The fight for ideological dominance of D.C.’s college sex column “movement” rages on. Are our local campus columnists on the forefront of radical sex writing, or are they bringing back the good old days of valiant male chivalry—only drunker? This week: G.W. student fucks Marine; UMD students are bitches, dicks, or pussies; American University issues a Very Special sex column. It must be sweeps week:

Read More “University Sex Columns, Reviewed: Chivalrous Hook-Up Edition” »

The danger of swine flu in pregnant women has received a great deal of press attention recently. As concerns over the health of pregnant women rise, the abortion debate has slyly emerged as a a central influence in the dialogue.

Yesterday, the New York Times told the story of Aubrey Opdyke, a 27-year-old woman who was pregnant when she contracted swine flu last June. What began as mild symptoms of aches and fatigue turned into a harrowing four month ordeal. Writes reporter John McNeil:
Read More “Swine Flu and the Abortion Debate” »

In today’s New York Times, Stephanie Saul detailed one of the most difficult decisions facing women who are desperate to become pregnant: whether or not to have an abortion. Women who undergo intrauterine insemination in order to conceive, Saul writes, are at a high risk of producing “quadruplets, quintuplets and sextuplets—the most dangerous pregnancies for both mother and children.” Women carrying “multiples” are often encouraged by their doctors to undergo “selective reduction”—the purposeful “elimination” of some fetuses in order to increase the likelihood that the remaining fetuses—and the mother—will survive.

“Reducing.” “Eliminating.” Saul doesn’t use the word “abortion” until page three, when she notes that “many opponents criticize selective reduction as a form of abortion.” It is abortion. So why don’t we call it that?

Read More “Why Some Fetuses Are “Reduced” Instead of “Aborted”” »

Nothing to see here: Laseinde wants newborns to suck and cover.

Ella Laseinde is accustomed to seeing strangers’ breasts. “I’m a mammographer, so I’m with the breasts constantly,” says Laseinde, 71, who spent 30 years in government service—including five at the National Institutes of Health screening women’s chests. That’s not to say she’s interested in catching sight of stray bosoms outside the office. “I think in today’s time, they need to cover,” Laseinde says of nursing mothers. “There are so many people walking around who can catch a look.”

Read More “Public Breast-Feeding: What the Nursing Bib Means for the Right to Bare Breasts” »

Mmmmmmmmmmmm, tacos.

A Hierarchy of Date-Rape Jams, a charticle that is totally invalidated if you hate Rod Stewart.

(How to Enginer A) Teen Sex Scandal!, for those of you clinging to your old media jobs

Who Can Make a Rape Joke?, but seriously folks.

My Body is Not Defined By Pregnancy, rather: tacos.

The Five Most Inappropriate Cock-Bib Phrases, and oooooh I cannot wait to get my very own CockBib in the mail!

Photo by pheezy

“The Belly Project” has been hailed as “sad, beautiful, empowering, overwhelming.” I’ll add another: problematic.

The product of sex educator Karen Rayne and midwife Christy Tashjian, the blog records user-submitted photos of women’s disembodied bellies, accompanied by the belly’s age and reproductive history. The point of the blog, the creators write, is to “put our bellies in perspective,” as bellies are “intimately related our sexuality and to our reproductive lives. It’s a complicated interaction, that confluence of sex and babies.”

A typical submission looks something like this:

It is complicated, that “confluence of sex and babies.” My midsection’s ability to create proto-humans is something I have to fight against every fucking day. Getting a birth control prescription. Paying for it. Taking it every day. Wondering if I’m pregnant. Buying pregnancy tests. Defending why I don’t want children. Swallowing painkillers for my ovaries. Bleeding out of my vagina. Dealing with CVS while bleeding out of my vagina.

Being able to make babies sucks. But I do a lot of other things with my belly, too. I fill it with tacos. I lay on it. I put beer in it. I do the odd sit-up. I bend it over when I bike to work. Most of the time, though, it just sits above my legs and under my boobs as I type on the computer all day, and I never think about the thing.

This is not a perspective on the belly supported by the Belly Project:

Read More “My Body Is Not Defined By Pregnancy” »

Last month, I wrote a story on why the government won’t fund local youth AIDS prevention group WAIT (or Washington AIDS International Teens). WAIT’s problem was this:

a. Their goal was stopping the spread of HIV.

b. Their methodology was abstinence.

c. The government only funds one or the other.

Last week, President Obama proposed to add another roadblock to their fight for funding by cutting abstinence-only cash from the budget altogether.

Now, groups like WAIT, which represent the most practical side of abstinence eduction—delaying sex only to prevent an uncurable deadly disease—will remain, well, pretty much unaffected. As I detailed in my piece, federally-funded abstinence-only education was always itself too much of a “comprehensive” strategy. In order to receive federal funding, abstinence groups couldn’t just work against AIDS—they also had to teach prevention of “out-of-wedlock pregnancy”; that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity”; and that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

So while proponents of comprehensive sex education rejoice at the White House rule, some abstinence advocates, at least, aren’t lamenting the move: abstinence’s realists have always been left behind.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery.

Today is the National Day to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, and right smack in the middle of National Offend a Feminist Week. I’m both offended and not teen pregnant. Coincidence?

I’ve always said that the best way to prevent teen pregnancy is to turn 20, am I right? But for those still stuck in their 13-to-19s, the campaign’s Web site offers a quick quiz to help you determine how likely you are to get teen pregnant.

If, like me, your teen years are mercifully behind you, take the quiz anyway. I used it to determine whether or not I can boast more emotional maturity than a 16-year-old.

And . . . I cannot! I took the quiz and scored as “Sort of a Sexpert.” (Sort of a Sexpert? Do you people have any idea who I am?) According to the campaign, that score means that “Most of the time [I] know what the right choice is, but [I] don’t always make it when it comes to sex.” Yeah, that actually sounds about right.

But hey, maybe I’m just too fucking old to know how to prevent teen pregnancy. There is, after all, a “sexting” question:

Laura and Amy are bored* one Saturday afternoon so they start taking goofy pictures of each other with Laura’s camera phone. At first its just funny faces and model poses, but then Amy lifts up her shirt and Laura snaps a picture of her. “I’m so sending this to Mike,” says Laura.

A. “Ha! Do it! He’s so hot. Maybe he’ll return the favor and send me a picture of his naked butt.”

B. “No, don’t! I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. I like him, but I’m not ready to hook up yet.”

C. “You have to delete that picture immediately. That was really dumb of me. I don’t want that pic to get
forwarded to everyone at school. Don’t you watch Gossip Girl?”

D. “Go ahead. Now he’ll see what he’s missing.”

I actually got that one right. But only because I watch Gossip Girl.

* oh, boredom.

That’s what Ruth Marcus claims in today’s Washington Post, quoting Sarah Palin’s remarks from a—what else—a pro-life fundraiser. At the dinner, Palin discussed her “choice” to have a child with Down syndrome  at the age of 44—a choice that, as Marcus points out, Palin wants to deny other women. Marcus is miffed that right-to-lifers like Palin routinely justify their anti-choice positions by describing their own “correct” “decisions” to have children. This isn’t the fist time Palin has used choice to explain why women shouldn’t chose—who could forget Palin’s election-season classic, “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby”?

Palin’s pro-”choice” comments—where she describes twice considering abortion before deciding to carry her pregnancy to term—after the jump.

Read More “Sarah Palin Makes Case For Abortion” »

Waiting for the dough: Tsubata and children Lan Lee, Kensei Tsubata, and Mie Smith

Kate Tsubata is not your typical abstinence advocate. She wants you to choose one person to have sex with for the rest of your life, but her fidelity to the movement’s traditions ends there. She refuses to draft no-sex pledges, forge promise rings, stage purity balls, or cite scripture. She doesn’t care if the sex you’re not having is straight or gay. She likes sex, actually, as long as you only do it with one person ever—no wedding required. The stakes are lower, too. In Tsubata’s abstinence movement, sex won’t lead you down a road of eternal damnation—all it will do is kill you.

Read More “Why the Chaste AIDS Movement Can’t Get Paid” »