Femagination » Sexuality

What’s With Arizona??

Ellen Keim — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 10:00:33 +0000

Arizona State Flag

Maybe it’s in the water. Maybe it’s the heat. Whatever it is, it’s bringing out the worst in the people of Arizona. I didn’t even realize that the governor, Jan Brewer, signed a bill into law last September denying benefits to domestic partners of state employees. The new law, which takes effect October 1, redefines “dependent” and excludes coverage for domestic partners, including heterosexual partners, children of domestic partners, disabled adult dependents, and full time students over 22 who are claimed as dependents.

Interestingly enough, the University of Arizona has decided to reinstate benefits to domestic partners, using funds separate from state money, in order to remain competitive in attracting talent. According to the Arizona Daily Star, about 20 employees of the University left because of the repeal of domestic partner benefits and some job offers were rejected for the same reason.

I’ve always seen the offering of benefits to domestic partners and other dependents as a way to get more people insured in America. Without those benefits, many people will not have health insurance at all. Why shouldn’t a person be able to cover more than herself on her policy if she is willing to pay the family premium? In fact, I think insurance policies ought to cover adult children indefinitely. There’s a terrible gap in insurance coverage between 22-year-olds and those who have finally established their careers to the point where they get employee benefits.

Nor do I think people should be forced to marry just so they can share a family insurance plan. It’s not the place of the state to pry into what kind of relationship domestic partners have.

This stinginess on the part of the Arizona legislators is only part of negative picture being painted of Arizonans. Besides signing into law the new immigration law that allows law enforcement officials to request proof of legal immigration, residency, or citizenship of anyone they suspect might be an illegal immigrant, the governor also signed a bill that bans ethnic studies classes in the state’s public schools. The new law (see PDF) bans classes that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” (In Tucson alone, where the school district is 56 percent Hispanic, there are approximately 1,500 high school students enrolled in ethnic studies classes.)*

In other words, students are going to be discouraged from being proud of their ethnic heritage. I’m assuming that anything that might promote resentment toward the majority (white) population will also be discouraged (such as telling the truth about certain parts of history). And since when did ethnic study classes promote the overthrow of the U.S. government? I thought it was mainly the Christian militia nuts who advocated that.

As if all this weren’t enough, there is the recent brouhaha over one public elementary school’s decision to paint over the faces of “ethnic” schoolchildren on a mural outside of the school so that they would all be white. Why? Because people were yelling racial epithets at it as they drove by. (Drive-by harassment.) Apparently that action has been reversed, but the fact that they would do it in the first place is beyond belief. Mind you, these were pictures of actual students who attend the school. (See Huffington Post story for more details.)

I realize that the eyes of the media are on Arizona right now and that equally absurd things go on everywhere, but it does seem that Arizona has a racism (not to mention a homophobia) problem. And the fact that it has a high number of immigrants shouldn’t be an excuse for the prejudice. Some (most) people don’t like change, and this is a changing world. In spite of the United States’ relatively restrictive immigration policy, it still has a lot of immigrants. And they are having babies. OMG!

Soon whites won’t be the majority anymore, and then what will they do?

I guess what they are trying to do in Arizona.

* Source: Feminist Majority Foundation’s Feminist News

Friday Videos: The Sex Talk

Ellen Keim — Fri, 28 May 2010 10:00:34 +0000

Julia Sweeney has “The Talk” with her 8-year-old daughter.

Thursday Thoughts: “Outing” Gays

Ellen Keim — Thu, 13 May 2010 10:00:32 +0000

Apparently the blog world is all a-flutter with speculations about whether the Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is gay. Besides the fact that there are more substantive issues to be discussing about Kagan, I find the idea to be extremely sexist. She wears pants, has short hair, is unmarried and childless, has never been associated with a man, refuses to discuss her private life and supports the end of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” therefore she couldn’t possibly be a normal woman. Never mind that she has had a demanding career (a situation that has prevented many women—and men—from devoting themselves to a spouse and children), she still should have the outer accouterments of accepted womanhood.

And of course, the speculation is homophobic as well. Kagan is not the first person in the public eye who has been suspected of being gay, nor will she be the last. Even dead people are not beyond suspicion (Eleanor Roosevelt being one example). You can be a wife-beater, a philanderer, a deadbeat dad, a sexual harasser (funny how these are all usually associated with male behavior) and nary a word will be spoken against you. But being gay—OMG!—elicits much the same response as being a Muslim (read: terrorist) does.

Of course there are people who are saying that it doesn’t matter to them whether or not Kagan’s gay; what they’re concerned about is how it would affect her rulings on LGBT issues. Then there are those who are supposedly more liberal about gays, but who are not comfortable with a person coming “out” as a gay. Both types are uncomfortable with a gay being ensconced on the U.S. Supreme Court. They prefer all gays, not just those in the military, to operate under a “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy. We won’t ask you if you’re gay—after all, we’re too politically correct for that—and you won’t tell us if you are.

Except that’s not what really happens. We have a voracious appetite for “outing” gays. And we don’t just do it with public figures; we do it with people we know as well. “He/she must be gay,” we whisper. And we obsess about it. We gossip about the person, maybe even come right out and rag them about it. It’s a relentless witch hunt that has driven many people to suicide.* Even just being suspected can lead to a suicide attempt, especially among teens.

When are we going to get it through our thick skulls that who people choose for sexual partners has nothing to do with anything else they do with their lives? Most of us keep our sexual lives private (thank God!) for a reason: sex itself is an intensely private affair. Who among us wants the details of our own sex lives to be common knowledge?

I can’t imagine how it feels to have people accuse you of being gay, whether or not you actually are. Because that’s just it; they’re accusing you. As if you’re guilty of something.

There’s one more thing that’s insulting about “outing” gays. It usually has more to do with an obsession with sex than with wanting to know who a person loves. As if one is impossible without the other. Or as if gay relationships are about sex only, not about love, devotion, friendship and day-to-day normal interactions. Sex may only be a small part of what a couple feels for each other. In fact, sex is often an outgrowth of a loving relationship, not its sole reason for being.

[Yes, there is such a thing as gay encounters that are for sex only, but that's also true for heterosexuals. The assumption is that heterosexuals are not promiscuous and homosexuals are. We should all know better than that. Straights can be promiscuous and gays can be monogamous.]

What we are really doing when we “out” gays is making value judgments. We’re saying that there’s something newsworthy about being gay, because, after all, we all know that being gay is something bad. (And let’s face it, news is based on what is “bad” or “wrong.”) As long as its considered a topic of interest, one’s sexual orientation will always be subject to extreme scrutiny (especially if we fit the gay profile). I look forward to the day when people don’t even care whether a person is straight or gay.

I wonder whether I’ll live to see it.

*See “Suicide Attempts Among Gay and Bisexual Men: Lifetime Prevalence and Antecedents” for some interesting statistics.

Also read Jezebel’s article “Elena Kagan: The Sexual Politics of a Private Life.”

HIV/AIDS Prevention: Do We Really Care Anymore?

Ellen Keim — Mon, 10 May 2010 10:00:45 +0000

I remember the anxiety and sometime hysteria about AIDS in the ’80s. The initial identification of AIDS as a “gay disease” was soon countered with the information that you could also get it through heterosexual sex, as well as from tainted needles and blood transfusions. Everyone became paranoid about getting the disease. Disinformation was everywhere: you couldn’t get it if you were a woman, or straight; you could get it from sweat, or a toilet seat.

The Reagan Administration was slow to respond to the crisis. In fact, the Surgeon General at the time, Everett C. Koop, was forbidden to bring it to the public’s attention. He finally did anyway and dissemination of information about how to prevent it followed. Other than avoidance of all sexual contact, the only way to prevent the transmission of AIDS was to use a condom. Koop, who was a committed Christian, saw no problem with saying so.

And then came abstinence-only sex education, which, as you should know, not only teaches abstinence as the only absolutely sure way to prevent pregnancy and STDs (a fact which can’t be argued with), but also refuses to disseminate any information about birth control methods…unless it is misleading. (Such as the “fact” that condoms fail 31% of the time to prevent HIV/AIDS infection.) That’s because abstinence-only sex education relies on scaring kids out of having sex. If nothing works to prevent pregnancy or STDs then it is assumed that kids will avoid sex altogether. It’s inconceivable to these “educators” that kids might go ahead and have unprotected sex, because after all “nothing works anyway.”

What abstinence-only sex education does is erase any frank talk about sexual issues. The message that sex outside of marriage is bad has even affected those who are presumably old enough to make their own decisions about sex. Young women especially are afraid to carry condoms or ask their partners to use them because they think it makes them look “fast.” If sex just “happens,” they can convince themselves that they didn’t mean for it to, therefore they’re still “good girls.”

The upshot is that HIV transmission has, after falling dramatically since the ’80s, begun to creep up again (for instance, a 15% increase between 2004 and 2007), and other STDs like syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia are also on the rise. Even though HIV/AIDS is no longer the death sentence it once was, it is still no picnic to live with, is very expensive to treat, and can still be fatal.

As part of the new health care reform, the federal government has committed to spending $50 million annually for the next five years on abstinence-only sex education. I say this is at best ill-advised, and at worst, fraudulent. Abstinence-only education shouldn’t even be called “education;” it is nothing more than indoctrination. But apparently our government thinks it’s a good idea to tell our children nothing substantive about how to prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted diseases.

Meanwhile, HIV/AIDS and other STDs (not to mention unwanted pregnancy) continue to plague our society. But, hey, that’s okay. At least people aren’t doing it on purpose.

Sources: Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports; an article in the June 2010 issue of The American Prospect magazine (you have to be a subscriber to read the whole article online).

DSD: Disorders of Sexual Development and How We View Gender

Ellen Keim — Mon, 03 May 2010 19:20:03 +0000

Which one is the "real" female?

DSD, or disorders of sexual development, is a controversial term because of the word “disorder.” Many who “suffer” from sexual abnormalities (another charged word) take issue with the idea that they are abnormal. They view their conditions as natural variations that have always occurred, in much the same way that homosexuality has always been with us. But, also like homosexuality, people with DSD are often seen as either freakish mutations or frauds.

Some cases of DSD are clear cut and can be verified biologically. Babies can be born with the sex organs of both sexes (also known as hermaphroditism). People with the condition may have irregular chromosomes: XXY for example, instead of the typical XX (female) or XY (male) set. The genes on the chromosomes may be defective. Or the body may lack the receptors that allows sexual hormones to be put to work.

But classifying sex by chromosomal or hormonal evidence can be tricky. What many people don’t realize is that the fetus is sexually ambiguous until around seven weeks when the sexual structures (known as “indifferent genitals”) begin to develop into the organs of a male or female. But in approximately one in 2,000 births the differentiation isn’t conclusive.

However, unless there is reason to suspect DSD from outward examination, the presence of the “other” sex’s organs may not be discovered until adulthood, if then. Some people go their whole lives never suspecting that they have sexual organs of the opposite sex, or that their sex chromosomes are defective, or that they cannot utilize sexual hormones appropriately. Often the only clue they have that something is wrong is that they “feel” more like the opposite sex than the one they were assigned at birth.

And then there are individuals who identify with neither sex (or with both). They often refer to themselves as “intersexual.” This is sometimes used interchangeably with DSD, but it is mostly used as an attempt to purge the terms that apply to their condition of their pejorative nature.

So why am I writing this post for a feminist blog? In other words, how is this a feminist issue?

My answer is that I think it is important for feminists to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to how we see all members of our human society. Feminists should stand for the ideal that there is no right or wrong way to be a man or a woman, male or female, masculine or feminine. In fact, I think it would be helpful for feminists to see human sexuality as a kind of continuum or spectrum. After all, those at the far ends of the spectrum are just as much variations as those who fall anywhere along it.

If we can see that the masculine male or feminine female is no more normative than the feminine male or masculine female, if we can stop categorizing people altogether based on their sexual characteristics, then we will have come a long way toward the acceptance of all human beings.

We need to realize that there are a lot of factors, some of them biological and thus not under a person’s control, that play into how an individual views his or her (or its) gender. And we need to give people the freedom to determine what variation they most identify with.

All of us know girlie-girl types as well as tomboys. We all know guys’ guys as well as “sensitive” men. What’s the point of putting people into categories, especially based on how masculine or feminine they are? The hypermasculine male might love babies and eschew sports. He might even—gasp!—be gay! The super-feminine woman might be a high-powered CEO or attorney. Or she, too, could be gay. The more we see and accept the whole person, the less likely we are to judge people as good or bad, right or wrong, normal or abnormal, acceptable or unacceptable.

We might be able to see people just for who they are, period.

For more about DSD, read “Neither male nor female: The secret life of intersex people” from Healthzone.ca.

The Men In My Life: My Grandfather

Ellen Keim — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:11:51 +0000

When I decided to write on this topic, I realized something: men have had far more influence in my life than women have (unless you count my four daughters). But maybe that’s to be expected: we form our identities partly by bouncing off of opposites: women/men, masculine/feminine, young/old, introvert/extrovert, and so on. It could be that our personalities are shaped by the tensions and conflicts in our lives more than by the relationships and events that go smoothly.

And what more basic opposing pair than men versus women? Don’t get me wrong: my mother influenced me more than I’d like to admit (as did our difficult relationship), but when I think of the people who have meant the most to me, it has been the men in my life.

You’d think that the first man I’d name would be my father, but the truth is, I loved my grandfather more than anyone else in the world until the day he died (and even for years afterwards). He died when I was 17 and I don’t think it’s an accident that I got married a scant three years later. I married my first husband partly because he was going to be a minister like my grandfather had been. I even thought it was a sign that we were supposed to get married because his youngest brother’s name was exactly the same as my grandfather’s: Daniel Bruce!

One of the last memories I have of my grandfather is of him being furious with me.

I was a quiet child and my grandfather was the only one who could draw me out. I also had self-esteem issues and my grandfather made me feel special. He encouraged my writing—he was the only one who did; when I was in grade school, he used to pay me one quarter for poems and two for stories. He also answered all my questions about God and religion. He was a scholar, loved to read, had his doctorate of Divinity and knew several languages. When I was little I used to climb on the top of his rolltop desk and watch him write his sermons. I wanted to be just like him.

In those pre-feminist days (for me, that is), it didn’t even occur to me to become a minister myself, so I married one instead. I loved being a minister’s wife, although it was sometimes hard to stand in my husband’s shadow. But I worked with the youth, taught Bible Studies, helped my husband with his schoolwork when he was in seminary and with his sermons when he started preaching. Years later, during my third marriage, I even earned my lay preacher certification and preached in nursing homes and in my church occasionally. My writing specialty was inspirational essays and one of the first articles I ever sold was to a Presbyterian women’s magazine. I felt like I was following in my grandfather’s footsteps.

But one of the last memories I have of my grandfather is of his being furious with me. I was around 15 and visiting him one summer when I decided to take a walk around the small town he lived in. Somehow I ended up at the ballpark and met a boy there. We ended up making out and I was gone so long my grandfather got frantic and went out looking for me. I can’t remember if he saw me with the boy or if he asked me and I told him I had met one, but I do remember his dark eyes flashing and the angry set of his jaw. Somehow that got mixed up with the guilt that I already felt about letting this strange boy kiss me and made me feel even guiltier. I couldn’t seem to shake off the feeling that the first time my grandfather had ever been disappointed in me it had to do with sex. I felt like a marked woman. And it didn’t help when I became sexually active a year later. Or when my grandfather died the year after that.

Somehow, this man’s opinion was so important to me that I still feel ashamed about my youthful “indiscretion.” We never talked about that day in the park; I don’t know if we ever would have, but my grandfather died before I had a chance to make peace with him about it. My mother had plenty of reactions similar to his during my teen-age years, but I never felt guilty about her remarks. Maybe it’s because I’d already decided that I was slutty based on what had happened with my grandfather, so how could her opinion make me feel any worse?

It took me a long time to get over my grandfather’s death. I eventually transferred my affections to my father and he became the most important male in my life (more important than my husbands). But that’s a story for another day.

Book Review: Another Life Altogether

Ellen Keim — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 10:00:36 +0000

We all long for “another life altogether” at some point. Thirteen-year-old Jesse Bennett has more reason than most to want to escape into another life. She has lived all her life with her mother’s eccentric behavior, which has just culminated in a suicide attempt and hospitalization. Even though she knows that she will be found out eventually, Jesse tells her classmates that her mother is away on a world cruise that she won in a contest. To bolster her story, she writes detailed letters which are supposedly from her mother (after having researched each destination) and reads them aloud in home room. Of course, in a small town news travels fast and Jesse’s ploy is revealed–and ridiculed. Soon after her mother returns from the mental hospital, her father moves them to an even smaller town in the hopes that they can all get a fresh start.

Jesse is pinning all her hopes on this opportunity to start over. She “providentially” makes friends with a girl who is popular at her new school and she resolves to do everything she can to keep her position in the “in” crowd. At the same time she develops a crush on an older girl and she escapes again into writing letters that she never sends, this time to the object of her affections about their “life together.”

Meanwhile, at home, Jesse worries constantly about her mother, fearing that she will try to kill herself again. She has to take over a lot of the familial responsibilities while her father alternates between denial and hare-brained schemes to help his wife to “snap out of it.” Further complicating her family life is the boyfriend of her aunt who secretly torments her and her jail-bird uncle who comes to live with them after his release from prison.

As her mother falls more deeply into her mental illness and her father more obsessed with making things right, Jesse finds herself fantasizing even more about her “other life” as well as questioning the behavior of her supposed friends in the “in” crowd. When she meets an engaging boy whom she immediately feels a connection to, she’s dismayed to discover that he is ostracized by the popular kids, who rag him about being a “poofter.” When the ostracism turns to violence, Jesse must make a choice.

On the surface this book is about a young girl’s attempt to deal with her mother’s mental illness and her own questions about her sexuality. But beneath the surface it is about so much more. First of all, it is a finely nuanced portrait of a young teen who is trying to find a way to balance her need for acceptance with her desire to be herself. She is beginning to question and explore her sexual identity even though she knows that she might end up becoming an outcast. She is also struggling with her need for a normal family life and with how to accept her family as it is. The normal conflicts between a teen-age girl and her mother are exacerbated by her mother’s illness, with Jesse left feeling that she doesn’t have a mother at all. (This is mirrored by her mother’s extreme reaction to her own mother’s “abandonment.”)

On another level this is about the dilemma that all LGBT people face: whether to hide in hopes of societal acceptance or come out and run the risk of becoming an outcast. Jesse is lucky in a way that she has to come to terms with this decision at an early age. She discovers that being accepted by the “in” crowd doesn’t make you feel “in” if you can’t be yourself. By the end of the novel we see a young lady who has taken a huge step toward living her life authentically.

This book is also about homophobia and the extremes to which some members of society will go to punish homosexuals. It’s also about the bravery of those who take a stand against homophobia, along with their empathy and sense of justice.

Perhaps because Jesse is trying so hard to fit in during the first half of the novel, her personality is somewhat subdued. But as events unfold that threaten to destroy the life she is attempting to make for herself, she becomes more fully-fleshed-out as a character and I found myself fully engrossed in her struggles to make sense of the life she really lives.

The author, Elaine Beale, a British transplant to the U.S. who now lives in Oakland, California, has set the novel in the 1970s along the eroding coastline of East Yorkshire, England. Although the book is not autobiographical, Beale obviously remembers what it was like to be a thirteen-year-old girl. Beale won the Poets & Writers 2007 Exchange Award for a partial draft of this novel. Her previous novel, the well-received Murder in the Castro: A Lou Spencer Mystery, was published in 1997 and her writings have appeared in many anthologies.

Al-Jazeera Interview With Eve Ensler

Ellen Keim — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:27:56 +0000

Riz Khan speaks with author and activist Eve Ensler.