Dear Anti Sex Ed Crowd:

Greetings and salutations! I bet you’re surprised to hear from me. After all, you’ve spent some time lately calling me a terrible mother (on television no less) because I advocate for a much-needed update to Nevada’s sex education standards — originally passed at the height of the AIDS-panic-1980s — that at its core is a mandate for abstinence-only scare-tactics about diseases on your privates. But we’ll get to that.

Maybe because Mother’s Day is right around the corner, I’ve been thinking about you and your unsympathetic, aggressive campaign against bringing comprehensive sex education to Nevada. Surely, you only compare things to Hitler and Nazis when they really, really deserve to be villianized as lacking any moral compass whatsoever. You don’t just go around TEXT SHOUTING onto the public record that sex education in schools is a PARENTAL COP OUT unless you have some solid data to back that up, right? I mean, that would be an irresponsible abuse of the standards of basic human decency and decorum that we live by in a civilized society. And, I know you’d never be one of those people who physically threaten violence when someone tells a story you disagree with at a public hearing. Because that would be immoral.

You’re very fond of talking about morality. It makes me wonder what would Jesus do if He saw you up on that moral-high-ground perch you’ve climbed onto. Not a lot of passages in the Bible about Jesus telling people to judge others — at least, not in the Bible I read at church every Sunday.

But with all your wisdom about morality, I’m sure you know that comparing a bill about school curriculum to Nazi genocide is immoral. They’re not even in the same league, and it belittles the real suffering of people who went through the Holocaust. Stop that. The same goes for calling whole groups of people terrible parents because they advocate for public education. That is immoral. Threatening violence against another person simply because you disagree with them, well, we know that’s immoral. Because if I’ve learned one thing from the pictures of dead fetuses you like to send me, it’s that you have a reverence for life. Your zest for life is so super-charged, it elevates a fetus above a fully formed, sentient woman any day of the week (twice on Sunday)! Now that’s a respect for life!

When I was sitting in church this past week, I was thinking about you. And yes, it’s a real-deal, Christians-who-love-Jesus United Church of Christ church. I was thinking about how you might be sitting in church at that same moment, reading or listening to scriptures from the Bible and nodding affirmingly to whatever sermon you were hearing. I was sitting next to my husband of almost 16 years (we’re high school sweethearts even!) and our beautiful daughter, the joy of our lives. Probably not that much different than what you do on Sundays either, right? So, I was thinking about you as my reverend was talking about forgiveness and grace; that we as Christians are charged to live by example and to take God’s shining light into the world. We are charged to give of ourselves, to lift up the down-trodden, and to go forth humbly because none of us are without sin. I was nodding. I was saying, “Amen!” But secretly, I was thinking about you. And I was wondering how I could ever forgive you for the things you are saying, not just about me, but about our neighbors and fellow Nevadans.

How can I forgive you for hating me and everyone I am trying to lift up — when we have never even met? Would you say those things to my face? Would you call me those names in front of my two-year-old? After all the times you’ve called me an evil whore, a baby-killing slut, and godless jezebel who will feel the fires of hell — and that was before you started calling me a bad mother — I must admit to struggling mightily to find a way to turn the other cheek. Again. And again. I struggle to just ignore you, let alone forgive you.

Because I can’t understand, let alone forgive, a person who would deny others a right to a complete public education. How can I forgive a person who wants to use my religion as a bludgeoning tool? How can I forgive a person who speaks on the public record about how homosexuality is “deviant behavior” and a “lifestyle choice” — as if Jesus made a distinction between who was worthy of His love and forgiveness and who was not? How can I forgive people who work to stop education that could save lives? Do you really think God approves of leaving young people in ignorance of their bodies? Do you really think that God wants young people to get diseases or have unintended pregnancies that they are not emotionally or financially ready for? If you so revere life, why wouldn’t you want to save lives by making sure people know how to protect themselves? Why wouldn’t you want to make sure there are less abortions because there are less unintended pregnancies causing them?

The only answer I can see is that you have absolutely no idea what the concept of morality is.

Because willfully denying people education that can save their lives — and make no mistake, understanding safer sex practices helps stop the spread of diseases like AIDS that kill people — is a public health issue. It is immoral to stand by and let people die out of ignorance. You are not just enabling ignorance, you are encouraging ignorance and that is true immoral behavior! And even as I feel the power of the Lord in my life as I write this, I feel certain that God weeps when people die of preventable diseases.

But let’s set the diseases aside for a moment. Because disease is not the only symptom of an uneducated, ignorant community — and let’s be clear that is what you are advocating when you rally against sex education. There is more to the health and well-being of a person than just worrying about diseases. Let’s look at teen pregnancy. Nevada has the fourth highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation. And you are fond of negating that statistic with the fact that our teen pregnancy rate has declined by nine percent. True. But that’s why we’ve gone down from being first in the nation to being fourth. Are you really proud of still being in the top five worst states for teen pregnancy? Is that really something to applaud? Whoopidydoo! We’re not the worsty-worst!

How about asking yourself why we are so terrible at helping our youth prevent unwanted pregnancies? I’ll tell you why: Abstinence-only. Nevada’s current sex education curriculum requires a unit on AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases as well as “sexual responsibility,” with an emphasis on abstinence. And while comprehensive sex education standards also emphasize abstinence, the difference here is that Nevada’s current law only gives abstinence information. In most cases, there is little to nothing about birth control. There is nothing about what consent means — and why a lack of consent to sex is the definition of rape. And that’s if — and only if — you happen to live in one of Nevada’s 17 counties in which there is actually a designated educator for the sex education unit. According to testimony in the 2011 Legislature for a similar bill, by their own admission, many Nevada counties do not have a sex education curriculum or designated educator for their curriculum. They are willfully breaking the current law. So, I guess the students in those counties are just, well, screwed. Is it moral to treat students unequally? I thought the point of public education is that the standards are equal, so all people are treated to an equal education.

Abstinence-only is not only demonstrably a failure in Nevada, it’s a failed sex education system across the board. A Congressional study already confirmed that abstinence-only education does not work and the American Academy of Pediatricians has recommended a comprehensive sex education approach, which includes but is not limited to abstinence education. Indeed, studies show that medically accurate, comprehensive sex education actually results in a delay of the first sexual experience. Probably because when young people get all the facts, they realize that they are not ready for sex!

So, if you’re goal is to prevent kids from having sex, then teaching kids comprehensive sex education is actually exactly what you want!

But I can just hear you now, shaking your fist at the computer screen, saying, “But I don’t want the schools to teach my kids about sex. That’s my job!”

And I say to you: Go forth and teach your kids sex education! I hope you know what you’re talking about. Do you know what to say about sexting? How about cyber-bullying? Rape? What does herpes look like? Can boys get HPV?  … Whew! It’s a lot to cover on your own. Good luck!

The reason why I can happily wave to you as you trot off to not-talk-to-your-kids-about-sex-because-it-scares-you, is that there is an escape hatch for folks like you built right into the law. You can opt-out of letting your kid(s) get educated! In fact, it’s probably one of the few times in your parenting career when you will face little-to-no shame for willfully removing your child from the classroom. Think about it. You can’t opt your kid out of math, science, or reading, but you can opt them out of sex ed? What a country! That’s because there is no graduation requirement to have sex education in Nevada. And, like I said before, you can totally opt your kid out!

Now, you may have heard that the proposed comprehensive sex education law, AB230 in the Assembly, is changing the parental permission standards. True. It’s going from a permission slip to be allowed to be IN class to a permission slip to be taken OUT of class. Right now, Nevada is one of only three states with an opt-in requirement, meaning that parents actually have to sign a permission slip to allow kids to have sex education. About four percent of students end up sitting out of sex education simply because they forgot to get the permission slip to their parents (or forgot to return it). So, really we’re talking about the four percent of kids who are missing out on education that their parents want them to have just because of a paperwork problem. That’s the dumbest reason ever for a kid to miss a class!

The other thing I can hear you screaming at me is that the new comprehensive sex education bill would “take away local authority.” Or, actually, the exact opposite. AB230 has a requirement for a local committee to oversee and approve regular updates to the curriculum. It’s actually pretty much the same thing we have now. I know, I’ve sat in on the Clark County committee before. True story: They didn’t want to allow a text book because it had a drawing of human anatomy. So, there’s your local control, working hard to control any kind of enlightenment whatsoever.

And don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of people from rural counties with legal brothels that pay their property taxes being against sex education. (Not that all rural folks are against sex ed.) What do you think the people at the brothels are doing? How is it possible that you can drive right by the brothel that pays for your fire department services and turn in to a meeting to talk about how we should never, ever, ever, ever talk to kids about penises and vaginas? It boggles my mind. And you do realize that rural counties have a much higher rate of teen pregnancy than anywhere else in the nation, right?

And come on, those are just red herrings anyway. Be honest now. You are just terrified about talking about sex with your kid(s). You don’t want them to learn that there are different people in the world, some even that you judge to be “bad” people. But just because you don’t like those people, it doesn’t make them disappear from existence. Just because you don’t like thinking about your child having sex, it doesn’t make them not have sex. Please! If that worked, I wouldn’t be alive! Yes, I am the product of a teen pregnancy statistic! (Cue: Gasps)

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I can feel you judging my mother right now. Yes, she was a teen mother. She also dropped out of college and raised me in poverty because of it — two things that are highly correlated to teen pregnancy, in fact. But right about now, I bet you’re sort of wishing she’d had that abortion when she was pregnant with me. Because then maybe you wouldn’t have to put up with this pain-in-your-ass prochoice, Christian, suburban, married, stay-at-home mom (really, we have so much more in common than you like to think) who keeps talking about why our state needs comprehensive sex education. I was there on April 1 when you were testifying before the Assembly committee about “unwed teen pregnancy” being a “natural punishment” for premarital sex. As if my childhood wasn’t hard enough, I have had to deal with people like you my whole life talking about my very existence as a punishment for my mother’s bad decisions. What was that thing the reverend said on Sunday? Oh yes: Judge not, lest ye be judged. But thanks for belittling my existence by implying that in my case there was no “miracle” to my conception, but rather a Job-like sentence made flesh, from a wrathful God. Thanks for that. On behalf of all “bastard” children everywhere, I thank you for your charity, kindness, and loving spirit in God’s name. You’re really nailing it.

That sort of brings me back to where we started when I sat down to write this letter. I wanted you to get to know me, your apparent foe. Because from what I can tell by what you are saying about me online and on TV and on the public record in legislative meetings, you don’t know me at all. You’ve created a sort of convenient caricature of me, and people like me. You’ve cast me as a godless sodomite who seeks to destroy the fabric of our society by advocating that public education has a minimum standard that includes sex ed curriculum that is medically accurate and age-appropriate. You’ve vilified me as a terrible mother because I recognize that not all families are whole and functional. Indeed, not all people are whole and functional. Some of us are ill-equipped to tackle big topics like sex education with our kids. And not everyone is as lucky as me to have friends who work as professional sex education instructors. Does it make us bad parents if we seek outside resources to shore up our weaknesses? I don’t have a clue how to teach my daughter Calculus. If she expresses a desire to learn it, am I a failure as a parent because I can’t teach her myself? I seem to recall some of you testifying that you checked out materials from the public library to teach your own kids sex ed. So, you can access publicly funded educational materials, but if we seek to make that available to everyone in a classroom setting, we’re abdicating our parental responsibility?

No. You’re wrong. You’re a hypocrite. You do not have the moral high-ground just because you throw God and Jesus’ names into the mix. You do not know more about being a parent than me because you have more children than me. You do not know what is best for my daughter. I do. And in the face of you hurling insults and mischaracterizations at me, I still respect you enough to make sure that you can legally decide what you think is best for your child(ren). It doesn’t matter if I think you’re wrong in how you raise your kids. I respect that you have that right. I was perfectly happy to turn my cheek again and again. Because unlike you, I don’t claim to know what’s best for your child(ren). I don’t take some imaginary moral high-ground and call you a simpleton or a fear-monger or a closed-minded bigot because you’d rather teach people to hate those who are not like them than to just simply acknowledge that they exist, without judgement (as that guy Jesus commanded). I don’t shame girls for having sex or making decisions about their bodies. I don’t threaten people with violence because they do not agree with me. I don’t create a culture of fear in the classrooms of young men and women so that they are too afraid to ask the important questions that need asking. The questions that can lead to valuable information that maybe, just maybe, might save a life. I advocate for comprehensive sex education because I want my daughter to have comprehensive sex education.

I think standing in the way of education is morally bankrupt. I think standing up and judging people (for their purported mistakes, like being raped) in a public forum is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. And I think that just because I believe in Jesus and I have a path that is right for me, that does not give me the right to force other people down that same path. I don’t demonize those who have a different faith (or none at all) than me. That’s not my business. And it’s not yours either.

You claim to be standing up for your beliefs. I’m doing the same. I’d like to think we can each have our opinions and debate them in a peaceful, respectful way. But that would require you to be a peaceful, respectful person. Everything you show me is quite the opposite. You want to attack any person who is not exactly like you, who does not believe exactly like you. That’s not the country we live in. We live in a country founded on the idea that people have a right to worship as they please, and to pursue happiness. You don’t get to decide what everybody else believes and what makes everybody else happy. And whether you believe in God or little blue fairies, it doesn’t change the fact that comprehensive sex education saves lives and prevents pregnancies (which in turn, prevent abortions and we all know how you feel about abortions).

It’s too bad that you don’t like comprehensive sex education, but that’s your right not to like it. But I’ll be damned if I let bullies like you silence me or anyone else from advocating for it. Because when you try to smear us or brand us as bad people, you are being a bully. And you are trying to keep me quiet. But I have right to say my piece.

And just one more thing: I want you to look around for a moment. I want you to remember the children, those very same little humans you are always claiming to be doing everything for. They are watching us. They are watching us have this debate. What are they learning from you right now? What are they learning about how to have a civilized, peaceful debate with somebody? What are you teaching them about your own ethics and morals right this minute when you call me a whore or a terrible mother because I disagree with you? Is that good parenting? I think actions speak louder than words, my friend.

I know we are far from finished with this debate. Going forward, I do hope for one thing: That we can have this debate as respectful adults, not children on a schoolyard. I hope that when we disagree — and we probably will — that neither side resorts to petty name-calling. But I really hope I never, ever again see a group of so-called Christians sit in a public hearing and make jokes during testimony from a rape survivor. That is grotesque cruelty. Be the people you say you are. Act as you believe God would want you to act. Really and truthfully think about what that means. Does God command us to go out and bully others to think like us? Or, does He ask us to lead by example in humble service to the world? Let’s discuss this thing as peacefully as possible. Open your heart to new possibilities and understanding. And at the end of the day, let’s remember that we are each other’s neighbors.

And for the love of God, stop calling names to those who are on the opposite side of the issue as you! There’s nothing morally superior about that!

Respectfully,

Emmily

This piece was originally posted on the The Sin City Siren and it’s cross-posted here with permission.

Photo Credit: Paree from Creative Commons

Even dry British economists are talking about it. It feels like it’s been everywhere lately — even the Supreme Court. Marriage rates: just in a slump, or do we need to talk?

The Economist reported earlier this year that marriage rates are continuing to decline in the U.S. and other parts of the developed world. We continue to delay marriage and more people are entering that nefarious category of “never married.” To which I say, welcome to my world. It’s actually quite fun, but don’t expect to shed all notions of wedded bliss.

In truth, it’s a strange place to be. I have known for as long as I was able to say “I do” that I wasn’t terribly excited about it. I still dreamed of it though. I doodled what my new last name would be based on the current crush, and planned the prettiest of details. All this while simultaneously questioning whether I really wanted to at all.

I recently participated in a study that is looking at how women in their 20s and 30s perceive being single. In this case, single is defined as those of us who are “uncoupled,” never been coupled (or married) and are childless. Surely a sad and sorry spinster state of affairs for some. But not all of us.

The researcher and I talked for about two hours. In retrospect, I feel as though she asked me questions that I’ve been asking myself for years. Why don’t I want to get married? Why don’t I want kids? Have I ever felt pressure to get married? (No.) Have I ever actively sought to get married? (No.) Have I ever wondered about what it would be like to be 70 and single? (Well, maybe…)

The Single Class may be growing in numbers, but we are still a minority. And as a minority of choice, it’s not always easy. We were not born this way, and it is not normal (by numbers at least). She questioned me about the difference between being single in my 20s versus my 30s. In my 20s, I had more friends who were also single, and happy about that. In DC at least, it’s not at all uncommon to be single in your 20s. In your 30s though, it’s less common. Our numbers have dwindled and only some of us are ok with still being “uncoupled.” Still, DC is a generally easy place to be single at any age, even the “ancient” age of 30-something.

What interests me most though, is that while I know I am comfortable being single, and that I find the thought of planning a wedding both daunting and unnecessary, I still think about it. In detail. Ok, not so much anymore. But for someone who has no interest in getting married, I have spent a considerable amount of time imagining it. Pretty much every guy I’ve ever dated has auditioned in my mind for the role of Groom. I’ve thought about the flowers, the time of year, the location, the bridesmaids, my dress, even the vows. The VOWS. This is a societal narrative that is hard shake.

To be clear, I do like the idea of a long-term partner. Very much, actually. I don’t think I am anti-commitment. I’ve been in long-term relationships, and honored them. I don’t regret them, and indeed hope to find another. I like the idea of having someone who is mine first. Someone to get close to, be comfortable with in that way that you can only be with someone that you love and trust 100 percent. Someone to listen your boring-ass day as well as your greatest fears and aspirations. That appeals to me and makes sense.

Furthermore, as a supporter of gay marriage and a reasonable person, I can envision multiple situations in which it would be a good idea to get legally married. The state affords you special privileges and tax breaks and you are in fact treated differently. This should be open to whoever wants to do it. I just don’t want to. At least not yet.

I would be only telling part of the story though, if I said that it wasn’t also hard to be single this “late” in life. Neither my family nor my friends have ever bothered me about my choice to remain single. But considering that more and more of my friends are getting married, it’s hard not to feel like I’ve missed something. I suppose that if I were still single now, and I really wanted to be married, that it would be difficult in another way. For me though, it’s more like choosing the uncharted, lesser traveled path, and slowly realizing that fewer and fewer travelers are with you. I’m checking my map more, and looking around in a way that I didn’t expect to. Even though I’m genuinely happy with my relationship status, I still wonder if there isn’t something that I’ve missed. What is it that almost everyone else sees that I don’t?

I thought this statistic from Pew was interesting:

“Nearly four-in-ten Americans say marriage is becoming obsolete, according to a Pew Research survey in 2010. Yet the same survey found that most people who have never married (61 percent) would like to do so someday.”

Marriage as we know it may be on its way out. In fact, it’s always been subject to change (see: women as property and miscegenation). Marriage itself, though, appears to be on solid ground. If even I am still thinking about what my dress will look like, despite my having zero desire to actually get one, I have to believe that marriage is doing just fine.

By the way, the dress would be green. It’s my favorite color, and frankly, why even bother with white at this point?

Colleen Crinion is a progressive activist focusing on women’s issues and labor. She earned her M.A. in Sociology from American University, focusing on gender, family, sexuality and the media. She has been published in the Virginian Pilot, Ms. Magazine, Fem 2pt0, and Spike the Water Cooler; and was a finalist in the Roe v. Wade blog contest for the National Council of Jewish Women in 2011. As a Board member of the DC Abortion Fund and former Planned Parenthood employee, she writes primarily about women’s issues and reproductive justice. Ms. Crinion also serves as Communications Director for the Women’s Information Network (WIN). She won a Democracy for America Scholarship to attend the Netroots Nation Conference in June 2012. Originally from Michigan, she currently resides in Washington, DC where can often be found tweeting while watching the Daily Show and Colbert Report with her dog. You can follower her at @colleeneliza.

This post is originally published on Huffington Post and is cross-posted with permission.

Photo Credit Paul-W via Creative Commons

IN Swaziland, teenage girls are taught about sexually transmitted diseases, condoms and HIV testing information handed out at will as they learn that sex is dangerous and mostly for men. 

In India, The Justice Verma Committee’s recommendation on recognizing marital rape as an offence under criminal law was hastily swept aside by the Standing Committee on Home, on the basis that ‘marriage presumes consent.‘

And a few weeks ago, in the HBO series Girls, Adam raped his girlfriend Natalia onscreen.

Or did he? It was, according to Slate, at the very least, “uncomfortable.”  Or maybe it was a violation and “something she didn’t like?“

All three of these situations highlight an unspoken topic in the fight against rape and sexual abuse: the presumed notion of consent.

We know all too well the meaning of no. We write about it, we repeat it, and men learn very early that: ‘no means no’ – and then quickly learn the accompanying jokes and ways to refute it.

As women, we’re told to say no when we feel uncomfortable. No, when we don’t want to be touched. No, when the lines are clearly drawn. That’s the way we like to read about rape too. We like clear-cut, open and shut cases of rape. We want a victim and a criminal. We want the victim to be decisive in her statements, preferably with no sexual promiscuity, and who clearly resisted the abuse, tooth and nail.

We certainly did not like the Steubenville rape case. We didn’t want to report on it for a long time. When it finally went to trial, just take a look at how the media fumbled their way through being rape apologists over a drunken girl and high school football stars.

What we especially don’t like are the situations like the ones described in India, Swaziland and on Girls, where pleasure, consent and that uncomfortable middle ground of sex arise and we don’t quite know how to feel about it – or what to do.

Let me preface the rest of this column by how I feel about what happened on Girls: it was rape. Was Natalia raped the way we like to read about it? No. Not at all.

But that doesn’t make the rape any less real.

The problem I think, is twofold. First, gender power imbalances remain present, whether in India or in New York, and accompany us right into our bedrooms. Second, we don’t stress the importance of consent, because it suggests a reformulation of traditional gender roles. We are so concentrated on the ‘no’ that if it’s not heard, then it doesn’t matter. The sex can go on.

Presumed consent removes all agency from the woman, and subjects her to complete control by her companion. It is a selfish, degrading and potentially harmful way to conduct a sexual relationship, one that makes the female body a thing to be taken at will, with no importance placed on her wants or wishes. It presumes that the man is the likely perpetrator of sexual abuse – that there is a defined giver and a taker. And that the taker will always win. These are, unfortunately, the very definitions of traditional gender roles when it comes to sex.

This brings us to Swaziland. Sex without pleasure seems pointless, but in many places and in many relationships, it occurs all the time and is a predominantly male-dominated act: he takes the lead, he take the pleasure, he always orgasms. I’m not sure this is something to be proud of, unless your companion is doing the same. Taking pleasure is not the same as having pleasure, and a whole other world to giving pleasure. Again, presumed consent looks at the notion of pleasure selfishly: a woman is there to give pleasure, willingly or not, while a man is there to take it.

I like that Girls showed this awful and disconcerting rape scene (wait, is there any other kind?). We often think of girls being subjugated and without voice in other countries, and think that sex must be a horrible activity for them. The scene between Natalia and Adam brings it back home, to a place where we mistakenly assume that women and men have an equal voice in an act where both are supposed willing participants, back to the unequal power relations between men and women that exist everywhere.

Congratulations if you haven’t been there – but I doubt it. As a woman, I’m willing to bet there has been at least one sexual episode that left you feeling uncomfortable, like you should have said no, you should have gotten up to leave, you should have done something, anything, but you didn’t and now its over, and you feel you can’t.

Even here, the pressure is on us.

I certainly have been in these situations. And I’m a pretty outspoken woman. But there’s something about the bedroom and the imbalances in power relations between men and women that have placed me in very uncomfortable situations. Plural. I’m betting this has happened to you too – but we’ve never talked about it. We don’t talk about our consent, our pleasure and how we feel. The sex is over, he’s had his orgasm, can’t you just move on?

Maybe it comes down to women not being taught to ask for their pleasure, or ever to take it, the way men do. Maybe its men not being taught to respect a woman’s body and value her pleasure in the sexual experience. Maybe it comes down to the closed lines of communication where a man’s ego suffers so greatly if his sexual acts are questioned and a woman’s expected role is to give and give without refusal. Yes, people have bad, awkward and angry sex for many different reasons. But unequal power relations in the bedroom that aren’t explicitly consensual can lead to very harmful situations.

The main criticism of John Locke’s theory of consent is that without the power to refuse consent, we cannot give true consent. While we may look to other cultures as places where that lack of power to refuse can be clearly identified, we know all too well that imbalances in gendered power dynamics can come to haunt our sexual activities – but because we’re supposed to be free, outspoken and ‘born equal‘ – we don’t talk about this thing we still know is very much alive, in our heads as well as in our actions.

What if we based sex on the radical concept of consent instead? Not presumed, one-sided understood or “I thought…” consent. There’s a big difference between not saying no and enthusiastically saying yes. Of course I don’t think people should verbally communicate their consent at every second of the act (although a little enthusiastic and positive dirty talk is always welcome). But wouldn’t you want to be in an experience that is mutually wanted instead of reluctantly accepted? Aren’t you paying enough attention to your partner to read their non-verbal cues? And if you put the entire onus on your partner to tell you ‘no’ – what does that mean about your own skewed version of power and sex?

All around the world we teach young girls and women about sexual health and encourage abstinence, the use of birth control and protection. What we don’t talk about enough is the pleasure component. We don’t teach enough about the importance of valuing your partner, respecting their boundaries and wanting them to be pleasured as well. We don’t teach women and men to love their bodies and love each other. We don’t knock down harmful stereotypes about who does and gives or takes what in the bedroom and that ‘good girls’ don’t ask for things, while whores deserve anything. We don’t redefine gender roles that bring about these stereotypes, and we continue to view rape through a very gendered lens, one that places the onus solely on the victim, as if power imbalances do not influence her actions.

Consent. This little notion that somehow works to rebalance the inequalities present between partners in the bedroom should be an integral part of our lives. We must claim it, require it and be respected because of it. Our partners should learn it, ask for it and make sure it’s present. To continue to presume its existent would be harmful for the delicate power balances we are fighting to correct.

photo credit: [ piXo ] via photopin cc

What makes a relationship healthy?  What are the warning signs of abuse?  How can you help someone you know is in an abusive relationship?  If you’d like to start these conversations with yourself or someone you know, now’s the time because February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month.  The stats show that 33% of teens in abusive relationships aren’t talking about the abuse, so we must all do something to support teens.  It’s estimated that 1.5 million high school students experience abuse from a partner in one year.

On Monday February 11, we hope teens, parents of teens, young adults, and all who care about ending dating violence will join Fem2pt0, Spark Summit, and the DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence for a #HealthyLove tweetchat.  Our chat will be from 1-2pm EST, and we’ll be sparking a dialogue on healthy relationships and healthy sexuality for teens and young adults.

We hope you can join us and share your crucial stories, advice, knowledge, and overall enthusiasm!  Just use the hashtag #healthylove to join us.

Photo credit: Alfonsina Blyde » via photopin cc.

For a country that built its reputation on the storied rugged individualist, its laws sure as hell don’t match the rhetoric.

Are single people discriminated against? According to evidence out there, American singles take a financial hit on income taxes, health care costs, social security, and IRA choices to name a few. And it goes without saying that unmarried women take a bigger financial hit due to the wage gap than their single male counterparts.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against marriage. It’s come a long way from being a mere contractual obligation to one of spending your life with, presumably, a love match. But it’s not for everyone. In 2011, the Census Bureau announced that married couples in the United States are in the minority for the first time.

At what point do we view these laws and company policies as archaic? Currently, the laws do not help the majority of Americans succeed financially, so why are they still around? Are we anticipating that the single trend will reverse? Perhaps there is no clear answers, but I think a part is that we all on some level, without question, accept that it’s better to be married than not. Tradition, culture, family, and nostalgia push us to seek coupledom, though more and more, people are cohabiting or living alone.

Arnold and Campbell in their wonderful and jaw dropping article “The High Price of Being Single” crunch the numbers on a hypothetical single women making $40,000 a year for 40 years. She will pay $245,000 in taxes compared to her married sister in the same scenario who will pay $209,000 in taxes! The joint return penalizes singles.

They then take the same hypothetical women making 40K and compare health care costs. The singleton spent $189,600 over 60 years and the married spent $165,600 over the same time. A single woman would fall further behind if she becomes disabled.

Additionally, single people have no death benefit that would go to someone. Singles should have a choice to who their social security benefits go to when they die. It shouldn’t be put back into the general pool.  Why can’t a sibling, niece or nephew, or friend be the beneficiary? Just because someone isn’t married doesn’t mean they don’t have family or caretaker obligations.

And single people have less choice when it comes to  IRA’s, including but not limited to, being unable to list another person on the IRA and being hit with required minimum distributions that married folks can dodge. If a single person has a health issue that requires her to withdraw money early, she will also loose 10% of the withdrawal amount while marrieds do not incur that cost.

The shape of our households has changed and continues to change. We’ve known this for years. Our laws need to keep up with the times. Marriage is no longer the bedrock of American society, and it’s a shame that some will get angry or sad or nostalgic about that statement of fact because we need to get past that emotional response to tackle this structural inequality. Unfortunately, little organizing has occurred around this issue. Part of the reason is that there are many types of singletons: single parents, cohabitators, and unmarried and childfree.

Everyone should agree to end the privileging of marriage. It’s kind of shocking that there isn’t more outrage given that Americans who do marry, do so later in life. That means more time as a single person loosing money, which ultimately mean bringing less economic resources to the marriage.  And even if you are married now, you lost out on money when you were single and who knows, you may be single again someday.

If we can agree that the ‘solution’ is not to get married, that’s a really good start.  There are enough awful unions out there already. Let’s not bribe people into bad relationships thinking that it will solve money problems. It’s not smart and we can do better.

Photo Credit: donbuciak via Compfight cc.

This post is originally published on Role/ Reboot.  It is cross posted with permission.  

The New York Times wants us to believe the End of Courtship is a disaster for young people, especially women. But new types of relationships—in which men and women are equal partners—inevitably require new ways of seeking them out, says Abigail Collazo.

The bizarre plethora of articles that has been published lately regarding young, single “millennials” and our dating/sex lives is mind-boggling. The Atlantic (not surprisingly) tops it out I think with recent pieces such as “A Million First Dates,” “Forget Online Dating: Here’s Something That Might Really Hurt Monogamy,” and “The High Price of Being Single in America.” Bloomberg presented us with “‘Intellectual Meat Market’ Makes Washington Long Odds for Single Women.” The Wall Street Journal recently published “Hacking the Hyperlinked Heart.” And of course, The New York Times just released “The End of Courtship,” an obituary to traditional dating and a cry for help for millennials who just don’t know how to navigate this new, tricky, casual, and tech-infused world of dating.

There has already been lots of criticism launched at The New York Times’ most recent attempts to use a few anecdotes as evidence of some sort of trend, and they’re spot on. So we’ll skip over for now the hetero-normative, cherry-picked, and unscientific aspects of this article and address the real concern: Does the new way of dating prevent the building of healthy relationships?

The End of Courtship and The Expansion of Women’s Rights

Courtship has traditionally been the period in which a male suitor pursued a female with the intent of marriage. A suitor’s family, wealth, and social standing were all major factors in whether the courtship would be encouraged by the woman’s family, leading to a prosperous marriage, or not. A woman of certain standing would be presented as ready to accept suitors at a “coming out ball,” and men dance with her and commence calling on her.

But our society is way, way beyond that now. Because of economics, technology, and of course expanded rights for women, we’re no longer even remotely close to that format of relationship-building. Times have changed.

Even as recently as a half century ago, women were no longer sold to the highest bidder, but we were still trapped in a system that prevented women from being fully engaged actors in the courtship ritual. I’m not saying a woman could never refuse a suitor, but we were hardly as free to pursue the relationships we wanted.

We were not permitted to act on our interest in a man, afraid we’d be considered “bold.” Contraceptives were not available to married women nationwide until the Griswold v. Connecticut case in 1965, and unmarried women until the Eisenstadt v. Baird case in 1972—meaning women didn’t have control over their reproductive cycles and were unable to fully explore their sexuality.

Women weren’t given the opportunity to be financially independent and therefore were forced to consider a man’s ability to care for them and any future children. We weren’t afforded the rights to leave a relationship that had turned abusive, and it wasn’t until 1993 that spousal rape was criminalized in all 50 states. All of this means that the traditions of courtship as we’ve understood it over the centuries has become radically outdated in today’s world.

Frankly, I’m delighted that the idea of courtship is being upended. For sure, my parents and many other couples from that generation are happily married. Then again, many aren’t. But this myth of “the good old days” is one that has been paraded around for generations—you know for sure that our parents, growing up in the free-love sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, also heard about their damaging relationships from their own elders.

This New York Times article isn’t about the end of courtship—it’s about how the end of courtship is ruining our lives and any chance at happiness. And that’s where it completely loses credibility. We are dating now via text message and websites, “hanging-out” and group activities. And it’s supposedly destroying us,“leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend” because we don’t “know how to get out of hookup culture” and are fooled by “a false sense of intimacy.”

The conclusion is that somehow this leaves us all unfulfilled, confused about how to date, and ultimately completely screwing up the dating, and ergo the “marriage and relationships” thing. That the combination of hookup culture and technology has led to an inability of my generation (especially women) to form normal, healthy relationships.

But the truth is, as an intelligent and well-educated young woman, I’m just as concerned with avoiding an unfulfilling and unhealthy relationship as I am with finding a strong and healthy one.

Why has dating changed? Simple. Because marriage has. Relationships have. Our expectations for ourselves and our society have. And perhaps most importantly, for me and my girlfriends, our options have.

Despite the GOP’s War on Women and the attacks on women’s health and rights around the country, things have gotten astronomically better for women over the past few centuries or so, and certainly over the past 50 years. My friends and I are being taught the warning signs of abusive relationships. We no longer need to marry a man who can support us financially. We can delay childbirth until we’re ready. And in response, men are changing their expectations. Gender stereotypes are alive and well, but the men we know want a woman with a career, with ambitions and goals, who can carry her end of the conversation. One who doesn’t rely on their paycheck (recession, anyone?), and with whom they have something in common. As sexually liberated women, we want a man who respects and pleases us. Men want a woman who has some idea of what she wants, isn’t afraid to ask for it, and enjoys physical intimacy as much as they do.

If reporters at The New York Times are going to comment on how millennials are going about dating, they should take a closer look at what we’re trying to get out of dating. The game of traditional courtship is dying because its participants are no longer playing for the same ends.

How Women Are Navigating This New World of Dating

One of my girlfriends recently got out of a 10-year relationship she’d been in since college. We were chatting the other day about her intrigue with just this topic—how to flirt, the appropriate ways of reaching out to men via text/technology, how to decide whom to go to bed with and when, etc. I reminded her that working so hard to throw out the rule book for women—on what we could and could not do and should and should not do—meant that she could write her own rules. For what she wanted. For what would work for her and for her relationship alone.

What were her own qualifications for who she would sleep with? What were her boundaries? Did she want to explore a real relationship again, in a more formal way, or was she really looking to just have fun out on the town, meeting new people?

These are the questions of the new relationships and the new interactions in which men and women are engaging. How can anyone possibly say this is more damaging than the days in which women were bought and sold like cattle to the highest or most respectable bidder?

Society bemoans all of these different, more casual relationships as damaging and dangerous, but they’re simply an extension of the changing gender roles we’ve been experiencing for the past half century and more. And that’s not a bad thing—even when it comes to redefining relationships. Those of us with higher educations who get married later in life tend to stay married more often. The national divorce rate is higher now than it was a century ago, suggesting that people are getting out of marriages that aren’t working for them anymore, and yet the divorce rate has also been declining for the past two decades. And marriage equality has completely opened up such public relationships to an entire generation of people who’ve been denied their civil rights for far too long, while rebuilding our own perceptions of what marriage “should” be like.

So yes, my friends and I are upending the traditional courtship rituals. I admit it. And it certainly is messy and confusing at times. There’s no doubt that “The End of Courtship” resonated with many of my friends in its assertions that it’s hard to tell a date from a hangout from a get together from a potential meeting of soulmates. But traditional courtship offered me far fewer options and far less control over my life. These new relationships are the relationships of a new world of men and women, seeking what they want when they want it on equal footing and on equal ground.

If a man isn’t engaged enough, doesn’t want what I want, or doesn’t treat me the way I want or know I deserve, for the first time in history, a woman can just walk away.

Messy? Yes. Confusing? Definitely. Tricky? You bet.

Such is life. And I’ll take it.

Photo credit: **Mary** via photopin cc.

When my editor sent out a request for us to ponder which woman inspire us, I posted the question on Facebook. I was curious if there would be a consensus (there wasn’t). And I was curious to know what kind of woman it was that invoked such an awesome emotion. After all, to inspire someone is pretty magical.

There were quite a few nominations for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as Vandana Shiva. Others nominated were Frances Fox Piven, Mother Theresa, Kathleen Hanna (love that!), Aung San Suu Kyi, Kathleen Zellner and many more. Indeed, I was impressed by how many women there are to be inspired by! A few people mentioned that they were inspired by people who are not politicians or at all famous, including family members.

As much as I am inspired sometimes by famous women, the truth is when I think about which woman, or women, inspires me most I always go back to my grandmothers.

My grandmothers could not have been more different, even though they were born and raised in the same Midwest state, less than 50 miles from each other. I had what you might call a Country Grandma and a City Grandma, but for all their differences, both of them taught me so much about life and being a smart, fierce, strong woman in this world.

My Country Grandma was born, raised, and died on the same farm. Widowed and left to raise three young girls on her own, she stared bravely into the face of an American culture of the 1960s that did not take kindly to single mothers. Having survived a sexual assault as a girl, she taught all her girls how to shoot guns and drive a car before they were 15. Life was hard on the farm and they were miles away from anywhere. But she put herself through night school and became a nurse in the maternity ward of the very same hospital where I was born. (She gave me my first bath!) As she continued to have a productive cattle farm (her livestock was sold for meat), she had to make men respect her, even as they looked down on her barely 5-foot frame. And when my mother became another unplanned teenage pregnancy statistic of 1976, my grandmother took us in and became my rock. No matter how strange things got with my often inept young parents, my Country Grandmother was there, full of spit and fire and a sureness about life that was at once comforting and, indeed, inspiring. What I learned from her more than anything else is that you have to respect yourself before anyone else will respect you. And that sometimes you have to make a lot of noise and make people really uncomfortable before they will give you a seat at the table. But you won’t get anywhere if you give up.

On the other side of the coin was my City Grandmother. Where my Country Grandmother would dole out folk-wisdom and fill a room with a hearty bellow of a laugh, my City Grandmother was all class. She was a lady in an era of ladies. She wore an apron and her garden always had beautiful flowers smiling up at you. But this is not to say that my City Grandmother was conventional. As a young woman, she got a music scholarship from playing the violin, which meant she left home and went to college in an age when that was quite rare. After college, she worked as a teacher even after she married my Grandfather. (Working after marriage! Such a rebel!) And she continued to juggle her many talents — from teaching, to secretarial work, to work as a seamstress and tailor — throughout my father’s childhood. When I was girl, my City Grandmother, then working as a librarian, taught me how to write a well-crafted, hand-written letter (my first foray into story-telling), and she encouraged me to use my imagination to turn the mundane — like metal tins full of old buttons — into a thrilling afternoon, dancing around her living room with home-made maracas. If my Country Grandmother taught me to walk with a big stick, my City Grandmother was the one who helped me understand how to speak softly while using it. And perhaps because the world around her couldn’t understand her desire to work outside the home and to use her artistic side to create beautiful things — she was once made me a life-size baby doll, making every stitch of the doll, its clothes and hair — my City Grandmother always reminded me that having a big imagination and marching to your own beat is a blessing, not a curse.

Together my two grandmothers showed me the strength and power of being a woman. They taught me the thrill of making mud pies and the thrill of making something beautiful. Each of them encouraged me to be my authentic self and never let the outside world force me to compromise my spirit for the sake of fitting in or being popular. They also were living examples of the fact that there is no such thing as “women’s work.” There is just work. And it needs to get done.

Sadly, both of my grandmothers have now passed away. I think of them all the time, especially now that I am raising my daughter. But the lessons I received will be passed down and I can only hope that I can match my Country Grandmother’s fire and my City Grandmother’s imagination in my daughter’s eyes.

Here’s hoping that whomever you see as inspirational, that you use that to propel you forward in 2013!

Photo credit: Jason A. Samfield via photopin cc

Nobody warned me.

When I started to “come out” as a feminist activist – not just talking with friends, but sharing articles on Facebook, writing extensively about women’s rights, and participating in advocacy movements – nobody warned me.

Nobody warned me that friends, friends of friends, acquaintances, and sometimes total strangers who’d come across my writing online, would come to me with their stories. With their problems.  With their worries.

And come they did.  First it was Susan, who had seemed in a perfectly happy and healthy relationship. Except that as it turns out, her boyfriend pressured her to have sex with him every night, and was aggressive when she refused.  She was petrified of him. Then it was Rachel, who read about the tweet chat Fem2.0 hosted a few months ago at #EndtheSilence, where survivors of domestic violence spoke out on twitter about their experiences using anonymous Twitter accounts.  Rachel wanted to learn how to use Twitter so she could share her story, too. Then it was Nick, an acquaintance who sent me a Facebook message because one of his best friends from high school never spoke about her husband, but kept showing up at the emergency room with suspicious bruises.  Another time it was Roxanne, who’d been to court twice already to get restraining orders against her former boyfriend who was by all definitions of the word, stalking her.

And then there were the rapes.  My friends will sometimes talk as openly about the second time they were raped as my male friends will about the second time they had sex.  My girlfriends post social media updates about the sexual harassment they face on a daily basis (often detailing the exact intersection where it happened so as to warn others), will caution one another about the violent and controlling tendencies of a particular guy they met online, or else ask each other about the safety of a new neighborhood – particularly for a woman living alone.

The truth is, violence against women is everywhere. And not just in India, Syria, Somalia, Sri Lanka, or Ghana.   Here in America, it is a pervasive part of our society.  Even for those of us who believe our friends, our circles, are less susceptible to such violence than are others – still, it is everywhere.  When we open our eyes, when we are exposed to what is happening around us, in even the most seemingly unlikely of corners, we realize that none of us is immune to it.  Violence against women has come to be seen as almost inherent to the female experience.

And like the rest of society, the House of Representatives chose to not provide additional help and support to female survivors of violence for one reason – they don’t recognize it as a real problem.

I know what some of you are thinking – the House Republicans were just trying to derail President Obama’s agenda.  Or else they were using women as a political football, and it was all strategy.  These things aren’t false.  But the truth is that just as the establishment of the Republican Party doesn’t believe in government spending or in education for undocumented children or in investment in clean energy alternatives, they also don’t believe that women need and therefore deserve special protection or assistance.

The Violence Against Women Act

First, some quick background.  The Violence Against Women Act has been renewed with overwhelming bipartisan support since its inception in 1994.  This bill strengthens the criminal justice system and provides support to survivors of domestic violence.  Unfortunately, it also expired in October 2011, and with the 112th Congress officially finishing at the close of 2012, the Act is officially dead, requiring the 113th Congress to start from scratch.

VAWA is, quite literally, a life-saver for millions of women.  The bill has funded the training of 500,000 law enforcement officials in relevant issues, established the National Domestic Violence Hotline which receives 22,000 calls each month, and has led to a significant increase in not just the reporting of such violence, but also in the strengthening of legal protections and services for survivors.

This year, we wanted to do more.  The Senate version of the reauthorization bill included increased protections for LGBTQ, undocumented, and Native American women, all of whom are at significantly higher risk than other demographics. The reauthorized bill would have expanded protections to 30 million more women.

But the question of equality and human rights is what is really the issue here.  Because apparently these Republican Representatives who blocked the bill from coming to a vote believe that being gay, entering the country without a visa, or else living on a Native American reservation are all crimes that prohibit you from being entitled to protection and assistance in the event that you are assaulted.  Or maybe it’s just that the crime of being a woman simply means that there’s no such thing as a gender-based crime being committed against you, because your crime in existing means that frankly, you got what was coming to you.

Republicans did not want to extend special protections or resources to these special groups of women.  But the truth is that just as not all men are created equal, neither are all women created equal.

Does “Equality” Help or Hurt Our Cause?

In her 2006 book, Are Women Human?, feminist advocate and law professor Catherine MacKinnon explores the legal difficulties inherent in seeking “equality” for women. She writes:

Aristotle defined equality as treating likes alike and unlikes unalike. Treating those who are the same the same, first class equality in this approach, is termed gender neutrality for sex, colorblindness for race. Its secondary rule, accompanied by an aura of inferiority, treats diffrently those seen as different; it is typically termed “special benefits” or “special protection.”

So here we are with an understanding of the 14th Amendment, or more specifically the Equal Protection Clause, which states that the law cannot deny protection and rights to one person or group of people that is enjoyed by another person or group of people.  If you are alike, you must be treated alike.  If you are different, and you experience that difference in a way that is degrading or violent, it does not defy “equal protection” because you are experiencing that difference in a context of different.  MacKinnon explains further:

Sexual violence seems assimilated to the difference between the sexes, so a woman is not considered treated unequally when she is sexually victimized, just treated differently for her differences. Sexual assault is seen as inevitable. The fact that women are generally victimized and men generally perpetrate is not considered subject to equalization. When women are treated “differently” from men, from sexual objectification to sexual murder, the traditional equality rule is not seen as violated because the distinction made by the practice fits the empirical definition of the group. Women being defined as rapable, raping them doesn’t violate them; it merely treats them as women – unlikes unalike.

What does any of this have to do with the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act? Quite a lot, actually.

When the House of Representatives put forth their own version of the VAWA, the provisions and protections for these additional groups – LGTBQ, undocumented, and Native American women – had been stripped.  When asked about it on NPR, Representative Sandy Adams (R-FL) responded as follows:

Let’s not look – let’s not have a solution in search of a problem … What we have to remember is you start listing the groups. Eventually, you’re going to get to a point where you’re excluding people. 

And that’s the real problem, isn’t it? That Republicans don’t want to acknowledge that women are different – and not “good” different.  Different in the fact that we face scenarios and life style requirements that they can never understand or appreciate.  And that even within that very broad definition of “women,” there are specific demographics of women who experience violence at higher rates and in different ways.

Republicans refuse to understand this.  These legislators – almost exclusively men – who control our government and our public policy.

Why were additional protections and assistance written into the law for these demographics of women? Because these demographics of women are facing higher risk of violence and lower rates of support than other demographics of women.  This is what the evidence shows.

While the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs estimates that the rate of domestic violence for homosexual couples is roughly the same as heterosexual couples, the former are significantly less likely to seek or receive help, and women are the overwhelming majority of the victims when such cases end in death. Native American women suffer from violent crime at some of the highest rates in the U.S., particularly at the hands of non-Native American men, because the tribes have no authority over such men.  And as I’ve written about before, immigrant women face unique challenges in seeking aid for domestic violence cases. Immigration status is just an additional tool used by abusive spouses or partners to control their victims and exert power over their lives.  If the abuser has legal status in the United States, he can use that status to his victim’s disadvantage, often by threatening to report her to authorities or refusing to file the petitions and paperwork that would give the victim legal status in the U.S.

But Republicans don’t want to acknowledge this.  In their view, women are either the same, equal to men, or they aren’t.  But we can’t have it both ways. They don’t support affirmative action because they don’t want to acknowledge or officially recognize that racism and poverty and class do, in fact, play a role in higher education admissions or in hiring practices.  Even though we all know they do.

So what’s really going on here?  As far as I can see it, Republicans who blocked the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act from coming to a vote simply do not see this as an urgent need.  Or as a problem at all really, it seems.

Maybe it’s because they secretly don’t really believe that women are really victims here.  Maybe, like the New Delhi police, they secretly believe that women who are the victims of rape really deserved it.  Maybe they are all like Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, who, after his son was arrested for beating up his girlfriend, released a statement calling it “an accident,” instead of a crime.

One way or another, these Republicans didn’t view the safety and lives of women as being worthy of protection or support.

The 113th Congress

Less than two weeks ago, with the 112th Congress coming rapidly to a close, the 12 Democratic women serving in the Senate sent a letter to all 25 Republican women serving in the House of Representatives.  ”We are reaching out to you to ask for your help,” they wrote.  The letter urged the House Republican women to pass the Senate version of the Violence Against Women Act, which included the increased protections and aid for the three additional groups of women. Because the truth is that despite differences, there exists a shared experience of being female in a male-dominated world.  A shared experience that women serving in government recognize.  And this extends beyond even just the officeholders – the Women’s Congressional Staff Association has over 100 members from both sides of the aisle, providing mentorship, guidance, support, and shared professional fellowship in their quest to support one another, regardless of party affiliation.

This morning, a record number of women were sworn in to serve as part of the 113th Congress: 20 in the Senate and 81 in the House of Representatives.  In fact, all kinds of gender-related records were broken in the 2012 Election cycle: women who filed for Senate races (36), women who won primaries for Senate seats (18), women who filed for House races (299), women who won primaries for House seats (166).

And, as has been documented, the women from both sides seem to have a way of coming together civilly (not, for instance, screaming the F word at one another on the floor), to actually get things done.  Women in Congress have crossed party lines – happily – to pass legislation not just on issues relating to women specifically, but also on children’s safety, national security, public health, transportation, and recommendations for Supreme Court nominations.

Senator Patty Murray, a longtime advocate for the bill, has vowed to absolutely bring up the Violence Against Women Act in the 113th Congress. Will her new female colleagues – from both sides of the hill and the aisle – aid her in its passage?  This new Congress is the most diverse Congress in history – it includes 19 new people of color, the first Hindu Representative and the first Buddhist Senator, the first openly gay Congressman of color, and the first openly bisexual Congresswoman, that our federal government has ever see.

Perhaps this new diversity will bring about the change we wish to see in the world.  Perhaps this new, diverse Congress with more female members than ever before, will be able to move forward on protecting and providing for survivors in a way that the previous Congress refused to do.

Maybe we can stop saying that “gender issues have to take a back seat to other priorities… [because] there is no way we can be successful if we maintain every special interest and pet project.”  Because after all, even with the fiscal cliff negotiations, Sandy relief funding, and other issues that faced the 112th Congress in its dusk, can we really continue to claim that the health and safety – the lives – of women, aren’t worth the effort it takes to protect them?

Every two minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted.  Every 15 seconds, somewhere in America, a woman is battered, usually by an intimate partner.  But every day, we also have a chance to do more to support and protect women, uniquely at risk for unique types of violence.

I don’t mention here the costs associated with violence against women.  What it costs us – in billions of dollars a year, what the court costs add up to, what the lost economic productivity of battered women amounts to.  Is it important? I suppose.  But ending violence against women and prosecuting perpetrators and providing help to survivors isn’t about cost.  It’s not about capitalism and about making our country as financially robust as possible.

It’s about women being people and people being women.  It’s about women’s rights being human rights and human rights being women’s rights. It’s simply the right thing to do.  Because women shouldn’t need to be men to be considered human.  For their rights to be considered as worthwhile.

Women are different from men.  There’s no doubt about it.  But being different doesn’t mean being less human.  It doesn’t mean violations against our minds and bodies, the denial of our freedoms or our liberties, aren’t human rights violations just because they didn’t happen to men – that status quo of humanity.

The 112th Congress failed in its quest to represent the American people in its failure to pass the Violence Against Women Act.  Let’s make sure the new Congress does better.

Lives – human lives – depend on it.

Photo Credits: PolicyMic and EMILY’s List

Consummation is traditionally defined as the first sexual intercourse between a man and a woman following their marriage. It has roots in the basic heterosexist idea that the purpose of marriage is to have reproductive sex, which is why in some places (Britain, for example), if a marriage has not been consummated with intercourse, it’s not valid. So what does legal consummation mean in terms of queer nuptials?

For the civil servants in Britain who have been charged with writing the proposals for gay marriage, this is becoming quite the conundrum. As reported by the Sunday Times, the British government will be publishing its proposals for gay marriage in a few weeks, and ministers have decided “to make gay marriage an exact replica of heterosexual marriage, except for the right to marry in a church.” Since that means that same-sex marriages will have to be consummated in order to be “valid,” the definition of gay sex is suddenly in the hands of civil servants, who are essentially stumped. For months they have been “considering the intricacies of gay sex . . . and have taken evidence from sex experts and gay rights organizations in an attempt to define consummation between two women and between two men.”

The main reason that a definition of sex is important to marriage in the UK is that a union can be annulled if it wasn’t consummated properly. The UK government recognizes annulments as as alternatives to divorce if a divorce isn’t wanted for religious reasons, as the established Church Of England prevents a wall of separation between church and state. A proper British consummation, according to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1973, involves “‘ordinary and complete’ intercourse, rather than ‘partial and imperfect” intercourse.’” If gay marriage is to be legally equivalent to straight marriage, the same rules of annulment should technically apply. But since a definition of “ordinary and complete” queer sex is so hard to pin down, it seems unlikely that the laws could be totally congruent, no matter how you spin it.

Some gay rights groups in Britain believe that as a solution, consummation could be left out of the draft of the law entirely, and some lawmakers have even proposed removing consummation from Great Britain’s Marriage Act. However, this solution was shot down by people like Edward Leigh, a Roman Catholic member of Britain’s conservative Tory Party, who according to Gay Star News, “claimed it would reduce marriage to the level of a civil partnership.” This view was shared by many other Catholics for whom annulment would become complicated if consummation was no longer a legal requirement for a marriage, and members of the Church of England for whom the sanctity of marriage rests solely in heterosexual unions. As religion plays a large and concrete role in political decisions in the UK, consummation as a religious act has enough political weight to uphold it, which is exactly what happened when the decision was made in June of this year.

Leigh’s argument that removing consummation from marriage law would downgrade the importance of a straight marriage doesn’t sound so bad to me, so long as all marriage was understood as civil partnerships. Though this is indeed one of the major fears of people who are anti-gay marriage—that legalized same-sex marriage would redefine straight marriage. Would that really be so bad, though? Having one strict definition of consummation is harmful to straight people, too: it leaves out everyone for whom standard “penis in vagina” sex isn’t the main course on the menu, such as those who are differently-abled, or those who don’t want to reproduce.

If you take reproduction out of the equation (as many couples, both straight and queer, have done), sex for straight people is as amorphous as sex for queers. I bet a copy of Autostraddle’s “Is It Sex?” Flowchart would really help.

Gabrielle Korn is a contributing editor at Autostraddle.com living in Queens, N.Y. She received her B.A. in queer and feminist theory from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in May of 2011.  Currently, she’s a member of the New York City Dyke March committee and a coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

This post is originally published on Autostraddle and is cross-posted with permission.

Photo credit: [ piXo ] via photopin cc

2nd Photo credit: Autostraddle.com

I was born in 1989, while the AIDS epidemic in the US was in full force.  I’ve never lived in a world where learning about HIV/AIDS wasn’t a part of my school health classes.  I know that I’m lucky to have been taught an unbigoted view of how HIV/AIDS could happen to anyone, no matter your sexual orientation or gender.  But I’ve had to be caught up on the how we’ve gotten to this point, and I still learn more and more all the time about how much more we need to do in order to end AIDS.  And with HIV/ AIDS affecting 33.3 million people on this planet, we have no choice to not care about this.

Last week, on the day before World AIDS Day, I was fortunate enough to catch a screening of “How To Survive A Plague.”  It was an incredibly moving documentary that details essentially how a group can mobilize change and be effective activists.  The film takes you through a crucial moment in recent history, 1987-1996.  It centers around the efforts of the grassroots groups ACT UP and TAG, and the men who were at the forefront of these groups.  Hours and hours of raw footage of protests, stand-ins, marches, passionate speeches, and compelling images are all compiled into a very powerful film that brings you back in time.  The anger is palpable in every scene, and the fuel for the AIDS activism revolution.  It was just so inspiring, saddening, and then uplifting to see all that they accomplished leading up to the 90’s Clinton-era.  By the end of 1996, with new drug distributions, the AIDS deaths in New York City decline by 50%.  It’s incredible to see the whole journey from a president totally ignoring the epidemic, to AID/HIV plans being a huge part of a presidential campaign, and access to life-saving drugs happening.  All of that and more was because of the activists’ efforts, because of grassroots activism, because “Silence = Death.”

Today there is a lot less silence about HIV/AIDS.  There are heroes, like Hillary Clinton, who continue to fight just as hard as all of the ACT UP folks did in the 90’s.  She has elevated national policy surrounding AIDS/HIV to new levels.  On Thursday last week, Hillary unveiled the new PEPFAR Blueprint for an AIDS-Free Generation.  The blueprint’s data shows, among many things, how many countries have brought down their death rates and also saved money, incredibly.  She began by saying, “Now, make no mistake about it: HIV may well be with us into the future. But the disease that it causes need not be…”  She outlined how through PEPFAR in this year alone they have directly supported about 5.1 million people on antiretroviral treatment.  This is a 200% increase since 2008!  She touched on how the blueprint provides financial plans for how to support treatment and prevention programs worldwide, but that stigma and discrimination are still making this disease harder to fight.  Of course, she also addressed the unique concerns of women and girls living with HIV/AIDS:

“…we are focusing even more intently on women and girls, because they are still at higher risk than men of acquiring HIV because of gender inequity and violence. So we are working to ensure that HIV/AIDS programs recognize the particular needs of women and girls, for example, by integrating these efforts with family planning and reproductive health services.  We are also working to prevent and respond to gender-based violence, invest in girls’ education, address gender inequality, and take other steps that have been proven to lower their risk of contracting the virus.”

Essentially, we cannot eliminate AIDS without addressing specific gender equality related problems for women and girls.

The PEPFAR Blueprint is an excellent plan that could bring down millions more infections.  Obamacare is also crucial for people living with HIV/AIDS in the US, because through it nobody can be denied health care coverage.  But we can’t be complacent, because when AIDS programs are in danger of budget cuts, people could lose their lives.  What should AIDS activists be doing?  Taking their clothes off, like the nude protesters in Boehner’s office?  That’s definitely one way to make some noise.  But really it doesn’t matter what form the activism takes, as long as voices are heard.  And there is hope.  As Hillary said at the end of her speech:

“So if we have any doubt about the importance of this work, just think of the joy and that big smile on Florence’s face when she told us about giving birth to her two healthy HIV-negative sons. And think of that same sense of joy rippling out across an entire generation, tens of millions of mothers and fathers whose children will be born free of this disease, who will not know the horror of AIDS. That is the world we are working for, and nothing could be more exciting, more inspiring, more deserving of our dedication than that.”

The end of AIDS could be near, but programs must be fully funded. Make sure you urge the President and Congress to support them.

Photo credit Rory Finneren via the Creative Commons License.