Sex and Health- All the Sex and sexual health issues that confront us

Much has changed in my life over the last few years. One change is that I've become very active with Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance. Another is that I've become even more active with my union. This latter change has created a problem for Sex In The Public Square: I have very little time to maintain this site. Fortunately, the former change provides the solution: I will now be blogging at Woodhull's web site. You will find my blog featured on the home page at http://woodhullalliance.org and it will have its own page at http://www.woodhullalliance.org/category/sex-in-the-public-square/.

I'm excited by the move. I'll be joining folks like first amendment attorney Larry Walters, sexual freedom and education scholar-advocate Marty Klein, and the folks at AVN in providing commentary for Woodhull. 

This site will remain here as an archive. Comments will be turned off and new content will not appear. Please join us over at Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance and be part of a bigger conversation!

Two stories about gender and children caught my eye, over the last couple days. They are not at all connected to each other, but the more I thought about them, the more I realized that they illustrate very different responses to gender inequality, and that those different responses say a lot, potentially, about the structure and culture of gender in two different societies: Canada and India.

The first story was making the rounds a few days ago on Yahoo! News. It tells the story of the Witterick-Stocker family, of Toronto, who have decided not to share the sex of their 4 month old baby Storm with anyone other than immediate family and the midwives who assisted with the delivery. 

The second is a story I read in the New York Times yesterday morning, and it tells of increased rates of sex-selective abortions among well-off, well-educated women in India. Specifically, it reports on a study recently published in The Lancet, documenting the spread of sex-selective abortion practices across India over the past 20 years. The study placed particular focus on the decisions made about second children when the first child was a girl.

What a world apart, both literally and figuratively. 

In one society there is gender inequality but yet enough freedom that a family might decide to challenge the social structuring of gender by refusing to label their child. Theoretically this frees the child to take full advantage of those equalities that do exist and might remove some of the barriers to equality that remain. Storm's parents explain their choice in relation to this very freedom, according to Zachary Roth's Yahoo! article:

Stocker and Witterick say the decision gives Storm the freedom to choose who he or she wants to be. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious," adds Stocker, a teacher in an alternative school.

In the other society, gender is so powerful in the structuring of inequality that parents use it to choose whether or not a child should exist. Girls are understood to be liabilities where boys are understood to be assets. Parents with means will apparently tolerate one girl, but not a second. Education and wealth are associated with better access to health services so a family wanting to limit its liabilities and maximize its assets use the illegal practice of sex-selective abortion to end pregnancies where the fetus is categorized as female. The impact is dramatic, demographically. According to Jim Yardley's New York Times article:

The 2011 Indian census found 914 girls for every 1,000 boys among children 6 six or younger, the lowest ratio of girls since the country gained independence in 1947. The new study estimated that 4 million to 12 million selective abortions of girls have occurred in India in the past three decades.

We should see both stories in terms of social structure and inequality, and not purely in terms of individual choices. Storm's parents are making an individual choice, but they are doing so in a way that directly challenges the structure of the society they live in, and they are doing so because they dislike the constraints those structures impose.  Any given pair of well-off parents in India are also making choices in reaction to the constraints of social structure, and are doing so in a way that reinforces the structural constraint they are individually trying to avoid. 

Parents should be free to choose whether or not to have a child. Children should be free to decide how to identify themselves. But our individual choices are not always as individual as we think, and often they have collective unintended consequences when we add them all up. And some of those consequences are much likely than others to move a society in the direction of justice and freedom for all.  

From page A18 of the May 24 edition of the New York Times

What do you think? This Bloomingdales ad for Rag & Bone Jeans ($165.00) and silk Equipment top ($178.00) contains the tag line "MEET YOUR NEW MUST-HAVE" and depicts an Asian model staring into the camera with her lips parted. It accompanies an article with the headline "In Oakland, Redefining Sex Trade Workers as Abuse Victims" which, among many things, criticizes the 'exoticization' of Asian women in the US. 

The article can be found online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/us/24oakland.html

Ten is the number of bodies that have been found on Long Island's southern beaches since December. The first four, all found between December 11 abd 13, were confirmed to be the remains of women who had had some experience in sex work. The next was found on March 29. Three more were found on April 4, and two were found today. The identities of those most recently found have not been determined, and police have not made a definitive statement about whether all of the murders are connected.

So far, none has turned out to be Shannon Gilbert, the search for whom turned up these other victims.

I suspect they will turn out to be related, victims of a serial killer who targets women who, among all of the other things that they do in their lives, also exchange sex for money. 

SWOP-NYC has responded with a statement that rightly reminds us that the dangers of sex work are the dangers of stigmatization and isolation, and not particular to the exchange of sex for something else of value. 

I just spent three days at my statewide union's Representative Assembly where health and safety was one of the key concerns. There was a singificant focus on framing issues in human rights terms. There was a lot of talk about the dignity of all humans, and the dignity of all labor. I was even impressed that when the issue of trafficking and children came up, the focus was on slave labor in the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast, and not a lurid focus on sex trafficking. 

But I don't think my union would stand up publicly for sex workers. Not yet.

I spent a couple of hours on Saturday at a huge labor rally in Times Square. I am sure there were people attending that rally who, in addition to all the other things they do, have also exchanged sex for money. But I did not see any sex worker advocacy signs in the block where I was standing. 

We still separate sex from the rest of work, from the rest of pleasure, and essentially from most of everyday life. 

The longer we relegate sex to the dark corners of our political and social discourse, the longer we will continue to find bodies hidden in the reeds of our beaches, long undiscovered because they were marginalized from the start. 

Sexual freedom, including the consensual exchange of sex for other things of value, must come to be seen a fundamental human right. Sex is a valuable thing. The right to physical autonomy and the right to sexual pleasure and the right to earn a decent living all intersect in the phenomenon of sex work.

Stand up publicly for your own right, and the right of others, to safely determine the conditions of each sexual exchange we make. 

Photo is by Karl Monaghan (Red_Tzar on Flickr) and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.

Are you a union member, or a friend or family member of a union member? If so, please come out. Please identify yourself that way in conversations. Please stand up for unions and for the basic worker rights that they protect. 

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2010, only 11.9 percent of workers in the US were represented by unions, and that number is only as high as it is because about a third of public sector workers are union members. 

What does this have to do with sexuality? First of all, without unions there can be no economic justice in a capitalist society, and without economic justice, sexual freedom is impossible in any meaningful way. To fully realize our sexual freedom we need basic economic security. 

Second, there is a lot to be learned from the coming out campaigns of the LGBT movement. When we are visible we reveal ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable, but we also become three dimensional human beings to those who have previously seen us as one-dimensional stereotypes.

Third, there is something similar about taking a part of your life, a part of yourself, a part that you perhaps take for granted, and making it a part of your identity. I am not just a professor, I am a union member. I am not just a clerk, I am a union member. I am not just a groundskeeper, I am a union member. Union membership is something we often see as part of the background of our lives, and we need to bring it into the foreground. Again, LGBT activism gives us a model for doing this. 

In tough economic times it is easy for people to villify or demonize a small group of people who are represented in the press as greedy, lazy, and selfish. Especially if you don't have any reason to suspect that real live union members are any different from that representation.

But that's not who we are, and it seems to me that the only way for unions to turn the tide that is undermining them now is if we each come out of the union closet and identify ourselves to our friends and neighbors so they see us as the hard-working, community-minded, caring and dedicated people that we are.

Harvey Milk is represented in the biopic Milk as saying "They vote for us two to one if they know they know one of us." (It's also worth recalling that Milk worked with union leaders and had strong labor backing of his campaigns, and that progressive labor unions and LGBT political unions often work in concert with each other.)

When nonunion workers are facing layoffs and pay cuts and the media tells them its all the fault of unions, it's easy to see how they'd vote to undercut the power of workers who are depicted as leeches feeding off an increasingly anemic public. But if they knew that we were their neighbors, their kid's friend's parents, the people they always nod to at the supermarket, it might be different. If we talk to them about the ways that unions protect not just their members but the basic rights of all workers, they might feel differently. What if, instead of hiding our union membership out of fear of being criticized or attacked, we talk to them about the struggles of all employees and encourage them to seek the strength of unions to protect themselves rather than to tear down the organizations that helped bouy their own raises and benefits just by virtue of comparison? 

This week is a week of We Are One events spreading solidarity, raising consciousness, and making demands for economic justice. Take a moment this week to identify yourself in relation to that effort. If you are a union member, or a friend or lover or kin to one, take a moment to tell someone else about that. Tell a story that helps counter the negative impression of union members in the press. Take a risk. We can't rebuild the labor movement from inside the closet. 

I'm a union member, and a union leader, and I'm proud of my role in protecting rights for all workers. How about you? 

May 19th is Armed Services Day (also called Armed Forces Day but I'll mention both since it's not clear who is winning that pr battle). Growing up in a big Canadian city my relationship to the military was simple. I didn't know anyone who was in the military. And the story is that my grandfather enlisted prior to the Second World War but never made it out of basic training because he had flat feet. The regiment that he was scheduled to be with did go to Europe and none of the service members in that regiment made it home alive. If not for his flat feet, none of us would have been born.

If you don't know anyone who has served in the military, and especially if you don't know anyone who has been deployed to a war zone, it's easy to think about service in black and white terms. I've met many who believe that the best way to support the troops is to question nothing and offer nationalistic platitudes till the cows come home. And I've met people who aren't able to see service members as humans deserving of the same rights and justice as the rest of us. There aren't a lot of folks in the middle.

Which is too bad since I bet a lot of service members would put themselves there. And I wonder, based on my very limited experience, how well equipped those of us who haven't served in the military are to offer the kind of support service members actually need. I worry that we aren't very well equipped at all. That we are failing.

Which brings me to an Armed Services Day promotion I came across. Some online pharmacy that specializes in "lifestyle drugs" (read: drugs for sexual functioning like Viagra, Cialis, Levitra) is recognizing the "service and sacrifice" of service members past and present by offering them $15 off their order of sex drugs on May 19th.

The truth is that service members are often un- and underemployed, and $15 off is $15 off, so it's hard to say "this is terrible and shouldn't happen". But it feels right to say "this is terrible". Service members get so little support with post-combat sexual health issues and the rates of sexual assault and suicide are so high, that I think it's fair to say this kind of shameless drug marketing simply doesn't have a place in any thoughtful consideration of what we might want to be thinking about on May 19th. And even though some might benefit from the discount, I have a hard time thinking of it as support in any meaningful way.

An article in the Times last week raised the complicated issue of talking with children about pornography. It was nice to see it there since it's been a reality for parents for years. Companies that make Internet connected technology (mobile devices, tablets, and old school computers) are increasingly marketing the devices as something suitable for young children. And plenty of parents agree.

But along with the free access to thousands of hours of kid friendly videos (thanks YouTube) and cool apps that turn classic kid's books into animated worlds of wonder, comes access to unwanted and inappropriate sexually explicit material, and pornography.

Filters don't do the job. And the always filter out plenty of important, age approriate, sex education material. The kind of material that can make it easier for parents and children to navigate sex education together.

The article describes several parents and their approach to the topic, ranging in degrees of openness to talking, and willingness to acknowledge that while pornography isn't appropriate material for children, sexuality and sexual health are topics that can and should be talked about. Some of the framing is off. Like the idea that teaching about sex is a series of discrete conversations, and all parents have to do now is add porn to the list.

But more than the article, I appreciated the accompanying piece which they call an "interactive feature" (I'm not sure what to call it, not exactly journalism, not exactly educational material, but the Times is producing more and more of it in an effort to get readers to stay on their pages).

In this feature the writer provides a more detailed description of each parent's response to the situation they found themselves in, and then they asked the two sexuality professionals who were quoted in the article to weigh in on the parents responses.

Something that stuck with me had to do with how we explain to children that pornography isn't appropriate for them. Saying "it's for adults" might be enough for some kids, but many, certainly older, kids will want to know more. Embedded in the answer is the assumption that you get to an age when you can comprehend the material and then it's "appropriate" or "safe" for you to see it? But what age is that?

I don't have an answer but I'm pretty sure it isn't a chronological age at all. I think it might be something along the lines of what Marty Klein (one of the professionals who is quoted in the article) calls "pornography literacy". The idea that what is most harmful about legal pornography is not what it depicts, but what we do with it in the absence of decent sex education and media literacy skills. It's an interesting question and one I'm glad the Times is raising.

NYTimes.com: When Children See Internet Pornography

For Parents: How to Talk With Your Kids About Pornography

For Educators: BISH Training - Working With Young People Around Porn

One can never know for sure what statistics about our online searching habits mean. Does the trending of a search term related to a celebrity illness or breakup "tell" us something about how much we care about that celebrity, or our health, or fidelity? Are we what we search for?

I think about this every time I look at the statistics for the Sexuality site on About.com. Millions of people visit the site, often finding me because they entered some term into a search engine. And based on a non-scientific sampling, it's my impression that far more people are interested in how to masturbate than in how to have sex with some one else.

What does this mean? And considering the gender stereotype that all boys/men know how to masturbate, how come masturbation techniques for men are at least as popular as those for women?

I don't have answers to any of these questions, but I like thinking about them and talking to people to hear their take. And also, it does my heart good to know that people are curious about feeling pleasure, and producing that pleasure on their own.

If you don't have a lot of plans for this second weekend of National Masturbation Month, I thought I'd offer some suggestions by way of my most popular masturbation tips. Maybe it's time for a date with yourself?

Read More - Masturbation Tips and Techniques

In 1994 when President Bill Clinton fired Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders for answering yes to a question about whether masturbation was an appropriate topic to be addressed in sexual health education, many of us shook our heads. Not that we couldn't believe he fired her for it. Most of us were dismayed (or depressed) by the level of hypocrisy that would make it a forgone conclusion that she'd lose her job for suggesting that the most common sexual behavior on the planet be at least mentioned when we teach about sexuality.

The following year in a collaborative move that is hard to imagine today, three feminist sex shops got together to simultaneously celebrate Dr. Elders forthrightness, raise the topic of masturbation in public, and raise their own profiles. And so National Masturbation Month and the Masturbate-a-Thon were born.

It's been 17 years, and the longest running Masturbate-a-Thon (brought to you by the Center for Sex and Culture) is scheduled for May 27th, while a Canadian contingent (from the worker co-operative Come As You Are) will be raising funds all month.

If you haven't heard of it before, a masturbate-a-thon is a fundraiser where people commit to heroic sessions of self-pleasure, and ask others to pledge them. Sometimes it's by the minute, other times it's by the orgasm. But however you do it, it's a whole lot of fun, and always for a good cause.

I'll be highlighting my own odes to solo sex all this month, and after reading an article about a college student who is pledging to abstain from masturbation for a month (because she feels she's doing it too much), I thought I'd start with a question that I get whenever I'm on a college campus: how much masturbation is too much masturbation. Read on, and if you aren't sure how to celebrate the month, later in the week I'll be offering tips in that direction.

Read More: How Much Masturbation Is Too Much?

Is it a sign of the apocalypse that it's harder and harder to tell the difference between so-called real news and the fake news delivered by places like The Onion or The Daily Show? It certainly makes it harder to know when to laugh and when to cry. Case in point, this item from WREG in Memphis:

Lawmakers have passed a bill changing the language of how sexual education is conducted in Tennessee.

The bill, Senate Bill 3310, focuses primarily on abstinence, but allows for comparison of contraception methods. However, contraception is no longer allowed to be distributed on school property.

The confusing part is where they prohibit instructors from encouraging "gateway sexual behaviors." The bill also allows for teachers to be disciplined, and for third-party instructors to be sued, if the rules are not followed."

Never mind that the idea of gateway sex is undefined, unproven, and unintelligible fantasy cooked up by the kind of people who say sex is bad, and then won't stop talking about it. In a television interview Rep. John Deberry, Jr. (ahem...(D) Memphis) explains that gateway sex is something most people would be able to understand if they saw it.

Except of course you provide sex education in part because it's a topic that most of us don't understand that well. At the end of the news item the Representative was paraphrased saying that the bill "would be a way to ensure that abstinence is a cornerstone of any sexual education."

It's also a way to ensure that even the best teachers won't be able to their job, and none of the students in Memphis can expect decent sex education in their public schools.

WREG Memphis: Lawmakers Pass "Gateway Sexual Activity" Ban