last updated 1/26/2011You probably heard that Siri, the new digital assistant on the iPhone 4S, could help someone find Viagra or a sexual escort, but not a family planning clinic, a local pharmacy to get a birth control prescription filled or an abortion provider. Whether that was intended or a glitch, it was understandably very upsetting. At Scarleteen, people can get easy help finding those important services and more through our SMS service, our fully moderated message boards, our growing Find-a-Doc database and, of course, our exhaustive information about contraception, abortion and other reproductive choices, sexual healthcare and so many other sexuality and sexual health topics.
Some people sure paid a lot of money for a tool that doesn’t serve them or others well. Scarleteen users get those services and much more for free. We give teens and young adults real people to talk with, for nearly 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, when the thousands of pages of in-depth, thoughtful information at Scarleteen don’t have all they want or need. While all of that is free to our users, providing it to them costs money.
You may have appreciated a recent piece on sex education at the New York Times. It profiled a sex educator who doesn’t limit sex ed to a dry curriculum, simplistic sound bytes or fearful warnings about the terrible, horrible things that will happen to teens if they engage in sex. We certainly appreciated it. Approaching sexuality as something potentially positive and enriching, rather than as only harmful, damaging or merely neutral is something we’ve always done. You may have seen this piece on why inclusive sex education is important. We know that, too: Scarleteen is inclusive of a spectrum of orientations and identities, including in our leadership and staffing. And we aim to be inclusive with more than just orientation, but also with gender identity, embodiment, relationship models, reproductive choices, socioeconomics, cultural and religious beliefs and more.
We know sex and sexuality aren't just about the bad things that can happen. We also know healthy sexuality and relationships aren’t things only heterosexual, gender-conforming, able-bodied, middle-class or white people can attain, and that one of the most important protective factors for healthy sexuality and positive sexual experiences and outcomes is real inclusion in sexuality education and support. Holding those kinds of positions limits our access to resources other organizations and initiatives who take a different stance have. But even when we’ve had to fight a long battle like we did with the ACLU over the COPA to defend these positions, we know this is what serves people best and is what we intend to stay true to, with or without media or political support.
Every year, millions of teen and young adult readers get the truly comprehensive sex and sexual health information, education and support they want and need at Scarleteen. Scarleteen users frequently express they find a level and a quality of education and service here they have not found anywhere else, including in school-based sex education and at other organizations or sites with exponentially greater resources.
We need your support because what we do costs money.
Scarleteen is an independent, grassroots organization without federal, state, institutional or foundational funding. We are, as we always have been, supported primarily by private, individual donations from people like you. And unlike some sex education services for young people that have come on the horizon lately who seek to charge them for information, we recognize the realities of the social and economic status of young people, and aim to always provide our services to them for free.
We often need to explain to potential supporters what it is we do and the many ways that we help young people. The fact that we’ve got more pages of original, thoughtful, in-depth and progressive sexuality, sexual health and intimate relationship information online than anywhere else makes some of what we have to offer obvious. But what might be less apparent to someone who isn't one of our young users is all of what we offer here and how much it can benefit them.
There’s also the user who utilized our text service after a sexual assault to get help gathering courage to go to the emergency room: we stayed on the line with her all day and into the night, giving her support throughout the many steps of that process. There’s the user who grew up in a socially conservative environment and married young, which was supported by his community, but who found himself without help or support from the same community when his wife filed for divorce, and when he realized that the strict gender roles he was raised with had resulted in the loss of his most cherished relationship. Or the evangelical user who engaged in sex before marriage and who struggled horribly with immense levels of guilt she felt unable to disclose to anyone in her community: she came to us for those conversations and that support. Or the homeless youth in Seattle this year who received pro-choice options counseling via our partnership with a local shelter: three young women made difficult choices with pregnancies, but all left these conversations with extensive resources and support for their different choices to terminate, arrange adoption and parent they didn't have before and couldn't get elsewhere.
Young people like these have said that without Scarleteen, they don’t know how they would have gotten through what they did and come out on the other side as well as they did. Young people like these rely on us to give them a kind of information and support they often say they couldn’t find anywhere else.
We know bad things or unwanted outcomes can happen. That’s why we dedicate so much time and energy to serving young people dealing with difficult trauma, issues or circumstances. However, not all of the young people who use Scarleteen come to us in crisis. Plenty come to us without traumatic experiences, or before they've engaged in any kind of sexual activity or sexual relationship. And that's just as important: we help young people create a foundation most likely to support healthy, happy sexualities and sexual lives and informed sexual choices they feel good about.
Users frequently voice surprise that we remember who they are as they come and go. Yet this isn't surprising for an organization who deeply engages with the people it serves as a core part of its model. We think this level of engagement and commitment is essential to serving young people well, particularly with issues as diverse, personal and complex as sexuality, core parts of their identity and intimate relationships.
A phone robot won't know or remember these stories and these people. Organizations who invest more time and energy in acquiring funding than in service, who base or change their missions or aims on the politics or whims of funders rather than on the expressed needs of those who need and use their services will not have a staff and volunteer staff who know all of these stories by heart like we do. Sex education initiatives which get hamstrung by social or political battles or by foundational or institutional red tape often never get off the ground to hear these stories or speak with these youth.
This level of service requires people with deep and abiding dedication and care, but it also costs money.
It can be easy to look at all we do for the many years we've consistently done it for and think we've got all we need to keep doing it. But we don't: the amount of funds we have to work with in a given year is typically about the same as the median income for one family in the United States, a budget which means closed doors for most organizations. We're proud of our ability to do all we have with so little, and proud of the profound commitment of our staff and volunteers. However to sustain our organization and all that it does and can do, we need continued and increased support.
That’s why we’re reminding you how much we need and depend on you.
You can assure Scarleteen remains available to the hundreds of thousands of young people who find what they want and need here each month by making a donation today.
Your contribution is something you can feel proud of because of the many young people's lives it helps us positively impact together; because of the dedicated passionate and compassionate education and support it provides them in an area of life where so many so often are undereducated and unsupported. Your contribution gets a thank you every single day through every young person who is able to use a fully comprehensive, caring service like ours. And it gets a big thank you from all of us at Scarleteen, who know exactly how valuable what you can give is, and who are grateful to you for helping us continue to do the work we so love doing.
If you'd like to know more about who we are, what we do and why and how we do it, or how else your contribution will be utilized, we've provided the links below as great starting points. We're also always happy to answer any questions you may have directly, including discussing larger contributions or private grants: feel free to email us anytime.
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.
I'm a 19-year-old virgin and I don't know enough about sex, period. I went to Catholic and Christian schools with terrible sex-ed classes (I learned the basic biology but virtually nothing about actual sex, condoms, safe sex, or anything like that). I looked at your list of books to read and I've browsed through the questions, but I still don't know where to start. I know a lot about gender but very little about sex. What kinds of books should this straight pro-feminist college freshman read?
Anyone who knows me or who knows anything about me usually knows that my pre-teen and teen years were incredibly difficult. I dealt with neglect and abuse in my family, starting from about the time I was 10. I was sexually assaulted twice before I even became a teenager. I was queer. I was suicidal and was a self-injurer. I struggled to find safe shelter sometimes. Few people seemed to notice, even though after I gave up trying to use my words, I still used my eyes to try and tell them constantly. The one adult I could count on over time to be unilaterally supportive of me had (still has) serious mental illness. I had to take more adult responsibility at the end of my teen years than anyone else I knew. Like many adolescents, I constantly heard directly or got indirect messages from adults who talked about how awful teenagers were, how awful I was, how difficult, how impossible, how loathesome. Four days after my sixteenth birthday, the first real-deal big-love-me-lover I had, who treated me with all the care, support and respect I could have asked for, very violently committed suicide, having scars of his own from a lifetime of his own sexual and emotional abuse. Four days after my sixteenth birthday, with just a few days of freedom under my belt, I looked at brain matter spread over a wall from someone I deeply cared about. And that was after things had started getting better. I'm 40 now, and in a whole lot of ways, I felt older at 16 than I feel now. Some days, I am truly gobsmacked that I survived at all, let alone with my heart and mind intact and rich.
A lot of why I survived is about having gotten support. Without it, I'm fairly sure I would not have, because the times I didn't have it are when I was so perilously close to either taking myself out or just numbing out; to staying alive, but not really being alive.
I can identify a few different lifelines I lucked into. That love affair was a biggie, despite the way it ended. I had a couple of good friends. My father did the best he could, even with contact made limited and his own limitations from his own traumas.I had a couple wonderful teachers who never really talked to me about what I suspect they knew, but who gave me some support and tools to help me value and care for myself. Having and knowing I had creative talents and being supported in those by some of the people around me was a godsend. I had also started seeing a counselor when I was 15, Barb, who was wonderful, sensitive and kind. However, she was so supportive of me, and so vocally nonsupportive of how I was being treated at home -- even though I'd only disclosed some of the picture -- that my stepparent axed her and wouldn't allow me to see her anymore. Unbenownst to him, she'd still kept seeing me pro-bono, and continued to do so for another two years. When my boyfriend died, she slept on the ratty couch in the ratty apartment my dad and I lived in to help get me through the night. She was the first adult to help me even get started on sorting out my sexual assaults, and was completely accepting of the person that I was and wanted to become.
But there was someone else very unexpected who made an incredible difference. I wish I knew his name. If I did, I'd send him a thank you note every day of my life in an envelope full of cupcakes and stars and love and guts; all the best tears of the joy and wonderful agony I've found in living and all the best sweat I've cultivated in surviving and thriving.
Throughout most of middle school and the start of high school, I was post-traumatic much of the time, holding hard secrets inside myself and deep in abusive dynamics, quite successfully abused and controlled. Not to the satisfaction of the person putting me there mind, because can you ever be controlled enough by someone who wants to control you? But I was mostly just not there: I checked out a whole lot. I sometimes playacted at what seemed like was supposed to be normal life, pantomiming what I observed my peers doing and saying, typing snippets of my own truth between the lines on the old typewriter that hurt my hands to use and which was missing two vowels I had to write in by hand. I often went to bed early so that I could wake up earlier still and leave the house unnoticed for a safe place where I could cry without worry of opening myself up to more abuses and write without fear of discovery. I'd then sort myself out, walk to school, and arrive with a manufactured calm that allowed me to at least be able to spend my days feeling like, and being treated like, I was living a completely different life.
Somewhere around the time I was 14 or 15, something inside of me spoke the truth of my own circumstances and the way that I felt. I was able to slowly stop internalizing the abuse and neglect, and know it wasn't about what was wrong with me. That change in my mindset, however small and seedling, and a few other changes started to give me some strength to resist, to try and survive, rather than trying to disappear, hide or check myself out altogether. This change did not go over well in my household, at all. The sad, suicidal, lost kid turning into the rebellious, resilient kid is not a change an abuser appreciates. But for a little while, I remember feeling strong, like I perhaps could go to battle in this, go to battle for myself, and just might be able to win.
But it quickly seemed I was going to get bested, in a really terrible way. My stepparent came up with a "last resort" of many abuses-disguised-as-therapies to deal with me; to have the control he clearly wanted, and the family he wanted, which did not include me. He was apparently going to utilize his counseling connections to get me institutionalized out of state. This threat, coupled with some escalating abuse, sapped my spirit, and made it feel like my idea I could get out of there and survive was a total delusion. It's always so hard to look back on how I felt then because in hindsight I can see that this person had very little power at all, over me, in the spheres he claimed to, save the power I and my mother gave him. In my adult eyes, I can see him as the pathetic pretender he was, and see that it was, in fact, my power he was so reactive to. But that's not how he looked and seemed then. Then, he looked and seemed, particularly with this new plan, like a very potent overlord with the capacity to make my whole life whatever he wanted.
In actuality, his connections were only so good and he still had to work within the system. To make an institutionalization like that happen, an outside counselor needed to recommend it. It was a given that my previous counselor would not make that recommendation. Before I'd started seeing that counselor, though, there was another counselor we'd met with, who I strongly disliked. My stepfather really liked him. I remember thinking he seemed cold, but the fact that my stepfather thought he was awesome was all I needed to know I wanted to stay the hell away from him. I can't remember how I managed to win the battle to not see that person and see Barb instead, but somehow I swung it.
So, of course, this was the counselor they wanted to try and get that recommendation so I could be sent away, sent away for good, I was told (which was a lie, obviously, but I didn't know that at the time). I figured I was doomed and defeated. All I saw in the few days before this appointment in the life ahead of me was no windows and no future. I saw myself losing the few good connections I had in the world, to my father, to my few friends, to my plans for my life which I'd only recently felt the desire to even have again, having stopped wanting to die. I saw myself doped up and locked up forever. I snuck out of the house in the middle of the night to say painful goodbyes. My boyfriend and my friends tried to help me come up with any possible out, but I felt so beat down that though I think there were things I could have done to make that happen, I believed in my stepparent's claimed omnipotence, I had started to believe that I was just nuts and broken, I believed again that I was powerless.
My stepfather, my mother and I drove a long way to see this guy. As ever, I had my giant bag I panhandled with packed with my own version of survival goods (loose change, some clothes, a couple pieces of fruit and bread, my journal, a mix tape or two, Sylvia Plath's Ariel, my teddy bear, eyeliner, sleeping pills, caffeine pills and an ever-present can of Aqua Net, extra-strength) in case I got the opportunity to run. But they seemed pretty prepared for that possibility by that point, and it didn't seem likely I'd get the chance. To boot, where we were heading was so far outside the city, I had no idea how I'd even get anywhere if I could get away.
I went in to be assessed. I held back a lot, not feeling safe to disclose, especially in a system where my stepparent had made himself seem like Napoleon. But I did disclose some of what was going on with me, some of what was going on in my house, some of how I felt, and certainly how powerless I felt. I voiced feeling my own life was being taken out of my hands, and a hard, tired acceptance of that. In spite of myself, I did share how awful it felt to live in a house where no one liked you, seemed to care about you, or recognized how much pain you were in and how badly you needed help, and how much I wanted to be with people who cared for me and where I could do all I knew I was capable of. Because I was madly in love and loved back in the same way for the first time, I of course couldn't keep from talking about that, too. I left his office, then, and went into the waiting room, silent and scared to death.
Then he took a turn seeing the two of them. They were in there for a long time: every minute felt like an hour. Then he called me back in again. I went back in. I sat down, awaiting doom. He was quiet, contained, and his face didn't give anything away. And then he said something like this:
"I talked to you. I talked to your mother and your stepfather. I do think there are mentally unwell people in your family. I do not think you are one of those people. I think it's amazing you're doing as well as you are, I'm so sorry you've had to go through what you have, and I'm sorry I didn't see what was going on the first time I saw you. I think if you are unwell or in trouble, it's not because of who you are or because something is wrong with you, but because you are living in a very unhealthy environment and there is something very wrong with that environment. I am not going to recommend you be sent to Kentucky. I am going to recommend you live with your father, or in some other placement, because if we want you to be and feel a lot better, it seems to me we need to get you out of that house. I am going to call them back in and tell them this, too, but I wanted to tell you alone first."
I think I still have a bruise on my thighs from my jaw falling so hard unto them in that moment 25 years ago.
I had so not seen that coming, even though my existing counselor had voiced similar sentiments (which is why I wasn't supposed to be seeing her). I know and remember that I trusted and valued her words, and felt similarly relieved when she'd said them, but this was something different that had a much bigger impact on me. For starters, this guy had just effectively saved my life when it felt moments away from being a total loss: in some ways literally, since I no doubt would have gone back to trying to off myself in an institution, but it was bigger than that. He'd helped save and secure the possibility of my both having the life that I wanted, outside a lockdown, outside abuse, and helped me save my own sense of self, because I'd heard enough to squelch it that the lines had started to become blurry. I'd started to believe what I was told in abuse, and what I felt in neglect: that I was awful, worthless, ugly, defective, wrong and broken from birth, crazy and would always be all of those things at my very core.
In a string of words that didn't even take a minute for him to voice, he'd done so much. When my stepfather came back in the room, I got to watch his face twist and then hang defeated when this guy voiced similar words to him, and I got a whole new wave of feeling empowered and brave. For a minute, it seemed like even my mother wasn't convinced he had all the power anymore. Back in the car, as we drove to a friend's house of his, I was told, from between gritted teeth, that if I could manage to get myself back to the city alone AND gather whatever of mine I could out of the house AND be gone by the time they got back AND if I accepted that I "should never ask either of them for anything again" (a deal I had to think about for all of a nanosecond, since some of my most basic needs hadn't been met for years, so I couldn't figure what exactly it was I would have gotten from them if I did ask) THEN I would be left to live with my father IF he would take me. Long story short, I managed to do it with the one phone call I was allotted, some expertly nimble window-scrambling, a sympathetic taxi driver and a whole lot of courage and confidence that counselor had provided me. If that had been an Olympic sport, I'd probably still hold the world record. That day ended in my father's apartment, with my Dad on one side of me, my boyfriend on the other, a pizza, and all of us crying and laughing and hugging with relief and joy and gratitude for hours and being able to fall asleep in the company of two people who I knew loved me immensely. It wound up being one of the most happiest nights of my life.
This did not fix everything for me. Six days later, my boyfriend took too many ludes too near his idiot housemate's loaded rifle. My father and I lived in deep poverty over the next couple years. I still had years (and do still) to work on trauma from all my abuses and assaults, to accept myself, to repair deep wounds that usually feel pretty well healed, but sometimes still feel raw and seeping.But it's okay. I'm okay. I'm really excellent, when it all comes down to it. It's kind of a miracle, and no small amount of it has to do with an hour of time and an ounce of compassion someone who didn't even know me gave.
That guy supported me. He listened, and he trusted my words. He was clear, he was calm, he was centered when I couldn't be. He gave me information I needed and dismantled misinformation that was hurting me and would continue to hurt me. He validated my feelings. He showed me I had and could find more allies. He watered my strength and courage. He gave me hope. He believed in me and helped me get back to believing in myself. He showed me that however scary disclosing is, you have to risk it sometimes because you have to risk being supported, not just being unsupported. He did something and said things that would make it a million times easier for me to really start talking to other people about what I had been through, would still later go through, what I was feeling and how I needed to be helped. And he was one of the rare and wonderful adults during that time of my life who demonstrated that someone like him, who did for me what he did, even though it may have felt smaller to him than to me, is a vital lifesaver.
The older I get, the more my memories of all of those years get blurrier, but this particular moment is deeply etched. Every time I call it back up, I wind up weeping with a revisited relief and gratitude; not just because he helped save my life, my self, my goddamn soul, but because he modeled something for me that very clearly took root and has allowed me to be able to do something a little like what he did for me for many, many young people who, however different or similar their circumstances, need that now just as bad as I did then.
* * *
Young people: my apologies for using "they" in the rest of this when I'm talking about you, which has got to feel like being talked about as if you weren't here when you are right in the room. I rarely use "they" like this, so I ask that you trust that today I'm doing it for good reason, and still acknowledge that you're here.
Lately, there's been some growing awareness of, and attention given to, young people who have killed themselves or been killed due to isolation, harassment and other abuse; around or related to gender, sexual orientation, sexual abuse or assault, interpersonal or interfamilial abuse or assault. There are always the omnipresent news stories about kids who shoot other kids, kids who die from overdoses or drunk driving or kill or harm other kids that way. But these stories, however important they are to tell -- and they absolutely are -- are about when the absolute worst has happened: when some young person simply can't take living anymore, or decides no one else should; when young people implode or explode. This is already a limited scope, and who knows how long even this level of awareness that young people often have it very hard will last. Unless something in the world has radically changed around young people, and I'm not seeing any evidence that it has, this will likely be a moment in time that passes, as many have before.
What doesn't often make the news, and what most folks so rarely see, are the young people who have been traumatized, challenged, squashed, mistreated, neglected, dismissed or just have been poorly served who turn it around. They don't implode or explode, they survive, thrive, endure, inspire. Those who slog on and pull through, even if all they can manage at first is to just get from one day to the next. But I see these young people all the time at Scarleteen, in other work that I do and in other work and environments like this (which sadly remain few and far between). That's because the young people that pull through tend to because they get some ongoing, reliable and compassionate information, help and support. That's because one of the biggest and most important parts of what my work is to be a person that's there for them to get those things from.
At Scarleteen, we see the young person who comes in making sexual choices that are simply not at all right for them, that they don't feel good about, don't like, or where they're taking risks they don't need to be or don't want to be. We see the young person who knows or suspects -- and is usually deeply afraid -- that they are lesbian, gay, bisexual or queer, and/or that they are trans or otherwise gender nonconforming and has no one safe to talk to. We see the young person who's had an unintended pregnancy, and in all sorts of circumstances; who may need help finding or being supported in abortion, or being supported in pregnancy and parenting, including after they've given birth when the folks who were so invested in them making that choice stop giving a damn because them making that "right choice" was all they cared about. We see the young person who's been sexually assaulted or abused; we see the young person who is currently being abused, who feels trapped in abuse and does not know how to get out. We see the young person who's only ever had abusive models of relationships and so has no idea that the abuse they're in is not okay and is not healthy. We see the young person who wants so badly to connect to others, but who just does not know how or who has a disability that makes it even harder for them to connect than it is for abled teens. We see the religiously conservative young person who has so many questions, or has even had something terrible happen to them and isn't their fault, but who's gotten the clear message that they can't bring those questions or needs to their community without being scorned.
We see the young person who grew up with so much shame around their sexuality that the mere fact of its growing existence, whatever it's like, has them terrified and desperately trying to crush it any way they can. We see the young person whose hatred of their body is so profound they are asking how they can literally cut certain parts off or starve certain parts away. We see the young person who's being told, endlessly, everywhere they look, how incapable they are. We see the young person so desperate to try and redo their own lousy childhood that they're trying to get pregnant at 14 in the hopes that creating their own family will give them love they never found and still don't have. At Scarleteen and every time I do the in-person work via CONNECT (the in-person outreach I do at youth shelters which is now part of Scarleteen) we see young people who have been rejected and cast out by the adults who were supposed to be the ones they could trust and rely upon most, the young person who is, with myself and/or other volunteers and staff, having the very first supportive and caring exchange with an adult they have had in their whole lives. We see the young person whose esteem and self-worth is so low that they simply do not care that their sexual partners are treating them like garbage, or who welcome being treated like garbage because it at least gives them some momentary sense of worth. Some of these young people are in times in their lives like I was in mine. Some of them have different challenges, and some of them are far less or far more challenged than others. Our world as a whole is highly unsupportive of young people, even in the best of circumstances. Our world as a whole is highly fearful of sexuality. Those worlds collide for me and for the people I serve every day.
But what we see in all of these kinds of scenarios and more are young people who have identified a place to be supported and helped, a place to utilize to try and make things better for themselves; a place to try and get even a little of what they need to care for themselves. If and when we interact with them directly, as we do with around 20-50 of them each day, we also see young people who are willing to take a risk and ask for help directly, often fully expecting that they will be denied, teased or shut down. And what we also see every single day are young people who often have those terrible expectations and don't have them met: who DO get the help and support they are asking for. Who DO get the information they need and are asking for.
What is it we do for them? It's often both as small and as potentially big as what that guy did for me. We give them information: information they ask for within the scope of what we do and what we know. We give them compassion and care. We listen. We respond to what they say and ask for, not what we want to hear and say. We support them. We always try and tell them the truth and to do so with kindness and care. We have and demonstrate faith in them. We work hard not to judge or project our own stuff on them. We treat them with respect, accept and embrace who they uniquely are and encourage them to do the same. We connect them with other systems of support and coach them in reaching out. We help them in steps that can improve their lives over time -- sometimes immediately, but more often it takes some time -- but we don't blow off that if we're they're at right now hurts like hell, it's painful and uncomfortable. We sit with them in that. We give them hope. We create and hold a space where we work to make it as safe as possible to take a risk and open up, and where they can also learn how to interact with others in safe, supportive ways, even when voicing things that hurt or are scary or uncomfortable.
For millions of young people around the world for around twelve years now, we are and have been that guy. We're not the only place to find that, but for many of teens and twentysomethings we are the only place at first, or the first place. Some have voiced that at a given time, we are, literally, the only place they feel able to talk and ask questions and the only place or people they know they can count on to be available for that, year after year.
I rarely get letters from a person we helped with taking a pill on time or working through a standard-issue breakup. Who I do get letters from, often years later, are the young people in places a lot more like I was. Usually, there's a lovely thank you, but the very best part is that they'll usually fill me in on how they're doing, what they're doing, and on how wonderful their lives are becoming, which is all the thanks I need, and what I always hope I'll hear in time, especially when I go to bed some nights having sat with someone through something terribly painful. I can let them go, both for my sake and for theirs, but some part of me always wonders and worries and hopes and hopes and hopes. Knowing that when I hoped for the best for them that the best is what happened is an incredible gift. And I'm very certain that there are many letters we don't get but would otherwise, because a lot like me, those now-adults remember the help they got and the impact it had on them, but for the life of them they can't even remember the name of the person who helped them. (Which is maybe how it should be when we do it right.)
Obviously, not every young person who comes to Scarleteen is dealing with the toughest-of-the-tough-stuff. I don't highlight our toughest interactions all the time because to do that paints an unrealistic picture of young people's diverse lives and the work that we do, which sometimes is about work that's much easier and less meaty than this. I do believe that a lot of what we do helps prevent the a lot of tough stuff in the first place; whether it's teaching someone about healthy and unhealthy relationship models, helping someone avoid infection or an unwanted pregnancy, or helping people set up a healthy sexuality before they can get solidified in typical, unhealthy and unhappy patterns. But I think it's important to also give visibility to young people's lives and stories like mine, and to make clear that one of the biggest things we do is to help some of the most vulnerable people, for whom good support and information -- often a challenge to even find -- really can be the difference between life and death, or between living and barely being alive at all.
* * *
I'm directly asking for your support right now, like I do once each year. Scarleteen is very undersupported financially. We always need more financial support and I would very much appreciate having yours. I think we do a fantastic, important job, think we have for many years, and I intend to do all I can for us to keep doing that job for many more to come so we can remain a place young people know they can come back to, and don't have to worry about passing in the night when a media or cultural tide shifts. I think Scarleteen and all that happens at Scarleteen is very worthy of being supported and sustained. To make that happen, we need more than just my own stubborn and dogged commitment and that of our volunteers: it also takes some dollars (and possibly a can or of Aqua Net, a mix tape and most certainly a teddy bear). In the last month we have been fundraising, and unfortunately, it's been very unsuccessful this year, even though we've provided the same level, quality and scope of service we have for the last twelve years, and the young people who need us keep on coming in droves. From today through the 18th, a small team will be matching funds raised up to $1,000 (see below), so if you haven't given yet this year, now would be a great time, and your gift would be deeply appreciated.
I felt a little strange that when I went to write a blog entry asking for support, this story is what came out. I wondered if it was appropriate or gauche to ask for financial support while also telling this story. But then I realized not only was it okay, it was actually ideal.
I grew up having plenty of things and people I wanted to be when I was grownup. I wanted to be the musician and artist I had all those talents for. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a lawyer, a doctor, a firefighter, an activist, a muckracker, a lion tamer. I wanted to be Emma Goldman, Patti Smith, Jane Addams, Judy Blume and the doctor who worked with my Mom I called Dr. Harry, who had webbed feet (he was really nice, but also, unlike the nurses who gossiped about it, I thought webbed feet must be the most awesome thing to have in the world, especially in the pool at the Y).
But most days, I wake up and jump energetically into my work even if the day before wiped me out, and I realize that who and what I most wanted to be, and clearly still want to be, was that guy who kind of gave me my whole life back in but one hour and a short string of words. For someone. For anyone who needs me to be and for whom I can be. I don't even remember that guy's name, but I know that most days, most of the time, he's who I want to be; he's who I try to be. He's better than my hero: he gave me access to what I needed to be able to be my own hero, and gave me something core I needed to keep trying to do the same turn for others every day, probably for the rest of my life.
When I ask for support for Scarleteen, one of the things I'm doing is taking some of what this guy gave to me and trying to keep it going. Because so much of Scarleteen is made of my personal time and effort, I'm asking for your help and support for my own aspirations to be like that guy, and for our staff and volunteers to do the same. But I'm also asking for help and support for a kind of intention, service and sustained space that I think, in the biggest of all possible big pictures, helps and supports every single person we help and support to be that guy, if not for a whole bunch of people, for at least one or two other people and most certainly for themselves.
That's a different end result to aim for than a reduction in unwanted pregnancy, lower rates of STIs, less abuse and more love and pleasure, better body image or people just being more informed so that their sexuality and sex life can be as good for them and any partners they have as it can be. You won't find a grant to fund sex education that wants a logic model for way bigger pictures than those, and I don't know that we can build something evidence-based on the grandest goals. You won't tend to hear people presenting this much-bigger-picture as part of sex education, even though I think it's implicit in all quality sex education, and some part of what every thoughtful sex educator is doing and aims to do. Teaching and modeling compassion, care, responsiveness and support, in everything, but especially in the stuff that's most loaded, is no small part of any good sex education because it's such a large part of any good sexual life and healthy sexuality and relationships.
I think -- and that's hopefully obvious -- that all of those kinds of less lofty goals are crucially important, but at the end of my day, what I want to have seen and done is this bigger stuff that lies underneath it all. I want to go to bed knowing it was at the heart of everything I did, that in ways great or small, I was able to teach or model something for everyone I interacted with that's all about being that guy for yourself and that guy for others, which I believe would be world-changing and also believe is absolutely attainable and should be as supported by all of us in all of the ways that we can.
UPDATE A generous ongoing donor has just agreed to throw an extra $1,000 in the kitty for matching through the 20th! So, up to $2,000 in donations will now be matched for donations made from today until Saturday!
This is a guest entry from Dr. Ruth Neustifter -- who we know here at Scarleteen as Dr. Ruthie -- for the month-long blog carnival to help Support Scarleteen. Can we get your support?
I remember it very clearly. I was a senior in high school and we were all noshing together in the lunch room when Darla, who was two years my junior, blurted out that she had seen her boyfriend naked and that they were planning to have sex soon. It would be her first time, although we thought he probably had more experience. ”I sure hope it gets smaller before it goes in, because my hole isn’t that big!” she declared and we all laughed together.
The thing is, she didn’t know whether it would or not, and none of us were willing (or able) to give her much information. Within weeks she recruited another friend to purchase a pregnancy test with her, but I don’t believe any of us considered STI tests.
Back then, I was a youth leader of our church youth group’s True Love Waits effort, a national program supported by Catholic church that encouraged chastity until marriage. Yes, one of my classmates shot herself in the head on a carefully laid plastic tarp in the basement of her family home in despair over her parents’ response to her disclosure that she was gay. I’m surprised I didn’t lose more friends for the same reason, as several other queer friends tried to end their lives at least once. Yes, several of my peers contracted STIs and/or became pregnant before graduation. There were numerous whispers about abortion. At least one of us caught HIV. And yes, I learned later that far too many of us were sexually assaulted during those years by peers, teachers, significant others, siblings and parents. We all attended a Catholic high school, but I’ve since learned that my public school peers often didn’t fare better when it came to sex ed and support. None of these stories should be shocking, especially in the wake of the recent media attention on juvenile sexual assault and young, queer suicides.
Was I fortunate for seeking refuge in the religious virginity fervor? I’m not one to share details about my sexual experiences, so I will simply assure you that True Love Waits did more harm than good.
I entered my dating years far behind the curve, with bizarrely fantastical romantic expectations, and a dangerous level of relational naiveté. Young adults in such situations are ripe for abuse at the hands of their intimate partners in the worst case scenarios, and are likely to encounter emotionally damaging levels of social-sexual disappointment and delay in the best cases. There seemed to be only two options as a teen: high-consequence sexual exploration now or even more awkward and equally dangerous exploration later. From what I have seen, this is still the choice for most young people.
I suspect that you and I could sit down over tea and trade many frightening stories from our pasts and those of our friends. Most of us have been there, and if we haven’t then we are close with those who have. It is terribly frightening to know that our own children are facing these same risks, perhaps worse. It is tempting to close our eyes and hope that they will make it through, especially if we do our best to shelter them from the risk-taking behavior that left a scar on our own generations. This is no more the answer for them than it was for us.
Without safe and accurate information on sexual and relational development, our youth are stuck in sexually pathologizing, polarized positions. Neither uninformed, fear-driven abstinence nor unsavvy immediate exploration offer a legitimate path to lower-risk, developmentally appropriate sexual development for our youth. We know this to be true. Our research backs this up, our personal experience supports the research, and our policy and public opinion listen to neither. Clearly, an accessible grassroots solution is needed.
It is natural, normal and absolutely healthy for teens and young adults to be sexual. Pushing them to do otherwise, in my professional opinion, may be comfortable for adults but is potentially damaging for youth. Similarly, allowing our youth to rush forward unprepared, as though they were the first people to discover the uncharted world of sex, is both dangerous and unacceptable. We owe it to them to create and support another option for our children.
Hands down, an important reason for me to be a sex educator is so that you don’t have to be. I’m fine with this arrangement and I would never expect every parent and youth educator to put in the kind of training and experience that I have in this area. We are here to support you and your youth by providing access to essential sexual health resources.
One of the finest examples of quality, grassroots sexuality education and outreach just happens to be an online website by the name of Scarleteen. This established, respected and highly utilized global resource is so darned good that I send my own grown-up clients there to catch up on the things they missed during their own youthful blunderings into sex and relationships. Go and explore – I promise you’ll learn something amazing and new. Then come back and tell me how much you wish you had found this site when you were 20, 16, or even 12.
Scarleteen is there, helping countless youth (and my grown-up clients) to have a safer option for their sexual development. This option wasn’t there for you and I when we were growing up, and we have to make sure that we do better for future generations by using our experiences as the impetus for us to support them. In spite of the site’s amazing span, capacity and breadth, it receives incredibly little financial support. I am asking you to join me in ensuring that Scarleteen continues to grow and flourish and be available to all who need it.
I am publicly pledging to donate a portion of every one of my coaching and educational groups to Scarleteen, starting with my upcoming mentorship group for aspiring and current sex-positive professionals. Join me in making your own commitment to contribute to this amazing web resource!
Look through Scarleteen and see just how important they are. Then make your own donation to them. It doesn’t have to be so dark and isolated for young adults, and Scarleteen provides a much needed beacon. They deserve and need our support, so they can continue to support our children.
This is a guest entry from The Gaytheist Gospel Hour as part of the blog carnival to support Scarleteen.
Preface: I was recently asked to participate in a blogathon to support Scarleteen, an online sex education forum for teens. I was flattered. I was humbled. I was a little queasy and had to breathe in a bag for a minute or 12. I decided to contribute the story of how I survived homophobic bullying thanks a single library book. I’m living proof that progressive sex education (no matter how small-scale) makes an enormous difference in the lives of the very young. It’s my hope that all who read my sarcastic, satirically-tinged autobiographical account will consider making an enormous difference by supporting Scarleteen.
"In this life, things are much harder than in the afterworld/ In this life, you’re on your own!" —Prince
High school is a laugh riot. It’s a jolly funhouse where the unpopular and the unusual are punished for their crimes against conformity with a topsy-turvy ridicule. Here, overweight boys have “due dates”, homely girls are proposed marriage by homecoming kings, underwear waistbands are wedgied into easy carrying handles for Special Ed students, and exchange students, (regardless of country of origin) are addressed in mock Chinese. In this swarming mosh pit of ha!rassment, powered by sweaty insecurity and raw, smelly fear, homophobia stands as the indisputable height of hilarity. At least that’s how I remember it.
“Gay” was the Golden God of Comedy at my Iowa high school back in 1985. It was the sun that shined down on an otherwise unfunny and frighteningly confusing world and made it all worthy of a ridicule most amusing. Anything could be “gay”, and therefore hilarious: a pack of Lit’l Smokies dog-piled on a cafeteria tray, “True” by Spandau Ballet, the color green and all who wore it on Thursday. Behaviors were “gay”, too: raising one’s hand in class, missing a foul shot during a gym class basket ball game, wearing one’s backpack over both shoulders as opposed to the heterosexually-mandated right shoulder. The entire marching band was apparently gay, and so were the Choir and the Drama Club. But they called themselves the Glee Club and The Thespians, so weren’t they just asking for it?
The Golden Gay God of Comedy was capricious. His ways were mysterious. Amazingly, not even heterosexuality provided an adequate defense against The Gay. Prince was a perfect example. Anyone who’d heard his Purple Rain album, (and only the Amish and the deaf hadn’t) had witnessed Prince’s very vigorous love of the ladies. Its most notorious track, “Darling Nikki”, was an epic ode to boy/girl frottage practically tailored to the heterosexual fumblings of the typical teenager, yet the man who had composed and performed it? Gay, gay, gay. It could be argued that, like the Glees and the Thespians, Prince had in his own way “asked for it.” He did, after all, wear high heels and make up, but so did Vince Neil of Motley Crue. Yet nobody called Vince Neil gay. And thus was the delightful cruelty of the Golden Gay God of Comedy.
When I moved from Ohio to this Iowa High School, I found myself a permanent inhabitant within the crosshairs of the Golden Gay God of Comedy. My favorite paisley shirt was gay. My red hair was gay. My glasses were gay. My inability to put a ball in a hoop was gay. I was president of the Student Librarians, a post I’d accepted with the purposeful solemnity worthy of the Gayest of the Gay. As fate would have it, I really was gay, which put a weirdly embarrassing spin on my relationship to the Golden Gay God of Comedy. How unfair, yet undeniably dead-on he was! He had called a duck a duck, and what could I do but quack “You got me there, bub!”?
I paid dearly for my hilarious gayness, and my own personal bill collector was comedian Chuck “Smith.” Who at my Iowa High School could deny his uproarious stylings? The spectacle of the redheaded new girl in the weird shirt with spit in her hair, getting groped by a “lezzie!”-squealing Chuck, filled the hallways with deafening laughter. Such rollicking high jinks!
Since the story I’m telling is sarcastic, satirically-tinged autobiography, I’m going to skip over the part where I cried when I got home and was afraid to go to school and hated the entire world for what had happened to me. In fact, I became physically ill while reliving 1985 in the writing the first draft of this story. Because there is no crying allowed in sarcastic, satirically-tinged autobiography, I’ll jump right over the abundantly obvious fact that what happened to me was very, very painful and will now mercifully deliver us all to the part where I decided to turn things around and fight hilarity with hilarity.
The fact of the matter was: I was much funnier than Chuck. Even though I was too inward and awkward at the time to let anyone else know it, I knew it. It galled me to be on the outside of the joke, looking in at its heart and soul, which was ironically enough, my own victimization. The Golden Gay God of Comedy may have ruled the school with his nonsensical and pitiless jurisprudence, but it was plain to me that he had a very sub-par servant in Chuck “Smith”. I mean, really: calling a lesbian a lesbian? It was the most uninspired put-down, ever. The personal disappointment was bad enough, but how was I expected to hold my head up amongst the pregnant fat boys or the portable special ed students?
Which brings me to the book One Teenager in Ten: Writings by Gay and Lesbian Youth. Published in 1983 by Alyson Press and edited by Ann Heron, the book was packed to bursting with the testimonies of people like me. One Teenager In Ten had unceremoniously arrived at the Library of my Iowa High School one spring day, innocuously packed in a cardboard box along with over a dozen paperbacks of sundry and disparate subject matter. As was my duty as the President of the Student Librarians and the Gayest of the Gay, I had glued the pocket in the front cover myself, and never dared to ask where it came from or who had ordered it. I snuck it home without committing my name to the check-out card and read it in one night.
The very existence of this book was an enormous comfort, because it was tangible proof that even though I was by myself in my Iowa High School, I was by no means alone. The book also gave me a sense of perspective. As bad as I had it, there were others who had it even worse. They would escape their own Chuck “Smiths” at the end of a school day, only to be harassed by their own families and members of their churches. Some had been institutionalized. Others had attempted suicide. For the first time in my life, I counted myself lucky to be the beloved daughter of 2 unrepentant hell-bound atheists for reasons other than not having to wear a dress for Easter. But as valuable as a source of solace One Teenager In Ten was, the book actually turned out to be an even better blunt instrument of pure comedy vengeance.
On the night that I had temporarily stolen One Teenager In Ten from the library, the Golden Gay God of Comedy came to me in a dream. He took the form of a paisley-clad Prince, tottering in the sauciest pair of F Me Pumps I had ever seen in my life. He wagged a sassy, lace-encased finger at me. “You’ve abused your post as The Gayest of the Gay,” he scolded in a surprisingly deep voice, “A crime most uncool and worst of all–unfunny.” He regarded me with those Bambi eyes ablaze within their Mabelline confines, so I knew he meant business. “Someone needs that book much more than you do,” Prince admonished me, and punctuated his disapproval with a nut-cracker split on the foggy floor below us. He sprung up before me, did a cyclone-spin, swept the curtain of curls out of his right eye, and said, “Someone named Chuck ‘Smith’!” He departed into the clouds with a chirping little shriek. I believe it went something like this: “Owwww—ahh!” which I took to mean “Don’t get caught!”
So the next day, I kept the book and returned the card to the library. I’d never seen Chuck’s handwriting, so the Golden Gay God of Comedy had guided my hand in the forgery of his signature: the plodding jumble of widely-spaced upper and lowercase letters you might find on a “No Girls Allowed” sign. I stamped the due date on the card and filed it away accordingly. And I waited.
Which brings me to Study Hall. Located at the left corner of the right-hand serif perched at the top of the U-style-layout of my Iowa High School, the Study Hall was ensconced in the end-of-the-line Gay Ghetto also inhabited by the Library and the Band Room. The white ceramic bricks that comprised the entire school were never whiter or shinier than in the Study Hall. Like teeth. Were we trapped inside the mouth of the school, I would often wonder. We were made to sit at desks set in skittish rows, and expected to ignore the lumpy loudness of the biggest hits of last year emanating from the Band Room next door while we ostensibly caught up on our studies. The clock on the wall was perpetually set on Anchorage time, and every minute was a shiny white eternity. It was the perfect setting in which to contemplate suicide. And receive overdue notices.
They were delivered from the Library next door, every Wednesday, and handed out to the offenders trapped in the Study Hall. The overdue notices looked harmless enough: innocent white pieces of paper, lovingly cut into slips. But the dot matrix derision they harbored left a stinging welt. “You have betrayed the trust invested in you by the Library, as well as the entire intellectual community of this Iowa High School,” the notices announced, “and therefore all will know your shame!” That was how I took it, anyway. Nobody else seemed to mind much. I had Study Hall with Chuck (naturally) and I would sit in the back of the room, watch as he writhed in boredom over his unopened books, and instead of suicide, I would think about One Teenager In Ten. And I would quake with suppressed laughter. It was an excruciatingly delicious wait for Wednesday. No matter what happened to me in the hallway or what would be thrown at me in Study Hall, I had something to laugh at and something to live for: Wednesday.
The only thing that trumped waiting for Wednesday was, well, Wednesday itself. The look of utter bafflement on Chuck’s face upon being presented with that first overdue notice is perhaps the most cherished memory of my youth. A cow confronted with a curling iron, a chimp with a chess set, a trout with Tommy Tune tickets– none of them had anything on Chuck’s goggle-eyed bewilderment. Stunned, he hesitated for a moment before accepting the notice. He blinked as if to shake it off, and regarded the slip of paper with the puzzled disgust one might exhibit upon being bestowed with a piece of freshly-wiped toilet paper.
The notice in and of itself was clearly an effrontery. Chuck would never do anything as gay as set foot in the Library, let alone check out an actual book. That stuff was strictly for fags. He protested loudly to no one in particular but to everyone all at once: “This is STUPID! I don’t go to the stupid Library!” He let out a gasp of exasperation and rolled his eyes.
And then he read it.
A funny thing happened next. No, make that a fucking hilarious thing: Chuck lept from his seat with such violence, I had to look twice to make sure it was still just a desk, and not the lap of Liberace. As his empty desk spun into the next row, nearly hitting a cheerleader, the Band Fags next door presciently pumped out a cumbersome cover of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” The Study Hall monitor shouted his name over the blaring tuba breakdown and demanded he return to his seat, but there was no stopping Chuck from storming the Library to defend his heterosexuality. But it was all in vain, as his name was clearly committed to the checkout card, in all its childish glory.
And thus, the Golden Gay God of Comedy was at last properly served. For several weeks afterward, I basked in a sunlight that rendered an otherwise unfunny, and frighteningly confusing world somehow worthy of a ridicule most amusing.
Afterword: I’ve grown up to inhabit a world that is in many ways both better and worse than the one in which I grew up. It’s a world in which same sex couples can wed (coming to a state near you!) and gay soldiers can serve their country with their heads held high (at least for now!). It’s a world in which, a gay-centric show like “Glee” not only exists, but thrives commercially, a world where an out lesbian is poised to take the daytime talk throne currently held by Oprah Winfrey. All of these things were just unthinkable back in 1985. Yet it’s also a world in which young gay people commit suicide to escape homophobic bullying. I survived 1985 thanks to One Teenager In Ten and a mean streak. The mean streak I was born with, but One Teenager In Ten came courtesy of my Iowa High School. It was just one book, one miniscule instance of forward thought and inclusion on the part of my school board, but the difference it made in my life cannot be understated. It afforded me the strength to stand up for myself and survive to adulthood. I can’t help but wonder how many lives could have been saved if that one miniscule instance of forward-thought and inclusion had mushroomed beyond that book in that tiny Iowa high school. I’m of the belief that the inclusion of the gay perspective in sex education would help eliminate the confusion and irrational fear experienced by both gay and straight students. Homophobic bullying and its tragic aftermath are the results of a fearful and narrow-minded educational culture. I truly believe the Chuck “Smith”s of the world would be better served by a book like One Teenager In Ten instead of overdue notices, which in a way, they have been receiving pretty much all along.
American educational reform, it seems, is powered by an arthritic hamster running on a primitive wheel made of third-world wicker. Thanks to the machinations of the Religious Right, it will very likely be a cold day in Satan’s codpiece before we’ll see true reform in our lifetimes. In the meantime, there is Scarleteen. Scarleteen is an online sexuality resource for young people, providing free, inclusive, comprehensive and positive sex education, information and one-on-one support to millions. Running strictly on private donations, Scarleteen does so much for so many with so little. It may have even saved a few lives along the way.
Please consider supporting this amazing resource with your donation.
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 by Max Kamin-Cross, originally published at abortiongang, that's part of the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen!
Sex ed. We hear that word a lot, but who really knows what sex ed is? It’s short for “sexual education,” but what’s that?
According to my handy dandy dictionary, sex education is: “education about human sexual anatomy, reproduction, and intercourse and other human sexual behavior.” Lots of words, but it’s pretty much learning about the human body and its reproduction. Pretty much straightforward, right? Wrong.
I know how un-straightforward sex ed is, probably more than any other blogger you read. That’s because I attended health class, every day, for 20 weeks less than a year ago.
Every single morning at 7:40am I was in Mr. Hanson’s (he requested I not use his real name) class for 46 minutes. Monday-Friday from December all the way to February, I had to sit in this class. This was a chance for New York State and Pittsford Central School District (the place where I go to school) to tell me everything they think I should know, or more importantly, not tell me what they think I shouldn’t know. We covered everything from eating habits, to drugs, to sex. Overall, I can’t complain too much about it. When it came to the sex ed part, Mr. Hanson made sure I knew “the consequences of engaging in sexual activity and the benefits of choosing abstinence.” Though it mostly focused on abstinence, our curriculum included the word condom, but pretty much nothing on birth control, even Plan B. Either way, I think Mr. Hanson did a pretty good job teaching what he was supposed to, and luckily what he was supposed to teach us was generally true. Sadly that isn’t the case in many of today’s sex ed classrooms.
Over the past several months, I’ve talked to hundreds of youth, adults, and educators from around the country about their sex ed experiences. From this I learned that I had a pretty good sex ed class, even though Mr. Hanson’s curriculum didn’t acknowledge the existence of non-heterosexual sex, or that condoms are almost 100% reliable if people use them correctly. Even though during those 20 weeks I never heard the words dental dam, or received instructions on how to correctly put a condom on, I still had a “great” curriculum compared to most.
One of the worst stories about a sex ed class came from a teen living in Utah. I met Emma this summer, and she told me about a video she had to watch in her middle school sex ed class. The video was about two people getting married. Not too bad, marriage is pretty normal and all.
Sadly, this video was anything from normal. It started with a man and woman about to get married, but before they did, they exchanged tennis shoes. The man’s shoes were nice and clean, while the woman’s were scuffed up and dirty. The man says to the woman “It looks like you let the whole football team run in these” and she responds by saying “But I made them all wear socks.” Right as the video ended, the man decided to break off the marriage with the girl.
In this video the tennis shoes represented their virginity. The man chose not to engage in premarital sex, so his “shoes” were nice and clean. The woman was supposed to have been sexual active with some football players, so her “shoes” were dirty. She explained that she made them wear “socks,” (or condoms) but the man was still mad her “shoes” weren’t as clean as his. As a result, he couldn’t follow through with the marriage.
This video, that a school district in Utah feels is important for every middle school kid to watch, is saying that if you have premarital sex (even with a condom) no one will want to marry you. Though some people may not be comfortable dating or marrying someone who had premarital sex, this video is blatantly untrue for that majority of Americans. Some studies put the number of people who have premarital sex since 1940 as high as 95%. If a result of premarital sex was no one wanting to marry you, there’d be a lot more singles out there and a lot less weddings to attend. Though it might be nice not to have to buy another toaster or blender for all those people, this video does nothing but lower the self esteem of teens that someday may have premarital sex.
This is only one example of the misinformation many sex ed classes give American students every day. It’s been proven time and again that abstinence only sex ed, where the entire curriculum is designed around telling teens not to have sex until marriage, does not work. Most of these curricula don’t talk about contraception or STD/STI prevention at all. As a result, teens are left starved for information about sex. One study in Wisconsin (where, up until recently, they had an abstinence-only curriculum) showed that teen girls believed that one of the best ways to rid themselves of gonorrhea was to sit in bleach.
Teens need a place that they can go and get real information on sex that they don’t get in school. Whether that be information about treatments of STD/STI’s (which do not include bleach!), information about contraception, or anything else about sex, Scarleteen provides it.
Though I hope for a day when every teen in America will be educated about sex by a highly trained professional in health classes with a comprehensive sex-ed curriculum, I don’t see that coming anytime soon. Until that happens, Scarleteen is vital for today’s teens, but for that to happen they need your help.
The site receives no government funding, which means you can get real information about sex without any interference from today’s politicians. Because Scarleteen doesn’t receive government funds though, it also means that they need your help to continue working to educate today’s youth and young adults. Please do your part and make a small contribution to this fantastic site today. To find out more about how to donate to Scarleteen, please click here.
This is a guest post from Dances With Engines as part of the month-long blogathon to help support Scarleteen!
I was hoping to make a post for the Scarleteen Blogathon that was pleasant and sweet and that would inspire people to make donations, and to do it without touching on my personal experiences. But there’s no way for me to make a post about sex and sex education without digging at old wounds. Isn’t that part of the new paradigm, anyway, where personal experience has authority?
Scarleteen is written for young people of all sexes and genders. That they manage to do so with so much consistency and dependability is amazing to me. As I become more conscious of my own binary and oppositional language (men do this, women do that, and only men and women), I get more impressed with Scarleteen.
When I recommend websites to my daughter, or to friends with growing children, I am always questioning—is the language and mission of this site going to be inclusive? Is anyone going to be left feeling like they don’t belong or that someone’s wrong with them? I felt like that, growing up. There were so many reasons I wasn’t human, wasn’t visible. Growing up in a conservative environment where I was defined by my sex and my ability to reproduce, having a sexuality that didn’t meet the norm left me in limbo.
As I grow as a feminist, I also want more intersectionality, and Scarleteen acknowledges the importance of this as well. I find that reading their blogs and articles—as an adult—helps me file off the old codes imprinted in my psyche and my thought. While Scarleteen is written for young people, it has helped me to complete development of opinions and identity that were broken short by trying to conform to my family and their community of choice.
Reading Scarleteen as a teen would have taught me that certain things that happened weren’t only wrong: they were illegal. It never occurred to me as a young woman that someone wasn’t allowed to do that to me. More than that, it never occurred to me that it wasn’t my fault. It took me into my forties to really grasp that.
I read Scarleteen because it helps me heal, I read it because I want to be a good parent to my teenaged daughter, and I read it because I want to make sure it continues to be a good resource that I can offer to other people. I read it because I’m a writer and I want to be constructive in my work, I want to write outside of the constructs given to me by me history.
I jumped at the chance to blog and to donate to Scarleteen because I wish it had been around when I was a kid. I love the way that it addresses young people as people. I don’t believe that children are chattel; I believe that they are capable of making wise choices when given consistent, comprehensible, non-condescending information, and when they can have faith in each other and the adults who are addressing them. One of the greatest disservices that we can do to our children, and ourselves, is to lie—no matter how noble the reasoning may seem.
Scarleteen does all the right things, in my opinion. It doesn’t lie. It treats its readers with respect—whether they are conservative or liberal or progressive. As a whole, it wants its readers to be true to themselves, no matter how that manifests.
I was raised in a conservative Christian family, where the entirety of my education on the act of sex was limited to the fact that I was to be married and that I was to lie down for my future husband as necessary, preferably to produce babies. Literally: the woman lies down with her legs apart. Nothing more. Until then, it was my responsibility to prevent men from having sex with me, which they would try to do, because I would do that to men, make them want to have sex with me.
Reading something like Scarleteen wouldn’t have made me run out and have sex. Information doesn’t do that to people. It would have saved me from being the victim of misinformation, self-hatred, confusion, and repeated sexual assaults. Supporting Scarleteen means—in my experience, and without hyperbole—that other children and young people will be saved from those things as well.
That’s worth a donation, or at least taking the time to share a link with someone else. If you do nothing else, share the link.
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