Sex Ed

There was a minor furor back in April when the Ontario Ministry of Education released an updated Health curriculum after consultations with sexual health experts, educators and other provincial education ministries. Church and “family focused” groups freaked out over children as young as 6 learning to use the words penis and vagina to describe, well, a penis and vagina. That wasn’t the worst of it, though, according to the critics: kids as young as 8 were to learn that there are homosexual relationships (what the children of same sex couples did before learning this, I don’t know) and adolescents were to learn the facts about anal and oral sex as well as the old standby of vaginal sex.

Rev. Ekron Malcolm, who is with the Institute for Canadian Values and was a major critic of the original revised curriculum, was quoted in the National Post, saying: “schools don’t need to be teaching my children about sexual orientation or sex education. Those decisions should be left to the family, to the parents, to guide children. These topics can be taught at the high school level, at the university level, when children can make up their minds.”

In terms of homosexuality and gender identity, there are huge problems with ignoring the fact that there are gay relationships and people who don’t adhere to traditional gender standards. (Never mind that fact that teaching homosexuality doesn’t mean teaching homosexual acts; just that boys can like boys and girls can like girls and people can marry someone of the same gender.)

A principal friend of mine had a gender equity assembly at her school which involved many skits dealing with male/female stereotypes and inequities as well as homosexuality. The next day, my friend had an office full of parents complaining that exposing their children to the idea that homosexuality was an acceptable practice contravened their religious and cultural teachings. And isn’t this what is really at the heart of Malcolm’s complaint, that parents should be able to teach that homosexuality is an abomination, contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the document which my principal friend had on hand for her enraged parents meeting).

I knew a boy once who was being “guided” by his parents when he was told he was no longer allowed to dress up in his sister’s clothing. This was a highly intelligent, creative and empathetic boy who was made to feel that his exploration of gender identity was wrong. And believe me, he had a forming gender identity at age 7.

It is the child’s understanding of this identity of which Malcolm can’t conceive: “I can’t imagine a child now has to question their gender, question their identity,” he said. “I think there’s enough confusion among our children in the world, for them now having to question themselves. This is where I would draw the line.”

The confusion in the world is precisely the reason why we should teach sexuality in schools. Sex is way more readily available with the internet nowadays. When I was an adolescent, you’d hear stories of people stealing their parents’ porn tapes and sharing them with their friends or sneaking peaks at the top shelf magazines at the variety store. The exposure was minimal, rare, usually accompanied by a group and required some resourcefulness. Now, you can get all manner of pornography for free from any computer without parental controls and none of it is mediated with a discussion as to what’s going on.

Adolescents need to understand the different types of sex and their risks and how to protect themselves from these risks. Critics argue that grade 7 and 8 is too young to introduce students to the taboo acts of anal and oral sex but the crux of the issue is that a lot of kids that age are already doing it. I remember becoming aware of people participating in oral and vaginal sex in grade 6 – and those were only the stories that made it to my ears. Who knows the number of girls who were convinced that having anal sex would preserve their virginity and prevent pregnancy.

Sexual education is a delicate, sometimes cringe-inducing necessity. Part of it is certainly the nitty-gritty physiology of parts and acts, but another part of it is arming kids with knowledge in order to make their own decisions – it has been widely reported that teenagers who have been sexually educated from a young age often delay having sex. Sex ed class is also the only time you’ll have the attention of every single student.

Unfortunately for Ontario, the outcry over the new curriculum worked and Dalton McGuinty backpedaled on his support for the curriculum two days later. An interim edition of the Health curriculum is now available on the Ministry’s website with all the dirty stuff taken out. Grade ones still learn to “identify the major parts of the body by their proper names” and education around puberty is still in there for the grade fours. However, there is absolutely no mention of homosexuality anywhere in the general and specific curriculum expectations.

In Montana, the state government has come out with a curriculum document that details how to sexually educate children from kindergarten to grade 12 (see specifically pages 36 – 40). It is a fully inclusive document which details a variety of sexual knowledge. The document has attracted some conservative backlash, certainly, but as far as I know, it is still being implemented in schools. Hopefully the Ontario interim curriculum document will have a chance to be reviewed with an eye to inclusion and public health and the final document will take into account “the confusion” of the world and arm our children with the knowledge necessary to meet this confusion.

With This Misogynist Tradition, I Thee Wed

Ah, Margaret Wente – you never cease to annoy me of a Saturday.

This week it was her column telling us why weddings matter more than ever. Wente writes how as a young adult she thought marriage was a “dusty relic of the patriarchy” and weddings “a silly, conformist ritual full of fake piety, tasteless clothes and ostentatious spending.” But now, of course, as an experienced 50-something, she can see the error of her young adult thinking. (This is a sly arguing technique – because you can’t really argue with an elder who is telling you that essentially your beliefs are wrong because they believed them when they were young, but now they know better.) Wente now sees her decision to seek out “self-actualization and adventure” over the “banality of coupledom and family life” as wrong – huh? But she got both! Dozens of times women who married young have told me to enjoy my single life now – they wished they had. I’ve had conversations with women who I met travelling who were divorced and in their 40s doing the backpacker thing because they wished they had done it in their 20s, but got caught up in marriage and kids.

Marriage is a dusty relic – based on the exchange of property – and few people understand my ire at the father of the bride walking her down the aisle to her husband-to-be. Some couples have chosen to have both the bride’s parents walk her down the aisle, but the symbolic tradition still remains: it is the woman who is being passed from one man (and his wife) to another man. Never mind the fact that my (and most women's) last name is that of my patrilineal heritage only.

Having been through several weddings (the cheapest of which was $15 000), weddings do invite outrageous spending. Part of this, of course, is the fact that everything you spend money on for a wedding is grossly inflated because it’s for a wedding. And our society says that’s okay because we place such importance on this one event.

Let me digress for a moment here and say that I certainly do not judge those people that enjoy the tradition and pomp of a wedding. Some people love the pageantry and the flowers and the centerpieces. But two things remain. One: I urge people to really think about where certain traditions come from. Two: I think it was Salman Rushdie that once said that women want a wedding, not a marriage (I’ll ignore his gender generalization to make my point). And for all the white tulle and roses, that’s the whole point of the day – two people promising to stay in their foxhole together.

Wente argues marriage is “indisputably the best arrangement for raising children.” I totally agree that having two people raise children is better than single parenting and having a male and female role model (although these do not have to be the mom and dad of a heterosexual couple) is ideal. But what is most important is that two people agree to stick it out together in the long run. It doesn’t take a 40K wedding to make that commitment – a simple “you’re stuck with me ‘til I’m old, babe” would suffice.

And finally, I'm not sure Wente can effectively argue that a life with someone else is "infinitely richer" than being single. For her (hopefully), she is happy because she is with a good man, not because she is part of a couple. I'd rather be single than in an unhappy relationship. If I left my partner now, I'd miss him, not having a boyfriend. And because Wente has been in a relationship for the past however many years, she has nothing to compare it to - perhaps she would have been more adventurous as a 40-something, or done things she wouldn't have as a married woman.

As Wente notes, marriage rates are in decline and people are waiting until into their 30s to marry. And there's nothing wrong with this. There's nothing wrong with getting everything you can out of life and not placing landing a husband as your primary goal. And hopefully when we all look back at our 20s and 30s, we'll say, hey - we were right. And as elders, no one can argue with us.

A Year of Writing Annually

Over the past several years, there has been a trend in publishing where people live differently for a year and then write about it: they give up something or follow a certain set of rules. Finlo Rohrer details this in his piece for the BBC’s online magazine. He points to Kath Kelly's How I Lived A Year On Just A Pound A Day; Neil Boorman's Bonfire of the Brands, “in which the protagonist burned all his branded goods and then lived for a year without them”; and Hephzibah Anderson’s book entitled Chastened: No More Sex in the City, in which the writer gives up sexual activity for a full 12 months.

Other examples that come to mind: The Hundred Mile Diet by British Columbians Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon who, for a year, lived on food procured from within a hundred mile radius of where they lived (I’d have trouble with the no coffee rule and the lean months of winter). Or The Year of Living Biblically by A.J. Jacobs, who follows the Bible so literally that he can’t shave his beard and has to stone adulterers.

There are other projects that fall outside the annual period: Rohrer mentions to Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Supersize Me that has Spurlock subsisting on food from McDonald’s for a month. And there is also Chris Jeavans’s blog in which she details her 31 days without buying anything plastic.

Stunts? Yes. But they all make a point about their subject: plastic is pervasive, McDonald’s is not good for you, the Bible shouldn’t be used to incite hatred, our world is comestibly globalized and sometimes casual sex interferes with women’s quest for “the one”.

Lazy as I am, I wouldn’t give up much that I like doing and I feel no need to follow a novel set of rules. But, as I’m sure everyone can acknowledge, there are several things I do as a matter of course that might be interesting to the reading public. But again, the laziness – so I will write in the spirit of John Crace’s Digested Read in which he takes books and distills them down to a few pithy paragraphs. (He even digests Chastened: No More Sex in the City – check it out at the link above!)

7 Months Without a Car

Back in January, I discovered that my muffler was completely rusted through. That, accompanied with the fact that the highbeams came on whenever I signaled left or right, the gas tank could only be filled halfway due to a hole at its top, the radio and parking brake didn’t work and the hood was held down with a flimsy contraption my dad had fashioned with the warning not to go faster than 60 or he couldn’t guarantee another hood-fly-up (which had happened several months before). So I sent my car to Car Heaven. Even got $300 out of the deal.

Considering it takes me 37 seconds to commute to work by foot, that part of being carless was easy. So was the fact that I live in an area where you can very easily walk to several grocery stores and specialty food shops to pick up anything I could want. I cheated a few times and “babysat” my parents’ car while they were away so I could purchase difficult-to-carry items like the economy pack of toilet paper or the large box of laundry powder.

Social engagements were arrived at by bike or public transit – the time commitment was definitely more, but there was never any waffling over whether to drive and remain sober or have a few drinks and cab it home.

The one drawback was missing out on those quick trips across town to visit people for just a few hours. Taking public transit sometimes was just not worth it. I also found I just did not frequent those stores that were out in Scarborough and I have yet to go back to Ikea.

25 Years Without Meat

When I was nine, my dad told me how they killed animals for food. I swore I would never eat meat again, and being the stubborn firstborn that I am, for the most part I didn’t. When I say “for the most part” I mean that there were a couple McDonald’s burgers in the first few years of my vegetarianism and then a few times when I ate meat without knowing it.

It’s become more of a routine now – I only know how to make two meat dishes and when I have tried bits of meat recently, I’ve found it takes a long time to chew. Besides, restaurants are much better now than they were in the 80s about offering vegetarian options. I also can claim environmental superiority by only taking up one field for food production instead of that field, plus a few more for the animals, plus a few more to feed the animals.

12 Days Without Sugar

A few years ago, I went on the Wild Rose Herbal D-Tox Cleanse (highly recommended) on the advice of my naturopath. For 12 days I was allowed no alcohol, no dairy products, no wheat or yeast and no sugar. I found the sugar the hardest, partly because I have quite the sweet tooth, but also because there is sugar in almost all prepared foods. I began reading labels much more carefully and ended up making all my meals from scratch – just fresh fruit and vegetables, beans, eggs and rice. I lost 8 pounds and felt so much better when it was finished. I also found my blood sugar levels evened out and I didn’t have that drop at 4pm when you crave cookies and other starchy, sugary snacks.

It wasn’t easy, though – I was craving things like pizza and cake like crazy. And when the cleanse was over, I went out and had poutine and immediately felt wretched. It taught me how much extra crap goes into prepared foods and how much what I put in my body affects me.

A Week Without Cell Phones or Internet Access

This summer I spent a week at a cottage where my cell phone didn't work and there was no internet. How did I cope? I went swimming, I read books and I lay in the sun. Hmm - this one seems to be the easiest - but also the shortest.

2 Months of No Work

At the end of the past 7 Junes, I have become unemployed. Weeks stretch out before me to be filled with sleep-ins, daytime television and meeting up with other unemployed friends. Some people ask how someone could possibly fill all those empty days without some kind of project or focus. Well, as I’m currently approaching the end of my unemployment once again, I can safely say that the days were filled and they slipped by easily.


On that note, I still have part of a week to continue my lazy unemployment. Maybe I'll try for a year of living like a responsible citizen. A year of getting up when my alarm goes off. Or a year without heroin.

Facebook & Feminism

Betty Freidan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique asserts that society requires women to define themselves by their husbands and family. During this Second Wave of feminism, many women broke out of the domestic sphere, both literally (by getting jobs, sharing housework) and symbolically (not taking their husband’s name). Despite this progress it appears, according to Katie Roiphe writing on doublex.com, that social networking sites may be causing women to revert back to being defined by their family.

“You click on a friend's name and what comes into focus is not a photograph of her face, but a sleeping blond four-year-old, or a sun-hatted baby running on the beach...Where have all of these women gone?” writes Roiphe, describing the majority of profile pictures of mothers in my friends list. I did a little Facebook statistical analysis and found that almost two-thirds of my friends who are mothers, have a picture of their child in their profile picture. Compare that to a little over a third of fathers who include a photo of their child in their profile photo. And this analysis did not involve the number of banal status updates some of my friends write about toilet training, eating habits and first steps.

Now before I am branded anti-child, let me say this: I understand that we tend to talk about what is important to us and what we deal with on a daily basis. If I was dealing with spitting up babies and squealing toddlers, kids would probably be an oft-visited topic of conversation for me. And of course, if I had a kid, they would be pretty close to the centre of my world, just like I was for my mother (Right? Right, Mum?). But just like my mother, I think I would have other interests outside the sphere of family, and my child and husband would not define who I was. According to Roiphe: “One’s children are of course an important achievement, and arguably one’s most important achievement, but that doesn’t mean that they are who you are.”

But here’s the difficult dichotomy within feminism: we strive for equal rights and the freedom to define ourselves how we see fit. So if a woman wants to take a great interest in the domestic sphere, free of societal pressures and expectations, what does it matter? If she just birthed a child of her loins and she wants to put a photo of him or her on her Facebook page, who cares?

Roiphe:

Many of these women work. Many of them are in book clubs. Many of them are involved in causes. But this is how they choose to represent themselves. The choice may seem trivial, but the whole idea behind Facebook is to create a social persona, an image of who you are projected into hundreds of bedrooms and cafes and offices across the country. Why would that image be of someone else, however closely bound they are to your life, genetically and otherwise? The choice seems to constitute a retreat to an older form of identity, to a time when women were called Mrs. John Smith…

It might be a bit difficult to project what book you’re reading or what cause you’re involved in through a profile photo. It is a small part of the whole Facebook page. And certainly the mothers in my friends list have other dynamic aspects of their personalities that are evident in their Facebook activities.

We need to validate archetypically female spheres: because of the whole uterus set up, women give birth to babies and due to their functioning mammary glands, tend to be the primary caregiver, especially in the first few months of infancy. Having and caring for babies does not mean women are sacrificing gains made during feminism’s heyday. However, being aware of what has gone before is essential. The Feminine Mystique illustrates a cultural shift in America where women were defined by marriage and family, yet many yearned for more. Nowadays, marriage and family may play a large part in women’s lives, but it doesn’t define them the way Friedan observed in housewives of the 1950s.

And here’s the proof: to the best of my knowledge, every single mother on my Facebook friend list is educated and employed. Thanks to feminists before them, they broke out of the domestic sphere with aspirations to higher education and careers. Some have kept their last names. I bet a few of them even let their husbands do the laundry.

Now if we could get some photos of that on Facebook…

Not Tonight, Honey, I'm... Oh Right - Obliged

Maybe it’s my unpredictable female hormones or the fact that I was almost convinced of the benefits of this UN-sanctioned war in Afghanistan; but I am now completely deflated by the news that president Hamid Karzai has signed a law that puts severe limits on the rights of Shia women. True, Karzai has backpeddaled after an intense international response, but it still brings up many uncomfortable questions.

The first has to do with the international response. Many critics used this opportunity to decry this step back in the UN’s quest to better the rights of women in Afghanistan. While certainly a bonus, this was not the reason the UN approved the forced removal of the Taleban. They went in because the Taleban were harbouring and funding terrorists who were loosely linked to the September 11th attacks.

Sally Armstrong, speaking on CBC’s The Current yesterday, pointed out that countries have never gone to war over women’s rights. I remember an article in Glamour magazine, of all places, detailing the oppression of women under the Taleban back in the early 90s. Western leaders cooled their heels for almost a decade before addressing the problems with the regime, their impetus certainly not being women’s rights.

So the UN is now in Afghanistan, nation-building and setting up democracy: essentially forcing Western ideals on a culture that has just proved they don’t hold. And this is where my deflation comes from: change like this can’t be imposed, it has to come from within and it’s going to take a really long time. Hell – when both my grandmothers were born, they were born into Western societies where being female precluded their right to vote. (By the time both reached the age of majority, they were afforded these rights. It is a right that I take for granted every time I enter a voting booth, despite only holding this right for a couple generations.)

The second question that arises is the fact that the law applies only to the Shia minority – a branch of Islam practised by the ethnic Hazaras, who, if you’ve read The Kite Runner you’ll know, are the social underclass to the majority Pashtuns (who are mainly Sunni). Not only is this law a gender issue, it is also a social one: Hazara women have been pushed to the lowest rung. Critics say that Karzai signed the law in order to get votes from the Shia population – but why is there a separate law for Shia women? (Although there is talk of a set of family laws being drawn up for the Sunni population - we'll see how these affect women's rights.)

Although the UN may have put in place a government that is supposed to share its democratic ideals, there is still a long road ahead until those ideals are accepted in everyday practice.

Blame

In the Globe today, there is an article by Ingrid Peritz questioning whether a faster response to Natasha Richardson’s head injury would have saved her life. A second article by Jessica Leeder talks about “talk and die syndrome” where patients are lucid and coherent right after the injury, but by the time they display worrying symptoms, it is too late. I hope this is not an attempt to lay blame in order to make sense of a random and tragic accident.

After severe headaches and signs of “instability,” Richardson was taken to a hospital nearby Mont Tremblant, where the accident occurred, and was then driven to Sacre-Coeur Hospital in Montreal for specialized treatment. The hours in between the accident and her arrival at Sacre-Coeur could have made all the difference to Richardson’s recovery, according to Peritz. But I’m not sure this situation would have gone any differently.

Richardson refused medical treatment immediately after the fall – as I’m sure do thousands of people who take a tumble during ski season. Though I’ve never hit my head, I’ve certainly had several falls on the ski slopes, off my bike and on ice. As long as you feel okay, as Richardson did at first, you brush yourself off and are on your way. Like many people, I err on the side of cavalier as opposed to hypochondria when experiencing a wide variety of symptoms and accidents. According to Doug Firby, a spokesman for Sunshine Village Ski and Snowboard Resort in Banff and quoted in Leeder’s piece: “Some of [the skiers] bang their heads. I can’t imagine a scenario in which you could actually force all those people to go to hospital.” The one thing I guess you could force them to do is wear a ski helmet, legislation that is sure to come down the pipeline soon.

But there are some accidents just happen and no amount of safety procedures and equipment can change that. It is unfortunate and utterly devastating to the loved ones of the victim who must spend an awful lot of time running through alternate “what if” scenarios in their heads. And sometimes people make glaring mistakes or are willfully negligent to safety and of course I believe these people should not be let off the hook. But sometimes accidents are just that: accidents. They are a confluence of unpreventable events.

I am reminded of Atom Egoyan’s film The Sweet Hereafter, based on a book by Russell Banks. In it, lawyer Mitchell Stephens comes to the town of Sam Dent after a school bus crash that has killed several of the town’s children. Stephens is intent on somehow laying blame for the accident – on the driver, the bus company – someone must pay for the deaths of these children.

But the conclusion of the book does not see anyone held accountable for the accident: it shows a community coming together only to mourn the deaths of the children. They see no need to find fault in order to assuage their pain – the people involved are already hurting enough.

Perhaps Richardson’s death will see calls for mandatory helmets on ski hills or better air ambulance service in the area. But it certainly should not be used to find fault where there isn’t any.

The Palin Is Just Not That Into You

First comes love, then comes… No, wait – first comes marriage, then… Oh shit, it was the baby first, then a forced engagement, then – what am I missing in Bristol Palin’s romantic history? Oh yeah – a little thing called freewill and a woman’s right to choose not to be the posterchild for Republican reproductive control. (Which is a bit difficult in the bedrooms and backseats of the nation as Bristol has demonstrated.)

It’s official: Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, who were once "committed to accomplish what millions of other young parents have accomplished: to provide a loving and secure environment for their child,"* have broken up.

So now little Tripp will grow up, cared for by a single mother – an archetype so despised by the vile Ann Coulter who believes "Single motherhood is like a farm team for future criminals and social outcasts”. Oh how I love the way conservatives unwittingly screw each other with their black-and-white statements.

Bristol recently stated in an interview with Greta Van Susteren that abstincence is “not realistic” and that “[sex] is more and more accepted among kids [her] age” (really?), something Mama Palin and Coulter seem to ignore. So instead of making the hard choice to terminate the pregnancy, Bristol had the kid and is now setting up her own little future criminal.

But the thing is, little Tripp will probably be okay. Like all sweeping, black-and-white statements, they leave out the little grey nuances. Coulter claims 70% of inmates, teenage runaways and delinquents, and drug users (amazing how this percentage is constant throughout) come from single parent homes. Regardless of the accuracy of Coulter’s stats, she is only looking at one variable – how many parents raise you – and completely discounting all the other factors that go with criminal activity, drug abuse etc. like socio-economic status, mental illness and abuse, to name a few.

The fact that Tripp will be raised by a single mother who has a set of support systems in place (ie. money and Mama Palin) already puts him ahead of the criminals that fall into Coulter’s 70%. It’s not Bristol’s marital status that affects her kid’s success, it’s her socio-economic status.

Hopefully Sarah Palin has learned that to support abstinence-only sex education is one of these sweeping statements. It completely discounts a pretty intense factor: teenage lust; something which Bristol spelled out for her mom in her interview with Greta Van Susteren.

It is a grand thing that America chose wisely last November and voted in a president who understands that sweeping statements (hello, War on Terror) are always riddled with shades of that truth.

______________________________
*Mama Sarah, December 2008