Sex Ed Transforms

Gendering our bodies: Crossed Legs, Makeup, and other Good Girl Poses

2012-01-30T15:37:00.001-05:00

“When I talk about embodiment,” she said, “I ask everyone to raise their hands if they are crossing their legs. All the hands raised are from women. Why is that? Because girls and women are taught to keep their legs closed, not to open their legs.”

As I listened to my academic hero, Dr. Deborah Tolman, I immediately became conscious of my legs tightly crossed under the table. Crossed because I was nervous. Because I wanted to make a good impression, to behave appropriately, to focus. Crossed because, as she explained, I was taught that the way to make a good impression is to keep my legs shut.

Taught? Well, no one told me that directly, but these are the messages girls (like me) receive about how to behave properly, how to be a good girl, to be ladylike.

I often purposefully uncross my legs. But I find it hardest to uncross my legs at restaurants, like the one in which I had the pleasure of eating lunch with Dr. Tolman. Mostly I have trouble at restaurants because the chairs are generally a little too high for me to sit with my feet squarely on the ground, and I cross my legs because, well, partly because I’m leaning forward anyway, and partly because that posture is quite ingrained.

Ah, ingrained. Ingrained does not mean innate. Sometimes, things that now feel like they come from within us, really came initially from outside us. We take these messages that we learn growing up and the ideas become part of us, part of how we hold ourselves. That’s part of the new concept of embodiment that I’m exploring in my work at Tufts and in my conversation and correspondence with Dr. Tolman, paraphrased above.

The ways in which we hold ourselves and how we feel right inside our own bodies are drastically shaped by the social and cultural influences that impact us from day one.

And feeling “right” does not always mean feeling “good,” especially with regards to the ways in which girls and women, and how we are socialized to “be” in our own bodies. I find, with my own body, that while I impulsively cross my legs, that position often does not actually feel good. It causes my lower back to hurt a lot. My IT band tightens (and it tightens so much and so often that I know now which part of the body is called the IT band). And yet, I keep returning again and again to that position, to that crossing. Why is that?

I was shy at that lunch. Nervous, eager, listening. Would I have uncrossed my legs if I felt more brave? Or, conversely, if I had purposefully uncrossed my legs, would I have then felt more brave as a consequence? Would I have opened up, so to speak?

Honestly, on a day to day basis at this point, I generally uncross my legs in an attempt at better posture and reduced back pain. But there are other choices that I am currently exploring, in an attempt to actively influence my own experiences of embodiment.

One such area is makeup. A while back, a friend of mine shared an article that said that women who wear makeup are judged as more competent, and she asked me what I thought. My response was to decide to stop wearing makeup to the office. Not because I want to be judged as less competent, but rather because I wondered if the reason I wore makeup was that I, too, had received messages that women who wear makeup will be judged as more competent. To be honest, it feels weird on some days, and natural and easy on others, to show up at work without any makeup. I’m not committing to no makeup as a permanent lifestyle choice, but I am trying it for now. For this semester, let’s say. Because for me, knowing that I am not wearing makeup and still being able to feel present and competent really matters. I need to know for myself that I’m not dependent on a cultural standard of beauty with which I disagree. Please note, I have nothing against people who choose to wear makeup, and I often choose to wear makeup, I just need to get to the place where I feel that makeup is a choice rather than an obligation. Towards this end, I have undertaken this exploration of my own embodied experiences.

Perhaps, as a result of not wearing makeup, I am crossing my legs less often. Perhaps not.

In Support of Effective Government

2011-10-07T08:21:00.000-04:00

I am not protesting against the government. I am protesting in support of the government. I am in support of a government that works, one that does its job, one that takes care of the American people and demonstrates positive teamwork across the globe. I support President Obama, and I want to see this country’s administration doing its thing a little more. Let’s make change.

I support Occupy Wall Street because we are the 99 percent, and we want a better government.

In the fall of 2000, I was in 10th grade, and I learned that the government is not doing its job well, not supporting the American people in the ways in which they need support. I was a stellar student at a stellar suburban public school, told that if I worked hard I could achieve wonders. And I believed it, because I had the resources to help me and the people to encourage me. I read Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol to do a book report, and my world changed. I read about other public schools, underfunded public schools, with run-down buildings, overcrowded and violent hallways, and classrooms in which tired and scared teachers struggled to teach hungry and traumatized students.

I was sold. I can fix this problem, I said to myself. I have found what I will do with my life. I love schools, and I love teaching, and I can help make all American public schools as great as mine.

Well, Jonathan Kozol and countless others had already spent decades trying to do the same, and they had not yet succeeded. The more I researched the issue and taught and tutored in urban public schools, the more I discovered classism, racism, financial crisis, financial restructuring, and what I consider a totally irresponsible government.

How did our government get away with spending money on corporations and war-waging when our schools needed that money for repairs, resources, curriculum, and teacher training? When our students were hungry? When our families needed health care, jobs, housing?

As someone passionate about education, I have done a lot of work in non-profit organizations. And yes, many of them are working to address inequities in education, and in other areas. But what I truly believe is that this work of ensuring high-quality education and providing high-quality health care and jobs and housing and food is the primary responsibility of an effective democratic government.

I quickly learned that I would not fix the system alone. It is too broken, in too many parts, and in such complex ways.

So I support Occupy Wall Street. Because I support the government. I support a government that is working for the 99 percent. We can do this work. I want to see the government take on this challenge. I want to see President Obama make this happen. I want to help make this happen.

Why write about weddings?

2011-08-31T21:33:00.000-04:00

I was quite surprised that nobody asked me how writing about wedding planning fit into the broader mission of this blog. Why write about wedding planning on a blog called “Sex Ed Transforms,” created to promote transformative sexuality education for adolescents and young adults? The more I think about this question and reflect on the process, the more reasons there are. I’ll explain three of those reasons here.

1. For the teenagers.
Marriage is one of the organizing principles of sex education in our public schools. Abstinence Only until Marriage programs teach that sex and sexuality are only legitimate in the context of marriage. On its own, this concept means that sex is framed in the context of these traditional gender roles and capitalist pressures that accompany weddings and marriages. Even teenagers lucky enough to receive comprehensive sexuality education that focuses on how to form healthy relationships at any age are still exposed to the media. In magazines, TV shows, and movies, marriage is the ultimate point of reference for romance. And weddings are the climax of romance, the height of the love and drama. Not only does this perpetuate the idealization of weddings as perfect and beautiful, but it also fails to teach anything about healthy and happy marriages. If weddings are the height of romance, then what comes next? Rather than learning the skills they need to have healthy, pleasurable, and fulfilling relationships at any age and with any shape or size of religious, legal, or private commitment, teenagers are instead learning that they must get married and enter into this specific kind of relationship or else they will never have legitimate sex and they will never get to live out their dreams of true love. Which everyone should want. And if they don’t, they’re missing out on something that they should want even if they don’t want it.

2. For us, the young adults in our 20s and 30s.
Young adulthood, in our society, is stereotypically framed by the achievement of certain milestones that mark the transition from being a kid to having kids, including launching a career, getting married, and, well, having kids. In reality, however, so many young adults enjoy such varied paths, which can result in much success and happiness. It’s said that today’s young adults are more likely to explore multiple careers in their lifetime, to live with a partner without plans of marriage, and perhaps to choose not to have children. Unusual paths are becoming more, well, usual. Why, then, is marriage still this ultimate point of reference? Even for young adults who don’t get married, the weddings of their friends and siblings mark the calendar year with showers, bachelor/ette parties, and the big days themselves. The culture of weddings thus becomes an intricate part of the culture of young adulthood. The involvement of friends and family in the wedding process is also seeped in both patriarchy and materialism, perpetuating unhealthy gender roles for men and women. Although I didn’t write a lot about these particular influences on friends and family, I just need to say that it’s not only about the bride, it’s about how weddings are embedded in the broader culture and thus create problematic and, at times, quite detrimental gendered and classed power dynamics.

3. For the children. Do it for the children.
I’ll keep this simple. My thought is just that if wedding and marriage are drowning in patriarchy and capitalism, and people who marry later go on to have children, the messages sent to the couple about what marriage should be like and what they should care about are going to trickle into the foundation of their relationship. That, in turn, will affect the environment in which the children are raised and the implicit and explicit messages the children receive, thus perpetuating the patriarchy and burying us deeper and deeper in sexism.

All I’m saying is, all of this wedding stuff I wrote about does not just affect me as a bride. It affects our whole society and everybody in it. Another thing to consider is that most young brides are doing it for their first time. And after they do it once, they often don’t get a second chance any time soon, so the industry gets to remain very stagnant, constantly getting new clients without having to woo old clients back again. And that’s part of the reason I decided to speak up and say something. I don’t plan on having another wedding, but I do plan on sticking around and engaging in this society for a while more, and I think all of this stuff is still going to matter even now that my wedding is over. So, nobody asked, but these are my reasons. Now I’m asking you, what should we do about it?

The Detriment of Internalized Femininity

2011-08-30T08:01:00.000-04:00

Planning that wedding woke me up. In addition to the wonderful sense of joy and community (and there was so much of that), I also experienced moments of deep despair, helplessness, and fear, in ways I never had before. But at none of these times was I unable to understand from where these emotions were coming. I knew.

Planning a wedding revealed to me places within myself still very much under the influence of patriarchal sexism. While working on my master’s thesis during this period, I came across Emily Impett and colleagues’ breakdown of femininity ideology (2006), in which they looked at how girls internalize the dominant messages in our society about how girls and women should behave. They breaks down femininity ideology into two pieces: body objectification and inauthenticity in relationships. Planning a wedding revealed to me in such a magnified and concise way how I am still affected by both of these elements.

Body objectification is perhaps the more obvious element, based on what I have written here so far. The entire wedding culture is premised on the idea that a bride will be utterly focused on losing weight and/or keeping her “figure.” As much as one year before the wedding someone commented that I must have turned down her offer of food because, she said, “you have a dress to fit into.” But body objectification isn’t about what other people say, rather, it’s about the internalization of these messages. It’s about how these ideas can creep into my own thoughts and twist and turn the way I feel about myself. Suddenly there was this whole element of the wedding that I had not anticipated, and that element was me, a specter of myself, sitting in the corner, looking at myself as a bride and judging whether or not I looked skinny enough, beautiful enough, bridal enough. I think this element has been re-triggered this week because we got the professional photos back, and I was so nervous to look at them. I was nervous not because I thought they would be bad or I thought I wouldn’t enjoy looking at them, but rather because ever since the wedding I had been able to dismiss those cries of self-objectification. Looking at pictures of oneself, it is hard not to ask oneself, “Am I beautiful?” However, one thing I can say happily and proudly is that on the day of the wedding, all my prep paid off, and I felt present and engaged, very much not the self-conscious wreck about which I had been so concerned. And that paid off when I then looked at the pictures – I look so ecstatic, both mouth and eyes wide open in almost every picture, and nothing else matters. Nothing besides that ecstasy, those looks of joy. Right?

Inauthenticity in relationships. Now this one is a little harder to explain, and I don’t think I wrote about it as much at the time. This concept is based on the idea that females are taught to be the ones to smooth things over, to make things better, to make things work. That girls and women are supposed to avoiding standing up for themselves, not speak up for what they want and need, and not cause problems. Being socialized in such a way strongly affects one’s relationships with others, in which assertive communication and clear expression of one’s thoughts and feelings help strengthen relationships and help individuals get their needs met. I had been working already on developing these skills and, in various capacities, teaching others these skills. But maybe this whole wedding planning challenge was just too much too soon. Planning a wedding involves so many different aspects, and so many details, and so many decisions that I did actually have feelings about (in addition to many I didn’t). I didn’t realize early enough how important it was going to be for me to speak up, express what I felt and what I didn’t feel, articulate my wants and needs, and assertively negotiate with my partner, our parents, and our friends. Most of all, I was not very practiced in this process and so, I am afraid, often I did not do it so nicely. Often panic, frustration, and inarticulate tears would seize me. Sometimes I would just say too little, too late. Sometimes I said nothing at all because I was too afraid of the consequences. And sometimes I definitely said too much, and I was too mean. However, sometimes it worked just right, and I owe much to my partner, our parents, and our friends for bearing with me (and each other) and for working through the process together. I learned a lot, and I believe that I experienced a lot of growth not only in my own communication repertoire, but more specifically in opening channels of communication in a few key relationships that I hope will stay strong the rest of my life.

These are just two examples of the ways in which I had to face the effects of sexism and patriarchy on myself, personally, through this process. In addition, as I have written about in other posts, the culture of wedding planning has in itself more elements of patriarchy than I had ever before directly encountered in my lovely, liberal, northeastern American world. The relevance of this process to my work of transforming sex education will be the subject of my next post.

Our Ketubah Text

2011-07-06T14:03:00.000-04:00

A Ketubah is a Jewish marriage contract. Considered a legal document, it is signed by the couple and two witnesses on the day of the wedding. While the structure of this text is based on the traditional formats, we worked diligently to craft a text that would reflect our intentions for our marriage. We would love to hear what you think!
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On the 1st day of the week, the 1st day of the month of Tammuz, in the year five thousand seven hundred and seventy-one since “the creation of the world,” corresponding to the 3rd day of the month of July in the year two thousand eleven here in Massachusetts, the groom Matthew Lowe, son of Jeffrey and Fonda, and the bride Mimi Arbeit, daughter of Susan and Robert, entered into the Holy Covenant of Marriage. The bride Mimi said to the groom Matthew: "With this ring you are consecrated unto me as my partner according to the spirit of Miriam and the tradition of Moses and the Jewish people. I shall treasure you, nourish you, support you and respect you as Jewish adults have devoted themselves to their partners with love and integrity." The groom Matthew said to the bride Mimi: "With this ring you are consecrated unto me as my partner according to the spirit of Miriam and the tradition of Moses and the Jewish people. I shall treasure you, nourish you, support you and respect you as Jewish adults have devoted themselves to their partners with love and integrity."

They also agree to the following: Our partnership is invested with the vision of radical feminism, which guides us in queering structures of power and seeking justice for ourselves and others. We promise to try to be ever open to one another and to cherish each other's uniqueness: to comfort and challenge each other through life's sorrow and joy; to share our intuition and insight with one another; and, above all, to do everything within our power to permit each of us to become the persons we are yet to be. We pledge to establish a home that welcomes the spiritual potential in all life: a home wherein the flow of the seasons and the passages of time are celebrated through symbols of our values and our heritage; a home filled with reverence for learning, loving and giving. Through our partnership we will strive towards wholeness for ourselves, for one another, and for the world. And if a time comes that either of us chooses to end this marriage, we each pledge to act with integrity, respect, and compassion towards each other in civic and religious domains.

The groom and bride also accepted full legal responsibility for the obligations herein taken on, as well as for the various properties entering the marriage from their respective homes and families, and agreed that the obligations in this Ketubah may be satisfied even from movable property. Both the groom and the bride formally acquire these obligations to the other, with an instrument fit for such purposes. All is valid and binding.

To my support network

2011-07-04T13:57:00.000-04:00

I wrote this piece to share with several wedding guests who came to spend time with me in the hour before the ceremony, in a tradition called a tisch, which means "table."

I have been experiencing this wedding in three layers, three perspectives, three ways in which I understand and express my own story. The initial layer is the personal relationship I share with Matt. Hopefully, you will hear the meanings of this deep layer as you witness our marriage ceremony, right after this tisch. The second layer of my experience of this wedding is political. Throughout the last month, I have expressed many of these thoughts and feelings on my blog, so I will not repeat them here.

The third layer of my experience of this wedding was actually the key motivating factor in my decision to have a wedding and reception to celebrate the marriage that Matt and I are undertaking. This layer is what I would like to focus on now, because it is about you. It is you. To my family, my friends, my loved ones, and those who love Matt and are here because they are open to loving me, too… welcome. Thank you for being with us today and throughout our lives. We have put all this thought and energy into preparing for today because we wanted to share it with you. It was because of you that I wanted to have this wedding today.

I once had an assigned reading for a gender studies class in college that addressed the Wedding Industrial Complex and analyzed many problematic and patriarchal aspects of modern weddings. One part of the critique that really struck me was he role of the guests in the wedding process. The couple and their parents plan the wedding, then everyone rushes in to celebrate for a day or for the weekend, and then the couple is left alone. Sealed off and isolated as they begin their marriage. Where the struggles happen, where the hard stuff comes up.

I don’t want to do it that way. First of all, we haven’t done it that way so far. We have been so blessed to have the effusive love and collaboration of each other and our parents in planning this wedding, but it didn’t stop there. Our best friends, our new friends, our parents friends, our cousins, they all helped us in planning this wedding. And each offer of help, each volunteering to take on a task, meant so much to be. Because not only was it extremely helpful in terms of getting this thing to happen, but it also, to me, implied a willingness and perhaps eagerness to help us in the times that will follow this wedding, whatever those times might entail.

We need you. I need you.

Our relationship cannot thrive in isolation. We need your support, in times of struggle and in times of joy, to help us thrive and reach our potential as a couple. I want to take this opportunity to ask you for this support, and for your patience, compassion, and wisdom as we navigate the joint and individual challenges ahead of us and cope with what that means for our relationship with each other and for our relationships with each of you.

And in addition to your support, I want to offer you mine. In the theme of approaching my wedding day as a personal Yom Kippur, I will start with an apology. I am sorry for all the times I have hurt or offended you or others that you care about. I have been distracted, I have been careless, too fast to speak, too soon to leave, and I have been selfish. Please forgive me. Know on this day, as I renew my dedication to living a life in which my words, actions and relationships reflect my values and passions, I am committing to you as well as committing to Matt. I want to be there for you, and I will be renewed because of this day and because of the strength I gain from my relationship with Matt. Please know that as we solidify our relationship to each other, as we invite you here to celebrate our commitment and rejoice with us, we hope that you will find joy and comfort in welcoming us into your lives, as well. As I set many important intentions today, I take this moment to set the intention to be your friend, to deepen our relationship, and to support you with love and caring. And, I will need your love and care to nourish me as Matt and I pursue a partnership thriving with health, happiness, and the pursuit of justice.

Why I will wear white

2011-06-30T15:56:00.000-04:00

I originally imagined that I would wear blue jeans and a pink tank-top for our wedding. It’s my favorite outfit! And I wanted to wear something that would allow me to be and feel like myself. Upon further consideration of occasion and dress code, I considered a flowing skirt and a tank top. Seemed reasonable.

I simply could not stomach the associations I had with the white bridal dress. The association with virginity and the implication of purity are not ideals that I seek to embrace and support. I have discussed with other women who are both sexually active and getting married how it feels insincere to get married in a white dress that implies virginity.

I’m not getting married to make myself into “an honest woman.” I have been honest all year, living with my partner, making a life together, and enjoying each other both emotionally and physically. I think both our past and our future are part of the process that we will celebrate on our wedding day.

As we started to talk more and more about our wedding, I learned a little more about the Jewish wedding ceremony. Matt mentioned his hope that he would be able to fast (not eat) the day of the wedding, as is tradition. I attended other Jewish weddings and saw the grooms don kittels, white robes. I found out that Jewish tradition considers one’s wedding day as if it were a personal Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year. Both fasting and wearing white are elements of Yom Kippur that symbolize renewal: seeking forgiveness, separating oneself from past transgressions, and getting the opportunity to earn life anew. One element of Yom Kippur that I always appreciated as a child is the way in which it acknowledges error as inherent to human life. The central prayer of the service on the eve of Yom Kippur is Kol Nidre, and it declares that all vows made in the year to come shall be considered void. This prayer is a legal process in which Jews, together, declare and embrace their human weakness. Although they will spend the day ahead of them fasting and repenting for what they and others in their community have done wrong, they are not expected to become perfect in the year to come.

I felt really drawn to this imagery because it focused on process, on improvement without perfection, and on the wedding as a day on which to renew oneself and one’s life intentions.

Upon discovering this association between one’s wedding and Yom Kippur, I said to my partner: I’ll wear white if you wear white. Let’s both wear white. Let’s have ourselves our own Yom Kippur. And he said yes!

(Note: our wedding takes place on Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the Jewish month, on which fasting is prohibited, so we will not be taking on that element of repentance.)

When I put on a white dress this Sunday morning, I will make no claim to virginity, or purity, or perfection. Rather, it is a move in which I will be reckoning with my own imperfections, failures, and weaknesses. It will be a statement in which I declare my intention to enter the wedding with a sense of repentance and renewal. I have erred in the past—in this relationship, in other relationships, and in other areas of life—both intentionally and unintentionally. On Sunday, I will seek forgiveness, and I will seek a new start. When I approach my beloved under the chuppah (wedding canopy) and see him, too, wearing white, I will know that he also seeks forgiveness, and that he also loves himself and me as imperfect beings. We will both make mistakes in the future—within our marriage, with our management of our household, with our other relationships. And the commitment we make to each other in the wedding ceremony includes standing by each other through those future mistakes.

The white we wear symbolizes the freshness of our relationship, the pursuit of personal improvement, and our celebration of our own and the other’s human fragility. For the wedding ceremony itself, we will emphasize this symbolism through putting on the ceremonial white robes. Throughout the rest of the day, our white outfits will communicate that we take this day to pause for renewal and celebration amidst a long and complex process of partnership.

The beginning of the rest of our lives

2011-06-29T07:47:00.001-04:00

Another guest post from my partner. Check out his writing on secular spirituality at his blog, The Empty Throne.

My wedding will happen in 21 days. But as far as I’m concerned personally, the beginning of the rest of my life began a little over a year ago, when my partner and I began living together. That was the day my bachelorhood ended, even though I am still technically a bachelor today. We moved in together after getting engaged six months earlier, so the domestic move was not one of trial, but of commitment. So, for me, all of the major life changes that come with marriage began on that day, not on the upcoming day of my wedding.

The above sentiment has greatly affected my hopes and expectations for the wedding. And it leads to an interesting riddle I’ve been thinking about—will I cry at the wedding?

My money is on yes. I think of myself, watching my one and only person walking down the aisle to me (walking down to a song that I also know will make me cry); I imagine myself, standing under the chuppah, looking at my life partner looking at me, surrounded by our family and friends… I tear up now thinking about it. And I know, I just know, that many times during the ceremony, I will think about how real this all feels. Real—meaning, this is happening, this is it, this is that transitional ceremony, that threshold I step through with my partner, into the adventure of life together. This is real life happening before one’s eyes, major life moment, check.

The irony should be obvious—real life is not standing under the chuppah. Transitional rituals work by serving as a discontinuity, a moment in which we mark life change by stepping out from everyday life. But “real life happening before one’s eyes” is what happens every day. The process and substance of partnered domestic life—that is the adventure of life, and I have been watching and participating in it for over a year now. Throughout the wedding planning, one of my favorite lines to repeat to my partner is that the wedding will change nothing. That the wedding, rather than move us from unmarried to married, will simply be a party we throw to celebrate something that happened last year, when our lives began again. So why this crying about the beauty of “real life” at the wedding?

The answer has to lie in the public nature of the event. If, as children, we gain our sense of self from experiencing the gaze of the other, this is surely a life-long human phenomenon. While my partner and I live day-to-day in the reality of our love and the new life together it has produced, we are almost always the only ones watching it happen. Our engagement was also something conducted privately, announced to a (mostly) unsuspecting family ten minutes later. But, when I think of the wedding, my goodness, all those faces watching us “become partners”! Nothing like an audience to make you very self-conscious. Our life together happens every single day, and I feel that reality every single day. But the wedding day is the day that our life together has its biggest audience. And, especially in our media-mediated reality, that will make it feel more real. There is just so much focus at a wedding, and the ritual, along with the gathering of family and friends, will invariably heighten our sense of life. Everyday life includes my commitment to my partner, the love and happiness, joy and excitement that life with her brings. But the wedding day— that seems to be a day solely dedicated to all this love and happiness, joy and excitement. This focus, and the step away from mundane reality that is necessary to keep such a focus, will impress the reality of it all upon me. So I expect to be crying.

Just to clear up the blind-spot lurking in this post, the wedding (with the consequent official legal/religious status of our marriage) will, indeed, change my life. When I say it will change nothing, I am thinking of life in a very small, private sense, of my day-to-day interactions with my partner. But just as the wedding holds meaning as a public event, legal/religious marital status greatly affects our experience as public individuals, which will also have its effect on us in our private lives.

How not to start a fight, even when you really, really want to…

2011-06-27T20:30:00.000-04:00

In the last week before our wedding, there are still several loose ends. Several decisions that still need to be made, several details we overlooked, and without doubt, many, many last minute changes. In the midst of all this stress, these conflicting values, and these deep and diverse desires, how will I maintain my sanity, pursue my vision for this event, and maintain my relationships with all my co-planners and other invested parties?

In this post, I list some advice to myself regarding how not to start fights this week, even when it seems like the obvious thing to do (as in, even when I feel frustrated, aggravated, or threatened).

1. Self esteem: Not starting fights is even more challenging in light of my last post, regarding my apparently plummeting self esteem. However, this week I will consciously try to access my calm and confidence. A wise friend gave me this advice: Take a moment every day to find the part of you that feels thoroughly strong and good. Although I haven’t been able to follow her advice as a daily practice thus far, I will try again this week.

2. Deep breathing: A pause. A moment. An interruption of the panic that can begin any time. Deep breathing is the link between #1 and #3.

3. Quiet voices: Once I take a breath and access my inner strength, I can then lower my voice. When I lower my voice, it often also means I say things that are less defensive. When I feel the need to defend myself, I speak loudly and authoritatively. But lowering my voice signals to myself, and hopefully to the person I address, that I am willing to let down my defenses, to share and listen to personal thoughts and feelings, to be vulnerable, and to compromise. I find even the slightest hint of increased harshness or increased volume in someone else’s voice to be particularly triggering during tense interactions, so I find it useful to take control of changing the literal tone of a conversation.

4. Check your assumptions: I have actually managed to address several conflicts in the past few weeks by doing the simple exercise of sharing assumptions. Once a conversation has been calmed down, I can take a step back and say, “This is how I am seeing it. Are you seeing it in a different way? Please help me understand.” This basic show and tell is essential to working through a conflict in a way that feels good and satisfies the most number of people.

5. Explore your flexibility: We have less than a week left. We cannot fix everything perfectly at this point. Furthermore, I do not intend to be a perfect person or have a perfect life, and I certainly do not need a perfect wedding.

6. Prioritize: Once I establish that I am flexible, I then have to determine what I need in the situation at hand. In what ways will the outcome affect me? What kinds of reflection, validation, or explanation do I need from the other person? How will the final decision reflect the meaning of the wedding ceremony, or my opportunity to celebrate and rejoice with so many loved ones? Identifying and expressing these priorities is not always something I can do the first time a conflict arises. I may need to take some time to reflect and then bring up the conversation again. Alternatively, I may want to enlist the other person’s help in thinking through my priorities. Either way, honestly and accurately identifying the relevant priorities is essential to finding a solution that feels good.

7. Make a decision: And stick with it. I am trying to close as many open ends as possible. I want as few details up in the air, or rattling around in my head, as possible. Conversations this week should be at least temporarily definitive. I want to make decisions, stick with them, and live with them through the wedding process. If there are any particularly strong conflicts with family or friends that I want to address later in July for the purpose of checking in and making sure our relationship is still strong, I may do that. But for now, I am here to commit, and I mean it.

If I raised my voice at you, responded harshly to something you said, or inexplicably started crying during a phone conversation with you, I apologize. And if I do so within the next week, I apologize ahead of time. I hope we can work it out. Let’s give it a try.

How my Self Esteem Plummeted during Wedding Planning

2011-06-23T19:26:00.000-04:00

I can’t exactly identify when it happened, but I’m sure it was sometime this spring semester. I hadn’t had this experience since about fifth grade, so I didn’t recognize it at first. But it kept happening. More and more. And I still can only guess at why: My self-esteem had plummeted.

I blame the wedding planning. But of course, there are some other confounding factors, the most obvious one being my first year of graduate school. Does graduate school make someone’s self esteem plummet? Since I had never had that experience before in my many other academic and professional endeavors, and since I basically feel okay about how I am doing in school, I am going to continue to attribute this phenomenon to the wedding planning process.

It’s a strange sensation, because rationally I still know that I am a great person in a lot of ways. But there is something about the social, emotional, and commercial challenges of this process that really got to me. As an attempt to dissect what happened, I am going to use the break-down for “Confidence” that we use in our research on adolescent development.

Confidence in Physical Appearance: I started out with loads of this, but I have to admit the constant focus on the details of my appearance during this one day are making me much more self-conscious than I enjoy. How will my dress fit? Will there be any blemishes on my face? Will my legs be adequately smooth, my fingernails properly groomed, and my hair not too flat and not too frizzy? I think a lot of my approach to dealing with my appearance is to wear bright colors. Since deciding to wear white, my usual strategy for telling myself I look stunning has been taken away. At least I will be wearing a kittel (ceremonial robe) during the wedding ceremony, so my attention will be completely taken off my appearance for the most important part of the day.

Confidence in Peer Acceptance: I usually have loads of this, also, but the contradictions in wedding planning mean that with every decision I make, I know there is someone who disagrees with me. I know there are people I love and respect that would have wanted me to make the other decision. Also, the more and more that I argue with people, disagree with people, fail to compromise with people, and am unable to give other people what they need from me, the worse and worse I feel about myself. A large part of my identity is based on my ability to nourish my relationships and to contribute flourishing friendships. The more conflicts I have with friends and family around the wedding ceremony, the more my self esteem plummets. And it is a vicious cycle, because with low self-esteem, I find it thoroughly difficult to hold my own when I experience tension with loved ones.

Confidence in School: As much as I hate to admit it, planning this wedding definitely affected my performance as a student and as a budding professional in my field. At the same time as I find this fact difficult to accept, I rationally believe it is completely understandable. I think it is incredibly important to strike a balance between one’s personal and professional lives. But when the wedding itself is already making me feel like I just can’t do things right, going to school and struggling there because I am overwhelmed, exhausted, and overcommitted makes me feel even worse. I gain a lot of confidence and self-respect by excelling as an educator, researcher, and activist. Scaling back from those activities this year, and performing slightly worse on the activities I did do, made me feel bad about myself.

Confidence in Area of Interest: I think the main reason that wedding planning led my self-esteem to plummet is that I didn’t feel like I was good at it. I didn’t have a real vision for what I wanted before I started, so that meant each detail was a new thing to navigate. I also haven’t been part of planning a lot of weddings previously, so a lot of conflicts were completely unanticipated. And sometimes I would come up with my own answer to something, and I would just be told that I was wrong. Most of those times I really was wrong—I didn’t really know what I was getting into and thus couldn’t really imagine what I needed. So a lot of the time I just didn’t feel competent. With the tasks for which I had no interest and no talent—such as selecting flowers—I just delegated completely (thanks, Mom!). However, sometimes I really did want to be part of the conversation, I just felt unprepared for the tasks at hand. Spending such a great amount of time and energy doing work in an area in which I felt truly unskilled really hurt my self-esteem.

I want to add something about the Wedding Industrial Complex, too. Because the Wedding Industry is just that, an industry and a business, it is set up to make you feel you lack something, or have specific needs, so that you will go out and buy something or hire someone to make everything better. The wedding industry is designed to kick-off this self-esteem plummet. However, the self esteem is then supposed to be rescued through purchasing and hiring. I really tried to hold myself back from extra expenditure, so I do not know how I would have felt if I had been more commercially-oriented. Or, on the other hand, I don’t know how I would have felt if I had fully committed myself to an anti-commercialist wedding.

In conclusion, I have this to say: last weekend was my bachelorette party. Two of my best friends in the whole world threw me an absolutely fabulous celebration full of surprises. I had friends present from childhood, high school, college, and these post-college years in Boston. If all of those totally fabulous, smart, caring, and fun people chose to spend a weekend celebrating with me, then there must be something good going on with me. The weekend reset me, centered me, and built a foundation for my self-esteem. I am feeling a little more ready to go into the last stretch before the wedding knowing that I am a good person, I have tried really hard to go through this process with integrity and care, and many outstanding people will be there to celebrate with me. I know my self esteem will continue to grow and get stronger, and I actually think the wedding is going to help, in the end, because of all the people that will be there.

What’s in a Name? Identity, family, and figuring it out

2011-06-17T12:27:00.000-04:00

Getting married raises question of whether one or both of us will change our names as an indication of this union. My partner and I, along with numerous other couples in this and previous generations, recognize that the traditional practice of a wife taking on a husband’s last name comes directly out of a patriarchal tradition in which the wife, upon marriage, is considered property of the husband. She is leaving her father’s house for the house of her new husband, thus she leaves behind her father’s name (which her own mother had taken upon marriage) and she takes on the name of her husband, which she will then pass along to her children, and so on.

We are very lucky to be getting married at a time when couples find many creative alternatives to this patriarchal tradition.

On the one hand, names are very tied up with our identity as individuals. I want to use a name that feels like mine, that feels like all of me, that feels like a celebration of my agency as an individual and does not reduce me to half of a partnership. I feel strongly connected to the name I have used for all my life, in both its full and shortened forms.

On the other hand, we grew up in a culture in which the concept of “family” generally implies a shared family name. My childhood family is “The Arbeits”: we are a unit in many ways, including that we shared the same last name. Now, my partner and I are forming our own family unit. We associate names with family designations, and thus we desire to use the process of (re)naming to demonstrate this formation of our new family, our new household, while at the same time honoring our own and each other’s family of origin.

We gave ourselves time and space to find a solution to this complex question. We did a lot of brainstorming, a lot of careful and gentle playing around with different options, a lot of sharing and listening to each other’s feelings. In addition to our commitment to queering structures of power and carefully working through patriarchal pressures, we wanted to attend to our personal preferences and desires:

1. We didn’t want to combine our names. I remember one g-chat conversation in which my partner and I went back and forth with different unpleasant-sounding combinations of our two last names. Besides, we both love our families and the connections that our family names give us to our parents and siblings, and weaving together the syllables of our names would not address that desire to explicitly stay connected by keeping our family names in their shared forms.

2. I wanted to keep my last name (Arbeit) professionally. My mother kept her name professionally, and I always really liked that idea. Furthermore, starting work as a research assistant last summer taught me something: it’s nice to be easy to find on Google. My last name happens to be much less common than my partner’s. (If you’re looking for our registries, search using my name!) Plus, I have already started my career with the name Arbeit—teaching, blogging, starting graduate school, serving as a coauthor on presentations and publications—and I would like to continue my career with this name. I mess around with my first name enough (Miriam v. Mimi) and I would prefer to keep my last name consistent.

3. I felt pretty open to using my partner’s name in certain social situations and, specifically, having members of his family refer to me or address me using their family name. As mentioned above, I consider sharing a name to be an exciting element of family membership. I am very excited to be a member of his family, to be one of the Lowes.

4. My partner’s middle name happens to be very similar to my last name, so he had the idea of changing his middle name to my last name, so that my last name would be his new middle name.

At first, #4 led us to the idea that we would both be Arbeit Lowe, as two family names sitting next to each other. Arbeit (my family name) came before Lowe (his family name) because of his idea of making Arbeit his middle name. I would keep Arbeit as my “first” last name and take Lowe as my “second” last name. As per #2, I still wanted to use Arbeit professionally, with no Lowe involved. However, if professionally my name ended with Arbeit, in what capacity would I add on Lowe as my second last name? We did not address this question until a few weeks ago when we went to City Hall for our marriage license. The forms required us to indicate what our last names would be after marriage. Not our entire names, but just our legal last names.

I realized, at this somewhat inconvenient moment as we stood at City Hall, that I wanted to keep my own last name as my legal surname. It felt important to me as an indication of my continued existence as my own independent entity, connected to my past as well as to my present and future, particularly in official contexts such as law and vocation. My partner agreed, and we filled out the forms accordingly.

But later, my partner commented, “If you aren’t changing your name legally, maybe I won’t change mine either.” Wait! I felt confused. I felt that changing a legal surname and changing one’s middle name had quite different implications. I realized that there were a lot of aspects of this decision that we had not yet discussed, and a lot of options we had not yet explored. So we discussed it in more detail, and eventually came to a solution that we both really love, that embraces our personal identities and symbolizes our integration into each other’s families as well as our formation of a new family unit. I am feeling quite excited for when we implement this decision after our marriage, through venues ranging from legal documents to Facebook.

Why are we getting married? Accepting privilege while wanting it eliminated

2011-06-15T21:31:00.000-04:00

Having reached the midway-point of this June journey of wedding-prep, I will take a break to reflect on why I’m even doing this—having a wedding—in the first place. And to address the question of why we are having a wedding, I really need to address the question of why we are getting married.

Deciding to get married: Over two years ago, my partner and I expressed our mutual desire to embark upon a lifelong partnership together. A lot of our decision to get married came from our desire to demonstrate our investment in this partnership and celebrate our joy with friends and family. That said, why the marriage license?

In college, I became ardently against the institution of marriage as it now functions in the United States. See http://beyondmarriage.org/ for some activism that has informed my beilefs. The basis of this stance is that the benefits and protections afforded to married couples should be restructured so that all people can access them. This position grew out of a radical response to the same-sex marriage movement.

I believe that the same-sex marriage movement and the beyond-marriage movement are both extremely important. I believe we must restructure the legal institution of marriage to incorporate same-sex couples, as well as couples in which one person is genderqueer or intersex. In addition, I believe that our country must engage in the long-term work of restructuring our many systems of social and economic privilege so that all people can access these cares and protections.

Legal protection: Beginning to intertwine my life with someone else’s is really exciting, and it is also really risky. Both in Jewish and American law, getting married means taking on certain responsibilities and gaining a degree of legal protection. As we share living quarters, a bank account, and possibly offspring, our marriage license gives us access to a plethora of legal back-up options should something happen to one of us individually or to our relationship.

Tax breaks: Married couples get tax breaks. As a Massachusetts resident at least I know that my married same-sex partners do have access to at least some of the privileges of legal marriage. However, since the federal government does not recognize same-sex marriages, legally married Massachusetts residents do not receive the federal tax break if they are in a same-sex marriage.

Health care: While on a personal level I am excited and relieved by the prospect of being able to put my partner on my health care plan or vice-versa, I also think that health care should be available to everyone. Married, single, healthy, unhealthy, employed, unemployed, old, young, everything. Everyone should get health care. Health care is a right, not a privilege.

On the one hand, I have listed and explained some of my reasons for getting married. On the other hand, many of these same reasons inform my belief that the legal institution of marriage should be eliminated.

I look at it this way: I recognize that for myself and my partner, access to health care, tax breaks, and legal protection will improve our lives. We have the privilege of signing a marriage license and thus enjoying these benefits. However, it also seems obvious to me that if everyone’s lives would be improved by such access, and making a lifelong commitment to someone of the opposite sex does not make me better or more deserving than other people, I should not have access to these resources while others do not. The institution of marriage in our country needs some radical restructuring.

Sanctifying our union: Setting the scene through an opening blessing

2011-06-13T21:53:00.000-04:00

From even before getting engaged, I knew that my partner and I would have a blast working out our wedding ceremony. We found a fabulous friend to officiate, one who honors our feminist and humanist values while helping us understand and connect to the laws and symbols of our heritage. The three of us have each made strong contributions to this process. The one challenge we are still addressing is the opening blessing.

Ebn Leader wrote a modern version of the opening blessing to a Jewish wedding ceremony, written in the spirit of the traditional blessing: “Blessed are You, who sanctifies us with Your commandments and separates us from unethical sexual behavior, permitting each of these partners to the other by means of the wedding canopy and the betrothal.”

Before I critique the blessing, let me explain two needs addressed by opening with this blessing: it states the function of the betrothal process that is about to occur, and it states that sexual behavior is a defining element of the relationship currently under discussion. While I like that the blessing incorporates these two aspects, I find the actual messages that end up getting sent to be quite problematic.

I very much like the idea of opening the wedding ceremony by setting the scene, or, in spiritual words, setting an intention for what is about to occur. Before going right ahead with what everyone already expects to happen, let’s take a moment to reflect on the act and to invite those present to join us in sanctifying the process, in making it joyous, positive, healthy, spiritual, meaningful. Why are we having a religious ceremony? What is the purpose of all these symbols and rituals? For me, the answer is not that we are doing these things so that God can sanction our life together. A re-worded opening blessing could appropriately set an intention, or introduce a mindset, that can prepare us as loving partners and our friends and family with us to take in the rest of the ceremony.

And on to my second point: I value discussion of sex and sexuality. A colleague of mine actually pointed out that there is no other place in the wedding ceremony in which sexuality is mentioned, so for those of us who think that frank discussion of sex and sexuality can be healthy and positive, there is an inclination to embrace it here, in this opening blessing. However:

In no way do I want to imply that getting married sanctions sexual behavior between two people or that a healthy life partnership must be sexual.

Let me repeat: I am not getting married in order to make myself an honest woman, and I do not want to erase the fact that people who do not want to have sex together may still choose to get married.

I do not want a blessing that implies that getting married renders acceptable, on the one hand, or requires, on the other hand, that my partner and I have sex.

That said, I do value making distinctions between ethical sexual behavior and unethical sexual behavior, and I do think that ethical sexual behavior is a healthy and beautiful thing worth celebrating, a thing I might even consider holy. Furthermore, my partner and I do value each other sexually and value the sexual aspects of our union. And I think it would be pretty cool if we could express our valuing intimacy and pleasure and passion through an opening blessing. We still need to work on getting the wording just right, and recognize the problematic history that has resulted in this modern blessing with these words and implications.

Reckoning with Personal Privilege

2011-06-12T14:28:00.002-04:00

This weekend was Boston Queer Pride. As a cisgendered female about to marry a cisgendered male, I spent a lot of this weekend and the weeks leading up to it thinking about social and political privileges that come with making a lifetime monogamous commitment, with religious recognition of our commitment, with legal recognition of our commitment, and with being able to talk about that commitment in any professional or social situation in which I find myself.

Friday night before the Dyke March, several members of a local Queer Jewish community met up for a Shabbat potluck. After dinner, another member of the community, whom I had met several times but do not know on a personal level, asked me very warmly what my plans were for the summer. I told her that my biggest plan is to get married in a few weeks. She smiled excitedly and paused as she carefully chose her next words so as to avoid assumptions about the gender of my betrothed. “And, is your fiancée here?” she asked.

“No, he is at a friend’s place tonight,” I responded, as my entire body filled with waves of emotion. What simple questions. In the past several weeks and months, I have repeated similar conversations several times. Telling people I’m getting married. Answering follow-up questions. Sometimes I am the first to express my partner’s gender, sometimes the other person does, indeed, make assumptions. But honestly, most of the time, I don’t notice.

This simple, safe, and supportive conversation with a fellow community member emphasized for me the heterosexual privilege I have benefited from during these several conversations about my wedding: I can talk about it wherever and whenever I choose. My physical, emotional, and professional safety is not on the line in these conversations. I don’t have to hold myself back and wonder if bringing up this topic would be taking too much of a risk. When I want to tell someone, when I want to refer to the wedding or bring it up, I can. Even by blogging about my wedding, by being so public about making this serious commitment to a “heterosexual lifestyle,” I am exercising privilege. I did not have to think through what this blogging choice would mean for my career, my public image, my family’s comfort, in the same way that I might have thought through it if the phrase “my partner” was followed-up with pronouns other than he, him, and his.

When I finished the conversation with the community member at the potluck, I looked around me for a few moments and then wandered away from the group, sat down by a tree, and sobbed. The weight of the moment, the weight of all those moments of casual conversation that had filtered through my personal and professional life throughout this period of engagement and wedding-planning, had hit me.

I think one of the reasons it hit me so hard is that this is a privilege I haven’t figured out how to use yet. I haven’t figured out how to share the “I’m [getting] married to a man” news and, in the same conversation, express my feminist values and queer politics and do or say something as a queer ally. I also haven’t figured out exactly how marriage will change the social aspects of this privilege. I know that there are legal, religious and material privileges that will come with marriage to a man — and I hope to share my thoughts on those in a different post — but there is also a different set of social privileges that come with marriage. Once I no longer have a boyfriend and do have a husband, how will that affect my social and professional standing? Furthermore, what responsibilities can I take on to be an even stronger ally for people who do not have access to those privileges?

I am about to enter one of the most cherished socially constructed privileges that a person can acquire in this heterosexist, patriarchal society. The question I want to address is, what can I do to foster critical self-awareness of that privilege and to doubly dedicate myself to eradicating the structures of power and oppression that have created it?

Doing Femme

2011-06-10T23:10:00.001-04:00

Yes, wearing makeup can be a feminist act. Wanting to appear feminine and femininely put-together can be a feminist desire. I never meant to imply otherwise. What I meant to say is that wearing makeup is not always a feminist act. Sometimes, it is a demonstration of internalized oppression, a desire to hide flaws, an act of objectification and submission, a nod to the system. When I wear makeup and skirts and pink and feel I’m doing that as a feminist act, I call that femme. I feel feminine, beautiful, brilliant, and powerful. I feel in control.

Doing femme means simultaneously critiquing and celebrating femininity in a variety of forms. It means embracing the aspects of femininity and female-focused culture that I find empowering and pleasurable in conjunction with embracing aspects of myself that totally clash with traditional conceptions of what it means to be feminine and womanly. Femme is about embracing contradictions, strengthening personal agency, and having a whole lot of fun. At least, that’s what femme means to me.

My last post was also about embracing contradictions. This contradiction: my decision to wear makeup does not only come from a place of femme desire and personal agency. It also comes from a place in which I feel I need to be girly in order to be accepted, in which I fear rebellion at risk of my own comfort and privilege, in which I yearn to achieve that standard of prettiness that I see held up as the ideal. Yes, that girl exists inside of me. Those fears and insecurities are a part of who I am.

Those fears and insecurities don’t make me any less femme and fabulous. Or do they? To be honest, I had not thought about it much until this week. I had associated doing femme with the times and places in which I feel truly free and empowered to be myself, to live and breathe and show off my own contradictions, to push boundaries. I had associated doing femme with weekends, vacations, or those days that seem so stressful that my best coping mechanism is to break out the red dress and black lace tights and go for it.

Until now, I had not thought to associate femme-and-fabulous with that place of insecurity and fear. When I chose to wear makeup at the wedding, I knew I could be radical and choose not to; but I still felt pressured by a desire to conform to mainstream practices of female beautification. Because I felt this pressure, this strong influence and pull that would, in the end, be a strong element of my decision, I didn’t feel I was doing femme. If it wasn’t totally free, it couldn’t be femme, right?

I realized today (through a conversation with a glorious femme friend) that not only had I been holding myself up to a ridiculous and damaging ideal, but I had also been holding up femme to an ideal that restricted it. I was trying to protect my femme identity from my own imperfections. I was protecting my femme identity from the parts of me that feel insecure, disempowered, and scared. But that’s not fair. What will it take to free my femme identity and let it flourish?

Femme can be imperfect. The reality of my inner experience is that, at this point in my mind-twenties, I can proudly and strongly embrace of my own power and beauty and brilliance. I am quite femme-confident. AND. And I have a good chunk of that internalized-female-oppression that entails a constant questioning of whether I am measuring up or not. I have both. And I bet a lot of other people do, too! And that’s okay. And that’s difficult. And it’s real. And yes I am using the word “and” over and over again on purpose to demonstrate that finding personal agency includes this process of embracing over and over again the contradictions of our own desires. And we can find beauty in these contradictions. And we can find power. And we can find feminism.

We can find these things, if we’re willing to risk looking for them.

Three lessons about decision-making I’ve learned from wedding-planning: A guest post

2011-06-09T22:23:00.001-04:00

When I told my partner about my series for this month on wedding planning, he asked if he could contribute. So here is his guest-post! Check out his writing on secular spirituality at his blog, The Empty Throne.

1) If you really want to choose something, first consider not choosing it.

When we were first discussing getting married, Mimi told me how, in college, she did not to think of herself as someone who would definitely get married someday. While at first I found this distressing, I later found strength and comfort in her explanation that her more recent decision to get married was made that much more confidently… clearly, she wasn’t getting married instinctually, by default, or out of societal expectations. By being able to feel whole in herself without marriage, she was consciously and confidently able to take on marriage as a life choice.
With all of the stress around wedding-planning, I recently realized that I myself had never considered not being married, but moreover, I had never considered not having a wedding. I attempted to imagine not having one, and how I would feel about that, and very quickly I felt far more confident in my choice—I’m happy about marrying Mimi, and I want to share that happiness through celebration. Pretty simple stuff, but it became much clearer after I attempted to consider not-wedding scenarios.

2) If you really want to choose something, make the choice a few times before announcing it.

My waves of excitement at having a wedding have many times now run aground on the frustrating politics of managing family and friends. If I could do it all over again, I would make more decisions with my partner before sharing them with the outside world. And I would mull over those decisions for at least a week. Given that I have never had a wedding before, my hopes for it and visions of it have changed over and over again, making my previous decisions seem short-sighted.

3) If you really want to choose something while in a partnership… be as open as possible.

Early on, I warned my partner against using the term “my wedding.” The loving/crushing reality continues to be that it is “our wedding,” and joyously/tragically the “our” often includes family and friends. A wedding is a minefield of decision-making, and I never seem to know when my hopes and dreams are about to run head-on into someone else’s. I have learned, as much as I can, to tread lightly. This one event seems to have many meanings for each person involved, and anxieties can be triggered by both the content and the process of making a wedding. I never realized how isolating it can be to throw a party celebrating a union. Because, of course, it is still “my” (own, child’s, etc.) wedding to many of the people involved—including myself. The powerful process of collective decision-making makes and breaks us.

These have all been hard, and terribly important, life lessons for me. In the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Berachot), there is a list of this-worldly items that are “1/60th” of an other-worldly item, such as Sleep:Death, Dreams:Prophecy, Sabbath:World-to-come, etc. To this I add that love between two people is 1/60th of the messianic age—the arduous process of learning to effectively love oneself and another, we get a taste of what is necessary to make peace for the whole world. Life and love together is made of all of this decision-making, and we need all the practice we get in order to get better at it!

The Social Construction of Desire

2011-06-08T20:21:00.001-04:00

I have a confession: I am getting my makeup done professionally for the wedding. Well, let me qualify that confession: A close friend of one of my best friends is a makeup artist and has offered to come to my parents’ house to do my makeup and the moms’ makeup. I am really happy to be supporting a friend (financially), and I am really touched that she wants to be a part of this process. However, I am still letting her paint my face.

I went back and forth with this decision for a while. I had a very explicit conversation with one of my best friends in which she told me that getting professional makeup was completely optional, that I could choose to do my own makeup the simple way in which I do it before I go to work or before I go to a party. I could choose not to wear any makeup, but I probably wouldn’t, since I do enjoy wearing some simple makeup items (especially eyeshadow). So I knew I had a choice. And my friend-in-common with this makeup artist brought me over for a trial run, and I actually thought it was pleasant enough and that my face still looked natural enough with makeup on. And, as yet another friend pointed out, it will be one more thing that someone else will take care of on the day of the wedding, I will not be in charge of my own makeup. I will have support in that task as I will in many others, and this support is something I have deeply cherished throughout the process of this wedding.

I am sharing this story not because I think my makeup is that important, but rather because it illustrates the clashing and crashing of so many different desires, some that come from my feminist values, some that come from my aesthetic preferences, and some that I know are socially constructed from my two and a half decades of living and breathing in a materialist patriarchy. This clashing and crashing has been incessant throughout the planning process. The kicker is, all of the desires are real, they are all strong emotions that I experience and with which I need to cope. I cannot have everything I want because so many of the things I want conflict with other things I want.

I want to not care about how I look. I want my appearance to be a mere detail in the exciting and spiritual proceedings of the day. I want to not have to edit, adjust, and cover up my natural physical states in order to show that I can rise to the occasion.

But I also want to look good. I want to feel pretty, I want to be happy with how I look in the pictures, and I really want my mother to be happy with how I look in the pictures. And I want to express physically the glowing joy and ecstasy I feel emotionally about the commitment and partnership that this day is meant to celebrate.

Mostly, I want to not feel self-conscious. I want to not be wondering if others are judging me for different choices I have made about my appearance. But that’s not an option. Just as it’s not an option for me to make a decision that I myself won’t have a way to judge, it’s not possible for me to make a decision that others won’t be able to judge.

I need to ask for acceptance, and I need to ask for forgiveness. I need to ask for these things from myself, and from my partner, my friends and my family. I need acceptance of my strong, complex and often-conflicting desires. I was, am and will be inconsistent, but passionately so.

Stamps of Sexism

2011-06-07T22:35:00.000-04:00

As much as we try to have a feminist, egalitarian wedding, we are still participants in the heterosexist patriarchy. We grew up in it, we are getting married in it, and we can only hope that we will do all we can to work so that future generations do not have to also suffer under it. The intention of this post is to render visible the stamps of sexism that are leaving their mark on our wedding, with hope that through making these visible, through acknowledging and understanding the effect of the patriarchy even on this careful couple, we can develop the communal awareness necessary for working together to repair this broken world.

10 stamps of sexism (among many) in our wedding and in the wedding, in the order in which they appear:

1. My Tisch.
In traditional Judaism, only the groom has a tisch (which means table in Yiddish). The Tisch is the time right before the wedding ceremony. There is a specific ritual in which the men distract the group while the bride is supposedly getting ready. Well, the Tisch now takes place after photographs have been taken, so I will already be ready. So I am also going to have a Tisch, except there is no tradition for a bride’s Tisch. So I will be making up my own thing, while my partner participates in an old, old tradition.

2. My hair and makeup.
This is not a Jewish tradition. This is an American tradition. Let me know if you need me to explain further.

3. My dress.
I didn’t want to wear a dress. I wanted to wear a skirt. I was told, by various sources, that I needed to wear a dress. My partner was not told he had to wear a dress. In fact, when he told people what his (untraditional) wedding outfit will be, no one told him he was wrong or not taking this seriously enough.

4. My kittel.
It is traditional for the Jewish groom to wear a kittel, a white robe, during the wedding ceremony. My partner and I will both be wearing one. See #1 regarding the contrast between his participation in an ancient tradition while I, going through almost the exact same motions, will be doing something unusual, surprising, shocking, and possible upsetting to others.

5. The opening blessing.
We are going back and forth with our officiant to try to figure out a version of the opening blessing that feels good to all of us. The traditional opening blessing references the distinction between sanctioned and unsanctioned sexual unions, and I just can’t stand the fact that we would open the ceremony with even the implication that we were implying that marriage is necessary to sanction our sexual relationship. If that’s not patriarchy, then what is?

6. The Hebrew versions of the blessings in general.
My partner and I grew up in Conservative synagogues and youth programs with lots of Hebrew prayers. As such, our ceremony includes Hebrew prayers in their original form, although they will be followed by English feminist-humanist interpretations of the meanings of these prayers. As such, there is a ton of sexism and patriarchy hidden in all that sneaky Hebrew.

7. Signing the Ketubah.
The Ketubah is the Jewish marriage contract, signed by me and my partner and our two witnesses. They will sign in English and in Hebrew, and one’s Hebrew name generally consists of one’s first name, one’s gender, and then one’s father’s name. We will go out of our way to ask our witnesses to sign also using their mother’s names to identify themselves. But should I really have to ask?

8. Stepping on the glass.
For logistical reasons, we could not come up with an egalitarian version of this ritual. My partner will be stepping on the glass. That’s a piece of patriarchy for you.

9. The dads toasting.
Our mothers will be offering toasts at the rehearsal dinner, and our fathers will be offering toasts at the wedding reception. I fully respect their decisions, but I am allowed to find it noteworthy, right?

10. Partner dancing.
My partner and I have been taking dance lessons in the hopes that we will do more than just hug for our first dance. While I have been finding the dynamics of power and consent in partner dance quite interesting, I am clearly the follow and he is clearly the lead. I guess this relates to #8, in that I am not a huge fan of taking on something myself just because it is traditional for him to do it. But I still find myself feeling feminized in a way I don’t really enjoy.

I hope this post doesn’t get me into trouble.

My favorite parts of wedding planning

2011-06-06T21:34:00.001-04:00

3. Creating our song list

It was challenging. Actually, quite challenging. There was probably more yelling than necessary, and some tears of frustration might have just about surfaced. But let’s face it, my partner and I love music, and we totally love dancing. We wrote the first draft of our song list within a week of getting engaged and then, a year later, when we actually needed it for practical purposes, could not find it. No problem; we started over. I think that creating the songlist was quite emblematic of a lot of the wedding planning process because it required an extremely delicate mix of considering my tastes, my partner’s tastes, what will please our parents, what will rouse our guests, and what will be most in line with our values (which in this case, include dancing, and lots of it). I think I am also still quite nervous to see how it will play out since, now made, this list is literally in the hands of our DJ.

2. Making the seating chart

Seriously, the seating chart was one thing I have been most excited about since the beginning of the process. I just couldn’t do it until now because I didn’t know exactly who was coming and who was not coming. I love making the seating chart because I love all the people who are coming to the wedding. I am having the wedding in the first place because I want these people to come celebrate with us. Making the seating chart is the one task in which I get to bask ahead of time in the glorious presence of all these friends and relatives. Each person matters, each person needs their seat. Furthermore, I can see the networks that we have supporting us, the webs of people that become so important to my decisions about who will sit where and with whom. It appears a pretty easy task of counting to ten (as in, ten seats at a table), but as I complete this task I am filled with joy at the physical promise that all of these people will be in the same room together, dancing with me.

1. (Re)writing our ceremony

Tonight we met with our friend the rabbinical student who will be officiating our wedding ceremony. Designing the wedding ceremony has been by far my favorite part of the entire wedding planning process. My partner and I are very verbal people—words mean a lot to us. Jewish tradition and liturgy also has meaning for us, but in a very complex way. In planning the ceremony we have carefully and critically considered each gesture, each blessing, each process. We are taking into account Judaism, feminism, humanism, our families’ tastes and our personal styles. It feels like us, like the core of what all this fuss is about. (Re)writing the ceremony is the one part of the wedding planning process that draws on our strengths as writers and as people actively engaged in reimagining spiritual and symbolic practices.

Navigating Family Dynamics

2011-06-05T12:32:00.000-04:00

When my partner and I first got engaged, I went to my hometown public library and checked out three books on Jewish weddings. I read only one of them, and had to return it before I got the chance to write down and follow-up with any of the ideas it gave me. One particular piece of wisdom in this book, a suggestion that seemed forced and unnecessary at the time, I now regret ignoring. This wisdom was found in the section of the book addressing family dynamics.

One of the most difficult and inaccurate myths about weddings (in my humble opinion) is the idea that “this is your day.” A lot of well-meaning, earnest, and excited people have explained to me some variation on the idea that the wedding is all about me and my partner and that we should get what we want out of the day. They have said this to me maybe to encourage me to voice my desires, or maybe to comfort me that all the hard work and stress will be worthwhile because in the end I will have something that is completely mine, or maybe just because they had heard it said before and figured it might be a nice thing to say.

I rarely had a good response when people said that to me in the past. But now I say to all of them: That’s not true. The day is not just about me, or just about my partner and me, or just about our relationship. It’s about who we are, where we’ve come from, and the people who have been our role models, our guides, our sources of encouragement and support, and, in no small ways, our lifelines. It is about us; it is about our parents; it is about family.

And by “family” I mean everything so often meant by “family”: love; mess; drama; complex family histories; collaboration and conflict across political, religious, and aesthetic divides; yelling; crying; and still a whole lot of unconditional love.

The book I read on Jewish weddings recognized that parents and families are an important part of the process. The piece of advice that the book offered (that I foolishly ignored) is this: Sit down with your parents early on in the wedding planning process for a “visioning” conversation. The couple could sit down with all their parents at once if possible, or different parents at different times. Start by inviting everyone to share some feelings about the wedding planning process. Then have people share what they are most looking forward to—what elements of the wedding are most important to them. From there, a conversation about details can develop. What specific parts of a wedding does each person really want, or really not want, or really want to do a particular way? Everything shared during this conversation can be adjusted, reconsidered, and changed; but everything must be heard. I can see now, from my vantage point at the near-end of this process, how powerfully such a conversation could open up the lines of communication and create a collaboration of mutual respect and care.

Although we did not sit down with our parents for the purpose of such a crafted and carefully facilitated family conversation, many of the intentions of this conversation did inform our wedding planning. We tried to respect each others’ desires, identify points of contention and ways to compromise, and understand that no one person and no one couple had to have everything go their way.

But at this point of the process, I am struggling to find a way to compensate for the lack of extreme openness and, clearly, that certain element of touchy-feely-ness that the above conversation might have precipitated. A few ideas float through my head, the most prominent one is this: What if I try to facilitate an analogous conversation on the Friday night before the wedding (two nights before our Sunday wedding)? We will be having a small family dinner, mainly parents and siblings and us. While simply sitting together for a small, intimate meal will, I hope, help us develop a family connection that we will build on throughout the weekend, the facilitator/community-leader in me wants to come prepared with some go-round questions, for example, asking everyone to share what they are most looking forward to for the wedding weekend, or one hope they have for the weekend, or one thing they have been thinking about most in the week leading up to the weekend. Any suggestions would be welcome!

“I promise we will not get in a huge fight over your wedding”

2011-06-03T18:47:00.002-04:00

I have great friends. The wedding-planning process has made me realize lots of things, including this fact.

Before getting engaged, I also knew that my friends are great. But planning this wedding has made me feel so vulnerable in so many ways, and this vulnerability has really allowed me to new explore aspects of my friendships. Maybe it’s that my fears and anxieties feel so strong and so urgent that I am voicing them more often. Maybe it’s that my communication skills are getting both strained and strengthened in many ways on a regular basis. Maybe it’s that my friends are kind, insightful, generous, loving people. (Yes, you!) Whatever it is, I have really benefited from all kinds of support from my friends during this process.

The “promise” at the title of this post is just one example of such support. As I told a friend about my anxieties regarding the “social politics” of the wedding process, she stopped the conversation and firmly committed to me that she would not fight with me through the process of wedding planning or over something occurring at the wedding itself. She just said it. She took responsibility. And it made so much sense to me. It was such a comfort. She wasn’t saying it descriptively—it was not a guess or a hope. This particular friend and I certainly conflict on occasion, so it was not unimaginable that we might fight over the next several months (it was March at the time). She was assuring me that she would actively take steps to not get into a fight with me. Of course, that does not mean I am being careless with our friendship. On the contrary, I feel a heightened commitment to enhancing the positive aspects of our friendship and enjoying the positive roles she is taking in the wedding process.

Living free from the fear that those closest to me might put our friendship on the line at any moment has been incredibly empowering. I could describe many other examples of the ways in which my friends have expressed forgiveness, understanding, and genuine support for my personal decisions even when they disagree, even if they disagree avidly. All in all what it comes down to is this: I can throw myself into wedding planning (and, in thirty days, the wedding itself) with the freedom to embrace vulnerability, explore anxiety, respect fear, and feel empowered that whatever goes right or wrong, those who love me will continue to love me, and I will continue to have their support.

And they, I can assure you, will continue to have mine.

Focus on the Marriage, not the Wedding

2011-06-02T22:17:00.000-04:00

I had a moment this afternoon that justified my decision to spend one month writing about weddings on a blog that is dedicated to explorations of sex education. I was at a meeting of people who work as sexuality educators in various capacities around the state, reviewing Sex Ed curricula. The leader of the group, who has spent decades working as a sexuality educator and advocate, was talking about the need for education that is inclusive of students who come from a variety of backgrounds, including, in this case, conservative Christian backgrounds with abstinence-until-marriage values. As advocates of comprehensive sexuality education for all students, we need to learn to reach those students also, she explained, and in a way that respects and builds on the strengths of their cultural backgrounds. Then she commented about how even individuals who do pursue abstinence until marriage have the right to learn how to have a healthy romantic and sexual relationship during marriage.

Then she brought up weddings. With all the focus on weddings these days, she asked, who is focusing on the marriage? The young couple is caught up in a storm of wedding planning, and then after the wedding, are they prepared for the marriage? Are those people who helped them plan the wedding and enjoyed the colors and flowers still around to help them navigate the challenges of partnership and the pursuit of shared life?

I started nodding vigorously as this woman and another colleague sitting next to me both elaborated on this point. Eventually she noticed my nodding, and I felt the need to explain, “I am getting married in 31 days.” And I was relieved that my disclosure was not the conversation-stopper it sometimes can be. She picked right up on the theme—

“Have you and your partner thought about what life will be like after marriage, and how getting married will have an impact on your life?”

Have we? Will it? How am I supposed to know if we are prepared for marriage, and what that would even mean?

To be fair, we have had many conversations about life after the wedding, the meaning of marriage, and the specific and serious nature of the commitment we are making to each other. But this woman, herself married for possibly longer that I have been alive, was talking about something I can only now imagine.

I consider myself pretty well-versed in the language of relationships, but the more life experience I get, the more I realized how many vital topics are so often left out of high school sex ed.

Marriage. So much more than just a wedding.

My June Journey: 30 Days of Blogging, Working and Wedding Planning

2011-06-01T19:03:00.000-04:00

June has 30 days, and I have decided to write a short blog post for all 30 of them—or at least to write one post for every day during which I have Internet access. Why? These are the 30 days leading up to my wedding. The wedding ceremony will be on July 3, so July 1 marks the day the families start arriving and conjoining and, in addition, the day I go to the mikveh, where I will immerse myself in water to mark the transition.

Throughout the past months, when June was mentioned in a conversation, I would think to myself (or remark out loud) that I have little imagination for what June 2011 will be like, feel like, entail. Excitement? Insanity? Overwhelm? Calm? I’m curious. Slightly nervous, but mostly really curious. I also feel that June might go by so quickly, with so much jumping from one thing to the next, that as the next months come and go, I might not remember what June felt like. And I want to remember—partly because I am grossly enthralled by this phenomenon of bridedom and wedding prep, and partly because I want to pursue a way to feel centered during this time. I hope that introducing this daily opportunity to write will give me a structure in which to reflect, to be with my emotions and to contextualize them.

I want to add that during the 30 days of June, I will not only be blogging and wedding planning, but also working as a research assistant and serving as the Health Education intern at a local public school district. I will likely be feeling a lot, and a lot of different feelings, throughout this month.

This month on my blog I will be trying lots of different things. For one, I have never before tried to blog daily. I imagine that blogging every day will mean that the content of my posts are very different. I am entering this process in order to record my thoughts and feelings in the moment, which is clearly a much more personal endeavor than my previous posts about my job, volunteer work, and opinions on current events. I hope that you, as a reader, will find some of these posts interesting and, above all, that you will comment. The words of my friends, families, colleagues, and allies have been a source of motivation, inspiration, and hope for me throughout my life and especially during the wedding-planning process, so I expect June to be no different. I look forward to hearing from you.

And with that, let these 30 days begin.

My first Giant Academic Conference: The Society for Research on Child Development

2011-04-03T18:51:00.001-04:00

This post is my attempt to summarize some of my recent thoughts on directions for research with the potential to transform the way we design and implement sex education. I just got back from spending three days in Montreal with lots and lots of developmental scientists. At the conference, I found many sessions that could help me think about—and connect with others who are thinking about—adolescent sexual health and its role in normative, positive development.

Among variables that help us measure adolescent sexual development, age at first sex gets a lot of attention. One aspect of this discussion is whether or not “onset” of sexual activity in middle adolescence can be healthy as opposed to inherently risky. The average age of first sex in the United States is 17, so that means many teens have had sex before age 17, too. Discussing this question in one session gave rise to a magnificent group insight: What if we look at the content of adolescents’ sexual experiences, the meaning they make of sex and the thoughts and feelings they have before and after sex, instead of judging them for engaging in a behavior that can have such a myriad of situation-dependent positive, negative, and neutral consequences?

So the next question is, as researchers, how do we do that? Here are some ideas I had while in Montreal:

1. We need to start asking about the nature of consent in adolescent sexual experiences. I saw many interesting studies that gathered detailed information from college students about their sexual activity and other factors such as body image and sexual satisfaction, for example. However, I did not see any studies that asked college students whether of not the sex they had was consensual—whether they had wanted it, or whether they felt pressured. I want to know.

2. We need to study sexual activity as if it takes place between two people, as if two people are doing it together. I saw some great research on sexual behavior, and some great research on romantic relationships, but not a whole lot of attention paid to the fact that much sexual behavior takes place in the context of a romantic (or sexual) relationship. Not necessarily a committed, long-term relationship, but some kind of interpersonal dynamic. And that dynamic—the emotional and social content of the interaction between those individuals—is an important part of the immediate context that can directly influence the healthfulness and hurtfulness of sexual activity.

3. We need to study the effects of gender roles and gender socialization on adolescents’ sexual identities and behaviors in more and more complex and nuanced ways. I went to sessions on the sexualization of girls, and I went to sessions on masculinity, and I went to sessions on racial socialization. All the sessions address intertwining themes, but most of the research presented missed some very important points: mainly, what the other researchers were discovering. Extensive collaboration can allow us to study the effects of the systems of power and privilege that structure today’s society. We will need to reach outside of the field of sexuality and sexual health in order to return to these issues with a new perspective and a transformed vision for change.

What else do you think sexual health researchers need to consider? What questions would you like to pose regarding the developmental course of adolescent sexuality?

Wedding-planning While Feminist

2011-03-29T20:02:00.001-04:00

Chloe’s blog post on Feministing last July put into perspective some of my recent thoughts regarding weddings and wedding-planning—and even marriage itself. It's good to know that so many other self-identified feminists chose marriage and pursued wedding planning, and it's good to hear them write about the ups and downs of it. In this post, I will mostly share passages of what moved me from Chloe’s piece and from the comments section. Perhaps in the weeks and months to come I will write more posts on this topic…

Here’s the conflict: As a young feminist, I learned about the history of the heterosexist institution of marriage, about the patriarchal systems that rests on this institution. Chloe writes:

And try as I might, I can’t help thinking of marriage as something that traps women, something that, despite my best efforts, will take away some of my freedoms. Perhaps it’s my personal fear of morphing into a woman I don’t want to be, a woman who doesn’t have the time or energy to prioritize the things that matter most to her, but like some fellow young feminists, I worry about how hypothetical marriage might change me.

Chloe is describing her experience at her cousin’s wedding. She knows her cousin is a feminist who, like Chloe, understands the feminist critiques of marriage and wedding rituals. With that social and self-awareness, what devout feminist would decide to get married? Well, Chloe’s cousin did:

Here they were on a warm July evening, under the chuppah, getting married all the same. Here they were, making this choice together, bringing two families together not for the traditional purposes of sharing wealth and power, but to add new members to each family – a daughter-in-law whom the best man called his “new big sister” and a son-in-law who had already lived for a year under his in-laws’ roof, just like a son.

Marriage can be about something else, something besides a father “giving away” a daughter and a man “gaining ownership” over a woman. Marriage is, when coordinated in a certain way and orchestrated by certain cares and values, about intentional family. Brianna comments:

Marriage needs to be opened up . . . marriage is a way of telling the world, this is my family. This man, or woman, or people, they are my family, even though I’m not their biological relation nor are we connected by adoption . . . and I have only their best interests at heart. And you, my family, should respect that and treat him as your kin too.

Here is the dream I had since my partner and I first started discussing the possibility of a wedding:

One of the nice things about being a feminist is taking shitty institutions that have traditionally given women a raw deal and making them progressive, personalized, and fun.

However, one bride takes on this opportunity to reinvent, and make the wedding personalized in her own feminist way, by not caring “what others think”:

As the “fiance,” I’ve come to discover that, while this role is circumscribed by icky stereotypes, this actually makes me feel more free. The fact that women in these roles are damned if you do, damned if you don’t anyway means that you can do anything you want . . . because we are trying our darndest not to care what others think, it’s much easier.

Part of my challenge in planning my own wedding is that I do care what others think. I profoundly care what my partner thinks, and I care what my partner’s parents think, and I care what my parents think. I even care about what my friends think. I especially care about what my brother thinks. I want people to enjoy our wedding, and also to feel comfortable. At the same time, I want us to be able to express ourselves. But our wedding will not be an expression of only our own values. Since we want our wedding to be about family, our families (and friends-who-are-family) are critical parts of the process of planning and creating this celebration. So it’s not just mine, or mine-and-my partner’s. In an ironic twist, the very value that Chloe identifies as redeeming the wedding as a process to be reclaimed by feminists—family—also means that our wedding will be a little less explicitly “feminist” in favor of incorporating our family in key ways. I know more than anything that it will be a wedding of feminists—but what would qualify it as a “feminist wedding”?

I am a Feminist (Finally!)

2011-03-08T20:41:00.001-05:00

I write this piece in honor of International Women’s Day and Feminist Coming Out Day.

I am a feminist, but I didn’t always call myself one.

I didn’t call myself a feminist in kindergarten when I told the boy down the street that we should have a playdate, even though he thought I wouldn’t like anything he liked since I was a girl. I said, I have dinasours and we could play with those.

I didn’t call myself a feminist in third grade when the boys organized a soccer game during recess, and I said I wanted to play. They were confused, but I had been playing soccer for years, and I insisted.

I didn’t call myself a feminist in seventh grade when some of my friends started pinching their bellies and saying they felt fat. I thought they were weird (and gorgeous).

I didn’t call myself a feminist in tenth grade when the boys on the track team teased me about another boy and without missing a beat I told them to stop it, seriously, not cool and not okay.

I didn’t even call myself a feminist in eleventh grade when I learned to teach workshops about how sexist jokes and reinforcing gender stereotypes lead to sexual harassment and violence against women. Because I thought to myself well, the gender binary is the problem. Separating women and men into different categories is inherently detrimental, and we should just destroy the binary and discard the categories. The exact wording of the label “feminist” didn’t seem to allow for that.

I didn’t call myself a feminist until college. I didn’t call myself a feminist until I was an undergraduate at Columbia University and campus organizing against sexual violence was based at a women’s center at Barnard College (an all women’s college): The Columbia/ Barnard Rape Crisis/ Anti-Violence Support Center. I was, I admit, upset that the work I wanted to do was in such a place because I thought, since high school, that the binary was the problem and that this structure would reinforce it. But my training as a peer educator at Columbia/ Barnard challenged me to grapple with the tensions inherent to feminist activism: yes, the gender binary is a problem and yes, we need to advocate for the rights of women—both, and. And, females, in our society face different socialization pressures, different emotional education, different kinds of sexualization than males face. And, females are more likely to be sexually abused or assaulted than males are. And, males are more likely to perpetrate sexual abuse or assault than females are, because we live in a patriarchal society and are immersed in rape culture and an epidemic of physical, sexual, social, emotional, and economic violence against women and girls.

And, I am a feminist.

I am a feminist because I listened to stories, and I read books, and I spoke with mentors and friends. And I grappled with the truth: we cannot truly get rid of the gender binary without also working to get rid of sexism. We cannot truly achieve gender liberation, sexual freedom, or economic prosperity until we tackle the patriarchy head-on and transform rape culture into a culture of personal agency, mutual consent, and universal human rights. Yes, I believe all humans are real humans, and I believe we need to protect the fundamental human rights of all humans. That’s why I’m a feminist. Finally.

Boston Teens Speak up for Sex Ed

2011-02-15T21:36:00.001-05:00

This afternoon, Boston City Council's Committee on Women and Healthy Communities held a public hearing on a proposal to bring sexual health education and condom availability to Boston Public High Schools. Committee Chair Ayanna Pressley presided with eloquence and insight over the hearing this afternoon.

While I am happy to express the depth and breadth of my support for sexuality education and condom availability in the Boston public schools in future posts, for this post I will focus on what I experienced as the most powerful part of this afternoon's proceedings: the testimony from the teenagers themselves.

The Boston teens who spoke today totally stole the show, and rightly so. The teen activists from the Hyde Square Task Force have been leading this work all year. “Sexuality is a part of our lives,” said one teen, insisting that young people want to make responsible decisions but need the tools that will help them on the path. The teens advocated not just for condom availability but also for access to broadly comprehensive sex education. The teens named issues such as health, relationships, identity, power, and control.

Two teenagers from the Asian Task Force Against Domestic Violence also spoke. One said that sex education has the potential to help each student learn how to become a better person and a better partner. The other said that her last relationship had been unhealthy, but she did not know it until she had the opportunity to learn about healthy relationships through her involvement in this task force. Her story illustrates the importance of making this education available to all teens.

A representative from the Boston Student Advisory Council said that without sexuality education, students feel confused, and they feel they are not receiving the support they need from their school. She wants teenagers to learn about both the emotional and physical risks of sexual activity.

Two teens spoke for Massachusetts Asian and Pacific Islanders for Health (MAP for Health). The first teen scrolled through his Blackberry, reading aloud that students need an environment in which they can ask questions without judgment. When he finished, he reached across to pass the Blackberry to his fellow speaker. Lovely laughter flowed through the room. I felt it was a very sweet and humbling moment… The next teen was a bit flustered, but soon he started speaking and spoke eloquently. He emphasized that teachers need appropriate training in order to feel comfortable addressing issues of sexuality in the classroom. Therefore, he argued, Boston should invest in getting more teachers trained and certified to teach sexuality education. Both teens also made a plea for sexuality education that is fully inclusive of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth.

Many adults who work in various capacities to address the health and wellbeing of Boston youth also spoke with poise and insight, as did the Chair herself. But tonight, I am prioritizing the voices of the teens themselves, the people whose lives and whose friends’ lives can be changed for the better through the passage of this bill. Let’s listen to the voices of the teenagers, who organize their peers, educate themselves and others, and have the courage to speak at City Hall and ask that their right to education be fulfilled. These youth really want to be educated and equipped and responsible and healthy—we, the adults in power, now need to give them what they want.

Better, Bolder, Hotter

2011-02-02T14:13:00.002-05:00

First: watch this video.

Lyrics here.

Rebecca Drysdale made this video for Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, and I hereby dub this video my favorite thing on the Internet. I challenge you to find something online that I will love more than this video–seriously, go for it.

I love so many things about this video.

It’s hot and fun and funny.
Having fun has a very important role to play in the process of enjoying and promoting sex positivity. After all, sex is about pleasure and ecstasy and just plain feeling that. Watching this video makes me feel good. Pleasure is an important theme throughout the video—what the youth find pleasurable, what adults find pleasurable. In addition, the video itself provides an opportunity for us (the viewers) to enjoy the pleasures of the entertainment media—comedy, music, and dance.

It makes me want to throw a dance party.
I have been searching for sex positive hip-hop and pop music for many years now. This song promotes positive messages about queerness, community, and sexual empowerment. What other song would you rather dance you? (Read: another challenge for you to post sex positive links in the comment section.)

It is an active, multidimensional demonstration of how better it can get.
She did not just tell us that it gets better–she proved it by making this video. We can see that she is a smart, talented, edgy, hilarious young artist. She also shows the personal, professional, and sexual confidence necessary to sing loud and proud a plethora of explicit sexual slang and anti-gay slurs effectively used to communicate a clear positive message. Furthermore, she has a community. You heard her at the end–there were over 50 people involved in making the video! They embrace her artistic talents and demonstrate their support of her sexual identity. If that’s not better, I don’t know what is.

Special shout outs to Rebecca Drysdale, The It Gets Better Project, and The Trevor Project for their ongoing support of LBGTQ youth. Thank you!

Educated, Empowered and Resilient

2011-01-27T09:29:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was the first day of classes! I am taking a seminar in resilience, which opened with ten minutes of free writing about what we think the concept of resilience entails. I love free writing as an educational technique, so I was thrilled. I also found it quite useful to take the time to frame my interest in resilience in terms of my mission of promoting positive adolescent sexual development:

Resilience is the process of getting through difficulty with continued strength and positive development. I think of resilience as a dynamic aspect of person and context that helps to foster positive development even through negative occurrences such as violence, trauma, illness, oppression, or other normal and abnormal challenges.

I believe resilience to be an important concept in the study of adolescent sexual development because adolescents must demonstrate resilient functioning in order to resist negative stereotypes and achieve personal agency within our sexist and sex negative culture. What characteristics of individual adolescents and of the contexts in which they live will contribute to their resilience and thus to their positive sexual development? How does resilience manifest in girls, boys, and transgendered youth? What kind of resilience do girls need in order to access positive feelings about their bodies and their sexuality?

We can ask questions such as the ones above in order to seek different approaches to promoting resilience within the realm of sexual development, and we can ask questions from a different angle. We might find that sex positive educators and activists are already engaged in promoting adolescent resilience in a variety of life contexts. How can sex education and, in particular, sex positive education, contribute to adolescent resilience overall? How can the knowledge, skills, and attitudes taught in a sex positive classroom or youth group help youth demonstrate resilience in a variety of situations in the realm of sexuality as well as in other aspects of their lives?

These two approaches to forming questions about the relationship between adolescent resilience and adolescent sexual development reflect the double meaning I intend in the title of this blog, “Sex Ed Transforms.” Through the reading, thinking and writing that I do in the process of blogging and in my other work on sex ed, I hope to transform the approaches we take to sex ed and our conceptions of what sex ed can entail. In addition, I believe that through reading, thinking, writing, and educating others and ourselves about issues of sexuality and sex education, we can transform our communities, our world, and ourselves. I am looking forward to discovering how the study of resilience can play an important role in both of these processes.

What is Rape Culture? An exploration of terms.

2011-01-03T17:27:00.001-05:00

After I posted in November about rape culture on college campuses, a curious reader asked me a seriously of strikingly simple and stunningly intelligent questions: “Are men in college inherently complicit in rape culture? Are college men complicit in rape culture simply because they want to sleep with college women? Does rape culture overshadow every joke college men make about sex?”

First, what is rape culture? This blog post is really long, but it's one of the most popular depictions of what this concept, "rape culture," means. For an act to be complicit in and to promote rape culture, it does not need to include an act of rape, necessarily.

Rape culture does not necessarily overshadow every joke college men make about sex, but it likely overshadows most of them. Not every college party is necessarily complicit in rape culture, but it's likely that most of them are. Not all college men are by definition complicit in rape culture, but if they do not want to be complicit in rape culture then they must actively educate themselves and pursue justice. And the same goes for women — for all of us.

Rape culture is tied into many other systems of power and privilege in our society. Most obviously, it is wrapped up in sexism (the power of men over women) and heterosexism (systemic structures of heterosexuality and the assumptions about what it should look like when men and women get together, i.e., he asks her out and not the other way around).

Like other systems of oppression, words and actions that are complicit in rape culture are the norm. They are invisible, unnoticed, because they are dominant. Yes, extreme examples get called out-- but the less extreme examples seem normal. Furthermore, the less extreme examples are so similar to most other things we experience in our lives that it is so difficult to call them out as wrong. We see them as just parts of life. By identifying rape culture within the dominant culture of America, we gain the power to name these aspects of the “norm” as hurtful and harmful.

Rape culture can be promoted in multiple layers and in multiple ways. For example, to advertise a college party, one could design a poster to make it clear that all people attending the party will be encouraged to exercise sexual agency. However, what music will be played at that party? Rape culture is rampant in rap music and other popular party tunes. So, there are layers.

In order to throw a party that is not complicity in rape culture, the thrower of said party is going to need to work at it, to be obvious about it, because the assumption, our norm, is rape culture. I'm thinking of a birthday party I attended last year in which a number of things were made explicit, such as, the aspect of the theme you chose for your outfit did not have to be based on your gender. In addition, giving and getting consent was made explicit during the party games. However, the music thing was/is still an issue...

So it's not an "in or out" kind of thing—is something part of rape culture or is it not... Here’s a parallel: We can be anti-racist—we can work against racism in our daily lives and in our society—but we can't be non-racist, we can't claim to be colorblind because that is nonsensical given the prejudices of the society in which we live.

The 2010 Teen Pregnancy Institute

2010-11-18T23:13:00.003-05:00

This week I had the honor of attending the 2010 Teen Pregnancy Institute: Expecting Success For Youth And Young Families, hosted by the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy. I spent the day learning with other educators, counselors, researchers and advocates invested in improving the sexual health and well-being of teenagers in our state.

When we came together in one space, I really did start to feel like there are a whole lot of us – people who work with teenagers and care about them and have the courage to talk to them about sex. No, not just the courage, it's more than that. The ganas. The instinct. The drive.

I wish I could take each one of the attendees out to dinner and hear their stories.

My day started in Consuela's workshop on the importance of giving teenagers access to words, concepts, and images with which to imagine, assess, and ask for healthy relationships. She challenged us to discuss how healthy relationships look similar and different for teenagers than they do for adults. What are the components of a good date? What does a healthy first month of dating look like?

When I learned to play tennis at summer camp, the counselor assured us that she would tell us when she saw us swinging our racket correctly, so we could learn what the correct swing felt like.

Have you ever told a teenager that you thought something was healthy and positive about their dating relationship?

In my second session, I learned about specific ways to teach sexuality through a Social Emotional Learning (SEL) framework from Liz of Planned Parenthood. When her coworker Mindy took over to introduce the parent engagement component of their curriculum, Get Real, I was captivated by the overlap between our fears as sexuality educators and the fears that parents have when their children enter our classes. The tools that Get Real provides for parents are really just conversation starters. A simple question like, "Are there any kids at your school you don't like?" appears not to be about sexuality in all, but it can clear the way for exploring relevant emotions and communicating core values.

In the afternoon, Kelly from the Cambridge Health Alliance launched a conversation about what a sex-positive national culture might look like, using slides from this Slate article. What would it take for American teens to start hormonal contraception before ever having sex? What would it take for American teens to carry a condom with them on a regular basis? And, how can we get from here to a place where American teens have an open conversation with their parents about what they want to do sexually and who they want to do it with before they actually start having sex.

Can such a world exist?

It can in the Netherlands. (Watch the Slate slideshow. Really.)

To end the day, everyone gathered together to watch The Gloucester 18, a story about teen parents who made national news. I have so much to learn about the lives of pregnant and parenting teens. See this film, then help push back on the stereotypes.

Thank you so much to the Massachusetts Alliance On Teen Pregnancy for putting together this incredible day of learning and community-building. Thank you to each of the presenters for sharing your passions, and to everyone I met or reconnected with for showing up and stepping up.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere Safe to Party

2010-11-02T21:05:00.001-04:00

Dear Eve,

I know what you mean. I know, and it breaks my heart. I know because I once studied, slept and partied on a college campus, and I know because I have read about other college campuses. I know that college can be a time of extreme empowerment and extreme disempowerment.

I know because this morning I got an email from my university with news that a sexual assault taking place in a fraternity house was reported this weekend.

The Golf Pros/ Tennis Hos party theme is clearly sexist and objectifying of women. However, when the fraternity advertises a party by saying, “Everyone makes mistakes, but not all mistakes are bad,” that is evidence of rape culture. That is part of a culture in which unwanted sex is actively expected of girls and then dismissed as a “mistake” and promoted as “good.”

I know that evidence of rape culture is ubiquitous on college campuses.

What I don’t know is how, why, and what can we do about it?

I apologize for my silence since you posted on my blog one month ago. Your post upset me and moved me from the moment I read it, and I have thought about you and your words regularly since then. i am sorry that I have been silent. We cannot be silent.

How did you feel when you saw the advertisement for that party? What do you think went through the minds of girls who had friends in that fraternity, who were looking forward to that party, who talked for hours with their friends about what tennis ho outfits they could wear, but who noticed their friends made no comments about whether or not mistakes would be made that night, and what makes a mistake good or bad, and how to choose for yourself what mistakes to make.

It’s hard to be a woman on a college campus these days. It’s hard to find sexual agency and to feel safe. I don’t feel we are safe when I see those posters. I don’t feel safe, and I don’t feel that any woman who attends that party is safe. At the same time, that doesn’t mean that woman should not attend those parties. Because we should dance and drink with the best of them, and make great friends and great memories. But we should be able to go to parties and still have our bodies and decisions respected…

we should, but that is not yet the case for most women at most parties.

Eve- what can I do for you and your friends? What can the health services staff and the women's center staff and other people on campus who want to help you feel safe and help you access empowerment--what can they do for you? What can I do for the girls at fraternity parties at my own university, to help them?

Furthermore, what can we say to the frat boys who made those posters and hosted that party?

Thank you, Eve, for sharing. I encourage you to share more.

Yours,

Mimi

Making Mistakes

2010-09-22T09:24:00.001-04:00

I made a mistake today. I left my reading glasses behind at the gym and had to go back to get them. I’ll probably make a mistake tomorrow too, although I don’t know yet what it will be. In fact, I’m going to make tons of mistakes this year, and actually I find that thought pretty frightening, given that it’s my first year of graduate school and my first year sharing a home with my partner. Those are some huge responsibilities, and I shouldn’t be going around making so many mistakes.

Given the inevitability of mistake-making, the meaningful question is not whether I will make mistakes, but rather, which mistakes will I make? Although mistakes are, by nature, accidental, I can still engage in a practice of intentional mistake management, choosing to increase my risk for making some mistakes while decreasing my risk for others.

In my mere two weeks as a graduate student, I’ve already made mistakes—for example, I responded to a question in class with the wrong answer. But I’m ok with the risk of making that kind of mistake again because I’m in this program for the purpose of learning. Others mistakes, however, I don’t want to repeat, like when I wore casual clothes to visit colleagues at another university. I felt awkward and out of place. Next time I’ll err on the side of dressing up.

Intentional mistake management could be a powerful concept for sexual health, as it offers a approach with more potential to promote sex-positive values in combination with risk reduction practices.

Since we all make so many mistakes, we’re going to make mistakes in our sex lives as well. A person might kiss someone and later decide just to be friends. Another person might invite a date to stay overnight and in the morning yearn for solitude.

As an educator, I would ask people to consider which mistakes they are not willing to risk and which mistakes they could willingly leave themselves vulnerable to making. Once people decide they are unwilling to mistakenly contract HIV, they can commit to using caution. Once people decide they unwilling to mistakenly violate someone else’s boundaries, they can make a habit of asking for consent.

Most mistakes are tolerable. Some are not. To what extent do you think we can commit to preventing intolerable mistakes, in sex and in life? How do we discern which mistakes we can tolerate and which we cannot? Furthermore, how can sexuality education support individuals in making that determination for themselves?

I'm studying adolescent sexuality!

2010-09-14T21:19:00.001-04:00

About a year and a half ago, I began pursuit of a new stage of my career. As I spoke with other sexuality educators and activists, I became acutely aware of the need for research on adolescent sexuality that can inform effective sexuality education programs. I decided to apply to graduate school so that I could do this research.

I am honored to say that I just began a Ph.D. program in Child Development at Tufts University. Throughout my five years as a student at Tufts, I will be working as a research assistant at the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development, directed by Dr. Richard Lerner.

Dr. Lerner's work appeals to me because of his strength-based approach to the study of adolescence, known as positive youth development (PYD). As the wording suggests, PYD is to the concept of adolescence what sex-positivity is to sexuality. What is “adolescent negativity,” you might ask? Dr. Lerner cites the stereotyping of adolescence as a period of “storm and stress,” one crisis followed by another, in which all that parents can do is make sure their kids aren’t on drugs or dropping out of school. But that’s not the whole story, nor is it the most healthy and helpful perspective. In fact, adolescents have all sorts of strengths and tons of potential.

Having a positive view on the potential of adolescents to be happy, healthy and productive people is a prerequisite to believing in the benefits of educating adolescents in a sex-positive way.

I plan to use the positive youth development approach for the study of adolescent sexual development, focusing on how school-based curricula and programs can proactively support adolescents in developing sexual agency, sexual ethics, and the social, emotional, and cognitive skills relevant to making healthy decisions and engaging in fulfilling relationships.

I face many challenges in pursuing this research, not the least of which is managing the sex-negativity that impedes even preliminary attempts to gather data from adolescents about their sexual beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. But I’m going to figure it out, and it will be worth it!

Agency, Objectivity, and a Vision of Sexual Justice: Part Two, on Hookups

2010-08-26T17:52:00.002-04:00

How do we define risky or inappropriate behavior? I think that sometimes we cast these categories too broadly. To explore this question, I will return to the issue of hooking up that I previously addressed through my comments on the work of Shannon Boodram and Nancy Bauer.

In responding to the chapter in Boodram’s book about “Hookups that Fell Down,” I expressed my feeling that many of the experiences described in this chapter include evidence that suggests they were sexual assaults, not simply bad hookups. Although I could defend this statement further using the examples in the book, I've actually chosen not to explicate these stories on my blog at this point because it is not my desire to place labels on someone else's experience.

More specifically, I'd like to refer to the disagreement as an example of what I see as the need to be more specific about the boundary of the categories that we're using to discuss sexuality. The title of the chapter blurs the line between hookups and assaults, including many assaults under the category of a bad hookup. I think this is dangerous because it fails to recognize the role of human agency in our sexuality. Having a sexual experience that “falls down,” or that one later regrets, necessitates having made a choice initially to engage in sexual activity. On the other hand, when a person is pushed, pressured, tricked, or otherwise made to engage in un-consensual sexual activity, that is sexual assault.

In Bauer’s work, I find the opposite tension. She critiqued all hookups as objectifying and violent—no hookup, it seems, could then be entered out of one’s own agency. I fear that clumping all hookups together as inherently unhealthy and inevitably unhappy experiences makes it so much harder to differentiate between hookups and sexual assaults. Furthermore, if we state ahead of time that all hookups are objectifying, then we are laying the groundwork for victim-blaming when someone does in fact experience sexual violence during the course of pursuing a hookup.

Unhealthy, unhappy and nonconsensual after all too often come hand-in-hand. Furthermore, we justify blaming the victim by lowering expectations below the line of respectable, consensual treatment.

Assault, objectification and manipulation come in all shapes and sizes. What we label every hookups as negative, and when we dismiss nonconsensual hookups as normative, we blur our vision and sacrifice our ability to identify violence, on the one hand, and strive for consensual pleasure, on the other.

Maybe no two people on earth have ever successfully had a healthy, positive, safe hookup together that both of them still, to this day, remember with a joyful smile. Maybe such a hookup has never happened. I think it has happened and does happen, but even if it has not, we need to believe it to be possible. We need to believe in this high standard because without this high standard, we blind ourselves. If we set this high standard, we broaden the spectrum on which we can understand hookups and we increase the number of ways in which we can describe hookups, acknowledging them to have either been amazing, pleasing, fun, sweet, mediocre, a bummer, a regret, inappropriate, not consensual, traumatizing, violent . . .

I want a way to talk about different hookup experiences not just in terms of the stereotypes we've used so far, but in terms of a vast range of real experiences and a fabulous image of safe, consensual joy. I’m frustrated by what feels to me like a lack of differentiation and a turning away from the challenge of enthusiastic consent.

Body Positivity: What Does it Really Mean?

2010-07-09T14:00:00.002-04:00

On my way to work yesterday, I was thinking about the meaning of sex-positivity.

To be sex-positive means to have an active sexual ethic that counters the dominant sex-negative, patriarchal, rape culture. In contrast, sex-positivity involves values such as knowledge, consent, agency, pleasure, and queerness.

As I thought about this conception of sex-positivity, I asked myself what, specifically, are the parallel values of body-positivity. What values do we want to promote in the place of body-negative, thin-obsessed, food-obsessed, fat phobia?

I realized that during my Body Positive Challenge (see past blog posts with this tag), I was doing something every day that felt like a positive step in caring for and enjoying my body. I knew I needed to do something active rather than just have a thought or feeling about it. However, now I’m thinking about it, and I’m looking for more of a theory, a conceptual goal for the process.

What are body-positive values? Can you name some? What knowledge, skills and attitudes to we need in order to effectively lead body-positive lives?

For years I proceeded with the goal of avoiding body-negativity by avoiding the topic of bodies. I clearly reversed that approach when I started the Body Positive Challenge! But now that I’ve entered the conversation, often I still don’t know quite what to say.

In sex-positivity I have found not only values, but a whole language that allows me to discuss the pleasures, pains and challenges of sex and sexuality. I’m yearning for an analogous—and overlapping, definitely—set of words and values to use to talk about both our own and others’ bodies: how we feel about them, how we think about them, and how we treat them.

I’m eager to hear your thoughts and suggestions, and I look forward to sharing more with you as I ponder this key realm of sexuality.

Agency, Objectivity, and a Vision of Sexual Justice: Part One

2010-07-01T23:32:00.002-04:00

Let’s “sketch a vision of a just world seductive enough to compete with the allures of the present one.”

These are the words with which Nancy Bauer ended her recent New York Times piece, “Lady Power.”

I agree; this is our call: To promote a sex positive culture, a place in which everyone's integrity and agency and sexuality are validated and celebrated in consensual, pleasurable and diverse ways. This vision of justice sure has seduced me! Has it got you yet?

I found many gems in Bauer’s piece, and I also disagreed with some aspects. She discusses Lady Gaga, college hookups, and Simone de Beauvoir -- all fascinating, if not controversial, topics. Some highlights:

• Lady Gaga uses her position as a sexualized female pop star to critique feminine sexuality and celebrity. Bauer asks, where is the line between self empowerment and self objectification?

•Bauer uses the same question to analyze an infamous college-campus phenomenon: For women, is hooking up an act of wielding power or a naïve giving-in to self objectification? Numerous bloggers have written extensively on this topic. I certainly have opinions of my own -- and I'd love to hear yours, too.

• I do take issue with some ways in which Bauer critiques hooking up. First of all, she contrasts Lady Gaga with “real young women” who “feel torn” after a hookup. Is Lady Gaga not real? Not torn? If I'm not torn, am I not real? How do I get to be real? I’m concerned that this tone erases the complexity of the story. Some college women hook up and do not express feeling torn. Where are their voices?

• The philosophy that Bauer brings in towards the end of her piece sheds light on the impact of gender socialization. We experience tension between ourselves as subjects and ourselves as objects. To cheaply resolve this tension, men get to be subjects and women objects, particularly when it comes to sex. However, Beauvoir “thought that truly successful erotic encounters positively demand that we be ‘in-itself-for-itself,’ with one another, mutually recognizing ourselves and our partners as both subjects and objects.” So, “successful” sex requires that we surpass gender stereotypes.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I'm all for promoting sex in which everyone involved can claim both subjectivity and objectivity. But where does that leave hooking up? Can a one night hookup be mutually positive and affirming? Can an objectifying hookup also be empowering? I need room for individual agency in my vision of sexual justice. But I also need for objectification to be recognized and named. What do you think? What do you need?

I’m eager for your responses to Bauer’s words and mine, and I will write more myself on this topic soon.

Sex Ed for Young Adults, Take Two: It’s Time for Outreach!

2010-06-24T21:46:00.001-04:00

A summary of Sex Ed, Take One:
The Sex Ed class for young adults that I was teaching ended in May. I loved and learned from each one of our 14 sessions, and I’m so grateful for the opportunity to facilitate these sessions and for the time and energy of each one of the participants. We achieved a lot: 14 evenings together reveling in the Our Whole Lives curriculum; 4 community members trained in facilitating both the Adult and Young Adult versions of this curriculum; and 1 community-wide Sex Ed Shabbat, including prayer services themed on the four Our Whole Lives values and four break-out sessions on various sex ed topics. To wrap up our semester, we joined Keshet in a celebration of Boston Queer Pride. Special shout-outs go to our community leaders at the Moishe/ Kavod House for supporting and participating in this project, to the Unitarian Universalist Association and the United Church of Christ for their fabulous sex ed curricula and trainings, and to the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel (BYFI) grant program for a grant that provided the funds for our work.

An introduction to Sex Ed, Take Two:
Literally the day after our closing session for the class, I started writing a second grant to fund the next stage of our project. And I’m happy to announce that we got the grant! The BYFI Alumni Venture Fund has provided us with a grant to do local outreach around issues of human sexuality. As we continue to provide sex education and community-building programming at the Moishe/ Kavod House, we will also reach out to leaders at local synagogues, university Hillels, and other Jewish community organizations. We will engage them in conversation about the needs of their own communities and the interest in their in experiencing and supporting comprehensive sex education. We will develop materials to serve as the foundation for building these relationships, particularly in the form of workshops we can offer in these other communities. The materials will cover topics such as consent, relationships and communication, gender identity, sexual orientation, family, sexual violence, body image, sexual health, and advocacy. We will explore these topics both on their own terms and as Jews, in conversation with our own Jewish experiences and with Jewish texts.

How you can get involved in this next stage:
We need leaders, and we need doers! Whether you were a participant in the first sex ed class or not, I encourage you to find a way to get involved with our Outreach project. Since this rendition of Sex Ed will combine community education with organizing and outreach, we will need many people to bring a wide variety of skills to the table. Do you want to be involved? What might you be interested in doing? Please be in touch with me to let me know if you’re interested in:
• Joining us over dinner (ie, meetings) to deepen our vision of this work and start planning
• Connecting us with people you know in other local Jewish communities
• Contacting and meeting with leaders in other local Jewish communities
• Finding an analyzing Jewish sources, commentary, and other writings on sexuality
• Helping us develop various workshops that can meet the different needs of our partner communities, including college students, adults and parents
• Researching and producing fact sheets with up-to-date information about local and national sexuality education policies and other policies related to sexual health and justice
• Attending an Our Whole Lives facilitation training (one weekend)
• Bringing any of your favorite skills to the table! Think: cooking, making posters, event planning, writing articles, event turnout, you name it...

I’m really thrilled and excited about moving on to this next stage alongside three other trained facilitators, talented community organizers, and passionate sex education participants. I welcome and encourage any and all feedback, questions or other thoughts and feelings that you may have as you read this news.

My Personal Goals for Summer 2010

2010-06-17T23:12:00.002-04:00

At my new job, I’ve been doing a lot of lesson planning about how to guide adolescents through the process of setting and achieving personal goals. When I write activities, I always like to try them myself. So, please enjoy this initial brainstorm of my summer goals:

• Write more (and post it online; hence this post)

• Demonstrate engagement and success at work

• Achieve and maintain physical health in body-positive ways

• Plan a wedding (the wedding of myself and my partner, to be exact)

• Review the statistics that I learned in college

• Launch a Sex Ed Team at the center where I’ve been teaching

• Strengthen my relationships with my partner, friends and family

All right! That’s a nice list. I’m pretty sure I have a to-do list somewhere, but that’s quite different from a set of overarching goals. Remember that this list is just a brainstorm, and I haven’t prioritized or expanded upon any of these goals. But I’m glad to share them.

I’ll elaborate on the first goal right now. I want to write more. I haven’t posted on this blog in month! I apologize profusely. At the same time, I want to validate that not every time of life is a time for writing. Some times are times for doing and speaking and listening and sleeping. The last few months of this spring, I was reading a lot and feeling a lot and thinking a lot, but I wasn’t pulling it together in writing. Over the course of this summer, I hope to express some of what I’ve been thinking about. But what do you want to hear? This blog is, in a large part, of course, for myself—but I’m also at the point at which I encounter about 5 topics each week about which I would love to write, and clearly they’re not all getting on here.

Do you want to hear my responses to other blog posts about sex ed and related issues? Do you want me to comment on the news? Do you want my reflections on my personal processes? More thoughts about education and how to teach this stuff to teenagers? More about politics, or about personal lives? I’d love some input and guidance.

In addition, I’d love to do some writing about the personal goals I listed above. Are there any of those that you’d like to hear more about? Do you have any suggestions or feedback for me as I explore these goals? Is there anything that I should be working on at this time that I blatantly missed? It’s just a brainstorm, so please forgive me if I did!

Well, I’m glad I started writing again, and I look forward to writing my second summer post next week.

Going on a Second Inter-Date

2010-03-22T10:31:00.000-04:00

This is the first time I've gotten a comment filled with such bigotry on my blog. I'm quite upset, and I'm very sorry for my readers who saw the offensive comment before I deleted it.

Interfaith dating does not kill people. In fact, dating, is about people who like and respect each other choosing to celebrate that like and respect. Seems pretty life-affirming to me.

I am pro-love. I think that when people interact with each other in intimate, passionate ways -- especially when they approach the process with kindness and thought -- great things can happen.

Interfaith dating does not necessarily decrease the number of Jews involved in Jewish communities. Condoning the shunning of interfaith couples, on the other hand, greatly decreases those couple’s chances of finding fulfillment within Jewish life.

Why be alienating when we can be welcoming? Why decrease each other's chances of finding home and happiness when we can increase those chances? What about traditions of hospitality, welcoming the stranger, and embracing human variation?

A special thank-you to Tabitha and samanthajess for sharing your stories in the comments section of my last post. I hope to hear more of you choose to share your stories, as well.

I want to highlight the particularly apt metaphor that samanthajess shares at the end of her post: “just say no” education does not work. Interfaith dating is a commonly known phenomenon, and it happens for many reasons. Given that, how can we welcome these couples into our faith communities in a way that promotes embracing and celebrating – yes, actively, positively celebrating—their relationships and partnerships?

Interfaith Dating: Taboo or Not Taboo?

2010-03-19T12:24:00.000-04:00

I often reflect on all the reasons I'm really lucky to have the parents that I have. These reasons include the values that my parents have communicated to me around dating. Specifically, I've thought of my parents recently as I grapple with messages I receive about interfaith dating.

My parents were very clear about what they expected of the people my brother and I chose to date: these people should be warm, loving, intelligent, and respectful... nothing in the requirements referred their being of the same religion. And although I mostly dated people of my own faith, my brother and I both did date people of other faiths, and without comment from our parents on that particular issue.

Even during periods when I identified very strongly with my faith, I felt open to dating anyone. For me, it was and is a question of with whom I could best connect and share of myself.

I also believe that others should make decisions about dating based on their own feelings and values. But I’ve noticed that not all of my peers feel the same. Some have various strong opinions about their own faith-based dating practices. Others, to my surprise and sadness, have expressed judgment of our friends’ interfaith dating practices. I want to ask how this plays out in your experience -- as young adults, do we judge each other for inter-dating? Is there pressure to date only people of our own faith? Why? How does that feel for you, and how do you think it feels for others?

Let's Call It What It Is

2010-03-15T19:23:00.001-04:00

I'm in the middle of reading LAID by Shannon T. Boodram -- fabulous project, by the way, in which teenage and young adult contributors relate stories of their specific sexual encounters. The stories are divided into chapters based on theme, and they each start with an introduction and end with FAQs and a self survey. It's a great read -- and designed to work pretty well as a sex ed text!

I want to respond to the first chapter: Hookups That Fell Down. What do you think it would mean for hookup to fall down? I thought maybe it meant that hookups are hard to negotiate and often end in confusion, hurt, and conflict.

Actually, the so-called hookups described in each story were full of confusion and hurt from the start. The thoughts and actions described in each tale demonstrate an apparent lack of consent. I didn't really want to... I said let's slow down... I figured I might as well go along with it... followed up by lots of bad feelings and other negative results.

In my line of work, we don't just call that a hookup. That is potentially rape and sexual assault.

However, I don't want to label other people's experiences. It wouldn't help the writers of these stories to feel pressured to identify as rape survivors. But if the point of the book is to educate others, which it is, then the author has a responsibility to educate accurately.

When someone tries to hookup with you without your explicit and enthusiastic consent, that's not okay.

A post for another day: in order to keep hookups from falling down this badly, we need to teach and promote better communication skills, clearly.

Transitioning to Middle School

2010-03-13T14:32:00.000-05:00

Puberty. Menstruation. Breasts. Sweat. Acne. Lack of coordination. Incessant hunger. Expensive sneakers. Pop music. Text messages. Swearing. Fist fighting. Exhausted teachers. School buses. Fear. Boredom. Failing grades.

I have a student who did really well in fifth grade and by half way through sixth, is now failing in both English class and math class. I have another student who falls on the floor, whines, and yells on a daily basis. I have two other students who want to go home early every time they have menstrual cramps. I have three other students who want to open the window even when it's cold outside because they don't know what to make of how much they've recently begun to sweat around their armpits.

And as I write this, I'm sitting across from a student who started out as one of my best but hasn't spoken to me all afternoon and refuses to even look at the unsolved math problems on the desk.

My job is to try to ease the transition to middle school, but I'm just one person amidst this whole scene of stress. Last year, when my job was to teach about puberty and friendships and communication, I think I helped to ease some of the confusion. However, I still was not the guidance counselor, and I still was not the English teacher. Now, I'm an afterschool team leader, technically concerned with the whole child and technically only needing to focus on a dozen children -- yet even now I know they need much more attention than I can give them.

They need more attention, more explanations, more validations, and much more tutoring. (Come tutor my students!)

Back to the point: I've been thinking a lot recently about school restructuring. What would middle school look like if we took what we know about puberty, adolescent emotional development, and peer dynamics and we structured a school with insight into these processes at its center, placing priority on meeting these social-emotional needs? What would middle school look like?

Blogging for International Women's Day

2010-03-08T10:23:00.000-05:00

Judith Butler wrote about the imperative to recognize all bodies as human. Today, for International Women's Day and as a new installment of my body positive series, I write about the need to recognize all bodies as deserving.

What does "equal rights for all" mean to you? To me, having equal rights means deserving. To have a right to something means to deserve it without having to prove yourself or earn it or live up to some set standard.

Among other things, all people deserve pleasure. During the body positive challenge, I have discovered how important it is to find healthy ways to act on my body's desire for pleasure. But I'm not always able to perceive myself as deserving of such pleasure, and neither are many people I know.

Often we use pleasure as a reward for children. As a teacher, I know it's useful, and I'm guilty of this trap myself. Students earn candy, extra snacks, a party, or a chance to listen to music. We teach children that pleasure is a reward for hard work and success.

The media continues this lesson when it comes to gender or sexual dynamics. Men deserve pleasure if they’re rich, if they're assertive, if they're convincing. Women, well, women rarely deserve pleasure, but at the very least she must be thin and buxom if she wants a chance.

Equal rights for all means we all deserve pleasure, no matter how much money, weight, or homework we may have. The pursuit of equal rights for all means that we must empower each other to pursue pleasure. We must validate desire as important and informative. We must want and seek more, together.

To conclude, I return to my students -- to adolescents. Instead of teaching them that pleasure is a reward doled out by others, how about teaching that pleasure is something they deserve to ask for?

Learning and teaching sexuality education has helped me connect to myself as a person among all people deserving of equal rights. Furthermore, I see sexuality education as a potential site for teaching adolescents to exercise agency -- to identify how they feel and what they want, and to communicate their desires effectively. Such education includes learning to ask explicitly for consent and understanding that yes means yes and is just as valid a response as no, which means no.

In order to counter the ways in which the psychology of sexism and patriarchy prevent us from feeling deserving and accessing or equal rights, we need to turn to conversation and education amongst ourselves, with our neighbors, and especially with teenagers. Let’s empower the next generation to get theirs.

The Gender Jungle Gym

2010-02-28T15:36:00.001-05:00

What is gender? Without using gender categories like boy, girl, woman or man, the term is hard to define. Here's my attempt:

Gender is a structure of social systems that teach, elicit and reward different behaviors from different people depending on a person's sex classification, age, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

Historically, the systems of gender have been structured according to two boxes, one bound as boy/man and the other as girl/woman.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

The idea of gender as a box, a role, a stereotype is familiar to many of us. We often feel nudged, shove, or pressured into these boxes, resulting in alienation from ourselves and from each other.

And there's potential for something better.

Sometimes I like to think of myself as on a gender jungle gym. I use my upper body strength to pull myself out of the box, and I swing my body around in order to perch on top, pause, and view the horizon. From here, I can see all of you pull yourselves up and swing yourselves around, from sports to skirts to tears to engineering. Sometimes graceful, sometimes awkward, you are consistently courageous. You inspire me, and I want to know your stories. I want to know how you feel.

I invite you and encourage you to post in the comments section and tell some of your stories, some of your feelings about the gender boxes and the gender spectrums and the gender jungle gyms that structure our lives.

Reflections on Why I Teach Adult Sex Ed

2010-02-23T08:02:00.000-05:00

I teach a sex education class for young adults in our 20s and 30s. Today, I want to tell you about the class and explain my belief that learning about sex is an act of healing the world.

The topic for our class is sexuality, broadly conceived. My goal is to facilitate the development of a safe space in which we can analyze our influences, reflect on our experiences and observations, and gain access to important knowledge and skills. Moreover, the basic process of engaging in open and honest conversations about these topics contains in itself extremely powerful moments and opportunities.

Honestly, it's not just that I think it's powerful or important, it's more than that: I crave these conversations. I need them for myself, to help me make sense of my life, my relationships and my community. I need to discuss these issues with others. In college, I volunteered as an HIV test counselor and a peer educator at the Rape Crisis/Antiviolence Support Center, so I was surrounded by warm and enthusiastic conversation about sex and sexuality pretty consistently.

When I graduated, I missed that. I really felt the need for more of these conversations. I wanted people to talk to me about changes, fears and feelings. I wanted to talk about my sexuality and gender since college, about how it felt for some of us to be in couples and some of us not, about the implications of growing older and the expectations on us to be women and men. I wanted to talk about sex.

Then, I got trained to teach Our Whole Lives to middle and high school students as part of my professional development. When I found out that Our Whole Lives also had a curriculum for young adults, I started thinking about teaching my peers.

I spoke with a community leader. She too had felt the need for these conversations in our community, and we made it happen.

So, that's what my sex ed class is and that's why I want it. But why is sex ed an act of healing the world?

1. Because healing the world starts with caring for your self. It may seem to take more time in the short term, but each of us individually will get more done and do it with more integrity in the long term if we're caring for ourselves along the way, physically, emotionally and socially.

2. Because healing the world means engaging in healing relationships. Conversations help us practice understanding each other and communicating with each other in stronger and deeper ways. Intimate relationships, friendships and professional relationships can all benefit from this process.

3. Because our community needs healing. A lot of hurt and violence is perpetuated and covered up because of social norms and structures that sanction it or render it invisible. Talking about these issues can help our community fulfill its potential to be a powerful place of healing, love and celebration.

To demonstrate my claims about our community, I want to play hand up hand down. I'm going to say a statement, all you need to do is raise your hand if this statement applies to you. These statements all include the phrase “our community” – define “our community” as you will, whether you want to think specifically about the people who are already involved in our programs, or you want to think about progressive young adults in Boston, for example.

Let's start playing.

Raise your hand if you know someone in our community who:
• has been in an unhealthy dating relationship
• is coping with an eating disorder or a history of disordered eating patterns
• wonders whether and how to come out
• is a survivor of sexual assault
• grapples with anxiety or depression
• has been hurt by homophobia or heterosexism
• has had a sexually transmitted infection
• has had an unhealthy breakup
• has said yes without meaning it
• has been hurt by sexism or gender discrimination

We have histories; we have pain; we have needs. At the same time, our community has amazing resources.

Raise your hand if you know someone in our community who:
• has been in a healthy, communicative relationship
• can say no when they don't want to do something
• is pro-queer
• is a great listener
• expresses their feelings openly and honestly
• identifies strongly as a feminist
• has many healthy ways of coping with pain
• speaks out against negative media messages
• has a positive attitude towards sex and sexuality
• loves their body

I want us to share our many strengths and many blessings with each other. We need to come together to listen, to validate, and to challenge each other. Through these processes, we can take care of ourselves, build community and heal the world.

A note on self-care: during the first part of the hands up exercise, I mention painful and dramatic experiences that many of us have had. If you feel upset by that activity, please talk to someone you trust. I'm here to support you and help you find the care you need.

Week Seven: And On to the Next Stage

2010-02-19T15:03:00.001-05:00

Sunday: had a conversation checking-in about physical boundaries
Monday: chose to stay in and continue to help my injury heal
Tuesday: ate a home-cooked lunch; felt it energize me at work
Wednesday: took a risk trying a new restaurant
Thursday: rolled out a yoga mat to lie on the floor in the office
Friday: lay down to sleep on the train without shame
Saturday: greeted and complemented new people without judging their appearance

I have now filled one poster on my wall with seven weeks of daily body positive acts, and I hereby pronounce the first stage of the body positive challenge to be complete!

Doing something different every day provided me with lots of ideas and allowed me to explore many facets of a body positive lifestyle. What I need next is not to do a different thing every day no but rather to do the same things every day, to learn a routine through which to honor my body. I need to feel more centered in my own life and in my own physical space.

Perhaps a future post will describe how these all fit together, but for now let me just list the gems of the seven-week experiment that was stage one, gems which I now hope to integrate into my daily life:

• get plenty of sleep
• enjoy moderate exercise
• meditate
• drink tea in the morning
• focus on fruits and vegetables
• wear the clothes I most enjoy
• dance

Since I still have many new body positive acts I would like to try, I will write about one new act per week, as well as how I'm doing with maintaining the seven daily processes above.

This part of the body positive challenge is about balance. I will focus on these behaviors to go to every day to remind myself of this commitment I am making to health and a positive, loving attitude towards my body.

What am I missing, and what would you add? What do you try to integrate on a daily or weekly basis to keep yourself feeling physically centered and confident? What suggestions do you have for me as I try to maintain rhythm and balance?

Study Shows Intelligent Conversation with Caring Adults Helps Teenagers Make Healthy Decisions

2010-02-04T22:14:00.000-05:00

Several people have asked me what I think of the study that found one abstinence-only program to be effective in delaying sex for middle school students. See coverage from the Washington Post, the Salt Lake Tribune, and the New York Times. Here’s my response:

This study looked at the effectiveness of just one program. It's not a comprehensive study of what abstinence-only has come to mean in this country, meaning that we must not generalize the findings to abstinence-only education overall.

The program studied did not follow the definition of abstinence-only under the guidelines for federal funding.:

o They taught students to be abstinent until ready to have sex -- not abstinence until marriage. They did not condemn sex outside of marriage.

o They discussed with students the pros and cons of deciding to have sex. This conversation can be useful and powerful -- and could not have occurred openly and honestly in federally-funded abstinence-only programs.

o The program was not sex negative and moralistic. Furthermore, they used only medically accurate information about condoms and contraception. Often, abstinence-only programs inaccurately present failure rates in order to discourage condom usage and scare students into feeling there is no such thing as safer sex.

All of these aspects of the program make it particularly hard to believe it in any way representative of what abstinence-only implies in practice.

What did the control programs teach? The coverage reveals very little about the programs used for comparison. So-called comprehensive sex education can be fantastic — and can also be taught poorly and ineffectively, especially if taught for a study designed to disprove it. From news coverage, it seemed as if the control programs focused on teaching health information, with perhaps very little opportunities for discussion and emotional processing. If so, they do not represent the myriad of comprehensive sex education programs focused on supporting the development of social and emotional skills that can help teenagers stay healthy and safe.

Let's take a step back and look at our goals in teaching sex education. The coverage cited growing rates of unwanted pregnancy and STIs among teenagers. Decreasing these rates is a public health priority. However, the results of this study showed that the program did not have any effect on frequency and consistency of condom use. To quote directly from the abstract of the study itself: “Abstinence-only interventiondid not affect condom use.” What the coverage calls evidence of success is evidence that the program delayed the onset of sexual activity for a certain percentage of participants. But when these teenagers to start to have sex, they need to know how to use and learn about condoms and contraception. If they don't, they're at risk for the very same unwanted pregnancies and STIs that we need to prevent.

I don't want to discount the specific program studied per se; I do want to temper the myth that we now have scientific evidence in favor of abstinence-only education. We do not. What we might have, however, if we pursue this research further using responsible methods, is a demonstration of the power of training caring adults to facilitate intelligent conversations

Week Six: Strength and Weakness

2010-02-01T21:42:00.000-05:00

Sunday: took a walk to enjoy the outdoors
Monday: attended a Pilates class
Tuesday: chose to write in my journal instead of a trip to the gym
Wednesday: purchased new exercise sneakers
Thursday: wore comfortable, casual clothes to work
Friday: cared for my foot injury
Saturday: received a lower back massage from a friend

I want to get stronger. I want to build strength in my core muscles because I believe it will lessen my back pain and because I believe it is important to be strong. I've read several feminist books that encourage women to build up their physical strength as an expression of personal power and ability. Valuing our capacity for strength is a feminist move.

Valuing our capacity for weakness is a feminist move as well. Although excited by my return to yoga and Pilates classes, I had quite a busy week last week in which my eagerness to attend extra classes dissipated in my concern over getting things done and the raw fact that I felt I needed to put off exercise until the weekend.

Then, I woke up Friday morning as my right foot pounded in pain. I could barely walk, let alone exercise, and I had to cope with my body's propensity for pain and inflammation as I figured out how to be body positive in this unexpected period of weakness.

Pause for a story about a person I dated briefly my sophomore year of college. This person said that he liked me for my strength: my independence, my confidence, my ability to take care of myself.

But I didn't feel so strong all the time. I especially didn't feel strong that spring as Take Back the Night approached, an event on my college campus which includes a speak out by survivors of sexual violence. I had been to the event the year before, and I anticipated a flood of so-called weak feelings including fear and vulnerability. I tried to picture what it would mean to let this guy who liked me for my strength see me in such weakness.

In looking at this tension between strength and weakness, I learned to see strength more as a skill set than as a state of being. The feelings of fear and vulnerability didn't disprove my confidence and ability to care for myself. In fact, my ability to express those negative emotions and participate actively in a caring community came from that very place of strength that my dating partner so admired.

To bring it back to the topic at hand: physical strength would be great, but taking on the challenge of building physical strength will be most holistically effective and healthy if I simultaneously prioritize that other kind of strength, strength that comes from a body positive attitude, strength that comes from confidence and self-awareness, strength that comes from a balanced perspective.

I'm not there yet. I still have my weakness, and I'm trying to face that weakness in talking about it and writing about it. Holding that weakness, carrying it, accepting it is the process of training my emotional muscles. I want to get stronger.

Teenagers Need Attention -- from You, Even

2010-01-29T11:51:00.000-05:00

My sixth-grade students need more attention. And I don't just mean they need a better attention span or that they need to pay more attention in general, which are both true. I mean that my students need more adults in their lives who can listen to them, help them, and relate to them.

Here's the good news: you can help. You can be one of those adults. I'm looking for volunteers to tutor my students for maybe just one hour per week. Mostly they need help in English, but also in math. I started looking for volunteer tutors because their homework and classwork are really hard for them and many of my students might not pass without extra help. However, I believe that tutoring also holds value beyond the academic.

When we get a chance to sit down with teenagers and pre-teens one-on- one, we get to teach them valuable skills about building relationships. A simple conversation about how their day went or how they're feeling about class allows them to practice expressing themselves. By sharing examples of our own highs and lows, we can model tenacity and healthy coping.

I have seen my students work with tutors a couple times before, and it really makes their day. They're proud of their accomplishments, they're a little more calm and a little more comfortable in their own skin. And they're even more ready to get to work and persevere on their own.

Try it! And spread the word if you know others who might be interested in volunteering. E-mail me at Mimi (dot) Arbeit (at) Gmail (dot) com for more information.

Week Five: Getting Beyond my Body

2010-01-25T23:21:00.001-05:00

Sunday: finished reading Locker Room Diaries by Leslie Goodman
Monday: granted myself permission to relax (watched Glee)
Tuesday: voted in favor of my reproductive health
Wednesday: actually got things done on my to-do list
Thursday: attended a yoga class
Friday: meditated
Saturday: went to my parents’ house for family dinner

Sometimes, it's just not about the body. Sometimes, other things are just more important. In the past, I've taken those more important things as opportunities to use and abuse my body, such as not exercising, sleeping, or eating while as I completed a major project or other task.

But this week I tried to take a different approach. What if those more important things helped me mediate my various physical needs and find balance in my body? I took a step back and thought about why I am doing this challenge in the first place.

I have clearly taken on this challenge because I want to develop stronger positive feelings about my body. Having positive feelings about my body is important not just because I like feeling good about myself but also because feeling and being healthy helps me do the things that I care about, for example, teaching, blogging, developing relationships, etc.

That's why staying in on Wednesday night to work on my to do list was a body positive act. I spent a couple hours sitting at my computer, celebrating the physical and creative energy I have and getting to spend that energy on what matters to me.

Do you ever find yourself misusing your body as you stress about other things? What helps you find perspective and balance between your body and other life tasks? What motivates you to be body positive?

Starting Points for Sorting through High School Relationships

2010-01-23T14:57:00.000-05:00

To a former health student, who asked me for advice about boyfriend troubles (by sending me a facebook message):

I wish I could sit with you in the cafeteria and talk about this like we would have been able to last year. I would like to ask you more questions and hear more of your thoughts. I still will -- but since that takes a long time when we're writing back and forth, I'm going to start by giving you some ideas to think about.

1. Trust your gut. If something doesn't feel right to you, it probably isn't. You don't think it's a good to fight with your boyfriend so much, or for him to try to make you feel bad, and you're right.
2. You deserve the best. Imagine what a healthy, supportive, enjoyable relationship would look like. That's what you deserve. Do you believe you can have that with your current boyfriend? What changes would you need to make in order to get that?
3. It's not your fault. When relationships get hard, it's important not to blame yourself for what the other person is doce of emotions, relationships, ing. He is responsible for his own behavior. When he does things that he knows you wouldn't like, he is making a personal decision, and that's his fault and not yours.

What do you think of these ideas? Have you thought about them already? How you feel as you read them?

In terms of next steps, I have three very specific suggestions:

1. Get to know your feelings. This sounds like a tricky situation that you're in, and I bet you are thinking and feeling a lot of different things right now. Writing to me is one good way to sort through your feelings. Keeping a diary is another great idea, or maybe even talking to a close friend. Your feelings are really important.
2. Talk to an adult that you trust. In person. Reaching out to me was a great first step, and you should be really proud of yourself for doing it. I will keep in touch, and I also want you to have an adult that you see in person that you can talk to. Is there a guidance counselor at school that you like, or a teacher or coach? Let me know what you think, and I can help you think of ways to approach that person and to start a conversation.
3. Talk to your boyfriend. This step is the hardest and the most important. But it's going to be much easier to talk to him if you first take the time to know how you feel, know what you want, and know that you have adults who are helping you and care about you. It will also help to have a plan about when and where you want to have this conversation and how you're going to start it.

What do you think? I don't know if you were expecting such a long response from me, but there's actually a lot more where this came from! I'd also like to keep hearing from you about what's going on with you and your boyfriend right now. Please write back to me soon! I look forward to hearing from you.

Caring about you,
Ms. Arbeit

Week Four: Talking with our Peers

2010-01-20T19:46:00.000-05:00

Sunday: started strength training
Monday: bought a sports bra
Tuesday: chose to extend my morning workout
Wednesday: took an extra-long hot shower
Thursday: taught a sex ed class in which we discussed body image
Friday: went out dancing
Saturday: lounged and pampered myself after working out

It just so happens that this week's young adult sex ed curriculum included an activity addressing body image. I was actually really nervous about asking participants to reflect on in their history of feelings about their body -- in a mixed gender setting, and only in our second session. As it happened, the participants rose to the challenge and shared quite meaningfully, given that the activity provided certain measures of anonymity.

I've been reflecting on why I thought that asking young adults to talk about their body image would be too much. I think what I've experienced at times is a certain sense of “all or nothing” in terms of how I'm expected to feel about my body. Either I'm struggling and have issues, or I'm empowered and love myself fully. But my reality includes both parts of this duality. Enjoying a healthy, positive body image is a process just as much as maintaining an active, healthy lifestyle is a process. Every day. Believing that I deserve to love my body is a part of that process, but achieving this one step doesn't mean that I've already completed the journey. And that's totally okay because I'm getting there.

My hope is that by recognizing positive body image as a process, we can help each other discuss the bumps and bonuses along the way, distancing ourselves from labels and comparison.

As part of Thursday's class, participants wrote how they hope to feel about their bodies in the future. What does a positive body image mean to you? How would it feel, what would you say, and how would you act? What are you working towards?

Week Three: Listening to Desire

2010-01-17T16:47:00.000-05:00

Sunday: finally got a full night’s sleep
Monday: bought lots of fresh fruit and vegetables
Tuesday: grazed all day; ate what I felt I needed, when I needed it
Wednesday: wrote an email describing my body image and feelings
Thursday: enjoyed my favorite meal at my favorite restaurant
Friday: packed for a weekend away without packing any makeup
Saturday: ate dinner earlier than everyone else because I was hungry

Desire. How often do we actually get to listen to our bodies, giving ourselves and what we want right when we want it? And, when it comes to food, how often do we actually believe that listening to desire is the right way to eat? I spent a lot of this week trying to attend to my bodily desires -- for rest, movement, warmth, protein, salts, vegetables, etc. and it felt good.

I teach the same methods of self-awareness in terms of sexuality: Listen to yourself, sort through your influences, identify your desires, and then ask for what you want. Having confidence in sexual desire is the basis of consensual sexual activity. Self-awareness -- the ability to pause, reflect, and be true to oneself -- is key both sexual consent and what we might think of as nutritional consent.

But in my experience, self-awareness plays a much different role with my nutritional choices than with my sexual choices. My schedule consistently gets in the way of my following my own physical desires. Either I can’t take a nap because it's time to leave for work, or I don't want to eat because I have dinner plans in an hour. The way that we commit and schedule ourselves physically complicates the process of listening to our desires.

Maybe that's why I feel better on the weekends, particularly when I haven't committed to meals at certain hours. Seems more natural to feed myself when I feel it's time. But I like being social, in fact I love it and need it and thrive from it. So how can I reconcile what my body is telling me with what my calendar is telling me?

Week Two: Vacation (The Body Positive New Year Challenge)

2010-01-05T21:19:00.001-05:00

Sunday: cooked food to freeze for lunches/ dinners in January
Monday: went to the gym first thing in the morning
Tuesday: shopped for and purchased a bathing suit
Wednesday: wore a bathing suit as I packed and cleaned
Thursday: left for vacation!

I took a break from tracking daily body positive actions over my vacation. But I did not stop exploring body positive habits and feelings! Actually, I found vacation to be a fabulous way to reconnect with myself physically.

Mostly, just feeling more relaxed and happy makes my body more easy to listen to and makes me more eager to respond accordingly. I ate when I felt hungry and didn't eat when I didn't want to. I showered twice a day and dressed nicely -- well, given the clothes that I packed. I slept, but did not track my hours; I walked, but did not track my miles. I lived in my body instead of in my head.

I could do all these things because I was on vacation. How can I bring this connection with myself back to my working life? That's always a question for me when I enter a new year or a new semester. How soon am I going to get stressed out and unhealthy again?

I think I need to drop the false division I'm making between relaxed and stressed. I didn't get stressed over vacation -- oh my. But I said to myself, “I'm on vacation, so it's okay, I'll work it out.” I felt entitled to relax and enjoy my vacation, so I focused on it.

I hope this New Year's resolution will help me bring that sense of being entitled to joy and relaxation into my everyday awareness. Through small and large daily actions, I'll tell myself that I deserve to take care of myself and enjoy being in my body here and now even as I push myself and get stressed and strive to accomplish and achieve.

Let the challenge continue!

Kid-Tested, Teacher-Approved

2010-01-04T11:02:00.000-05:00

The Boston Public Health Commission has come out with a great new innovation in sex positive music -- the Sound Relationships Nutrition Label. Playing off the idea of a food nutrition label, this one serves as a worksheet for assessing the messages that a song sends about relationships. They even had teenagers rate the current most popular 100 songs and published a top 10 list of popular songs with unhealthy and healthy messages.

I took these 10 songs and made a mix CD that I gave to my sixth-grade students as part of their end of the semester president. I hope they're listening to it and enjoying it right now -- and absorbing lots of positive messages! (I really liked the CD myself.)

I do understand that they might not be enjoying every song. But I told them that they'd have a chance in January to nominate their favorite songs for our next team mix CD.

What they don't know is that in order to nominate a song, they will have to analyze the song lyrics using the BPHC’s Sound Relationships Nutrition Label.

I'm really looking forward to engaging my students in exploring the effects of the music we listen to and dance to. I'm still working out the details of the process to make sure that my students meet the learning objectives and also feel fully engaged and excited. Additionally, you need to figure out how much I want to adjust the Sound Relationships Nutrition Label in order to make it age-appropriate for sixth-graders and the extent to which we have and have not discussed healthy relationships so far.

What characteristics do you look for in songs that make them feel healthy, positive, or simply like something that want to internalize? What criteria would you use in choosing which songs to play for children? How would you explain to children and adolescents how to analyze messages in the media and make healthy choices about media consumption?

The Body Positive New Year Challenge, Week One: Dressing Up

2009-12-23T12:26:00.000-05:00

Sunday: self-massaged my tight leg muscles using oils
Monday: told a friend about the challenge
Tuesday: went to work dressed ready to dance
Wednesday: gave my students non-food items as prizes and gifts
Thursday: cried, briefly, in the morning
Friday: read a book about healing trauma in and through the body
Saturday: wrote my blog posts about the challenge

The first few days of this challenge were quite exciting, but it definitely became more difficult to think of what to do as the week went on and my attention drifted elsewhere.

My most body positive day was Tuesday, when I went to work dressed ready to dance. I really dressed up because my students had a major presentation that evening, but I realized in the morning that I really enjoyed moving my hips in that outfit. I felt good the whole day not because I was actually dancing, but because even walking reminded me of my body is amazing ability to dance and how much I enjoy it.

How do your clothes affect how you feel about your body? How do your feelings about your body affect the choices you make about what to wear? When is dressing up a body positive action, and when does trying to dress a certain way contribute to negative feelings about our bodies?

My Body Positive New Year Challenge

2009-12-20T10:07:00.000-05:00

I was reading feministing.com and came across a post about New Year's resolutions to start dieting. The blogger pointed out that many of us also set New Year's resolutions to love our bodies for what they are and to enjoy our various curves and appetites. I took notes from the comments on that post with suggestions about how to set and keep such a resolution.

Now, I'm going to do it! Body positivity is an essential element in sex-positivity. Learning to love and listen to our bodies is intricately related to our embracing of a healthy sexuality, though different and separate in many ways. As I document my progress in this body positive challenge through a series of posts on this blog, I hope to explore that connection between body image and sexual health.

For now, here's an outline of my definition of this challenge:

• Every day, do one thing that supports a positive connection to my body.
• What I do each day must be unique, although I expect patterns to develop and similarities to be clear.
• What I do each day must be something active and/or interactive -- simply having a thought or feeling will not suffice.

My personal goals are to experience less physical pain, develop healthier habits, and have more energy. On the blog, I hope this challenge provides me with an opportunity to explore different ways we can initiate promoting body positivity and sex positivity in our individual lives and to open a discussion of the benefits and challenges of embarking on this process.

If you have any ideas about actions or steps that I can take as part of this challenge, please post a comment!

The Sex-Positive Educators' Book List

2009-11-28T20:33:00.000-05:00

As I come to the end of my application process, I'm excited to get back to the rest of my life. In addition to blogging more frequently, I definitely plan on reading a lot.

What are your suggestions for me? I'm looking for nonfiction in addition to fiction. I’d love to read books related to sex ed and human relationships -- I'm sure you’re surprised -- as well as books on other issues that you care about a lot!

In return for the recommendations that you will give me, I decided to write my own recommendation lists. Some of these references are quite obscure, some are quite well-known. Feel free to ask me for more details on any and all of them.

Mimi's top 10 reading recommendations for sex-positive educators:

1. Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality, by Jessica Fields

2. Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality, by Deborah Tolman

3. Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson

4. Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, Eds. Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti

5. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, by Mary Pipher

6. GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary, Eds. Clare Howell, Joan Nestle, and Riki Wilchins

7. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, by Daniel Goleman

8. Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, by Jessica Valenti

9. Anything by Paulo Freire

10. Anything by Jonathan Kozol

What do you think? In terms of transformative sex ed, what other books should be included on the reading list?

What’s the list of the books that you recommend for the issues that you are passionate about?

I can’t wait for your responses!

No such thing as TMI?

2009-11-23T08:21:00.000-05:00

I always have an issue when people use “TMI” to excuse their talking about their own sexual experiences. It’s not too much information– it’s exactly the information that I want to hear! That’s why I’m listening to them, as their friend/ counselor/ teacher who wants to know what their experiences are so we can learn together and think together about our real lives

Check out Thomas's post on the Yes Means Yes blog.

However: A conversation I had last night brought up another layer to this discussion. Are there contexts in which sharing more details may make the listener uncomfortable? Yes, most likely. So? ASK! Check in. Ask for consent. "Can I tell you some more about..." Or, "I'd love to share some detail about... if you want to hear it!"

I've been away so long...

2009-11-19T11:05:00.000-05:00

I have been steeped in grad school applications (and my job), and I'm really sorry I haven't posted in so long! Here are a few thoughts, really briefly:

I just read a fabulous post on Feministing.com about sexist humor. It really gets to the core of why I protest offhand comments, jokes, and yes, it specifically mentions the ever-sexist Family Guy.

I'm beginning to enjoy the New York Times Style section more and more. I highly recommend a recent article about young adults increasingly popular androgynous clothing styles, and an article from a few weeks ago about high school students dressing in clothes more often attributed to a different gender.

In terms of my own job and my own thoughts... What can we do about sexual harassment on the middle school schoolbus? How can we create systems that support safety and accountability? How can we work to teach past and potential perpetrators new behaviors? How can we help the students who have been targeted and the other students who fear being targeted? This problem is far bigger than individual incidents, and the schools and bus monitors need to treat it as such.

I'll start writing more frequently, and in more depth, in January. Thank you for your patience! Meanwhile... your responses to my brief ideas would be much loved!

Safety And Structure for Adult Sex Ed

2009-10-15T10:20:00.001-04:00

I’m currently planning to teach sex ed to young adult peers in my community. Please see previous posts for other discussions of my thoughts and feelings while planning this project.

How can I plan this class so that it suits the realities of our lives and yet challenges us to take positive risks?

I think the first step is recognizing that for many, coming to even one session involves taking a positive risk. For others, arriving may be simple, but speaking up may feel momentous. I’d like to focus on these two challenges for now: attendance and participation. I want my expectations for both to be as flexible as possible to meet the varying needs of individuals and yet to be as consistent as possible in order to promote group cohesion. I have some ideas about how to approach this, and I would love some feedback . . .

Attendance

Ideal: 10 to 20 people committed to attending each of the 14 sessions. We would get to know each other, develop the group dynamic that supports accountability and confidentiality, and their learning in each session would build on our previous work.

Reality: “Eek! Who has enough time to commit upfront to 14 sessions? What if I missed the first one – does that mean I’m excluded from the project altogether? I’m sorry, but my [work/ studies/ family/ other] takes priority, and I have to allow for that in my schedule.” –thoughts of a hypothetical community member.

Compromise: I encourage community members to attend as many sessions as possible. I also hope that newcomers will contact me before coming to a session so I can help them get somewhat caught up. Just arriving at session is great, too. What I do ask, however, is that participants come for an entire session from beginning to end – arriving late and leaving early can drastically upset momentum. Does this seem reasonable? What other approaches might we consider?

Participation

Ideal: Participants could share their thoughts, feelings and experiences without embarrassment, shyness or fear of affecting their reputation. Such sharing could lead to communal support, learning and growth.

Reality: Sharing can be very difficult and scary! In addition, all of us have biases and prejudices that can keep us from reacting in positive and supportive ways. For some, sharing with friends and community members feels easier than sharing with strangers. For others, it feels much harder.

Compromise: We’ll spend time at the beginning of each session discussing building blocks for a safe space and sharing expectations with each other. No participant will be required to share, and multiple avenues for reflection will be encouraged, including group discussion, pair-shares, private reflection, and anonymous feedback. What more can we do to work together to keep everyone feeling safe, comfortable, and able to take positive risks?

I look forward to hearing your ideas!

Dancing for Sexual Health

2009-10-02T08:35:00.000-04:00

Responding to a question about my last post, paraphrased as: What is positive, empowering dance music, and what makes it much more fun to dance to than misogynistic, degrading dance music?

Some reasons I love dancing:

• I get to move my body, and that feels fantastic.
• What matters is that my body moves, not how big or small or curvy or tall it is.
• I can’t fail; the harder I try and the more energy I put into it, the better I’m doing, by definition.
• I get to emote: As I move, aggression and frustration exit my body, and the joy and celebration expressed by my movement enter deeper into my body, and I can feel that joy and celebration.
• I get to act: I’m very much in my own body, and yet I get to perform by acting out the lyrics I hear. I am myself, yet I have this opportunity to connect with characters and feelings outside myself. I feel a part of something.

Among favorite positive-coping pastimes, dancing stands out because it does not involve verbally expressing my feelings or any direct conversation with another person. I’m not journaling, I’m not talking to friends, and I’m not blogging. I’m not expressing myself through words, which is the best way to ensure that I have direct control over what is expressed about me in that moment. Instead, I’m more fluidly a part of the moment and a member of the scene. This silent membership leaves me vulnerable. When I’m not speaking, the “scene” has much more power to define who I am and what I’m expressing, especially given my way of participating in this particular scene, as outlined above.

A sketch of my experience while dancing to music with a great beat but denigrating lyrics: I pick up the beat, and start dancing. I recognize the lyrics, and start singing along. I’m moving, and smiling, and beginning to perform fabulously. But the lyrics I’m singing aren’t fabulous. Maybe I’m singing about how great it is to watch my big butt move while I dance. Or maybe I’m singing out my desire to get some stranger into bed that night. But wait, this isn’t my body and my desire, right? I’m just inadvertently singing along. My facilitator at the MVP training made the following argument: The singers don’t know who you are, personally, and that you wouldn’t actually say such a thing. No, the singers don’t know you at all. But they do sing about you. Yes, if you’re dancing along to their song, they are signing about you. And just as I dance and sing the anger and frustration out of my body, I’m dancing and singing these negative, hurtful messages right into my body. I’m internalizing them, quite literally, whether I’d like to or not. And that’s when I start thinking about my body as a vehicle for sex and attraction instead of joy and celebration. And that’s when I start worrying about whether I’m doing it right, whether I’m impressing others in the right way, whether I’m adequately sexy but not too much so, whether I’m wearing the right clothes or shoes or earrings. And that’s when it does matter how my body is shaped in comparison with everyone else’s, because that’s what the lyrics tell me. I’m getting insecure and being objectified and as the lyrics move on and on, it sounds more and more like I’m dancing in order to show how attractive I am rather than dancing for my own joy and celebration. Is this about dancing, or is this about thinness and availability and sex?

A sketch of my experience while dancing to positive, empowering music: The music backs up the exact reasons I like dancing. The lyrics emphasize emotional expression, personal rights, and the complexity of relationships. In acting out the lyrics, I celebrate characters and feelings that resonate with who I am and what I believe in. Expressing those lyrics confirms my personal desires, and I’m thrilled to imagine that these lyrics are about me and my life. I emote. Some songs help me express feelings of upset, anger or sorrow. Other songs help me seek joy. I celebrate my beliefs, my friendships and my body as I smile at the people I’m with, dancing sometimes with them and sometimes with myself. But I’m always dancing for myself, not for an onlookers or dance partners. Other people’s gaze and opinions need not provide me with validation. I find inner validation in how great it feels to move. I feel warm, happy and successful. I feel optimistic. I feel stronger and more ready to take on life the following day. I feel more connected to myself, my body and the people I’m with in positive, emotional ways. When I wake up the next day, I look up the lyrics from my favorite songs the previous night so I can memorize them, and sing them to myself when I need an extra moment of coping during the week. And maybe while I’m signing the song to myself, I’ll close my eyes and picture myself dancing to those lyrics in order to return, for the moment, to the scene of release and joy as celebration courses throughout my body.

Don’t you wish your music were hot like this?

2009-09-21T20:14:00.000-04:00

Many teenagers love hip hop music, understandably. Dancing, especially to those great beats, helps us loosen up, express ourselves, and celebrate. But all this fun may be at quite a high price. Whether or not the content of popular hip hop music helps or hurts teenagers has been the subject of much heated debate. Granted, the content of hip hop music varies widely. Much of hip hop is decidedly positive and proactive. But the other kind of hip hop—the materialist, drug-promoting, women-degrading hip hop—permeates radio, television and the internet. While it’s hard to demonstrate a direct causal relationship between hip hop and sexual violence, this music most surely negatively affects adolescent sexual health.

This issue is an offshoot of a broader question that frequents psychological and educational debates: Does violence in the media lead to violence by adolescents? James Garbarino, in his book Lost Boys, answers yes, it does. After enumerating the increasing incidents of violence involved in children’s television and video games, he cites studies that show that children’s use of these media accounts for a significant portion of the variance in children’s violence. While exposure to violent media does not cause violence per se, it is one of many major factors influencing children to behave in violent ways. If television and video games have this measurable affect on children, music most likely can promote negative behavior as well.

The connection between music content and listener behavior can be experienced at many parties and clubs. At the Mentors in Violence Prevention training I attended over the summer, we discussed how we would respond if a friend played such denigrating and sexist popular music at a house party. Really? Many of us in the room had been in the exact same situation before and had not said a thing. Why would we complain about such a common occurrence? Why would we deny ourselves the opportunity to dance and party with our friends without causing a fuss? Over time, our initial resistance gave way to a challenging discussion about what it feels like to dance to such music. Even if we try not to attend to the words, we still hear them and feel them. The words affect the way in which we portray our bodies, our sexualities, and our relationships with each other. Like Garbarino found in his study, the lyrics may not be the single determining factor of our behavior or our thoughts, but they certainly are one significant factor out of many. Besides, it can be much more fun to dance to positive, empowering music.

I have to face the popularity and attraction of hip hop directly right now at my job. In my past position as a health education teacher, I made it part of my curriculum to discuss song lyrics openly and to push students to find music that is both positive and enjoyable and popular. But I’m in a very different position this year as one out of several leaders at an afterschool program, and a new staff member at that. As part of our daily routine, the students come to the cafeteria afterschool for a snack before they start their homework. To make the transition fun and casual, we have music playing. And we want them to like the music, so it’s hip hop. However, I’ve noticed over the first few weeks that there are only one or two songs that we play. Does the veteran leader in charge of music pick only songs she considers positive? We haven’t discussed it at all.

Music plays a role in many other aspects of our program as well, so we need more than two songs that we condone! The positive-music CDs I made in my last job are now two years old, so finding the current positive-and-popular music would mean starting the project from the beginning. I need to find a way to discuss the issue with my coworkers—while presenting myself as both discerning and fun-loving! I value joy and dance and celebration, but we cannot compromise values such as respect, peace and health.

New Job, New Roles, and Persistent Passions

2009-09-09T08:38:00.001-04:00

Dear New Students,

I'll meet you in a few days as your afterschool program leader. My job entails supporting your academic and emotional development. I hope this year that I can teach you to build healthy ways of relating -- to express your feelings, to ask for what you need and want, and to listen to others. These skills will serve you academically and socially. In particularly, though, I want you to learn these skills because they can help you achieve sexual health.

Because here's the deal: I am a sex ed teacher at my core. You are sixth-graders. Therefore, I want to teach you about puberty, reproduction, consent, and HIV prevention. I want to set up a question box and hold small group discussions. I want you to demonstrate mastery of relevant vocabulary and skills while demonstrating an open-minded and positive approach to the care of your own body and relationships. I know sexuality education is important; I know I have the ability to teach it to you.

However, my dear students, I'm not your sex ed teacher. Instead, health is part of your physical education curriculum. I'm here to care for you afterschool and to join you an other powerful and crucial learning adventures.

So what, I just forget my own priorities for a year? No! No, I cannot do that at all. I need a moment to reconfigure, to re-conceive of myself and my rules and to refocus on how I can do this job passionately and fully. Here are some of my initial thoughts about this dilemma:

You need many adults in your lives who advocate for sexual health and express sex-positive values. I've already started connecting with your school staff -- today I spoke briefly with your nurse and she mentioned other teachers I might turn to as potential allies. My job also entails reaching out to your parents and guardians, and I will present myself as a resource to them. Most of all, I myself will become an important adult in your lives. As a “mainstream” mentor-figure, perhaps I can model discussing sexual health in a manner that helps normalize such conversation. Adults should not confine intentional teaching about sexuality to one unit or one class. Students, you and I together will figure out how to weave what I can teach you and what you want to learn into both structured and spontaneous lessons throughout the year as part of the dynamic we develop together.

Hopeful, curious, and eager to engage,

Ms. Arbeit

A Role for Women in Preventing Men's Violence against Women

2009-09-01T21:29:00.000-04:00

I'm breaking from the discussion of my plans for teaching in order to reflect on a recent experience I had as a student at a training in preventing men's violence against women.

Many different aspects of the program, called Mentors in Violence Prevention, struck me as fascinating and insightful; I'm still reeling, however, from the “bystander approach” used: The facilitators address participants as witnesses to men's violence against women and trained participants to actively respond to potential scenarios.

As a female, I'm not only a bystander to men's violence against women. I am by definition a target as well. I listen to music, I watch television, and I walk down the street. Furthermore, most women have suffered more specific targeting through violent interactions with men.

As I sat in the training, part of me clung to my identity as a target and wanted to a right to hurt, to cry, and to remove myself as quickly as possible from any situation, real or hypothetical, in which I personally felt targeted. But I found no room for these reactions in the training. According to the MVP philosophy, even when I'm a target I also have the responsibility to address the violence as an active bystander.

But I want to run away!

At first I felt offended. When I'm hurt, my first responsibility is to take care of myself. Yes. And after that, what is my responsibility? Is there an “after that” — what would it mean to “fully” recover from violence?

Can taking a stand as an active bystander play a role in the process of recovery? What's the ethical responsibility of targets in preventing their perpetrators from harming others? How can we support survivors in recovery AND encourage active response in a way that both validates their experience AND empowers them?

I could continue listing question after question... Right now, I would love to hear your ideas as I sort through my own thoughts and feelings and figure out the implications for my personal and professional work.

Adult Sex Ed -- Wait, What?!?

2009-08-25T12:03:00.000-04:00

In my last post, I shared my intention to offer a sex ed class for young adults (in their 20’s and 30’s). Here, I will speak to the three most common concerns raised in response to my proposal.

1. “My long-term romantic partner is also part of this community -- how can I participate in this class without violating my partner’s and my privacy?”

As a group, we can develop a confidentiality structure that will guide us in respecting everyone's boundaries and privacy. I've seen class facilitators encourage participants to tell personal stories and to speak from experience; I've seen other facilitators prohibit participants from sharing personal information and require them to word all stories and questions in the third person (“I have a friend who...”). We can work together to find a method that suits our needs and wants. Participants may choose to speak in the first and the third person at different times depending on context and comfort level. By coming together to discuss our knowledge, thoughts, and feelings, we certainly need not get into specific details regarding our current sexual habits. I intend this class neither as a support group nor a gossip session! We will explore ourselves, our community, and our society while we respect and honor the plethora of boundaries, desires for privacy, comforts, and discomforts that we all bring to different settings.

2. “How will this class be related to social justice and social action, since our community is explicitly dedicated to both?”

This question is so important and inherently related to my motivations for offering this class. As such, my response diverts in a few different directions: By discussing these issues together in an open, progressive setting, we work towards justice for ourselves, those close to us, and our community as a whole. And as we create this space in which we can insightfully analyze the social processes that affect gender and sexuality, we can build awareness and generate new thoughts and feelings that will inform our fight for justice in our society. Such class discussion can spark ideas for and interest in a specific campaign that we can plan and implement together as a class and/or as a community. Additionally, I hope and expect that the class participants will generate even better answers to this question as we discuss and learn together.

3. “How can we have these discussions in an inclusive and safe manner?”

Yes! We must also pose and respond to this question throughout the class. Therefore once more I can only offer my initial reaction supplemented by my trust in the process: We will establish building blocks for safe space, we will check in with each other and reflect on our developing dynamic, and we will celebrate our differences. I will also combine multiple venues for participation and reflection, including but not limited to group discussion, sharing ideas in pairs, and recording private thoughts in journals or anonymous question/ comment cards. Alas, I can only describe structures -- the dynamic of the group will deepen and develop when we are together, conversing, taking risks, taking care, and holding each other accountable.

I'm so excited!

Young Adults Enjoy Sex Ed, Too

2009-08-13T22:24:00.000-04:00

While I consider myself primarily an educator of adolescents, I'm a strong believer in sexuality education throughout our life span. I'm also currently a young adult. Thus I'm very excited to say that I've decided to offer a sex ed class for interested members of my young adult community.

The UUA publishes Our Whole Lives, a progressive and insightful sexuality education curriculum. I love this curriculum. And while my professional self yearns to someday teach the high school version, I'm currently getting inspiration from the young adult program. Because educated, informed, insightful young people in their 20s and 30s also deserve lots of great sex ed.

To explain my motivations, I return again to the initial thesis of this blog: I believe in sexuality education as a site for personal and societal transformation. Change. Growth. The need for growth does not end with the end of adolescence. Indeed, I feel as a young adults that we can and do appreciate such growth in a whole new way. The conversations, revelations, and debates we can have about sexual health now are entirely different from those we had as teenagers. And yet, like when we were teenagers, we lack the context and structure in which to discuss sex in sensitive, meaningful ways. So let's make that space.

My goals for this class are multilayered. First, I hope that participants engage in a process of personal reflection and growth. Second, by sharing their reflections with each other, I hope they develop a deeper appreciation for and understanding of each other’s lived experience. Third, I want the class to contribute to the process of community building – engaging in reflection and growth on a communal level. Finally, I believe that such conversations can help us understand how our personal lives relate to our search for social justice and vice versa.

Right now, I'm working on the logistics of offering such a class and trying to gauge the levels of interest and enthusiasm among members of my community. What do you think I will need to do to make such a class enjoyable and worthwhile? Feedback wanted!

A New Campaign in Boston

2009-08-06T09:29:00.000-04:00

When multiple friends forward me the same news story, I figure I should write about it. Today's news is the latest sex ed campaign of the Boston Public Health Commission, which features a video on STIs and condoms to be played on YouTube and cable television. In addition, the campaign has its own Facebook page through which teenagers can comment and post questions.

Fantastic! I definitely want to meet the people behind this campaign. I've heard lots of talk about a growing desire to reach teenagers through technology. This campaign combines peer education, one of my favorite methods, with new ways of using the media. In particular, I'm interested to see how teenagers respond to the Facebook page, and whether they really do frequently ask cyber questions. I'm also glad that the large technological component of the campaign does not preclude in-person work -- teams will also perform street theater in Boston.

While I'm very pleased with the campaign, I'm not as pleased with the rhetoric used to explain the need for the campaign. The Boston Globe article cited teenagers’ age – “barely old enough to drive” – and their “casual attitudes about sex” as the reasons for increased STI rates. Can't we seek to support teenagers without such condescension? We must be able to explain our reasons for wanting to teach sex ed without putting down the very same people we need to empower.

One choice that did not seem to demand justification, however, was the selection of a featured video that focused on promoting condoms and STI screening and did not mention abstinence. Here's a question that I've been pondering for a while: Do sex educators in the field of public health have more political leeway than those of us in schools? No school committee writes the rules for the Boston Public Health Commission. And this funding was for preventing communicable disease, not for character education. If we can frame public school sex education in terms of these public health priorities, how would that affect the discourse around what we should and should not teach?

While sex education through cable and the Internet is exciting and chic, it cannot replace face-to-face conversation. The benefits of structure, space and relationship building will remain unique and powerful elements of school-based sex ed, in addition to and (hopefully) in conjunction with Facebook and YouTube.

My Past

2009-08-03T11:26:00.000-04:00

I have been interested in health education since I began tenth grade. I spent the next three years of high school volunteering with my school’s chapter of Mentors in Violence Prevention. As a Mentor, I taught 8th graders to think critically about gender stereotypes and take an active role in preventing gender violence. From those early lessons, I realized how health education can bring to the surface conversations about the most vital and pressing issues in students' daily lives.

In college, I volunteered as a health educator in the New York City public schools through Peer Health Exchange. I saw the transformation of ninth graders as they received basic health education. When our program started, they lacked basic information about how to care for themselves and their relationships. As they enthusiastically engaged with the lessons we taught, however, they reported change in their attitudes and their behavior. Students expressed the results of feeling empowered, whether through a vow to stop the cycle of teen pregnancy in their families or through more daily decisions to stop drinking soda.

Meanwhile, in my health education work on campus at Columbia University, I saw what happened to otherwise bright and aware people who had not received comprehensive health education as child or teenager. I worked with college students getting tested for HIV, often anxious and ashamed but unaware of the specifics of HIV transmission. In teaching incoming freshman about consent and sexual assault prevention, I encountered a plethora of young adults who could not talk about their bodies, neither with friends nor with partners. As a result, they suffered from heartbreak, violence and disease.

Health education is a basic tool to protect youth from a plethora of epidemics spanning obesity, sexual violence and HIV. But health education is also much more than that-- it is a path through which to develop healthier, happier students and learning communities. As I taught health education full-time these past two years, my students developed basic social and emotional skills that immediately began to help them manage their emotions, relate positively to each other, and engage with their schoolwork. They brought to class many current, pressing issues in their lives, whether related to conflicts with friends, changes in their bodies, or concerns about their schoolwork and stress levels. In these ways, I saw the health education is a crucial part of helping a school become a positive and productive learning community.

When a health learning community thrives, it has the power to transform much more than just itself. Through our discussions in health class, my students became inspired to take a stand on issues, express themselves, and spearhead community service projects. For these reasons and others, my experience engaging in and reflecting on health education for nine years and has inspired me to pursue this path for many, many more.

Weighing in on the Weight Debate

2009-07-23T09:35:00.000-04:00

Pediatricians discuss in New York Times this week how best to address weight with their patients. I've heard health and physical education staff debate without resolution how to communicate with students and parents about BMI measurements. Who knows how to do this effectively, supporting students’ health and well-being without spawning lifelong obsessions and insecurities? In her memoir Moose, Stephanie Klein recalls her childhood experience seeing weight management specialists and attending fat camps. She also poignantly illustrates how the cycle of weight loss and gain continued through college and adulthood to hurt her self-esteem, her relationships, and her family.

I believe that the values of transformative sex ed can inform how we address weight with children. I also believe that we have a lot of work to do before we can meet this challenge head-on. Furthermore, we will best cope with this epidemic of disordered eating if we can in turn allow our dealing with it to transform our thinking about bodies and relationships.

Teenagers must access positive feelings about their body in order to achieve a strong sense of sexual health and agency. As long as teens face an onslaught of messages criticizing their bodies and making them feel physically bad or unworthy, they will lack a basic motivation for taking care of their bodies and for choosing respect and safety over degradation in danger.

Distorted body image also grossly distorts the ways in which we relate to each other. Klein details how body hatred so painfully alienated her from her romantic partners. We need a new way of thinking about bodies that can serve as a basis for stronger, healthier, and safer relationships.

I don't have the answers on this one, but searching for answers is essential. Any ideas?

2009-07-15T17:32:00.000-04:00

The Sex Ed Bookclub Reads Twilight

2009-07-10T13:27:00.000-04:00

Alas, I never actually hosted a Sex Ed bookclub, but I would like to discuss the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. I read these novels because so many of my students absolutely love them. The story both thrilled and appalled me, and here is a little bit about why.

Brief summary: Edward, a century-old teenage vampire, falls in love with Bella, a local human high school student. The smell of her blood draws him in, and his urge to drink her blood is drastically opposed to his urge to protect her mortal life. This focus on Edward’s control over Bella's mortality, his literal ability (demonstrated many times over) to save her life or take it, drives much of the tension in the series.

Edward positions himself as Bella's protector. Now, I've heard many people complain about Bella for being so vulnerable, dependent, and ready to give in. But how can his seductive (manipulative?) words and actions be her fault? We can't blame Bella.

Bella recognizes the power imbalance in her relationship with Edward and speaks out against it. She repeatedly points out to Edward that he should not be the only one in the relationship who has power. She doesn't want a relationship based on his constantly saving her from various dangers. But although she sees this problem, she does not know what to do about it.

Bella does not know how to develop a healthy relationship between a vampire and a human. She does not have the language or the skills to articulate what kind of relationship dynamic she wants and how she can get that. She does not even know why balancing the power between them feels important to her.

What does she do? She blames herself. She thinks, “Well, if I'm the weak one, then something is clearly wrong with me, so I should change.” She starts begging Edward to make her into a vampire. (He has the power to do this — he controls her very humanity, remember?) As a vampire, she dreams, she can be as powerful as he is, and their power imbalance can be righted.

Bella blames herself, but we know better. We have to show her that it's not her fault. Even if he has more raw power than she does, even if he is stronger and wealthier and more attractive, it is his responsibility to renounce that power if he wants a healthy relationship with her. He must control himself to keep himself from controlling her, and he must make room for her agency. He needs to work to ensure that they are both equal partners, sharing decisions, communicating openly, and both giving support to the other and receiving support themselves. If Edward can not manage his power so that Bella can achieve equal partnership, then he should not be dating her.

When one partner in a dating relationship attempts to use their power to control the other partner, it's called abuse. Why in this case is it called romance? Furthermore, how does presenting such a power imbalance as the ultimate in love and romance affect the children and teenagers who cherish these books? We need to help our children understand that it's not Bella who needs to change what she's doing and how she's living, it's Edward.

We are all potential acitvists

2009-06-30T14:57:00.000-04:00

Dear students,

Remember that you are the ones with the most information about what's going on in your lives and what you need. If you need better health education, speak up and ask for it. You told me that you felt sad and angry that the school committee had cut health class. You told me that you need to learn this health information, that you liked having a space to share your feelings and that you wanted more opportunities to ask your burning questions.

You deserve a health class, but you might need to fight for it. I'm not there to help you, but I do have some suggestions:

1. Start gathering your stories. Why do you need and want health class? Find examples from your experience this past year to show how health class helps you.

2. Work together. Share ideas, and encourage each other. Use the resources you always use to connect with your peers -- the Internet, text messages, and gatherings at the mall or the park, for example.

3. Reach out to adults! They are the voters, the taxpayers, the ones with political power who are supposed to have your best interests in mind. Make sure they understand how you feel. Show them how health education gives you what they want for you. Get adults talking with each other, too.

4. Contact the press -- the local papers, in print and online, are major venues for debates about public education. Use them to make your voice heard.

5. Convince the school committee. The school committee consists of elected adults from your city. It's their decision, ultimately. Show them what you want and why you want it, and make them work for you the way they are supposed to.

To my students and to teenagers everywhere: Fight for the information, resources and support that you need in order to take great care of your health.

I believe in you.

With hope,

Ms. Arbeit

A Letter to my Students

2009-06-12T15:00:00.000-04:00

To my dear students,

I'm not coming back to teach health next year. In fact, you won't have health class next year the way you have it this year. Your city government decided they can't give the schools the money needed to keep everything like it is now. Faced with the need to make cuts, the school committee decided not to have health teachers in the schools anymore. Instead, physical education teachers will teach about health in gym class. I'm not quite sure what that will be like or what they will teach.

I really wish that you could still have health class next year. I'm worried that you won't get the health education you deserve; I'm scared that without this education you won't have the knowledge, skills and attitude that you need to take care of yourself. I'm angry at the school committee for taking away health class because I believe in the value of learning about and talking about our health. I'm frustrated that not many members of our community are fighting for your right to in-depth health education. I'm also very sad that I won't personally get to teach you next year -- I'll miss you!

How can I inspire you to continue educating yourselves about health? Who will you go to with your questions? How will you figure out the difference between the myths and truths you come across? What will you do when puberty becomes overwhelming, confusing and frightening? What will you think and feel as you come face to face with desire, pressure and risk?

I want you to understand that health isn't something that you have, it's something that you do. Living a healthful life is a constant process that you are just beginning. You will continue that process in physical education next year, and you must also continue on your own, both during and after middle school. I hope that you keep practicing all the amazing healthy behaviors you have impressed me with this year. Remember my goals for you: (1) love and respect your body; (2) express your emotions; and (3) build relationships based on open and honest communication.

If you start to feel that all this is too much or too hard, you're not alone. The process of living a healthful life does not start and end with you in isolation -- in order for us all to be truly healthy, we need to make some changes in our society. Your awareness and acceptance of your own needs, your hunger for accurate information, and your courage to ask questions will help you figure out what changes you need. Then, make yourselves heard. Make demands. In order for us all to be the healthiest and happiest people we can possibly be, we need a lot of change. We need you to make that change.

Love always,
Ms. Arbeit

I should not teach gym, so why should they teach sex ed?

2009-06-02T19:56:00.000-04:00

Sexuality education has a long history of being put into other classes, specifically science and physical education. While I strongly support integrating a discussion of sexuality, sexual development and sexual health into many areas of the curriculum, I also believe that adolescents need a specific safe and supportive class in which to learn, think, and ask questions about this sensitive topic.

Does it matter what teachers’ backgrounds are once they've taken on the task of teaching sex ed? Technically, their particular degree might not matter as much as their knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject matter. I offer my support and commendation to any teachers excited to bring discussion of sexuality into their classrooms. But I get a very different image from friends’ stories from about hesitant, awkward and grossed out teachers who just had to do the sex ed unit.

Not only the teaching style but also the curriculum changes depending on where the school puts sex ed. The aspects of the sexuality that are emphasized depend on the context in which the material is presented. While science classes might focus specifically on the reproductive system, a physical education class might stress how to take care of a growing body. Furthermore, students will expect the lessons to take on these tones and may not even think to ask questions about the social and emotional aspects of their sexual development.

How will students feel when they're told that today's gym lesson has been canceled due to the sex ed requirement? What attitude will they take toward sex ed and sexual health? What will they perceive about the value of sex ed and its importance in their lives? What will they do when they have questions or need help?

I chose this topic because I've been told to expect official notice that the school district I currently work in will not need me next year. Instead of hiring teachers specifically to teach health, they will instead require physical education teachers to cover my topic. While upset, I'm not that worried about myself and my career. But what will become of my students?

Teaching Values

2009-05-21T18:06:00.000-04:00

I’m writing to respond to CG’s comments on my last post. CG wrote that a major point of contention around sexuality education is the question of values: can we teach values in schools, or do parents have a monopoly on imparting values to young people? If we can’t teach values, which values are and are not acceptable to teach? Who gets to decide? As teachers all over attempt to manage student behavior and establish school culture, they teach values such as respect, obedience and getting work done, and very few people question these teachers’ right to do so. However, sex education is seen as different in that it can be a site for teaching students quite specific values. Indeed, I think part of the amazing power of sex education is its potential for teaching progressive, transformative values. But CG is right – the other disciplines can and should embrace this power as well.

Science classes teach values – in some senses adherence to the scientific method is itself a value, for believe in the Biblical creation story has long been pitted against belief in evolution in a struggle over science curriculum. Science teaches the values of objectivity, inquiry, and integrity. Scientists also like to categorize and theorize, and categories and theories of past scientists have the potential to become common scientific values as teachers pass them on to their students. And in so many scientific studies, one can see how the values of scientists color their interpretation of their findings.

We definitely teach values through the ways in which we explain history and social studies. Racial tensions might be deemphasized by the topic of multiculturalism. On the other hand, the same racial tensions might be explored through a critical view of slavery, segregation and immigration policies. Students can be empowered by learning about abolitionists, the civil rights movement, or feminism. And again the same topics can be used to emphasize nationalism, democracy and capitalism. Biases in the textbook and in teaching methods send value-laden messages that the students will absorb.

If it weren’t for my passion for sexuality and health, I would happily teach English for the very reason that I believe English classes serve as fabulous venues for teaching values. Character, emotions, relationships, conflicts, challenges and other aspects of life can all be explored through careful and appropriate selection of reading material. Through writing, students find value in expressing their feelings, voicing their opinions, and exploring new ideas.

Values matter, by definition. Values are the core of what we hold near and dear. What we don’t carefully select the values we want to teach, we risk teaching students values that can mislead, confuse or injure them as they develop. We must select core values with intention and care, and impart them to our students by all means possible.

Sex Ed before Text Ed

2009-05-05T17:38:00.001-04:00

The New York Times fashion section ran a very telling feature this weekend on “The Birds and the Bees Text Line,” a North Carolina public health program. As cool as all this texting might seem, teenagers would gain a lot more from living in a society full of adults they could discuss these issues with face to face.

According to the article, North Carolina public schools must teach abstinence only sex ed (although the legislature is debating an endorsement of comprehensive sex ed). Meanwhile, as teen pregnancy and STIs remain a problem, the public health officials freak out and are forced outside the schools for answers because all the programs within the schools are doomed to failure by law. I've got to say it again: The state restricts sex education in the public schools, which is arguably the best possible means of educating teenagers, and consequently the state encounters a health crisis and pours money into a much less-than-ideal means of reaching the same teenagers whom the state also spends money on actively not reaching in sex ed class. Why can't they just spend money on providing effective education the first time around -- in class?

One of the teen texters said that before texting the hotline she had asked her question to her health teacher, but was made to “feel ashamed.” What if her health teacher had been empowered to provide comprehensive information, and had been trained to discuss touchy subjects without judgment? What if her health teacher had approached sex education with the same pro-health, pro-teen attitude with which the adult texters treat their anonymous questioners?

What if the government put money into ensuring that every public high school has a staff member who encourages teenagers to ask all their questions in person? Such a staff member could use the process of sex education as a means of developing teenagers and emotional and social understanding of sexuality. Such a staff member could start conversations that allow teenagers to act on the “longing to unburden themselves.” Such a staff member could build long-lasting relationships with teenagers who need more loving adults in their lives.

The staff members of the text-education line offer important support to the teenagers of North Carolina. However, the support they offer should be available face-to-face in the public schools. Teenagers deserve adults in their schools who help them ask anything they want to without feeling shame. Teenagers deserve adults who provide them with positive feedback, accurate information and helpful referrals in person.

I do think it would be really cool to continue exploring how technology can help us promote sexual health, but we can't do this without teenagers and adults engaging conversation, in person and explicit, at times challenging and at times awkward, but always caring, truthful and attentive to the teenagers’ spoken and unspoken needs. They may ask a lot over text, but they will never ask enough in those short lines. We need to be there in person to help them understand what they cannot yet put into words.

Please comment on my blog!

2009-05-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

I'd like to take a step back and explain why I'm blogging in the first place.
* I love talking about sex ed, and I'm excited for any venue that helps me do so.
* I find it helpful to have an outlet for my own weekly opinions and reflections.
* I want to tell you what I'm thinking about! Well, I'd actually rather have a conversation with each of you face-to-face, but blogging at least seems like a good way to start a conversation.

Those are three things that I get from blogging -- but I want things from you, too.

***I want you to comment! Is this too much to ask? I've been patient for the past two months, not pushing any of you. But I'm asking all of you, publicly, right now.

Please comment on my blog. I want to share my ideas and opinions -- but more than that, I want to read your ideas and opinions. If you want to share something privately, you can e-mail me.

Your comments can describe whatever thoughts or feelings you have while reading the posts, or other ideas you have on the topic. Sorry, now I feel like I'm giving you a prompt for a writing assignment. Ah, teaching. But really, I didn't intend for this to be such a one-way thing. I think there is much more transformational potential in processes of interaction.

I'm really enjoying the process of gathering my thoughts and expressing them, but I'd love even more to involve some interaction in this process. What do you want to read about? What kinds of things don't you want to read?

Okay, there is my shameless plea.

Once a term I send out a worksheet asking my students and their families for feedback. Every day I'm paying attention to the more subtle ways in which my students react to my tone of voice, my lesson plans, and my assignments. Maybe I'm just not used to discussing sex education without constant feedback and judgment. What do you think?

Community

2009-04-28T15:01:00.001-04:00

I want my students to grow up valuing community. I want them to identify as members of a community, and I want them to experience the power of community as a site for developing love, health and activism. Understanding ourselves as in community with each other can profoundly affect the way we function in our professional, personal and sexual lives. However, before I can use the concept of community as an educational tool, I want to understand how this value manifests in my own life.

These days, I think a lot about what it means to be growing up. The gendered aspects of growing up are the first to pop out at me, but that's another blog post. Lately, I've been hearing a lot of friends talking about wanting to achieve something they call independence. What is this independence of which you speak, and what makes it so cool? I seem to remember talk of such a thing back in high school, when I wanted to start buying my own clothes and driving myself around. But these days, I will only go clothes shopping with my mom, and if I can't get a ride with friends then I just take public transit.

I enjoy these acts of dependence. The concept of dependence has been pathologized -- if I wrote here that I feel dependent on a my mom, my friends, or my dating partner, many readers might judge that as unhealthy. But I do not desire independence. I am deeply connected to the people in my life, and they affect me emotionally, physically, professionally, and financially. I'm sensitive to the ebb and flow of these relationships, and I feel powerfully my potential to receive both pain and pleasure from my interactions with these people.

Wait... I started this argument with the concept of community, and now I'm at the concept of dependence. Let's get back to community.

Just as I do not experience myself as an individual striving for independence, so too do I recognize that healthy relationships involve more than two people. All of my relationships have developed, healthy or not, in the context of a community. And just as I grow from embracing my dependence on my relationships, I believe that my relationships can grow from our mutual embracing of our dependence on community. For relationships to be healthy, the community that supports them must seek health as well . . .

Homophobic Bullying As a Sign and Symptom

2009-04-22T18:07:00.001-04:00

Judith Warner just posted a blog about the topic I brought up two weeks ago -- kids calling each other gay. The article and many of the online comments provided me with insight into multiple perspectives on this issue: addressing it either as a sign of homophobia, a symptom of patriarchy, or one of many acts of childhood bullying. In my opinion, we can understand the “that’s so gay” epidemic as a sign and symptom of all of these problems, and seek to eradicate it using a social transformation perspective.

Bullying is not and never has been separate from sexism. When children bully each other, they're reflecting society's prejudices -- they are re-creating the same systems of violence that torment the adult world. To get rid of this behavior among children we need to model healthy alternatives, teach preventive behaviors, and discuss issues as they arise.

All that my students know about bullying is that on the one hand, they shouldn't do it because they might get in trouble, even though if adults get involved they do not always effectively stop the bullying. My students also believe that “respect” and “being nice” are the opposite of bullying. Maybe respect is just not a strong enough concept to encompass the alternative and preventative behavior we all need to practice.

Calling a classmate gay is not simply disrespect -- it is participation in the violent, deeply rooted systems of sexism and heterosexism. We need to actively work to counter the systems that define our worth based on how effectively we fit into certain social categories and how fully we meet certain social expectations. We need to counter children's urge to use cruelty to “police” their own in each other's behavior. We need to teach our children processes of support and affirmation so that they don't need to fear who they are and who their friends are. We need to find out why they put each other down and replace that behavior with its opposite.

Gender and the pressures that come with it intervene in children's lives with pervasive and contradictory expectations. What would happen if children didn't need to worry about being the perfect boy or girl and instead worried about reaching a standard of humanity -- being loving, caring, and kind? And what if other roles children reach for, such as student, athlete and partner, were no longer differentiated by gender and instead everyone had the same encouragement and guidance as well as the same expectations for success and achievement within these roles?

What if children were taught to be their whole selves, and nothing but themselves, in order to achieve happiness and success? What if they were taught to help others do the same? How can we teach them to do so?

Remember the Teenagers. A response to the abstinence-or-comprehensive sex ed fight

2009-04-11T16:38:00.000-04:00

I support comprehensive sex education -- programs that provide teenagers with information and options in the context of teaching emotional and social processes of self-care and empowerment. But today I'm not writing for the sole purpose of arguing my position. I read yesterday's Boston Globe editorial on this topic and the comments that other readers have posted. I have many responses and opinions of my own that I will, down the line, articulate. Today, I'm writing because I want to remember the teenagers.

Where are the voices of the teenagers? I didn't read their words, and no one seems to be advocating for them. The people commenting miss the fact that they are debating the education of real people -- people that feel, think and do, every day. Yesterday, while adults fought on the Internet, teenagers across the country said yes to sex, said no to sex, asked to wait, asked for more, showed off their virginity pledges, showed off their hickeys, had their first kiss, gave birth, broke hearts, pledged their love, watched foreplay on television, saw rape in a movie, lied about their age on the Internet, lied about their sexual history, told the truth about their sexual history, viewed cleavage while flipping through a magazine, took a birth control pill, used a condom correctly, used a condom incorrectly, hated sex, enjoyed sex...

Yes, reading those comments from fighting adults, I just really missed teenagers and the intensity of their daily realities. Teenagers are real people, with bodies, sexualities, lives, and multiple senses -- and they take in a lot more than they let on.

Most importantly, teenagers are a lot more diverse as a group and a lot more complex as individuals than these adults seem to give them credit for. We learned a while ago in education that we can't approach all 20 or so students in one room as if they have the same needs. Instead, we practice differentiated instruction, working as much as possible to help students achieve according to their own level, style and potential.

Not all teenagers will decide to abstain, nor will all teenagers decide to have sex. But one theme that I did find in many of the comments from both “sides” of the fight was the desire for teenagers to learn to respect themselves and others.

Teenagers will only have a chance to learn respect when the so-called adults in this situation model such behavior for them. We need to respect each other. More importantly, we need to respect the very teenagers for whom we claim to feel concern. In order to respect teenagers, we must recognize them as full human beings with their own thoughts and feelings and dreams. They can't vote, which immediately renders them less-than-relevant in any debate over policy. But this policy is about their lives, and this debate puts their right to their own humanity on the line. They are more-than-relevant, and we must treat them as such. We must respect, include, and listen to the teenagers themselves.

A More Specific Question

2009-04-05T13:00:00.000-04:00

What are the best ways of responding to students who called something “so gay” in order to cast it apart as weird or wrong? The best response will entail having a conversation -- communicating with the students, engaging them, challenging them.

In order to plan a caring and effective response, I'll start by applying the very communication skills that I teach in health class. When preparing to have a serious conversation, first determine a good time and place. If I'm not in the middle of teaching a class, I can ask the student to step into the hallway with me and I can address the issue immediately. If I am in the middle of teaching a class, but do not have a class directly following, I can tell the student to speak with me after class. If neither of these options is available, or if the student spoke these words in the context of other disciplinary issues, then I will keep the student in my classroom after school.

That's when the hard part starts. What can I say to help them understand better why they said it, why they shouldn't say it again, and why homophobia hurts all of us? Those are my three objectives. What's my plan?
1. Guide them through taking responsibility for what they said.
2. Ask them why they said it and listen to where it was coming from.
3. Help them think of more effective and respectful ways of expressing their feelings.
4. Use this moment to teach them...

... insert 5-to-10 minute, developmentally appropriate lesson on homophobia here. Any suggestions? I have lots of ideas, but I have yet to determine the best strategy. Right now I'm trying out what I feel is most applicable to the given student in the given situation. But I would love more feedback on planning ahead for this too frequent of challenges, for I'm sorry to say it will come up again.

Towards an Emotionally Intelligent Sex Ed Program

2009-03-28T13:22:00.000-04:00

In addition to providing accurate and accessible information, sex ed teaches values, sending explicit or implicit messages to students about who they are, how to relate to others, and what roles to seek in society.

Schools end up teaching values wherever they want to or not. We need to take responsibility for the values and behavioral patterns we instill in students. One recent movement known as Character Education focuses on explaining what it means to have good character and be a good citizen. A new approach that can be called Emotional Education has the capacity to go deeper than that. I read about emotional education recently in the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, and I'm enthralled.

Emotional education and sexuality education are inextricable from one another. In order to learn how to develop sexual agency, we need to know how to identify our own emotions and figure out what we want. In order to negotiate with potential sexual partners, we need to know how to recognize and respond to other people's emotions. In order to develop healthy relationships, we need to communicate, debate and support each other in emotionally healthy ways.

Emotional education must also be antiracist, feminist education. In order to support all of our students, we must ensure that they receive the instruction and encouragement that they need, intentionally countering legacies of oppression and instead providing them all with opportunities for development as full and complex emotional beings. While the imperative to bring in the political analysis may not seem as obvious, I believe it is an essential basic element of such a curriculum.

I'm excited to continue to explore the potential for teaching about sex in the context of emotional education.

My analysis

2009-03-21T11:45:00.001-04:00

What happens when we put the body at the center of our analysis? What can we learn about our own personal challenges? What can we learn about our relationships? Moreover, how can such an analytical process help us to transform our society?

My analysis centers around the body. All of the issues I address and care about bring me back to the body, and the importance of our having bodies and our having our own power over our own bodies. Through my body, I experienced myself and the world. By hearing about my embodied experience, you can understand my plight.

I learned many different radical critiques that use slightly different lenses for analyzing and critiquing the world’s inequalities. Is it all really about who has the most money? Is it all really about who has the most power over others? I think it's about who has the most power over their own body and over the bodies of others.

My analysis uses the plight of our bodies as a lens for critiquing our society. In advocating for healthy, happy, safe, self-asserted, consensually involved bodies, we can sort through the myriad of oppressions that afflict our world.

We begin and end in our bodies. We feel our bodies constantly. We relate to each other with our bodies, through our bodies, in our bodies.

I'm not trying to make a concluding point in just this one entry. I'm trying to make a starting point. When we started from our bodies, where can that take us?

Talking about talking about sex

2009-03-17T20:09:00.001-04:00

Last week, a friend of mine invited a couple people to dinner with the specific intention of discussing sex.

Why did we need a specific event in order to engage that topic? Why is it talking about sex something that happens on its own? I wish it were. I wish I had more frequent and more open conversations about sex with my peers. And even though I don't do it enough, I bet I actually get down to talking about sex more than other people do. But much more than I get to talk about sex directly, I have conversations about the process of talking about sex. Meta-discussions. Discussions about discussions about sex.

We talk about why sex is so hard to talk about in the first place. We talk about what holds us back, our fears perhaps, or shyness, or our perception of other people's fears or shyness. And social convention. Oh, social convention. It's not usually done, so it doesn't usually happen. How can we start making it happen?

Part of the issue is that we don't have an easily accessible, already agreed-upon rubric for how such talking about sex could work. Is there such a thing as “too much information” (TMI)? What kinds of comments would be inappropriate? What “ground rules” can we use to build a “safe space” in which everyone feels more comfortable?

How can we honor the feelings that hold us back from talking about sex, and also move forward in seeking the discussions we desire? Please comment, for I would love to read your thoughts and feelings.

Desire, Desire, Desire

2009-03-07T12:04:00.001-05:00

I would've benefited from learning about enthusiastic consent in high school. I wish I'd known why to say no every time that I didn't actually really, really, really want it.

But what makes a person enthusiastic? Desire. And what is that desire for? Pleasure. I think that these concepts are essential to transformative sex ed. They are essential to the process of countering rape culture and the epidemic of sexual violence. Recently, I've become more able to articulate these convictions thanks to the new anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape

Once we encourage each other to get in touch with our personal desires for specific pleasures, we can begin planning to fulfill our desires. That’s agency -- being our own advocates.

I'm just beginning to get a sense for how extremely empowering these concepts are in my life and the lives of my friends. I want to figure out how to teach them to my students to empower them, also.

I started the 8th grade unit on sexual violence prevention by defining pressure as trying to get someone else to do something without considering whether the other person actually wants to do it or not. Pressure takes away the other person’s ability to consent by erasing the importance of desire. During the teen dating classes, I've expanded the concept of pressure to the concept of control, which is any use of power to make another person think, feel or act a certain way. Again, control violates the importance of the other person's desire.

Next, I will tackle directly of the issue of rape and sexual assault. I hope the themes that I've developed through the preceding lessons at least somewhat prepare my students for what's about to ensue.

My Work

2009-03-04T20:19:00.000-05:00

I currently teach health in a public middle school, and just today spent two classes with seventh graders explaining the anatomy of the male and female reproductive systems. “Why do we need to learn this?” the students often ask. Variations on this question include, “why do we need to learn about both males and females?” and “why do we need to learn this in school?”

I'm hoping to empower them. I explain that this information will help them care for themselves and their relationships -- that at some point in the future they will want to be familiar with their friend’s and/or their partner's reproductive system. I tell them that I want them to discuss it with me, at school, because I want them to have the opportunity to develop a positive attitude towards bodies, to hear from someone who doesn't consider it weird or gross, and to ask questions of someone who is excited to provide answers.

On www.ratemyteachers.com, one of my students wrote about me, “She is a little weird how she talks about things with both boys and girls together and it looks like she enjoys it but otherwise she is a good friend?” Today, in a similar vein, a student asked me to my face if I enjoy teaching this topic.

“Yes,” I wanted to shout, “this is the best thing ever! I wish I had more time at you so I can teach you in more detail, make up many more activities, and ensure your mastering the information.” I didn't say all that, but I did clearly affirm that I do enjoy it, and that's why I teach it.

And why shouldn't I? Is it weird to enjoy my students’ discomfort -- or is it thrilling to open up a conversation with them that they've never had before quite this way? Is it wrong to be able to say words like vagina and penis with steady calm, or is it beautiful to make room for young adolescents to air their confusion and concern?

Maybe doing this work is weird in that it's unusual, but I think that is one of its most important qualities. I believe that it's thrilling, beautiful and fun. I'm in the zone while I'm doing it. And I'm convinced that most of the time my students are enjoying it, too.

My Dream

2009-02-25T06:48:00.000-05:00

I believe in sexuality education as a site of social transformation. By talking about our bodies, our relationships, our desires, and the restrictions and pressures on all of these, we have the opportunity to develop new ideas and ways of thinking that will change our lives and our society. In order to embark upon this project, we need to transform our conception of sexuality education. We must move beyond the debate between information and abstinence-based curriculum and reach for new paradigms in structure, pedagogy, and content. We will transform sexuality education so that sexuality education can in turn transform us. We will develop and articulate new values to guide us. We can achieve love, freedom, agency, and a system of support for the health and wellbeing of all. I strive for social change. Please strive with me.