RH Reality Check recently announced the winner of its Fresh Focus Video Contest in which participants submitted videos about ways to make sex education more interesting in the future.  You can view my previous post about the call for entries and check out the winners.  Enjoy!

A nursing lecturer at Salford University in England will host the first live seminar on sexual health on virtual world Second Life next week, according to the Guardian.

“Over the last 12 months I’ve been looking at social networking sites as a way of getting through to young people. Far from just being a source of amusement for people, it offers a huge opportunity for education,” Barbara Hastings-Asatourian said.

What do you think of using newer technology to reach audiences for sex education?  I recently posted about using another form of new media, podcasting, as a way of drawing attention and educating others about this topic.

A Maine woman has lodged a formal complaint about a sex education book, saying it violates the city’s obscenity ordinance.

JoAn Karkos refused to return the book, “It’s Perfectly Normal” by Robie H. Harris, and urged police to issue a citation against Lewiston Public Library. The library eventually had police issue a summons for the book’s return.

According to other news articles, Karkos learned about the book from American Life League’s protest of the book, including a full-page advertisement in the Washington Times last year that likened the book to porn.

The American Life League released a video news release about the book this week. The American Life League is an opponent of Planned Parenthood and says it plans to release other news releases about the pro-choice organization’s activities. Planned Parenthood published an interview with the book’s author last year in which he responded to critics’ objections to his book.

How explicit do you think children’s sex education books can be without being too much for kids? Have you read or seen this book? You can read excerpts of the book.

A researcher at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville is questioning results of a Ohio State University study in February that claimed teens who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents.  According to the Washington Post article, “so obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal ‘abstinence only’ programs.”

There was just one problem: It is probably not true. Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.

The new study “really calls into question the usefulness of abstinence education for preventing behavior problems,” Harden [a leader of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville study] said, “and questions the bigger underlying assumption that all adolescent sex is always bad.”

Health educators risk students’ well-being by being too politically correct, according to a column in WorldNetDaily.com.  The author cites Miriam Grossman, author of the book “Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student.”

According to the article,  Dr. Grossman has garnered media attention because of her claim that health educators risk students’ health by promoting a “particular ideology – usually a combination of feminism, androgyny and ‘anything goes’ liberalism.”

The commentary goes further, saying that young women are particularly hurt by this ideology.

One fact absent from most sex education programs is that young girls are more susceptible to STDs than mature women. They don’t include information about the cervical transformation zone (or T-Zone), a ring of cells that is vulnerable to infection. The transformation zone is dramatically larger in a teenage girl, but shrinks as she gets older.

The commentary says the rationale for this ideology is that “sex educators like the idea of telling teens to have sex as soon as they feel ready not because it’s good for them, but because they see it as the values-neutral position.”

For more about Grossman, you can also read a recent San Francisco Chronicle article in which she discusses her book and what she sees as dangers in the casual “hook-up” environment on college campuses.

What do you think?  Do you think sex education programs are too politically correct to the point of being permissive, sending the message that it’s okay to have sex early?

The New York Times recently reported on the “vajayjay,” or the nickname for a vagina, that sprang into the popular lexicon after being featured on “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” Shonda Rhimes, the creator of “Grey’s Anatomy,” decided to use the nickname after facing resistance from the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates media decency standards.

“I had written an episode during the second season of ‘Grey’s’ in which we used the word vagina a great many times (perhaps 11),” Ms. Rhimes wrote in an e-mail message. “Now, we’d once used the word penis 17 times in a single episode and no one blinked. But with vagina, the good folks at broadcast standards and practices blinked over and over and over. I think no one is comfortable experiencing the female anatomy out loud — which is a shame considering our anatomy is half the population.”

Rhimes was not alone in her reluctance to use a nickname for female anatomy. According to the article, Eve Ensler argued long-ago in “The Vagina Monologues” that “what we don’t say becomes a secret, and secrets often create shame and fear and myths.” Vagina, her widely performed series of monologues declared, is too often an “invisible word,” one “that stirs up anxiety, awkwardness, contempt and disgust.”

In a recent post that I wrote, one of sex therapist Dr. David McKenzie’s tips for parents talking to kids about sex was to use correct terminology. He said parents with good intentions sometimes use nicknames, but that it actually makes it more difficult for kids to comfortably ask questions about their bodies as they mature.

Meanwhile, Dr. Carol A. Livoti, a Manhattan obstetrician and gynecologist, said in the New York Times article that euphemisms and slang for women’s body parts can render women incapable of explaining their symptoms to health professionals. But in the article, Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and the chairman of the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary, said there was a need for a pet name, “a name that women can use in a familiar way among themselves.”

How do you think nicknames affect sex education and discussions about maturing bodies? Also, what do you think of the suggestion that the FCC has a double standard in its decency standards, coming down more heavily on the use of “vagina” than “penis”?

You can read blogosphere discussions, including postings on The Huffington Post and Boing Boing.

Watch a comedic “Talk Soup” video that includes the clips from “Oprah” and “Grey’s Anatomy” in which “vajayjay” was used:

A popular podcast that debuted this past summer and aims to teach teenagers about sex is generating both praise and criticism.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “The Midwest Teen Sex Show” aims to teach teens about sex using risqué sketches, explicit language and anecdotes that draw on the teenage experiences of its two 28-year-old creators.

 

The two felt that existing sexual-education efforts were far too prim — and boring — to be useful to teens. Their podcast focuses less on birds-and-bees basics and more on real-life scenarios teens are likely to face.

According to the article, more than 50,000 people subscribe to the podcast through iTunes. The show is listed under the iTunes’ “Health” category, where it regularly is in the top 10.

Along with growth has come controversy, particularly among sex-education teachers and therapists. While some praise it for tapping a hard-to-reach audience, others worry it’s too racy for younger teens, and still others say the podcast focuses too much on humor and not enough on the facts kids need.

Deborah Roffman, a sex-education teacher who works in Baltimore schools, says, “I can see why it would be very popular with kids. It’s daring, it’s very open, and it’s funny, and it has information that they would find very useful. “At the same time, it is satirical in nature,” she says, adding that unless teens are intellectually sophisticated, it’s not “the right vehicle.” She says further: “The entertainment value of this material is not the same thing as its educational value.”

What do you think of the podcast if you were able to watch it through the embedded file below? Do you think you this an effective new vehicle to reach hard-to-reach teenagers on a difficult topic to discuss? If you feel that the podcast does more harm than good, do you object more to its content or to its general tone, both of which were points that critics raised? Is this a podcast that you’d consider subscribing to our telling others about?

WATCH an episode:

With Halloween this week, people were out in full force with their costumes.

Capital Newspapers printed a story about the trend towards sexier Halloween costumes, for women and girls alike.

The popularity of the risque young girls’ and teen costumes parallels the demand for racy women’s costumes. At some stores, the aisles for those clothes have the feel of a porn shop, with selections made by Playboy, among other brands.

But the sexier costumes don’t come without costs, according to UW-Madison Sociology professor Myra Marx Ferree. Ferree argues that “portraying young girls as innocent and sweet children but sexy at the same time is part of the ‘Lolita-ization’ of young girls.”

Ferree said this over-sexualization is sending a mixed message to girls.

Frequently in American culture, women are viewed as sex objects, but “at the same time, we’re telling girls, don’t have sex, let’s not talk about sex education, let’s not talk about responsible sex,” Ferree said. “That’s the ambivalence in the culture.”

I thought this article was interesting because of Ferree’s argument about potentially contradictory messages in terms of how females are depicted in culture versus how they’re told to act, as well as the potentially helpful role of sex education in making sense of all of it. What do you think? Have you noticed an increase in sexier apparel and general attitudes among young girls? If so, do you think the increasing sexualization of females is worsened by a lack of education and discussion to explain how to deal with it?

Here’s a fun tidbit for you:

You’re not the only one who might have been grossed out by sex education.

Oscar-winner Helen Mirren revealed that her sex education experience at 14 was a bit too revealing.

This film comes on, which is a midwives’ educational film. There is a close-up of a woman having a baby… it’s bloody and disgusting. Within 30 seconds, two boys had fainted.’

Mirren says the film put her off childbirth for life.

An editorial by former congressman Bob Barr in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution states that a Portland, Maine, middle school’s recent decision to offer contraceptives to middle schoolers is being done so at the expense of the students’ basic education.

What is particularly distressing about the Portland, Maine controversy is not so much that it is taking place at all, but that it is occurring even as those very same public school systems fixated on providing their young charges with birth control options, are failing miserably to provide students an adequate basic education in subjects that really do belong in schools.

As the Portland, Maine education gurus are pushing condoms, pills, skin patches and implants onto middle school kids, more than half of its eighth graders — some 57 percent to be precise — either do not meet or only partially meet state standards for reading. Those same middle schoolers fare even worse in math and science — with 71 percent of eighth graders failing to meet, or only meeting in part, math standards; a figure that rises to 85 percent for science subjects. You get the picture. Portland’s middle school students may not be able to read or do math real well, but they’ll be able to tell you all about condoms and birth control pills.

Do you agree that contraceptives and sex education are offered at the expense of basic education? Does the type of education, abstinence-only or comprehensive, make a difference in your answer? I’d be interested in whether Barr would also argue that abstinence-only education takes away from the core education.