Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
It is not the other persons fault if you choose to have sex.
So choosing to have sex now absolves the person you have sex with of the responsibility to not be a dick? Because that's what pressuring someone in that situation to have sex without a condom is. (Saying "I can't/won't, but I'll do (non-condom-requiring-activities), and I'm totally cool with that" isn't, to be clear. Saying "no sex unless we can have penetrative condom-free sex" is.)
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OnPoint: Transcription of new Rick Perry…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
You’ll need to explain who Rick Perry is. I’m guessing he might be Katy’s brother?
(I snogged a bloke?)
Governor of Texas. Current leading Republican presidential nominee. Anti-social security, pro-creationist, pro-death penalty, think Bush on Tea Party steroids. Has stood surprisingly firm on requiring Gardasil, but otherwise pretty terrible. (Also gave the best straight line ever when he announced that suggesting he could be bought for $5000 was offensive, and no-one took it up. I was so disappointed.) Would never snog a bloke, or even joke about it.
The victim in question was none other than Ron Paul’s own campaign manager. Is that really how they treat those loyal to their cause? Even Gov. Perry shuddered at the thought.
You have to give it to Ron Paul: he's absolutely committed to the philosophy he espouses. The philosophy he espouses would drag America back to the nineteenth century, but he's willing to admit to that, too. The honesty is refreshing, even if the total blindness to the suffering of others isn't.
What is it with middle America? Don’t they realise that the American dream has become a Nightmare of their own making?
Very large majorities of Americans support raising taxes on the rich (along with The Economist, Fortune, and other well-known bastions of left-wing thinking.) It's Congress that doesn't, because the American electoral system requires them to spend every minute they can fundraising - and "fundraising" mostly means spending time talking to the rich. The isolation of the power structures and media commentary in this country from popular opinion is staggering.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to BenWilson,
You wouldn’t have to persuade me to change my mind – you’d have to persuade my penis to change its mind. I never refused to use one, that was a purely physical response, which vexed me greatly.
If it's a physical reaction, then that really sucks, and you have my sympathies. But it's still not a guide for general usage, and I think what you're missing is that the onus is on you, in the context of sex education and teaching young people about safe sex, to prove this is a general problem with condoms rather than a personal issue you have with them. (One where you exposed yourself to a certain amount of risk; this isn't about you being an evil STD-and-pregnancy-spreading person. You could have easily got an STD off someone you had unprotected sex with. Works both ways.)
It's not about a "narrative", it's about determining why people don't use condoms when they need to, and how that can be changed. Chlamydial infections are at something like 25% of young people in NZ. In that sort of disease environment condoms for penetrative sex need to be considered non-optional by everyone.
You're asserting that an issue with universal usage might be because condoms are physically difficult for a non-trivial proportion of men to use, but your evidence is that you have problems with them. It's not hugely convincing.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Paul Williams,
all men should expect and plan for any penetrative sex they wish to have with anyone to involve a condom (with the usual exceptions relating to partners and pregnancy). To expect or plan otherwise is indulgent. I don’t think women should have to ask a man to wear a condom, men should take responsibility for themselves.
Basically, this. Contraceptive value aside - and I certainly don't advocate using them as a sole form of contraception, where others are possible - they are the only safeguard against STDs. Even if they suck for some people, well, until vaccines are invented for a whole bunch of things or a better version comes along: they're what we've got. If acknowledging that they interfere with pleasure for some people will give kids more realistic expectations, that's a great idea, but their use except in very specific situations has to be considered a given. (That still won't get use up to 100%, but you do what you can.)
And I'm a bit confused by this:These would probably have involved lengthy fucking around with condoms during which they felt stink because they wanted to have sex and it didn’t happen, or it did but in a way that wasn’t very enjoyable.
For whatever reason I missed out on the "learn to put a condom on" bit of sex ed at school, but the first time I tried it with a partner, it was fairly obvious how it was supposed to work, and I don't recall any fucking around ever being involved (excepting the intended fucking, as it were.) They're not exactly complicated technology.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to BenWilson,
When you consider the highly competitive sexual market, I’m not surprised kids would ditch them a lot. It’s important to acknowledge that the drivers of this aren’t solely ignorance of risk.
The anecdotes reported in this thread are about women avoiding using them, though, unless you’re suggesting those women were put off by male complaints.
If they’d put it over their head and then tried to continue the lecture, it might have come closer to some of my own experiences with condoms.
I know I’ve seen you venture this view before, but you’re seriously the only guy I’ve ever seen express that much antipathy towards them. Regardless, condom use is sort of non-negotiable for safe casual penetrative sex. It’s probably worth including education about the fact that sex which requires condoms is not the be-all and end-all of sexual experience, but there’s no real substitute for drilling into kids that you shouldn’t be engaging in casual penetrative sexual activity without them, and that there are steps you have to take before you can stop using them in non-casual sexual relationships.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Megan Wegan,
And when I asked, she basically admitted at least part of hte reason is that she hates asking a guy to wear a condom.
In my first year of university, the RA for my part of our hall - i.e. the older person there to be a fount of wisdom and guidance for teenagers embarking on life away from home - told us that she didn't like asking guys to use condoms because it was so awkward and spoiled the mood.
We all lambasted her roundly for it ("You'd rather get chlamydia than be awkward? What kind of people are you sleeping with that think condoms spoil the mood?" etc) but if that was the kind of advice she was passing on to people less likely to argue with her about it...
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Russell Brown,
It's an interesting one for us, because it's not unusual for young ASD people to go for the security and structure of belief.
There's a recent study which seems to demonstrate that in the US, at least, ASD people are far more likely to be atheists or agnostics than neurotypical people. Whether that would hold out of the cultural context is another question, though.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Paul Williams,
I’ll confess to wondering how I’ll approach certain topics with my daughters
I'm sort of hoping that any kids I end up having will be enough like me and my partner that we can just leave books around the place and they'll do the research themselves.
Come to think of it, that pretty much worked for my siblings as well, although the large role Footrot Flats seems to have played in my brother's gradual understanding of How Sex Worked probably wasn't optimal.
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Of course, in New Zealand, even if you’re straight getting decent sex education is a complete lottery.
I’m always a bit fuzzy on what I picked up through school sex education and what I didn’t, due to spending a lot of time as a child hanging around Family Planning and reading semi-pornographic historical novels (only occasionally at the same time), but if I had got the bits on clitorises and anal sex and so forth it would have made parsing certain scenes in said novels far, far less confusing.
I do remember, though, being absolutely horrified at what some of my religious classmates had, er, swallowed about sex (belief that their siblings had been conceived via consecutive bathing, etc.) If you don’t educate teenagers about sex they will, basically, make shit up and pass it around as fact. (This is true of everything novel and interesting, but especially of sex.) That doesn’t help anyone. If you want to stop them talking and/or speculating about sex…well, good luck with that aerial pig farming thing.
. I put down ‘what is a blow job’. The nurse said it was oral sex. I thought she meant french kissing.
I do remember very clearly being told in "sex education" (also at a single-sex private school) that masturbation was when you touched your breasts and it felt nice. Most of us had barely hit the sports-bra stage, so this was less than informative.
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OnPoint: Sock-Puppeting Big Tobacco to…, in reply to George Darroch,
If you think that controlling an addictive disease that kills ten percent of New Zealanders and twenty five percent of Maori every year is unreasonable, then we have no common ground, and we can’t have a useful conversation
That's 10% of NZers and 25% of Maori *who die*, right? I'm sort of boggling to imagine the effects of the way you put that...
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