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Scarleteen's Heather Corinna Needs Your Help With Survey About Real Adults Attitudes About Casual Sex

Thu, 2010-03-04 15:17 — figleaf

I’m passing this along for three reasons, because Heather’s a friend, because she’s doing good work, and because I hope I can help her find adults in their late 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond who are willing to complete a confidential survey for what I consider to be a worthwhile project.

Heather Corinna is doing a large study on multigenerational experiences with and attitudes about casual sex. The data will ideally be used for publication, but answers are completely anonymous and will only be used anonymously.

There’s a lot of buzz now about “hooking up,” the newest term for casual sex, though casual sex isn’t new at all — nor does it only belong to the current generation, despite often being presented that way. Unlike most of the buzz out there, she’s not interested in telling anyone how to have sex, warning people off any given kind of sex or in presenting any one kind of sex as “the best way.” She’s just looking for what’s real, both in sexual attitudes and experiences among a diverse array of ages, genders and sexual identities, races and sexual ideologies/constructions. The only requirements for participating in this study are being over the age of 16, and having had some kind of sexual partnership before, even if none has been casual. The study will take around twenty minutes.

She would like the study to show as diverse an array of people as possible, especially since so often media representations or cultural conversations about casual sex are usually only about heterosexual white women or about gay men. She particularly wants to be sure LGBT people, people of color, those over 45 and social conservatives are adequately represented, so please share this link with your networks after you take the survey yourself, especially if your networks include people in any or all of those groups.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/S97WR6H

If you don’t know who Heather is, she’s been working in human sexuality for around 12 years. She is the founder and executive director for Scarleteen.com, does sex education outreach at youth shelters and women’s clinics in Seattle, and has been a sex columnist and writer online for sites like The Guardian and RH Reality Check. She has also been published in a handful of anthologies and is the author of S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College (DaCapo Press). If you have any questions, you can contact Heather at hcorinna@mac.com

Considering that so flipping much of what we “know” about human sexuality is based on research conducted on undergraduates I’m always enthusiastic about efforts to include the other 85% of the adult population in the research! Thanks to Heather for doing the research and thanks to you if you choose to participate.

Distinguishing Casual Flings from Casual Sex

Tue, 2009-07-21 10:53 — figleaf

Karen Rayne of Adolescent Sexuality, who teaches both sex education to early adolescents and sex-ed instruction to education majors has an interesting take on summer/vacation flings for teenagers.

Vacation flings can range from more emotional connection and no physical connection to an exclusively sexual experience.  They can last a weekend, or a week, or several weeks.  Some of them are remembered and some are forgotten.

But what’s the point of these little affairs?  Are they essentially good or harmful for teenagers?  Should parents encourage them or discourage them?

As I have mentioned before, teenagers are in a place where they are discovering who they are, who they want to be, and how much choice they really have in the matter.  To go through this process, most teenagers need to experience themselves in a variety of situations and acting in a variety of ways.  It’s a healthy thing for them to date around and learn what kind of a partner they want to have.

Vacations often offer a safe place to experiment.  The relationship is generally, by circumstance, limited in length. If the match is not a beneficial one, the parents (and the teenager) can take solace in it ending shortly. The teenager can experience a different side, a different personality, a different kind of relationship, with a firm expiration date attached. If the teenager likes this new sense of self, it can be brought back home, but if the teenager does not like the new sense of self, it can be discarded and left behind. Very convenient, no?

She said it here.

As my blog name suggests I’m not enthusiastic about sex and young people. That doesn’t mean I don’t think they shouldn’t be sexual. I hope it’s obvious that I support sex education (I believe age-appropriate sex education should begin very early.) It’s just that since adulthood actually lasts a really long time, and that a healthy, non-pressured, non-sexualized adolescence lays a great foundation for… well… real adult sex I don’t think one “misses out” by waiting till you’re already a adult instead of imagining it’s sex that actually makes you a man or woman.

Where I part company with the abstinence/chastity crowd, of course, is that don’t see adolescence as a rearguard attempt to hold off on relationship formation till one finds their “one true love.” So I agree wholeheartedly with Rayne that casual or transitory relationships are important precursors to serious and long-term ones.

See also: Debby at My Sexy Professor has a post about How to Make Casual Flings Work. The four main headings: know thyself, come prepared, safety first, and have realistic expectations nicely illustrates the difference between adolescent and adult relationships and further illustrates how learn to crawl before you walk and learn to walk before you run extends to learn to navigate relationships before you have sex.

It takes time to “know thyself.” “Come prepared” tends to assume you already know what to prepare for. “Safety first” sounds self-evident, and to be honest in our hyper-vigilant culture of parenting it’s the rare child who hasn’t been stuffed brim-full with it from birth. But the transition to “independently assessing potential partners and opportunities” is a pretty big step up from “don’t put your fingers in the fan.”

Which takes me to Debby’s last point about having realistic expectations: Good expectations need to include the point that at least half of all college freshmen are still virgins! Even though something like 85% of freshmen believe only 15% are… and that, naturally, they’re part of that 15%... and that, naturally, that makes them losers. Which evidently, even in college, in turn makes it harder for them to get a serious grip on know thyself, come prepared, and safety first.

Which in turn goes back to the message Karen Rayne, and Deb Haffner, and Heather Corinna and countless other professional sex educators come back to again and again: the point of real, comprehensive sex education isn’t just to get us ready for sex (a big concern of “traditional values” types that Rayne beautifully refutes here) but to help us get ready to get ready to have sex as well.

Children, Adults, and Respecting Decison Making

Fri, 2009-04-10 13:24 — figleaf

In this post about Freud and polymorphous perversity in adulthood I made an offhand comment related to my feelings about why, whatever their subjective experience might be, children shouldn’t be sexualized or otherwise pushed to be sexual before, well, adulthood.

In the aside I said

I think (obviously for someone with my blog title) it’s more appropriate to encourage sexual expression in adults after we’ve gone through a lot of healthy identity formation. One of the problems with children, ironically, is that because they’re polymorphous they’re more easily manipulated down convenient-for-adult narrow pathways (gee, sound familiar?)... as opposed to organically developing their own.

I said it here.

Since the post was actually about something else I didn’t really think about it till Jha of Rebellious Jezebel Blogging called it to my attention in comments.

I like the way you put this. Somehow, whenever I try to talk about comprehensive sex education for kids, either I get the told that I’m expecting kids to have sexual expression too young, or that sex shouldn’t be a priority anyway. It’s kinda mind-boggling.

She said it here.

Yup. And by the way it’s not as easy as it looks. This is one of the reasons I take my hat off every time I think about how hard Heather Corinna works to keep things safe but neutral at Scarleteen and in her writing for young people.

It’s not just about sexual trauma in childhood, though the world overflows with adults who will never enjoy their own sexuality thanks to an adult who enjoyed it for them… for a day, or a week, or a year… before they were ready. It’s that growing up is complicated. The complex soup of sex identity, sexual preference, sexual orientation, interpersonal negotiation with peers, critical faculty development, and hormone-surge processing, body-image adjustment (compounded by, um, profound body changes), and reconciliation of gender construction messages with subjective reality takes a really long time! All that and differential physical and psychological development rates and timing for boys and girls. And physical “readiness” can precede actual emotional or developmental readiness as well.

Which is not to say that it’s not appropriate to try to influence children’s sexual development before they’re ready to be sexual on their own. With sports it’s fine to tell a child “if you’re going to play you should be familiar with the rules and wear appropriate equipment but wait till mineralization in your shoulders and knees before playing X” and with sex it’s fine to say “if you’re going to be sexual you should be familiar with the rules and wear appropriate equipment” as well. So comprehensive sex education, as designed and taught by competent authors and instructors, is just fine.

Beyond that? It will always be fiendishly hard to separate one’s own, um, interests from genuine pedagogical concern, therefore for entirely pragmatic reasons it will always be best to give young people room to let their own sexualities emerge.

Imbalanced Thinking: Prosecuting Girls But Not Boys for "Sexting" Indicates Other Bigger Problems

Sat, 2009-04-04 08:06 — figleaf

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors hits the nail on the head

The news in recent weeks has reported a spate of child-porn prosecutions against teens accused of “sexting“—sending nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves to friends and classmates—typically using their cell phones. According to a study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, nearly as many boys as girls have sent or posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video self-portraits (18% vs. 22%). Yet, it seems that almost all of the prosecutions one hears about involve pictures of girls. Boys are sometimes prosecuted for possessing or “distribution,” but of those who photograph themselves, it is the girls that are the primary targets of legal action, press reports and public attention.

She said it here.

Sort of speaks for itself, eh? The Two Rules of Desire say that men or boys can send photos because they’re horny — typical noxious activity perhaps but no harm. But if girls do it? Whoa, that’s broken! They must be in thrall. They don’t know better. They’re going to turn into sluts. They’re victimizing themselves!!!! They might tear their hymens and then nobody will want to marry them!!!!” Better lock ‘em up… before they further harm themselves!

I’m not sure which is worse — throwing the book at girls or completely neglecting boys.

Fortunately we don’t need to decide: hysterical overreaction and blind indifference are both really shitty things to do when children are forming their sexual identities.

It’s not about hypocrisy, although there’s bound to be some of that. (Freud would surely have a field day if anyone wanted to dig him up.) But that’s not my beef: being completely in denial about emergent sexuality, hinging all discussion of emergent sexuality on girls’ virginity, failing to have adequate models of emergent female and male sexuality, and consequently failing to prepare to help children cope when their sexuality emerges is a problem because it will serve them ill in adulthood. Which lasts 50-80 years compared to the handful of years of actual sexual emergence.

Prosecuting girls, and disregarding boys, for expressing sexuality isn’t just stupid or wrong, it’s evidence of child neglect at a societal level. Heck, just getting hysterical about it in the first place is a problem, instead of, oh, say, anticipating that it might happen and, you know, having a plan and maybe even comprehensive curriculum developed to deal with it.

Update: Just to be clear: the answer to which is better, prosecution or ignoring it the answer is neither. It’s possible (and, I think, necessary) to react appropriately and child-developmentally without overreacting.

On Letting Hairless Little Boys Determine *Anything* Let Alone Women's Hair Fashion

Tue, 2009-03-31 11:43 — figleaf

On the other hand… here’s a a follow up on my previous, possibly overoptimistic post. Laura Woodhouse of reviewed a British TV program allegedly intended to contrast sex education and pornography and turns up… well a whole raft of issues. Some of which are not just wrong but (just from my privileged, future-dead-white-hippie-male perspective?) sick and wrong.

Last night’s first installment of Channel 4’s The Sex Education Show Vs Pornography focused on the way in which pornography affects young people’s attitudes towards and expectations of the female body…

...

The programme’s findings were unsurprising: boys find big, fake, firm, round breasts most attractive; girls want big, fake, firm round breasts because ‘that’s what the boys want’. Boys preferred hairless genitals; girls felt pressurised to shave because they ‘want to make the boys happy’.

...

Well, aside from showing them photos and real naked women and telling them that porn bodies are not natural (making the mistake of claiming that being slim with big boobs is unnatural – way to further alienate girls who get picked on for being just this shape), not much. She didn’t challenge the boys’ sense of entitlement to porn style bodies, simply laughing when a boy said that if he came across a girl with pubic hair he’d tell her to get rid of it. She didn’t actively tell the girls that it was perfectly OK not to shave all your pubes off, that they shouldn’t feel pressurised to conform to what boys want, and instead gave them advice on reducing shaveburn and ingrowing hairs and suggested that they shave ‘for themselves’ rather than for the boys. Considering the series is supposed to be challenging the ‘pornification’ of our culture, it seems rather ironic that the presenter is using the typical anti-feminist backlash tactic of convincing women to do things men want by persuading us we’re doing it for ourselves. Yes, some women do like to shave it all off, but this is hardly the most empowering or helpful advice for teenage girls.

In general, the programme stank of repressed British, seaside postcard style boob-enduced hilarity…

...

[I]t completely failed when it came to actively recognising the clear sexism and gender divide here and challenging it: the main solution being put forward is simply to prevent kids having access to porn by persuading PC companies to install child block software on their products. I hope to see boys in particular actually being asked about how they feel men and women are presented in the porn they watch, but it looks like subsequent episodes are focusing mainly on the body, orgasms and performance.

She said it here.

I gotta say, while totally acknowledging my privileged-hippie standpoint it baffles me to no end that grownups would imagine telling girls how to avoid fucking razor burn instead of maybe that what boys want (or say they want… or even cluelessly imagine they want!) isn’t the only possible frame of reference in the universe.

I mean… there’s loss of power, sure, but there’s also surrender of power. And not to put too fine a point on it, in the case of letting 11-year-old boys (the average age, according to Woodhouse’s sources, that boys are getting their exposures to porn) have the power to dictate feminine standards is… is… what the fucking hell moron universe does anybody let an adolescent child, of any gender, establish beauty standards?

I mean… Shiva up the stovepipe, of course little boys are going to want women to have no pubic hair — boys don’t start getting pubic hair till they’re maybe 13! They don’t even go into puberty on average for two years after girls their age! It’s… it’s… Dick Cheney on stilts! Ask an 11-year-old boy… even a 13-year-old boy what he thinks girls ought to look like and he’s going to say they ought to have an exoskeleton and a compartment for their favorite Magic™ card decks and a spigot for grape soda! And not to get overwrought or anything but at least when I was growing up boys started playing with their father’s or grandpas old empty safety razors and pretending to shave from… pretty early on. And searching our faces, with generally increasing anxiety, through 5th, 6th, 7th, and sometimes later grades for the first hint that finally we can start… not to grow a beard or mustache but to begin shaving.

So of course we’re going to be totally, utterly, and (literally!) juvenile-y wiggy, conflicted, and just generally to-the-bone not the people to be cool-hunting what women ought to look like!

Not to put too fine a point on it but… I stumbled across my URL by accident, but I chose to use it when I started sex-blogging for absolutely intentional, purposeful reasons. Children are a lousy source of standards for human sexuality. If we designed cars to suit children’s driving habits they’d need big red rubber bumpers and windshield-wipers on the inside because when children drive they stick out their tongues and go “blpblpblpblplpblpblpt!”

But we stand by and let children… unsupervised boys (because I’m pretty sure that by-definition 11-year-old-boy porn-viewers, or 13-year-old, or 16-year-old, are not being supervised) or girls establish, let alone dictate, what’s supposed to be “normal” adult appearance.

And for adults to let this happen? Or just mope about it? Or, worse, enable it either by suggesting restricting access is sufficient (criminy!) or by offering (to girls, natch) “helpful” suggestions like how to avoid flipping razor burn, or by shrugging helplessly and saying “woah, even 11-year-old hot-wheels-decal Y chromosome-rays are just so Teh Powerful how can we fight it?” Or, worst of all, not getting in there and raising your fucking children by maybe, y’know, making sure their first (and second, third, tenth, and 87th) exposures to information about sexuality from sex education instead of porn… or peers… or possibly well-intentioned but otherwise ill-prepared magazine editors and television programmers.

Seriously! It’s obviously not benefitting boys. And it’s sure not empowering girls. It’s abdication in the worst possible, lest responsible, most thoroughly non-real-adult way possible.

Sheesh!

No, really, WTF, OMG, !=LOL sheesh! I… I… At this point I need a windshield wiper on my laptop screen!

New Initiative At the F-Word: Request For Adult Sex Education Suggestions

Thu, 2008-03-20 16:45 — figleaf


Photo by Flickr user vivified. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Jess McCabe of The F-Word Blog says

Following on from Laura’s post about the poverty of sex education in the UK, we got thinking about ways to fill in those gaps (and then some) for adults.

Me and Laura are looking to compile a listing of resources on safe, happy, consenting sex, relationships and sexuality, for the over 18 set, who can no longer benefit from whatever wisdom HMG and the national curriculum might impart. Can you help us?

Of course, we’re particularly interested in anything which is coming from an explicitly or implicitly feminist perspective. And we’re interested in making this as inclusive as possible. That means regardless of/aimed at all levels of experience (beginner to advanced!), sexuality, gender, kink or lack thereof, etc.

Book, blog, website, workshop, feminist/women’s sex toy store, DVD, audio tape – whatever it is, we’re interested! Not porn though, at least partly because that gets into contentious territory we’re not really interested in for this one.

A few words on why you are making the recommendation would also be great. You can tell us anonymously if you so wish in the comments, or email us using the feedback form.

We’ve got a few resources listed in the bookshop’s sex and relationships section, to get your thought process started.

I’ve quoted the whole post and please go there to leave any suggestions.

I think this is a fabulous initiative, and a much-needed one. Because almost all of us learn about sex at the same time we’re undergoing adolescence it’s not surprising we sometimes confuse the adolescence part with the sex part. That’s actually fine while you’re an adolescent. Not so hot if we never learn to migrate to real adult relationships or, well, um, adult sex.

I also have to say that it’s a fabulous idea because unlike a lot of other stuff in the world, the obstacles to real adult sex are way more a product of simply not noticing, not knowing, or not thinking about stuff. Plus, compared to other stuff in the world the benefits of adult sex education tend to be enormous, immediately useful, and instantly appreciated.

Just to get the ball rolling, since I’ve just moments ago finished a quarter in a college-level sex-education program here are some recommended links that my instructors and fellow students thought were pretty useful.

  • Go Ask Alice
    http://www.goaskalice.columbia.edu/about.html
    Go Ask Alice! is the health question and answer Internet service produced by Alice!, Columbia University’s Health Education Program – a division of Health Services at Columbia.
    This site has three primary features:
    • New GAA! Q&As of the Week gives you the latest inquiries and responses – this section is updated every Friday.
    • Search GAA! lets you find health information by subject via a search of the ever-growing Go Ask Alice! archives containing nearly 2,600 previously-posted questions and answers.
    • Ask Alice! gives you the chance to ask Alice! a question.

  • Babeland
    http://www.babeland.com

  • Disability and Sexuality
    http://www.disabilityresources.org/SEX.html

  • Equality Now website
    http://www.equalitynow.org/english/navigation/hub_en.html
    Equality Now was founded in 1992 to work for the protection and promotion of the human rights of women around the world. Working with national human rights organizations and individual activists, Equality Now documents violence and discrimination against women and adds an international action overlay to support their efforts to advance equality rights and defend individual women who are suffering abuse.

  • The Gottman Institute
    http://www.gottman.com/
    Right here in Seattle we have one of the best relationship researchers in the country. The Gottman Institute is committed to helping couples using techniques built on substantial, reliable and valid research with couples. In addition, they hold useful workshops and train therapists.

  • The Guide to Getting It On
    http://www.goofyfootpress.com/
    Here is the link for a very frank, amusing and completely useful sex guide, check it out.

  • Guttmacher Institute
    http://www.guttmacher.org/index.html
    The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) is a nonprofit organization focused on sexual and reproductive health research, policy analysis and public education.

  • SEX EDUCATION: WHAT PEOPLE THINK
    http://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/pomr012904oth.cfm
    A new project by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University’s Kennedy School examines Americans’ views on sex education in the nations public schools.

  • Sexual Harassment: It’s not academic.
    http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/ocrshpam.html

  • The Wet Spot
    http://www.wetspot.org/
    A sex positive community center in Seattle.
    Note: Now known as the Center for Sex-Positive Culture and on the web at http://www.sexpositiveculture.org/

Again, if you’ve got suggestions of your own, please make them over at The F-Word Blog. Thanks!

[Note: I just so want a t-shirt like the one in the photo at the top! —fl]

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