More on sex education

My former roommate, currently a graduate student at Brown, posted this on her blog and I thought it was worth sharing. I think that sex education is such an important topic when you think about all of the issues that it (sometimes) tries to help young people with: pregnancy, disease, consent. I know that my own sex ed was abstinence only, but I've found that an increasing number of my friends have had different experiences that have shaped the way they think and talk about sex. I wish I could have been at this same panel, because I think the woman my friend mentions who emphasized the relationship aspect of sex education has a really important point. We need to be teaching our young people more than just mechanics, because the scars from having some STDs are incomparable to the scars from having forced intercourse or from the accumulation of negative self-image.

I wouldn't call it child pornography...

One of my most meaningful continuous dialogues about literary expression of sexuality, kids and all things worthwhile continued tonight and culminated in this post, a poem, on that individual's livejournal. Just thought I'd share since one of the discussed topics was the question of the nymphet (think Lolita) and the difference between kidding and not and the fine line of appropriateness.

This was a topic that had been breeched earlier in the day at dinner when a few girlfriends and I were talking about what it means to take naked pictures of your own children and how careful you have to be about it because of the media's obsession with child pornography. My one friend, who works as the assistant director of an art gallery and is quite aesthetically savvy, mentioned a woman, Sally Mann, whose photographs bring the aforementioned fine line of appropriateness into question. It should be noted that the pictures she takes of naked children are all her own, but her exhibit (later turned into a book) stirred up controversy. She also has a book called At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women which is a series of pictures of girls on the verge of womanhood. I am excited to look over this book which we do have at Swem and to respond to the way that these pictures portray these girls. Another interesting thing to note about Sally is that she is from Lexington, Virginia so I feel like she's of particular interest to those of us here in the state. And a personal "cool fact" is that she attended Friend's World College, now Global College, the program through which I did my semester abroad.

Also, I came across this news story this evening and thought it was worth linking.