Much of sex education is fear-based. How does this approach hinder sexual development?
Do you think speaking openly about sex from an early age leads to a healthier and safer sex later in life? If not, why?
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Video edited by Tiye Massey.
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News of Note: ‘You know what men are like’: Indonesia to ban mini-skirts over links to rape
Indonesia’s powerful religious affairs minister believes that mini-skirts are pornographic and should be banned under the country’s tough new anti-porn laws.
Minister Suryadharma Ali has been appointed to run Indonesia’s new anti-porn taskforce, announced by president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono earlier this month.
He told reporters in Jakarta yesterday that before deciding what they must ban as pornography, the taskforce would consult widely to come up with “a set of universal criteria”.
However, “one [criterion] will be when someone wears a skirt above the knee,” according to the Jakarta Post.
“Pornography is something that we can feel … but we have to make the criteria,” said Dr Suryadharma.
Wanting to be or feel sexy is an entirely justifiable and natural human behavior. This reminds me of a conservative high school’s dress code, not something that an actual country would enforce on its citizens. With the growth of anti-women and anti-other fundamentalism, how soon will we see this type of repression on Main Street USA.
Indonesia’s new anti-porn taskforce must not have heard about the fallacy of slut shaming, so aptly in the hands of our SlutWalk advocates, who assert that no one asks to be assaulted no matter how s/he appears to their rapist, or murderer. Blaming the victims of rape for dressing sexy is simply absurd and offensive and deflects an act of violence to something akin to a sex act gone awry.
Stories like this reveal the astounding depth of sexual repression our world must still conquer. With laws like the one being pushed in Georgia to exchange the words “rape victim” with “rape accuser” in all state law, we have a long way to go to assure a world where no one even conceives such a vile thought, or mounts a task force to tell us how we must dress to not incite the insane violence of rape?
*Creative Commons Image by: “Applegurl“
(También en Español)
News of Note: Employers ask job seekers for Facebook passwords
In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person’s social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.
“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”
What about relationship status, sexual orientation, and religious belief? I don’t expect all the details of someone’s personal life to be completely agreeable with every employer and I certainly don’t expect them to use all the information they obtain in an unbiased way. The work environment is one that demands neutrality and tolerance. When companies pry into the private lives of their employees, they are venturing where they were never intended to go.
It is naive to believe anything online is private? We live in a world that is becoming more transparent everyday. If the truth about each of us is forced onto the table, how will society react? I don’t think it is reasonable for employers to ask for Facebook passwords during interviews but I do believe it is inevitable. Are you ready to show the world your true self?
Creative Commons image by: jakeliefer
News of Note: The new legal theory that enables homophobic evangelising in US schools
Last month, 8,000 public high school students in Montgomery County, Maryland, went home with fliers informing them that no one is “born gay” and offering therapy if they experienced “unwanted same-sex attraction”.
The group behind the flier, Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), isn’t the kind one expects to find represented in student backpacks. Peter Sprigg, a board member of PFOX who doubles as a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, recently told Chris Matthews that he believes “gay behavior” should be “criminalized.” PFOX president Greg Quinlan told another talk show host that gays and lesbians practice “sexual cannibalism.”
The Family Research Council is a documented “hate group,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Truth Wins Out (TWO), a high-profile organization fighting anti-gay religious extremism, has covered the Montgomery school fliers, and even filed a lawsuit recently against PFOX and Greg Quinlan for defamation — Quinlan resorted to accusing TWO Executive Director, Wayne Besen, of threatening his life. Such an obvious attempt to smear TWO should only serve to further paint PFOX as the bigots that they really are.
I can only imagine the amount of bullying and self-loathing that these fliers generate. Kids are discovering their own sexuality in high school, discovering who they are.
Over the past 20 years, legal advocacy groups of the religious right – a collection of entities that now command budgets totaling over $100m per year – have been pushing a new legal theory, one that has taken hold of some parts of the popular imagination and that has even been enshrined in recent judicial rulings. The essence of the theory is that religion isn’t religion, after all; it’s really just speech from a religious viewpoint. Borrowing from the rhetoric of the civil rights movements, the advocates of the new theory cry “discrimination” in the face of every attempt to treat religion as something different from any other kind of speech.
These religious groups do not have the ability to distinguish between religious dogma and rational thought. Freedom of religion is great because it also gives us freedom from religion. We need to actively label the intolerance that these groups spew as religion, and never allow them to sneak into public schools.
I like to imagine a future that is more progressive. With hate groups like PFOX finding ways to teach their backwards ideas in public schools, the future we all want to see protected is being undermined. If you have experienced similar intolerance or bigotry, we would be happy to add your story to our continuing coverage of this most important issue.
For more on A Course in Immortality…
Click here for 0.8 But I’m Not Dead Yet!
También en español The erotic is the universal foundation of personal growth in Love.
If you play by the rules, is there any sense in which you can “win the game of life?”
Were you someone who is hopeless, thinking that the game ends with all the players dead and buried in the ground, you might value yourself in terms what you did while you were alive, though that is only relevant while you yet live.
You may have amassed a great fortune, built huge companies, accomplished visionary philanthropies, made great discoveries, or had thousands of friends, but your body is still dead, apparently along with everyone else’s.
Nothing can have any personal meaning for you dead. Your deceased biohost will not be aware of or remember anything.
Meaning comes from the values and ideals you have experienced and affirmed in mortal life, which define your immortal super-consciousness.
But if essentially everyone has the opportunity for immortality, can’t everyone win the game?
To answer this, you must ask what it means to win.
Since all have the opportunity for immortality, becoming immortal is NOT winning the game.
Understanding and embracing your own immortality is required if you are to play the game at all.
Given that, at the end of life of the biohost of your super-consciousness, does it make sense to speak of winners?
Yes, but there are no real losers, since all who will themselves to survive will do so.
Believing in immortality doesn’t make you immortal—nor is it necessary for you to be immortal—but once having desired immortality you have imported a lasting new meaning into your life.
Your ability to conceive of and desire immortality makes you a potential immortal—choosing to become what you desire—and demonstrating this choice by continuing to live, grow, and serve.
And you already know that the worshipful pursuit of erotic joy is the thread that unites the infinitude of events in your eternal quest.
In a very real sense, you have a score in the game of life at every occasion—before and after biohost separation.
Your score is based on your contribution to the four supreme ideals—Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Beauty is disclosed in your ability and effort to create harmonious arrangements that work together for expression of a common ideal.
Goodness reflects the value of your service to Love and Truth, expressed as service to your fellow humans—to serve another as you would be served yourself.
Truth is the will that directs your actions for the accomplishment of Good and the satisfaction of the desires of Love.
Love is the desire to do Good to others.
These four measures sum up the growth your super-consciousness has achieved at any time.
The experience of worshipful erotic joy is available to you at all times, so that you may better discern the light of Truth.
So do your personal scores have any bearing on your personal future experience?
Not surprisingly, they have a big effect on your immediate experience of continuing life after separation from your biohost.
To learn to be a better person, with greater value to the universe, you must socialize your experience in a community containing some people from whom you can learn and other people whom you can inspire.
The proof of your continuing growth is your success in showing the way to others.
Everyone moves on to more spiritual levels of socialization, so initial differences, no matter how great, are all erased in time.
No matter where you find yourself, your task remains the same—to continue developing your ability to function in service to supreme values.
And in all places throughout the cosmos, forms of erotic joy illuminate the experience of worshipful meditation wherein all choices are made.
Thus, in time, all advance toward perfection, regardless of their starting level—some will progress rapidly, others slowly, but all in the certainty that they who desire personal immortality are indeed immortal in universe service.
Our pastfathers had no knowledge of the cosmos and imagined a heaven of stationary values, but the real universe is complex, adaptive, and dynamic—a vast school dedicated to teaching all beings the art of Love.
You need only choose to persist in your quest for immortality to finally attain perfection, become absolutely immortal, and function as a personality of the emerging deity of time and space that comprises the super-consciousness of all universe beings—the Supreme Being.
Worship Love in all its manifestations and you will always find Truth.
At each step the erotic provides a way to express and experience Love through literal action.
Though we may personally traverse a billion worlds enroute to final perfection, we know that the joy of Love is made literally manifest at every level of experience.
The erotic is the universal foundation of personal growth in Love.
Join me today and forever in the worship of the power of erotic joy.
Click here for 1.0 Welcome to the Universe!
También En Español.
Which will you choose for 2012? Will you commit yourself to the power and supremacy of love? Will you check yourself to make sure your actions are “of love?” Are you willing to call out those who are not-of love?
The stark realities and compounding errors of the feckless conspiracy of the greedy and the stupid are in sharp relief. These realities become clearer, bolder, and more desperate by the hour, with no exit strategy that doesn’t involve even greater hardship to the rest of us who own this earth. Who are the humane and the inhumane? Who are those “of love” and who are those “not-of love?” It’s easy to spot each camp. People cannot help showing which side they are on by the commitments and actions of their everyday life.
Our task is to co-create a world free from the bondage of a few. The few, let’s call them an aged, economically privileged, mostly entirely white, and corrupt. They are a small group, roughly .005% of the world’s population. They are characterized by their own polarizing fear of anything “other,” and naturally devolve to attacks at the intersection of race and sexuality because these two things so obviously threaten their ragged, useless paradigm that has brought nothing but social and economic injustice to the entire planet.
These folks are the ones in need of serious re-education. Movements such as Occupy Everything is doing a sterling service by pointing out this dislocation of world resources and the income disparities that are dismantling otherwise benign and serviceable institutions. For the first time in history enough people are mobilized throughout the world to flip that script once and for all, while the insane inanity of the now lock-step radical right, led by a new and rather freaky breed of (irreligious) American fundamentalists, is doing its part to speed along the process of their eventual demise.
Start with governments, “the state.” Governments are instruments of the people, and have an important role in maximizing the efficient uses of our collective resources, and in guaranteeing education and equalizing opportunity. An ideal government would have as its motto, “Privilege For All,” and carry on policy, programming, and administration to make that possible. Gone will be the most coercive arm of the state, the military, an end to the horrible choice given young people, unemployment or lack of tuition versus enlisting to fill body bags of endless asymmetrical wars aimed at justifying huge government budgets. That’s wrong, obscene.
Why must the state interfere with our reproductive rights? A private relationship between a patient and her physician is a precise example of the type of voluntary association that replaces its current coercive system that leads to nothing but heartache and more social and economic dislocation.
Why can’t teenagers have access to birth control? Condoms are more widely accessible, but why are teenage girls prevented from getting the morning after pill if they choose? The American fundamentalists driving governments insist that this is killing a . . . a what? a zygote?
“Personhood” proselytizers would have you believe that life begins at the moment of conception, when (the) sperm fertilizes (the) egg, and anything or more correctly, anyone, interfering with that “life” is guilty of a poorly thought through illegality. But they haven’t thought this through at all. The personhood laws would make every female guilty of infanticide every month because menstruation discharges those “eggs” that failed to attach. Shall we look all women up for their pre-existing condition that calls them monthly murderers? It make no sense and laws like these perforce are destined to the gooey dustbin of failed attempts to control people’s destiny.
These are just a few headline examples demonstrating how easy it is to separate out the haters among us. With the upcoming election, as crazy laws make their way through right wing controlled state legislatures, as mean-spirited Republican candidates spread their vitriol, it should be easier and easier for us to isolate and eradicate the draconians among us.
We have to have courage and call them out at every turn, and women are leading the way. Everyone, including men, comprising our 99.095% must join in to bring about a season “of love.”
How do you think prostitution can be legalized, protecting the right of individual choice, while at the same eradicating unethical sex slavery and human trafficking?
Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.
Video edited by Tiye Massey.
Two Guys Kiss at Santorum Rally
About three minutes and 35 seconds into Santorum’s speech at the Christian Liberty Academy in Arlington Heights, Ill., Timothy Tross and Ben Clifford screamed, “MIC Check!” Then they made-out to the horror and fascination of the 2,100 people at the rally. The men, along with a female companion, were removed from the event as attendees shouted, “U.S.A.”
Tross and Clifford aren’t saying whether they’re gay. They claim their orientation isn’t the point, Santorum’s antigay baiting is.
It has been used before at Westboro Baptist protests, and it occurs to me that Rick Santorum isn’t the only right wing zealot masquerading as a politician who deserves this.
Mass same-sex kiss-ins could become a formidable technique of non-violent civil disobedience!
Groups of us can go to public hearings of discriminatory legislation and policy, candidate rallies, and anti-marriage events, etc., whenever and wherever, and stage a timed mass kiss-in, something that would be as effective as sit-ins but much prettier and much harder to penalize. We could ask our allies to join in, putting their lips where their mouths are, staging kisses with same-sex allies.
We would drive the opposition crazy with this newfound, in-your-face strategy, or at least help them along their path of personal self-destruction. That would be a campaign I could get my lips around.
(También en Español)
News of Note: Rock Group “Junkyard Prophet” Delivers Controversial Message at School Assembly
High school students in Dunkerton, Iowa, were expecting an assembly about bullying and making good choices. What they got instead was the Christian rap/hard rock band called Junkyard Prophet delivering an anti-gay and anti-abortion rant.
According to the La Crosse Tribune, after the band performed, they separated the girls, boys, and teachers into three breakout groups. “They told my daughter, the girls, that they were going to have mud on their wedding dresses if they weren’t virgins,” said Jennifer Littlefield, whose 16-year-old daughter, Alivia, called her in tears after the event. Reportedly, one of the band members led the girls in a chant pledging purity and encouraged them to be submissive to their husbands after marriage.
The boys were shown images of musicians who died of drug overdoses. A video of the event shows a band member criticizing Elton John and Lady Gaga for encouraging “sexual deviancy” and supporting laws outlawing homosexuality.
I find it hypocritical and unfair that faith-based groups like Junkyard Prophet (and PFOX) are imposing their intolerant beliefs on helpless school children. The separation of church and state should (and unfortunately often does not) protect all children in public schools from being force-fed religious dogma and intolerance. Arguments against homosexuality, abortion, and premarital sex, are clearly rooted in the teachings of christian zealots, and have no business being taught to public school children as objective information.
These organizations have no shame in taking any opportunity they can to inject dogma into publicly funded schools. How can we organize to prevent this intolerance from being perpetuated in the future? This surely isn’t the end of it.
Creative Commons image by: Jsome1
There are just as many personal idiosyncrasies that distinguish everyone from the next person, as there are things that distinguish each person religiously, socially, culturally, financially, politically, etc. Why do you think accepting and defining your own sexuality, and having others accept it, is harder than any other facet of human development?
Make a video, write a poem, song, or an essay — or even create an original work of art — and express your thoughts. If we feature your contribution on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt to thank you.
Video edited by Tiye Massey.
