and being ignorant about something that was so important was disturbing. Being self-reliant, I set out to learn about sex via the only tools I had available to me: books. I knew the act was called sex, so I consulted Webster's Student Dictionary, but looking up "sex" was a big disappointment to say the least.
From Medicinal Marzipan:
When I was a kid, I was really lucky to have a mother that answered any and all sexual questions with blatant, irreverent, and knowledgable answers. Nothing was off topic. Nothing was considered too mature for my knowing. I never wanted for information, ranging from anatomy to sexuality.
I was very lucky.
Now, I’m not saying that this approach is going to work for everyone. I entirely understand not disclosing everything to your seven year old if it makes you uncomfortable or if you believe that is too much information for a small child. I am saying that access to appropriate and factual information about sex was an asset to me during my youth. It spared me from many things, from taking risks that would impact my sexual health such as not using protection, to feeling no shame about my sexuality or sex practices. In other words – BIG things.
From Button Street:
Shuffling feet, dusty floors. Click-whrr, washed-out slides. Snickering. Honestly, I don’t remember much about high school sex ed except that it was boring. My school was reasonably progressive, but our sex-ed class was anatomical, biological, and cold–in short, completely unhelpful.
My parents? Oh, I have the very vaguest memory of my mom having a “talk” with me…it would another year or two before I came out to them, but I knew I only liked girls and as soon as she started talking about boys my mind wandered off. If I never had sex with boys, I certainly couldn’t get pregnant, and I couldn’t catch anything nasty either right? So I didn’t need to care. And when I finally got laid with a girl–you know what I remember about my first kiss, my first time having sex? I’ll tell you it had nothing to do with safer sex. Not on my radar.
As a cripplingly awkward young lesbian too frightened to ask my parents or anyone about what I was going through, it wasn’t easy to find what I was looking for. Like many queer youth, I thought I was weird, I thought there was something wrong with me. I was terrified and embarrassed and didn’t know where to look other than the internet. This was in the last days of the BBS, when Geocities twinkled like so much tacky graffiti–and unfortunately, I didn’t find anything like Scarleteen.
Although I turned out okay, it took most of my young adult life to correct my misconceptions about my own sexuality and identity. Other people have much worse stories—but it doesn’t have to be like that.
From I'm Not Sorry:
Unfortunately young women have been given the shaft, literally and figuratively, for millennia when it comes to sex education. Ever-pervasive religion of pretty much every sort puts women in the “you are a vessel” category, there only to serve men’s needs, denying that we might have needs of our own. We are told how to please men, but not how to tell men to please us. We are told to put our men and our children’s lives over our own; society applauds the brave woman with cancer who puts off treatment to give birth or who finally gets that baby after seven IVF tries. If a woman wants anything other than a husband and children—or, just maybe, pleasure during sex—she is branded as selfish, a slut, a whore, unnatural. Thanks to the Internet the misogynists have really come out to play. While I was writing about Debbie Does Dallas out of curiosity I Googled “seventies porn ads.” With some poking around I found the worst term used towards women in the ads was “broads.” These days? “Cum-guzzling sluts eager to swallow your load!” “Hungry bitches ready for your cock!” “Nasty cunts who take it in the ass and beg for more!” I’m not saying women weren’t exploited in the seventies and eighties, but at least they weren’t called names–in public, anyway.
Thankfully, the Internet also offers a platform for the truth, which brings me to Scarleteen.
I first came across Scarleteen a few years ago and immediately fell in love with it—because it was honest. It embraces every choice a teenager can make—straight, homosexual, omnisexual–without judgment and is super medically accurate. It advises frank talk and actions from safe sex to masturbatory techniques without any of the mainstream media’s bullshit or spin or political correctness. You will not see terms like “va-jay-jay” there. If you are a parent and aren’t comfortable with talking about sex with your kids, the best thing you can do for them is send them over to Scarleteen. Hell, even if you are comfortable with talking about sex with your kids send them to Scarleteen. Read it yourself, you might learn something. With INS I’ve striven to present the truth about abortion without judgment. Heather Corinna goes about five hundred steps ahead of me with sex and Scarleteen and she does it on next to no cash, which makes it even more amazing. I don’t ask INS readers to pony up money very often, but please try to throw a few bucks Scarleteen’s way. It is a truly valuable resource and any help to keep it available to kids, especially this generation, bombarded with conflicting messages all over the place, will be gratefully appreciated. If one gender-bending kid breathes a sigh of relief knowing that there are others; if one teenage boy realizes that it’s okay to be a virgin; if one teenage girl learns that there’s nothing wrong with her if she doesn’t come solely through intercourse, that’s one more sexually healthy human being on the planet.
Want to help out? We need whatever you can give this year, and whatever it is, we can assure you, it'll be so appreciated by our staff and volunteers, and more importantly, by the millions of Scarleteen readers and users every year who rely on us for a safe, sound and smart place to learn about sexuality and to get direct support when they need it. To find out how, click here!
This is a guest entry from Shanna Katz, M.Ed, as part of the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen!
When I was 10 or so, I discovered the wonders of the internet. It was back in the mid-90s, before most people had access, but my father was a computer scientist, and I was rocking out on Mosaic, way before IE or Eathlink or Netscape or AOL made their brands so popular. I didn’t use it for much, as there wasn’t that much info out there pertaining to me, but I did have an email, and learned how to search.
Around the late 90s, I was in my “oh em gee, want to learn everything possible about puberty and sex” and after my parents exhausted the info available at the local library, I was lucky enough to discover Scarleteen.
It was still quite young back then, but it was knowledge, and that was something I was desperately hungry for. More importantly, it was more than just information; it was interactive. I could learn from older teens, from educators, from people my age. I became obsessive about checking the forums every day. It was a way for me to connect, to get information, to teach myself about sexuality, to have my questions answered, and to get to know my body.
I didn’t really get any sort of sex education from school until I was a Junior in High School (age 14), and accidentally ended up in a Parenting and Child Development class (amusing, since I definitely didn’t want and don’t want children). In that class, we spent a good week or two on birth control and contraception. I got 100% on every assignment, and impressed the teacher, as I already had learned most of this info from Scarleteen.
High school was hard for me. I graduated at 16, so I was always about 2-3 years younger than most of my peers, and that caused endless taunting and worse, being ignored. I had my inner circle of friends, of course, but more importantly, I had the knowledge that on Scarleteen, I was equal. My questions and answers were just as valid as a popular cheerleader, or another braniac. To me, sex education was my great equalizer. I might not be cool, or popular, or the social ideal of beautiful, but because I had information that no one else had, I was still interesting. I might get teased, but people still wanted what I had (knowledge) and so I wasn’t the brunt of as much hate as I might have been.
Sex education made me a better person. I understood my body more, and I chose to respect myself more. Not in the “I’m going to wait till marriage” kind of way, but in the “I’m going to do what I want to when I’m ready, and not when everyone else is” kind of way. I was sexually assaulted when I was 17, and my knowledge of sex education, paired with what I was learning in my Human Sexual Behavior class, and then compile all that with my info and ability to talk to others on Scarleteen, and I made it through. It was so easy to just curl up and want to die, but my knowledge of sexuality made me want to live again.
I wanted to learn more, and to teach others in order to help them know more, and love themselves more. I joined the sexual assault prevention and hotline group, V.A.T. I trained on how to talk about sex with others. I drove friends up to Denver to buy their first vibrators. I bought book after book, searching for more knowledge. I experimented a bit on my own, and wrote a lot about virginity — what was it, why the hell did it exist, what did it mean to “lose” it and so on. Because of all of my background in sex education, by the time I chose to have intercourse (what many people define as “sex”), I had just turned 20, and although I later realized I wasn’t really interested in men, it was actually quite a good experience. It didn’t hurt very much, we used lube (as I had learned to do) and pillows to prop up my hips. I went in really WANTING to have sex, with knowledge about how to protect myself from STI transmission and pregnancy, and tips on how to make it as comfortable of an experience as it could be. I have met few people that had such a communicative and fairly enjoyable first time. While that friend with benefits didn’t last long, I’m forever grateful to my sex education (and his willingness to cooperate) for helping to create such a positive experience.
Sex education made me feel powerful. Knowledge IS power, and even more so when it is about your own body, choices, options, etc. Sex education made me feel as though I belonged, as though I was just as good as everyone else. Scarleteen made my life so much better than it could be. It made me more confident, it helped me to know myself and respect myself more, and to make the healthiest decisions for ME about myself and my sexuality.
I actually did my thesis on sex education in middle and high schools, and how it helped college women to view their bodies. Not shockingly (back in 2005, although I doubt much has changed), the more information on sex education that the subjects I interviewed received in their teens, the more confident they were about themselves and their bodies, and of course, their sexuality. It is proven, and not just by my tiny study, that sex education is crucial to our society. People with sex education are armed with the power to make the best decisions for themselves — whether that is waiting to start sexual activity, providing protection for their own activity, education their friends, and exploring their sexual identities. Without sex education, we leave youth without the tools for good decision making, and take their agency away.
Sex education should be available for everyone. Scarleteen is such a place where EVERYONE can learn, can share, can ask questions, and can be an equal. Scarleteen saved me from some dark places, and I know it has helped countless others as well.
So please, if you can spare something, ANYTHING, please keep Scarleteen going. Even $5 or $10 can help to create change. I donated what I could. It wasn’t a lot…but if it means not eating another cupcake until 2011, it was worth it to support such a great site. And if you can’t afford anything, then please, spread the word about this amazing and FREE resource we have in our community.
What Scarleteen Needs: Last year, Scarleteen needed increased donations in order to get through the end of 2009 and into 2010, in large part because private donations for a few years previous had been so low and left us in a very financially precarious position. We increased our financial goals to reflect the need for a minimum annual operating budget of $70,000. Thanks to generous contributions from our supporters in response to that appeal, while we were not able to reach that level, we were able to raise what we needed to not only get through 2009, but were able to use the funds wisely to sustain the organization through 2010. Our goal now is to continue to work toward that annual operating budget. Ideally, we would like to see a minimum of $20,000 in individual donations each year to combine with funding from private grants. In order for that to happen, we need for current donors to keep giving, and we also also need to cultivate new donors.
This minimum budget is exceptionally cost-effective for the level of service we provide, especially compared to other organizations and initiatives whose budgets are far higher, including those which do not match our reach and our level of direct-service. If you would like more details about our budget and expenses, just contact us via email and we’ll gladly share that information with you.
Unlike many other organizations often in a bind because they are solely or highly reliant on foundation or public funding, Scarleteen has always been primarily supported by generous individuals like yourself and small community groups. While this requires we operate at a far smaller budget than other similar organizations, it also allows for a high level of freedom and autonomy and the ability to best provide young people with what they want, rather than seeking to create or adapt content and services primarily to suit what funders want. This approach to funding also allows our staff to put nearly all of our time, energy and money into directly serving youth, rather than into grant seeking, writing, schmoozing and administrating.
We’re asking for your help in either giving a donation of your own or encouraging your readers, colleagues, friends and family to donate. Given our visibility, tenure and traffic, with your help, meeting our goal should not be particularly challenging. A $100 donation can pay half of our server bill for a month, or half the monthly cost of the text-in service, or can fund any kind of use of the site, including one-on-one counsel and care, for around 10,000 of our daily users. However, we very much appreciate donations at any level.
We’d be grateful if you’d share our appeal with your own networks to broaden ours, and let the people who care about you know why you care so much about us. We’d love it if you’d Tweet about your post, share it via Facebook or add a link to your emails. Please feel free to quote from this email or from information given in the links below.
This is a guest entry from Dangerous Lilly for the month-long blogathon to help raise awareness and financial support for Scarleteen!
At 15, I was still scared of boys, sort of.
Sure I’d “date” them, and yeah I’d make out with them, but everything else? Terrified. It was because I knew next to nothing about boys, sex, *whispers* penises, and all that good stuff. You learned about sex in one of three places: 6th/7th grade so-called-sex-ed lectures; your equally uninformed friends; your parents (so. mortifying.).
Oh, ’92. So good, so innocent, so…awkward. Way back in 1992, SimCity still had copyright codes hidden in black & white pixelated jumbles in a booklet that required a piece of see-through red plastic to enable viewing of text – without it, you were struck with natural disasters every 10 minutes. Oregan Trail was still fun, sorta, if you didn’t mind the thyphoid. The internet? Did not exist as far as we were concerned. We still used the freaking 30-some volume encyclopedia in hardcover for our school projects, as software-based (hello, Microsoft Encarta, long time no see) wasn’t yet available.
Today’s teenagers have the privilege of not just copious internet access, but Scarleteen. Scarleteen provides kids with accurate, safe, embarrassment-free sex education and a place to ask questions. They don’t use scare-tactics, they use facts. At the end of the day, the hormones of a 15-17 yr old are not going to be swayed by a threatening father, a threatening religion, or simple lack of information.
If I had had Scarleteen access in high school, I would not have:
In short, my sex education/dating education…sucked. It sucked in that it severely lacked. I know that things aren’t perfect, even now. There’s a lot of misinformation floating around the ‘net, and even some schools providing incorrect information. But this site, Scarleteen, it’s a huge help. It’s a big dent in the “war”. They need help to continue on providing the information and support that teenagers so badly need.
This is a guest post from Wendy Blackheart, at Heart Full of Black, for the Scarleteen blogathon. Want to take part? Toss us an email and we'll get you in touch with Laura, our blogathon organizer!
Ah, Scarleteen. I can actually remember a time before Scarleteen – they started up in 1998, when I was in 8th grade. See, I went to a school where 99.9% of our sexual health information was from an abstinence only program.
The school sex ed actually started out okay – in grades 3 and 5 we had health classes where we learned about the human body and how it works. In 5th grade, we separated out into groups of just boys and just girls, and got some of the details of puberty and what would happen to our bodies. We learned where babies came from and all that before the abstinence-only programs were started.
By high school, however, we were not getting much in the way of good information. We didn’t learn about birth control at all – it wasn’t even mentioned, not even in a negative way. We saw lots of photos of what STD’s can do to your body. But nothing I would consider really useful. Very little mention of alternative sexualites. Very little information on how to deal with interpersonal relationships. I can remember the anger from teachers, some of whom I had as teachers in my past sex-ed and health classes, at not being allowed to teach properly. I’m pretty sure that one of the teachers, who continued to push the envelope, was fired or quit, as she disappeared shortly after.
Hell, my younger sister went through the same program right behind me, and she didn’t even know that blue balls wasn’t a real thing that she needed to be concerned about. She gave many an unwanted and unnecessary blow job before one of her boyfriends set her straight.
People argue that schools shouldn’t be involved in sex education, and that it should rest on the parents of children to teach them instead, but this has problems too. When I, at a young age, found a copy of an age-appropriate book on where babies came from and started to read it. I read *everything* at that age. (I think I was about 6. I started to read quite early.) My mother found me reading it, took it away, and slapped me. My later maternal sex education included gems like “You don’t need to go to the gynecologist, you don’t need to go until you are married” (At the time, I was 2 weeks into my first period, which would last for another 2 weeks. I probably should have seen a doctor). At 22, she told me that I shouldn’t do something until I was married (she made weird hand gestures explaining this). Generally, all sexual health questions were answered vaguely, incorrectly, and with anger.
However, I, even as a youngin’, tended to be extremely pro-active about things I wanted to know about. I rode my bike to the library, and got whatever the current new edition of the Teenage Body Book, and other sexual health text books. I had been given an adult access library card since I had already read my way though most of the age appropriate fiction and had moved on to adult fiction by then. Thankfully, my mom was tired of having to go to the library to check stuff out for me on her card and got me my own.
So, I have always been a big fan of outside research for sex education. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t know half the shit I know today, nor have the skills to find them out.
Scarleteen was the only site I found on the internet at the time that I trusted. They gave honest, accurate information in a relatable, understandable non-judgmental way. By the time I was checking the site regularly, most of the information was already known to me, but it became, for me, the gold standard of websites.
When people came to me for information, I sent them to Scarleteen. When they had a question I didn’t know the answer to, I sent them to Scarleteen. When I needed to give someone information about something, I sent them a link from Scarleteen. All of my youngest sister’s friends used Scarleteen, because part of my drive-by sexual advice (I used to wander by and drop a tidbit off ‘Never use oil based lube with latex condoms!’ ‘Some antibiotics make birth control pills less effective!’) was a link to their website. Because no matter how cool of an older sister I was, there were still things they didn’t want to ask me yet.
To me, the idea that we had to go looking for this information was so sad. I sincerely wish that schools were all required to have honest, comprehensive sexual health information. This is information we all NEED, to be healthy, effective adults. That fact that we don’t have this is a sad thing – but thankfully, there are resources like Scarleteen available to kids and teens today to get them the information they need.
I’ve noticed, at least in my own little bubble, differences between the kids who have access to this information and those who didn’t – my sister and her friends are much more pro-active now about maintaining their sexual health, and dealing with issues with their partners. So far, none of them have had an unwanted pregnancy, which is not something I can say about my graduating class. They are willing to talk, and ask, and question in ways my generation wasn’t quite ready to to yet – and this is only an age difference of seven years.
What also is important to me is the fact that many of these children are LGBT, Queer, or questioning, and they have a fabulous resource available to them while they figure themselves out, again, something my generation was only just starting to have.
Scarleteen was an important stepping stone in my sexual education. Because of them, I was able to go into my early sexual experiences with knowledge and agency. I was able to make good decisions, and I was happy with the decisions I made. Actually, I waited quite a while before I finally had sex, and again, was able to go into this experience physically and emotionally prepared. These are Good Things. All kids should have that opportunity. (The Sex Readiness Checklist was a great resource for that, BTW. I think it should be given to anyone who ever may have sex, ever.)
We’ve made leaps and bounds in a remarkably short amount of time in non-standard, alternative sexual education and information, and the accessibility for those who need it to find that information, and that is a beautiful thing.
However, unsurprisingly, this takes money. Scarleteen does not have any federal, state, or local funding. The majority of their funding comes from private donors, and to continue to provide such outstanding service, they need donations! Scarleteen has always managed to provide outstanding information and outstanding services on a tight budget, and I can only imagine what they could do with more. They’ve done such good work for so many, and I for one want to see them continue to do this work!
So, if you can, I encourage you to donate to Scarleteen! They do so much good for so many kids and teens who need it. That’s all I can say – donate if you can. Hell, in a few more generations, we might even be able to get good sexual health information back into the schools, if we can educate enough of the kids today who will turn into the administrators of tomorrow!
(It's much more fun if you do your best Mary Catherine Gallagher moves when you say it.)
Today we're starting our yearly fundraising appeal -- the shiny marketing term for "beg for cash" -- for Scarleteen with some righteous month-long festivities and extras.
We aim to publish an in-depth advice column every single day from now through November 15th. Myself and Scarleteen's assistant director, CJ Turett, will be burning the midnight oil with answers, but we also have the help of some fantastically talented people to help this month, like Jaclyn Friedman, Kate Bornstein, Susie Bright, Zaedryn Meade, Cory Silverberg, Petra Boynton, Justin Bish, Amanda Marcotte, Carol Queen, s.e.smith, Nona Willis Aronowitz and more! You can get started with Jaclyn Friedman's guest advice on getting sexual assault awareness started in your college right here.
All across the 'net there's also a month-long blogathon for us starting today, and we will be reprinting most of the entries right here on our own blog for you to enjoy. You'll be able to read posts from writers and sexuality activists like Anne Semans, Maymay, Shanna Katz, Elizabeth Wood, Angie the Anti-Theist, Thomas Roche, I, Asshole, Figleaf, Violet Blue, Clarisse Thorn, Twanna Hines, Liz Lee and a dizzying array of other excellent and generous bloggers. You can start today with this entry on parent/teen communication from Tess, and keep up with all the rest by following our blog or by using our RSS feed.
There are only a small handful of sites online that expressly serve young people, nationally and internationally, with comprehensive sex education that focuses on all the issues, not just one, and that aim to serve the wide diversity of young people there are: not just straight youth, not just white youth, not just middle-class youth, not just youth who aren't sexually active and not just youth who are, not just youth of any one gender or sexual identity. Fewer still do so through a learner-directed educational model like we do.
Founded in 1998, Scarleteen has stubbornly stood a long test of time for tens of millions of young people at this point, some of whom now are parents of children and teens they have already referred here or who want to refer their kids to in the future. We made it through the Bush administration and its abstinence-only mandates (not with our sanity fully intact, but that's okay). Some important baby steps have been made to turn that around, but they're going to be very slow going. Hopefully, access to quality, medically-accurate and inclusive sexuality education will keep improving, but all around the world, including right here where we're located stateside, comprehensive sex education still isn't available to millions of young people, both those attending school and the millions of teenagers and twentysomethings in the United States alone who aren't currently enrolled in school. Even when it is available, it's often missing key components of sound, fully accessible sex education, like the full inclusion of young people who are queer or who are gender nonconforming, who have already become pregnant or contracted an STI, who are already sexually active and want to be so, or who have all the bare basics, but want to know about some of the more complex parts of their sexual health, sexual lives and interpersonal relationships.
We've got a tenure that's incredibly long for anything on the web, let alone for an independent organization providing young people progressive, comprehensive sex education. We fully intend to stick around for as long as we're needed and as long as there's coffee to guzzle, but our tenacity, workaholism and caffeine-powered intellectual steam engine alone aren't enough to make that happen. While we provide our services for free, it costs money to make that happen, money that our teen and young adult users rarely have; money we hate talking about just as much as the next guy, but which we have to talk about if we're going to be able to stick around, keep doing what we do, and keep growing and evolving to best suit the needs of young people.
If you already support Scarleteen with your wallet or your words, thanks! We can't tell you how much we appreciate you and how much what you give helps. If you don't donate to us, or haven't in a while, we hope you'll consider it.
To donate to Scarleteen, click here. To find out more about donating first, check out this link.
To find out more about what we do, why and how we do it, and why we think we're worth supporting, take a look at:
Want to participate in the blogathon? We've got a great lineup so far, but more is always merrier! It would be particularly fabulous to hear from those of you in your teens and twenties, whose voices we all need hear more of, and who are the most impacted by all of the issues around sexuality education. To find out about how to take part, drop our coordinator, Laura, a line at: aagblog@gmail.com
You probably know Scarleteen has been the premier online sexuality resource for young people worldwide since 1998. We have consistently provided free inclusive, comprehensive and positive sex education, information and support to millions for longer than anyone else online. We built the online model for teen and young adult sex education and have remained online for nearly eleven years to sustain, refine and expand it.
What you might not know is that Scarleteen is the highest ranked online young adult sexuality resource but also the least funded and that the youth who need us most are also the least able to donate. You might not know that we have done all we have with a budget lower than the median annual household income in the U.S. You might not know we have provided the services we have to millions without any federal, state or local funding and that we are fully independent media which depends on public support to survive and grow.
You also might not know Scarleteen is primarily funded by people who care deeply about teens having this kind of vital and valuable service; individuals like you who want better for young people than what they get in schools, on the street or from initiatives whose aim is to intentionally use fearmongering, bias and misinformation about sexuality to try to scare or intimidate young people into serving their own personal, political or religious agendas.
To try and reach our goal, we're asking our supporters to consider a donation of $100 or greater. If that isn't possible for you, what you can give will still help and will still be strongly appreciated. To donate now, click on one of the links below. If you'd first like more information on why we're setting the goal we are, what Scarleteen has done in the last year and during the whole of our tenure, our plans for 2010, and what the scoop is with our budget and expenses, keep reading.
Had around 1 million overall hits to the site each day from an average of 25,000 unique users daily. Scarleteen has a very high page-load rate as compared to other websites: on average, our users load 3.5 pages each when visiting Scarleteen. Since 2006 alone, our site has had over one billion overall hits and nearly 70 million page loads.
Currently, Scarleteen is the #1 ranked site by Alexa for teen sexuality education/information and for general sexuality advice for users of all ages. It is ranked 27,823 of all websites internationally, and is ranked 11,210th in the United States (on 10/12/2009). Our core users are international, 15-24 and diverse in their race, gender and sexual orientation. To see some of our user testimonials, click here.
To find out more about our educational philosophies and model, you may want to read Scarleteen Is..., What Is Feminist Sex Education?, On Innovation and Inclusivity in Sex Education, A Calm View from the Eye of the Storm: Hysteria, Youth and Sexuality or look at our general about page. If you've never taken the time to just look around the site as a whole, please do!
Engaged in over 4,000 conversations with young people on our message boards, providing them factual and friendly answers on contraception, sexual anatomy, safer sex, sexual health, masturbation, interpersonal relationships and other related topics; helping them through struggles like pregnancy scares or unplanned pregnancies, STIs, sexual harassment, rape and intimate partner violence or abuse; talking them through relationships and breakups, family conflicts, gender, sexual identity or body image issues and their sexual decision-making; discussing political issues pertinent to sexuality and youth rights. Most posts at the boards are answered within a few hours, some within minutes. Many of our board users return to the boards again and again for more help, to engage in deeper discussions or to talk with or support other users.
In total our boards have over 43,000 registered users who have posted over 60,000 topics: all have been answered by one or more of Scarleteen's staff and volunteers. Our boards are fully moderated and a safe space for young people. To help protect our users from potential harassment, they may not share personal information like full names, e-mail addresses, messenger or social networking handles or personal webpages. Managing and moderating the message boards often requires the bulk of our staff and volunteer time.
Answered nearly 100 column-length young adult questions in our Sexpert Advice section, which is also syndicated weekly at RH Reality Check. There are around 900 Sexpert Advice columns in total published at the site. However, our advice queue typically has over 500 questions waiting for answers. In order to catch up with this backlog, we need the funds to acquire more staff to handle the high demand for the longer, in-depth answers our advice column provides and our users are seeking there.
Generated fresh static content. So far this year, we have posted 42 blog entries, half of which were penned by young adult volunteers, and have added more than ten new full articles to the site. Some of our most recent articles include Positively Informed: An HIV/AIDS Roundup, Boys Do Cry: How To Deal With a Breakup Like a Man, An Immodest Proposal, Chicken Soup for the Pregnancy Symptom Freakout's Soul, Let's Get Metaphysical: The Etiquette of Entry, Give'em Some Lip: Labia That Clearly Ain't Minor and Love Letter. We have also added several new youth-written articles this year, and updated several existing articles to be sure our information is accurate and timely.
Excluding the message boards (where there are tens of thousands of pages), Scarleteen currently contains around 1500 pages of content: articles, advice answers, blogs, external resource listings, polls and more. We are not able to pay authors for articles, though we often are queried by authors we'd love to hire who have great ideas. An increase in our budget would allow us to provide more new articles and to further diversify Scarleteen's editorial voice.
Received media coverage: In the last year, Scarleteen was mentioned by/in Salon, Glamour, BUST magazine, Medill Reports, TIME Magazine, City on a Hill Press, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, Utne Reader, CBS News and other outlets. To see some of this and more media coverage for Scarleteen in previous years, click here.
Provided direct community education and outreach: In the last year, Scarleteen director Heather Corinna gave talks to sex education students, sex educators and sexologists, youth and/or their allies via presentations at or for the University of Texas (NSRC Regional Training), the sex::tech conference, the American Medical Students Association, Harvard College, the NARAL Youth Summit and Garfield High School directly reaching around 350 total participants. In addition, through the CONNECT program for Washington Corinna currently directs through Cedar River Clinics, direct to-youth sex education was provided on an ongoing basis both to Cedar River young adult clients and homeless teens in Seattle at Spruce Street SCRC, a secure residential shelter. In 2010, Scarleteen will inherit the CONNECT program and continue Seattle-based direct outreach. We also have plans to continue providing information and education both to youth and other educators via conferences, summits and other public outreach opportunities nationally. In addition, with the help of a student intern, Scarleteen is preparing four informative pamphlets for print and distribution to clinics, schools and other groups which serve young people on sexual readiness, consent, managing sexuality after rape or abuse and on how to be queer and trans friendly.
In 2009 we ran a pilot program to train young adult peer sex educators online. To find out about that program and see what trainees had to say about their experience click here. We want to provide two more sessions of the training for 60 trainees in 2010. We have also just debuted a new SMS service for young people to text sexuality, sexual health and relationship questions to us and have them answered on their mobile phones. For more information on the text-in service, click here. As with all of our services, both of these new services are provided at no cost to youth.
On top of continuing the existing services we provide, we would like to continue to grow, adding new sections, functions and levels of service.
What We've Got & What We Need: As of November 1st, 2009, Scarleteen has received approximately $42,000 in grants and donations, the bulk of which has come from a single private grant. Only around $8,000 of that total has come from individual donations, $3,000 of which was from a single donor. To meet our needs for 2009 and the start of 2010, we need $70,000 in total financial support. Our goal now is to raise at least $24,000 in the next two months to meet our needs and cover the costs of 2009, as well as to walk into 2010 on financially healthy footing.
Beginning next year, we will require a minimum annual operating budget of $75,000 and the revenue to support it. While that is a substantial increase from our existing budget, it is essential: our existing budget cannot adequately sustain our staff or the organization as a whole. That new minimum budget is also still incredibly low: it accounts for the site running at a total of around $200 a day to provide all of the services we do to all of the young people and their allies who use them.
75K is exceptionally cost-effective and reasonable for the level of service we provide, especially compared to other organizations and initiatives, including those which do not match our reach and our level of direct-service. To find out details about our budget and expenses, and to compare them to other budgets and expenses of both similar and opposing sex education initiatives, click here.
Please make a donation if you are able, and consider the value and level of the services we provide to young people in doing so. A $100 donation can pay a major chunk of our server bill for a month, or half the monthly cost of the SMS service, or, can fund any kind of use of the site, including one-on-one counsel and care, for around 10,000 of our daily users. However, we would very much appreciate your a donation at any level.
We'd be grateful if you'd share our appeal with your own networks to broaden ours, and let the people who care about you know why you care so much about us.
In advance, we thank you for all you can give us and all you do or have done in support of Scarleteen. We fully intend to keep doing all we can to give just as much back.
If you would like to support us in some other way, such as through advertising, sponsorship or by volunteering your time or if you have any questions about donating, we'd love to hear from you. You can contact us via e-mail here.
© 1998 - 2011 Scarleteen/Heather Corinna. All Rights Reserved.
Best viewed with Firefox • Privacy Policy & User Guidelines
Subscribe to our RSS feed.