I'm 13 and I really need some help. I have been talking to this guy for ages on my phone and texting him. We have Skyped, and I know he might be 'one of those older people who have random children acting for them and they have voice filters' etc, but he has Facebook and I know loads of people who know him, but I just haven't met him. He is really nice and we both wanna meet each other... We decided we were gonna meet and I'm really excited. He says he wants to finger me, and he want me to give him head, that's fine because I have done it before so all's cool. Then when he asked if I wanted to have sex with him, I got creeped. Just need someone to say if I'm doing the right thing or not.
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?
The last section of our recent demographics survey (click here and here for data from the previous sections) was an optional, open section where we simply stated, "If you have any comments you'd like to add about this survey or Scarleteen as a whole, please feel free to add them here."
Of the 419 participants who left comments in this section, most were about Scarleteen as a whole, rather than the survey. The few on the survey itself included a couple concerns about the previous section discussed here, a couple nods of appreciation for the inclusion in the education section of no schooling or alternative education, and two concerns (from people identifying as cisgender) that when we asked about gender, and provided fields for men, women and also trans gender, separately, we were suggesting trans people are neither men nor women. To clear that one up, the opposite was our intent. Our intention was to recognize and validate the many ways people who are not cisgender may and do identify. We used the options we did (as well as the additional options) because we know some trans gender people simply identify as men or women; others identify as trans, trans men or trans women. We figured -- and looking at the back end of the data, it does seem participants who were trans seemed to get that -- participants would know they could check however it is they identified, or choose the open-ended field if their gender identity was something outside all the options or they wanted to specify further.
The vast majority of responses in this section were about Scarleteen. Critical responses were few, but they included a couple suggestions to consider using gender-neutral pronouns throughout the site. That is something we have discussed often over the years, but have not reached any conclusions about, especially given how many of our readers do not have English as a first language, how many use translators to read the site, and for how many we are introducing so many new concepts and frameworks for, and don't want to overwhelm. It's always a challenge for us to try to best serve the wide diversity of our readership, and this remains one of the core challenges. Per usual, we're always up to discussing this with anyone who would like to in the comments or via email.
A few people voiced challenges with navigating the vast amount of content we have on the site. In the positive comments there were just as many statements of how easy it is to find everything here at the site. However, we do feel that navigation and organization improvements very much could and should be made, have been starting work on that already, and hope to raise the funds to implement and complete those improvements by by summer of 2012. A couple people also made requests for increased content for men, people with disability and about asexuality. You got it!
One participant voiced a desire for Scarleteen to only support one model of relationship or sexual interaction: that of marriage or long-term exclusive romantic relationships only. That isn't ever likely to happen. Not only is marriage not even an option for everyone, but our readership is diverse, and we know healthy relationships and healthy sexual interactions can and do occur outside that model and unhealthy relationships and sexual interactions can and do occur inside that model. We know that based on history, quite a lot of broad data and study and directly from our readers as well as our own lives.
One last critical comment expressed feeling our text-in service is a waste of money. This stands counter, however, to the many users of our text service who have voiced a deep appreciation for the service. As well, the text service is highly cost-effective: our server bills are higher than the cost of our text service, and the tools for running the text service allow staff and volunteers to manage the text service while doing other work. Should the text service ever be utilized less or should the cost massively increase, be sure we'll rethink it. Scarleteen is one of the most cost-effective and cost-efficient organizations of it's kind, so we always have a keen eye on things like this.
There were an awful lot of comments that were simply very gracious thank you's. And you're so welcome! Thank YOU!
We really appreciated all of the positive feedback, and so much of it was also really educational for us. It's so helpful to know what our users find of value here, and how what we do is or has been personally relevant to them, especially since, again, there is so much diversity among our userbase, so what one person finds here or gets from it can be very different from what another does. There were far too many of those comments to document all of them here, but please know they all were deeply appreciated. Here's a sampling:
Next up? I'll wind this down by talking about an overview of all the data, and where we're going to take things from here with what the data helped show us or make more clear for us. Again, our deepest thanks to everyone who took the time to give us such valuable information.
Every day, around 20,000 to 30,000 people come to Scarleteen online. We already know some basics about who our users are via backend site logs, Alexa, Google Analytics, the direct ways we engage with users daily and some demographics from years ago. This summer, we created a new demographics survey as part of a potential partnership with a fellow organization, and to get an additional, fresh source of information for ourselves.
Many of users mentioned they'd be curious about the survey results, one reason why we're sharing them with you here. Our supporters and potential supporters also often ask us about who our users are. In addition, we wanted to see these results too, to help us keep doing the best job we can. I'd like to share, then talk about some of the results with that aim.
We decided to limit our survey to 2,000 participants who completed it, a number that was manageable but also statistically significant. So, we cut the survey off once we had that number. We recruited for the survey by posting a link to it on our website, including at our message boards, as well as via our social media networks on Facebook and Twitter. The vast majority of participants came to the survey via the link to it on internal pages of the main website. We used SurveyMonkey to collect and compile the data.
There's a lot to look at and talk about, so I'm going to share this information in three or four posts. Today I'll fill you in on some of the most basic demographics from the survey, all of which required answers and the first set of answers from the section where answering was optional for participants. Next, I'll do two more posts with the remaining information that was optional, including some of the comments from participants. Last, I'd like to talk a little bit about what some of the findings of the survey suggest to me, how we intend to respond to them and get some user and community feedback on that as well. If anyone wants to start discussing any of this in the comments here before then, I'd be happy to do that with you.
I'm also including some links to on-site polls which are similar or relevant to some of the data, in case a comparison is of interest.
In the survey, users in the United states and all others outside the US answered separately, with 65% of respondents coming from the US, and 35% from other nations (a number of US readers about 20% higher than our logs and other analytics typically reflect). Here, all the answers have been combined and averaged, both for ease and because the answers did not differ significantly between US users and those outside the US.
Age: The vast majority of our readers (79%) are under age 24; most are between the ages of 16 and 21 (53%). 13% are aged 13-15, 32% are 16-18, 21% are 19-21, 13% are 22-24, 11% and 25-30 and 10% are over 30.
Area: Scarleteen users are primarily urban and suburban. 40% of those surveyed live in urban areas, 38% in suburban areas, 13% in rural areas, and 9% are unsure what type of area they live in. (We did not ask about economic status because so many of our users do not know what their yearly family income is, and do not want to disclose to their families they they are utilizing a sex education service.)
Sex and Gender: We differentiated between sex and gender in this survey, asking what sex users were assigned at birth, and, separately, what their gender identity is. We did this this way for several reasons: gender tends to be far more relevant to us in serving users well than sex, we do not address sex and gender as the same as an organization, and we also already knew we have a substantial number of users whose assigned sex differs from their gender.
In addition, when asking about gender identity, we had fields for men/boy and women/girl and trans/trans gender, and assumed that some trans users would choose one of the former two fields rather than the trans field. We did this because we know that some prefer to identify specifically as trans, while others prefer not to identify specifically as trans, instead identifying their gender in the ways cis gender people most often do. This also had to do, again, with what is most relevant to us as an organization, which is how our users identify their gender, rather than how and if their gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
86% of participants were assigned female sex at birth, 13% male sex, and around 1% reported an intersex assignment, did not know what sex they were assigned at birth, were not assigned a sex at birth to their knowledge or preferred not to answer the question.
80% stated they identify their gender as women or girls, 12% as men or boys, 4% as genderqueer, gender-variant or agender, 1% as questioning, 1% as trans or trans gender, and 1% stated they identified their gender in some other way than the fields above (with some identifying a sexual orientation as a gender identity, either because they misunderstood the question or because that also is or is part of their gender identity). Less than 1% preferred not to answer.
The other field for gender included answers such as "transfabulous and genderplayful," "gender abolitionist," "Strong female. I decide what that means day by day," "A man who is happy in a woman's body," "not a girl," "bigender," "femme," "butch," "Teddy Bear (masculine-leaning genderqueer)," and "boygirl."
Related poll: When it comes to my gender, I:
Sexual orientation: Scarleteen readers represent a highly diverse spectrum of sexual orientation. When asked what word respondents "use, or best describes, sexual orientation (who you are sexually/romantically attracted to, if anyone, based on gender)," 52% answered straight or heterosexual, 19% bisexual or pansexual, 8% stated they chose not to use any words or terms to identify their sexual orientation, 5% answered queer, 5% answered questioning, 3% answered lesbian, 3% answered asexual, 2% answered gay, and 3% stated they identified their orientation with words or phrases not included in the fields given. 1% preferred not to answer the question.
The answers to the "other" field were most typically combinations of some of the above terms or the above terms combined with other aspects of sexual identity (like polyamory or monogamy, BDSM, celibacy, fantasy, the desire or lack of desire for romantic relationships, attraction based on age, etc.).
Related poll: When it comes to my sexual orientation, I think I am:
Ethnicity or race: A majority of responses were from white users. 68% identified as Caucasian, European or White, 8% as Asian, 4% as African, African-American or Black, 4% as Hispanic, Latino/a, Mexican or Mexican-American, 8% as Biracial/bicultural or multiracial/multicultural, and less than 1% as American Indian/Native American, First Nations or Alaskan Native, Arab or Arab-American or Pacific Islander. 3% chose other, and these most often were answers reporting a bicultural or mutlicultural race or ethnicity, reporting a religion as a race/ethnicity, stating a national identity as a race or ethnicity (such as Irish, French or American), specifying a South Asian ethnicity, or an AU/NZ aboriginal ethnicity. 4% preferred not to answer the question.
Education: Most of our users are in or have completed K-12 education or college/university. Less than 1% reported never attending any type of schooling, 2% reported their highest level of education as K-12 education via homeschool or another setting, 41% reported K-12 in traditional school settings, 12% reported 2-year college, vocational school or other higher education, 25% reported 4-year college, vocational school or other higher education, 6% reported some graduate school, 8% have completed graduate school, and 5% chose other (most of the these answers involved GEDs, alternative education or were responses which referenced/were included in the above categories).
How did users first find Scarleteen? The vast majority of users (77%) found Scarleteen online, via a search engine or a link on another website. 40% report they first found us via a search engine, 37% via a direct link on another website, 6% were referred by a friend or romantic/sexual partner, 2% via a sex education class, group or independent sex or health educator, 2% via a book or magazine, 1% through a teacher, coach or other mentor, less than 1% by a parent or guardian, less than 1% by a healthcare provider, and 5% found Scarleteen some other way. 7% don't remember.
The other responses included links to websites (so should have been included via that field instead), listed books (so, again, should have been included under books), podcasts including those of Dan Savage, Susie Bright and Amanda Palmer, radio, sex education text services, and "my awesome lesbian cousin."
What are users' favorite parts of Scarleteen as a website and an organization? Participants were able to choose more than one answer in this segment. The majority report that the articles (80%) and advice column (62%) are their favorite part of Scarleteen. The message boards are a favorite for 24%, the blog for 19%, the polls for 15%, the text service for 4%, the resource listings for other sites, agencies and services for 13%, and the new Find-a-Doc database for 6%. 9% list our facebook page as a favorite and 5% list our twitter accounts, @Scarleteen and @STSpeaks. 46% say that the parts of our website written by staff and other experts are a favorite, and 28% say first-person content written by young people is.
What have users used Scarleteen for? Respondents were able to choose more than one answer in this segment. 53% said they used it to "find sexuality or relationships information or approaches I couldn't find anywhere else."
23% have used Scarleteen to "talk with others about sex or sexuality in a safe space," 21% to get emotional support, and 20% used it to get help or information when in a crisis. 24% have used us to find help or information for someone else, and 13% to give emotional support to others. 47% have used Scarleteen to find out about sex education in general, 16% to get ideas for activism, and 10% for research.
44% used Scarleteen to "fact-check information I heard/read somewhere else," 32% to get information a sexual healthcare provider/doctor didn't give them, and 3% to get a referral for in-person help or services.
Nearly equal numbers of respondents stated that they were using Scarleteen to find out about sexuality and relationships for the future (50%) as those who stated they were using it to get information for current relationships and situations (52%).
When given an open field to list other things they may have used Scarleteen for, the most common answer was getting information as a partner, guardian, teacher or healthcare provider to share with a young person.
Related poll: Which of the following did your sex ed in school (before any college) and/or at home include:
The following data is the first part of a section of the survey that was completely optional. Just over 1,500 respondents answered these questions. They were allowed to choose multiple answers. We asked these questions because we wanted a more well-rounded sense of some of the life experiences our users have or have not had, particularly those pertaining to sexuality and relationships, or which we know have an impact on sexuality and relationships:
Have you ever:
Related polls:
(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
I hope you would be able to answer my message as soon as possible. It is very urgent. I have passed through the site and decided of asking you some questions maybe you could help me. I am an Indian girl. My age is 26 and I never had ever sexual intercourse because it is against our traditions here. A girl is not allowed until she is married. I never ever masturbated using machines or finger. I never ever touched my area down before. I even never knew anything about girls and guys masturbation. Here we are not taught about sex issues. I entered accidentally one of the sex sites and most probably out of curiousity about a new thing, depression, and much free time. I started chatting dirty(no voice) with these guys and I watched some. I never did this before in my whole life really. I noticed that i gave water from under when I chatted dirty or watched a guy and I become very jelly like down there. I really never knew this is masturbation i am really ignorant about that. I did this only about two months but I chatted and masturbated several times in a day.
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