How Christian Moralizing Drives Kids to Dangerous Sex

RH Reality Check / By Amanda Marcotte

Sexual shaming can dramatically increase the likelihood that an individual will look for excuses and rationalizations for not using contraception.

According to the latest research from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the proponents of abstinence-only can count one success in altering teenage sexual behavior.  No, they didn’t lower the rate of teenagers having sex, which the CDC indicates has stayed steady at around 4 in 10 teenagers (with 18 year-olds having sex at double the rate of those ages 15 to 17, despite media panics about younger teenagers having sex). Ab-only fans weren’t able to convince teenagers to marry younger.  Nor did they convince them that condoms are scary items that you should never touch unless you want to get cancer and rabies; most teenagers use condoms the first time they have sex. 

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Shame-o-Phobia: Why Men Fear Therapy

Psychotherapy Networker / By David Wexler

Several years ago, I was on a family trip, sitting on a bench with my wife in a plaza in Paris. Loaded down with shopping bags, she asked me to grab her purse and carry it over to a new spot across the plaza. That's all. Yet even though I knew I was being stupid, I couldn't do it. The 15 seconds being seen carrying a purse were beyond my capacities as a card-carrying male. My wife looked at me like I was nuts and shook her head in disgust.

So what was my problem? All I could envision were people smirking as they saw me publicly toting that damn purse, all of my hard-earned Guy Points accumulated from my half-century of being male suddenly vanishing without a trace.

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Sex Pill for Women: Big Pharma Trying to Profit from Low Sex Drive?

AlterNet / By Martha Rosenberg

Drugs to boost women's libido are not recent. They date all the way back to Roman times when the wife of Augustus Caesar dosed her guests to liven a party. Marquis de Sade did the same, seventeen hundred years later.

Now a new female libido drug, dubbed the Pink Viagra, has husbands, boyfriends and Wall Street cheering, if not its intended patients.

On June 18 an FDA advisory committee will consider approval of flibanserin, manufactured by Germany-based Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, for "treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in premenopausal women."

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Why is Teenage Pregnancy Still on the Rise?

AlterNet / By Laura Rosbrow

We celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the pill recently and many have written about its power to reduce poverty, including Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times last week. In another New York Times Op-ed titled, Promises the Pill Could Never Keep,”Elaine Tyler May goes as far to say that American women, “no longer need to choose between having a family and a career.” But can we say this for all women, particularly poor women and women of color? And why have teenage pregnancies increased since 2005?

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The Trauma Myth: Understanding the True Dynamics of Sexual Abuse

From the book The Trauma Myth: The Truth About the Sexual Abuse of Children and Its Aftermath by Susan A. Clancy. Copyright © 2009 by Susan A. Clancy. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Book Group.

Tell us what you think about this article by e-mail at letters@psychnetworker.org This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or at www.psychotherapynetworker.org. Log in and you'll find the comment section on every page of the online Magazine section.

As a graduate student at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I participated in research studies carried out by the psychology department that began in October 1996 and continued until August 2005 to interview adults who had experience sexual abuse as children and learn what effects the abuse had had on their lives. Although I was sure I knew what I would discover—that the abuse would be remembered as a horrible experience that overwhelmed the people I interviewed with fear when it happened and had always been viewed as a traumatizing occurrence—what I heard in the hundreds of interviews I conducted was quite different.

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Is Porn Bad for You?

Psychotherapy Networker / By Wendy Maltz

Since the advent of the internet, millions of Americans have started visiting porn sites daily. Is there a hidden cost to this newfound access?

"Porn is an easy outlet, a one-way outlet. What a rush! What a release! The Internet puts an endless stream of images at my fingertips. I've conveniently conned myself thinking it's okay, but deep down I know it's wrong. It makes me feel dirty and has hurt my relationship with my wife. I beat myself up afterward, hate myself, and swear that was the last time. But before I know it, I'm back at it again. I'm scared where it's leading. Can you help me?"—Scott, 44 years old.

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Catholic Leader Says Woman Should Die With Her Fetus -- When Did Woman-Hating Go Mainstream?

RH Reality Check / By Carole Joffe

In many extremist anti-choice circles, full throated woman-hating never went away. But now it's entering the mainstream.

"She consented in the murder of an unborn child.  There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child."

With this brief quote, the speaker, the Rev. John Ehrich, medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix, deserves credit for achieving a twofer in a recently revived (if not formally declared) misogyny competition that is now sweeping the anti-choice world.  He is not only stating that a gravely ill woman (the mother of four children) should have been left to die, rather than being permitted an abortion; he is also explaining why Sister Mary Margaret McBride, the nun-administrator of a Catholic hospital  who authorized the abortion (thereby saving the woman’s life) deserves to be excommunicated. 

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Holding Hypocrite Congressman Souder's Feet to the Fire on Dangerous Abstinence Education

AlterNet / By Shelby Knox

What do Rep. Souder and others like him have to say to the millions of young people whose health was endangered by being told condoms don't work?

Yesterday, news broke that Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) is resigning in the wake of an affair with a female aide.  A “family values” conservative who’s sold himself as a proponent of “traditional marriage,” Souder repeatedly advocated federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs even after the programs were exposed as ineffectual and harmful to young people.

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Google Thinks Sexual Older Women Are Gross, But “Sugar Daddies” A-OK

Posted by Tana Ganeva

Need a reminder of the sexist double standards that pervade every aspect of our culture? Here you go! (via Huffington Post):

CougarLife, a dating website for women “looking to catch younger men,” has accused Google of sexism, claiming that the company deemed its web ads “non-family safe,” while condoning as “family-safe” Internet ads for “sugar daddy-type” sites.

According to CougarLife’s founder Claudia Opdenkelder, a Google account manager toldher that promoting liaisons between older women and younger men was “unsafe for family audiences, even if the ads contain no sexually suggestive words or images”–while sites aimed at connecting older men with younger women received no such restrictions.

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Kagan and Reproductive Rights: No Time for Complacency

By Amanda Marcotte, RH Reality Check

So far, the issue of reproductive rights hasn’t really been much of a factor in the discussion about Obama’s new nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan.  For the most part, this is because the right is occupied with the game of trying to figure out how to call Kagan a lesbian without coming right out and saying it. Because it’s not on the table right now, it’s awfully tempting for pro-choice activists to assume that it may never really become an issue.  Perhaps the Obama administration’s decision to find a candidate with as obtuse a record on the issues as possible might be enough to keep the rabid dogs of the anti-choice movement out of this?

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Gay Sex Scandal Rocks Christian Right ... Again

CounterPunch / By David Rosen

George Rekers, caught with a gay escort, makes clear that sexual scandal is about more then sex and hypocrisy. It's also about denial, shame and pathology.

The Miami New Times recently broke the story about George Allen Rekers’ 10-day Europe vacation with a male escort, identified only as 20-year-old Lucian. The story has been picked up by the national media and turned this aging puffer into the butt of popular ridicule by Steve Colbert and Jay Leno. One can only shout: Come out George, come out of your closet!

Rekers is an upstanding, 61-year-old white Christian homophobic and has all the credentials of a great deceiver. He is a Baptist minister, was a member of the founding board of the reactionary Family Research Council and is on the board of National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH).

According to various reports, he has been a research fellow at Harvard University, taught at the University of South Carolina, is editor of “Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems” and author of “Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality,” books that seek to ensure that children grow up straight, and has repeatedly testified against gay adoptions. He prides himself for his moderate stand on homosexuality, insisting on “the rights of individuals with unwanted homosexual attraction to receive effective psychological care."

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Words of Caution for Elena Kagan, There's a Far Touchier Reproductive Issue Than Abortion

AlterNet / By Keli Goff

For some reason the idea of not having children remains one of the most taboo subjects, especially for women.

Question for you. Today what is the most controversial thing a female candidate can say?

A) I had an extramarital affair.
B) I am gay.
C) I do not want to have children.

Or forget a female candidate. What about the female spouse of a candidate, or a female vying for a major appointment, such as to the Supreme Court? Fifty years after the pill was created to empower women to take their reproductive choice into their own hands, I would argue that the answer is still C.

Before you ask, no I am not basing this theory on any groundbreaking new study on the subject. This is based strictly on anecdotal evidence, including my recent conversations with a variety of women. Not to mention some not so anecdotal evidence, namely the number of children who continue to be born into unloving, unstable and unsupportive homes. But it's also based on the fact that within minutes of Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court being confirmed, a blog post titled, "Elena Kagan sends us on the Way to a Motherless Supreme Court" popped up online, as if her parental status has a single thing to do with her qualifications for the High Court.

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Masters of the Uterus

The 3,500-year battle over where babies do—and don't—come from.

— By Elizabeth Gettelman

c. 1500 BC Genesis describes how God kills Onan after he "wasted his seed on the ground" during coitus interruptus. (See "Thou Shalt Not Spill.")

c. 1500 BC Egyptian experts suggest mixing ground dates, acacia bark, and honey as a spermicide and crocodile dung as an anti-pregnancy suppository.

100 Greek gynecologist Soranus recommends that women hold their breath and jump backward seven times after sex to prevent pregnancy. Sneezing also advised.

c. 700 Muhammad endorses withdrawal during sex.

1000 Contraception gets medieval: European women wear bones from the right sides of black cats around their necks to avoid pregnancy.

1554 John Calvin calls masturbation "monstrous" and withdrawal "doubly monstrous. For this is to extinguish the hope of the race and to kill before he is born the hoped-for offspring."

1727 In "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom," Daniel Defoe compares contraception to infanticide.

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The Pill Turns 50: Its Surprising Effects on Population, and the Risks It Poses to Our Water Supply

Planet Green / By Sara Novak

With so many women today taking the pill, we need to think about the adverse ecological effects that this powerful pharmaceutical have on our water supply.

A recent article in Time Magazine highlights what the pill has meant for women and society. In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of the first pill for women. Shortly thereafter, nearly 1 million women started taking the pill. Today, over 80 percent of women will take the pill at some time during their reproductive years.

That's not to say that the introduction of the pill wasn't met with controversy. Even today, many religions believe that the purpose of sex, even within marriage, is reproduction. Outside of these social controversies, however, the pill, like all pharmaceuticals, has an effect on the planet. So, what effect has the pill had on the once exploding U.S. population? And, with so many women today taking the pill, how can we mitigate the adverse ecological effects that this powerful pharmaceutical has on our water supply?

A Declining Birth Rate?
The overall decline in the fertility rate over the past fifty years may be attributed, in part, to the spread of industrialization and a correlated rise in income in societies that are becoming highly urbanized and more educated so that there is less reliance upon the family to support production, as is the case in agrarian societies. Nevertheless, the increase in family planning since the introduction of the pill has undoubtedly played a part in lessening the birth rate in nations where methods of birth control are readily available.

According to a recent article in the Huffington Post, access to contraception has led to a decline in unplanned births, shotgun marriages, and adoptions and delayed family formation in some cultures until the late twenties and early thirties. With more women than ever taking the pill, the birth rate is falling. In fact, the number of children per household in this nation has gone from 3.6 to 2 children over the last fifty years. And the trend has increased in the last several decades. According to a CDC report, the birth rate fell [pdf] to 13.9 per 1,000 persons in 2002, down from 14.1 per 1,000 in 2001 and down a full 17 percent from the recent peak in 1990 (16.7 per 1,000).

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Christian Anti-Porn Activists Now Targeting Female "Porn Addicts"

SeXis Magazine / By Lorna D. Keach

Religious anti-porn groups claim to cure women suffering from "porn addiction."

It’s no secret that many women enjoy porn just a much as men. Researchers have shown that women experience similar genital stimulation as men while watching porn—with less regard to what sexual orientation is being depicted. And according to Theresa Flynt, vice president of marketing for Hustler video,female consumers make up 56% of video sales. 

Now women have fallen under fire for their naughty consumption, as Anti-porn activists such as XXXChurchand Dirty Girls Ministries have targeted women for porn addiction. 

The group Dirty Girls Ministries calls itself “a Christian anti-pornography ministry created to help women struggling with pornography addiction.” During their graduation ceremonies, their members are asked to write on a balloon all the horrible things they’ve given up—things like “Masturbation,” “Lustful Thinking,” and “Self-gratification.” 

The church does attempt to advocate some version of sex positivity. Masturbation and arousal may not be part of healthy sex according to Dirty Girls Ministries, but administrator Crystal Renaud states, “It’s an injustice that the church is not more open about physical sexuality. God created sex. But the enemy has twisted it.” 

The enemy might have twisted the mainstream definitions of porn addiction, too, if we take any advice from Good Morning America, which aired a segment detailing the life of a self-proclaimed porn addict who watched an astonishing 1 hour a week. If that’s what flies for porn addiction these days, it looks like most of us need some rehab.

5 Things You Don't Know About Sexually Transmitted Diseases

RH Reality Check / By William Smith

April is National STD Awareness Month. And there's a lot you probably don't know about sexually transmitted diseases.

Then I entered the world of sexually transmitted infections and diseases...and doubt settled in.

I am now three months into my new role as the executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors (NCSD) and I have begun to reflect on a few things I did not know previously that have been, well, shocking to me, and have tested what I thought was a well-honed repertoire of knowledge. We’ve been working here at NCSD to highlight some key issues related to STDs given that April is National STD Awareness Month and I thought I would take the liberty of providing a few reflections of my own.

Here are a few things I did not know that I think every sexual and reproductive health advocate should:

We are on the verge of a highly untreatable gonorrhea epidemic.

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Do Men Have a Sexual Advantage in the Post-Viagra World?

AlterNet / By J. Goodrich

According to a new study, older men say they have great sex lives; older women, not so much. But those results may not be all they're cracked up to be.

"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?" The Beatles' enduring question wafted through my speakers as I pored over what, at first glance, seemed to be troubling new data about women and sex from a major university.

Older men have great sex lives; older women, not so much. Those were the findings of the recent study from the University of Chicago -- at least if you learned about the study from the popular media. But the simple deduction that turned up in some headlines about the study read more like old stereotypes than scientific conclusions.

"Men have shorter life spans than women on average, but when it comes to sexual life expectancy, the guys have the advantage," read a blurb on the Fox News Web site. "Women tend to live longer than men, but men have longer—and better—sex lives in their later years, new research shows," the editors of Health.com declared. "Women may live longer, but it appears men are more likely to go out with a smile," wrote a reporter for the Montreal Gazette.

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Studies Show that Sexual Objectification is More Damaging to Women than We Think

Miller-McCune.com / By Tom Jacobs

New research suggests sexual objectification hinders some women’s cognitive ability.

Guys, here’s something to consider the next time you ogle an attractive woman: Your desirous gaze may be reducing her capacity to think.

That’s the startling implication of a research paper titled “My Body or My Mind,” recently published in the European Journal of Social Psychology. It suggests some women who are objectified by men internalize this perception and think of themselves as “a sexual object to be scrutinized.” For reasons that are not entirely clear, this process appears to undermine their cognitive ability.

Psychologists Robin Gay and Emanuele Castano of the New School for Social Research tested this thesis with a clever experiment that mimics and magnifies what many women experience in everyday life. The study participants — 25 women ages 18 to 35 — were told they were recruited to provide information on “the impressions people form about others solely based on their carriage and style of dress.”

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Ruling Ok's Tasering Pregnant Woman

AlterNet / By Liliana Segura

Seven-months-pregnant Malaika Brooks suffered repeated 50,000 volt shocks for refusing to sign a speeding ticket, and a federal court of appeals ruled it justified.

You are a police officer on traffic patrol and you pull over an irate driver who refuses to admit she was doing 32 mph in a 20-mph zone. She won't sign the speeding ticket, not even when you call for backup. Also, she is pregnant. What do you do?

a) Finish writing the ticket, making note of the fact that the driver refused to sign, and send her on her way, perhaps admonishing her in the process.

b) Grab the keys from the ignition, tase her three times, force her out of her car, and arrest her.

In the minds of three Seattle police officers in 2004, the latter was the reasonable course of action when they stopped seven-months-pregnant Malaika Brooks -- and last week, a federal appeals court agreed.

In a 2-1 ruling, Judges Cynthia Holcomb Hall and Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled the officers were justified in their use of force, because of the threat that Brooks might somehow "retrieve the keys and drive off erratically," and because the third tasing allowed the officers to "finally extract her from her car and gain control over her."

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The Bill is Pro-Choice Enough Already

By Ruth Marcus

There are any number of good reasons for House Democrats to vote against health care reform. Abortion isn’t one of them.

At least, it shouldn’t be. There is scant difference between the House bill that anti-abortion advocates deem acceptable and the Senate version they claim would allow federal funds to underwrite abortions.

If anything, both versions would end up restricting abortion coverage more than under current law. Some women whose insurance covers abortion would lose that benefit as their policies move to the new insurance exchanges.

If anything, health care reform would have the impact of reducing the number of abortions. More women will have coverage that includes contraception. Pregnant women would know that their medical care, and that of their child, will be covered.

If anything, government funds are already used to pay for abortion on a massive scale. Employer-sponsored insurance policies, most of which include abortion coverage, benefit from a fat government subsidy: they are provided tax-free.

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