Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

A group of organizations is holding a contest for the best short video by a young person. The contest focus is: Why is sex so interesting and sex ed so boring? There are already some movies submitted to the contest. You can watch them!

Here’s the text describing the contest:

Using digital video technology, tell us what your Sex Ed experience was like OR tell us how you would redesign Sex Ed for the future.

Was sex ed at your school a total drag or did you love it? If you had your choice, would you want a personal robot tutor or an online game you could play with other teens to learn about sex and its consequences?

A dynamic group of progressive organizations is hosting a digital video contest with two themes to choose from:

Theme 1. Share your sex ed experience so far. Show us how and why it sucked or rocked.

Theme 2. Redesign how sex ed should be delivered. Imagine that anything is possible.

Make a video with either theme and submit it through DoGooderTV by December 31st, 2007. First place wins a $3500 scholarship to the educational institution of your choice (or cash equivalent); second place wins $1000 cash; and third prize is your choice of a Nikon P5000, a Nintendo Wii or an iPhone. Content and creative vision will be weighed more heavily than production quality. Voting begins on January 4, 2008. Film makers must be between the ages of 15-30.

Video finalists will be featured at the Sex::Tech Conference: Focus on Youth, an Inaugural STD/HIV Prevention Conference about youth and technology, January 22 - 23, 2008 in San Fransisco, CA at SFSU’s Institute for Next Generation Internet.

See the contest website for official rules and details.

I have mentioned in the past that talking with your children about your own sexuality is generally a bad idea. However, there may be times when it is warranted.

The blog Sexuality In Art recently reviewed a graphic memoir called Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. The story is centered on Alison as a young girl, coming to grips with her own sexuality and budding homosexuality and her father’s closeted homosexuality. It sounds like an astute and honest look at emerging sexuality and sexual awareness.

Alison portrays a time and a place where it may be appropriate for a parent to open up and talk in some very general terms about their sexuality. Alison appears to be grasping for that very conversation, trying to lead her father into it, however clumsily.

Looks like it might be a great read, well worth the time of anyone trying to understand a young girl, particularly one grappling with homosexuality, either personally or in her family.

On Sunday night a young man, a teenager, took his own life. He was a senior at the same school where my daughter in is Kindergarten. The outpouring of pain and love is overwhelming.

We are a relatively small community, with something like 250 families, but I did not know the young man well. Nevertheless, the reverberations of loss encompass the entire school family.

As I write, I do not know what extreme internal strife drove this young man to take his own life. Perhaps no one does.

This is a poem that is currently making it’s way around our school community:

I Have Made Ready a Room

I have made ready a room
here in my heart
with walls of warmth
and windows of color
toward every side of the cosmos.

Oceans, mountains, and clouds are without,
within – loving and light:
and here I invite you to come,
dear being I love.

Lead me in what you have learned
now that you have left your body
so early in life
and become a heavenly star:
the up-rising in dying!

by Albert Stefen
(Changed slightly for this occasion)

National Suicide Crisis numbers:
1-800-SUICIDE (1-800-784-2433)
1-800-273-TALK (1-800-273-8255)

Austin/Travis County Crisis number:
512-472-HELP (512-472-4357)

For more information about suicide:
American Foundation for Suicide Prevention

The parental decision of when to start leaving kids at home alone is often fraught with anxiety. Of course, in this age of cell phones, it’s perhaps a bit easier, because the child will always be able to reach the parent. And most parents start by leaving their child home alone for short trips. But eventually parental anxiety wanes, and children are able to stay home alone.

But being home alone can be complicated by rising teenage sexuality. A mother told me that she had called home to check up on her teenage son and asked, “So are you alone?” And the response was, “Pretty much.”

Hmmm…

Suddenly the rules are all turned upside-down. The parental anxiety skyrockets again - not, this time, because of a nameless fear, but because of the very named fear of the boyfriend/girlfriend coming over.

What were the rules you had as a teenager about staying home alone? Were you allowed to have friends over? What kinds of friends? And in retrospect, do you think that they were appropriate rules?

What kind of rules do you have for your teenager right now? How does she or he respond to them?

The Washington Post’s technology columnist recently wrote about a new brand of camera that - you guessed it! - automatically washes away wrinkles and slims the person in the picture. Here’s what he says about the process:

When they work, both can generate a photographic likeness that looks more attractive than the real you — a SuperYou that you can post on Facebook, MySpace, Match.com or any other site.

Nice, huh?

Well, either that or completely over-the-top, feeding into the negative body image, portrayal of a PretendYou. I’m inclined to suggest the latter.

On the slimming mode, you can even choose one of three levels of slimness you would like the camera to impose on this soon-to-be tortured image.

Here’s what the columnist says in the end about these cameras:

Neither of these cameras will make a regular schmo look like a supermodel. That still requires other forms of technological intervention — cosmetics, injections, implants.

But both can cater to people’s vanity at a low cost. That makes them a pretty smart business move for manufacturers. This kind of photo fakery — I’m sorry, embellishment — also fits in with the overall evolution of digital cameras. As easy as some photo-album programs are, people can still be intimidated by the prospect of cleaning up their shots on the computer; some would rather press a button on the camera to have that work done automatically.

So why not build cameras that know more of the editing tricks creative photographers have used on their computers? If a camera can make people look thinner and younger than their physical selves, why not have it also whiten their teeth, dye their hair and blot out their birthmarks?

You will, however, have to know when to stop upgrading your image. At some point, you’ll have to meet people who know you only as a younger, slimmer, blemish-free version of yourself. They could be shocked to see how scruffy you look in real life — unless they’ve been even more aggressive about polishing their own portraits.

Indeed. These camera features sound clunky and not-very-useful in the first place, kind of like a lot of words strung together into-a-meta-word. In the second place, they cater to a kind of image-oriented self-centeredness that I find appalling.

I understand if you want to look your absolute best in your pictures - who doesn’t? But that’s completely different from looking well…completely different in your pictures.

In his column a week ago, Leonard Pitts had this to say:

Sometimes — times of pain, times of commiseration, times of affection, times of joy — you just need to be held. So I was appalled to read this week about a school in Texas — Fossil Hill Middle in Fort Worth — where students are banned from hugging or even holding hands. And it turns out Fossil Hill is not the only one.

From Bend, Ore., to Oak Park, Ill., to Des Moines, Iowa, to Orlando, Fla., to, believe it or not, Cornwall, England, schools are banning hugs. Some say it’s because hugging creates congestion in the halls. But there are others who say these ”PDAs” — public displays of affection — are a gateway to sexual harassment.

My, my, my.

Honey, chill out

…………

No one is pro-sexual harassment or, for that matter, pro-hallway congestion. But surely there are better solutions.

We’re not talking about kids groping and making out. We are talking about hugs. To hug is to reach across. It is to reaffirm common humanity. That is a powerful instinct.

Now the hug joins that long list of banned things. I guess kids who need consolation, kids primed for celebration, kids who just want to know that they are not alone will henceforth have to write text messages instead.

And progress marches on.

What Mr. Pitts did not talk about was what this school ban of hugs is really based on: fear of adolescent sexuality. Hugs can be amazingly sensual, sexy things. And administrators don’t want that in their hallways. But hugs are, as Mr. Pitts points out, also amazingly human.

And we must not dehumanize the school building more than it already is - with guards, metal detectors, regular locker searches, concrete yards, no windows in the classrooms. It sounds more like a prison than a school. And now we’re beginning to regulate genuine, humanizing touch between the young people at these institutions.

Perhaps what we need is more hugs, not less. Perhaps we need to recognize the humanity, including the need for physical touch, that exists in young people, rather than lock them away and treat them as though they are criminals.

When Asa Coon terrorized and shot his teachers and fellow students in Cleveland yesterday, it was not because he had experienced a shared humanity, or perhaps a shared anything, with them. Rather, it was because he had experienced violence as the solution in his personal life, he was ostracized, he felt excluded and laughed at. There is, of course, no excuse for what Mr. Coon did. Nevertheless, it is critical that we pay attention to what was behind his actions so that no one else chooses to take those same actions again.

Because here’s the thing: we don’t need more metal detectors, as has been called for in Cleveland. We need to make sure that teachers, counselors, students, everyone will reach out to anyone in pain. A person who is that angry, that full of grief and loneliness, will always find a way through any but the most extreme safety measures. And as Mr. Pitts says elsewhere in his column:

I’m just not convinced what we gain is worth all that we lose.

So I was blithely searching the Internet when I came across this surprising topic: teenage circumcision.

I was surprised because I understand circumcision to be a useless operation that causes a lot of pain for absolutely no gain. No, it’s nowhere near as bad as female genital mutilation. But there just doesn’t seem to be much point to it. So why, I wonder, would a teenager get circumcised?

Well, there’s no real comprehensive sources of information about teenage circumcision out there. I’m not too surprised about this. Most sites on infant circumcision have a strong message to send about circumcision being either good or bad. The sites with information on adolescent circumcision seemed similarly opinionated. However, most of the sites I found on a google search were message boards, with teenage boys asking questions about teenage circumcision. Mostly they seemed interested in circumcision because their girlfriends were interested in them being circumcised.

So what’s important enough to teenage boys to entice them to get circumcised?

Of course. Getting laid.

I have to admit, I’m pretty horrified that teenage boys are out there getting circumcised because their girlfriends have some misconstrued idea about what a penis should or should not look like. This is every bit as outrageous as teenage boys dictating unnatural beauty in teenage girls (rail thin, gigantic breasts).

I would like to hope that we can teach teenage girls to appreciate both circumcised and natural penises. I would like to think that we can teach teenage boys to appreciate real women’s body shapes.

However, both of these perspectives need to begin being taught at a younger age than teenage. Pictures of beautiful women need to include all shapes and sizes. Pictures of beautiful naked men need to include cut and uncut penises. I honestly don’t understand why this seems so impossible for our society.

What are your thoughts/reactions/questions on adolescent circumcision?

This weekend’s edition of This American Life is a must-listen for anyone with kids or teenagers or anyone who ever interacts with kids or teenagers. Here’s what they talk about:

A raunchy comedian gets booked on a tour…of kids’ sleep-away camps. A middle-aged woman grapples with right and wrong in talking to her teenage daughter about her sexuality. Plus, other stories of adults trying to learn the language of children.

They start out talking with kids about inept adults’ attempts at starting conversations. Scroll down below the picture, and there’s a link for a free download of the episode.

Go take a listen, and then come back and let us know what you think - good and bad - in the comments.

October has been designated THE month to talk about sexuality with your family. So jump on the bandwagon, folks, and be the coolest person on your block by talking about sex with your teen!

A wide range of organizations set aside the month of October, now that everyone is settled back into their school routines, as a great time to talk about whatever issues around sex or sexuality need to be addressed in your family. Maybe you’ve been avoiding this discussion, whether it be about homosexuality, masturbation, condoms and safe sex, how to say no to a potential sex partner, or a whole range of other issues. Well now is the time to stop putting off that discussion!

Here are a variety of sources for you to reference for help in having that conversation:

• How to gut it out…A Top Ten List for Talking To Teens About…Well, you know.
• Planned Parenthood’s materials for parents
• SIECUS’s (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States) Families Are Talking project
• About.com’s extensive information for parents on adolescent sexuality and sex education

All of those sites could keep you busy reading for some time. But only poke around on those for a little bit - then turn off the computer and go start talking with your family!