Glee-fully Sex-Educated

WARNING- this post has spoilers in it! If you haven’t watched the new Glee episode, “Sexy,” scram. Go watch it first, then come back and read this post.

But for those of you with no intent of watching Glee, here’s a quick run-down of the episode’s features so that we’re all on the same page:

It becomes painfully evident (via one of Brittany’s fantastic one-liners) that the kids in Glee club have had almost no sex education and are pitifully unprepared to navigate a sexual adult world. So, Mr. Shue invites Holly, a substitute teacher who had a stint as glee director when Mr. Shue was sick earlier in the season, to come and teach a lesson for the club, while inserting some sex education into the mix.

The New Directions Glee Club is indicative of so many high school students across the US, who, because of poor sex education policies made by the Bush Administration and general squeamishness by educators and administrators themselves, have had almost no access to formal sex ed. Even for those who have had classes- who know the basics of how to put on a condom and “how babies are made”- that education has been woefully inadequate at addressing the real concerns about teen sexuality. Glee points that out in humorous ways, like Brittany thinking she’s pregnant because a stork has built a nest outside her window, or Finn, who thought he got Quinn pregnant by cumming in a hot tub where they were sitting, but the basic point is still there. Teens have NO IDEA what sex means physically, much less emotionally or socially, and it takes a daring person (teacher, parent, whoever) to break out of their shell and share it with them.
And while I wouldn’t call Holly’s approach (singing a song about sex, and then telling the kids that “When you sleep with someone, you’re sleeping with everyone they’ve slept with”) is terribly comprehensive, it does show that there are ways to bridge the generational divide and get at least the basic message across to kids. Plus, it’s another place to throw in a great song.

But what really impressed me about this episode of Glee was the way sex education was brought home for Kurt and his Dad. After Kurt’s friend Blaine mentions to Kurt’s dad that Kurt isn’t seeking information on his own about sex education and will likely make bad choices in future because of this, Kurt’s dad steps up to the plate to give his son “the talk.” And Glee’s producers, rather than taking the easy way out and cutting the scene as they sit down at the dinner table for serious discussion, see the scene through to its conclusion. Kurt’s dad not only has reading material for his son, but also a heartfelt explanation about how sex means something emotionally, and that it’s important to take care of your body and your mind when it comes to sex.

Now “the talk” Kurt received was far from perfect by my standards- it reinforced gender stereotypes about the difference in how men vs. women think about sex, it solidified the social opinion that sex should only be with someone you love, and it didn’t really mention anything about the different ways that people express intimacy (Kurt’s dad mostly spoke with the assumption that all parents have- when your kid is having sex, they are “having sex” and not any other form of physical closeness, which is why, I believe, people are still so dumbfounded about lesbian sex). But I still think this episode was groundbreaking, and that overall, the explanation that Kurt’s dad gave was a very good example and a fantastic starting point for everyone watching.

Thing is, even if Glee didn’t cover all the bases about sexual education, it did open the subject up for dialogue (which we all know I’m so fond of). Like Rhianna’s S and M video, Glee might not have changed minds or practices, but it elevated the issue at hand to a new level of public consciousness. Sex ed IS STILL SOMETHING WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT, and that was really what Glee aimed to get across, for which it succeeded eloquently.

And I have the perfect example of WHY it’s still so important to talk about. This article in New York Magazine details the progression that youth growing up in the social networking age are taking towards adult sexuality.

“If eighth-graders today are spared the indignity of having to first learn about sex by watching a middle-aged health teacher roll a condom over a banana, having the web for a teacher comes with drawbacks, too. Consider that a single Google search of the term “sex ed” turns up, among other—more useful—information, a picture of a naked woman, the areolae of her nipples barely obscured by what appear to be Skittles, which run in a single-file line down to her nether region.”

It is widely cited that the age of first exposure to sexually explicit material is 11 years old, and right then, as students are entering middle school, reaching the cusp of puberty, and dealing with all the ups and downs of life as a teenager, that they now have to negotiate a whole new world with unfamiliar rules and boundaries. The article focuses mainly on teens’ use of new social media (like posting racy pictures on facebook and using Chat Roulette) to explore the uncharted territory of sexuality.

It affects both young men and women in different ways- but the findings echo many of the old-guard anti-porn arguments: that the internet is making men violent, more likely to rape, and more likely to reject a woman who doesn’t have the porn-star body that they’ve grown up viewing.

“This is the paradoxical fear of many heterosexual 14-year-old girls: that the Internet is making boys more aggressive sexually—more accepting of graphic images or violence toward women, brasher, more demanding—but it is also making them less so, or at least less interested in the standard-issue, flesh-and-bone girls they encounter in real life who may not exactly have Penthouse proportions and porn-star inclinations. (“If you see something online, and the girls in your neighborhood are totally different, then it’s, um … different,” one 14-year-old boy tells me.) This puts young women in the sometimes uncomfortable position of trying to bridge the gap. “

This is the first online phenomenon that I personally haven’t grown up with, and it is a little frightening. It was one thing for me to come of age in the era of the internet- I was exposed to many of these same things- porn sites popped up on my browser accidentally (and then not-so-accidentally), and I went searching in some interesting places for information. But facebook was only for college kids, and Chat-roulette not even a fantasy yet. I didn’t have the ability to consider my sexuality through these mediums, whether or not I had the desire to do so.

But the fact of the matter is that these social mediums are out there, and kids are growing up and taking advantage of them. WHICH IS WHY it is so desperately important to keep the conversation going between parents and kids, older siblings, and younger siblings, those who have been over the hurdles and come out with more knowledge and a strong sense of sexual self helping those who have just begun to discover themselves. The passing along of information, of moderating and offering commentary on the crazy things the internet hosts is crucial to making sure teens understand how they fit into an increasingly complex set of sexual situations.

And Glee is one step along a winding path that brings these divergent perspectives together to create a better understanding of our society’s sexual welfare.

Out of Africa

There are a few reasons that I feel I need to write a serious blog post to you today.  First, I am leaving for Kenya in just shy of 3 weeks, and I am absolutely terrified and beyond excited.  Second, while I’m gone, this blog will go inactive, unless someone is there to care for it.  So three, I am scoping out caretakers for the site until I return.

This isn’t a big obligation, but if you ever felt like blogging about sex, sexuality, or the like, this is your shot.  I’ll be gone for four months and internet is spotty in Kenya, so I probably won’t have time to upload any content.  If you want to put something here, just email me at bonkiep@gmail.com or comment on this thread (or facebook me, if you must), and I’ll get it up there.  Your help will be greatly appreciated.

–

As for the actual post, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about homophobia on the international stage.  While I am in no position whatsoever to try and sum up what the nearly 200 countries in this world have integrated legally and socially into their codes against LGBT people, I can offer a few handy links to give you an idea.

The best source I’ve found to-date about the legal discrimination placed against LGBT people is this pamphlet issued by the International Lesbian and Gay Association called “State Sponsored Homophobia.” It goes state-by-state, listing all the applicable sodomy and obscenity clauses in national documents which apply to gay people.  The problem, of course, is that the document does not even begin to touch on the traumas, trials, and tribulations of transfolk in foreign countries, which is often an even more torturous road to travel.  As I’ve written before in my article on Queer Literature abroad, the story of Randa the Trans illustrates how even in the relatively progressive state of Lebanon, there are incredible hurdles for transpeople to clime in living the life they want, and if so desired, changing their body to fit that life.

As a queer person who is about to travel abroad, this reality terrifies me.  Queer activists in many countries, especially Russia, the Middle East, and Africa, are harassed, beaten, and stalked for their affiliations and beliefs.  They are murdered as examples to the LGBT community.  They are beacons towards a world of tolerance often swallowed up by the waves.

I am a person who despises injustice in all its forms and idolizes the people who fight for equality by putting their lives and futures on the line.  Yet, as a foreigner, I find myself worrying about my own personal safety.  What if I slip up and mention my girlfriend?  What happens if I attend a meeting for LGBT people in Nairobi?  Will there be angry mobs outside my door?  Will I be watched?  Vilified?  For me, perhaps this is an over-reaction- I am insignificant on the bustling streets of the city.  But am I really?  I’m a mwanza, a white person, sticking out like a sore thumb.  A white person in a black country means something, even when it means nothing.  People pay attention.  I do not honestly know how safe I am.

Now imagine that being your entire life.  Imagine always wondering who is watching you, who is checking the people you let into your apartment at night, who is noting where you go for drinks in the evening, who you dance with.  It’s an ugly, unnerving feeling, to be unsure who is out there and what their intentions are.

For the starkest picture, compound this constant alertness with the fear that strikes every woman at some point in her life: rape.  In many countries, most notably South Africa, civilian vigilantes still use “reparative rape” as a means of “converting” LGBT people back to normalcy.  And rape itself is not an unusual problem.  This article from BBC highlights the threat of gang rape in public latrines in Nairobi slums.  These are all issues staring me in the face during my study abroad.  The focus of the program isn’t ecology or African literature- it’s sustainable development.  That means addressing the structural problems of HIV/AIDS, rape, discrimination against women and LGBT people, the devastation wrought by poorly-run government programs and the slow decay of urban slums.  All problems are linked.  One cannot isolate one issue from another.

I can’t offer a solution to any of this yet, but perhaps after some field work, I’ll be able to report back with some perspective.  I don’t know where this journey will lead me to, but I know where it starts.  When I began my studies in International Relations, I thought there was no room for LGBT and sexuality studies in Africa, that other problems came first: water, access to medical care, etc.  But everything is interconnected, and I see now that the hardest and most obscure battle to be fought may be the one that needs the most help.  In closing, let me remind you to be thankful for your freedoms, but also never to compromise.  Always push for true acceptance, for real equality.  The battle is to be fought everywhere.

((side note: the bill to get rid of DADT just passed the house.  If it gets through the senate before the end of the year, President Obama will sign it and the discriminatory policy will be no more!))

Sex Ed Abroad- What Thailand Got Right

Once upon a time, there was a country named Thailand.

And in the 80′s, Thailand found out it had a problem…

In 1984, the first case of AIDS was reported in Thailand, and with the abundance of sex trafficking across the Thai border and a lack of information about the disease, the country was rife for an epidemic.

BUT INSTEAD, the Thais got creative.

Condoms became an advertising campaign.  You could get them with your coffee, at the grocery store, at school, from traveling health groups, and pretty much anywhere else you turned.  There were condom balloon-blowing competitions held as school fundraisers, a Harvard MBA turned superhero-icon spokesperson known as “Condom Boy,” and even t-shirts with condoms in the shape of the olympic logo with the slogan, “Weapons of Mass Protection.”

And from this, something really awesome happened.  Not only was a serious epidemic averted, but a new idea for sex education was born- one that didn’t shy away from touchy subjects or try to gloss over serious issues.  Which is why I think this exhibit at the National Science Museum of Thailand is freakin’ fantastic.

“Teenage boys gape at a coloured photograph of a vagina, while girls give embarrassed smiles as they watch a cartoon that showed penises ‘talking’ about masturbation. Young girls crowd around a display panel about love and relationships, as a boy embraces a female mannequin with all his might in order to measure the strength of his hug. “

By embracing the various conceptions of sex, rather than avoiding it or censoring specific kinds of sex (see Rubin’s “The Charmed Circle” ), kids can better understand sexuality and make healthier decisions about their own practices.

And it hasn’t stopped with just this exhibit.  Thai sex ed in general is getting more and more progressive.  Anothergreat article about engaging students in honest dialogue about sex is available here:  http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=13448

So my question is, why is it so impossible to get this kind of forthright and legitimate education here in the supposedly more developed and socially responsible United States?

Take Back the Night

Last semester, I attended part of the Take Back the Night ceremony, an event which has quickly become a national movement and rallying call for preventing rape and keeping women safe worldwide.  The format of Take Back the Night is fairly simple- audience members, as well as scheduled speakers, are asked to come to the center of the meeting space and share their story- or the story of someone close to them- about their experiences with rape or sexual assault.

The stories are moving, daring, sometimes humorous, but more often heart-wrenching, and always carry a somber, but hopeful message for the future: if I share this, my understanding and my experiences, maybe it won’t happen to someone else.

While Take Back the Night was one of the most compelling events I attended at American University, it was also the most frustrating.  It reminded me of the total helplessness that so many women (and men!) face when confronted with violence and abuse.  It reminds me of how little our society has done to PREVENT rape.  There are so many of organizations out there which deal with the after-effects of sexual abuse: counseling, medical  attention, support groups, memorial projects, but there are so few that do anything about educating the population most likely to commit rape.  I think Scarleteen puts it best in their article How You Guys — that’s right, you GUYS — Can Prevent Rape: (which you guys should all at least skim through)

“Do you know that you shouldn’t walk home alone at night, or on unlit streets? That when walking home, you should have your house key between your fingers to poke a potential attacker in the eyes or throat? How about that if you don’t want to be raped, you need to be sure your skirt is somebody’s idea of the right length, that you don’t sway your hips when you walk, you shouldn’t be alone with new dates, alone in large groups of men, say you enjoy sex out loud where men can hear you, shouldn’t drink — not because you’ll get liver damage or become an alcoholic, but because it’ll result in you being raped? Did you know that if someone tries to force you to have sex, that you shouldn’t fight back, but should probably just try to be nice to them? How about that if you say yes to one kind of sex, you’d best be prepared to have every other kind of sex your partner wants, and that if you want to avoid being raped, you’d best say no to ANY kind of sex, even the sex you DO want?

If these things aren’t as familiar to you as the nose on your face, I can guarantee you that they are for nearly every woman you know. Women have this stuff drilled into our heads endlessly, from nearly everywhere we look, all with the aim of helping us prevent something from happening we aren’t even doing. Almost every article we see when it comes to rape prevention is aimed at women – the ones most often getting raped — not at men, who most often are the ones doing the raping.”

This is rape culture.  These are the protective ideas that our society enforces about the way women have to act to protect themselves from something that should never even happen in a dignified society.  And yet it does.  It does all the time.  So what I’m wondering is- why haven’t we, as a society so deeply concerned with the problem of rape- addressed its root causes?

This loops right back to everything I’ve been saying about sexual dialogue and openness.  As Antonio Banderas says of dance in Take the Lead- “If your son can learn to touch a girl with respect, how will he treat women throughout his life?”  The same applies here: dialogue turns into action, which turns into practices, which becomes cemented as values.  If we hush up sex like it is something bad and dirty, it becomes taboo, desirable.  If we talk about it openly, it becomes something normal, regular- something pleasant to be done with discretion and care, like driving or being in charge of your own finances.  As a society talks more, barriers break down and understanding develops.  “Oh, you mean women like sex too?  And if I’m not a bastard to them, but instead help them find their own sexual desire, then they’ll actually WANT to sleep with me?”  Go figure.

The more women feel in control of their own sexual wants and needs and the clearer those are, the more potential rapists will come to understand about their potential victims as whole groups.  More understanding = less frustration = a heck of a lot less of violent sexual crimes.  Would this eliminate all forms of sexual abuse?  No, certainly not.  But would it go a long way towards a society-wide movement away from rape and the culture of “taking” by men.

—

And if that wasn’t long enough for you- there’s a second segment to this whole rape culture article.  And that’s about The Gray Area- or rape that isn’t rape.

Part of the “taking” attitude I wrote about involves sexual interactions that sort of bridge the consent line.  There’s “yes, but only yes because you’ve been pressuring me for the last six months,” or “Yes, but I’m really drunk and so are you,” or even “Yes even though I’m not enjoying it.”

Again, this goes back to a societal paradigm where women often don’t “own” their sexual desires.  They feel like sex is “for the man” in their relationship. (or, in the case of same-sex partners, “for the other partner”- sorry, I know a lot of these articles assume a heterosexual relationships, although these problems occur in same-sex relations too.  Excuse my use of the gender dichotomy for ease of writing in this case.  Thanks loves!)

Thus, “the Gray Area.”  When women say ok, even though they mean, I wish you’d stop harassing me about it.  Or, sometimes, when they say ok because they want to feel desired, mature, or some other social construct attached to sex, without actually wanting SEX.  The C-spot, a literary/erotic women’s magazine, published a great article on this concept here:  http://www.c-spotmagazine.com/main/?p=1159.  For the author, the idea of being wanted, of being mature by fooling around, even though she didn’t have any real idea about sex, pushed her much farther than she wanted to go.  It’s a very relatable article for me, as I’m sure it will be for many people out there.

The prescription here is all about women taking hold of their own sexual identity, as Scarleteen writes brilliantly about it again in their article: An Immodest Proposal. Here’s the best part though:

“What we individually and collectively visualize has power and influence when it comes to what we manifest. By all means, not a one of us can somehow erase or alter all of the barriers we have right now when it comes to real sexual agency for all women. But there are no barriers beyond the limitations of our own imagination when it comes to rewriting the scripts of our sexual ideals, our individual sexual lives, and what we present to ourselves, our sisters and our daughters. We have the power to dream up and manifest something far better than a woman merely being able to say no and to say yes; something which is an entirely different animal than scenarios which are positive primarily because they have avoided the most negative consequences or results. Good sex, great sex, enriching sexuality is not just about the absence of physical or emotional pain nor only about emotional intimacy. It is about desire and the full expression of that desire.”

Guys, girls, all of you- especially if you haven’t had sex yet, or you’ve had bad sex, or had sex you didn’t really want, READ THIS.  I mean, PLEASE READ THIS.  The more we as individuals come to realize the power of our own sexual agency, the greater the ability for sex to mean something, to be something big, Powerful, and EXPLOSIVE.  And my personal hope, as a writer, as a student, as a sister, as a friend, and a queer teen, is that everyone who reads this gets an experience like the one this article describes.

Take care, queer kids.  Keep the dialogue open and the ideas flowing.

((Also, we should be having a guest collaborator or two on a sexuality and religion article soon.  Huzzah!))