I’ll never forget the last time I sat on a Santa’s lap.
It was the first time I learned about boundaries.
Archive for December, 2009
I’ll never forget
Posted in holidays on December 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I like good news!
Posted in awesome, birth control, krazy konservatives, politics, sexuality on December 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A Saturday editorial in the NY Times, End to the Abstinence-Only Fantasy, is news that makes the heart grow fond. It’s a bright light on the absurdity of abstinence-only ideologies in a decade of restriction of choices. With the recent abortion debates surrounding government health care, here’s to hoping that comprehensive sex education works.
The entire article, the emphasis is all mine:
“The omnibus government spending bill signed into law last week contains an important victory for public health. Gone is all spending for highly restrictive abstinence-only sex education programs that deny young people accurate information about contraceptives, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. The measure redirects sex-education resources to medically sound programs aimed at reducing teenage pregnancy.
Federal support for the wishful abstinence-only approach, which began in the 1980s, ballooned during George W. Bush’s presidency. As the funding grew, so did evidence of the policy’s failure. A Congressionally mandated study released in 2007 found that elementary and middle school students who received abstinence instruction were just as likely to have sex in the following year as students who did not get such instruction.
Many states rightly declined to participate in the abstinence program, forgoing federal money. Most of the nation’s recent progress in reducing the abortion rate has occurred in states that have shown a commitment to real sex education.
The last Bush budget included $99 million for abstinence-only education programs run by public and private groups. The new $114 million initiative, championed by the White House, will be administered by a newly created Office of Adolescent Health within the Department of Health and Human Services with a mandate to support “medically accurate and age appropriate programs” shown to reduce teenage pregnancy.
Unfortunately, some of this progress could be short-lived. The health care reform bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee includes an amendment, introduced by the Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, that would revive a separate $50 million grant-making program for abstinence-only programs run by states. Democratic leaders must see that this is stricken, and warring language that would provide $75 million for state comprehensive sex education programs should remain.
In another positive step, the spending bill increases financing for family-planning services for low-income women. It also lifts a long-standing, and utterly unjustified, ban on the District of Columbia’s use of its own tax dollars to pay for abortion services for poor women except in cases when a woman’s life is at risk, or the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.
Ideology, censorship and bad science have no place in public health policy. It is a relief to see some sense returning to Capitol Hill.”
The Spectrum of Normal
Posted in sexuality on December 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The German teen magazine, Bravo, has posted a gallery of vulvas.
Like snowflakes, each one is beautiful and different.
found via re: Cycling
synopsis
Posted in mundane life on December 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
It’s supposed to snow!
Posted in mundane life on December 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Frosty Desire and Girl Germs
Posted in mundane life, politics, sexuality on December 7, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The first frost of the season arrived yesterday. The day was sunny, brisk, and full of sparkles.
Handmade potholders and speckled eggs can make morning waking worth interrupting a dream. This is the time of year of long pauses and reflections.
I took a class in college called, Women and Monsters. One winter afternoon we each had to take an uncooked egg into the local cemetery that had been subsumed by the campus. The eggs represented a self-contained world. It was a fragile world that lacked complexity. It was the culmination of a semester in which we learned that women were defined as deviant because they were strong, or independent, or simply because they were women.
***
Female desire is being defined by a woman named Lori Brotto. It’s a heady responsibility of mental erotics that is both about power and pleasure; a project that is both envious and to be avoided.
It’s the close of another decade and women continue to be defined, limited, and oppressed because they have the genetic potential to give birth. After the didactic dust settles, H1N1 won’t be the virus of the year, instead girl germs will be the potential deadly virus that restricts over half of the United States health care claims.
How does this distort the “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” ideology? Will the degree of regression be measured in backlash, sugar coated compromises (i.e. quit bitching, women are over half of the breadwinners in this atrophied economy), and blogger keystrokes?
