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Please Advise | Nikki Darling

Friend and writer Nikki Darling has words for your advice column:

“5. If you go to the gym or have a gym membership take the New Yorker or a book and a bag of chips. Read and eat them while sitting on the bike machine. Then take a shower and go home.”

Telling "Real" Sex Ed Stories

From Our Bodies Our Blog, a reluctant student of Our Whole Lives (OWL), recalls her story as a participant in the Unitarian Universalist Association’s comprehensive sexuality education curriculum.

I myself was a Young Religious Unitarian Universalist before the OWL curriculum replaced the controversial About Your Sexuality (AYS) course.  Launched in 1970, AYS went through several revisions before becoming the unfortunate target of a Bryant Gumble expose.  I was not a student of AYS, joining the church later on in my adolescence, but many of my peers were.  AYS was notorious for its visuals, a series of slides and film strips depicting masturbation, gay and straight couplings.  Everyone had an AYS story, a girl I attended summer camp with made an appearance in Gumble’s program.  In the video she turned beet red and described watching a video of a guy jerk off and then taste his cum - which is yes, maybe a lot for some youth.  But not without its merits.  Most of the AYS stories I heard were for the better, some nervous and uncomfortable but nothing news magazine worthy.

Our Whole Lives was adopted in 1998, an ambitious rethinking that borrowed from its predecessor and became a truly comprehensive sexuality education curricula, with sessions for children, teens, young adults and adults.  This young woman shares her story from her time as a student of the “big curriculum” for 7-9 graders, a session taught with an intimacy unlike the conventional middle school health class.   The program’s religious education context frees it from the limitations imposed in a federally funded setting.  Though our schools do not have the same freedom in their approach to sexuality education, the lessons learned from OWL have a place within the public classroom:

“[W]hat I really absorbed from OWL at the time, and what I have carried with me ever since, is an outlook on sexuality that was strikingly absent from my sex-ed unit in health class: OWL taught me that sexuality is not something to be ashamed of, to be hidden or feared. It is something to be questioned and explored, respected and protected. It is nuanced and complex, and sometimes infuriatingly confusing… Most of all, it is an essential part of the human experience that last[s] from birth until death”

Dude You've Got Problems | NY TImes

“It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained?”

Plan B Must Be Made Available to 17-Year-Olds | NY Times

“It is a complete vindication of the argument that reproductive rights advocates have been making for years, that in the Bush administration it was politics, not science, driving decisions around women’s health,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a non-profit group that was one of the plaintiffs in the case against the F.D.A.

Moving on, moving on

I am a homebody. I like to be home, get cozy and nest. For the past three years, almost four years now, we have been making our home in the same place. It’s a big, old quirky apartment with strange excuses for doors and windowpane cabinets in our kitchen. I have an office and so does he. There is always a draft.

The old tenants painted this place some pretty wild colors. We never repainted, we’re not the types. The old tenants glued glass beads on our bathroom tile in a big hippy mosaic, it took us years to get them down. The old tenants had their baby in our kitchen, and we’ve always said “that’s why this place has such good energy.” They had a water birth.

My folks helped us clean the place before we moved in, and then we all ate pizza.

My dearest friend in all of New York City lives down the block. We could borrow a cup of sugar from each other, but we don’t. We each have sugar of our own, and I don’t really do that much baking.

This place is big, we can take our space from each other here. He likes to lay on the kitchen floor. I am in love with our kitchen, If we pushed the table to the side I could do a cartwheel across the floor.

I cried today when I realized how much I would miss my dry cleaning lady. A few weeks ago, during the cold snap, I came in without gloves and she took my hands into hers to warm them.

The Myth of Lost Innocence - NY Times

The myth of the oversexed adolescent female plays into something perversely tantalizing, and gets some folks there jollies. It also obscures the real lives of young people and the decisions they make about their sexuality - as it obscures the decisions that others make for them.

Judith Warner has her say.