books
Scarleteen Confidential: In Defense of Teen Media
For two years, I worked in a bookstore that was aimed primarily at children and teenagers. It was a job I quite enjoyed, but I quickly discovered that when you work near books, people always want to tell you their opinions on said books. That's fine most of the time. But I noticed a pattern when parents or adults would refer to The Hunger Games series. They would express dismay over a child wanting to read the book, wondering what they saw in it, and either implicitly or explicitly stating that they thought the book was not good for youth to be reading.
What struck me about these conversations was that ninety-nine percent of the time, the adult in question had not even read the book they were criticizing. They dismissed it, either as inappropriate trash or as mindless fiction without ever actually seeing what it had to say.
Scarleteen Confidential: A Resource Toolbox
50 Shades of BS - How to tell the Difference Between Kink and Abuse
Anastasia, the main character, knows nothing about kink or BDSM to start out with - her new lover Christian Grey is her only source of information. And Christian Grey - or rather, his creator, E.L. James - has some pretty whack ideas about how BDSM works.
Where do I even get started in educating myself about sex?
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....
These are Good Things.
This is a guest post from Wendy Blackheart, at Heart Full of Black, for the Scarleteen blogathon.
Ah, Scarleteen. I can actually remember a time before Scarleteen – they started up in 1998, when I was in 8th grade. See, I went to a school where 99.9% of our sexual health information was from an abstinence only program.
How can I give my sister a good sex education?
I am 17, and I have a 15 year old sister who is Autistic. I also come from an EXTREMELY Catholic family. I never got a sex talk - I straight-up asked my dad what sex meant when I was 9 or 10, and he gave me some very unhelpful answer about a gift that God intended to be shared between a man and a woman in marriage....
An Immodest Proposal
The Road Back From Whatever
While out of town this weekend, between two plane trips and a couple late evenings up reading, I started and polished off Elliott Currie's The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence in very short order.
Everyone Loves S.E.X.!
...and we love them back!
We interrupt your regular programming for a little bit of shameless and self-congratulatory self-promotion.
The reviews of our young adult sex guide, S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College have been coming in, and we're elated to hear that readers and reviewers of the book seem to think it's just as special and essential as we do.
Full-Spectrum Choice
I've recently been unable to put down The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade by Ann Fessler. (It's a tough month for my bedside table, which has had to bear the physical and emotional weight of that book, as well as bell hooks' All About Love: New Visions, Jackson Katz's The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help, and Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature.)