Gender & Sexuality

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Thoughts on Gendered Language Use in the Classroom

October 22, 2024 in Education, Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Two gendered restroom signs, slightly askew in space

I try to create an inclusive space when I teach, and that means everything from learning my students’ names (even when there are a lot of them!) to not having policies that would make people feel unwelcome (like, I don’t require students to ask me to leave the classroom for any reason; I figure they’re adults, I should treat them as such, plus such a policy might single out students with a disability or medical condition requiring them to stand and stretch their legs or visit the bathroom regularly).

This sense of trying to be an inclusive teacher also extends to how I use language, and how I encourage my students to use language in their writing and speaking. And here, too, my goal of teaching critical thinking skills creeps in, as it often does, because it turns out that being attuned to social justice concerns (those foregrounded in inclusivity practices) also correspond with acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the world around us, and responding with curiosity and empathy rather than trying to wedge everyone and everything into narrow boxes.*

All of this is why I don’t use “male” and “female” as nouns, and why I’d encourage others to give it some thought as well.

 First, the history of these words makes it clear that they have a very specific meaning and narrow usage, which I don’t think should be generalized to “hello, I am addressing a group of humans outside of a medical/reproductive context.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “female” popped up in European languages in the 1300s to mean “A person of the sex that can bear offspring; a woman or a girl.” In addition to the noun usage, female also has an adjective meaning: “That belongs to the sex which can bear offspring (contrasted with male); characteristic of or relating to this sex.” And while I’m less upset by the use of the word as an adjective, it still has that icky reproductive-connotations thing going on. And for what it’s worth, I’ll point out that there are way more entries under the adjective section of the word than the noun section of the word.

Second, I believe addressing people as males and females is potentially exclusionary. I look at all the wealth of information we have about different genders (there are more than two!) and sexes (also more than two!) and I think, why would I address people using binaristic language that’s bound to leave someone out? Maybe someone in my classroom is intersex, trans, or non-binary. Remember, according to some research estimates, around 1.7% of people have an intersex condition and around .5% of the U.S. adult population is trans so combining those facts and knowing that if I teach around 100 students every semester means I’m gonna choose less exclusionary language, even if it only helps one person in one hundred. Not all of these identities are visible to the naked eye, either, so it’s entirely possible that there are others in my classroom who don’t know they’re intersex yet (I mean, I haven’t had karyotyping done, have you?!), or they’re exploring their gender identity, or…there are so many possibilities, I’d rather err on the side of being more inclusive.

Third, as Carrie Cutler points out in a Slate article, “female” is often an adjective used to manage the meaning of a noun…when it’s assumed the noun is a broad category that usually includes men. So we’d say “female scientist” because upon hearing “scientist” one might assume we were talking about a dude scientist. And something about that just sets my teeth on edge, that we have to keep specifying that it’s a woman doing the job that used to be only done by men, and we still need modifiers to do this work instead of just assuming that women can be included in the catch-all profession of scientists.

Fourth, there are some, uh, connotations. In the Slate article linked above, the author points out the use of “female” in song lyrics (which I shan’t reprint here) to refer to sexually available women. And I think this is an equity issue: women are often discussed in terms of their sexual availability and desirability to men (let alone how we might feel about ourselves or one another!), and until men undergo the same level of objectification women do, I’m gonna be a little prickly about it. Not that feminism should be a tit-for-tat leveling of the playing field so everyone gets equally dehumanized, but these discrepancies bother me, since I don’t think any gender is more sexually anything than another.

As one researcher in STEM writes, this has professional implications too: “In a work setting, would you refer to the Vice Chancellor as a girl? Probably not, because we are accustomed to being respectful to people in senior positions. So should we extend that respect to women in other roles as well? (hint: yes)”

Some scholars go so far as to argue that gender difference (often expressed in terms of sex difference) exists in the first place to police who has access to power, and honestly, I’m not far away from this stance myself. In Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity by Paisley Currah, for example, it’s argued that:

In European, and, later, American legal traditions, gender difference was codified in laws designed to limit the rights and resources available to white women. From coverture to inheritance laws to the inability to vote to exemptions in the criminal sphere for marital rape, the law’s distincions illustrated how deeply patriarchal norms were incorporated into state structures. (20)

Oh, but that’s all changed, we’re sooo much better, yay feminism has done its job, you say? Currah (and I) would disagree: “gender subordination remains one of the organizing principles of domestic life, the workplace, and cultural production” (24). Why on earth would I use binaristic language that supports this historical and ongoing suborbination?!

Finally, there’s the question of audience. When I’m addressing my college students, I don’t really need to say “Greetings, males and females, today in class we’re going to read…” because drawing attention to my students’ (presumed) biological sex is simply not relevant in most if any classroom settings. Is it relevant in other settings? Gotta say, I’m drawing a blank. The 2024 Paris Olympics brought the debate about biological sex traits in elite sports to the public stage, and I mostly don’t feel qualified to weigh in on it (see my response here); yes, there tend to be some distinctions between the bodies of cis men and those of cis women in terms of muscle growth, metabolic functioning, and so on, and in certain sports those differences may matter. However, I know from research (and honestly, having a lot of trans friends, whom I appreciate sharing their experiences with me) that the human body is extremely malleable and responsive to hormonal interventions, so I don’t see it as my place to weigh in on this except to urge us all to remember that bodies have so much diversity and variation beyond the element of sex, it just doesn’t make sense to me to make it a really rigid distinction unless the athletes in that sport agree on it. (and please recall, one of the boxers who fought Imane Khelif was basically like “yeah, whatever” when her biological differences were brought up, so if athletes within the sport aren’t bothered by it, I don’t see why non-athletes should be bothered by it).

Hm, okay, when are other contexts where we might wanna say “males” or “females”? Do I ever want to signal something that feels very womanhood-specific to my fellow females? Not really, because I don’t care to enter any debates on how we’re defining femaleness and womanhood. For example, if the connotation of female relates to reproductive bits, are we still calling cis women who’ve had hysterectomies females? What about trans men who started out with that kind of anatomical equipment but ditched it? I don’t see a need to get into the weeds with this sort of thing, so I’ll say what I mean: “Ugh, I’m on my period and it sucks, who can relate?!” and that gets the job done in my opinion. Or if I want to talk about experiences of having my worth tied to my perceived beauty or sexual availability, then I’ll address fellow women, noting that this leaves room for people to weigh in whether you’re cis or trans, because trans women are women and they’ve had many of the same experiences as me, whereas some people who started life with XX chromosomes and a uterus might have had similar experiences at first which then diverged if/when they transitioned to something less binary or something more masculine. I think my choice of language lets people opt in or out of these kinds of conversations as they choose, and I’m okay with that.

At the end of the day, I’m not the language police. I’m not here to grade you on every single aspect of language use, though I will point out places where I think there’s room to grow in terms of word choice, nuance, and so on. If this is a language choice that you are consciously making and you’re aware of all its implications and you still want to run with it…you do you! We can have one conversation about it in class (which has already happened this semester) and that can be it.

Also, language is constantly evolving! Maybe in 5 years this conversation will be completely irrelevant for whatever reason. That’s fine too. I’m going to make the choice that makes the most sense to me right now, based on what I know and on my desire to signal to the broadest audience possible that yes, you belong here in my classroom, and learning is for everyone.

Defending gendered language that reinforces a binary is a weird hill to die on in my opinion, but whatevs.

 

*Bit of a rant here and I didn’t want to derail myself while still getting to my main point, but holy crap, fascist and bigoted and authoritarian belief systems are so lazy. Like, they are utterly devoid of both critical thinking skills and empathy, both of which absences annoy me to no end, I mean, at least pick one of the two to go with?! Every -ism or -phobia out there is rooted in essentialist thinking, generalizations, and stereotypes that are simply not true, and if the people believing these things took like 2 seconds to look at history or at the variety of cultures and human variation around the world they’d see the mounds of evidence disproving their irrational and mean-spirited beliefs, but I guess they’re not gonna do that because a) it’d take some effort and b) they’d have to admit they were wrong, and nobody likes that, especially when you’ve made your whole identity into hating some group you think takes away your power. Oh honey, late-stage capitalism has already done that, you really think we queer people are somehow outdoing corporations in making your life miserable?! There would be far more sparkles involved if we ran this shitshow!

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For F*ck’s Sake, Treat Women Like People

September 16, 2024 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

It is an astoundingly simple proposition, and yet here we are.

I shared this blog post about the men who dislike women and how we can tell on my Facebook page, and immediately, friends and acquaintances leapt in to discuss it. Most women were like “yep, that tracks.” Some men were like “Wow, I’d never thought about it that way before,” and I thanked them for taking the time to read it, because really, what system of oppression (and patriarchy is one among many) incentivizes those with power and privilege to actually sit and ponder it? Very few if any.

Then there were some men who wanted to add nuance. Which, sure, nuance is great!

But I noticed at least some of the comments came down to the following: Well, I do like women and enjoy their company, but I don’t act as though I do, because I don’t want them to get the wrong impression (that I’m flirting, that I’m available, etc.). And on the one hand, this is totally valid, because not everyone is available for every romantic configuration at every moment, and no one should have to be – so if people are assuming you are, and that’s making it weird, then yes, dispel that assumption with whichever tools you have at your disposal! And the guys on my Facebook page were respectful in their discussion, so this isn’t aimed at them as much as the general responses I see to this conversation.

However, something strikes me as odd about this idea, that men must manage women’s expectations by acting in unfriendly, antisocial, and even cold ways.

I figure that every single one of these men has social interactions that don’t revolve around the premise or promise of courtship without making it weird. They manage to have daily interactions – from the friendly to the mundane – without making it about sex.

How, dear reader, is such a thing possible?

These men are interacting with other men (and apologies for the assumption of heterosexuality here, it’s among the patterns I noticed in commenters on my post).

In the social world, men interact with other men as part of business transactions, while shopping, while dining, while doing a whole ton of activities. And unless I am missing out on some rad gay subtext happening 24/7 in mainstream social spaces, most of these men are probably managing to do so without hitting on or being hit on.

This is what most of us women want: we want to be treated as human, as a whole-ass person who can have conversations and manage business transactions and throw parties and play sports. If (presumed straight) men can manage to interact with other (presumed straight) men and have a friendly chat while doing whatever other task brings these people together in that moment, why would such a thing not be possible when interacting with women?

And yes, this is a throwback to feminist scholar Catherin MacKinnon’s classic “Are Women Human?” essay, wherein she repeatedly asks the titular question while listing numerous well-documented and sadly common instances of violence against women (rape, assault, domestic violence, street harassment, labor and sex trafficking) and asking why, in each instance, these aren’t framed as horrific human rights abuses to be battled but rather are seen as unfortunate things that simply happen repeatedly to women, as if by complete happenstance.

So I don’t mean to conflate the human subject with the masculine subject; culture has already done it for me! Hence I am borrowing some useful shorthand.

The scenarios men seem to be playing out are ones where they want to avoid inappropriate types of social conduct (wherein sexual availability is falsely presumed), and so refusing to engage with women is the way to go.

Now, I will grant that some men might hesitate to fully engage because they know many women are hit on, preyed on, objectified, and the like, which is an especial bummer when we’re just trying to live our daily lives and suddenly have to live with the reminder that some people see us as walking sex banks (don’t be that guy! Or gal, on the occasions when it happens!). Some men know they occupy tall and large bodies, and want to avoid coming across as threatening. That’s legit too.

But overall, I see some troubling assumptions embedded in these conversations, and so I feel compelled to reminder y’all: WOMEN AND MEN ARE NOT SEPARATE SPECIES!!!

And the really problematic theme I see embedded above is that men apparently feel they need to treat women differently than they’d treat a “regular” person (a.k.a. a fellow man)…because they are worried that women will treat them differently (as a sex object, a conquest, and so on).

Here is where my irony-meter goes through the roof: my good dudes, while this may seem like a problem to navigate when you encounter sexually aggressive women, this too is a symptom of patriarchy. Many women are socially conditioned to pursue higher-status male partners because we goddamn know we’re paid less, and we’re not gonna get maternity leave in this hellhole of a country, and nobody is going to protect us from all the horrific kinds of assaults visited upon women (and often in much worse ways upon women of color and trans women) unless we explicitly recruit those people to our sides by, I dunno, putting a ring on it or whatever. And don’t get me started on how domestic spaces are often even more dangerous for women; I’ll drag out my favorite terrible stat from the CDC about how half of American female homicide victims are killed by present or past male partners.

Feeling like someone doesn’t respect your boundaries or consent, hence you need to put up barriers that make you seem rude or cold or misogynist? That’s a patriarchy problem, because patriarchy teaches that sexual conquest = status, mostly for men, but women are starting to be able to take advantage of this attitude too without the only option being slut-shaming.

Feeling crummy and like someone only wants you for your money? Granted there are greedy people out there of every gender who are just assholes regardless, but, and say it with me: That’s a patriarchy problem, because Western women for centuries couldn’t own property because we WERE the property, and so snagging a man was the most reliable way of guaranteeing one’s quality of life. (brief addendum to remind that the transatlantic slave trade also made people into property, with ongoing consequences even today in terms of generational wealth disparities, state criminalization and violence, and so on; these facts can be discussed in conjunction without detracting from the severity of one another because white supremacy and patriarchy enable one another, and hopefully drawing attention to one starts to poke holes in the armor of the other)

Feeling like it’s more respectful to engage with a woman’s partner socially before engaging with her socially? That’s a patriarchy problem, because it classifies women according to their relationship to the nearest man, making men the gatekeepers of women’s ability to have a social life, just like men have long been the gatekeeper’s of whether women could enter male-dominated fields, or get medical procedures like hysterectomies, ands so on.

And of course—of friggin’ course—the irony-meter is going off when men say things like “it’s really uncomfortable to have women sexually pursue me and treat me like a conquest when I’ve already said I’m married,” because that is an experience women have all the damn time. Yes, it genuinely sucks! People shouldn’t do that to other people! It’s rude! But the overall pattern that exists in this world is one where men relentlessly pursue women, up to and including throwing harassment and violence into the mix, and so when a dude experiences this treatment from women, it is by definition and by the weight of empirical evidence a less common problem, hence not the one I want to devote extensive resources and bandwidth to. Again, yes, very crappy to experience that, but as I’ve pointed out above, these are patriarchy problems, as well as individual-people-being-assholes-regardless-of-gender problems.

One of the reasons why we keep having these damn conversations, and keep trying to explain using clear language what it’s like to be a woman stonewalled by men, or talked over, or whatever, is that by the very definition of being marginalized and socially oppressed, we cannot get our oppressors to listen to us. This is true for pretty much every social justice issue; this is why bystander interventions matter; because dudes are more likely to listen to other dudes than to listen to women, since women are presented as lower-status, less-intelligent, far-more-likely-to-be-hysterical irrational beings who are mostly good for having sex and having babies. We are constantly gaslit about our own experiences, social and professional and medical and more.

So yes, we need dudes tuning into these conversations and realizing “huh, yeah, that’s problematic” and speaking up when they see this behavior from other dudes. Because they’re more likely to be listened to and believed than we are.

If my tone is off-puttingly aggressive, please consider that a) tone policing is bullshit, and b) many of us women have experienced these frustrating dismissals a ton, and we’re tired of being polite about it. It sucks to feel sidelined and dismissed, and my guess is that a lot of dudes can relate, perhaps because racial or class-based discrimination has factored into your lives. So even if gender discrimination is still something you’re trying to wrap your head around because you haven’t experienced it much, chances are good that in this shitty racist and classist society, you’ve been put down for a trait that is not your fault, that is some arbitrary nonsense, and that hurt. The parallels don’t always function 100% but hopefully you see what I’m getting at—being judged and treated differently for an inborn trait suuuucks, and by being a dude who listens to women when we have these conversations, you have the chance to make a difference and stop perpetuating those small acts of bigotry and prejudice that add up and make things shittier.

To conclude, for fuck’s sake, please treat women like people. Don’t make it weird by assuming that you need to jump through all these bizarre hoops in order to fulfill the minimum politeness required in social interactions. Just, like, talk to us like human beings!

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In the Olympics and Elsewhere, Patriarchy, Misogyny, and Racism Misdirect Our Rage and Fear

August 2, 2024 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Image of the Olympics rings imposed over the Eiffel Tower

If you look at news headlines or social media, it might seem that trans athletes have come out of nowhere at this year’s Olympic Games to violently pummel women.

Except that’s not what’s happening. At all.

First, I find it a bit odd that people who formerly didn’t give a shit about women and women’s sports are suddenly rallying to this cause. In just the U.S., “men received $252 million more in athletic scholarships than women” and athletes with other aspects of marginalized identities face even larger barriers. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation:

“Girls and women of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ athletes consistently receive less access to sport than their peers.

  • Girls at high schools where the majority of students are Black and/or Hispanic have only 67 percent of the opportunities to play sports that their male peers have, compared to their counterparts at heavily white schools, who have 82 percent of the opportunities that boys do.
  • And while women make up 44 percent of all NCAA athletes (compared to 15 percent in 1972), only 14 percent of female NCAA athletes are BIPOC.
  • In addition, of the more than 15,000 high school students who participate in adaptive sports, only 44 percent are female.
  • In a recent study,  77.6% of LGBTQ students avoided school functions, 71.8% avoided extracurricular activities, and 25.15 avoided school athletic fields or facilities because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable.”

Further, I’ve trained with boxers, and part of the sport involves getting hit. Sometimes in the head. Sometimes quite painfully. So it just shows me that people who know absolutely nothing about boxing are seeing footage of women boxing for their first time ever, and losing their minds about how violent it is. That is…just how the sport is? And there are rules to protect people as much as possible. And none of those rules were violated here.

You also may have noticed that whenever an athlete’s gender is called into question, that athlete is not white. Related to the above paragraph, it seems a lot of white people are conditioned to absolutely freak out when it looks like a white woman is being assaulted by a person of color. Which, yes, nobody should be assaulted! But in a sport where we see women of color getting ahead of their white peers, and suddenly it’s only women of color whose gender identity is being called into question? That speaks of the intersection of racism and sexism.

South African athlete Caster Semenya went through this. As ESPN documents in a history of gender tests in the Olympics, Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan also went through this, and was disqualified. Both are poor women of color.

So, too, is Imane Khelif, who is certainly not trans (which is illegal in Algeria, among other reasons). This next bit gets a bit convoluted so please bear with me.

The IBA – International Boxing Association – filed a report saying that both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting “did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential” and this confidential test “conclusively” that “both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

Which sounds kinda official, but then again, what kind of testing was it? Did they conceal this information to protect the athletes’ privacy, or because their testing standards were perhaps not as rigorous as they might otherwise be?

Further, the IBA is currently discredited in the eyes of the Olympics. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) announced that it’s no longer recognizing the IBA due to issues like lack of financial transparency and not following procedures to ensure its integrity.

So in light of this, it does not seem like we should be listening to the assertions of a discredited organization, meaning, it doesn’t matter what (unspecified) testing these two athletes went through, if the Olympics Committee is like “nah, they are not trustworthy.”

In fact, the Olympics Committee has stated:

The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.

And this part is worth focusing on, because Khelif has competed in the Olympics before…and lost. According to the sports website Give Me Sport, Khelif has suffered losses at both World Championships and Olympics Games, notably losing to Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst, who said: “Personally, I don’t think she has done anything to ‘cheat’. I think it’s the way she was born and that’s out of her control. The fact that she has been (beaten) by 9 females before says it all.”

If her fellow athletes are saying she’s not unbeatable, then maybe we should listen to the people who know their sport.

Indeed, according to the National Organization for Women, trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2004, and not a single one has medaled. That kinda destroys this narrative about trans people coming to sports to dominate and humiliate, doesn’t it? Not that Khelif is trans, but some ignorant people are saying that’s the case.

Because in athletics, a wide range of variation is allowed, as long as it’s not due to gender differences, apparently. The classic example is Michael Phelps, who according to the Washington Post has a disproportionately large wingspan and double-jointedness along with a different production level of lactic acid that allows him to dominate his sport…and his physical differences are celebrated, yet those of Caster Semenya and other more gender-ambiguous athletes are not?

In case you need a brief lesson on anatomical sex, it is not as binary as we’ve been led to believe. According to the Intersex Society of North America, there are a variety of conditions we might classify as having indeterminate anatomical sex, whether that’s seen in chromosomes or hormones or reproductive and pleasure anatomy. Some people have mosaic genetics, with some of their cells having XX and others having XY chromosomes in them. In all, around 1 in 100 people have some form of intersex display, whether it is medically knowable or so subtle that it has escaped notice until now, or ever.

I’ve never had genetic testing, and I doubt that you, dear reader, have either. The question of determining one’s biological or anatomical sex is so much more complex than it appears at first, and squeezing the amazing diversity of natural human variation into binary boxes is a clumsy method at best.

The science is complicated here too. I’d recommend talking to someone with a PhD in this stuff if you can get your hands on them, or reading some Anne-Fausto Sterling, a widely recognized expert in the field. If you don’t want the incomprehensible jargon, well first, I think you’re missing out on a chance to learn that the natural world is inevitably more wondrous and uncategorizable than we make it out to be, but I guess you can learn about the most relevant implications of all this in a Scientific American piece on sex testing in the Olympics and other elite athletics.

And beyond the physical attempts to categorize an individual’s sex, there are, of course, people who are gender-non-conforming in a variety of ways, whether they are transgender, or cisgender but leaning non-binary, or intersex and learning that a gender was arbitrarily imposed on them at birth to make them seem more normal (there is a horrifying history of surgeries and other interventions on intersex babies before the age of consent, which you can read about here and elsewhere).  And in case it needs to be said, gender-non-conforming identities are valid. They’re not sick or deluded, nor are they inherently predatory. We can and should allow gender non-conforming and trans athletes to compete in their chosen categories because they are – like Michael Phelps – just a normal human variation on the spectrum of what we generally see humans being and doing, sometimes a bit more towards the end of the spectrum, but rarely the ridiculously stark differences transphobes make them out to be.

As noted above, fellow athletes who have faced Khelif are like “yeah whatever, I’ll box here, it’s fine,” for the most part. Let the athletes make these decisions for themselves, in conversation with scientists where necessary…but again, the scientists are probably going to roll up with 100+ slides of a Powerpoint deck to explain why this is so damn complicated, and they won’t have concrete answers either, so let’s just go with the “trust athletes” angle I’m suggesting here, yeah?

Finally, to the title of this post: we are being sold a narrative that some men are so into the idea of hurting and violating women that they will put on dresses and try to pretend to be women to do so.

This is not what’s happening. It has never been what’s happening. Men violate women with impunity, without donning skirts, all the fucking time. According to the CDC, 41% of women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Do you seriously think that the perpetrators need to pretend to be women to get away with it? They get away with it—in homes, in bedrooms, in workplaces—all the fucking time. This is a worldwide problem; the UN states that one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes. It happens everywhere in the world, all the damn time, and it is primarily being performed by cisgender men (those assigned male at birth, who continue to live as men).

Patriarchy misdirects us, though. Patriarchy says it’s only a handful of bad men committing such crimes, which cannot logically be true given the upsetting prevalence.

Misogyny misdirects us too; it says women are weak and must be protected from those bad men, or worse, those bad men who think they are women and use those disguises to gain access to women-only spaces like bathrooms and women’s sports.

Racism gets in on it as well, telling us that women of color are unnaturally masculine, needing policing, fit only for hard labor, not deserving of protection.

I get that a lot of women fear sexual violence; I do too, I have a “rape schedule” of when and where I do and don’t walk alone, just like my female college students do.

But if you are a woman who’s afraid, and you’ve allowed yourself to become afraid of trans people, or of women of color who seem a bit too masculine, then you have been sold a package of bullshit, because patriarchy and misogyny lie to us, and tell us to look around for convenient scapegoats that are already marginalized, instead of looking the actual problem—patriarchy—in the eye and refusing to hold men accountable for their abusive behaviors (not all men, obviously, but enough men that it’s a continual concern of who we can trust not to rape us when given the chance).

If you never gave a crap about women’s sports til now, you are responding to sexist and racist dog whistles about who the real threats are. Please read up on the history of gender testing in sports, and on how complex biological/anatomical sex actually is, and the harassment of women of color who excel in athletics and elsewhere and are then taken down a notch. Please listen to actual trans and gender-non-conforming people talking about their lives, because mostly they want to exist in peace and they are not the predators they’re made out to be—which, again, if you are paying attention, is exactly the same rhetoric that was weaponized against us gay/bisexual people from a few decades ago. Almost like it’s a convenient way to marginalize and oppress a group as it starts to gain equal human rights.

(oh, and credit where credit is due: women of color have been leading these discussions for a long time now, and for example, Imani Gandy has shared a lot of valuable resources on Twitter that I benefited from in composing this post; this tweet of hers said it best: “None of this hullabaloo is about protecting women. It’s about reifying gender roles and femininity.” Yes, yes, a million times (unfortunately) yes; cisgender women are already being stopped in bathrooms and so on because we don’t look feminine enough, and other similar nonsense things are happening, so a lot of this fuss is indeed about patrolling womanhood, which is discriminatory and gross)

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Reflecting on New & Old Identities

June 23, 2015 in Education, Gender & Sexuality | 2 comments

Dressed for the academic classroom, posed in front of my voluminous bookshelves.

I’ve had this website for a few years now, and the tagline at the top of the site has always been: “Jeana Jorgensen, PhD. Folklorist, Writer, Dancer.”

Now that’s changed.

The three main words haven’t changed. I may not be seeking full-time employment in academia anymore, but I haven’t stopped being a folklore scholar. In fact, just last month I attended a small working symposium on digital trends in fairy-tale scholarship. I’m a little cranky (to put it mildly) in the general direction of academia right now… but being a folklorist is too ingrained into my identity for me to ever give up identifying as such. It influences how I understand the world around me, how I learn, and how I teach.

Similarly, I’ve been dancing for over half my life, and I plan to dance for the rest of it. I now direct a professional troupe, Indy Tribal, and I’ve learned tons from my students about trust and teaching. Dance is somewhere between a hobby that pays for itself (YAY) and an all-consuming passion, and as such it’s an essential part of my identity.

I’ve grappled more with the title of “writer” than the previous two. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was in 4th grade, but I gave up writing fiction and poetry (my primary two loves) in favor of nailing nonfiction skills in grad school. And it worked. I wrote and published a lot. Recently, though, I’ve been getting back into the idea of writing more for pleasure, and returning to some of my early ideas about writing. But no matter what I’m writing, or for which audience, writing has been a constant in my life. I write for myself in the form of journals; I write for various blogs; I write endless to-do lists; I write scholarly articles. It’s a part of me at this point.

Now, however, I’m adding the tagline of (Sex) Educator to this website. I have a separate site devoted to my sex education work, but I want this site, which is my main web presence, to reflect that this is a part of my identity too.

See, I didn’t set out to become an educator of any sort, let alone a sex educator, but it’s evolved into a huge part of my identity, and it’s time I recognized that.

I’ve become a person who will have a conversation about rape culture with just about anyone, in the hopes that even though it’s an emotionally fatiguing topic, maybe someone will reach a new understanding of it. I’ve decided to keep adjuncting in large part because even though it’s exploitative labor, I love teaching too much to remove that venue from my life. I teach dance two and sometimes three nights a week, much to the consternation of my life partner and anyone else who likes to see me socially, because I just can’t get enough of it. I educate on gender and sexuality topics for little to no pay more than I should, not just because I’m still establishing myself in the field and am taking those pay-in-prestige opportunities for exposure (mixed bag because of undecutting, I know), but also because  this knowledge is too damn important to not be sharing at every chance.

This is why I’ve added “Educator” to the site tagline, with “Sex” in parentheses. I’m an educator who also happens to be a sex educator. I love making knowledge and concepts accessible and relevant… and I’m particularly good at unpacking the tangled mess of gender, sex, and sexuality, thanks in part to my upbringing. At one time, with only a few years of sex education blogging under my belt, I balked at calling myself a sex educator. Now? I embrace the title.

Anyway, I’m still deciding if I visually like the addition of (Sex) Educator to my website header, but I’m probably going to keep some version of it. It’s been neat reflecting on the process of getting here!

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Teaching, Touching, and Pleasure

June 9, 2015 in Academia, Dance, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Teaching a belly dance workshop. Photo by Pauline Shypula.

Teaching a belly dance workshop. Photo by Pauline Shypula.

I just got back from the annual conference of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). Since I’ve started doing more work as a sex educator, it made sense for me to go, and while I learned tons about sexuality, it also provided me with valuable opportunities to reflect on the connections between teaching, touching, and pleasure.

There’s a lot of concern in sexuality fields (particularly counseling and therapy) about maintaining ethical boundaries when practicing with a client. Obviously the same concern applies to sex educators too, but it seemed less pronounced. I attended one panel on the ethics of touch, which focused on touch-based practices like sex partner surrogacy and sexological bodywork. There’s so much ethical grey area around these professions that long-time AASECT board members were dodging the question of whether an AASECT certified therapist can even ethically recommend these kind of hands-on treatments to a client (even when it seems like the best modality to help that client). I listened in on related conversations, too, and those helped me put into context the real fear of bodily connection that many people in the sexuality field seem to have, because of how connecting through touch is seen as dangerous both since it risks intimacy that can compromise a professional relationship, and because it just looks bad to an erotophobic culture like ours (plus there are potential legal ramifications, because getting paid to touch people in certain ways is illegal in many parts of the world). Touch – especially sexual and/or pleasurable touch – is incredibly suspect to people today, and that’s a shame in my opinion, because it can definitely be healing.

The two main venues I teach in – the academic classroom and the dance classroom – allow me to handle connection in different ways. In the academic classroom, it’s rare that I have a reason to touch my students, which is fine by me. We do, however, spend a lot of time connecting intellectually. I believe that face-to-face conversations offer hugely important ways of conveying both information and critical thinking strategies, and I think my teaching would suffer if I had to give up the live, face-to-face component.

Unlike touch, I do try to incorporate pleasure into my academic teaching. I let it show when I’m excited about a topic. I praise students when they pick up a concept quickly or bring a pertinent example to class, knowing that many will receive a compliment with pleasure. I try to make things “fun” without capitulating to an all-play, no-work atmosphere. Pleasure is a frequent guest in my classroom, and I like it that way. If teaching and learning weren’t pleasurable, I’d wonder where I was going wrong. I think this helps in the creation of a safe space: my students trust me not to drag them through unnecessarily tedious or unpleasant stuff all the time, and to make topics fun and exciting, and so that when we do have to buckle down and do the hard work, they’ll be ready to come with me on that journey (at least, that’s what I like to believe is happening).

In the dance classroom, I do touch my students. I try not to do it very often, and I certainly keep it appropriate. I ask consent very frequently, even though they sign waivers before stepping into the studio with me. Here, as with the academic classroom, I believe it’s important to establish a precedent that involves a fair bit of trust. I think they need to trust that I won’t unexpectedly come up behind them and touch them without warning, which carries over from social norms in the rest of life. As in other areas of life, I try to model good consent practices, in part because lots of people don’t get this information elsewhere, and in part because it’s central to how I choose to live my life.

Pleasure also figures significantly in the dance classroom, especially for my main style of dance, belly dancing. It’s pleasurable to learn to skillfully move your body, and to adorn yourself to practice. I make a point of complimenting students when they do things right. The thrill of learning to improvise, as we do in American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, carries its own unique sense of enjoyment. As a dance teacher, I try to harness these modes of pleasure and give my students multiple opportunities to explore them.

Learning can be plenty intimidating: fear of failure, feeling stupid, not getting things right, feeling overwhelmed, ramifications for failure (like with grades or wasted money on a class), and so on. Having solid boundaries around touch (when it has a role in that kind of classroom) and incorporating pleasure can both be ways of engaging students and making them feel connected. I don’t think my use of touch or pleasure in either context is inappropriate, but the more I get into the sexuality field, the more I see people scrutinizing – and in some cases fearing – touch and pleasure. In these cases, I want to figure out what’s really going on, and then continue to do what I pride myself on: putting the students first.

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Taboo Topics in the Classroom

April 23, 2015 in Academia, Education, Gender & Sexuality | 1 comment

This file was shared under a Creative Commons Attribution image from Wikimedia Commons. Thanks to user Stefan-Xp for sharing it.

Over at my sex education blog, Sex Ed with Dr. Jeana, I have a post called Syphilis in the Social Sciences Classroom. In it, I describe the ways in which syphilis has proved to be a relevant STI for me to bring into my anthropology and gender studies classes.

For all the silence around STIs today in the U.S., you’d think STIs were a taboo topic – and for many they are. As I’ve already discussed, teaching sex education is not the same as encouraging sex, despite the claims of those who believe that teaching about something is the same thing as endorsing it. Add in the (unwarranted) shame and stigma of admitting that you’ve got an STI, or are even interested in learning more (“for a friend,” right?) and it becomes clear that simply talking about STIs is a revolutionary act in many contexts.

I’ve taught plenty of taboo topics (non-monogamy, BDSM, trauma, Freud, feminism) in my college classes, and while there’s no magic trick to getting it right, I’ve found a couple of things that tend to work well for me. Here are some of my favorite strategies:

  • Explicitly acknowledge that teaching about a topic is not the same as endorsing it. This is one example of how I’ll often use verbal communication to the point where it seems way too obvious to even bother saying, which is why I go ahead and say it anyway. I’d much rather sound a tad silly than risk misunderstanding.
  • When introducing the topic, ask students what their impression of the topic is. Perhaps we old fogies are clinging to taboos of our day, while our students might be pretty well over something. Or maybe they’ll shed some light on an aspect of the topic that hadn’t occurred to us.
  • Try to find that balance between acknowledging that a topic is controversial, and introducing it as just another thing people do, hence worthy of scholarly attention. Take, for instance, my approach to kink in the classroom in my blog post And Then I Brought Up Flesh Hooks. Normalizing human sexual behavior – especially when it’s been stigmatized – is a huge mission of mine as a sex educator and an educator in general, and thus I try to talk about things in a not-terribly sensationalistic way. Again, if people are doing it, it’s worthy of study (from the hybrid social sciences/humanities perspective that I’ve come to as an interdisciplinary folklorist and gender studies scholar).
  • Give students time to respond to the topic in a less-structured way, such as journaling, doing an in-class writing prompt, or talking in pairs. Allowing them to process their feelings in some forum other than talking in front of the whole group, or having to answer directed questions from you, can be beneficial.
  • Frame the conversation with a set of rules, boundaries, or guidelines for respectful discussion. I like to remind my students that it’s okay to disagree with me, with the reading/texts, and even with each other, so long as they do it politely. In certain conversations I’ll emphasize that no one’s required to share anything about their personal lives, but only to engage with the material as it’s handled in the class. The way I do this, it’s less about creating a “safe space” where everyone feels 100% comfortable and nurtured all the time, but rather creating a space where people feel supported in speaking up, and where it’s okay to challenge and be challenged.
  • Divide students into groups and have them debate different facets of the topic. Again, this might bring up ideas and issues that I haven’t even considered.
  • Give them an opportunity to make up classroom credit if a topic proves to be triggering or emotionally activating. This might be listening to a podcast, reviewing a blog post, watching a TED talk, or something along those lines. Since I deal with sexual topics a lot in my classroom, I tend to have a lot of these options floating around my brain at any given moment, in case somebody needs to pass on participating.

At risk of being snarky, I’m sure it helps that I have white, middle-class privilege and thus can bring up certain topics without being seen as too offensive. At the same time, being a woman means I probably come across as nurturing and supportive when I don’t necessarily think of myself that way, which may help students feel more comfortable during difficult discussions. I’m not thrilled about these areas of privilege, but I have to acknowledge them, and I might as well try to use my privilege to benefit others, by creating unique educational opportunities.

I’ve never had anyone tell me not to teach a topic, or that I was being too controversial, or that I would be penalized for anything I taught. But I’m sure there’s a first time for everything. In the end, I try to keep in mind that teaching is less about my experience (as much as I might feel like a bad-ass for handling touchy topics with grace) and more about the students’ experiences, and that helps me navigate some of these tricky subjects. In the end, if it doesn’t benefit them, why am I doing it?

What about you? How do you handle taboo topics in the classroom?

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Activist Conversations

March 31, 2015 in Academia, Gender & Sexuality | 1 comment

Image from Wikimedia under a Creative Commons license. Originally uploaded by user Fry1989.

I thought about putting this post over at my sex education site, but decided to publish it here instead. Why? Because I’m increasingly convinced that activism needs to be a part of my scholarship as well as my daily life.

The state in which I currently reside, Indiana, has passed a so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA, also known as SB101). As this Huffington Post blogger explains, it basically opens the door to discrimination against groups that are not currently protected from such – namely, LGBTQ folks and other sexual minorities, anyone to whose existence a religious group might object.

While I generally support protests and even certain boycotts, in part to raise consciousness and in part to display displeasure, I have to agree with friend and colleague Mike Underwood who states:

Rather than a blanket boycott of Indiana, I’d suggest a strategic and vocal boycott of businesses seen to use this law to discriminate against marginalized persons. Instead why not vocally patronize inclusive businesses?

And on top of that, fight to make sexual orientation a protected class for the entire state, and to get SB 101 overturned so a more reasonable protection for religious expression can be crafted and implemented.

Boycotts punish everyone, and tend to disproportionately hurt smaller business of those already marginalized.

That’s why I’ve started asking establishments that I go into what their policy on RFRA is. And you know what? It seems like a small act, but it has so much potential.

Already I’ve spoken with employees at my favorite cafe on the northside of Indy, and heard that they promote tolerance and inclusion. I cheekily replied that I’d be happy to give them more of my money. What I wasn’t expecting was for one of the employees to approach me as I was packing my things to leave, and to warmly thank me for bringing up the issue. That was really touching, and a good reminder that activism isn’t just about creating concrete change in economic patterns, but also about connecting with people.

On the scholarly side, we’ll see how much attention I can give this issue in my classroom. On the one hand, I may not need to mention it much, as my wonderful students this semester have already posted links to relevant news in our online discussion group. On the other hand, my status as a PhD-wielding college lecturer gives my words a certain amount of weight, and so speaking up might infuse some opinions with a bit more legitimacy, and give my students something to fall back on if they want to mention our hypothetical classroom discussions to their peers or family members.

As Kelly J. Baker points out, scholarship and activism have an uneasy relationship: “Activism appears to have merit when it can be neatly attached to one’s scholarship or a vision of a shared politics.” I’m already pretty “out there” as a scholar who does a lot of work on gender, sex, and sexuality, so it’s probably not surprising to anyone  that I hold the position that RFRA is thinly-disguised homophobic bigotry.

We’ll see how things go with this (abhorrent) piece of legislation. I’m going to try to speak up as much as I can, in both formal and informal settings, in part because I have a privileged position as an institutionally-recognized scholar, and in part because I get to vote with my wallet, and make human connections while doing so. I also get to lean on some personal privilege here, as I walk around wearing a wedding ring and am cisgendered. In my mind, one of the better things to do with privilege is use it to challenge the status quo and help others out, so hopefully I can do some of that here.

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Sex Positivity in Folklore

November 10, 2014 in Fairy Tales, Folklore, Gender & Sexuality | 2 comments

The famous non-consensual kiss from “Sleeping Beauty.” Image by Henry Meynell Rheam (in public domain).

I spent a good chunk of this year’s annual meeting of the American Folklore Society live-tweeting the conference. And, given that I’m now working as a sex educator, a lot of what I tweeted about was sexuality and gender.

When I tweeted disparagingly about the lack of sex positivity at the conference, a colleague responded by asking what exactly I mean by sex positivity. It’s not, unfortunately, something that everyone in our society learns about, nor is it on the curriculum for most folklore studies programs. So I wrote this blog post about what sex positivity means to me, and decided to do a follow-up post relating it back to folklore.

In folklore studies, and especially my specialty of narrative studies, we spend a lot of time talking about genres. A genre is a basic category of folklore, a type of expressive culture that we group by similarities in content, structure, transmission/performance, and function. So my first thought when it comes to relating sex positivity to folklore is to write about which genres engage with sex positivity (or not).

Based on the paper I gave this year, examining gender and sexuality in the TV show Lost Girl, I’ve been thinking about sex positivity in two specific narrative folklore genres: legend and fairy tale. We define legends as belief tales that are told as though they actually happened, which is why you so see so many urban legends debunked on Snopes.com: they tie into people’s beliefs about reality, so strongly that they’ll be transmitted regardless of their truth value.

For a representative sampling of legends about sex, check out these summaries of texts from just one legend book, The Vanishing Hitchhiker by folklorist Jan Brunvand: innocent make-out sessions lead to death in “The Boyfriend’s Death,” infidelity is punished in “The Solid Cement Cadillac,” and various nude surprises occur because people are generally acting pervy. Then there are legends regarding the transmission of HIV/AIDS, organ theft after a one-night stand, people getting stuck together during sex, and people losing objects internally during masturbation.

Based on this sample, I think it’s safe to say that most legends are NOT sex positive. They depict sex acts as having dangerous consequences. Even if a character’s intention was not malevolent, the effects are harmful. This probably relates to how legends function in society: they often contain socially conservative messages meant to police communal behavior.

With fairy tales—which have a bit more distance from reality as they’re fictional, formulaic tales about magic, quests, and transformation—it’s a bit harder to make sweeping proclamations about whether or not they’re sex positive. Most fairy tales end in marriage, after all, which would seem to be an endorsement for sex. However, fairy tales give us a fairly narrow vision of acceptable forms of sexuality: most fairy-tale pairings are heterosexual, monogamous, and transactional.

I’ve been researching promiscuity and non-monogamy in fairy tales, and based on that, I’ve concluded that fairy tales (like legends) convey rather restrictive attitudes about sexuality. Promiscuous female characters are punished, while there’s rarely any comment on the need for a man to be a virgin before marriage (yes, there are tales about magical virginity tests before marriage—only for the female characters, of course). It’s a little disturbing to realize that fairy tales contain many similar elements to contemporary abstinence-only programming: an emphasis on virginity before marriage, a need to police sexual behavior especially in women, and a correlation between chastity and virtue. (want citations? contact me for a copy of my paper)

In contrast to legends, though, fairy tales do show sexuality as being potentially generative and therefore positive in that light at least. Sex in fairy tales leads to children, and fairy-tale children are generally valued. You never know when having a kid might lead to breaking a curse down the road, after all. So while it’s still a mixed bag, I have to conclude based on this brief survey that fairy tales are a bit more sex positive than legends.

I can’t think of any other folklorists using sex positivity as a metric to evaluate the messages within various folklore genres. This could be an intriguing and useful line of inquiry, so if you have suggestions for folklore genres to compare and contrast in regard to sex positivity, feel free to leave a comment and get in on this discussion!

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Sex in a Limited Good Economy

July 30, 2014 in Feminism, Folklore, Gender & Sexuality | 2 comments

When a friend shared a link to Why We Care About Other People’s Sex Lives, a look at the evolutionary psychology behind ideas of sexual morality, I was skeptical. As I’ve ranted about to anyone who will listen, I have a hate-hate relationship with evolutionary psychology and related fields such as literary Darwinism. They’re just so… essentializing. Ugh.

But the above-linked article caught my interest. The author looks at a number of recent studies about how people judge casual sex. In one instance: “Even after controlling for variables like age, religiosity, and political affiliation, the study authors found that people who saw female financial dependence on men as more common were also more likely to negatively judge promiscuity in both sexes.” Why does this occur? I’m not inclined to go with the evo psych reductionist reasoning that women are less horny than men but simultaneously more calculating; instead, I’d like to draw some parallels between sexual and economic principles.

What do sexual morality and financial dependence have in common? The concept of limited good. As folklorist Alan Dundes explains in this interview about evil eye beliefs: “The idea is that many peasant societies have what anthropologist George Foster refers to as the concept of ‘limited good.’ There’s only so much wealth and health. So you want to conceal your wealth because people are going to wish that they had it, otherwise you’ll lose it.” Dundes goes on to argue that expressive culture (in this case, folk belief about the evil eye) reflects a society’s underlying worldview of paradigm about economic exchange.

So when we have an economic system that commodifies certain kinds of social and sexual interactions (such as marriage) by directly tying them to one’s ability to survive and thrive, it’s not surprising to see that same attitude reflected in a society’s sexual attitudes. The fear about not enough potential (and desirable) spouses to go around (hence not enough access to married-life-resources) affects beliefs about sexual practices, turning sex into a commodity when really, it doesn’t have to be that way. We know from the non-monogamous emotion of compersion (feeling joy when someone else feels joy) that it’s possible to react to sharing your partner with another with positive, constructive emotions rather than destructive, possessive, jealous ones.

I sometimes wonder how sexual behaviors and stereotypes will change in my utopian vision of the future, wherein we move from a limited good economy to one where marriage isn’t required to obtain health insurance, citizenship, or other concrete goods. Will sex ever be de-commodified? I’m not sure, but I hope we move more in that direction.

Oh, and there’s another, simpler idea that I’d like to extract from the essay on sexual morality: the notion that a society’s attitudes about sexuality can (and perhaps should) change over time. The authors of Sex at Dawn (which I review here) also implicitly explore this concept. What I like about the idea that attitudes about sex are always evolving is that it recognizes that sexual behavior is always culturally constructed. Our ideas about sex are always changing due to a confluence of various factors: the ways in which we have sex change, our social paradigms (some of which explicitly relate to sex) change, and our scientific understanding of sexual functioning is always evolving too.

Basically, there’s always been an amazing diversity of sexual practices throughout human history. In my mind, that’s as it should be. There is no one way to have sex. There is no universal, monolithic meaning of sex. The only thing that’s universal about sex – other than it happening to continue humankind’s existence on this world – is that I believe sex should be considered among the list of universal human rights.

So, let’s keep up the dialogue about sex and society. Hopefully a greater understanding of how these paradigms intersect and influence one another will lead to more tolerance and progressive social change.

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Consent Discussions in California

June 2, 2014 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Thanks to Wikimedia for the image.

One of the things I love about my family is that they take an active interest in my career and hobbies. So when I flew into L.A. to see my folks, my dad handed me a big box of newspaper clippings, related to literature, folklore, dance, sex education, and so on.

Among them was an opinion piece from the L.A. Times about a recent piece of California legislation, SB 967. This would mandate, among other things, that all California universities include the following language about sexual contact that occurs on campus:

  • An affirmative consent standard in the determination of whether consent was given by a complainant.
  • Prohibition on an accused perpetrator using self-intoxication or recklessness as a defense.  It would also not be a defense if the accused failed to take reasonable steps to ascertain consent.
  • An explicit provision that an individual is unable to give consent for sexual activity if the individual is asleep or unconscious; incapacitated due to drugs and/or alcohol; or unable to communicate due to a mental and/or physical condition.
  • A preponderance of the evidence standard in the determination of disciplinary action.

And so on. So far, so good, right?

Well… no. One of the opinion pieces, published in the Sunday June 1 L.A. Times, thinks that an affirmative consent standard is not only unlikely, but also unsexy. He writes: “The legislation’s affirmative consent requirement doesn’t apply just to sex. It covers all physical contact for which consent is required by a college’s sexual assault policy, like intimate touching. In real life, such contact is welcomed after it begins, not affirmatively consented to in advance.”

I hope y’all see that this is really problematic. This statement exemplifies the sex-negativity prevalent in our culture, specifically the idea that having to obtain consent by explicitly asking for it is un-sexy. It’s not hard to see where this idea comes from; in practically every Hollywood flick the characters experience mind-numbing chemistry, kiss, and wind up in bed together, with nary a word spoken.

Is it really all that terrible to have to ask for someone’s consent before touching or kissing them? Would it really be so soberingly un-sexy to say something like, “Hey, I’d like to kiss you. How do you feel about that?” Apparently, yes, there is no greater boner-killer than verbally obtaining consent.

What’s even more  troubling is that this opinion was expressed by Hans Bader, an attorney and former U.S. Department of Education Lawyer. In other words, the people making our laws don’t think obtaining verbal, explicit consent is sexy or feasible.

Another person, Sandra Perez, wrote in to say: “Legislation in Sacramento essentially would mandate that a would-be Romeo obtain an express opt-in before proceeding to bed with his sweetheart, as if any such target of Romeo’s desires doesn’t have ample opportunity to communicate her unequivocal wish to opt out.” This is another WTF comment, since it both assumes that men are always the initiators of sexual contact (which is a harmful construct of performing idealized masculinity) and that there are never coercive situations wherein women – or men – don’t feel safe saying no.

I’m saddened and disturbs that both of the quotes in this opinion piece reinforce negative, harmful, and untrue ideas about consent. Whether or not you’re in California and hence potentially affected by this law, I recommend reading up on consent and figuring out how to make it a more prominent part of your conversations and your practices. So here are some links:

Please read and consider passing on these links. I’m aware that there are more sophisticated (often feminist) conversations happening around consent, specifically problematizing the notion of “enthusiastic consent“ (and this discussion too), but hey, we have to start somewhere.

P.S. June is  Adult Sex Ed month! Consider this post a contribution!

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