NEWSSEX

America, you are in luck. Kathie Lee Gifford, co-host of the fourth hour of NBC's TODAY show, is qualified to judge your sex life and give you unsolicited "motherly advice," free of charge. That is, at least, if you're named Snooki and you are a guest on her show.  Then again, one woman's advice is another's slut-shaming, so maybe we aren't in luck after all.

On January 11, Snooki, star of MTV's popular reality show Jersey Shore, made an appearance on the TODAY show to promote her new book. Kathie Lee, having watched (I assume) some of Jersey Shore, felt that this was a great opportunity to shame Snooki for her sex life. Snooki sat and listened politely as Kathie Lee asked her how she's justify her behavior to her imaginary, future babies and said things like "I'd be crazed if you were my daughter." The kicker was that, at the very end of the interrogation— oops, I mean interview — Kathie Lee tells her to "value yourself more. Don't give yourself away to just any jerk, okay?" Kathie Lee just can't wrap her mind around a the concept of a young woman enjoying her sex life and having fun.

At first blush, maybe you don't have a problem with that. Maybe you think Snooki brings it on herself. Maybe you even think that Kathie Lee is right. If so, ask yourself this: would Kathie Lee ever, in a million years and a million extra TODAY show hours, say that to a young man? I don't think so.

With the release of and subsequent media frenzy surrounding Pope Benedict XVI's published comments on condom use has come a renewed debate about religion, sexuality and public health. And it's not just about "male prostitutes." While the Pope's original declaration referred to the fact that condom use may be a moral act for male prostitutes wishing to prevent against sexually transmitted infections, the Vatican later clarified that -- oh, wait a minute -- women, men and transsexuals also may use condoms to protect themselves against transmission of disease, thank you very much.

Many progressive Catholics and organizations say these statements have opened the door to the potential to have a more realistic conversation about the role condoms play in protecting the health and lives of women, men and young people globally.

But, of course, the conversation has been happening for years between public health experts, advocates and those who use condoms. We already know that condoms are the only sure-fire contraceptive method for women who want to prevent both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. However, Catholics for Choice say that many Catholic health providers working for Catholic aid agencies in developing nations are secretly handing out condoms while fearing for their jobs since condom use is still unacceptable as a tenet of the Church. Catholic groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in the United States have stood in the way of ensuring access to condoms, as well as to the funding of other HIV/AIDS prevention strategies that work -- like comprehensive sex education in developing nations -- for too long.

The best way we can "use" the Pope's comments on condoms, in this country, is to put pressure on Catholic health agencies working on the ground in these poor nations to formally integrate condoms into their prevention strategies.

For all that conservative organizations and some media blame progressives for sexualizing teenagers, teen sex is the one topic that they cannot get off of their brains. This is especially true when twisting science and statistics in studies related to teenage sex and its effects.

A new study on the impact that teens' sexual activities had on their academic ones drew conservative media like sharks to a chum-filled cove. Unlike the sharks, however, those who reported on this study were not honest about the findings.

Most news sources reported the same poisonous tripe: While admitting that teens who engaged in bedroom activity in the confines of a committed relationship didn't have trouble with school, and showed no negative effects towards planning a future involving college, they over-emphasized the idea that teenagers who engaged in "flings" tended to be delinquents with no futures.

When I contacted Heather Corina of Scarleteen fame for her thoughts on the coverage of the study, I found out that it is members of the media who are interpreting the findings this way. In her post, she interviewed one of the study's authors, Bill McCarthy, to clear up some of the confusion.

Turns out, words like "commitment," "fling," "hook up," or any word defining the length or depth of a relationship between teenagers is absent from the study. The study's data was self-reported by teenagers who were asked if they had sex in romantic or non-romantic settings, based on a series of statements about various situations regarding those relationships. The projection of adult concepts of relationships onto teenager situations by the media has clouded the actual findings, and shifted the focus from things that could be useful into harmful stereotypes.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that my teachers had a personal life outside of the classroom. I'm not sure when exactly it dawned on me that, when three o'clock rolled around, the people who taught me to read and multiply stepped out to do their own thing, or when that recognition evolved into figuring out that this real life might include such activities as going to bars, drinking, dating, and even having sex. In New York City elementary schools, my favorite teachers were almost always unmarried young women who could reasonably be expected to do one or all of those things. Now that I know peers who teach youngsters, while also enjoying life as single young women, I have better insight into the probable lives of those cherished teachers. Reflecting on this as an adult, I'm glad their lives didn't revolve solely around bratty youngsters.

Of course, there's no reason why a kindergartner should know anything about a teacher's sex life. Whatever she did on her own time was certainly not a five-year-old's business. And whether or not my teacher was getting laid outside of marriage didn't impact her ability to teach me how to sound out words. Yet Republican Senator Jim DeMint thinks a woman's sex life has a significant bearing on her ability to teach. At a rally over the weekend, DeMint asserted that an "unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend ... shouldn't be in the classroom." He holds the same position on LGBTQ teachers: if they're openly homosexual, we can't let them near our children.

This statement by DeMint shouldn't come as a surprise, since he got into hot water over similar comments during his 2004 bid for Senate, when he said that gay individuals single, pregnant women living with their boyfriends should not be allowed in the classroom. When called out for his homophobia and attacks on single moms, he tried to backpedal without really apologizing, pulling the old "I shouldn't have said that" card rather than "what I said was wrong." Obviously, since he just said pretty much the exact same thing, he doesn't think it was wrong.

With all the ads for drugs like Viagra and Cialis touting erections, I figured sex-enhancement pharmaceuticals were deemed a-okay for the T.V. viewing audience. My mistake: male sexuality is a perfectly acceptable subject for commercials on an array of television statements at all times of the days. Female sexuality, on the other hand, needs to be kept on the down low.

Creators of Zestra, a female arousal drug that claims to put a little zest into a woman feeling chronically uninterested, say that they've run up against a major double standard in the television industry, where male sexuality and four-hour erections can be discussed but female sexuality needs to be kept hush-hush. After approaching approximately 100 T.V. stations, only Soapnet Women’s Entertainment and Discovery Health would run their less-than-racy ads featuring middle aged women bringing up their desire to feel more, well, desire. "After I had my children, sex didn’t make me feel the same way." My goodness: call the morality police, that's some X-rated dialogue.

Some networks rejected the ads out-of-hand; others wanted disclaimers such as "Not for people under 18"; some would only agree to run the ads between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., when few viewers are tuned in. This line from the New York Times article made me chuckle with its dry humor: "Many stations told them to remove the words sex and arousal, which proved somewhat challenging for a product having to do with sexual arousal."

I have no comment on how well Zestra actually works, but if it helps women put a spring in their sex life, more power to them. T.V. stations rejecting an ad for no better reason than a prudish discomfort with discussing sex or female sexuality in particular need to get out of the Victorian era.

You can sign this petition to call for an end to double standards in advertising.

Photo credit: kyz

A Dutch study of parents and teenagers yielded some highly interesting results: Dutch parents are generally much more accepting of their teenage children participating in sleepovers with their romantic partners — and this permissive culture has actually led to teen pregnancy rates much, much lower to than their more prudish American counterparts. The report, "Sex, Love, and Autonomy in the Teenage Sleepover," by sociologist Amy Schalet, paints a fascinating portrait of the two different cultures' attitudes on teenage sexual activity and the consequences of these belief systems.

Just how common in the coed sleepover in Dutch culture? A 2003 study "found that two thirds of Dutch fifteen to seventeen-year-olds with steady boy- or girlfriends are allowed to spend the night with them in their bedrooms." Yet the birth rate among American teens is a whopping eight times that of the Dutch (something the Dutch have managed to accomplish while maintaining a low abortion rate for teenage pregnancies). The rate of STDs among Dutch teens, too, is significantly lower. Furthermore, Dutch teenagers are less likely than American teens to engage in sex outside a committed, monogamous relationship. To recap: Dutch teens are having safe sex in the context of loving relationships and under their own roofs, while American teens are engaging in alarming rates of unprotected sex in questionable relationships god knows where.

So, why the huge cultural divide, especially given how much time, energy, and money America funnels into the prevention of teenage pregnancy? Essentially, it boils down to this: the Dutch treat their teenagers' emerging sexuality as normal and healthy, and react accordingly. Contraceptives and reproductive health care are readily available. Conversely, in America we tend to treat teenage sexuality as a demon to be fought. We throw money into unrealistic abstinence-only education programs while simultaneously neglecting to educate our youth on their bodies and sexual health. We throw up barriers to birth control and abortion services.

Whether a woman has had sex thousands of times or never before in her life has absolutely no bearing on the likelihood of her being raped. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop off-base attacks on a woman's sexual history as a means of undermining a rape allegation, provoking laws in the United States and other countries to help shield sexual assault survivors. In India, however, Human Rights Watch reports that the victim-blaming goes beyond digging up private info about a woman's sex life to a traumatic examination in which a doctor inserts multiple fingers into a survivor's vagina to judge how "loose" she is. Loose vaginas mean loose women, right?

Besides the original point that a woman's sexual history has no bearing on either her likelihood to be a victim of rape or her credibility as an accuser, a medical examination like this one cannot make accurate determinations about how sexually active a woman is. Doctors in these cases base medical judgments on the prevalence of myths about the hymen and how a woman "should" react physically her first time having sex, despite the fact that each woman's hymen and vagina is different, can be impacted by regular physical/athletic activity, and reacts to penetration based on how relaxed the woman is, not how often she has had sex previously. The Swedes even recently went through the trouble of renaming the hymen, which some believe all women might not even have at birth, to counter misconceptions about what exactly this tissue is.

Nonetheless, doctors in India will testify in court that if they can insert two fingers into the woman's vagina easily and without pain, she is "habituated to sex." If a woman is single, she is judged for having premarital sex, and if she consented before, hey, she probably consented this time around to and is just making the rape up. That's one of the first things you learn in Victim-Blaming 101.

In addition to being a medically unsound and misogynistic judgment on women's sexuality, the examination itself can be deeply traumatic to a rape survivor, and as such a massive deterrent to a woman reporting the crime and having her rapist prosecuted. Gee, what a surprise: Having a man penetrate your vagina with his fingers after you've been raped could trigger a post-traumatic stress reaction?

Pornography: one of the great dividing points in the feminist movement. Is it good? Is it bad? Do anti-porn feminists feel uncomfortable getting in bed with the Religious Right? Do sex-positive pro-porn (or "erotica") feminists get a funny feeling about objectification?

Clarisse Thorn has an article raising this issue on Alternet: "Why I Sympathize With Anti-Porn Feminists — And Love Porn Anyway." On the one hand, many women just get an icky feeling when it comes to porn. On the other hand, this can be attributed to the fact that the pornography industry caters to men (and often the macho, misogynistic male side at that): it's the type that's the problem, not the whole concept. (This is about where I fall.) If porn is seen as degrading to women, is that because of the hyper-focus on cum-shots, rather than an inherent degradation involved in watching somebody having sex? Porn is rarely so attacked as degrading to men, after all.

And there are plenty of women out there — like Thorn herself — who both enjoy porn and think it's beneficial to society. Why should they be denied their sexuality or the right to appreciate porn just as men do? It reinforces the purity myth that surrounds women. In Thorn's article, she basically tells anti-porn feminists: I get it. I used to be like you, too. But I have learned, and what I have learned is: porn is good. Yet there's other evidence that porn, or the type most common today, can normalize sexual harassment and violence for boys. There's also the separate problem of exploitation and even trafficking in the porn industry, but then again, we don't advocate banning the production of T-shirts because many of them come from sweatshops — we just push for better regulation and labor standards.

Careers have been built on telling women that casual sex will make them miserable, and they don't truly want to have sex anyway. While society tends to accept that men will seek to obtain sex by hook or crook, women's worth lies in keeping their legs shut, as fellow Women's Rights blogger Kendall McKenzie's post article on revirginization surgery demonstrates. But the battle of the sexes and double standards can go by the wayside because, ladies, there's nothing wrong with your sexuality or deciding to have sex-for-pleasure.

Not convinced? Having trouble getting that abstinence-only education out of your ears? Monica Shores on Alternet lays down "6 Reasons to Have Casual Sex." To start with, casual sex can counteract the ill effects of sexist, gender stereotyping sex education that demonizes women's natural sexual desires. In disturbing patriarchal practices such as Purity Balls, girls undergo ceremonies where their fathers "posses" their virginity, which will later be handed off to the husband. "Notice, if you will, that these daughters never control their own virginity, their own sexuality," fellow Women's Rights blogger Roxann MtJoy writes. With an array of societal and cultural constraints telling women they do not own their sexuality, deciding to have casual sex can unlock the jail of conservative norms women find themselves in.

Casual partners, Shores writes, also have special benefits from being one-night stands or otherwise not deep, committed relationship: there's less at stake, and women have the ability to explore without getting hung up on what their partner thinks. Casual sex gives women more opportunities to experiment with their likes and dislikes without that little voice in their head asking "what does he think of me?" Plus, multiple partners can teach you their own sexual tricks, and if you end up settled into a committed relationship, you can bring to the bed mind-blowing techniques and insights about what really rocks your body that otherwise neither of you might have stumbled upon.

And if it turns out casual sex isn't really your thing? It doesn't mean it was a mistake to try. Much like going on a bad blind date or undergoing a break-up, you come out of it a little wiser about yourself and what you want, knowledge that you can take forward with you on further relationship and sexual adventures.

In a spectacular mash-up of sexual double standards, chauvinism, and the tired notion that a lady’s worth is inversely proportional to the number of dudes she’s diddled, the Washington Post is reporting that “revirginization” surgeries are on the rise in China. Also known as hymenoplasty or hymenorrhaphy, the procedure either sutures together pieces of the remnant hymen or recreates it entirely using new tissue, almost always for the purpose of “proving” virginity to a new husband via busting it on their wedding night. Lovely.

While there isn’t sufficient numerical data to conclusively determine a jump in revirginization surgeries in China, it does occur and appears to be increasingly common. Previously thought to be confined to Muslim countries, hymen restoration is making the rounds in places like Europe, the United States, and now China, which goes to show that misogyny and f’d up expectations of women know no religion, ethnicity, or culture.

It’s mind-boggling that virginity, which is entirely subjective and indefinable, still remains an appropriate yardstick by which to measure the humanity of women. But the emphasis on the hymen itself is particularly problematic. These thin membranes are an unreliable indicator of one’s sexual experience because they often perforate or disappear with normal childhood physical activity; some believe women can even be born without one. Sexual assault obviously factors in as well. In terms of proving the occurrence of prior voluntary intercourse, hymens are as useless as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.

Of course, this hymen-obsession is a blatant manifestation of one of the most toxic and unrelenting double standards, which places strict limitations on female sexuality, yet permits men to get their rocks off whenever they please. (It’s always been a head-scratcher for me: if guys are encouraged to sow their wild oats but women are supposed to remain chaste, um, who exactly are those men sleeping with?)