Category Public Information

Newsflash America: Denying Teen Sex Doesn’t Make It Go Away (Part 1)

Amy Schalet, author of “Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex” (University of Chicago Press, November 2011), states that denial is the real problem for American parents when it comes to teen sex.

. . . But talking to teens about sex does curtail unwanted teenage pregnancy

Amy Schalet, an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst originally from the Netherlands, urges American parents to stop denying that teens have premarital sex or participate in other sexual activities. Once parents accept that teens have sex, and teenage sexual development is normal, then parents and children will be able to have open relationships. Also, teens will see their parents as available resources when they start exploring their sexuality and develop sexual morals. “Adolescents,” according to Schalet in an interview, “still need their parents as support, to help sort out what are healthy relationships, to take precautions against the risks of sex, and deal with experiences of first love.”

But most parents do want to talk and be resources for their children. However, only expressing concerns and warning against the dangers of sex are not the way to foster trust and openness in any relationship, making it difficult for teens to confide in them. Therefore, a culture of “sneaking around” is established where teens hide their sexual activities from their parents, which never ends well for either teens or their parents.

Americans view teen sexuality as merely a storm of hormones, generating the expectation that teens can’t actually have sex in the context of loving relationships. Schalet says that this can lead to the psychic burden of being split between being a “good” child and a sexual being: a phenomenon that does not happen as readily in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands, Dutch families, the educational system, and the health care system go through the process of “normalizing” teenage sexual development: young people are encouraged to “self-regulate,” or refrain from sex before they are ready. But Dutch and Americans have severely different ideas to when teens are ready to have sex.

Most Dutch parents agree that teens are not ready for sex before the age 16 and that sex should occur in steady relationships in which both teens are in love and use precautions. Moreover, Dutch parents don’t want teenage sex to be a secret: they want to stay connected with their teens and be able to exercise influence and provide support, which includes providing teens with contraceptives.

For example, Dutch parents allow their older teens to have sleepovers with their partners, knowing full well that sex might occur. The conditions for the sleepover are generally that (again) the teens are in a steady relationship, are in love, and the parents have met or are familiar the partner (showing how Dutch parents, like their American counterparts, do not particularly want their teens to have “one night stands” or “hook ups,” for these pose greater threats to sexual health through STD/STIs transmission). On the other hand, Americans believe teens will never be ready for sex and expect youth to abstain from sex until marriage.

But why are parents in America so reluctant to speak with their children about sex when the Dutch aren’t?

Find out in “Newsflash America: Denying Teen Sex Doesn’t Make It Go Away PART 2” coming soon!

Tags: Teen sex, The Netherlands, Parents, teenage pregnancy, teenage sexual development, sexually transmitted diseases, abstinence

Caption: The Dutch acknowledge that children grow up to become sexual beings way before marriage. Therefore, parents and educators do all they can to help prepare teens to be sexually responsible and healthy when they are ready and decide to become sexually active.

Creative Commons Image by: FaceMePLS

Gateway Sexual Activity: Fact or Fiction?

Spurred by a classroom demonstration involving a sex toy, Tennessee recently enacted a pro-abstinence sex education law that is among the strictest in the nation, which includes bans educators from promoting “gateway sexual activity.”

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam signed this “no holding-hands” bill, as critics have labeled it, into law in May. According to drafters of the bill, HB 3621/ SB 3310, this so-called “gateway sexual activity” includes any discussion of “intentional touching of the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttock or breast of a human being.”

Governor Bill Haslam in “Tennessee’s Civil War on Comprehensive Sex Education and Teen Sexuality”

Let’s see what some of the topics this narrow definition excludes from sex education: oral sex, masturbation, mutual masturbation, breastfeeding, anal sex, menstruation, genital anatomy, pap smears, and well… sex in general. With all these topics banned, sex education in Tennessee will be anything but valuable, reliable sex education, so in other words, abstinence-only education. But without these topics, will students even learn what they are supposed to be abstaining from? Probably not.

Moreover, sex education classes will be required to “exclusively and emphatically promote sexual risk avoidance through abstinence, regardless of a student’s current or prior sexual experience.” Glad to know legislators at least recognize that they are consciously discriminating against 70% of the teen population who have had premarital intercourse by the age of 19.

But the evidence shows that the more we teach teens about sex, the more likely they will have sex, right?

WRONG. Evidence shows that comprehensive sex education programs that provide information about abstinence and effective use of contraception can help delay the start of sexual activity and increase condom use among sexually active teens. Therefore, banning the teaching of “gateway sexual activity” is fallacious (some may say felonious) because it is in direct opposition to students’ right to medically accurate, safe, and reliable sex education.

Even more outrageous is the fact that the discussion of whether the law would help reduce Tennessee’s high teenage pregnancy rate was absent from the debate in the Legislature. This law was simply an irrational response to a disgruntled parent’s comment after he found out an anti-AIDS group had visited his daughter’s class and demonstrated safe oral sex with a sex toy and condom: “When you start bringing sex toys in, at a point you’re stimulating kids to have sex.” Because demonstrating how to put a condom on a realistic phallus, rather than a banana, is going to turn his daughter into a sex-craved “slut.” Under this law, such classroom visitors and educators can be fined $500 by parents for teaching their kids how to protect properly themselves from STDs and HIV!

Can you image what would happen if that 70% of the teen population who have had premarital sex used condoms or another form of birth control every time they were sexually active? Can you imagine the positive sexual health outcomes if all teens used condoms the first time they had sex? I can. But these fantasies will only become reality if schools continue to move towards comprehensive sex education, not away from it like Governor Bill Haslam is taking Tennessee’s schools and certain Mississippi school districts.

Creative Commons Image by: Flickr

Carrying Condoms Not Only Makes You A Slut, but also a Prostitute

Initiatives in New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., allow the police to search and arrest women carrying three or more condoms late at night under prostitution charges.

So a woman carrying a few condoms can be arrested under the suspicion of being a prostitute? Does this profiling sound familiar? It’s just like the stigmatization that teen girls who carry even one condom receive from their peers whether or not she planned to use it: if a girl carries condoms, she’s automatically a “slut.” This is called “slut shamming,” or as a 13-year-old girl describes it in her video, Slut Shamming and Why it’s Wrong, “the act of degrading or mocking a woman because she dresses in tight or revealing clothing, enjoys sex, has a lot of sex, or is rumored to be sexually active.” Furthermore, slut shaming makes a woman or girl feel guilty or inferior for being sexually active, having multiple sex partners, or acting or dressing in a way that is deemed excessively sexual.

You might recall a popular example of slut shamming in recent media when Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut and a prostitute on air for advocating for contraception coverage and women’s health. This type of unwarranted labeling steers teen girls away from carrying condoms to avoid being labeled a “slut.” Likewise, these initiatives will steer women, sex worker or not, away from carrying condoms to avoid being labeled a prostitute and arrested. In the case of actual sex workers, trying to protect themselves from arrest forces them to participate in unprotected sex, increasing the spread of STD/STIs among sex workers, their clients, and the general public at large.

How can we fight gender discrimination and the stigmatization of teen girls carrying condoms when the government is legally allowed to do the same to women carrying condoms? How can we encourage our female youth to protect their sexual health while condemning the sexuality of women sex workers and dooming their sexual health? How can we convince boys that slut shaming is wrong when it is legal? These laws are asinine and need to be stopped. If a 13-year-old knows better, then there is no excuse for the government and the police department to support this type of sexist profiling.

Activists at the SlutWalk NYC in October 2011. SlutWalk is a worldwide movement, originating in Toronto Canada, working to challenge mindsets and stereotypes of American society that blames the victim or survivor in sexual assault cases and slut shaming.

Slutwalks are taking place all over the world for the second year to address these specious attacks on sexual freedom at the grassroots, including tomorrow in D.C.

Creative Commons Image by: David Shankbone

in Grassroots / News of Note / Public Information / Sex Education by Alifa Watkins 10 Aug 2012 1 comments

Why Should Men Control Women’s Sexual Health? It’s Time for Women and Girls to “Take Control”

Philadelphia teens, no matter what gender, need to truly understand that condoms are one of the best ways to prevent the spread of STDs and that stereotypes should NOT keep them from protecting their sexual health.

The Philadelphia Health Department launches a safe sex campaign called “She Takes Control” that promotes female empowerment and responsibility by encouraging female youth to carry condoms. Pennsylvania is one of the many states in the U.S. that suffers from high rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among teenagers — they are as much as five times the national average. STDs are increasingly prevalent in Philadelphia and Philadelphia County, with 1 out of 3 youth getting an STD during their teen years. In fact, PA ranked seventh highest among the 50 states in 2008 for AIDS cases. While many states and cities focus on sex education in public schools as solutions to STDs and unwanted teenage pregnancies, the Philadelphia Health Department (PHD) decided to take a separate route: a safe sex campaign targeting young females.

The new campaign, “She Takes Control,” follows an earlier campaign, “Take Control Philly,” launched last April. The later program gives free condoms to teenagers between the ages of 11 and 19 through 160 distributions sites and a mail-order program. However, only 22% of the mail orders came from females. According to Dr. Caroline Johnson, director of the Department of Public Health’s Division of Disease Control, this disparity was because “Adolescent boys were much more interested and accepting of these condoms.”

Why were boys more receptive than girls? Well, that is because of the stereotype of carrying condoms means that someone is loose or sexually promiscuous, especially when it comes to females. Generally, American youth find males who carry condoms to be much more acceptable than females who carry condoms, labeling the males as “studs” and the females as “sluts.” Unfortunately, society has taught youth that it is okay for males to be sexually promiscuous as a demonstration of their manhood, while women are supposed to fight back the advances of males and remain “pure” and “innocent.” Many describe this attitude as the “sexual double standard.”

This attitude is what “She Takes Control” is trying to counter. It is already bad enough that only 60% of Philadelphia boys are using condoms the first time they have sex, 20% lower than that national average. With the new campaign providing free condoms, and its website listing info because of stereotypes, fear, or stigma. For in the end, the ridicule of having an STD or becoming a teenage mother is far worse than being teased for carrying a condom and being a sexually responsible individual.

With the campaign providing free condoms and its website listing information about STDs (how to use condoms, where to get condoms, and about testing and treatments), and offering resources for parents about how to talk to their kids about sex, hopefully Philadelphia will see an increase in female youth carrying condoms and taking control of their sexual health. Women and girls should NOT depend on their male partners to carry condoms. Nor should they let men or boys decide the fate of their sexual health through unprotected sex by trusting that these guys get tested regularly and are free of any STDs. All teens need to respect their bodies and take care of their sexual health, regardless of what others might think of them, or their sexual health, regardless of what others might think of them, or because of stereotypes, fear, or stigma. For in the end, the ridicule of having an STD or becoming a teenage mother is far worse than being teased for carrying a condom and being a sexually responsible individual.

Collective Commons Image by: Jo Jakeman on Flickr

Image By Superstylo via Wikimedia Commons

in Campaigns / Key Issues / Public Information / Sex Education by Alifa Watkins 31 Jul 2012 0 comments

Net Neutrality and Internet Freedom: A voice for the voiceless

In preserving all human rights, especially those having to do with privacy of person and sexual freedom, free access to the unfettered communications of the Internet is crucial. The Internet is the circulatory system of the body politic, and the world’s only hope for true pluralism.

Any and all attempts to restrict or dismember the Internet and its uses must be met by an army of us willing to lay down our lives to make sure these attempts fail. Think of young Bradley Manning, who thought that transparency to bring alleged government corruption to the attention of a whistleblower was something he was willing to go to prison for. Very unfortunately, he has been in solitary confinement and suffered other loathsome, cruel, and unusual punishment at the hands of the U.S. government (latest updates, plus).

The hackerverse is populated with tens of thousands of young people like Bradley who are the world’s free speech heroes. They are not letting lawmakers interfere with Internet freedom with flawed legislation such as SOPA, PIPA, or the White House’s proposed Online Privacy Bill of Rights, or let stand any restrictions on constitutional freedoms on religious grounds. (Here is more information on the Stop Online Piracy Act/SOPA, the Protect IP Act/PIPA, and more.)

Most important, the freeway of the Internet is the only mechanism whereby the voiceless have a voice, and for that reason alone, all of us must keep a watchful eye on anything that would interfere with the free flow of information.

The reasons that politicians try to interfere with Internet freedom are not very pretty, and are often stupid. For example, christianists in Congress want to invade the privacy of everyone who views pornography. Others would like to see all pornography removed from the Internet.

Ironically, that very industry, pornography, made possible the early exponential growth of the Internet that turned out to have been instrumental in fueling the rapid expansion of the technology throughout the world. These self-appointed politicians think that all adults shouldn’t be allowed to view porn, but again ironically, these very politicians represent their own personal statistical cohort group in the American South, the so-called “Bible Belt,” a population which watches the most pornography and breeds America’s backward abstinence-only sex education leading to the highest rates of STDs and teen pregnancy. The Bible Belt has the highest divorce rates in the country, too, despite its “religiosity.” That has to tell us they are doing something wrong, but it doesn’t penetrate because their minds because they are so busy condemning the rest of us. Sad, sad, and sadder.

Will this opposition ever abandon their egocentric greed for personal and institutional power? Will they ever choose to live and let live? Or will they be content to be known for all time as just another bunch of ignorant and backward yokels who arrogantly assume the name of god in vain, as they try and fail to put freedom in a corner under their control?

Help us watch these people like hawks and make sure they keep their creepy hands off our inter webs.

Editor’s note: This is one of a series of position papers Dan Massey and I are creating and will soon index on our home page. They briefly explore the evolution of our points of view about a range of issues related to sex, gender, and racial freedom. Your feedback is always welcome.

Creative Commons image: Source

in Campaigns / Global Sexual Freedom Watch / Key Issues / News of Note / Public Information by Alison Gardner 25 Jul 2012 0 comments

Lesbian and Gay Rights in the World—Geography of Bigotry and Oppression

Click to enlarge

This amazing map, developed by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Organization, portrays, as of May 2012, the status of critical LGBT protections and persecutions world wide. We hope all people interested in international issues will examine it and understand where progress is being made and where horrible persecution and enforced neglect endure.

It is encouraging to see signs of great progress in areas of South America and most of Western Europe, where a modicum of equality is emerging, in spite of entrenched religious opposition by atheistic religionists deeply embedded in the pastoral hierarchies of these societies.

It is painful to see how pervasive persecution and ignorance continue unopposed and unabated throughout Asia, Africa, and North and Central America, omitting only Canada. This horror persists and advances in such economically advanced nations as the United States, Russia, and China.

At the same time, the atheist leadership of the false religions of fundamentalism—regardless of the mythological origins of their beliefs—have made it their worldwide business to oppose education, and anything else which would broaden people’s perspectives on the realities of living in a modernizing society.

Nowhere is this atheistic negation of the most basic tenets of the faith they claim to espouse more apparent than in the United States, where the bigoted leadership of christianist cults, who know nothing of the “Christ” they claim to extol, expend vast sums to export their hatred to the third world in hope of colonializing the minds of uninformed citizens while quietly seizing financial control of undeveloped natural resources for personal advantage.

There are seated U.S. Congressmen that hold allegiance to their egocentric interpretation of “god’s law” as supreme. They respect neither teachings of great world religions, nor the U.S. Constitution, which they once swore to uphold. Their behavior hovers on the border of treason. They encourage bizarre religious hysteria in client country populations, while personally profiting from abuse of their government position to influence U.S. Foreign Aid, taken from your tax dollars, into back-end income from third world development projects and exploitation of those countries’ rich natural resources.

in Global Sexual Freedom Watch / Key Issues / News of Note / Public Information by Alison Gardner 22 Jul 2012 0 comments

Religion: Real and Fake

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Society suffers from a severe misunderstanding of the nature and role of religion. Nowhere is this more apparent than in ongoing arguments about the “separation of church and state.” Blame the Puritans.

The basic idea in the U.S. Constitution is one of freedom FROM religion, expressed as “freedom of religion.” The tenets of any religion may not be imposed on its citizens who disagree. This concept is fundamental to the unalienable human right to absolute privacy of person, and pillar of sexual freedom and the bedrock of all other freedoms.

The pilgrims who came to Plymouth imagined that they could impose their concept of the divine will upon everyone who opposed them, that the free exercise of their religion meant forcing the world into compliance with their beliefs, a severe misdirection victimizing all sincere people. A few years later, Puritan fanaticism swept England herself into a great civil war. Such foolishness has characterized many fanatical conflicts throughout history, and can be seen today in the demands and schemes of theocratic groups worldwide, including today’s America.

A real religion is world religion. One could say there are as many religions in the world as there are people. Even atheists and agnostics objectify “god” and choose to exclude these hobbled, uninspired notions. World religion is superstition- and mythology-free and an immediately accessible and consistent guide to living in tune with the rhythms of cosmic destiny. This vitology—our urge to persist—gives each person a vision of immortality, an unending, improving, and harmonizing ecology of living.

Our faith is one of loving—desiring to do good to one another. This perpetual cycle of love shared is powered by all kinds of love, especially including the erotic, and it gives us a unified power for progress the world has yet to see. Our inherent and inherited capability for sexual pleasure and orgasm (erotic joy) is the living and loving communion that matures us individually to the service of Love and its destiny, and unites us as a team in shared fellowship—a loving siblinghood.

in Cosmic Citizenship / Global Sexual Freedom Watch / Key Issues / Public Information / Transhuman Erotic Freedom by Alison Gardner 20 Jul 2012 0 comments

Sacred Sex and Erotic Joy

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

Gustave Doré – Paradiso

The world’s secret history is strewn with tales of visionaries and pioneers who have advocated for the primacy of erotic joy in connecting each person with the universe at large and endowing each of us with supreme power to shape our own destiny (however that is defined by the individual).

For eons, these practitioners have operated in secret to protect this inherited knowledge (and more frequently, their lives) from self-appointed minorities who by their nature suppress this information and fear its neutralizing power. Tantra survives today. More recently, today’s guardians of this secret knowledge have warned us that lifting the veil on people’s direct connection to the power of erotic joy is a bad idea. We are told average modern people will not understand this power, that they are not yet ready to wield this power, that there will be disastrous results.

Today, we ask the question, “What could be more of a disaster for the vital and progressive spirit of humanity than the current state of the world?”

Revelation of the long-hidden knowledge of the primacy of erotic joy in shaping vitological (spiritual) experience is the precise antidote to practically every problem on earth. When entirely materialistic values and coercive systems are cleared away by worshipful engagement with erotic joy, verifying the primacy of love, not only does everything get better—but also we each release the power of truth, beauty, and goodness to reign our world. Voluntary associations replace these obsolete and now useless systems that are based on fear, bullying, violence, and spiritual oppression. In this way the collective of humanity fosters the best future, the intended and inherited future, the future that each new child born into this world deserves and would choose.

We campaign for Sexual Freedom to enable all to experience erotic joy free from human superstition, performing its intended function to expedite the emergence of a society based on love and service.

You will find more about how you can bring Sacred Sex and Erotic Joy out of the closet on our websites (venusplusx.org and its sister en espanol, venusmasx.org), including the serials, A Course In Immortality and in Spanish, Un Curso de Inmortalidad.

in Cosmic Citizenship / Global Sexual Freedom Watch / Key Issues / Op-Ed / Public Information / The Sexual Freedom Project / Transhuman Erotic Freedom by Alison Gardner 18 Jul 2012 0 comments

“Femicidios”: Unsolved Murders Against Women in Mexico and the Caribbean (Part I)

También en español ”Death to the b**ches, I’m back” read a sign found next to the body of one of the nearly 1,700 Guatemalan women who have been murdered in the past five years. Since 1993, some 500 women of limited means have been killed or disappeared from the streets of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The authorities have not resolved these female murders. “Women of all ages, educational levels, social-economic backgrounds, races, ethnicities and sexual orientations may be the eventual victim of this extreme form of gender-based violence”, explains the scholar Diana Russell.

While femicide is committed around the world, the border city of Ciudad Juárez’s infamy as the capital of feminicide is by now common knowledge. The term “feminicidio” was first used in the late 1990s to describe a phenomenon of unsolved murders and disappearances in Ciudad Juárez, dating to 1993, the year women’s rights groups first noticed an unusual increase in murders and disappearances of women and girls. It was this alarming rate of violence against women in the border region and the near-absolute impunity for gender crimes that catalyzed transnational activism: the hemispheric “Por la Vida de las Mujeres” (For the Life of Women) initiative launched by the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights (known by its Spanish acronym, CLADEM); research on the subject matter; and, eventually, the elaboration of “feminicide.”

Most of the bodies of murdered women exhibit high levels of sexual violence. The murders and disappearances of women occur within the context of a patriarchal society with high levels of sexism, discrimination and misogyny. Mexico, for example, has one of the highest rates of gender violence in the world, with 38 percent of Mexican women affected by physical, sexual or psychological abuse, compared with 33 percent of women worldwide. Two-thirds of female homicides occur in the home, and 67 percent of women in Mexico suffer domestic violence. For Guatemala, the figure is 47 percent.

In Mexico, women’s human rights groups have long held that police failed to respond to gender crimes because “they feared organized crime was involved, or because they were involved themselves, or both.” Police indifference to gender crimes is rooted in a system of illegality so interpenetrated in the state structure that it blurs the distinction between state institutions and criminal networks, and between government agents and criminal agents.

After Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched Operation Chihuahua in 2008, deploying thousands of soldiers and military police to the region, violence and criminality have reached pandemic proportions, together with a disturbing trend of human rights violations committed by the very same security forces sent to restore order.

Parte 2, to come.

Thanks to Eduardo Carrasco for contributing to this story.

in Global Sexual Freedom Watch / Key Issues / Public Information by Alison Gardner 14 Jul 2012 1 comments

Going Live: espanol.venusplusx.org and venusmasx.org

También en español Having been a bilingual site since last fall, VenusPlusX is now gradually rolling out its new all-Spanish site, espanol.venusplusx.org (o, en español, venusmasx.org) — our continuing gift to the worldwide Spanish-speaking community, side by side with our now all-English site, venusplusx.org.

Our round seal, in English and Spanish, portrays “Columbia,” The Statue of Freedom atop the U.S. Capitol. The original sculptor chose a two-spirit (transgender) First People model to create his ideal of freedom. In both English (Sexual Freedom . . . You Are Born With It) and now on our Spanish site, it has become our ideal symbol of a peaceful post-gender world.

We call for a New Age of Sexual Freedom, asking sincere people to devote themselves to sustainable changes that guarantee everyone’s inalienable personal sovereignty, and freedom to love as they see fit, without fear of being overridden and perverted by presumptuous governments, religious hierarchies, greedy corporations, and blind social custom.

We also want to urge our sister organizations and websites to consider making some of their resources available to the greater community in languages other than English in demonstration of our shared dedication to worldwide change. This enhances the global celebration of common ideals, and demonstrates to everyone what is important (of love) and what must be left behind as no longer useful to people’s health and well-being.

To be any sort of movement, we must advocate first and foremost for the most vulnerable in any community, the sexual and gender minorities. In the U.S., this especially includes those people whose skin color, origins, and/or or economic and immigration status further diminish their fair access and happiness, and expose them to extreme social violence. In most of Latin America, the rate of murders and assaults is far higher, social tolerance of sex and gender nonconformity far lower, and the vulnerable population far larger, for reasons beyond the concerns of race and immigration.

The very integrity of any movement depends on addressing global evils wherever they appear. From our point of view, the voiceless and least able are our “boss,” the people whose stories stir us, who fuel our passion to get up each morning and work hard on their behalf. Because when we direct our educational efforts, advocacy, and activism to those who need our help the most, we sleep better at night knowing we have have done everything that day, the very best we can do, for the largest possible number of people.

We hope you will take a look at both our sites and let us know what you think. And, please follow us on Twitter (Lady Gaga does!) and Like us on Facebook.

Creative Common image (modern Furoshiki gift wrapping, from 6th Century Japan) by: Wolfgang

in Grassroots / News of Note / Public Information / The Sexual Freedom Project by Alison Gardner 12 Jul 2012 1 comments

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