Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

I am hoping to present a panel at the 2009 SXSW Interactive Festival - and I need your help!

First here is information about the panel I’d like to present:

Sex Ed Online: How Teens Self Savvy

Creators of popular online teen sexuality content—including the Midwest Teen Sex Show and Scarleteen.com—community educators, scholars and advocates discuss teenagers, sex, and the Internet. Content developers, parents and teens: Bring your questions, fears and hopes. We’ll answer generational quandaries. Sexy prizes for the best questions

Yep, that’s right, I’m hoping to present with Heather Corina from Scarleteen and Nikol Hasler from the Midwest Teen Sex Show.  Rock’n'roll, eh?

And for those of you who are wondering, here is a bit about the SXSW Interactive Festival:

The SXSW Interactive Festival (http://sxsw.com/interactive) is an industry conference for web developers and digital creatives, held in Austin and now in its 15th year. These days the conference has become so popular that it gets hundreds of proposals, like mine, from people who would like to present at the conference.

This is why I need your help! To help the SXSW Interactive folks sort out what people what to hear, the conference organizers now use a web-based panel picker. Please visit and use the panel picker and to place a vote on it for my proposal and leave a comment.  It’s fine if you don’t currently have plans to attend SXSW Interactive 2009 - anyone at all can vote and leave a comment!

Leaving a comment would be especially helpful, because the SXSW people pay more attention to those comments than anything else.

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==> Please go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/  and, in the search box, enter “Sex Ed” in order to quickly find the listing for my proposal, place your vote and leave a comment. The panel picker will be active until August 29. Please act now!
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It will take you less than 3 minutes and costs nothing, but you must open an account on the panel picker to post a comment. You are not signing onto any e-mail lists by giving  your information, and you do not need to attend the conference nor must you have attended it in the past in order to vote for my panel.  While votes to rate the proposal (1-5 stars) are valuable, I’m told that what really counts with the organizers it is having comments written about why someone would be a good speaker and/or why the topic is of interest. So please vote for my idea and comment

And here are more details about the panel:

I’m very excited about the wonderful women who will be on this panel: Karen Kreps, Heather Corinna, Nikol Hasler, Kris Gowan PhD.

* Karen Kreps will be moderating the panel. Karen has more than two decades developing interactive content (www.netingenuity.com), and has written and published the book, “Intimacies: Secrets of Love, Sex & Romance,” a collection of columns she has written for The Good Life magazine. See http://trueintimacies.com. For six years, Karen hosted monthly public discussions about love, sex and romance.
* Heather Corinna is a sex educator and activist, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, and author of “S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.” Heather, via her website Scarleteen, serves tens of thousands of teens and young adults internationally every day, making sure they have a trusted place to ask questions they can’t ask anyone else.
* Nikol Hasler is one-third of a highly entertaining podcast, “The Midwest Teen Sex Show.” A Midwestern mother of three (who isn’t afraid to use her children in the service of sex education) Nikol has no formal training as a sex educator but along with her co-creators Guy Clark and Britney Barber, she has created a great sex education tool, playing with stereotypes not just about sex, but about age, race, class, and orientation in a way that is engaging and opinionated enough to be useful.
* Kris Gowan has a Master’s in Education in Human Development and Psychology and a PhD in Child and Adolescent Development. She is the author of “Sexual Decisions” (Scarecrow Press, 2003) and started www.teensforum.com (but left before it became overly commercialized) Her research has focused on healthy relationships/sexuality in adolescence and lately on positive youth development and the intersection between youth, the Internet and sexual development/sexual identity.

Some of the questions that will be answered on this panel include: 1. What do teens want to know about sex? 2. How do they use the Internet to find answers? 3. Which social media tools provide the best sexual education? 4. What positive or negative impact can the Web have on teen sexuality? 5. At what ages should online use by children and teens be monitored? 6. Are parents abdicating their roles as sex educators to the Internet? 7. Does online info encourage or discourage sexual experimentation by teens? 8. What role does the Internet play in educating youth about sex? 9. Can the government regulate online sex education and should it? 10. Can online sex info be trusted for accuracy?

I will be most grateful for any support you can offer and hope that you will please use the Panel Picker and vote for my proposal. Thanks!

==> Please go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/  and, in the search box, enter “Sex Ed” in order to quickly find the listing for my proposal, place your vote and leave a comment. The panel picker will be active until August 29. Please act now!

As I have mentioned in passing in this space, I am a Unitarian Universalist. I grew up going to UU churches, and I consider my Unitarian Universalism to be a major part of my identity. I attend Wildflower Unitarian Universalist Church in Austin, TX, where I gather weekly with adults and youth to deepen my understanding of the divine and my commitment to making the world a more sustainable and kinder place to be. While I am not reticent in stating my faith when asked, I rarely go out of my way to expressly identify myself as a UU. Instead, I work to exemplify my faith through my actions and my work.

Today is different.

This morning an armed man walked into the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee and fired on the congregation sitting in their morning services. Two are dead, and more are in critical condition. There is no evident motive. The shooter is in custody.

Today I stand with Unitarian Universalists around the world as we send support and love to the Knoxville UUs through our prayers and our thoughts.

Here is the message sent out by Rev. William G. Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association:

I am shocked and sorrowed by the terrible shootings in the sanctuary of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.

My heart is heavy and my prayers are with our injured sisters and brothers in Knoxville. While many details of this tragedy remain unclear, our Association will do all we can to support Unitarian Universalists in Knoxville in the hard days to come.

A tragedy such as this makes us acutely conscious of the beauty and fragility of our lives and those of our loved ones. I am especially saddened by this intrusion of violence into a worship service involving children and youth.

I know that many people, both in Knoxville and around the country, are struggling with shock and grief right now. I pray that those so affected will find strength and comfort.

Members of the Unitarian Universalist Trauma Response Ministry are on their way to Knoxville to offer additional ministry to the congregation as it grieves. And Unitarian Universalists around the world are sending love and prayers to the Tennessee Valley congregation to tell them they are not alone on this dark day.

Yes, I am struggling with shock and grief. I know that many of my readers are Unitarian Universalists, and I know that you are working through this difficult time as well. Know that we will stand together and we will lean on each other for support. Our shared faith and doctrine of love will carry us through these terrible times.

Regardless of your religious affiliation, please pray, meditate, and send healing love and energy to our community in Knoxville.

Well, I tried to post an ABBA video from YouTube this morning, but for whatever reason it’s not working. So you’ll have to wait for your morning dose until it shows up or I give up and re-post it.

I have been thinking about age this morning. I’m making friends with a delightful young man I’ll call Charles. I met him out with his friends this week for the first time, and we had a lovely time. He was teaching me how to three-step (or something?) at a local, completely empty gay bar. Lots of fun, and I quite liked his friends. At one point in the evening Charles mentioned he was from a certain small Texas town where one of my good friends is also from. I asked his age, wondering if they might know each other. And Charles got weird on me - blushed, shifted his eyes around, and stammered out his age. I noted his reaction, and went on with the conversation.

So yesterday I asked him (via e-mail) why he had reacted oddly when I asked his age. His response: “I guess I was worried you would suddenly think to yourself, “Why am I out with this kid…??”" Which is ridiculous, of course, he’s only three years younger than me.  But that stark insecurity came from somewhere, and it got me thinking.

In the last week, I have had two people literally not believe my answer when they asked how old I was - one was sure I was older because of my professional accomplishments and one was sure I was younger based on my appearance. I showed one my driver’s licence (the one who thought I had to be older) and one my business card (the one who thought I was a 21-year-old undergraduate). It’s exhausting, this constant concern about age!

I’m too young to be a professional. I’m too old for my looks. Charles is too young to be friends with me. I’m too young to have a substantial and relevant moral and ethical position. (That last one is a whole other story I won’t even get into here.)

I am so freaking tired of people making judgments based on age! My age, your age, my children’s age, none of this is information you can use to make a personal judgment

Recently I’ve watched several of the old episodes of Doogie Howser, M.D. on hulu.com, which has also brought up some of thinking about age. Setting aside the rather laughable theoretical basis for the show, it’s interesting seeing an image of a teenager functioning in an adult world and dealing with professional slights and injustices based on his age. I remember experiencing the same intellectual slights and personal injustices as a teenager. I occasionally feel them now, albeit not nearly as often.

And ageism can certainly plague the young and the old - just last night a friend cringed in passing at the thought of an elderly couple having sex (and I regret I did not stand up and argue the point as I know that the author Joan Price would have done).

So what are your experiences with ageism? And how do you work to keep your interactions clean of ageism?

This guest blog written by femmes femmes.

While it may be true that many doctors will not prescribe hormonal birth control without a pap test and/or pelvic exam, the reality is that there is no medical basis for such a restriction. Pap tests are for cancer screening: the result of the pap test doesn’t determine whether the patient can use birth control. Neither the US Food and Drug Administration, the World Health Organization,Planned Parenthood Association, or the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists believe that a pelvic exam or pap smear should be required for hormonal birth control. According to WHO, a pelvic exam for contraceptives (including monthly injectables) is a Category C. That is “does not contribute substantially to the safe and effective use of the contraceptive method.” The information that a doctor gets from a pelvic and a pap is not information that is needed to safely prescribe hormonal birth control.

From this article http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/490153

Over the past decade, questions have been raised regarding the evidence-based need for pelvic exams and Pap smears, especially in regard to the initiation of oral contraceptives. There is consensus among several prominent healthcare organizations that the pelvic exam is not required, at least during the initial visit. These organizations include the US Food and Drug Administration,[1] the World Health Organization,[2] Planned Parenthood Association,[3] and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.[4]

There are certainly many good reasons to do a pelvic exam and Pap smear, but initiation of birth control, specifically oral contraceptives, is not one of them.

See also this article:

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/3192

Although hormonal contraceptives are not recommended for women with some serious medical conditions, the problems that make their use unwise are effectively identified through medical history and a simple blood pressure measurement. “Hormonal contraceptives can safely be started based on medical history review and a blood pressure check. For most women no further evaluation is needed before making a decision to use them,” said George F. Sawaya, MD, UCSF assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences and research coordinator for the UCSF-Stanford Evidence-based Practice Center.

Furthermore, requiring pelvic exams for birth control prescriptions is both paternalistic and unethical. The decision to have a pelvic exam should be the client’s: she shouldn’t be coerced into it due to a need for contraception.

See also:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYD/is_20_37/ai_93531936
http://www.managingcontraception.com/qa/questions.php?questionid=36
http://www.managingcontraception.com/qa/questions.php?questionid=635
Heather S. Dixon, Pelvic Exam Prerequisite To Hormonal …
http://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&channel=s&hl=en&q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.medscape.com%2Fviewarticle%2F490153&btnG=Google+Search
http://www.fhi.org/en/RH/Pubs/Network/v21_3/NWvol21-3medbarriers.htm#safeuse
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:SKnqAiWZAj8J:www.contraceptiononline.org/contrareport/article01.cfm%3Fart%3D65+Pelvic+exam+is+not+necessary+for+safe+use+of+combined+oral+contraceptives.&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=15&client=firefox-a
http://humupd.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/10/5/449
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3301301.html

Yesterday I met someone formally who I’ve known for about two years now. It was a delight, really.

Joe works construction. For the past two years he’s been the gate guy for a building under construction at UT. So every day that I’ve gone to UT over the past two years, I’ve passed by Joe. If you’re a regular reader here, you know that I often encourage my readers to say hello and engage with their communities around them. Generally I’m encouraging you to do this with the teenagers in your community, but the principle holds regardless of the age of your friend-in-potentia. So taking my own advice, I’ve said hello and then later good-bye to Joe about three days out of five for the past two years. Joe’s got grown children and six grand-kids. When there’s something official going on at the gate, he’s all business, but when there’s not, he’s delighted to chat for a minute or two. But for whatever reason, even though we always said hello and chatted, Joe and I had never formally introduced ourselves. He knew I had kids because sometimes they came to campus with me, but that was about it.

The building that Joe’s working on will be finished this month. So as my class ended yesterday, I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t see Joe again. As I was leaving campus, I stopped to say a final good-bye to Joe. Here’s how our conversation went:

Me: Well, today’s my last class day! I probably won’t be back until the spring at the earliest.

Joe: I guess that means we won’t see each other again. My name’s Joe.

Me: Hi Joe. I’m Karen.

(we shook hands)

Joe: I’m going to miss seeing you here. It’s been nice saying hi whenever you’re coming in.

Me: Yes, I’ll miss seeing you too, Joe. Here’s one of my cards.

Joe: Oh good! Can I call you sometime to say hi and see how your little girls are doing?

Me: I would love that, Joe.

And then Joe looked at my business card.  And suddenly I wished I hadn’t given it to him.

Because here’s the thing. I love my work. I think it’s important work. Critical, even. But there are people who I don’t talk with about my work. Like my grandparents. Don’t get me wrong, my grandparents know what I do. I tell them when I have parenting classes coming up, and I’ve given them this blog address. But they tend not to read it, and they don’t ask me probing questions about my classes. My grandparents expressed some sadness that they wouldn’t be able to watch the documentary I was interviewed for last month.  (It will come out next March probably - I promise I’ll let you know!)

Back to Joe. He’s a bit younger than my grandparents, and yes, I was jumping to some huge conclusions and making some brass, potentially unfounded, judgments about what he would think of me when he read my business card. (It says “Adolescent Sex Education”.)

So I’m worried that Joe thinks…well, poorly of me because of what I do. My grandparents are proud of me, because that’s just the kind of grandparents they are. If they heard of someone else doing what I do, they would probably say something along the lines of, “Well, I never!” Because I’m doing it, they probably say something more like, “Well, it must be important then! Good for you, for doing something important!” Joe, of course, has no such compunctions about being proud of me.

And this is why I find it hard to state my business outside of business circles. If I meet someone in the context of my work, they’re welcome to disagree with me and argue with or ignore me. But it saddens me deeply when I’m suddenly worried that someone I’ve met in social circles won’t want to continue our friendship because of my work. I’m sad when I realize that in addition to being not-safe-for-work (yes, I know there are plenty of you who consider me that, regardless of my tastefully worded content), I am also sometimes not-safe-for-friendship.

That, in a nutshell, is actually why I do what I do. Sexuality needs to be talked about. It should be a topic appropriate for public spaces. And eventually, it will be. Between now and then, I just hope that Joe and others accept me for who I am: someone whose business is to talk about sex.

I have loved teaching this class at UT. I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and that I’ve been able to guide my students to a deeper understanding of their students’ learning process. Both of these are good things.

But I’m also just exhausted. I’m ready to wake up and stay home. I’m ready to not have hours of reading and grading every night. (Yes, I read everything I assign to the class, the night before we’re due to talk about it. And I assign a lot of reading.)

I’m ready to be back here, focusing on you and your teenagers and supporting their path to healthy sexuality. That will start tomorrow, after I turn in final grades.

Hooray! Freedom!

A father told me yesterday afternoon that he was worried about his pre-teen son’s future break-up habits and how they would effect his son and his son’s future, theoretical dating partners. (Might sound a bit preemptive, but I had asked this dad to tell me his biggest fears around his son’s sexuality, and this is one of the things that he was the most worried about.)

I’m working under the assumption that if one parent has this fear, so do others. So here’s what I told him:

Break-ups suck, regardless of the age. But they are potentially a good long-term learning experience for teenagers. (If there are any teenagers reading this, please forgive me! Keep reading and I hope I’ll win you over.)

It’s good for teenagers to learn how to handle re-grouping after a rejection. And it’s also good for teenagers to learn how to make a considered rejection.

There are lots of times that we get rejected. It can be by a love-interest, by a college, by a publishing agent, by potential job, by a current job (getting fired or “reassigned”). And learning how to hold on to your self-compassion through such an event is critical. Adolescence is a pretty good time to learn - the stakes aren’t as high as with a marriage or a career. It still hurts, it still sucks big time. But it also teaches re-grouping skills in a very effective, hands-on way.

There are also lots of times we need to reject someone else. This can be as simple as saying no to a request for a date to as complicated as firing a friendly co-worker who is the only breadwinner for her family. Again, this can be emotionally draining, but sometimes you’ve got to do it anyway. Not very many people are good at saying no gracefully and then let the other person deal with their own hurt feelings. And learning how to do it as well as possible is better to do as a teenager than as an adult. Because the stakes are lower.

When’s the last time you were rejected or you rejected someone else? Do you feel like you handled it well? Do you feel like the other party handled it well?

Okay, folks, I’ve hit bottom in my ability to write cogently about adolescent sexuality, about parenting, about current events, about all the topics that make this blog fun and interesting. Happily for you and me, I see the way out of this pit. It brightens up particularly well after next Wednesday, when the class I’m teaching at the University of Texas ends. The issue is really that I’m teaching for three hours a day about a topic that is not sex.

So what’s the point, really? I mean, since the topic isn’t sex?

Yesterday I twittered for the first time in some weeks: “Too much talk about education, not enough talk about sex. What can I say? Sex is just more fun than learning.” And I hold by it. I miss writing here every day, I miss my consultations with parents, I miss my parent classes.

Nevertheless, here is a lovely missive from my slightly-punchy students yesterday morning:

Girl (dating, no children): “Steven, I love you. I love your life. I want to marry you.”

Boy (single, no children): “Okay. You can raise my children for me.”

Boy2 (unknown dating status, no children): “Oh, you might want to watch out. He’s got a thing about dumping his kids on his wives and leaving them for grad school.”

Girl: “No, that’s okay. I would totally be pregnant and barefoot in his kitchen.”

Boy: “Thank you for the sentiment, but that’s really unnecessary. I mean, there’s no need for you to be barefoot.”

And the class dissolved into hysterics. Literally, several of them laughed so hard they cried. But maybe you had to be there. Or maybe you have to be exhausted from over-reading and over-analyzing every little, teeny, tiny classroom nuance. Because it really was funny at the time.

And another dialogue event from yesterday morning during a conversation on adolescent cognitive development:

Girl: “But you have to be aware of more than just the cognitive development. I mean, so much else is going on in teenagers. Like you have to know what happens when a boy gets a huge surge of testosterone…”

Now, I will admit under pressure to having made a hand-gesture…maybe more like a finger-gesture…but common…with an opening like that, how could you not. I think only one student saw my little finger-gesture, and he found it highly amusing anyway.

So now, here I am, blathering away, nauseous I’m so tired. And thanking my personal, private deity that there’s only three more full class days before I can sleep in and make waffles with my daughters. Not to mention writing better blog posts.

In the meantime, take a look-read here. I think it holds the test of time. And then come back again next week when we’ll be talking about issues like adolescent relationship abuse and “pregnancy pacts” and other whathaveyous.

Condoms vs. AIDS

Happy Friday (and Happy Weekend) to everyone! I’ve started teaching my class, and am bulking up on my academic reading rather than my condom commercials…but this one jumped out as too fabulous to pass up.I also want to recommend one of Hugo Schwyzer’s recent pieces on how and when it is appropriate to talk to teenagers about breaking up with their boyfriends/girlfriends. Hugo’s blog is really great and it’s high time I recommended it in this space.

See you on Monday!

How to hide an unwanted erection

This is a straightforward list of effective suggestions for those teenage boys who are dealing with extensive testosterone surges and who are in need of some assistance in making themselves socially appropriate for the duration.

Go on now, pass on the video or the information to those most in need!