Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

MTV has a new initiative to reduce HIV transmission. A worthy cause to support an interesting initiative. Anyone can call Stand By What You Say and record a short message. A nifty little software called SpinVox turns your message into text, which is then posted on the homepage.  Everyone who contributes is asked to give a small donation.

It’s being billed as a blog of sorts, but it’s not really a blog in the normal sense of a blog, because there are potentially millions of contributors.  But the focus of everyones contribution is supposed to be about sex - and the site is supposed to be an outlet for supportive safe sex.

So far there are only a handful of contributions on the first topic (sex secrets).  But I am honestly surprised by the quality of the messages and the supportive nature of the comments so far.  Maybe this is because the service has gotten more calls from the UK than the US so far?  (There are also numbers to call if you’re in Canada, Spain, France, Germany, and Ireland.)

This seems like the sort of thing that could really take off and be wildly popular, or the sort of thing that could languish in the section of the Internet labeled “Boring and Unused.”

I called Stand By What You Say, along with a friend, but my post hasn’t shown up on the homepage yet.  Maybe I’ll let you know when it does.  I’d love to hear from others who call and leave a message.  How do you feel about the experience?

So I’m taking the day off. However, please feel free to fill my comment box with well wishes.

So in place of a more in-depth post this morning, please download and read my recent interview with Karen Kreps in this month’s Good Life Magazine about teenagers learning about sex on-line.

See you tomorrow, folks.

Ah, good ole Texas. Always a great place for scandals like this one. So here’s what happened: A senior named Marche Taylor wore a really skimpy dress and was denied entrance to her prom based on it. And yes, it is really, really skimpy. So I get where the prom sponsor was coming from when she told Marche that her dress was too skimpy. But Marche offered to wind her train up and around her torso - and that really should have made it okay. Instead, “voices were raised” and the cops were called and escorted this loud, scantily clad girl off the Sugarland Marriott premises. Honestly, I don’t see what the big freaking deal is.

So here’s where the conversation about this one random girl near Houston, the stinky armpit of Texas, turns into a conversation about the state of our country’s obsession with adolescent bodies and adolescent sexuality. In fact, I wonder if this is even news worthy just because of the recent Miley Cyrus fiasco? Or maybe it’s because silly things like this suddenly go viral on the Internet and out of nowhere everyone knows who Marche Taylor is and that her prom sponsor accused her of not wearing underwear to her prom (Marche says she was).

But really, I think people pay attention to things like this because they get to look at a teenage girl’s body. We are, as a culture, both obsessed and repelled by teenage girls ‘bodies. We want them to be shown off and considered sexy in the right ways (like your standard prom dress or a bikini on the beach) but not in the wrong ways (like Marche or Miley). But teenage girls are never really given a good, solid list of guidelines and what’s appropriate can change far too quickly for the average teenage girl to be expected to keep up.

Let’s get back to that liking to look at teenage girls’ bodies. When we see a news show, or read a blog post (unless it’s this one), or read a newspaper article about a scantily clad 17 year old, the man - the publisher - knows that eyeballs will be had in great droves because people like to look at 17 year old’s bodies. And I’m fed up with it.

As a society, we honor and love youth - particularly the fabulous body part of youth.

But then at the same time we slam (a) a teenager’s too-sexy choice in photo arrangements or (b) a teenager’s too-sexy choice in prom dress.

We can’t do both, folks. It just screws with girl’s minds and makes them obsess at a highly unhealthy level about their body - because they’ll either be considered stodgy and not sexy enough or too slutty and too sexy. The middle ground is a very, very narrow tightrope. So let’s all just breathe. And stop it with the obsession about teenager’s bodies.

Planned Parenthood has a new education campaign for teenagers called Take Care Down There. At least one blog has questioned whether the site is cheesy - or more to the point whether it is too cheesy for teenagers. And yes, it’s highly cheesy. Here are two cheesy things I noticed about the site:

1. The lines are clean and the colors bright and the whole site is somewhat reminiscent of that penguin game the kiddies like so much.
2. The characters in the videos are wearing gender-color-coded t-shirts and are somewhat reminiscent of the Apple/PC Apple ads with their white backdrops and amusing banter.

In other words, Planned Parenthood has made this campaign fun rather that stressful. But I think that’s good. There are links to more in-depth, useful information. And through the videos, teenagers are getting exposed some good, basic information about safe sex. It’s not a sex-ed class, and it’s not comprehensive. But imitating a classroom environment is not how the Internet works, and teenagers know that.

Basically, I’m delighted that Planned Parenthood has gone out and gotten people who know what they’re doing on-line and in advertising to create a funny and engaging site to work as a portal to greater information. I think teenagers will be much more likely to visit this site and to recommend it to their friends than something like this one, and it will stick in their minds so they’ll know where to come back when they have pressing questions. Then they’ll be ready to make their way through Teenwire’s denser, more informative body of information.

So go take a look, and report back: What do you think of the Take Care Down There campaign?

I learned many things at SXSW Interactive.

First and foremost, of course, I learned that geeks are a lot of fun. There were interesting and relevant panels starting at 10am everyday, and when they ended at 6pm, the parties started and went until 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning. The networking and connecting were amazing and fabulous.

I went to a panel on what teenagers want online and on their cell phones, and what they had to say was really interesting. There were really three points that seemed particularly salient:

1. Teenagers don’t use e-mail except to communicate with adults (teachers, family, etc.). Instead they communicate through their cohort’s social networking site of choice (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.).
2. Teenagers don’t use cell phones to talk to each other. Instead, they use them to text message and to play games. This was also true of the participants at SXSW, and I found it rather disconcerting. My old dinky cell phone just wasn’t up to the challenge, and I’m considering getting an iPhone so I can manage to stay in touch with my more technology-enabled new friends.
3. Teenagers don’t watch TV on TV - they watch it online. Based on this point in the panel, and many other conversations about technology, I’ve got to say that I disagree with my new friend Sarah Dopp’s position that TV and Internet time are as different as reading an book and watching TV. Rather, I posit the point that Internet time is a larger, more general category that can and does include TV time. Furthermore, they do both need to be categorized as “screen time” because of the very real impact on our human eyes, brain, and body when we sit still and stare at a screen - regardless of what is on it.

These points about communication are relevant to anyone who is trying to communicate with teenagers, including parents and teachers. Generally the most effective way to reach someone is the way they tend to communicate with their friends in passing. While of course teenagers continue to hang out in person, they are as often as not texting a friend who is in the same room with private commentary on the public conversation. This is something that many adults like teachers and parents just don’t seem to fully get, and so they stand to loose out on the full context of their conversations with technologically savvy teenagers.

I also met a number of sex bloggers (and missed more that I had hoped to catch!). As this blog straddles the world between sex and parenting, it’s been hard for me to figure out really where I belong. So far, I have aimed my time and communication at the parenting blogging world. It was eye-opening and fun to begin talking with the sex bloggers as well.