Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

It is fully 2009.  Crazy!

I have a new-looking blog that I’m excited about.  (If you’re reading this via RSS or e-mail, and haven’t looked at my actual site this year, come look!  It’s fan-tabulous!)  I learned CSS and a new graphics program to get the site looking like this - there are still a few bugs though, so continue to let me know if/when you run into them so I can continue to address them.

Yesterday I started another sexuality education class for middle school students.  I now have two classes going through the end of May - the first one is a private class a group of parents hired me to teach, and the second is through Wildflower Unitarian Universalist Church here in Austin.  One of the reasons I am excited to be teaching both of these classes at the same time is that I can actually talk about them more freely here on my blog.  I know that several parents from both of these classes read my blog, so while I was teaching only one class I was very hesitant to talk about it all because I was concerned it did not fully honor my students’ confidentiality.  However, with two classes going, there is far more confidentiality.  So look forward to more thoughts and conversations about my middle school classes coming up this spring.

This weekend, in addition to starting my new class, I also started reading Condom Sense by M. Monica Sweeney, MD, MPH and Rita Kirwan Grisman.  Here’s my favorite quote, even though it’s really from the authors:

As the former Surgeon General Dr. Jocelyn Elders said, “I”ve never heard of anyone needing an abortion who wasn’t pregnant.”  She further commented that just as we teach kids how to behave in the front of the car, we should teach them how to behave in the back seat.

So here’s the thing about this book: It seems like it has ended up with two, somewhat conflicting audiences.  First, young people who she is trying to scare into using condoms.  Second, policy makers and sex educators who she is trying to scare into promoting condoms.

Condom Sense is pretty good at reaching it’s goals.  It’s certainly scary.

And here is where I, perhaps, differ in approach from Sweeney and Grisman.  They make sex sound pretty scary and deadly.  In fact, they say anyone who has sex without a condom is committing murder.  I don’t like that approach at all.  Now what about the man who the authors describe as in his mid-forties who is infected with AIDS, knows he is infected, and is “determined to continue his sex life with multiple partners, and without condoms.”  Is he committing murder?  Maybe.  At least he is an accomplice.  Because the people he is having sex with are choosing to have sex with a man they don’t know without a condom just like he is.  Are all of these man’s partners committing suicide?

It’s a delicate balance, making the repercussions of non-protected sex serious and real enough to change people’s behaviors without going too far and making sex scary, gross, and filled with negative imagery.  I think that for the majority of the population, Condom Sense has gone too far.  That said, there are people who feel immortal and who do not recognize the implications, or at least do not believe they apply to them.  This is a great book for these people.  In fact, I am considering sending a copy to my little brother as an Epiphany present.

Welcome to my new, shiny blog!  It’s not completely final yet, so if you have thoughts, inputs, comments, raving compliments, feel free to drop them into the comments section below or send me an e-mail.  I’d love to hear from you!

The archetype of the maiden, the mother, and the crone as the three places women move through in their lives is a strong one that many of us identify with. The maiden is the girl from the time she starts her period until she starts having sex.  The mother is woman from the time she gets pregnant until she begins menopause.  The crone is the older woman from the time she can no longer reproduce until she dies.  Marking our paths through these transitions points is a meaningful one that can give meaning to our daily lives in ways that can sometimes be overlooked.

However, as times change, we live longer, and reproduce later or not at all, there is a certain need for a fourth category.  Where do the women who are clearly no longer maidens, but have not yet become mothers fit?  They fill a distinct and meaningful place in many of our lives - they are our friends, our sisters, our aunts.  They provide support, love, and community in ways that are different from the mother, but certainly highly worthwhile in and of themselves.

But their life trajectory just doesn’t fit into this archetype in a very supportive way - and so I think it is time to change how we define the archetype.

I am specifically asking because on the website for The Belly Project, my newest on the side fun, we would like to have categories for maidens, mothers, and crones, for easy searching ability.  But that’s going to be hard to do if we can’t figure out an appropriate fourth category.  So, at least for the purposes of The Belly Project website if not the entire archetype, what is a good word to describe these post-maiden, non-mother, pre-crone women?

I wait, breathless, for your input!

Among other lovely holiday treats, I started reading again.  Oh yes, I’ve been reading all along of course, but I had tilted my reading far too much towards blogs and it had been some time since I’d picked up a good book.  So, in typical style, I picked up one good book and remembered how delightful they are and picked up another three…or eight…

I’ll be talking more about these delights over time, but for today I want to dive into a discussion started by the first chapter in Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe by John Boswell which is called “The Vocabulary of Love and Marriage.”

Now, while the majority of this chapter is a relatively arcane conversation about the difficulties inherent in translating words referring to human relationships between cultures, the first page includes this fabulous nugget:

“Most English speakers will feel the can recognize, intuitively, distinctions among feelings that might be characterized loosely as “erotic,” “friendly,” “fraternal,” or “paternal.”  In actual fact, however, such feelings are often confused both by the subject who experiences them and the person to whom they are directed, resulting in not only romantic disappointment and misunderstandings between friends but also guilty feelings about incestuous desire or a failure to recognize abusive relationships between parents and children.

Most such feelings - although profound, urgent, and ubiquitous - are difficult to specify, not only because language is a frail medium for powerful and overwhelming emotions but also because the feelings themselves are often jumbled, shifting, and imprecise, to such an extent that many languages fail to make distinctions that English speakers consider essential…”

There are two points here that I consider really essential to the conversation.  First, the acknowledgement that there are different kinds of love.  Second, that these different kinds of love can be so difficult to tell apart that other languages, particularly historical in Boswell’s conversation anyway, decline to distinguish between them clearly or at all.

These two points raise the bar and point out the urgency of truly high quality sexuality education as far as I’m concerned.  Leaving young people to muddle through the emotional and linguistic mess that human loving, romantic, and sexual relationships create is a vast unfairness to them and indicates a distinctly purposeful ignorance on our part.  As adults who have (often) muddled through much of these hurdles with either only our friends or (God forbid!) only ourselves to consult, we know it is a hard row to how.  Nevertheless, even very good sexuality education programs and very good, very open parents sometimes fail to include a conversation on how to figure out what kind of relationship you or another person is interested in pursuing.

But this is the essential nugget that sexuality education (and parents who do it themselves!) MUST include!  Yes, everyone needs to know how and when to use condoms.  Yes, everyone should know how pregnancies happen and where and when to get tested for STDs.  These are the very basic facts of sexuality education.  But guidance, apprenticeship, and lessons in social skills and learning to understand other people’s confusing and non-verbal signals are also basic parts of sexuality education.  Learning to look inward and examine one’s own actions and words and choices and how to change them when need be are basic parts of sexuality education.

All of this is hard to know how to do, especially when it was never done properly for you!  As a parent, it can be scary to to step up to the personal emotional work that this kind of education for your own children requires of you, because then they will be more skilled at pointing out your communication inadequacies and internal inconsistencies.  As a teacher, it’s scary to work with your students in this way because the reaction of their parents can be unexpected - either highly positive or highly negative - and your attachment to the students often becomes deeper and ties you closer than you might feel comfortable being with an ever-changing population of young people.

This kind of deep inter-personal education also takes time.  It takes more time than I often feel like I have with students in a one-semester chunk of time.  In fact, it generally takes a lifetime.

I provide what support and apprenticeship in understanding relationships that I can in the short periods of time that I have with my students, and I am beginning to more explicitly do this work with my children as they reach into appropriate ages.  So I know the difficulties of this explicit education on love and friendship well, both from the perspective of a teacher and of a parent.  But I am absolutely certain of the need for it from the parents, because as a teacher I can easily separate the students whose parents took the time and energy to talk about the difference between love and marriage, how to acknowledge the subtlety of desire, and how to begin to navigate those deep paths.

This is actually the root of why my favorite work is with parents rather than children, teenagers, or young adults.  It is the parents who have the time (over many years!) to give their children the education they need, while when I have a paltry 32 hours over 16 weeks, I worry I have only a fighting chance of making a difference 16 months, much less 16 years, in the future.

I took last week off, not just from blogging but also from e-mail, grading, presentation planning, and everything else save my personal life.  It was lovely.

I spent time with my husband, our two daughters, and our extended families and friends.  We sang Christmas carols, went to a Trail of Lights, cooked and ate fabulous food, read books, carved stone, and played lots of games.  The last time I took more than two consecutive days off from work was about a year ago, and before that it had been almost a year and a half.

I also spent some time with a number of youth in my family and among my friends.  Here is where my holiday ruminations led me: Teenagers often fall into one of two categories: The Overachievers and The Underachievers.  Neither of these extremes are really good or happy places to be.  Of course, we all tend to fall along this continuum somewhere, but teenagers seem to be more extreme in their placement along it than the rest of us.

The Overachieving teenagers drive themselves absolutely in all things scholastic and extracurricular, and this trend is getting worse.  My husband, who is older than me, was talking about a friend of his in high school who was an Overachiever.  He absolutely had to make all A’s.  By the time I was in high school, making all A’s just wasn’t enough.  You also had to have a long list of extracurricular activities, volunteer activities, and at least a few years of solid foreign language classes.  Now, of course, teenagers “have” to do even more - they need to show leadership in at least a few of their extracurricular activities, foreign language fluency (or at least conversational ability), travel experience, perfect SAT or ACT scores, and a list of high scoring SAT IIs and AP tests.  We continue to turn the screw tighter and tighter - and the Overachieving teenagers are entering the ranks of the sleep deprived, foregoing a true social or family life, and learning less and less about life balance.  The problem with this scenario is that American society has not yet fully acknowledged that being completely out of balance doesn’t really help individuals find happiness and success in the long run.

The Underachievers have the opposite problem.  They look at what it takes to be an Overachiever and decide to decline that life path.  Far too often these young people are looked down on - their older relatives ask, “What went wrong?” and remark, “So much potential wasted!”  But really I’m not sure this is a more problematic path than that of the Overachiever, because neither of them have found a balance in their lives.

I know that I don’t always have enough balance in my life.  I tend to lean towards the Overacheiver.  My husband tries to remind me about this at opportune moments by saying things along the lines of: “It’s almost bedtime.  Close your computer and come play a game while the kids are still awake.” and “I see you haven’t eaten lunch today.  What can I make for you?”  It’s good for me, this reminder to slow down and enjoy the passage of life.  It was good to take 9 days off from work.

I hope your holidays were as lovely and relaxing as mine.  I’m getting ready to start back full-force again, and I have lots of exciting things coming up in the new year - including a presentation at an international women’s conference, a presentation at SXSW Interactive, my new website The Belly Project, a part in a soon-to-be-released documentary movie, and maybe some other fun things too.  I’ll be giving you more information on all of these things soon!

On Tuesday I wrote about my community college students and their developing understanding of rape and how to prevent it.  I ended with this:

I am sure that this class changed how many of the students think about sexuality - they’ve told me as much themselves.  But I’m not as sure that it has influenced their choices or actions to nearly the same degree.  And this is always the ultimate challenge for a teacher: How to influence not only the in-class response, but also the out-of-class actions and thought processes?  This is, of course, a particularly fascinating and poignant dilemma for a sex education teacher.

And I’m still ruminating about it. There are a number of issues here, including the goal of a community college class in human sexuality, the appropriateness of a variety of educational techniques in human sexuality, and essentially how to change human behavior.

I have realized this semester that human sexuality class was attempting to reach two goals: (1) to provide the students with an academic understanding of the dynamics in play in human sexuality and (2) to provide the students with tools and skills to enhance their personal and social sexual activities and decision making.  My students were (mostly) far more interested in the second goal, and so the class tended to drift in that direction.  But finding a way to evaluate and assess students on those criteria is incredibly tricky, so I ended up assessing the students on primarily the first goal.

This question goes beyond the borders of this specific class.  Should we teach sex ed more like we teach a standard Algebra I class, or should we teach it more like a Ballet class?  Is it primarily knowledge or primarily skills we are focusing on?  Of course the answer is that it is a mix of the two.  But where is the focus?  What, exactly, are our goals?

Once we have clarified the goals of a sex ed class, I want to move on to educational techniques.  In my off-campus classes for teenagers and parents, I utilize a lot of role playing, art, and other non-standard educational techniques that make the class more fun and less information-based.  But I find them highly useful for improving skills.  In the typical human sexuality on-campus classroom, however, there is often more reliance on PowerPoint, lecture, and remaining one step removed from the content even when discussing issues like communication skills.  This makes the class more information-based and less skills-based.  But is it appropriate to have the students in a college classroom bring as much of themselves into the class as role-playing does?  Or is it appropriate to project a list of ways to prevent rape onto a screen and talk about them one-by-one?  These activities seem too personal and too cold by turns.

And now to my essential issue: All education is about changing or influencing the students’ actions or thought process.  Human sexuality is no different.  So what is the best way, where is the balance between too close and too much distance that will allow the students to grow as much as they are able to in a given 16-week class?

I’ll be grappling with all of these questions over the next month or so as I revise and revisit my human sexuality syllabus for next semester, and I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions, and reactions, so send me your comments!  I am waiting with baited breath for your fabulous input!

Last March I wrote a post about preventing rape through sex education.  It just got a new comment, so I went back and read my way through it again.

I recently used the story I described in that post of a date rape told from two very different perspectives in a college classroom.  We had a volatile and dynamic conversation about whether or not it was rape and who was at fault and when and where the evening’s trajectory could have been changed by either party.

The male students came into the conversation (after reading only the man’s description of the evening) with varying degrees of certainty about whether or not rape had happened.  The female students came into the conversation (after reading only the woman’s description of the evening) absolutely certain it was rape and absolutely certain that the man had gone into the date with the goal of having sex at any cost.

By the end of the class, the male students had all agreed that it was rape - but they wanted a different word to describe an event where the man had wanted to have sex and had mis-read the woman’s cues and had truly had no harmful intent.  The female students realized that the man on the date was a decent guy who had not intended to harm.  Everyone had good things to say about the problems with alcohol and unclear communication.

But I don’t know if, in the end, it will change any of their behaviors.  Will the women in the class be more forward about stating their sexual intent?  Will the men in the class be more forward about stating their sexual intent and demanding a clear response rather than relying on cues?  I just don’t know.

The semester is over now, and as an end-of-class party interested students and I gathered at a series of bars and clubs in downtown Austin to observe one kind of mating ritual that college students often engage in and to have fun.  The students danced, drank (I made sure they all had sober rides home before we started the evening), and generally engaged in more mating ritual than they observed.  I don’t think any of them considered the ramifications of their actions beyond the immediate.

I am sure that this class changed how many of the students think about sexuality - they’ve told me as much themselves.  But I’m not as sure that it has influenced their choices or actions to nearly the same degree.  And this is always the ultimate challenge for a teacher: How to influence not only the in-class response, but also the out-of-class actions and thought processes?  This is, of course, a particularly fascinating and poignant dilemma for a sex education teacher.

But hark, the un-graded tests and papers do call, so I will have to write more on this tomorrow.

In the past several days, one of my older posts (that I’m quite proud of, incidentally), got picked up and published at RH Reality Check and Alternet.  If you’re heading over from either of those places - welcome!  Take a look here to find out more about me and my perspective on adolescent sexuality.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in Austin, Texas.  When it drops below freezing here and it happens to be wet, we get ice, not snow.  And that happens maybe once a year.  One other thing to know about my local micro-climate: It changes quickly.  We get huge sweeping cold fronts that drop in from Canada across the plains, and warm blasts from the Gulf of Mexico fighting over our heads all winter long.  I love it!

So yesterday the high was 81.  This morning the low is around 30.  And it snowed!  So my husband, my kids, and I had our first snowball fight at home (we’ve had them in Montana and Germany…) and ate maple syrup over clean snow just like the Ingalls family did in the Big Woods.  It’s been a fabulous morning.

And it got me thinking about changeable winds.  All through yesterday, a warm wind blew in from the south.  Then, suddenly, around 2:30 in the afternoon, it changed to a cold blustery wind from the north.  I stood outside and marveled at the change.

Living with a teenager can feel very similar to living with dramatic, changeable winds.  Everything is pleasant and lovely, until suddenly it isn’t.  It’s just what happens, much like the weather here in Central Texas.  Some of my friends burrow inside and complain or ignore it or shake their heads and comment on how bizarre it all is.  But really the best thing to do is to sit and marvel at the changeable winds.  Stay grounded, calm, engaged, and know that this storm will pass, so appreciate the passion while it’s here.

Your teenagers will not always be teenagers, and just like you appreciated them as babies for their essential baby-ness, now you need to appreciate them as teenagers for their essential teenager-ness.

Oh my goodness, it has been far too long since I’ve written here.  But I had a really good reason, I promise!  On Saturday, I co-ran a huge holiday fair at my daughter’s school.  As some of you may remember but probably not all of you know, it’s a private school for grades K - 12.  Quite a range.  This fair (which was the 25th annual!) is typically attended by grade school kids and their families.  The middle school students and their families typically make and sell all the food at the event.  The high school students typically don’t come.

But, of course, I had designs for involving the middle and high school students more closely.  So I tried out a newly-found trick.  Here’s the scene on Friday during the event set-up:

There were droves of roaming middle school students playing basket ball, walking industriously to and from the bathrooms, attempting to avoid the horrible smelling broken septic system, while a few helped to set-up their food stands.  There just wasn’t enough to keep all of them busy, so they relaxed and got in everybody’s way instead.

I walked around, semi-appalled at how much they got in everyone’s way.  I asked around (this was my first year to be intimately involved in the set-up of the event), and heard that this was a typical scenario.  Here are the kinds of reasons people gave me:

• Well, there’s just not enough for them to do.
• I can’t get them to do anything!
• Middle schoolers will be middle schoolers!

Now, while I appreciate that it may be more difficult for a parent to get their kid off their butt to help out, there were plenty of people around who knew these kids, but weren’t their parents who gave plenty of excuses for the kids.

So I tried a trick a teacher friend of mine uses in his high school classes:  I walked over to a group of middle school students.  I said, “What are you guys doing right now?”  They typically shrugged.  One or two of them might have attempted to make something up on the spot, particularly as the day wore on and they realized what I was about to do.  “Oh great, well, I have something for you to do then.  Come with me!”  And I turned around and walked away.  I didn’t look back.  And I always found them following me by the time I reached my destination.

If you can manage to have absolute certainty that a young person will fulfill your request, you will often find that they do.  The trick is to turn around so that you are not facing them any more.

My friend does this when he wants students to do problems on the board.  He’ll say, “Michael, you can do this next problem on the board.”  And then he holds out his hand with the white board marker, and turns his body to face another student and begins another conversation.  The student is then left with a hand holding a marker directly in front of him, but only the teacher’s back to argue with.  My friend tells me it works every time, even with students other teachers tell him are completely unwilling to engage in the classroom.

It’s fabulous!

A parent asked me yesterday if I could do some one-on-one sex education with her son.  I don’t have a class for his age group starting up soon, and she thinks he needs information and support sooner rather than later.  It sounds like he doesn’t disagree, but he’s worried it’s going to be awkward.

He’s right.

Talking about sex is awkward if you’re not use to it, which most young people aren’t.  Let’s be honest, most old people aren’t use to talking about sex either.

The problem is that we are so very use to seeing sexy pictures, seeing movies and television about sex, listening to music about sex, and basically having sexiness inculcate every single aspect our lives except the one where we actually talk about it and learn about it.

So it probably will be awkward for him.  He’ll need to get over the general societal expectation that you don’t talk openly and honestly about sex - and even more importantly that you don’t talk openly and honestly about sex with an adult.

I know young people who came into classes or consultations with me who were awkward in the extreme, but ended up loving that they can talk with me about sex and now that they know these kinds of conversations with adults are possible, they are working towards the same kind of openness with their parents.  These young people feel empowered and supported by an expanding group of adults and will know who to come to with questions and problems in their eventual romantic and sexual relationships.

I know that there are readers on this blog who dearly wish they had managed to have open conversations with adults about sex when they were young, and had adults who probably would have been happy to talk with them, but never got over the awkwardness.  They did not know who to go to when they were in romantic and sexual relationships with problems, some of them small and some of them substantial.

Living with, and getting over, the awkwardness is worth it.