Disney Princesses and their movies are horrible role models for children - boys and girls.  I can talk about the issues until I’m blue in the face, but I think nothing I can say will be as effectiveness as the sarcasm dripping off the following videos.

To be clear: The relationships shown in Disney videos are by and large unhealthy for a raft of reasons, including codependency and emotional and physical abuse.

Favorite line from this one: “You should always find a stranger to obsess over, and then genetically modify yourself for that stranger. Never be comfortable in the body you’re given. If you don’t like the way you look: snip snip! Nothing wrong with that!” - Ariel

Favorite line from this one: ?”Desire is when a man wants you so much that he’s willing to yell at you and beat down your door and tell you if you don’t eat with him, you don’t eat at all!” - Belle

The Times article has a few really good points:

1. We know the brain is not fully developed at 16 or 18 like we used to think, and it is the long-range planning parts that take a bit more time.  While sexuality does not have the same negative repercussions on brain development that are inherent to drug and heavy alcohol use.  Regardless, this does speak to an increased need for youth to spend extra time thinking over big decisions rather than jumping in with two feet.
2. The article goes on to say that “the research on this point is limited. But there is evidence to suggest that when parents provide more information and better modeling early on, their children’s risk of substance abuse goes down. And a 2009 study by the Hazelden addiction treatment center in Minnesota found evidence that many teenagers believed that parental honesty about alcohol use was a positive influence.
3. Dr. Janet F. Williams, professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and head of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on substance abuse says, pointedly, “What you think they want to know may not be at all why they’re asking.”  The article doesn’t elaborate on this point, but it is a critical one.  Your teenager may be trying to bring up something that he or she has questions about, rather than trying to find out your personal history, but isn’t sure how to do it smoothly.  A simple response like, “That’s a pretty personal question!  Why do you ask?”
4. However, if you suspect your teenager is trying to deflect attention away from something he or she did, the Times quotes Deborah R. Simkin, a psychiatrist who is a liaison to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.  Dr. Simkin “drew an analogy to an alcoholic who resists treatment by trying to bring up other people’s issues.  ‘The kid’s trying to divert the attention from an appropriate intervention by a parent,’ she said. In such cases, the parent’s response should be clear: ‘We’re not going to discuss what I did, we’re going to discuss what you did.’”

Ultimately, you don’t have to tell your teenager anything about your personal sexual history.  There is some evidence to suggest it might be helpful, but it’s not very conclusive, and research is notably not about you, your teenager, and your situation.  So it might not be helpful.

But regardless of your choice about whether and how much to share, always be honest.  Rather than making up a personal history, decline to answer personal questions, offer examples of friends, or quote or look up statistics.  For example, rather than answering a question about how old were you the first time you had sex, look up historical statistics of age of first intercourse with your teenager and talk about the differences (or more likely, the lack thereof!) that exist over time or the dramatic differences that do exist between cultures.

Last week, my stepfather, Mosch Virshup, was in a terrible bicycle accident. He is unconscious in the neurological ICU at the University of New Mexico Hospital.

Mosch came into my life when I was already a teenager – I met him through the church youth group as a high school freshman. The first time I met Mosch, I don’t think I made much of an impact on him, but he made quite an impression on me. We were at a church lock-in with youth from all over our district. One of the youth who came with Mosch had taken some over-the-counter pill to help her stay awake. She ended up very sick. Mosch stayed with her throughout the weekend, very sweetly tending to her. In addition to his sweet attendance on an ill youth, I also noticed Mosch’s absolute support for youth to make authentic decisions about themselves. I was fascinated by him.

Mosch quickly became a very important presence in my life, starting at these church gatherings, and slowly seeping into my home life. He moved in with my mother (and I) full-time the summer before my senior year of high school.

I think Mosch was surprised when I started referring to him as a stepfather. He felt he had entered my life too late to hold the role of parent, or anything like it. But he was wrong. Teenagers need parents, and there’s no particular reason to stop at two or three of them. Mosch stepped into my life at a time when I needed his approach to parenting, and being with teenagers generally. A lot of who I am, and how I think it is important to be with and teach young people, is based on my experiences with Mosch as my stepfather.

I don’t think I have ever properly thanked Mosch for his role in my upbringing and my life. I dearly hope I will still have a chance to.

Tired of the pulp eroticization of sexuality? Annoyed by the self-aggrandizement of sex bloggers? Want a more thoughtful, heartier, smarter approach to sexuality, society, culture, feminism, and queer activism? These are the droids you’re looking for.

Kink on Tap is co-hosted by Emma and Maymay.  This week their guests will be myself and Solidad DeCosta.  We will be talking about a delightful range of material (all of which can be seen on Kink on Tap’s delicious page), but I’ll give you the topics that I know we’re already talking about here:

• Why do women leave science and engineering? This is a recent article from Forbes.com, and I’m particularly looking forward to the conversation.  Much of my graduate work was with the Biomedical Engineering department at the University of Texas, and I did quite a bit of reading on the gender gap in the field.  I was also in graduate school when Lawrence Summers, at the time president of Harvard University, made his rather infamous statement about women inherently having lower abilities in engineering than men.  It’s been a while since I’ve had a conversation on these topics, so I’m looking forward to it!
• State department eases passport restrictions for transgender Americans. This is a great step forward!  Two thumbs up!
• Hot new Brazilian dance craze called Surra de Bunda! I just can’t give justice to this in words.  You’re just going to have to watch it.  NSFW.  Most certainly NSFW!

So.  I’ve watched that video a few times over, and I’m still not quite sure what I’m going to say about it tomorrow evening!

Is there anything else you’d particularly like to hear my opinion on, along with Emma, Maymay, and Solidad?  Leave it in the comments here or go add it to Kink on Tap’s delicious page if you’re on delicious.  And I hope you’re able to tune in on Sunday!

Ultimately, I prefer the non-grading format.  I want students to take what they need to know from my classes for their personal lives.  If they are constantly concerned about their GPA, they will instead be focusing on what they think I think they should be learning - rather than what they think they should be learning.  The teacher should not be the focus of a class on sexuality, rather it should be the student.  Ultimately, I do not like using the stick of poor grades in order to force compliance and attention.

I work to make every lesson inherently interesting and engaging, and while I know that I cannot possibly succeed for every student in every situation, I think I come relatively close.  When the material is made personal, tied-in to prior knowledge, and presented in ways that engage multiple perspectives and approaches, students have more fun with it.  When something is fun, students are far more likely to pay attention and learn.  This is the carrot for a good teacher.

So when I have an informal class of students who I am not grading, I can tell when my lessons and classes are falling flat.  The students drift away, paying attention to more interesting, and ultimately more fun, topics.  I am fully willing to compete, because if I am not, I am short-shifting my students.  If students do not want to learn what I have to teach, why should I take it upon myself to try and force that process?

But when I have a class of students who I am formally grading, it is much harder to tell when a particular activity is not as good as it should be.

I have learned, over time, that there are generally one or two students who remain a good barometer of whether a lesson is high enough quality.  They drift - until I bring out a truly quality lesson or lecture - and then they refocus and return to the group.  The rest of the class often follows behind, but in much subtler ways that can be hard to pickup on until it’s too late to re-direct and re-engage.

Right now I have 22 students sitting in front of me, answering questions about the content we’ve covered over the last two weeks.  I would rather be using this precious time together to be learning and talking rather than restating and proving.  But, alas, this is a graded class, and test we must.

One of the things that I am always particularly interested in with a new formal class of students is what brought them into my classroom.  This summer is a particularly interesting group.  I have a couple of students who already have bachelor’s degrees, a high school student, a wide age range, a good gender and gender queer mix, a pair of sisters, someone who is just discovering polyamory, and a substantial range of conservative to liberal.  One of my students shared that his sister signed him up for this course without telling him what it was - and oh was he surprised on the first day of class!  But seems to be holding his own, as does everyone else.

The diversity of the topics and the nuances that each individual class brings is what keeps me completely engaged in this process of educating about sex and sexuality.  I am so blessed to have such a wonderful job!

I do this every semester in the first week or two as part of our conversation about anatomy.  It is rare for American college students to have seen many naked people - just normal people, only without their clothes on.  So I show them a number of pictures from Greg Friedler’s series Naked New York, Naked Los Vegas, and Naked London (Friedler’s website, and a Google search for Friedler’s images).  I particularly like Frielder’s Nakes series because they show the same person fully dressed in street clothes and then fully naked in the same setting.  It is ripe fodder for discussion for people of all ages - from children to teenagers to adults.

This summer, one of my students, An Huynh, wrote a particularly poigniant response to her experience viewing these images.  She has graciously agreed to let me share her response:

“I think I experienced this epiphany in class today… When we were looking at the naked pictures of women, I was thinking “Gosh, females and males look SO alike.”  I started thinking that perhaps men and women are actually quite the same biologically and even internally.  It seems that the clothes we wear, what society has taught to be “right,” isolates us from being alike with one another.  I think it’s our clothes, that are produced by society, that is keeping us isolated from each other.  It seems that our material items are what makes us female and male.  The way we wear our clothes, our hair, our jewelry and even our attitude make us “female” or “male.”  I feel like these things that we wear are materialistic items that make us so different and ultimately so lonely.  I feel like big fat corporate bosses are sitting around a big red oak table thinking about how to make money.  One of them jumps up and says, “We make them feel shitty.  Because people who feel shitty buy more shit.  Ultimately we want shitty people buying OUR shit.”  So they create these advertisements and commercials and TV that create this “norm” that people must become.  I’m so sad about this.  I’m sad because, this is most likely true.  Big momma and papa industries don’t care about people, they care bout making money.  But I’m even more sad at the fact that I didn’t realize how much of an impact these commercials and movies had an effect on me until now.  I just always thought men and women are different.  The phrase men are from mars and women are from venus is a big ass lie.  It’s these goddamn sick riddled commercials, social norms, laws, and religion that has made human being so different from one another.  So alone.  When seeing those people naked, I felt so alive.  I felt that women aren’t as gorgeous and curvy as the magazines make them to be.  I felt that my body was NORMAL.  My body is the same as every other body, male or female.  I realized that it’s those goddamn fat ass greedy son of a bitches that made me feel so humiliated, so alone and so…UGLY.  I’m sad that I use to think this was normal.  That feeling fat, non-curvy, shirt, not blonde, just ugly was just normal.  I thought I handled my self esteem well.  Just think of the several hundred girls being born into a society in which they first learn how to kiss from watching ABC’s “Life of an American Teenager.”  For them to learn that everyone is beautiful on TV.  To learn that being ethnically different is like being ugly.  To learn that not having hips or small boobs mean you were undesirable.  When I saw those pictures it made me feel that if we never had these material items in the first place, and that we were all showing our selves bare and naked, that the world would be such a happier place.”

I wonder if the father is just unaware of his son’s sexual orientation, if he is in denial about it, or if he is blatantly homophobic?  I think the clip is trying to suggest he falls somewhere between unobservant, heteronormative, and denial.

I talk with a lot of parents who assume their kids and teenagers either are not gay.  Many of these parents have gay friends - they would not think twice about saying sexual orientation is “fine with them.”  But they still assume heterosexuality as the norm - they assume heterosexuality for their children.  Perhaps the father in this video would be fully supportive of his son’s sexual orientation if he was aware of it.  But by assuming heterosexuality, he has made it substantially harder for his son to come out.

What do you think of this commercial?  Does it change the way you think of McDonald’s - at least over seas?

I like the slow pace of a long semester human sexuality course.  In fact, with my middle and high school classes, I prefer to meet even less often and stretch them out over an entire school year.  The addition of lots of time gives the students time to go home, think about what we’ve talked about, mull it over with their roommates and parents and romantic or sexual partners.  It gives them time to really start noticing the incredible sexualization of the media around them.

When I have taught fast classes - either college summer school or sex ed for the teenage set - I’ve found that the group becomes quite close quite quickly - but that there just isn’t enough time for them to really digest the content before they are being pushed into another set of ideas.  There isn’t time for them to e-mail me or Facebook me with questions and thoughts.

I am excited to be with this new group, though, because I also think that many college students consider summer their time off - and if they are taking my course, which doesn’t specifically “count” towards any graduation degree program that I know of - they probably really want to be there.  Often in my long-semester courses at Austin Community College I get students who needed a “filler” course - something to bring them up to the number of hours they were required to take - some of them just sign up for any psychology class without regard to the content.  These students are often quite surprised on the first day!

Because I will be spending several hours every day teaching this class and interacting with the students, it will be very close to my thoughts through July 7th.  I will try to mix it up a bit, but I will probably write a lot about my approach to college sex ed - perhaps, for example, counter-pointing what I do in this class to how I present the same material in my younger classes.

Welcome to summer, folks!

A couple of the issues with this report.  First, putting teenage sex in the same category as heroin is just a tiny, tiny bit over the top.  One is a relatively typical and healthy experience of growing up, the other is an illegal, addictive substance.  Second, it does not appear from the video that the page on teenage pregnancy made it sounds glamorous at all.  I wonder why a page discussing the hardships of teenage pregnancy and parenting is considered a reward of any kind?  Third, I wonder how many calls or e-mails the school has actually received?  From the report, it just doesn’t sound like many people are complaining - certainly not enough to justify a news report.

This is so often the case, I think, with topics surrounding teenage sex and pregnancy.  The media over-reports the controversy, making the angry side sound much more vocal and much larger than they actually are.