Welcome back from the holidays!  But more on that later, because I’m too worked up on this topic to be able to concentrate on returning-from-holidays-niceties.

There is a recent meme floating around in the flotsam of the great wide Internet that seems to be causing much inappropriate hilarity.  Here’s the basic gist: A teenage girl (her age isn’t clear) gets her brother in trouble with their parents for some beers hidden in his room.  In retaliation, he rummages through her room, finds her “hook up list,” scans it, posts it to Facebook, and tags everyone mentioned in the list.

You may notice on the list (to the left) that in addition to names, Katie included what acts she’d like to engage in with each boy, and she’s tidily crossed off and dated the boys with whom she has already hooked up.

After posting this to Facebook, and tagging many, many people, Chris got quite a response.   The comment thread shows quite a range of responses from Chris, Katie, Katie’s (apparent) friends, and the boys Katie listed.

Feel free to read through these if you’re include, but the thing to take note of is Katie’s level of distress (pretty high) and Chris’ utter dismissal of her distress (the last comment in the stream).

All over the Internet comment streams are being inundated with “HAHA!” and “ROFL!” and people who try and say this is a bad, bad thing are being slammed.  One comment said, and I’m generally paraphrasing, “I’m a mom of a teenager who is probably about Katie’s age and I know I should be upset, but this is fucking hilarious.”

No, it’s not fucking hilarious, folks, it is, in fact, an extreme example of sexual bullying.

I suggested in one comment stream among friends that this could easily lead to Katie being sexually harassed, abused, and raped and was dismissed out of hand.  But see, what if Adrian decides that he’d rather like to finger Katie?  It’s not so far fetched for him to suspect that Katie would enjoy that, is it?  So let’s say Adrian and Katie are at a party together in a few months, Adrian’s a bit drunk, and he pulls Katie into a backroom with him.  Katie may have changed her mind - she may have decided she doesn’t want to have anything to do with any of these boys ever again - she may just not be in the mood - it doesn’t really matter why she doesn’t want to be fingered in this hypothetical event.  But as far as Adrian’s concerned, Katie has already given consent, even given a public request.  So what’s the problem?  And as long as they’re at it, well, Katie was giving other boys blow jobs, why not him too?

This is hardly a far-fetched scenario.

Was Katie wrong to tell on her brother?  Maybe, maybe not.  We don’t really know her reasoning - maybe she was concerned about Chris’ alcohol consumption for true and legitimate reasons - maybe she was getting back at him for something else entirely.  It doesn’t really matter.  Chris took this sibling rivalry to a whole different level that is, in itself, an attach on Katie.  Even if Katie is never raped, even if she were theoretically never harassed by anyone else (I say theoretically because she is already being harassed in the comment stream), Chris has violated Katie’s sexuality.  He has taken control over a very private matter and, by leaving the image up on Facebook, is refusing to relinquish control over Katie’s sexuality.

This is a pretty terrible state of affairs as they stand.  My heart truly and deeply goes out to Katie, though, when I realize that she has very little recourse for responding.  Given her parents’ reaction to Chris’ alcohol (3 months grounding), I seriously doubt that she will engage her parents for help (which Chris points out in one of his comments).  Does Katie have any other adult to go for help?  I hope so.  But I doubt it.  By reaching out to an adult for support, she would be necessarily admitting to a level of sexual engagement that few teenagers have adults who they trust will react with dignity and understanding rather than blame and recriminations.

Most teenagers probably do know one or two adults who would be able to handle a teenager engaging in sexual activities of this sort and be able to help the teenager move through this painful time with love and trust.  However, many teenagers don’t know who these people are.  Adults who are fine talking about sex - even with young people - often don’t bring up the conversation on their own.  Adults leave the conversation unspoken for so many reasons - they don’t want to expose the young person to ideas they didn’t have on their own (HA!), they don’t want to make the young person feel uncomfortable, they don’t know if the young person’s parents would have a problem with it, and so on and so on.

But if the adults don’t start the conversation, how are teenagers supposed to know who is willing and able to have the conversation?

Was Katie too young to be engaging in mutual masturbation and oral sex?  Certainly, a list of this sort suggests that Katie had an idea of what sexual activity means that doesn’t include a deep connection.  But this question - and the many similar ones that are brought up by this train of events - doesn’t really get at the nugget of what really must be addressed first, and strongly, here, which is that sexual bullying harms people.  Katie needs help and support with this crisis now, and conversations about healthy sexuality later - maybe much, much later.  Far too many adults get this backwards.

Oh, and by the way, the boys who were listed here and tagged here are also being bullied.  So far I’ve only seen congratulatory comments about them, but I highly suspect they might be just as mortified and want the list down just as much as Katie.

I just returned home from a gay dance club.  I like to go dancing - pounding music and blinky lights relax me, apparently, in a zen-like meditative kind of way.  I make no apologies.  Why the gay dance clubs in particular you might be asking yourself?  (Or the answer is obvious, but I never assume…)  Because I’ve found that the music is better, the quality of the dancing is better, and most importantly I’m not hit on there.  The meat market quality of the gay dance club just doesn’t include me.  I get written out of that aspect, but get to partake in the dancing.  It’s a fabulous arrangement.

There are a few gay dance clubs that I’ve frequented at one point or another since I started dancing two and a half years ago.  The important thing to know is this: There’s a new-ish club in Austin that I went to for the first time tonight without a (gay) man on my arm.  I went, instead, only with a female friend.  We went to dance, and I assumed it would be much like my other nights there - no cheesy guys hitting on us, just good dancing.

Oh, how wrong I was.

Apparently two women dancing together in a gay bar scream “HIT ON ME!” in a way I never knew.  This is most fascinating to me because in all of the times I’ve been at this particular club dancing with a man I was only hit on once.  Tonight I found myself asking over and over again - do you know this is a gay bar?  Some did, some didn’t.  None seemed to jump to the conclusion that my friend I might be gay.

So what’s the deal here?

Why if there is no man present do men persist in the belief that one is welcome?  Even in a place, of all places, where cross-gendered dancing might happen, but generally only on a friendly level, not on a dancing-as-a-prelude-to-sex level.

There is a middle school here in the Austin Independent School District that is making the news because of a report of sexual assault.  While taking the case seriously, the news reporters, at least, are comforted that this is an unusual report.

I have had too many AISD graduates crying in my classrooms and my office about sexual abuse that they never felt comfortable reporting to their school officials, or sometimes even their parents, to let this go by without comment.

First, by saying, “Well, it might have happened once, but it’s not common,” is hardly consolation to the individuals involved in this case, but instead continues to label these young people as different and weird - of being different in a bad way, which is often particularly painful to young people.  Second, the research is clear: The vast majority of sexual assaults, abuse, and harassment is not reported.  So the absence of reporting does not mean that there is not a problem.

I teach community college classes that draw heavily on students from the public high schools in the surrounding area, and what I know from my students is that sexual assault, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment are not uncommon.  Now, perhaps it is uncommon for a middle school student to sexually assault another student during class time.  But saying that this is “an isolated incident” is whole unwarranted.  To go on to say that there were no reports of sexual assaults in AISD in 2008 and that the only ones besides this one in 2009 have been dismissed (the implication being that this was the only example of sexual violence in AISD in 2008 or 2009) is a vast misrepresentation of reality.

The reality of the situation is that preteenagers and teenagers are sexually assaulted and sexually harassed by their peers.  Burying our heads in the sand and saying it’s rare is not a fix - or even a band-aid - but it continues the harm of the victim by making them standout as freakish.  Our children need education on how to recognize sexual abuse when it happens, how to stop it, how to get help, and how to support each other through the process.

Ideally we would live in a culture where this sort of thing never happened.  But we don’t live in an ideal world, and pretending we do isn’t going to make it so.  The only way to reduce sexual abuse is by bringing it out in the open and having the extraordinarily painful conversations that it requires.

This morning a fellow teacher who, according to his degrees and professional standing, appears competent to do research, perform statistical analysis of the output, and make balanced statements about populations made such an outrageous statement to me that I am still having a hard time comprehending it.  He said:

“Fat women all hate prostitutes.  The skinny ones are fine with it because they’re not threatened.”

The mind is simply boggled.  When I suggested that perhaps he was making a generalization, he staunchly held to his argument.  He said, in fact, that he could tell me which of my students were okay with prostitution and which ones weren’t with 98% accuracy just by looking at them.

When I suggested that he was simply stating a layman’s opinion rather than a research-based assumption, he went on and on about how all of the women he’s met have fallen into those two categories (i.e., fat = anti-sex-workers; skinny = pro-sex-workers).  This man was clearly talking out of rear end rather than his mouth.

But it’s not an uncommon thing to hear someone making obscene judgments about other people based on their physical appearance.  Gender, sexual orientation, religion, marital status, parental status, even beliefs about prostitution, are apparently openly obvious by simply looking at someone from across the room.

It is just not that easy.  If it were that easy, everything about our lives would be radically different.

Even people who we think we know to some degree - for example, the parents of our children’s friends - often will surprise us when we sit down and have an open and honest conversation about topics relating to sex and sexuality.  We cannot make the judgment that other essentially good, interesting, intelligent, engaging adults will come to the same conclusions as we do - particularly about our children’s (and more specifically, their children’s) sexuality education or sex lives.

Plenty of parents think that young people should wait until they’re in college - or married - before they have sex.  Plenty of parents think it’s appropriate for young people to experiment sexually as teenagers.  I know from talking to many, many parents that you just can’t tell which perspective any given person has until you ask them.  Religion, education, age, and gender are all relatively un-useful indicators.  Maybe on a population-wide basis you can make an educated guess, but without an honest conversation all you’re doing is guessing.

The man I spoke with this morning said to me, “I’m going to look this up in the literature, and if you’re wrong, I’m going to know that you are angry and unhappy.”  Don’t be that guy.  Rather than making assumptions about other people, ask them.  Especially when other people’s children and sex are concerned.

Folks, I want to talk with parents - mothers or fathers - who feel basically comfortable with their teenager(s) being on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, etc.  There are lots of parents who feel pretty passionately about watching over their teenagers in one way or another - by “friending” them, keeping their passwords, and just flat-out telling them they can’t be on these sites.  These are not the parents I hope to talk with.  If you are aware that your teenager is on these sites (or at least one of them), and you pretty much trust your teenager and do not intervene, I’d love to talk with you.

Please e-mail me (karen.rayne@gmail.com) or leave a comment here (http://karenrayne.com/2009/11/17/parents-and-teens-and-social-networking/)…

Please feel free to post this request anywhere you feel would be appropriate.

While this is not a topic that is terribly related to adolescent sexuality, it is one that is receiving a lot of attention recently.

One week ago the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether sentencing a juvenile - someone under 18 years old - to life in prison without the possibility of parole is cruel and unusual punishment.  In Roper vs. Simmons in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to impose the death sentence for a crime committed when a person is under the age of 18.

This New York Times Op-Ed piece argues that too many teenagers do not have sufficient emotional and brain development to be, in effect, written-off as unchanging and unchangeable.  It’s an effective argument.  It is also important for parents to understand that their teenagers - even the ones who seem like they have developed so much by the time they are 16, 17, and 18, still have years of brain development ahead of them.

Below is a video about a young woman in California - currently 29 - who was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole when she was 16.  It is deeply moving, and well worth watching.  Our legal system does not respond to or address teenagers as effectively as we could - as effectively as we should - as effectively as we must.  We are loosing potentially active participants in our civic society, needlessly conscripting an individual’s life to very narrow confines, and frankly, wasting a lot of money, by relegating these young people to a life in prison.

The Western world has been divided into male/female for many years.  This division is slowly dissolving, and not surprisingly it is our young people who are pushing this crusade.

There’s a recent article in the New York Times called Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School? It’s not a terrible article, although it does make unfounded assumptions and statements and provides unchallenged statements that are ignorant and insulting.

The article starts poorly here:

“Rules” + “teenager” = “challenges.”

While there is a certain segment of the population that probably laughs appreciatively at this question, while nodding their head, it’s a fallacy that teenagers and rules don’t get along - in fact, teenagers and rules tend to get along famously if teenagers feel they have ownership and partnership in creating and implementing the rules.

We move on to a generalized statement of the situation:

In recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate — or confound — gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

I am delighted to see this profound acknowledgment in a print institution like the Times.  This evolving understanding and acceptance of gender is a dramatic contribution by the up-and-coming generation in the way of the evolving understanding and acceptance of inter-race relations was over the past decades.

Take a look at Genderfork, for example.  It’s a blog with pictures, videos, quotes, and profiles of people who identify as queer - or rather as non-traditional in regards to gender or sexual orientation. Our evolving world is continually more open and accepting of androgyny and playing with gender.

But back to our Times article.

For bonus points, who can point out what is so terribly wrong with this paragraph:

And safety is a critical concern. In February 2008, Lawrence King, an eighth-grader from Oxnard, Calif., who occasionally wore high-heeled boots and makeup, was shot to death in class by another student.

Apparently many administrators hide behind safety concerns when they require students to wear gender-specific clothing.  This is a bunch of malarkey.  If there are safety concerns afoot, the people whose behavior needs to change are the individuals who are causing harm, not the ones who are being harmed.

Why is this backwards approach even still a question?

If a person is beat-up because they like the color green, telling them to change their favorite color will not address the underlying issue of violence.  Instead, we need to educate and provide therapy for the person who believes it is appropriate to perpetrate violence against the green-color-lovers among us.

And this comes down to school culture, which is ultimately what determines whether the student body accepts their peers or harms them.  This culture set by the administration, more often than not.  The Times article ends with this anecdote:

SOME guidance counselors say that while safety concerns can not be dismissed, high school administrators shouldn’t presume that such students will be targeted by peers.

Jeff Grace, faculty adviser for a gay-straight alliance club at high school in Columbus, Ohio, said he has seen student perceptions change over the last decade.

One student, Mr. Grace recounted, born male and named Jack, has long, straight hair and prefers to be referred to with a female pronoun. Jack is careful not to violate the dress code. She favors tops that are tapered but not revealing, flats, lip gloss.

“One day I heard a student say, ‘Man, there was a girl in the guy’s restroom, standing up using the urinal! What’s up with that?’ ” Mr. Grace recalled.

Bathrooms can be dangerous for transgender students. But the other student replied off-handedly, “That wasn’t a girl. That’s just Jack.”

And ultimately, acknowledging each individual simply as themselves is exactly what we need to do - and hopefully exactly what our children will continue to teach us how to do.

(I am choosing to ignore this fallacy, which apparently the Times chooses to continue to propagate: “the latest styles that signify a gang affiliation, a sexual act or drug use.”  But in the event that you’re asked, most teenagers have nothing to do with styles that signify sexual acts.  It’s a ridiculous concept and needs to be pitched along with other urban legends.)

Gang rape, pulling a train, gang bang, serial sex.  These painful words that hurt, following or preceding or completely apart and separate from the acts they describe.

And then that one word that looms so large: SLUT.

And the smaller ones words that follow: she wanted it, she asked for it, dresses like a whore, I knew a girl once and she totally wanted it with all those guys in one night and I can prove it to you because her name is…

And this one: If a prostitute is made to have sex, is that rape or is it shop lifting?

I have heard all of these statements in my classes, and so I stand up in front of my students and read first person accounts from rape victims and prostitutes and girls who were called a slut in high school.  I tell these stories, occasionally tearing up during my readings, often seeing tears in my students’ eyes, so that my students will learn on a deep and integral level that women and men are hurt by these words and actions.  I have had many students ranging in age from twelve to thirty tell me that they had never really, thoroughly realized what pain is caused through rape and rumor until my classes.

It has been a painful week in the news for adolescent sexuality.  On Monday the New York Times published this top-notch piece about teen runaways, who often turn to prostitution to keep a roof over their heads and are then treated as criminals by the justice system that should be trying to help them.  And then last Friday a fifteen year old girl was brutally assaulted and gang raped outside her homecoming dance.

That link back there is to the AOL story.  Two of today’s recent comments are: “Is she hot?” and “Anyone want to bet this 15 year old girl knew some of these guys and hung around with this low life crowd by choice prior to this rape.”  I am so deeply horrified by this response.  I hadn’t written on these particular events because I assumed that it would be all over the news - which it is - and that the actions of the rapists would be roundly vilified.  I clearly have too high a standard for the general American public.  I read a post today from the Yes Means Yes blog called Bracing For The Rape Apology, and I thought it was an extreme post.  Clearly I was devastatingly wrong.

I live in a society where victims are blamed for being assaulted.  I challenge rape jokes constantly, reminding people that rape is not a joke and it is not funny.  The constancy of this pain in our lives is overwhelming, and we cause it, each and every one of us.  Clear sexual boundaries are not optional, both in actual actions and in our words and opinions.  We each carry this responsibility with us everywhere we go, to hold our fellow people to clear sexual boundaries in their words and jokes so that their actions are not thrown around as lightly either.

_____________________________

I had planned to write today on my morning college class, which was truly a delightful, soul-empowering, sexually-supportive class.  These extreme highs and lows that are possible in this field of sexual education are astonishing.  But the education has such extremes because sex inherently has the same extremes in our society.

Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, blogs, blogs, and more blogs - so much online space, so many questions!

I am delighted to announce that I will be moderating a panel called Negotiating The Parent/Teen Divide Over Social Networking at SXSW Interactive 2010.

I’m very excited about this panel as an opportunity for parents and teenagers to speak directly to the social networking companies about how they negotiate use within the home.

Now, this is a topic that parents vary widely on - some parents give their teenagers free reign on social networking sites, others dramatically limit what they can do, and some even require their teenagers to provide the parents with their passwords.  I will soon be creating a survey about how families negotiate social network use by teenagers, but I’m interested in hearing from my readers first in the comments section:

1. What are the rules in your house about social networking sites?
2. How well do these rules work or not work for you and your teenagers or your parents?
3. Have the rules changed over time?
4. How knowledgeable are your - or how knowledgeable are your parents - about social media?
5. And whatever else you think would be interesting or important to me!

I do, by the way, have my own opinions on these matters, and I’m sure I’ll be sharing them with you in more detail as I ponder my panel.  But for right now, I’m interested in what you have to say, so please share!

I had the pleasure of seeing Spring Awakening on Tuesday.  I had never seen it, nor had I read a full plot description.  So while I knew it was one of those things I needed to see, I didn’t have any preconceptions or really any details at all.

What I found in Spring Awakening was a portrayal of a deep understanding of the emotional lives of teenagers.

There are many points I could talk about from Spring Awakening, and I might go into all of these over time, but first I want to talk about the opening song: Mama Who Bore Me.  Listen to this song, it’s amazing:

And you can read the lyrics if you’d like.  Although it’s really no substitute for listening to this haunting song.

There are, of course, plenty of good reasons not to give too much good, comprehensive sex education too soon.  And as soon as that starts being a problem on any kind of large-scale here in the US I’ll start railing against it and begging parents and teachers to - for the sake of the children - wait until later elementary or middle school.

As it is, this is not often a problem.  Far more common is for parents to ignore their children’s development, both emotional and physical, and to leave these conversations until it is too late.  In Mama Who Bore Me, Wendla Bergmann asks her mother why she has not given her the critical information about sex that - later in the musical - might have kept her from getting pregnant.  While most young people today find out from a variety of means, if not their parents, what exactly causes pregnancy, plenty have no idea about condoms - most importantly how or where or even if it’s legal for the young person to access them.

Wendla begs her mother in a very straightforward fashion to give her more information, her mother tries her best, but ends up balking.  Most parents don’t have the pleasure of a child begging for more information - they have only silence and evolving winces and giggles between their child and his or her friends.

Sex education is not something that can be ignored in the family - it has to start there, even if the child has a really great comprehensive sexuality education program to attend out of the home.  Indeed, sex education both in the home and in the classroom are really necessary in order to fully and completely educate and support a young person in their sexual development.

Listen to that song again.  It is the pain of a young person who doesn’t have the knowledge she needs.  In the end, and through a botched illegal abortion, Wendla dies because of her lack of knowledge.  Sex education is a life-or-death matter, both emotionally and physically.  Our children need us - they depend on us - to teach them what they need to know.  I have never seen this dire reality portrayed as vividly or deeply as it was in Spring Awakening.  It is all the more disheartening that the original play was written in 1891, and yet we continue to fight the same issues - and in particular this one of parental neglect of proper sex education still holds so strong.