Why Teach Kids About Sex?

I'm not sure why I always assumed that sex education was about the basics of conception and how to avoid it, but talking with Alexandra Lord made clear how wrong I was.  Nor is sex ed only about preventing venereal diseases, though that has mattered more than I'd recognized.  At heart, whether, what, and how we teach young people about sex is really all about how we think about society and each other.  Do we think that sexuality is ok for some people but not for others?  Do we see sex as a source of disease and problems, or as a source of pleasure?  Embedded in these overtly sexual questions are ideas about how we think about each other's intelligence, morality, opportunities, and interactions.  We have tried to control or limit the sexual activity -- or at least the procreation -- of people we think are intellectually inferior.  We have ignored the educational needs of those we deem too "naturally" immoral to be trusted to have their sexual desires controlled at all, or we have focused only on educating them, assuming that "people like us" will behave "well" with no guidance at all.  We base our ideas about about what to teach on how functional we think other people's families are.  And we educate people to avoid catching disease because we're afraid they might infect us.  We simply can't separate out sex ed from social power, human relations, and culture. 

Of course, we've been seeing a lot of evidence of that lately, with public debates about insurance coverage for contraception and requiring invasive procedures that mimic rape before a woman can have an abortion.  Those debates reflect different perspectives not just on sex, and not just on morality, but on larger questions of who will have the power to control other people's bodies and choices. 

The Chief Organizer at Work

Wade Rathke is pretty darned inspiring.  He started one of the most successful organizing groups in U.S. history, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), when he was just out of college, and over its 40-year history, the organization led drives for fair housing, fair wages, voter registration, and more.  And despite having to shut ACORN down under political and financial pressure (in part because of defunding by the government) in 2010, Rathke still believes in the power of organizing and continues his work, much of it now international.

He's also still involved with social issues in the U.S., and his book Citizen Wealth lays out a clear analysis of what people need to achieve income stability, the obstacles they face, and strategies for addressing those challenges.  Along with the ideas, what comes through in the book is Wade's ongoing belief that people working together can make a difference.  In the face of decades of being involved in the ups and downs of public and business policies that seem to be incredibly able to perpetuate and expand inequality, he writes forcefully and optimistically about the possibility of social, economic, and political change.

Wade spoke as part of YSU's Center for Working-Class Studies lecture series. I had to break the talk into several sections, but here are links:

Part1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Audience Questions

Dying with Dignity

As Carole Ann Drick explains in our interview, the way we die has changed over time, from the fairly quick at-home death from critical disease to the extended, often very slow process of dying in a hospital or nursing home.  All those machines and that long, drawn-out decline takes away our dignity.  She advocates more use of hospice and other approaches to allow us to die more calmly, surrounded by friends and family or, at least, by caring and appropriately-trained nurses. 

Her vision seems like an attractive alternative, something that should be common sense.  It sometimes seems that we want to extend each person's life as long as possible, regardless of its quality.  While Drick isn't arguing for euthanasia, her approach does suggest that we might die more comfortably, in both spiritual and physical sense, if we were able to accept rather that fight death. 

Defending Women's Choices

I can’t pretend to be neutral about Planned Parenthood, or women’s health, for that matter, and my conversation with Gary Dougherty, Legislative Director for Planned Parenthood Affiliates of Ohio, probably shows that.  I believe that women should have access to good health care – well, everyone should – regardless of their income, and that includes access to contraception.  I wish that no woman was ever raped, ever had her contraception fail, or ever made a mistake and didn’t use it when she should have.  But I’m realistic, and I want women to have the option of having an abortion if necessary.  Those are my views, not those of any of the organizations that support my work, and I stand by them.  So I was encouraged to hear Gary talk about the work he and his colleagues are doing to protect women’s access to affordable health care, contraception, and yes, abortion.

And as Gary suggested, the most troubling part of recent debates about providing health insurance that includes contraceptives is that just beneath the surface seems to be the desire by a few to reduce or even eliminate contraceptives for everyone.  Not just for those who think it’s morally wrong, but for everyone else, too.  As I explain to students in my women’s studies courses, reliable contraception made a huge difference in women’s ability to make choices about their own lives.  Many choose to have children.  Some, like me, choose not to.  But we only get to make these choices because we have access to care and the right to make choices about our health.

Job Preparation and the Liberal Arts: Journalism as a Model

It's always fun talking with Tim Francisco about education, especially the NewsOutlet.org, the project he runs with Alyssa Lenhoff.  Yes, he's enthusiastic, but he's also very thoughtful about the goals and approach they're using. For me, the most impressive part of this project is its vision for what undergraduate education can accomplish by engaging students in challenging hands-on learning that is at once practical and intellectually-significant.  I worry that our emphasis on higher education as workforce preparation leads us to make undergraduate programs focus more on skills than on critical thinking and that we encourage students to view anything that isn't part of their future job as irrelevant.  We know that most undergraduates will not spend their entire working lives doing the jobs they trained for in college, so they need broader knowledge and skills, especially in gathering information, analyzing problems, and effective communication.  Journalism can provide these skills, but a strong general education program and an emphasis on inquiry and problem solving within the major can do that for students in any field.  So while I'm excited about how the approach taken by YSU's Journalism program works for their majors, I hope that other departments will embrace this model of combining job prep with a liberal arts approach.

The Fight Against Human Trafficking

Like many of you, until I sat down to talk with Jean Waris and Brian Hudzik, the main thing I'd heard about human trafficking in our area was the story of new regulations for massage parlors in Warren.  But as Jean and Brian made clear, "human trafficking" isn't something that happens far away, nor is it happening only in massage parlors.  The term refers to anytime someone is forced through violence or coercion to do things they wouldn't normally do, so it applies to most forms of prostitution and also occurs in other types of labor.

After our interview, Jean sent me the story of Theresa Flores:

Theresa lived in an upscale suburb of Detroit. Her father was a mid-level manager in some type of business who was transferred every two years. Theresa attended a good high school where she met an upper level classmate who raped her. Unbeknown to her, pictures were taken during the rape. Several days later the classmate approached her with the pictures threatening to post them all over her school and church and to send them to her parents and her father's boss. BUT...if she would do a favor for him, he would give her the pictures. 

After midnight she received a call on the phone in her bedroom telling her to be on the corner in front of her house in 10 minutes and a car would pick her up. She was taken to a location where she was raped by a number of men. This continued for TWO YEARS! She would be called several times a week, she never knew when. It was always a different location and different men. She was terrified. They follow her younger brother home from school in a big, black, slow moving car. He was scared. She was terrified. Their small dog turned up dead in the yard. She told no one. And no one noticed. After two years her father was transferred. She told no one. She just didn't turn up in school. She had escaped!

I heard Theresa speak last summer and she told of being somewhere and hearing about HUMAN TRAFFICKING. Suddenly she realized that there was a NAME  for what had happened to her and that it was a CRIME. Theresa has shared this story in her book The Slave Across the Street. 

 Jean and Brian are involved in the local portion of a growing national movement to fight human trafficking.  You can learn more about the broad effort from the Polaris Project.  Just this week, Governor Kasich announced a "statewide war on human trafficking" as part of his State of the State Address.  Locally, the Anti-Human Trafficking Core Group of the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative is working on both policy issues and strategies to help victims.  If you want to get involved, call the MVOC office at 330-743-1196.

Cheating and Character

The most interesting thing about talking with Sam Antar isn't his story of committing fraud, or the way he evaded jail by helping catch other criminals, or the fact that he now spends his time teaching others about white-collar crime.  No, the most interesting thing is his belief that we can't stop people from committing these crimes by promoting better business ethics or even by a lot more regulation.  According to Antar, people like him will always find a way to cheat, and they do it because they can and in a way, almost because they have to.  He compares cheating in business to alcoholism and gambling addictions.  Business people don't cheat because they didn't have sufficient training in professional ethics.  They cheat because they're the kind of people who want to get away with something.

The key, Antar suggests, is training the rest of us to be more cautious in dealing with those who manage our money and in helping law enforcement agencies develop a better understanding of how people commit fraud so that they can get better at catching white-collar criminals.  I find that kind of discouraging.  And it's even more discouraging to hear Sam Antar suggest that the desire many of us feel to always expect the best out of other people and to prefer to assume that others mean well not harm is exactly what could make us good targets for the next cheater.