Abstinence fails, use a condom

According to a recent study, 25% of teenage girls in the United States have a Sexually Transmitted Infection. (requires login) Such a high rate of infection is public health crisis, and one that is very preventable. It's also a sign that our government is failing our youth, especially young women, by insisting on abstinence-only sexual health curricula. Teenagers have sex. They have hormones, and they experiment, because, well, they're teenagers and they're horny and why not? Ignorance, combined with the adolescent feeling of invulnerability and the need to fit in, results in extremely risky behaviors. Even if girls know that they need to practice contraception, they don't necessarily practice safer-sex, and even those who insist on condoms for penetrative intercourse can catch diseases through other types of sex play. In fact, only half the girls in the study admitted to having had "sex", which, thanks to Bill Clinton et al, is often defined only as penetrative vaginal intercourse. There are lots of ways two naked people can have fun together, and many of those ways carry the risk of disease. Obviously, these girls didn't get HPV or chlamydia simply from holding hands, which indicates that they're engaging in other types of sex acts.

When teens know the risks of "sex" but define "sex" so narrowly, they decide to mitigate those risks by engaging in other kinds of sex play. And girls, especially, get the raw end of the deal when it comes to abstinence-only sex ed, because many girls feel intense pressure to give into their boyfriends' sexual demands in order to maintain a certain social standing.¹ Even in the 21st century in the USA, girls and women still do not have the same amount of sexual autonomy that males do. By giving girls accurate information about the risks associated with all kinds of sex, we empower them to make decisions based on facts, not what they learned at summer camp and on cable. They have better reasons to say no and to wait until the decision is theirs, rather than their partner's. And boys too, need to know just what risks they are taking by engaging in these activities.

But no one wants to imagine their precious little girl performing fellatio, so instead we bury our heads in the sand and tell teens to keep it in their pants. Which is good advice, certainly. I'm not advocating that we encourage free love in the corridors of our nation's schools. But we know for a fact that it isn't being followed by everyone. We tell kids not to smoke or drink or do drugs or speed, and yet they continue to do so, owing partly to adolescent rebellion and partly to that aforementioned feeling of invincibility. The difference between these activities and sex is that sex is a biological drive, necessary to the survival of our species, and there are ways to mitigate the risk when you give into that drive. We need to teach our young people what those ways are, because the chances that they're not going to engage in sex someday are very small. Teaching teenagers about sex and how to be safe doesn't turn them into fornicators. Being teenagers does (even the dullest teen can generally figure out that Tab A goes into Slot B, esp. in our sex-saturated media culture). Even if they make it out of high school without having any kind of sex, they grow into adults, and with each passing year, the likelihood that they remain virgins goes down (92% of women have had sex by age 24 ). If we don't make reality-based sexual education available to our teenagers, when is it that we expect that anyone will learn about the risks of sex? College? Loveline? Isn't part of the point of public education to prepare our youth for their place in society? And some of these girls are destined to join the unacceptably large numbers of people without health insurance (15.7% as of the last census). Who will continue to spread disease, because they won't have primary-care physicians to suggest testing or provide treatment and education. When left untreated, many curable STIs can result in infertility (and other long-term side effects, including heart disease and brain damage) or be passed on to infants during pregnancy and labor, greatly increasing the public health crisis.

Bottom line is this: the vast majority of people will have sex at some point in their lives. By hiding the realities of sex from our teenagers, we do everyone a disservice. Ignorance may be bliss, but it's a lousy bedmate. Why are we so afraid of teaching people how their bodies work?

1. I remember a very interesting discussion in my Sociology of Sex and Gender class about why such a narrow definition of sex is embraced by our society. Teenagers are under pressure from the media and their peers (and their hormones) to have sex. Teenage girls are under pressure from society to remain chaste until marriage (or at least college). By engaging in sex that isn't intercourse, they get to remain "virgins" while still satisfying their boyfriends' and society's demands that they be sexual. But our public schools can't discuss these activities or the risks they carry, and so your average teenager doesn't know what her risks are or how to prevent them.

Margaret Sanger

I (finally) saw Juno last night. And any movie or story that deals with unplanned pregnancy is going to eventually lead to discussion of reproductive choice and freedom.
So today I wanted to write a bit about Margaret Sanger, who is one of my heroes. Margaret Sanger came from a very large family. Eventually she became a nurse and was faced with many cases of women whose bodies were worn out from so many pregnancies and births, not to mention the labor required to take care of so many children. She also saw the horrific consequences of abortions (which were illegal and thus unregulated and frequently unsafe). When these women begged doctors to tell them how to avoid future pregnancies, the doctors' only solution was frequently to suggest abstinence, a remarkably unhelpful and impracticle solution. Margaret Sanger knew there had to be a better way.
She set out to inform women about their birth control options, starting clinics that were often shut down. She was arrested for disseminating birth control advice through the US Postal Service, because the information was deemed "obscene." Not only were there extremely limited contraceptive options available, telling women what those options were was against the law. Kind of difficult to imagine in a world where ads for various contraceptive pills air on network television. But it is Margaret Sanger that we have to thank for the existence of the Pill. She realized that it was important for women to be in charge of their own fertility, and helped fund research that led to the development of hormonal contraception. She also started Planned Parenthood, which was connected to the Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut that made birth control legal in the US. Imagine living in a world where it was illegal for married couples (because of course single people would never have sex!) to regulate the number and spacing of their children as they saw fit. Then be grateful to Margaret Sanger and her coworkers that you live in a world where you can decide if and when to have children based on what's best for you and your family.

Blue Skies, Silent Springs

Since today is such a beautiful day, I decided that today's historical female would be Rachel Carson.
I remember reading Silent Spring as a freshman in college. I had heard of Rachel Carson and this book, but it wasn't until I took an intro-level biology class aimed at non-biology majors that I was assigned it (probably the single most useful thing I did in that class, other than meet someone who didn't believe in natural selection for the first time in my life. The rest of the curriculum had been well-covered by my ninth-grade biology teacher, Mrs. Acattato, and by Mr. Goodfriend, with whom I took Anatomy and Phisiology in twelfth grade).
I grew up in a relatively eco-conscious household. We recycled more than we threw away, even taking into account that garbage was collected twice as often as recylcables. I had books on how kids could save the planet. I also had lots, and I mean lots of books and magazines about animals and nature. This isn't to say that I was a particularly outdoorsy kid, but I loved nature, and I still do (note to potential suitors- the zoo is on my list of top 5 best first dates). I spend so much time indoors that sometimes I forget how restorative fresh air and sunshine can be. But even though I knew that CFCs were bad for the ozone and you shouldn't throw out soda rings, I didn't necessarily know all about the complexities of the environment.

Rachel Carson's book was the kind of book that shakes up the world, much like Uncle Tom's Cabin or The Jungle. It made people aware of how their actions were (and are) dramatically impacting their environment for the worse, and ways that they could try to restore the balance they had upset. Long before Al Gore started telling us An Inconvient Truth Rachel Carson was spreading the word about environmental destruction. Her book challenged the conventional wisdom that man-made chemicals were always the correct solution and were a sign of progress. I'm sure I'm not the only person whose choices to use natural or organic products whenever possible were influenced by Rachel Carson's work.

As spring begins to bloom around you, I encourage you to pick up a copy of Silent Spring from your local library and try to think of ways you can live Ms. Carson's environmental legacy in your life.

Spring!

I know that spring doesn't officially start in astronomical terms until later this month. And I know that it isn't officially here in DC until the Cherry Blossoms start to bloom. But today is ripe with the promise of spring. Yesterday was so clear and beautiful that my coworkers and I did yoga on the lawn after lunch. I slept with the window open and wore only a sweatshirt over my uniform this morning. It is supposed to rain hard tonight, and I can smell it coming in the air. But for now, the skies are blue and clear, the air is warm and fragrant. Little blue flowers are appearing in the grass, the trees are blooming, and the birds are singing. And I am singing with them. I have books to read, courtesy of my neighborhood library, and the sun is out by the time I am awake and still out when I get home. I can smell the dirt and the rain and the flowers in the air. It is a beautiful day, filled with all the promise of spring, and I think it is going to be a wonderful one.

Reading, Writing and 'Rthmetic

Today is the anniversary of the day that Annie Sullivan arrived in Alabama to begin teaching Helen Keller. Annie Sullivan is probably one of the most famous teachers in American history, and Helen Keller the most famous student. Contrary to popular belief, Helen Keller was not the first deaf/blind person to learn language; rather, Laura Bridgman was (which is an interesting story that relates to how all those antebellum reform movements I mentioned yesterday were connected).¹ But Annie Sullivan did manage to help Helen Keller achieve heights no one would have thought possible. Previous education for the blind was aimed mostly at making them self-sufficient, teaching them skills so that they wouldn't be a burden on their families or society. Annie Sullivan focused on helping Helen learn to communicate with and understand the world, tutoring her for her entire educational career, as far as Radcliffe College. This speaks of Ms. Sullivan's incredible devotion to her student. Obviously, Helen could not have made it to Radcliffe without a good deal of native intelligence, but without her teacher to help her unlock it, she would probably have been stuck at her parents' home for the rest of her life. But Ms. Sullivan was determined and understood the importance of discipline, the importance of using other senses to help Helen connect, and a good deal about language acquisition. She essentially used language immersion to teach Helen, rather than a rote curriculum, which probably accounts for a large part of her success. She said "The child happily interested in his work learns quickly and without conscious effort"², which I think those of us who have survived school can all relate too.
She also had some other very wise things to say about education: Education in the light of present-day knowledge and need calls for some spirited and creative innovations both in the substance and the purpose of current pedagogy. A strenuous effort must be made to train young people to think for themselves and take independent charge of their lives. Only when we have worked purposefully and long on a problem that interests us, and in hope and in despair wrestled with it in silence and alone relying on our own unshaken will—only then have we achieved education.

I know that I was lucky enough to have several truly excellent teachers, both male and female in my life. I had some bad ones too, but the good far outnumbered the bad. Take a minute today and think about the teachers you had and how they've influenced your life. And consider especially that so many great women's stories start with the fact that they had an education that taught them to think for themselves and opened up their minds, making them want more for themselves than society said they could have.

Annie Sullivan's great gift to Helen Keller was the gift of words and literacy. If you'd like to share that gift with a child, there are many ways you can. Volunteer at your local literacy program or library. Below, I've included two ways you can help without even leaving your seat.






1. I highly recommend The Education of Laura Bridgman by Ernest Freeberg if you're interested in learning more about the story of Laura and her teacher, Samuel Gridley Howe.

2. source

Never mix your liquors

I'm still recovering from a night of celebrating a friend's birthday perhaps a little too vigorously, especially considering the infrequency with which I imbibe. And so I'm led to thinking about the temperance movement, and its connection to women's rights.

One of the things I find really interesting is the way that basically all the reform movements of the early 1800s in the US were interconnected- temperance, abolition, dress reform, education reform, diet reform, prison reform, etc. And many of these movements were connected to women's rights. Why? Because the educated women of the upper classes who were drawn to this work, partly out of a sense of moral obligation and probably also partly because they were bored (since they weren't supposed to work outside them home) were not allowed to be equal participants. And after being told they couldn't speak publicly in mixed meetings, or at all, and being asked to confine their reform work only to that labor that was appropriate for ladies, they got a bit cranky. The birth of women's rights in the US can be traced back to an international abolition conference in London, where the female delegates (who'd been sent as voting delegates by their American chapters) weren't allowed to speak or vote. They were allowed to sit in their own little section and observe. The dedicated female abolitionists at this meeting were, to say the least, slightly perturbed. And that feeling fermented and eventually became a movement.

Strolling through wikipedia you'll find that many women who were associated with the temperance movement (esp. the Women's Christian Temperance Union) were also suffragists. And since they each deserve an entry of their own, I'll link you to a few of them.

Frances Willard
Susan B Anthony (who will get her own post later on this month)
Amelia Bloomer (a perfect example of the intersection of different reforms)

Elizabeth I

March is Women's History Month, and in honor of that, I'm going to try to write about a different woman I admire every day.
Today's woman owes partly to the fact that I went to see The Other Boleyn Girl last night.
Elizabeth I has long been one of my heroes. After her father, Henry VIII, executed her mother, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth went from being first in line for the throne (in front of her older sister, Mary) to not being in line at all. The people running things for her brother, Edward, during his brief reign did what they could to make England a Protestant nation. When Edward died and Mary became queen, she became known as Bloody Mary for the number of executions she ordered in her quest to bring the English church and people back to Rome.
Elizabeth came to the throne after her siblings had caused significant religious and political turmoil. She was a woman doing a man's job in a man's world. And she did it better than any man had done it before. She had an official policy of not caring precisely what a person's religious views were, as long as they were loyal to her throne. Her father had been a true Renaissance man who encouraged the growth of art, science and law in his court, and she did the same, reigning over the golden age of England. She refused to marry and let a husband take away her power, and styled herself as the Virgin Queen, but she almost certainly wasn't actually a virgin.
I think in many ways, the female leaders of today would do well to examine Queen Elizabeth's style, because she was respected as a queen without having to sacrifice her feminity, and women in power still struggle with that challenge.