Dr. Phil: Another Irresponsible Talking Head

I’m on a forever media watch. We have lies about health care, propaganda of political agendas. I’m confused: is it the media’s job to relay information that is happening among the everyday people or is it to find little tidbits of material to sensationalize and broadcast over the air?

Dr. Phil’s latest episode Teen Sex Trends, has done an enormous disservice to people who are raising and caring for young adults in our society. Jezebel sums up the episode very well with an edited video clip. Dr. Phil's opening is infuriating, referencing “your” young daughters as these little stuffed animal toting powder puffs that are being destroyed by sex. He says he will “arm” and “prepare” you to “inoculate your daughter against getting caught up in this.” Ugh. He goes on misconstrue statistics to support his argument that “teen whoring” is every where.

His view, unfortunately, goes along with how a majority of our society approaches sexuality: that, in this case, young girls need to be “protected” from the evil ways of sex. Disease, disaster and dysfunction are is often the framework of how people think of sexuality and here is a prime example of it in the mainstream media.

Educating about sexuality is the answer here. Talking to kids and young adults is the answer. Making assumptions about why young people are participating in oral sex is not the answer. For some amazing commentary on this topic check out the Sex Positions blog on the National Sexuality Resource Center website (one of my fav sites!).

P.S. I'm excited for my first post here! I'm an outreach and education specialist here at PPRSR. You'll be hearing more from me soon.

College regulates student sex..

So, a new policy at Tufts University regulates sex in dorms, which actually (to me) seems fair enough:

"The Office of Residential Life and Learning (ResLife) has added a new stipulation to its guest policy that prohibits any sex act in a dorm room while one's roommate is present. The stipulation further states that any sexual activity in the room should not interfere with a roommate's privacy, study habits or sleep."

The new regulations also state that non-Tufts overnight guests must be registered with the student's resident assistant ("RA") and the roommate must consent to the guest's stay.

You can read the full article here, but I'll give you my two cents if yer just not feeling like it.

According to Tufts, the new rule is meant to address a common conflict between roommates in dorms: sex and sexual activity. It claims to help open the floor for dialogue about sex, something that officials think students are uncomfortable about discussing.

Personally, I think it's a good idea. Now, normally I am pretty anti-rules and regulations, but as a former dorm resident I think that this type of rule is necessary in protecting the individual rights of students to have a comfortable living space (and the right to study and sleep!). In the two years I lived on campus there were numerous times where partners staying the night was an issue, and unfortunately sometimes mere reasoning and compromise is not enough. It's pretty amazing and unfortunate how stubborn and disrespectful people are.

Now, I'm all about sex. And I'm all about college. But when we must share small spaces with people who we don't really know... mutual respect has gotta come first. Wait... shouldn't mutual respect always come first for EVERYTHING? Ding ding ding - we have a winner!

So... what do you think???

Sexual Satisfaction May Lead to Greater Well-Being in Women

This article is really interesting, and at first glance, makes me want to say "of course! I'm so glad a study is finding this out!"

But upon further investigation, it kind of leaves me confused. From the headline, I think the article would go in details about how a new study proves that sex is good for women's self-esteem and health - but instead, most of the article is spent wondering if this could actually be the case.

Of course, the data needs to be scrutinized - and it's fair enough to say that the cause-and-effect here isn't so clear -

...it is impossible to determine if dissatisfied women had lower well-being because they were sexually dissatisfied, or if the reverse is true, such that women who started with lower well-being tended to secondarily have sexual dissatisfaction.

Ok. So this is in a journal of medicine - it's going to be critical of data, as it should be. But why can't we focus on the benefits of having a healthy sex life - not the doubts that this claim brings up? I appreciate a good analysis of data, but I'm tired of people not being ready to say "SEX IS GOOD! DO IT!" There's always a caveat, it seems there's never any decisive reporting on these types of issues.

And furthermore, I wonder why this is even a study to begin with. By focusing it just on women, it insinuates that there are certain scientific doubts about women having sex in the first place (has anyone noticed this article that keeps showing on the CCN homepage? jeez). Why are we questioning why women have sex, and whether it is good for women? Nobody seems to be asking these questions about male sexual behaviors...hmmm....

I guess this study is important to dispel beliefs about female pleasure and women being sexually active, but the tone just puts me off, somehow. There has got to be a better way to report on these issues, and a more unambiguous, frank way to present this data.

Cecile Richards Is Awesome

I've always had a cool-person crush on Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. Aside from seeing her name the bottom of emails I get from PP, she's always right there, on the front lines, doing the crucial work that Planned Parenthood does every day. If you want to know why I call Cecile Richards one of my heroes, read this interview.

It's important to remind people how important Planned Parenthood actually is - beyond the politics. When I was tabling at the State Fair, if people looked skeptical, we reminded them that it's about Women's Rights! And Women's Health! Cecile Richards does that for a living (and much much more!) and she is wonderful.

Here are some of my favorite parts:

Planned Parenthood is this incredible organization that is a legacy organization – it's 92 years old – and yet, as relevant today as it was when Margaret Sanger started it.

The incredible thing about Planned Parenthood is we're in every state. We're not just in blue states or just red states or just in in-between states. We're everywhere.

We are the largest reproductive healthcare provider in the country…Ninety-seven percent of our work is preventive care—contraception, STI testing and treatment…Last year we did 1.3 million cervical cancer screenings.

During the last few years, we've seen this country [USA] with the highest teen pregnancy rate in the Western industrialized world, and we have now one in four teenage girls in America has a sexually transmitted infection. So this is like, it's not just a theoretical problem, it's a healthcare problem.

And if you love her like I do, follow her on Twitter!

Working together to prevent rape.

Check out this article on Jezebel, talking about rape prevention and different approaches on college campuses.

The article discusses the ways in which the weight falls on the shoulders of women to prevent rape. Oftentimes, the target group to educate is women, with the message being: "YOU have to avoid rape by not drinking, not dressing sexy, don't drink, don't be alone, don't stay out late..."

But (the article asks), what about educating men about rape, too?
The author of the article quotes Jaclyn Friedman:

"Schools would stop telling girls to mind their liquor so they don't "get themselves" raped and start teaching young men that alcohol is never an excuse to "get away" with anything. They would offer bystander training, so that all students on campus know what it looks like when someone's sexual boundaries are being violated and what to do if they see that happening. They would teach students that the only real consent is the kind that's freely and enthusiastically given, removing the "she didn't exactly say no" excuse that too many rapists hide behind. And their campus policies would support prevention, recovery, and justice, not dismissiveness, victim-blaming, and denial."

While I certainly agree with Friedman and the Jezebel.com article, I think that Jezebel fails to ackownledge the campuses that already have active rape prevention programs that involve many men.

What's also important to note is that while a large percentage of reported rapes are by men and the victims are women, we must remember that women can rape and men can be raped.

I think the main point, and one that we can all agree on, is that we all (as women, men, and otherwise) need to be watching out for eachother.. be it ensuring that our friends are safe from rape and that (as hard as it may be for some of us to imagine) our friends are not commiting rape or sexual assault. It's about being safe and watchful, but also making sure that we all are intolerant of any kind of sexual assault.

Asexuality is hot

In my "Queer Fictions" class at Syracuse University last week, we talked about what the "binary" means for sexual orientation - "straight vs. gay" transforming into "straight vs. LGBT." And we talked about how even by using the word "binary," we're somewhat negating the differences between L, G, B, and T. And Q and Q and A and everything else in between.

The idea was that by enforcing the binary, in saying that "there's straight people, and then there's everyone else," we leave out a lot of nuances and diversity within all those categories. And when I read this article about the asexual movement, I realized how asexuality didn't even come into the picture. Even by talking about a sexual orientation binary, and proposing to broaden how we view that spectrum, we were still leaving people out.

And yeah, I guess I'm not sure what that means. But this article is one step in trying to figure it out...

Talking about abortion.

Great article on feministing.com (full link here) discussing one woman's abortion story and how we all talk about abortion:

"But as I began to tell the relevant people in my life—my friends, my boyfriend, my family—I felt myself falling back on euphemisms. I was avoiding a word I say every day, and I didn’t like it. So I stopped. I made a conscious decision to talk frankly and directly about my abortion...

...It’s not that anyone I told was unsupportive. In fact, many even exceeded my expectations. When I called my Dad, I didn’t beat around the bush: “I have some health insurance questions because I need to get an abortion.” To his immense credit, he responded with the same matter-of-factness, answering my questions and asking none of his own. My boyfriend, after asking about the procedure, what was done, how I would feel, articulated what I considered a great stance to take: “I’m going to be as stressed out about this as you are.”

But I was thrown by so many hushed voices, the consistent tone of oh-my-god-this-must-be-the-end-of-the-world, the many utterances of “I don’t know what to say.”"