Wow. Today somebody out there found my blog by searching for it by title. This is a first in the animal’s blogging career. It makes me feel that there is now some pressure on me to start writing properly and expressing real opinions rather than reiterating what other intelligent internet entities have said. That’s part of what blogging is about, I guess, but since I have a brain which functions fairly well, I should probably use it from time to time. No promises, because I tend to break those, but I would love to start writing more about birth and pregnancy and sexual health, and how we think about women’s bodies in all of these contexts – for that matter, how we think about men and their bodies in these contexts, because they are often overlooked. I would love to give myself some leeway to write frivolous things about fiddling (as in, playing the violin, you dirty bastards) and books and cats and my little prairie life. It’s a pretty great life with some pretty great people in it. So try not to mind if I occasionally remove the stick from my ass to talk about the things that make me happy to be in the world, rather than all the things I wish were different.
Thanks for making my morning, Google user.
Next Friday, February 12th is Sexual Health Awareness Day. This means that you, my faithful stoppers-by from various dusty corners of the internet, will be treated to daily diatribes on sexual health for the next week! Aren’t you excited?
Tomorrow I’ll write on the concepts of sexual health and healthy sexuality, the differences and similarities between them, and what they mean to me. I would love to get some talk going around here, so if you’re in my neighbourhood, please give some input! Because, c’mon, who doesn’t love talking about sex?
Last friday was Blog for Choice Day, apparently, but it kinda passed me by. I think I blog for choice on a regular basis, not to mention counseling for choice and working for choice and talking about choice. So instead of writing an obligatory post, I… didn’t.
Today, however, I am effing the dog, and I’ve been reading the blog over at NAF (the National Abortion Federation, which accredits clinics in Canada and the US). They have a weekly feature called Wednesday’s Words from Women; I strongly suggest heading over to check it out. These quotes are from women whose choices were made for many different reasons: abusive partners, sexual assault, bad timing, responsibility to children they already have. Some will break your heart:
I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006 at the age of 28. I am now 32 years of age, pregnant, and have a tumor growing in my uterus, and the doctors are concerned that it is cancerous. I have chosen to make this decision based on my health and the two boys that are already here that need me – alive! I have already given a baby up for adoption, so I know how that feels too. It wasn’t easy and neither is this decision. I did what’s best for my health and for my boys.
-submitted by Justine* through a member clinic
Others will make you smile, if you are like me and you smile when you read about empowering moments in people’s lives:
I grew up in an anti-choice household, but ever since I was able to truly think through the issue, have been pro-choice. But like many beliefs, for most of my life it went untested. Then, last spring, I became pregnant and came face-to-face with my belief that women have the right to their own body, including the right to an abortion. I was 29, had a master’s degree, was employed full-time and had a supportive network of friends and family. By some standards I had everything necessary to adequately take care of a child. But I wasn’t ready. I had just ended an unhealthy relationship; I didn’t want to be pregnant. I didn’t want to have a child. It was and always will be my body. I made a choice that was best for me. My body, my choice, and thankfully still my legal right.
–submitted by Susan* through our website
One beautiful thing about counseling is that I get to see women come to these decisions first-hand. The theme of last week’s Blog for Choice Day was ‘Trust Women,’ a phrase which Dr. George Tiller used often in defending and describing his work as an abortion provider. I believe that one of the best ways to learn to trust a person is to truly listen to them – though, of course, for a person to feel they can be truly, nakedly honest with you, a certain amount of trust is a prerequisite. The quotes on the NAF blog are all different, from women with varied backgrounds; the thread that links them is their thoughtfulness, the deep self-knowledge that people who make these decisions have about their own lives. I have never counseled a woman who was careless or cavalier about her decision to end her pregnancy. If anti-choice people trusted women and were willing to listen to their stories, I sincerely believe that they could not hold as hard a line as they do.
As it stands, I doubt that many women want to give these honest accounts to anti-choice people, because they know that the prerequisite trust doesn’t exist. We are here, though, working to understand all of the ambiguity and anxiety that surrounds the choice to end a pregnancy. Trusting women, their words and their understanding of their own lives.
Today I’m thinking of a particular client; my heart is with you and I hope you’re well.
*NAF changed names here, so I didn’t have to.
I thought I would take a few minutes out of my oh-so-hectic workday (that is extreme sarcasm, by the by) to talk about a couple of clinics local to me and why they’re so wonderful. Seemed like a spirit-lifting kind of post, though perhaps not quite as much as the gay animal couples.
Nine Circles Community Health Centre
This organization is involved in harm reduction activities, including needle distribution; as far as I know there’s only one other place in the city, the Methadone Intervention and Needle Exchange program, that provides clean needles to drug users. They provide HIV and STI testing, care for clients who are HIV positive, and an HIV/STI info line. These services are available elsewhere, of course, but they are strengthened at Nine Circles by the organization’s community focus. Nine Circles participates in some pretty fascinating research projects and they are trans-friendly, both in theory and in practice.
Anyway. I like them. Also because I went there once and my nurse-practitioner dude made me laugh so hard that he could barely give me a pelvic exam.
(Too much information, facebook creepers? Sorry. Get used to it.)
Klinic Community Health Centre
Klinic has two locations in the semi-inner city area where the provide a variety of services. They offer counselling for sexual assault and domestic abuse as well as crisis counselling and rural stress phone services. Their health services for men and women are primarily reproductive/sexual health care services, though they do offer limited primary care services to people in the community as needed. Their education services include Teen Talk, which lets young folks teach young folks about all kinds of sexy things like condoms. Klinic, like Nine Circles, has some programs geared specifically toward men, which the Women’s clinic I work at obviously does not. They are pro-choice and gay positive, and very welcoming.
Both clinics have volunteer opportunities available. As does the Women’s Health Clinic, just to get in a word for me and mine.
Back to work, maybe.
Sexuality and Society recently posted about a region of Spain called Extremadura which is funding a sexuality education campaign that focuses on masturbation as a part of individual sexual health. One important feature of the campaign, as discussed in the post, is that solo pleasure is not necessarily presented as a ‘do this instead of that’ alternative to partnered sex; the materials that advocate self-love also discuss contraception.
I started writing this post in a very objective voice, but I don’t think I can write well about sexual health without getting a little bit subjective. For all of you who know me personally and don’t think you can handle some introspection, avert thine eyes. I won’t get too icky, but I may cross lines for some. Because, as I’ve discovered, my boundaries seem to be further afield than those of many of my friends.
Anyway. I think it kicks ass to put masturbation out there as a normal, productive sex act. It’s more acceptable, I feel, for men to be open about masturbating, because it’s more acceptable for men to have a sex drive (which is another post in itself – but see Figleaf’s two rules of desire if you want to see what’s been fuelling my perspective on women’s desire lately); but for both men and women, there is shame and stigma attached to self-loving. I had no idea how to talk about it when I was young. I remember finding out that I could make myself feel good by putting pressure on a certain spot, but I didn’t know what to call it for years. After I found out, the only conversation I had about mastubation for a long time was one in which my best friend at the time told me how disgusting she thought it was to masturbate and how she would never, ever do it. Which didn’t make me feel great about myself, and definitely did not make me want to open up to anybody about it. My only friend was a book for young women about periods and bras and the like, which told me that this was actually a good thing to do. At the time I was glad to have some kind of positive reinforcement; now, I’m double glad, because I have no clue what my sex life would be like if I hadn’t given myself license to explore my own body. As far as I can tell, this campaign is gender neutral, so boys and girls alike get a positive message about masturbation. I’m not sure that this will make it any easier to talk about, but at least it will give them the support I found in book form.
Advocating masturbation as part of a healthy sexuality is great; doing so alongside information about contraception is even better. This tells the young folks targeted by the campaign that partnered sex is also good, just more risky. It can be difficult to take a non-punitive approach to protection from STIs and pregnancy, and even at the clinic I work for we tend to be heavy on the birth control discussion and less into talking about how pleasure figures into a woman’s experience with sex. This becomes even more pronounced when a client is pregnant and seeking to end her pregnancy; the doctors want to know that she will be working to prevent another unwanted pregnancy, and so we have to discuss how her birth control has failed in the past and what might work better. This is obviously important, but it’s difficult to integrate pleasure into a discussion around hormonal birth control or IUDs or spermicide. Condoms are easier, but even then the discussion tends more toward men’s pleasure. There’s no easy way around this, because we are a clinic and we deal with the consequences of (heterosexual) sex on a daily basis. As a feminist organization, however, it is vital that we help our clients see sex as an important and normal part of their identity and their relationships. When you talk about masturbation – all pleasure, no potential baby-making or disease-vectoring – you talk about that person on their own; it’s all about their desires, their fantasies, what works for them physically. Those ideas of self-defined sexuality need to become part of the discussions we have about contraception if we are going to discuss sex in a holistic, non-punitive way. Although harm reduction is important, we cannot talk about sex in terms that people can truly relate to unless we use language that makes pleasure central, diversity more than just a buzz word, and that normalizes STIs and condom use.
That’s my rant for today. I think sexual health is going to be a prominent theme for the next little while, though I also have some books to write about. Expect something well-researched and carefully edited sometime soon, because I’m going to have a dearth of non-working daytime hours in the next couple of weeks. Hurrah!
