Tag Archives: sex and gender

Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves

by Jerilyn00H Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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One night not long ago while coming home late from a dinner with friends, I passed frat row near the University of California-Berkeley campus. Groups of girls were clacking along the street in their party uniforms: short skirts, bare midriffs, five-inch heels. One of them stopped and lifted her skirt above her waist, revealing a tiny thong, a flat belly, and some righteously toned glutes. She looked happy and strong, laughing, surrounded by friends, having fun. Then she turned toward a building where two bros, appraising the relative “hotness” of those trying to gain entrée to their party, were posted by the door.

Honestly? I didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled.

I have spent three years interviewing dozens of young women about their attitudes toward and experiences with physical intimacy. On the one hand, girls would enthuse about pop icons like Beyoncé, Gaga, Miley, and Nicki who were actively “taking control” of their sexuality. Whereas earlier generations of feminist-identified women may have seen Kim Kardashian West’s “happy #internationalwomensday” tweet and accompanying nude selfie (Instagram caption: “When you’re like I have nothing to wear LOL”) as something to denounce, many of today’s generation talked about it as an expression rather than an imposition of sexuality—brand promotion done on her own terms.

Young women may not have a million-dollar empire to promote, but they can relate. As one college sophomore told me, she never feels more “liberated” than “when I wear a crop top and my boobs are showing and my legs are showing and I’m wearing super high heels.” She added, “I’m proud of my body, and I like to show it off.”

But a moment later it became clear that unless, through fortuitous genetics or incessant work, you were able to “show off” the right body, the threat of ridicule lurked. The young woman told me that a friend had recently gained some weight. It’s not that she couldn’t wear skimpy clothes, the woman explained. “But she knows how she would feel if there were asshole-y boys who were like, ‘She’s a fat girl.'”

Young women talked about feeling simultaneously free to choose a sexualized image—which was nobody’s damned business but their own—and having no other choice. “You want to stand out,” one college freshman explains. “It’s not just about being hot, but who can be the hottest.”

But as journalist Ariel Levy pointed out in her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, “hot” is not the same as “beautiful” or “attractive”: It is a narrow, commercialized vision of sexiness that, when applied to women, can be reduced to two words: “fuckable” and “sellable.” No coincidence, Levy added, that this is “the literal job criteria for stars of the sex industry.” And maybe no coincidence that young people are growing up with far more access to porn than ever before. Which means their early ideas about sex are drawn from fiction that has largely been produced for male masturbation.

Perhaps nowhere is that influence more clear than in the emergence of full-frontal waxing. Once the province of fetishists and, yes, porn stars, the Brazilian moved mainstream in 2000, thanks to Sex and the City. (“I feel like one of those freaking hairless dogs!” Carrie complained after visiting an overzealous aesthetician.) In 2003, trendsetter Victoria Beckham declared that Brazilians should be “compulsory” starting at age 15. She may get her wish: A study of two universities, published in 2014, found that nearly half of female college students were entirely hairless and just 4 percent went fully au naturel.

Most young women I met had been removing their pubic hair—all of it—since they were about 14. They cast it as a “personal choice,” saying it made them feel “cleaner.” Yet, when I pressed further, another darker motivation emerged: avoiding humiliation. “I remember all these boys were telling stories about this girl in high school, how she kind of ‘got around,'” one young woman told me. “And people would go down there to finger her, or whatever, and there would be hair, and they were appalled…Guys act like they would be disgusted by it.”

“There’s this real sense of shame if you don’t have your genitals prepared,” agreed Debby Herbenick, an associate professor at Indiana University’s School of Public Health. Herbenick studies something called “genital self-image“—how people feel about their private parts. Women’s feelings about their genitals have been directly linked to their enjoyment of sex, she told me. In interviews with young women, she found that those who were uncomfortable with their genitalia were not only less sexually satisfied, but also more likely to engage in unprotected sex. Herbenick is concerned that young women’s genital self-image is under siege, with more pressure than ever to see their vulvae as unacceptable in their natural state. She recalled a student who started shaving after a boy announced—during one of her class discussions—that he’d never seen pubic hair on a woman in real life, and that if he came across it he’d walk out the door.

There’s no question that a bald vulva is baby smooth—some would say disturbingly so. Perhaps in the 1920s, when women first started shaving their legs and armpits, that act seemed creepily infantilizing, too, but now depilating those areas is a standard rite of passage. That early wave of hair removal was driven by flapper fashions that displayed a woman’s limbs; arms and legs were, for the first time, no longer part of the private realm. Today’s pubic hair removal could be seen the same way: We have opened our most intimate parts to unprecedented scrutiny, evaluation, commodification.

Consider: Largely as a result of the Brazilian trend, cosmetic labiaplasty, the clipping of the folds of skin that make up the vulva, has skyrocketed as well. While it’s still a small slice of overall cosmetic surgeries, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, there was a 16 percent rise in the procedure between 2014 and 2015—following a 49 percent jump the previous year. Labiaplasty is rarely under­taken for sexual function or pleasure; it can actually impede both. Never mind: In 2014, Dr. Michael Edwards, the society’s president-elect, hailed the uptick as part of “an ever-evolving concept of beauty and self-confidence.” One sought-after look, incidentally, is called—wait for it—the Barbie: a clamshell-type effect, meaning the outer labia appears fused, with no visible labia minora. I trust I don’t need to remind the reader that Barbie (a) is made of plastic and (b) has no vagina.

It might be tempting to pass off my concerns as the hand-wringing of an older generation. And if all that sexiness were making for better sex, I might embrace it. Yet while young women talked about dress and dep­ilation as things they did for themselves, when they talked about actual sex, that phrase disappeared. Virtually none of the women I met had been told what (or where) a clitoris was. Sex education tends to stick with a woman’s internal parts—uteri, tubes, ovaries. Those classic diagrams of a woman’s reproductive system, the ones shaped like the head of a steer, blur into a gray Y between the legs, as if the vulva and the labia, let alone the clitoris, don’t exist. Whereas we talk about male puberty and the emergence of a near-unstoppable sex drive, female puberty is defined by…periods and the possibility of unwanted pregnancy. When do we talk to girls about desire and pleasure?

Few of the young women I met had ever had an orgasm with a partner, either, though according to one longitudinal study, the percentage of college women who fake it is on the rise, from less than half in the early 1990s to 69 percent in 2013. Meanwhile, a researcher at the University of Michigan found that when asked to talk about good sex, college men are likely to talk about pleasure while women are likely to use their partners’ satisfaction to measure their own.

It’s not surprising that young women feel powerful when they feel “hot”: It’s presented to them over and over as a precondition for success. But the truth is that “hot” tells girls that appearing sexually confident is more important than actually being confident. And because of that, as often as not the confidence that “hot” confers comes off with their clothes.

This article is adapted, in part, from Peggy Orenstein’s new book, Girls & Sex.

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Our Barbie Vaginas, Ourselves

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The Surprising Way Parents Sabotage Their Daughters

by DessieC90438 Posted on May 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Caroline Paul frantically tried to get her ice pick to take hold in the slushy snow. Her friend had fallen into the bottom of an ice canyon and her other friend, strapped to the rope that held all three of them, was headed in the same direction.

Paul needed to anchor herself and pull them both up. But the unusually warm weather on Mount Denali prevented her ice pick from staying put. In those moments on the United States’ largest peak, Paul had to take everything she knew about climbing (very little) and everything she feared about dying (a lot) and set some priorities.

Caroline Paul calls her latest book the Lean In for girls, with cliffs, trees, and rivers. Bloomsbury USA

Before becoming an author, Caroline Paul worked as a firefighter for the San Francisco Fire Department. Photo courtesy CarolinePaul.com

Paul lived to tell the tale, and it’s become one of the 10 so-called “misadventures” that the scuba diver, paraglider, luge champion, pilot, and firefighter-turned-writer shares in her book.

The Gutsy Girl: Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure, isn’t as dramatic as it is thrilling, hilarious, and packed with tips on ways to practice bravery every day. The Gutsy Girl, published March 1, is for young girls but also has a message for parents: Stop telling your daughters to be careful.

We caught up with Paul the day before she went flying in an experimental plane she describes as “a hang glider with a go-kart underneath.” She talked about how we learn to be brave and why the outdoors is the best place to cultivate it. If we want our girls to grow into strong women, we’ve got to let them be gusty, she says.

Mother Jones: What made you want to write The Gutsy Girl?

Caroline Paul: Over the years I had seen that my female peers often said they were too scared to do something, and it struck me because often what they were talking about was not that big of deal, like picking up a bug and putting it outside, like going on bike rides. I didn’t think a lot about it until my friends who are parents lamented to me that their daughter was a real scaredy-cat. In watching her, I saw that her parents were telling her all the time: “Be careful,” “watch out,” “no,” “don’t.” I realized that it was the parents who were really anxious and fearful for her, and that was something she caught from them. I’ve noticed this more, not only with girls but with women. It seems to start at a very, very young age.

MJ: The Gutsy Girl is full of tales of scuba diving, paragliding, ice climbing, and even your eight-mile crawl around a track in an attempt to beat the world record. Not all of your stories are about your successes. How did you choose what to include?

CP: I picked 10 of my misadventures, and I’ve had more than that unfortunately, because it’s the misadventures that really teach the lessons that I want girls to learn. Lessons like bravery, resilience, camaraderie, decision-making, risk assessment, which is a boring word but so important. I feel really strongly that girls are not taught these things; they sort of pick them up as they get older in other areas that aren’t the outdoors.

Caroline Paul in front of her ultra-light aircraft Photo courtesy Caroline Paul

MJ: Why is that a great place for girls to be gutsy?

CP: The great thing about the outdoors is that it’s so obvious out there. When you’re standing on the edge of the cliff with your paraglider and you’re asking yourself whether it’s too dangerous, you’re going to assess your skills, you’re going to look at your fear, you’re going to access your confidence. All of that stuff is super important when we’re adults.

MJ: How can women be more brave in daily life, say, in the workplace?

CP: I often see women’s unwillingness to take initiative in things. First of all, men will do it for them and that really needs to change. I think we as women know that; I do it, too. But men have been taught for so long to try everything.

MJ: What do you recommend for girls who don’t have access to mountain climbing, ski trips, or other extreme activities?

CP: Adventure can happen super close to home. You don’t have to go to far-off countries and you don’t have to climb big mountains and buy fancy equipment at all. An adventure is getting on your bike with your friends; an adventure is hiking through a new park. It’s really about getting outside your comfort zone—then you have become successful adventurer.

MJ: Who are some of your heroes?

Elizabeth “Bessie” Coleman went to France to get her pilot’s license in 1920 when she wasn’t allowed into American flight schools. wikipedia commons

CP: When I was growing up, I didn’t have any. The only hero I knew of was Amelia Earhart; it seemed like she was the big exception to the rule. In other words, women didn’t do adventuring. But upon researching this book I realized there were a lot of women I could have been told about. My favorite is Bessie Coleman, a storm pilot and parachutist. She was African American and female, and since none of the flight schools would allow her to study with them, she went to France. Not only the fact that she wanted to fly back then (in the early 1900s), which is an obstacle psychologically as well as logistically, but then to face all that prejudice and all those naysayers and still do it? That’s the ultimate definition of gusty.

Caroline Paul says it’s not about being fearless, but learning how to manage the emotion. Photo courtesy Caroline Paul

MJ: What’s the hardest part about being gutsy?

CP: Managing fear, which I think a lot of girls and women don’t bother to do because we are infiltrated by this idea that we should be fearful. I’m seeing from other people just how deeply they feel that girls are more fragile than boys. What they’re not thinking about is that before puberty girls are actually stronger than boys, most of the time they’re ahead in terms of coordination and emotional maturity. But studies show that they are already inculcated with the idea that they could get hurt when they think about things like riding bikes. We teach them at such a young age that they are fragile. I hope that this book combats that.

MJ: How are you gutsy in your everyday life?

CJ: Well as a writer, just putting words on the page is such a heartrending and awful, soul-crushing experience. When you start with a book and tell yourself, really, you’re going to finish this, that takes all the life lessons you learn in the outdoors and you have to apply them. It takes bravery and it definitely takes teamwork. I applied a lot of these things. On more than one occasion, I remember Wendy (MacNaughton, who illustrated the book) looked at me and said, “Why aren’t you being gutsy about this?” And of course people call you on your own stuff and you have to knuckle down.

MJ: Anything gutsy you did recently?

CP: Recently when my dishwasher broke my first reaction was, “I can’t do this, I have to call one of my guy friends.” But the truth is, these days it’s all on YouTube—there’s nothing that any one of us can’t do. I fixed my own dishwasher and I felt smug. And great.

MJ: How can we ignore, or defeat, our fear?

CP: I’m not against fear. I think people think I’m fearless, and I’m not. I do believe it’s important that when you do feel fear you take it out and look at it, and then put it in it’s rightful place. What’s ahead is exhilaration and focus and anticipation—all these emotions that will make what you’re about to do super fun. The fear is just reflective, so put it where it should go, which is often the back of the line.

In the book I also encourage girls to practice acts of micro-bravery. The concept comes from Rachel Simmons, co-founder of Girls Leadership (in San Francisco). She says that bravery is learned, and so we need to teach ourselves and be taught it, and one way is by taking small steps. As you do those you start to learn so much about yourself, where your boundaries are, and what the feeling of fear versus the feeling of excitement is, because they often feel similar and chemically they’re similar. So by practicing daily acts of micro-bravery you’re teaching yourself how to recognize the difference between exhilaration and fear.

We have to start so much earlier teaching girls to stand up in the ways that women want to when they’re in the office. At work, it’s just so late by then.

MJ: Is your book sort of a “no boys allowed” space?

CP: I feel strongly that boys should read this book as well. Girls have to sit through so many books with boy characters, white boy characters. There’s no reason at all that boys should be told that this book isn’t necessary for them. They need to see that there are bad-ass girls out there.

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The Surprising Way Parents Sabotage Their Daughters

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Here’s Why Oral Rape is Not Rape in Oklahoma

by MellissaA42 Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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In Oklahoma, it’s legal to have oral sex with someone who’s completely unconscious, the state’s highest criminal court has ruled.

In a unanimous decision, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that a teenage boy was not guilty of forcible sodomy after having oral sex with a teenage girl who was so intoxicated after a night of drinking that she had to be carried to his car. “Forcible Sodomy cannot occur where a victim is so intoxicated as to be completely unconscious at the time of the sexual act of oral copulation,” the judges ruled on March 24. The decision was reported by the Guardian on Wednesday.

Local prosecutors were shocked, saying the court’s ruling perpetuated victim-blaming and antiquated ideas about rape. Benjamin Fu, assistant district attorney in Tulsa County, described the decision as “insane,” “dangerous,” and “offensive.”

But some legal experts note that Oklahoma’s forcible sodomy law only prohibits oral sex with someone who’s unable to provide consent because of mental illness or mental disability, not because of intoxication or unconsciousness. Therefore, they say, the court’s ruling was appropriate. The state has a separate rape law that protects victims who are too drunk to consent, but only in cases of vaginal or anal penetration, not oral sex. “We will not, in order to justify prosecution of a person for an offense, enlarge a statute beyond the fair meaning of its language,” the appeals court wrote.

The incident occurred in 2014 after the two high school students had been drinking and smoking marijuana with friends at a Tulsa park. The boy, who was 17 years old at the time, gave the 16-year-old girl a ride home; blood tests later showed her blood-alcohol level was .341, indicative of severe alcohol poisoning, Oklahoma Watch reported, citing court records. She was unconscious when he dropped her off at her grandmother’s house and taken to the hospital, where she woke up in the middle of an examination for sexual assault. The boy’s DNA was detected around her mouth. He claimed she had consented to have oral sex, but she says she can’t remember anything after leaving the park, the Guardian reports.

Sexual battery might have been a more appropriate charge than rape or forcible sodomy, Shannon McMurray, an attorney for the defendant, told Oklahoma Watch. She added, however, that it would be difficult to show there had been no consent, since the girl could not recall what happened after leaving the park.

The court’s decision was an “unpublished opinion,” meaning it can’t be cited as legal precedent. But according to Fu, other defendants are asserting the same interpretation of Oklahoma law in a bid to avoid charges in similar cases.

“This is a call for the legislature to change the statute, which is entirely out of step with what other states have done in this area and what Oklahoma should do,” Michelle Anderson, the dean of the CUNY School of Law, told the Guardian. “It creates a huge loophole for sexual abuse that makes no sense.”

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Here’s Why Oral Rape is Not Rape in Oklahoma

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This Powerful Video Shows Just How Violent Online Harassment Is for Women in Sports

by KobyABTxzeisz Posted on April 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Part of the unstated job description for a woman in sports seems to involve dealing with serious forms of online abuse—harassment that often extends well beyond the innocuous jab and into violent, misogynistic threats. It’s a well-documented problem, but that doesn’t matter. It’s a near daily reality for far too many women working in sports.

A new video featuring Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro, two well-known professional sports reporters, brings the issue to the forefront. They gathered some of the tweets they had received on the job and asked a few men to read them back. Here are a selection of those messages:

“One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick, like the whore you are.”

“This is why we don’t hire any females unless we need our cocks sucked or our food cooked.”

“Sarah Spain is a self-important, know-it-all cunt.”

“Hopefully this skank Julie DiCaro is Bill Cosby’s next victim. That would be classic.”

The men in the video appear visibly struggling to recite the disturbing language other men have directed at Spain and DiCaro. “I don’t think I can even say that,” one man says. “I’m having trouble looking at you when I’m saying these things,” another says.

The video ends with several of the men apologizing for having anything to do with bringing back the tweets. They are clearly taken aback with the material they’ve just read. As for Spain and DiCaro, they sit nearly silent; their familiarity with the experience didn’t make it any easier to handle.

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This Powerful Video Shows Just How Violent Online Harassment Is for Women in Sports

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Congressional Republicans Found the Most Useless Way to Combat Race and Sex Discrimination

by JulianneR05 Posted on April 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republicans in Congress are trying to end race and sex discrimination—in the womb. The Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA) would ban abortion on the basis of the race or sex of the fetus. Republicans say the measure is necessary to protect the civil rights of African Americans and women.

“It took the Civil War to make the state-sanctioned practice of human slavery come to an end,” said Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), the bill’s author, during a recent hearing on the measure. “One glaring exception is life itself, the most foundational civil right of all.”

According to Franks, who has introduced various versions PRENDA since 2008, ending race- and sex-selective abortions is the “civil rights struggle that will define our generation.” During a hearing by an all-male committee earlier this month, Franks also noted that upward of 50 percent of African American babies are “killed before they’re born,” and that “a Hispanic child is three times more likely to be aborted than a white child.”

The proposed measure would make it illegal for a physician to perform on abortion on a pregnant woman who wants the procedure because the fetus isn’t her desired sex or race. Under the measure, the father of the unborn child and the pregnant woman’s parents could sue a physician who performs such an abortion. Doctors would also be required to report suspected cases to law enforcement.

It’s unclear where Franks is getting his numbers. A 2012 Guttmacher report found that evidence of sex- and race-based abortions in the United States is limited and inconclusive. According to the report, two studies using 2000 US census data found that although the sex ratio of first-born children was normal in families of Chinese, Indian, and Korean descent, those families did have a preference for sons in second and third births. The authors in that study were unable to conclude whether the imbalance was caused by abortion or fertility treatments.

But in a single 2011 study, commonly cited by PRENDA advocates, 65 Indian Americans who were interviewed had practiced sex selection, through either fertility treatments or abortion.

More recent data suggests that contrary to some stereotypes, Asian American communities are not biased in sex selecting for sons. A 2014 report by researchers at the University of Chicago Law School and two abortion rights groups analyzed population data from 2007 to 2011 and found that Chinese, Indian, and Korean Americans have more girls that white Americans.

Evidence to suggest that black and Hispanic communities are targeting their abortions is even less clear. According to Guttmacher, abortions are more common in black communities than white ones because unintended pregnancies are also more common. As a result, African American women get abortions at a rate five times higher than white women. “The truth is that behind virtually every abortion is an unintended pregnancy,” wrote Susan A. Cohen in a 2008 article on abortion and women of color.

In a letter to the House, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of 200 civil rights organizations, points out that health and economic disparities of black and Hispanic women are likely to blame for increased abortion. “African American women and Latina women have less access to contraception, prenatal care, and other critical reproductive health services, resulting in stark disparities across a number of sexual and reproductive health indicators,” the Leadership Conference wrote.

Loretta Ross, the national coordinator of SisterSong, a reproductive justice organization for women of color, told Mother Jones in 2011, “It’s kind of hard to find evidence that a black woman is going to have an abortion because she’s surprised to find her baby is black. It just strains credulity to think that’s a problem. I mean, she wakes up in the morning and says ‘Oh my God! My baby’s black!’?”

According to abortion rights advocates and Democratic legislators, the measure could increase discrimination against pregnant women, particularly women of color, by forcing doctors to speculate on the reasons their patients seek abortions, and then requiring the physicians to report suspected discriminatory abortions. Because of stereotypes that Asian communities prefer male children, advocates worry that Asian women would be especially vulnerable to profiling by their physicians.

“This bill is so horrendous that I could not believe it when it was first brought up,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.). “It is a nightmare. This is a piece of legislation that would impose criminal penalties on providers and limit the reproductive choices of women of color and all women.”

Seven states already ban abortion based on sex selection. Only Arizona, which Franks represents, also bans race-selective abortions.

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Congressional Republicans Found the Most Useless Way to Combat Race and Sex Discrimination

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North Carolina’s GOP Just Fast-Tracked the Broadest Anti-LGBT Bill in the Country

by LeoraMendez Posted on March 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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UPDATE 2 (3/23/16): North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory signed HB 2 into law late Wednesday night, invalidating a Charlotte LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance and similar laws in nine other localities. His office released the following statement: “This new government regulation defies common sense and basic community norms by allowing, for example, a man to use a woman’s bathroom, shower or locker room…As a result, I have signed legislation passed by a bipartisan majority to stop this breach of basic privacy and etiquette which was to go into effect April 1.”

UPDATE 1 (3/23/16): North Carolina Gov. McCrory plans to sign HB 2 into law on Wednesday evening, his spokesperson tells BuzzFeed.

North Carolina state legislators introduced, debated, and passed a sweeping anti-LGBT bill on Wednesday, pushing it through a Republican-controlled Assembly so fast that 11 Democrats walked out in protest before the Senate vote late in the afternoon.

House Bill 2, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, strikes down all existing LGBT nondiscrimination statutes across the state, on top of banning transgender people from using some public restrooms. “That North Carolina is making discrimination part of the law is shameful,” North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper said in a video statement Wednesday.

Republican lawmakers introduced the bill in the House during a special session called to deal with a Charlotte anti-discrimination ordinance that was set to go into effect on April 1. The Charlotte ordinance adds sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes under the city’s existing anti-discrimination law. It includes a provision allowing transgender people to use restrooms at public facilities based on their gender identity and also protects LGBT people from discrimination by businesses and other institutions that serve the general public, like stores or schools.

Nine other localities in the state have ordinances similar to Charlotte’s, but if House Bill 2 becomes law, all of them will be invalidated. In their place, the legislation proposes a statewide ordinance that would protect people from discrimination based on “race, religion, color, national origin, or biological sex.” The “biological sex” provision would be a new addition, and refers to the sex listed on a person’s birth certificate.

State representatives said they didn’t have a chance to read HB 2 before it was introduced Wednesday morning, an hour before its scheduled vote by the House Judiciary Committee. The committee chairman gave lawmakers a five-minute break to read the bill after a request from Democratic Rep. Bobby Richardson.

As this bill sailed through the House, Democratic state Sen. Jeff Jackson listed the bill’s sweeping implications on Facebook:

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Here’s what’s happening – at light speed – in the General Assembly’s “emergency” session right now.In response to…

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The bill passed the House 83-to-25 on Wednesday afternoon, and 32-to-0 in the Senate later in the evening after Democratic lawmakers walked out en masse rather than debate the bill. (GOP Senate leader Phil Berger told ABC News that such a walkout was unprecedented during his 15 years in office.) Gov. Pat McCrory hasn’t said whether he will sign the bill, but when Charlotte passed its nondiscrimination statute in February, McCrory expressed strong opposition and promised state-level backlash: “This shift in policy could also create major public safety issues by putting citizens in possible danger from deviant actions by individuals taking improper advantage of a bad policy,” he wrote in an email to the Charlotte city council, adding that the bill would “most likely cause immediate state legislative intervention.”

With the bill now headed to the governor’s desk, several companies expressed their opposition to it, including Dow Chemical and North Carolina-based Red Hat.

“In blocking the will of Charlotte and other cities,” tweeted the Human Rights Campaign’s Chad Griffin, the Assembly “is trampling on the rights of every taxpayer in North Carolina.”

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North Carolina’s GOP Just Fast-Tracked the Broadest Anti-LGBT Bill in the Country

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These Porn Stars Want the Government Off Their Backs

by Stanton2314 Posted on February 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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Dozens of porn stars—some in business casual, others more colorfully dressed—mingled outside the Elihu M. Harris State Building auditorium in Oakland, California, on Thursday morning, trading notes on the speeches they planned to make when they testified before California’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board (OSHA). After six years of advisory committees and meetings, the board was set to vote on a package of regulations they hoped would protect the actors against sexually transmitted infections—a measure publicized as a “condoms in porn” mandate. But workers in the porn industry opposed the rules, which they said did not account for the realities of their work or respect for their personal autonomy. The Free Speech Coalition, a porn industry trade group, brought porn stars from Los Angeles to join others from San Francisco’s kink- and gay-porn scenes in speaking out against the regulations.

“We’re not fighting safety,” Mickey Mod, a veteran porn performer and producer, told the panel. “These are our bodies, and we work with them every day. Every day, I trust the men and women who are on our side to be as safe as possible.”

Since the regulations were first proposed in 2009, some porn advocates and public-health academics have offered suggestions that they say make the rules more realistic for those in the multibillion-dollar industry. Many of them say they have felt ignored. On one draft of the regulations, the OSHA board dismissed all of the Free Speech Coalition’s 37 concerns, including objections that the measure failed to sufficiently protect workers’ medical privacy and ignored the possibility of using HIV-prevention drugs as an option for protection. “We understand that they feel it will affect their livelihood, but Cal/OSHA’s primary concern is the health and safety of workers,” an exasperated public information officer from the California Department of Industrial Relations, which includes OSHA, told me before the meeting.

A few minutes before the meeting, Eric Paul Leue, the Free Speech Coalition’s executive director, spoke privately to the workers, urging them to stay optimistic and reminding them that the OSHA board was in a difficult position. “Usually, workers and the board are fighting employers,” he said. “In this case, the workers and employers are fighting together.”

After nearly five hours of testimony, in which about 100 performers, directors, and production staff members spoke against the package of regulations—and a few former performers expressed support for it—the OSHA board struggled with the apparent contradiction of workers who were actively opposed to the OSHA protections. “I’m a labor representative. I work with working people for a living,” Dave Harrison, an OSHA board member, said. When he first heard about the regulations, “it was almost like, ‘Oh, okay, the porn industry’s coming out for an issue. What’s going to happen here?'” He chuckled. “But as the rule-making process works through, I’m actually more torn over this than I could ever explain.”

For the measure to succeed, four votes were needed, but it failed in a final vote when three board members voted for the regulations and two opposed it.

Here’s what you need to know about the proposed rules and the conflict that surrounds them:

What did OSHA propose? Some regulations already exist, but the ones that were proposed would have added a section to the OSHA code that specifically described the actions porn producers needed to take to protect workers from STIs. The regulations would have required the use of condoms, plastic barriers (known as “dental dams”) for oral sex, gloves, goggles, and other gear to block contact with bodily fluids that can carry infection. Similar requirements for all industries already exist under federal and state regulations, but they’re not well enforced. Since 2004, when OSHA began enforcing STI regulations at porn companies, they’ve only issued a handful of citations. Proponents argued that new regulations were needed to clarify the responsibilities of adult-film producers.

If condoms are already required, why is this a big deal? Because the porn industry ignores the condom requirement. Many industry workers argue that porn viewers do not “want to see dental dams, they don’t want to see gloves, they don’t want to see kissing with something in between,” explains Kevin Quintero, a cameraman for Treasure Island Media, a San Francisco-based gay-porn production studio. “That ruins their suspension of disbelief.” But if the proposal resulted in more aggressive enforcement, producers and performers say they would be forced to move away from California or to find work “underground.” Quintero says that would mean working for producers “who promote drug use, promote unsafe situations, who don’t care about their performers’ safety, usually only care about the ‘money shot’ or getting what they need. Oftentimes, it can be exploitative…I fought really hard to get out.”

What other regulations would the industry face? The proposal also would have put new testing regulations in place, requiring vaccinations and STI testing every three months. The requirements would have been less stringent than unofficial regulations that already exist in the porn industry under a system known as PASS, in which actors must pass a blood test every two weeks or they are not permitted to work. Repeatedly, performers have stressed that they feel safer having sex with other porn stars in the PASS system than they do with “civilians” outside of work. Some have also raised concerns about the possibility of confidential medical information being shared with their employers.

What’s the opposing position? OSHA argues that frequent testing isn’t the same as prevention. Several performers testified Thursday that they’d gone entire careers without contracting an STI, but past research has indicated a high rate of gonorrhea and chlamydia among performers. Earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report documenting an incident involving male adult-film actors, in which an actor received a false-negative result on an HIV test in 2014 and then went on to infect two other people before his next testing date. Newly HIV-positive performers have forced the industry to declare periodic shutdowns, during which production is suspended for a few days while all the actors receive testing. Advocates have maintained that most infected performers do not contract HIV on set.

That’s no comfort to Sofia Delgado, one of the few performers who supported the regulations at the OSHA meeting. Delgado told me that she had been working in porn for just months when she tested positive for HIV in 2013, at age 20. Afterward, she couldn’t work, and now she says she’s saddled with thousands of dollars in medical expenses each month. “I felt so safe,” Delgado told me. “Everybody I was with was tested, but it didn’t matter.” If her partners had been using condoms, she says, she would at least be sure she didn’t contract HIV while working. Back then, PASS required testing once a month. “You’re having sex every day, so for 30 days you’re exposing God knows how many people to disease,” she said.

Additionally, the new regulations would have required producers, not actors, to pay for tests, saving employees hundreds of dollars per month—a point that none of the workers brought up in their anti-regulation presentations.

What does this mean for porn? The failure of the regulations will likely keep producers from moving out-of-state to avoid fines and hassle. After Los Angeles County passed a law in 2012 that required porn actors to wear condoms and companies to pay a fee to the county’s department of public health, the county saw a 95 percent drop-off in film production permits, which means companies either left, went “underground,” or filmed without permits.

What’s next? The fight over safe-sex precautions in porn will continue despite the defeat of the OSHA proposal. The next time it will be in the form of a proposition appearing on the 2016 California ballot. In the meantime, the OSHA regulators will go back to the drawing board—only this time, members of the board noted, they will listen more closely to the concerns of those in the industry.

Meanwhile, the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which submitted the original petition to OSHA to amend the regulations in 2009, has also pledged to file a new petition. The foundation, which is controversial among AIDS activists for its objection to HIV-prevention medication, is also behind the statewide ballot initiative as well as several lawsuits attempting to compel condom use in porn.

“I always expect the establishment to not hear us, not respect us, not listen to us, not pay attention to our lived experience,” says Nina Hartley, a longtime performer and outspoken porn advocate. “This shows that some people are open to hearing challenging ideas and maybe changing their opinion. I don’t know if anybody on the board likes porn, but they are clearly seeing us as humans, as actual people, and not just as a projection and not a stereotype, and that’s huge.”

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These Porn Stars Want the Government Off Their Backs

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What Happens When a Campus Rape Expert Gets Accused of Sexual Assault?

by UteAunger29908 Posted on February 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jason Casares, the associate dean of students and deputy Title IX coordinator at Indiana University’s flagship campus in Bloomington, has built a reputation as an expert on college sexual assault. He’s well known enough among his peers to have been voted president, in November 2014, of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, a professional group of around 2,700 college officials. Last year, he helped write the curriculum for the group’s training program for campus rape investigators.

For the ASCA’s annual conference this month, Casares had planned to teach seminars on Title IX and on using a “trauma-informed approach” in sexual misconduct investigations. Then, during the conference keynote on February 3, ASCA board member Jill Creighton circulated a letter accusing him of sexual assault.

Creighton’s letter described an evening last December when the two had drinks at a convention for fraternity and sorority advisers in Fort Worth, Texas. “I made the mistake of letting my guard down while socializing with Jason about Association business,” Creighton wrote. “Jason took advantage of me after I had had too much to drink…I did not consent to sexual contact.”

Casares declined to be interviewed, but a statement released by his lawyer says that he “categorically denies the false accusations of sexual misconduct leveled against him by a colleague.”

Creighton, an administrator at New York University who had recently been voted the ASCA’s next president, provided Mother Jones a statement detailing her experience in the days after the alleged assault. According to the statement, she confronted Casares in a text message, requesting that he resign from the ASCA—they were slated to work together on the board for at least two more years—and step back from his position as a public leader on the issue of sexual assault. When Casares refused, Creighton filed an incident report with law enforcement in Fort Worth on December 9.

Detectives are still reviewing the report, officer Tamara Pena confirmed. Meanwhile, IU has placed Casares on paid administrative leave. A school spokesman said that IU also is conducting its own investigation and will review all student sexual-misconduct hearings in which Casares participated this academic year.

Perhaps the most troubling development, though, came when Creighton asked the ASCA board to impeach Casares after she filed her police complaint. The organization—which is made up of people trained in investigating campus sexual assault—mounted an investigation resembling an on-campus sexual-assault inquiry, but, Creighton says, without the same concern for protecting the accuser.

“I was repeatedly told that this isn’t a Title IX matter, and while I understand that, I am speaking my truth to make sure that our Association takes a hard look in the mirror before it claims national leadership on sexual misconduct,” Creighton wrote in her letter.

The ASCA’s leadership had never been faced with a claim like Creighton’s before, according to Anthony Icenogle, the group’s attorney. As student conduct officials, they knew how to investigate sexual assault without the involvement of law enforcement. But in an interview with Mother Jones, Creighton says the inquiry did not reflect their training. “The processes that we run on our campuses are designed to be fundamentally fair to everyone involved,” she says. “At no moment was I provided with fairness.” Among other things, Creighton says that Casares was allowed to hear and respond to her presentation to the board, while she wasn’t allowed to do the same for his.

“The scope of our process was to determine whether or not there was board member misconduct,” says Jennifer Waller, the ASCA’s executive director. “Although we completely adhere to as much as possible the principles of fundamental fairness, the process that ensues from that is very different from a campus process.” (The ASCA later released a letter outlining the procedures they followed in Creighton’s case).

Upon receiving Creighton’s claim, the board’s first move was to temporarily suspend both her and Casares. The ASCA then hired an independent investigator, attorney Shannon Hutcheson, to help determine whether the board should impeach him.

Hutcheson’s investigation, however, leaned on “ancillary witnesses,” Icenogle says—people who could testify to Creighton and Casares’s general honesty. Icenogle made a point to say that Casares and Creighton had gone to multiple bars. (“This wasn’t a one-transaction event.”) Still, Hutcheson “didn’t go through the process of going to the bars,” Icenogle said. “There’s a possibility there could have been third-party witnesses, but nobody was identified to us.” After almost six weeks and at least $30,000 in expenses, Hutcheson presented her conclusion to the ASCA board: Creighton’s story “could not be substantiated.”

When Creighton received an excerpt of Hutcheson’s report, she says she was shocked: “The report blames me for being in the same hotel room, blames me for not crying out for help in the moment, blames me for not taking physical pictures of my injuries…and blames me for confronting him.”

The board’s deliberations remain under wraps, but Casares stepped down on January 29, according to an ASCA letter released on February 4. He remains a member, with “the same rights as other members to attend and present at ASCA events,” the letter says.

The decision to allow Casares to appear at last week’s conference is part of what prompted Creighton to go public with her story. She posted the letter to her Twitter timeline on February 3, after Casares’ presentation on “trauma-informed” sexual-assault investigations. “I felt unsafe in ASCA,” Creighton’s letter says. “I also could not stand the hypocrisy of Jason parading his expertise on Title IX, knowing how he had behaved with me,” she wrote, adding:

This is not something the Association can afford to be ambivalent about. We cannot claim national leadership in addressing sexual misconduct, only to fail miserably in our first test within our own Association…I don’t want to hurt the Association by speaking out, I want to strengthen it, cause us introspection that this can happen even within our own profession, and challenge us to walk our talk not just on our campuses, but in all phases of our professional engagement.

Casares’ lawyer has discussed a possible defamation suit against Creighton. And if an ASCA member makes a complaint about Creighton’s conduct, Waller confirms, she could receive a warning or even face impeachment from the board.

For now, Creighton remains the ASCA’s newest president-elect, though she will take a leave of absence from the organization rather than immediately stepping into the role of president. “These are my friends and colleagues and my professional family,” Creighton says. “To me, it felt like the safest place in the world where I could have possibly reported, and it turned out to be the exact opposite.”

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What Happens When a Campus Rape Expert Gets Accused of Sexual Assault?

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The American State of Teenage Sex, in 3 Charts

by ValentiBernstei Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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Back in 2002, the government funded a study that showed there was no evidence that abstinence programs increased a kid’s likelihood of abstaining from sex. In fact, no studies have found evidence that teaching abstinence works to prevent teenage pregnancies. And yet this year, the federal government will fund abstinence-only education to the tune of $85 million.

Last week, for the third year in a row, President Barack Obama’s budget proposal included cuts to some $10 million of that abstinence-only education funding. Obama has consistently taken an anti-abstinence-education stance over the course of his political career. Back on the campaign trail in 2008, he said he believes contraception should be part of sex education curricula. He wasn’t alone: In 2010, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) took a poll and found that 88 percent of parents of junior high school students and 85 percent of parents of high school students believe information about how to use and where to get contraceptives is an appropriate topic for sexuality education. Even Obama’s first budget as president aimed to make similar cuts to abstinence education funding. GOP members of Congress fought it, and the attempt ultimately failed. The same happened in 2010 and is pretty likely to happen this time, too.

All this means that over the past two decades, more than $1.8 billion in federal dollars have been funneled into abstinence-only education.

The Obama administration has had some victories. In 2010 and 2011, Obama and Congress agreed to eliminate two-thirds of funding for previously existing abstinence programs, and then allocated almost $190 million in new funding to initiatives aimed at preventing unintended teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Meanwhile, as the various wings of the government have been fighting over what dollars go where, teen pregnancy rates have plummeted to record lows over the past three years. What’s more, rates fell 51 percent between 1990 and 2010. The reasons for the decline are complicated and hard to pinpoint; some studies give credit to better contraception and more precise use of it.

But when it comes to American teens and sex, we still have a lot of problems to fix: According to a report by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 41 percent of 18- and 19-year-olds admit to knowing little or nothing about condoms. And more young people than ever—aged 15 to 24—are getting sexually transmitted diseases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 65 percent of chlamydia cases in 2014 were in 15- to 24-years-olds, as were 53 percent of gonorrhea cases. We don’t know which kids sat through abstinence classes, but this is the age group that received the most federal funding for abstinence education. (Although perhaps it’s fair to note that abstinence groups would attribute the increase in STDs to the rise of hookup culture and media representations of sex.)

From 2000 to 2014, the number of schools that required kids to learn about STD prevention dropped by 10 percent. To combat the rising rates of STDs and the lack of education, different states are taking different approaches. A Utah lawmaker is trying to persuade his colleagues to pass a law that allows kids to learn comprehensive sex education in schools—a tall order, considering the moral code of the state. To the west, California passed a law last year that requires comprehensive sex education in schools for 2016. San Francisco schools are considering making condoms available to students as early as sixth grade. They would not be the first California schools to do so; Oakland Unified schools implemented a similar policy in 2014. On the opposite end of the spectrum, last year Texas took $3 million from its state budget for HIV and STD prevention and reallocated it to abstinence education.

For a quick look at where the United States stands on abstinence education and teen sex, here are three charts from an upcoming Mother Jones feature story on abstinence education:

From:  

The American State of Teenage Sex, in 3 Charts

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

by CarmellCvf Posted on January 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has taken a lot of heat lately for its failure to nominate any actors of color for the Oscars, two years running. But race may not be Hollywood’s biggest diversity problem.

The number of women directing big-budget films and TV series is stunningly low. Only 9 percent of the directors of last year’s 250 top-grossing movies were female, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. And women accounted for just 12 percent of the directors on more than 225 shows on prime-time TV and Netflix during the 2014-15 season.

The numbers are even more depressing for women of color. Black women directed just 2 of the 500 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2012, according to a study by the Women’s Media Center. Women of color directed only 3 percent of TV episodes during the 2014-15 season, notes a report from the Directors Guild of America.

The numbers aren’t improving, either. The share of big-budget directorial jobs going to women was lower last year than it was 15 years earlier, when it peaked. The TV numbers have been stagnant in recent years. “Women’s underemployment has simply not been perceived by many executives as a problem,” says Martha Lauzen, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, who has been gathering data on the topic for nearly two decades. “As a result, little meaningful action has been taken to correct the gender imbalance.”

The shunning of female directors is so rampant that the feds have gotten involved. In October, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces anti-discrimination laws in the workplace, began interviewing female directors so that “we may learn more about the gender-related issues” they face. The probe came after the American Civil Liberties Union called on the EEOC to investigate the film industry’s systemic failure to hire women directors. The agency contacted at least 50 women in October, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In an email, an EEOC representative acknowledged that the agency has “had further discussions” with the ACLU about its data and conclusions, but she said she could not comment on any investigation—or even confirm whether one exists. The EEOC, she wrote, encourages the industry to “publicly address the serious issues raised by the ACLU.”

Part of the problem, female directors told the ACLU, is that male producers often make hiring decisions based on tired stereotypes. Women said they were steered toward romantic comedies and “women-oriented” movies, while the most lucrative, action-driven films went almost exclusively to men. Female TV directors said they were offered shows for women and commercials for “girl” products while being overlooked for car commercials or other types of shows.

What’s more, Hollywood producers, who are overwhelmingly male, will often pick directors from short lists that contain few women, or through word of mouth. Women who haven’t yet directed a major project often end up on the sidelines.

Hiring more female directors could be key to improving Hollywood’s gender imbalance. When women are in charge, Lauzen found, the number of women employed behind the scenes increases considerably: On high-grossing films directed by men in 2015, women made up 10 percent of writers, 19 percent of editors, and 10 percent of cinematographers. When a woman was the director, female representation on the crew increased to 53 percent of writers, 32 percent of editors, and 12 percent of cinematographers.

At stake in all of this, Lauzen explains, is how women are represented on-screen. “People tend to create what they know. Having lived their lives as males, men tend to create male characters,” she says. “If women comprised a larger percentage of film directors, we would see more female characters, particularly as protagonists, onscreen, and we would see more fully developed, multidimensional females.” In another study, Lauzen found that women accounted for just 4 percent of protagonists in films with exclusively male directors or writers. But when at least one woman was writing or directing, nearly 40 percent of the protagonists were female.

TV is way ahead of the film industry on that front—think Scandal‘s Olivia Pope, How to Get Away With Murder’s Annalise Keating, or Jane Villanueva of Jane the Virgin. As X-Files star Gillian Anderson (who says she was initially offered about half of David Duchovny’s salary to reprise her role as Dana Scully) recently put it to Mother Jones: “Television isn’t the issue. There are a lot of female characters on TV who are intelligent, and a good enough portion of them aren’t all about the date and the car and the plastic surgery. It’s in film that it’s lacking…I think there’s a lot of female directors out there—I just don’t think their material gets made. Studios don’t believe they’ll have an audience if women make it. A lot of female directors can’t pay somebody to hire them.”

The Directors Guild’s current agreement with film and TV studios has no quotas for women but asks employers to “make good faith efforts to increase the number of working” women and minority directors. Last May, the Guild’s Women’s Steering Committee considered altering the agreement to treat women and ethnic minorities as separate diversity categories. Supporters of the change felt that it would create more opportunities for women—particularly women of color, who would qualify for both pools. The idea never made it out of committee.

But since the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission got involved in October, there has been some movement within the industry. Two weeks after the agency started its probe, several dozens of Hollywood’s leading CEOs, producers, writers, and directors met privately to discuss solutions to their industry’s gender problem. Among the ideas discussed were introducing “unconscious bias” training across the industry, creating more recruitment programs to identify and hire talented women directors, and rewarding studios that show a commitment to achieving gender parity in hiring.

Gillian Thomas, an attorney at the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, says that while an investigation as expansive as this one will take time, she thinks it will ultimately produce results. “I think women in male industries is a priority of the agency’s,” she says. “So I have faith in the process working.”

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Hollywood’s Pathetic Treatment of Women Is Ready for Its Close-Up

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