text:
This action might not be possible to undo. Are you sure you want to continue?
Editor-in-Chief: Rachel Solnick Design Editor: Jenny Narrod Photography Editor: Taylor Johnson Perspectives Editors: Becky Leven, Margaret McKeehan Short Story Editors: Katherin Sudol, Anastasia Harris Articles Editor: Amanda Hu Editorial Editors: Mimi Arnold, Katherin Sudol Poetry Editor: Liz Mallet Health and Body Editors: Sergio Jaramillo, Rachel Heirman Publicity: Meilani Santillan, Kate Hildebrandt Editorial Assistance: Andy Dimond, Lauren Fitte, Matilda Young Web Editor: Becky Leven Cover art by Taylor Johnson Open Magazine is a literary sex magazine produced by undergraduates at Rice University. Copyright © 2008 by Open Magazine No portion of Open Magazine may be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. SUBMISSIONS Please submit articles, short stories, poems and works of literature or art to Open Magazine at RiceOpen.submissions@ gmail.com or mail to : Open Magazine 6340 Main Street Houston, TX 77005
Submissions disclaimer: A submission becomes the non-exclusive property of Open Magazine and may be used as marketing to further promote the magazine.
Photo Credit: Edward Merritt
GET INVOLVED Open is looking for volunteer writers, web designers, business and editors for next year's staff! Email RiceOpen@ gmail.com. To advertise, please contact firstname.lastname@example.com http://www.rice.edu/openmagazine
Letter from the Editor
When I first told people that I was starting a literary sex magazine, they were surprised. A literary what magazine? Why make an entire publication about sex? Why take something so private, so personal, out of the bedroom and into the public domain? The short answer is simple: the interaction between sex and culture brings about issues that need to be confronted. The longer answer is not so simple- while it may be more comfortable to make generalizations about culture from the vantage point of the observer, any real understanding needs to come from within. Maybe it is because of the small student population, the intense workload or the self-professed nerdiness of Rice students, but in the opinion of many students with whom I have spoken, the culture of Rice is not as welcoming to sex as it could be. I strongly believe in the maturity of college students to intelligently tackle socially, and sometimes morally ambiguous issues and I think it is about time we used the caliber of analysis we reserve for academics and turned it inward to Open the doors of the unspoken, the implied, the taken for granted, to see the truth that lies behind what we know and think about sex. What Open Magazine is advocating is not necessarily more sex, but rather a respect for sex and its impact on culture and our individual lives. According to a study by the American College Health Association, about 70 percent of girls who have not had sex prior to entering college lose their virginity by senior year. Compared to the relatively sheltered homes many freshmen come from, college represents a freewheeling environment of tantalizing excess, a plunge into the cold water of unfamiliarity in which some students indulge sexually. But the expectation of college as a time for experimentation, self discovery and making bad decisions provides only a temporary safety net. Open seeks to present the reader with a level-headed compilation of writings that taken together, vouch for sustainable moderation. We are living in an age of paradox. An age where Fox television network can reject a Trojan condom advertisement because it promotes the use of condoms for pregnancy prevention instead of disease prevention, but then turn around and feature the glamorously sexual dramas of The O.C. An age where the biological desire for sex is compounded by the desire to comply with societal expectations, which are often prescribed by sexually saturated media. An age where we reach puberty earlier, but economic independence and full-time employment later. An age where legislation governing a women's control over her body is getting less restrictive- just last year, after years of debate, the FDA approved emergency contraception for over-the-counter sales – but many classrooms around the country still teach abstinence-only sex education. An age when discussing sex on a personal level is still taboo, but one in four American teenage girls has an STD, according to a Centers for Disease Control 2 report released this year. Caught in the crossroads of conflicting messages, we face a moral tug-of-war. Sex is a multifaceted issue, and its complexity needs to be brought to our attention. Open is about realizing that sex can be both profound and fun! By featuring a more literary side to experiences with sex through short stories and poems, we aim to use words and art as an artistic medium to convey emotions. The magazine is meant to be educational as well; we present features such as news briefs, articles and a health and body section. Instructional details on sex are left out- we believe such information is readily available online or in other magazines; instead we present the voice of your peers. Open is founded on the belief that sexual expression is a natural and essential part of human development, a viewpoint supported by the majority of today's psychologists. The magazine does not have a specific agenda regarding issues such as the morality of sex, or when sex should or should not happen, but rather presents the imperative to examine your own views on what role sex plays in your life. With changing contraceptive options, gender roles and societal norms regarding virginity, the landscape of sexual morality seems in constant flux. By itself, Open cannot define a path for you, but it can be a companion on your journey. And in the end, Open magazine is not as much about sex as it is about people and a respect for humanity in dealing with something that has the capacity to be anything from confusing and risky to pleasurable and playful. Let Open be your intimate conversation with a confidante, a disclosure that resonates a familiar note and leaves you with a broader worldview. Rachel Solnick
Photo Credits: Creative Commons Attribution
Table of Contents
2 3 4 5 Letter from the Editor Table of Contents Survey News Brief
Anastasia Harris & Rachel Solnick
47 48
Gardasil and What it Means to Men
Guyton Durnin
Evolution of the Orgasm
Sergio Jaramillo
7 8 9 2
Being Bisexual
Chelsea Smith Anastasia Harris
5 53 55
Dane Powell
Abstinence-Only Sex Education Is Anything But Sex Education in Tennessee
Margaret McKeehan
The Absence of Sex in Being Black My Relationship with Sex: An Indian's Perspective
Raj Bandyopadhyay
On Women and Assertiveness in Dating
Misha Teplitskiy
Interview with a Buddhist Monk
JianYing FaShi
57 57 58 59 59 60 6 62 63
Courtney Ng
5 6 7 9 22 23 25 26 27
Short Stories
Puzzle Pieces Sexy Little Thing
Ann Wang
Beach at Evening Captivity Ice
Anastasia Harris
Haley Richardson
Petite Mort
Liz Mallett
Mil y un maneras de olvidarte
Luis Zuleta
On the Sexuality of Cocktails
Haley Richardson
Hope for the Hollow Woman
Haley Richardson
Julia Bursten
Exceptions and Mapmaking
Ann Wang
The Love Handbook Grand Theft Panties
Courtney Ng
She's Crafty One Hit Away
Darren Arquero
Dancing Zoetrope
Rachel Solnick
30 32 34 37 39
When the Teacher is Gone
Katherin Sudol
Open Magazine would like to thank the Dr. Bill Wilson Student Initiative Grant for its generous support of this magazine.
Ground Zero
Derek Workman
Women of the Magdalene Program
Claire Berry
The Kama Sutra and the Ananga-Ranga
Dr. Anne Hardgrove
Geishas and the Floating World
Celestine Shih
42 44 46
Health and Body
Victoria Trinh
Getting Tested Exploring Health Benefits of Sex Plan B -FAQ
Katherin Sudol Explicit Image - Watch out!
Conducted by Meilani Santillan and Kate Hildebrandt
This winter, 793 Rice undergraduates completed Open Magazine's online sex survey, answering over 30 questions that investigated their sexual behavior and opinions. Compared to the national average of percent of students who have had sex, Rice had almost twice as many students respond that they had not had intercourse. A 2006 study in the Journal of American College Health reported 23.5 percent of respondents were virgins. For Rice, this number was 39.2 percent. While participants took the survey on their own accord, extensive advertising was conducted to elicit a large response to help offset the self-selection method. Participants were distributed fairly evenly among residential college, year and sex. For the complete survey results, find the link at http://www.rice. edu/openmagazine. The following statics highlight some of the findings:
60.5% of women and 6.2% of male students have had sex 4.3% homosexual and 5.6% bisexual 46.8% assign significant importance to the quality of sex in a relationship 80.4% of students masturbate 8.4% have had sexual experience with a member of the same sex 65.8% of women have used a sex toy and 72.3% of those who haven't would be willing to try ~35% discuss sex with their partners on a regular basis 59.7% of sexually active students have had unprotected sex 0.0% have been sexual abused while intoxicated 49.2% of students who have had sex would not change anything about their first time and 25.3% would have changed who it was with 28% of women and 24% of men have had more than 0 hook-ups 23.6% do not think it is necessary to be dating before having sex 53.6% of women and 33.8% of men have never had an orgasm ~60% believe that if a person they were interested in dating initiated intimacy sooner than expected, it would not be a factor in the development of the relationship
News Briefs
Compiled by Anastasia Harris and Rachel Solnick
In a ruling that was announced on Valentine's Day this year, a federal appeals court struck down a Texas law that made it a crime to sell or promote sex toys as reported by statesman.com. The law dates back to the 970's and though rarely enforced, in 2003 a woman in Fort Worth was arrested for selling sex toys at a Tupperware style sex toy party. Stating that the law violates the right to privacy protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, Texas courts followed in the footsteps of Louisiana, Kansas and Colorado courts that recently struck down similar laws. Not wanting to extend such pleasures to the people, Alabama, Mississippi and Virginia still have laws banning the sale of pleasure shafts. A cure for AIDS? Gambian President Yahya Jammeh claims to have created an herbal concoction that cures the symptoms of AIDS afflicting his West African nation. The world court hasn't taken too kindly to such claims however, calling Jammeh's statements "irresponsible" and "dangerous" as reported by CNN. No more advertising your "services" on craigslist my lovely streetwalkers. The NYTimes.com reports that eight women visiting Long Island last summer were arrested on charges of prostitution as a result of advertising in craigslist's erotic services category. And no, 00 "kisses" for 30 minutes isn't going to fool the fuzz anymore. "Heeeeeeeere piggy piggy piggy!" Trojan's recent "Evolve" ad featuring male pigs attempting to hit on a woman at a bar apparently did not sit well with the two heavy-hitter corporations Fox and CBS who rejected the ad because it lacked overt health messages according to NYtimes.com. But have no fear, the commercial has been showcased elsewhere on ABC, NBC and nine cable networks, which include MTV, Comedy Central and Adult Swim. The Washington Post reported in 2007 that a large number of 5 members in the senate are supporting the move toward mandatory HPV vaccines in middle school girls to combat the rising numbers of cervical cancer. Almost half of Maryland's senate backs the legislation that would require all girls in middle school to take the preventative measure. Other states thinking of following suit? New Jersey, California, Georgia, Texas and Kentucky. Male birth control pills? It could be coming soon. In a recent study by researchers at the University of Sydney, Australia, a combination of testosterone and progestin was found to suppress sperm production to an level as low as that of a male who has had a vasectomy. Though more investigation on types of hormones is still needed, scientists are optimistic that hormonal contraception in males may become an effective and reversible form of birth control. For more, see the study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. "This ain't no etch-a-sketch…" but it's not a pregnancy test either. It's a do-it-yourself paternity test called Identigene. Developed by Sorenson genomics, this at-home DNA test was released in March this year and is sold for $29.99 at Rite Aid pharmacies. Sales were so strong in the first week of its release that Rite Aid decided to sell the product in over 4,000 stores in 30 states according to msnbc.com. While the Food and Drug Administration's review is not required, results are puportedly reported with 98 to 99 percent accuracy. Based on new statistical information, the abortion rate in America is dropping. In a study conducted by the Guttmacher Institution between 2000 and 2005, yearly abortion numbers tumbled from .3 million to .2 million. The amount of abortions performed has not been this low since 974 as reported by the New York Times. It has also been noted by the Times that this decline is due to prevention and sex-education programs within schools and not to Bush's abstinence only program.
Photo Credits: Simon Bucknell
Being Bisexual
Chelsea Smith
"Being bisexual means I am attracted to souls, to people, to individuals. It means that eroticism is not limited to one set of genitalia, but found in minds, hands, eyes, hips, mouths of all genders." - Rebecca Walker I sat down to write this article with a topic in my mind and the charger in my laptop. Strangely enough, though, I couldn't think of anything to say. I was shocked that something I have evolved into the past three years of my life, something that I believe defines such a significant part of my identity could leave me so speechless. Yet, there it was on my computer screen: "Bisexuality is..." and ,500 missing words that I had imagined my fingers would be too slow to get out of my head. I tried to start by recalling a story about an old man's reaction to my ex-girlfriend and me kissing in a grocery store parking lot. I tried to explain what coming out was like and my experience at Rice. However, when I looked over the choppy and disjointed ideas I knew that they didn't convey what I really wanted to say. In my attempt to explain my sexuality, I was reinforcing the very definitions about it that I hate. When trying to describe to people what bisexuality means, it is easy to fall into the trap of defining the genders. Simplifying the explanation of bisexuality into, "I like women for this reason and men for that reason" differentiates the genders, something that bisexuality claims not to acknowledge. I would be lying if I said that women and men are the same and that I don't see people in terms of gender at all. I often joke with friends that relationships are lose-lose situations because girls are crazy and boys are stupid. Having experiences with both genders, I know those stereotypes can be true, but I also know that they are true for only some people. There is a definite distinction between men and women, but it does not apply to everyone and it merely adds another layer to what I find attractive. These are differences that I look at as one of many things that make up the person I'm interested in. I have always found it strange when people talk about their "type" because I have never really had one. Even ignoring gender, the different kinds of people I find myself attracted to are all strikingly unique from one another. For me, it is more of the spark, the connection I have with someone. Many people, straight and gay alike, have difficulty understanding this. Straight people can comprehend that gays are attracted to the same sex just as they are attracted to the opposite sex, and vice versa, but adding another gender can be confusing for people that are monosexual. I believe that sexuality is fluid and people lie at various points on a spectrum of sexual preference, ranging from completely heterosexual to completely homosexual. For a while I tried to explain my bisexuality to my monosexual friends as the proportion of how much I was attracted to men versus women – 50/50, 40/60 and so on – but this was just another way that I was giving into the constructions about sexual attraction and gender roles. I don't go into relationships with the mindset of meeting a gender quota based upon how I view my sexuality so why should I explain it that way. One thing is clear: when I fell in love with a girl, despite having loved my ex-boyfriend, I couldn't deny the spark; I just had to redefine myself to fit with what I felt. Somehow, I didn't struggle with my identity in the face of this new attraction. It just fit, like something natural; and maybe that's the best way to explain my bisexuality. Despite the cheesiness of this horrendous phrase, I go with the flow. I am attracted to whomever I am attracted to and I don't deny myself based upon what some people dictate as appropriate. I don't want to let anything restrain me from love, even though I find it in varying aspects of people – from minds to hands to eyes to hips to mouths. I am not trying to speak for the bisexual community, because I feel everyone's sexuality is unique and subjective, and who am I to define someone else's sexuality. However, I hope I have broken down at least a few of the strict definitions of gender we use to define our relationships and attractions. Or at least I hope that the next time I tell someone I am bisexual they won't ask me for a menage a trois or when I'll be getting back on my train headed towards gayville. 7
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
The Absence of Sex in Being Black
Anastasia Harris
Debut performance at a Black Student Association event. Tension and anticipation over. Relief finally setting in as I flawlessly conclude one of my erotic poems. Result? Dead silence. I thought perhaps it was the initial shock to my work – I had experienced that before: the confused eyes, the scrunched-up eyebrows, the mouths gaping wide open. But there was none of that, just plain quiet. I even sensed an air of total disdain as I went back to my seat to enjoy the rest of the pieces. As any performer will tell you, an audience's feelings are almost tangible and what they're thinking is always clear. I needed no words to tell me that they were more than just shocked. They were floored. Trying to cut my peers some slack, I presented one more time at another event to convince myself that it wasn't them but the night or the atmosphere or maybe even the poem itself that had caused their reaction. But alas, no change. I couldn't figure it out. At my predominately Caucasian high school in the nation's capital I was received with open arms and was even marketed as headliner for the shows we put on. I couldn't understand why here, at one of the most prestigious universities in the country, my African American counterparts wouldn't try to hear what I had to say. I'm not trying to push sex on everyone. I'm not even trying to push myself or my absurdly liberalist views on anyone. But something inside me expected more from people I thought were like me. In high school I had friends of all creeds, all of whom were receptive to me and hung out with everybody, not just people that tended to favor them and their quantity of melanin. Perhaps I was sheltered inside a bubble where everyone embraced each other despite a few differences. But what was I supposed to do? I came to college with false sense of reality - and then good morning real world. As time went on I realized that it was less me and more what I observed to be a serious group dynamic that had a chokehold on a large majority of the non-athletic black community here at Rice. Partying was to be done only in moderation, drinking was rarely if ever on the agenda, and sex? Don't mention it unless it has something to do with AIDS (because it makes sense to talk about it after the problem has become too unmanageable to deal with). Okay, for the sake of everything holy I must clarify here: 8 there is nothing wrong with good values and proper behavior, and I am by no means discrediting anyone who follows their moral law. My issue stems from the outward projection of such values onto other people. I feel as though the African American nose of Rice turned itself up and snubbed me just because my point of view was too radical to be a part of their group. Sex wasn't something they wanted to openly be associated with, or at least not in my poems. Not limited only to the African American community at Rice, sex influences interactions within most peer groups, especially in college. It comes as no surprise that when one member of a group loses their virginity, their chums are sure to closely follow, depending on how close the group is. Our peers' opinions have an incredible influence on what we deem acceptable behavior. People jump on the sex bandwagon just like they did with the ludicrously popular middle school virtual pet fad, Tamagotchi. Likewise with the black community here: the majority rules. If you don't go to church every Sunday, you're the odd man out. If you recite erotic poetry, people start to question you. Is it too close to promiscuity? Simply talking about sex – does it make me a "working girl" peddling my special wares to the world? Do I give a bad name to intellectual blacks that attend school here? Are the African Americans here so scrutinized that we want to be disassociated from any kind of vice whatsoever so as to avoid any kinds of stigma? The innumerable amounts of questions that plague me really boil down to one: can I still be me and truly be accepted by this group of people? It strikes me as oddly ridiculous that sex tends to be a touchy topic of discussion among African Americans, seeing as how our body parts can be seen flagrantly dancing all over music video networks. However, the issue at hand is not sex in the black community at large but rather sex as it relates to those that affect me. Due to poor reception to poetry I have stopped participating in such events and have begun to search elsewhere for an audience. This attitude towards sex here pains me to the degree that I feel we are missing out on something, especially something that affects us all. I may never know the real reason for this lack of enthusiasm with sex as a topic of discussion in the African American community, but I can only hope that a change is on the horizon. Perspectives
Photo Credits: Edward Merritt
My Relationship with Sex: An Indian's Perspective
Raj Bandyopadhyay
I consider myself to be the world's least qualified person to be writing anything meaningful on the topic of -- deep breath -- Sex. First of all, I come from a country and cultural background where open discussion of this topic is unacceptable. On top of that, I am an Engineering major, and nerd to boot. This double whammy means that my sexual knowledge probably ranks lower than the stereotypical American undergraduate. So what am I doing pretending that I could say anything insightful about -- sex? I grew up in an urban middle-of-middle-class milieu in Mumbai, India in the eighties and early nineties. This was still when India was a partly socialist economy with several aspects of life controlled by Government. While India always had a politically free and lively media since its independence in 947, moral censorship was a fact of life. This meant that television, newspapers and films were carefully bowdlerized and no public discourse of sex and sexuality existed in the mainstream media. Even socially, sex was taboo as a discussion topic and inseparable from (very heterosexual) marriage. I was not aware of homosexuality until I came to the United States. This censorship was not something that was forced by the government. It was very much a part of society and what a large number of people wanted and appreciated. However, unfortunately for me, I've always liked reading too much for my own good. My parents provided me with a bilingual and secular upbringing, and always encouraged me to read and think for myself. A turning point for me was when, for my tenth birthday, I received a complete set of a 20-volume encyclopedia (this was before the internet and wikipedia existed). This was where I went when I first heard the word "sex" whispered among older students in middle school. Reading books like these told me that sex and relationships were perceived very differently by cultures around the world. However, my purpose is not to present my country as sexually backward or perpetuate outdated notions. India has a social system that has developed organically over centuries and has served its purpose historically. Once I settled in the U.S., I found that there are two distinct stereotypes about Indian sexuality. One thinks of India as some kind of sexual paradise based
Photo Credits: Amanda Hu
on the Kama Sutra or Tantric sex, and the other view, mostly held by people who have actually been to India or studied it superficially, sees Indians as asexual beings who somehow still manage to have lots of children. Conversely, growing up in India, the US seemed to be both a land of sexual excess and a utopia where people were far more open about their sexual needs and desires, judging from its movies and television shows. As always, the truth is far more complex. India is a big and diverse country, and attitudes to sex can differ drastically among different subcultures and social class. In addition, India is currently in the throes of a rapid transition in sexual attitudes. This has several causes: globalization, western media, and the AIDS pandemic. These days open displays of affection such as kissing are far more acceptable in movies, and a few urban societies, and homosexuality now exists as a peripheral topic of discussion in media. On a recent trip to India, I needed a transcript from my college, which is on the banks of a lake. On the way back, I saw a bunch of workmen dredging the lake, piling up mountains of white shiny stuff on its banks. Upon closer examination, I was shocked to see that those were piles of – used condoms. Apparently, a favorite activity for nearby high-school kids was to rent little boats to take out into the lake and "do it". Should I be relieved that at least they remembered to use condoms, or should I be appalled at that particular addition to my city's major water supply? Whichever way one looks at it, this is highly illustrative of some major changes in Indian society. As I found out after I landed in the U.S. for graduate school, sexuality here is far more diverse than American TV shows would have the world believe. While the American media is highly explicit and commercialized in its depiction of sex, a spectrum of attitudes exists in American society. Even in a small school such as Rice, I meet both people who abstain from sex and those who treat it as just another fun activity. In addition, the sexual mix here includes people who are openly homosexual, bisexual, polyamorous and have other sexual preferences. This relative openness towards sex in the U.S. was quite a shock at the beginning. I was amazed to find myself in groups where people actually discussed sex-related topics, especially in mixed-gender gatherings. In contrast, I found myself having to switch to a far more conservative version of myself when in predominantly Indian events, a cultural schizophrenia familiar to many immigrants. My personal sexual awakening began with an accidental relationship in my first year of graduate school. My partner, a graduate student from an East Asian country, and I did not have proper sex. We were both bound by cultural mental blocks that were too hard to surmount. However, what shocked me about this interracial/intercultural relationship were the reactions of people about it. I was horrified by the racist treatment meted out to her by my more conservative Indian acquaintances, and I began to question if I wanted to base my identity on unquestioned cultural values that allowed such treatment of another human 0
being. This started me on a personal journey, leading to massive changes in my attitudes towards culture, sex and relationships on the whole. The cultural transformation of migrants, particularly males, through sexual experiences is well documented in immigrant literature. A popular little novel among Indian graduate students is "The Inscrutable Americans" by Anurag Mathur, which provides a hilarious, if somewhat stereotyped story of the protagonist's quest through American society to get laid. On another note, "Seasons of migration to the north" by Tayeb Saleh, is a far more serious take on a Sudanese man's cultural journey through sexual experiences in Britain. On rare occasions, this clash of sexual ideologies can have tragic consequences, as demonstrated by the life of the Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb. During his Master's degree in the U.S. in the late forties, Qutb was unable to reconcile the sexual openness of American society with his native Egypt. He reacted viscerally to it by returning and founding an ideology of hatred against American decadence, which profoundly influenced radical Islamic groups such as Al-Qaeda several decades later. Fortunately, my own cultural journey has been far more benign. One of the first decisive moments that I remember was during my third year in the US. I was driving with one of my few American friends when I took a deep breath, turned around and asked him, "So, tell me more about this dating thing that you Americans do", thus taking a figurative plunge into the topic as if it were just another research project. I began discovering preconceived notions about sex and virginity that existed both in my own mind and in society around me. Growing up in India meant that I took virginity before marriage as a no-brainer. It was hard to question that assumption. I remember some heated discussions I had with some of my Indian friends who argued why they wanted their wives to be virgins before marriage. The arguments, which were repeated by more abstinent Christians, mostly revolved around the assumption that losing one's virginity was a life-altering event, and would tie you to a person for the rest of your life. In particular, women apparently never forgot their first-time partner, so it was necessary for me to ensure a woman's lasting loyalty by being her first. Somehow that same logic did not hold for men, who were permitted a few indiscretions, though they were frowned upon. On further scrutiny, these kinds of arguments did not fly. A quick survey of my more liberal friends, both male and female, showed many who had been in multiple sexual relationships that were both healthy and happy while they lasted. On the other hand, I ran into some equally surprising double standards that exist about male virginity. Obviously, most women who are open to sexual relationships outside of marriage tend to be the liberal type. Contrary to all the enlightened feminist discourse out there, in reality, women still want their men to be sufficiently masculine in terms of sexual experience. For most women that I met, I found that being honest about my lack of Perspectives
sexual experience was a serious turn-off, and an opportunity for women to exercise sexual power. Apparently, since I was a guy and a virgin, I'd obviously be willing to do anything for the promise of getting laid. One particularly honest partner told me that she did not want to be my first time because she refused to be a "crash-test dummy". A close friend of mine, a lesbian herself, gave me a piece of sage advice, "Dude. Don't freak out so much about sex. It's not that hard. You're good at reading, aren't you? Pick up a book on anatomy with lots of pictures. Figure out what it says about the sensitive body parts and you'll do ok". These barriers of entry to the sexual marketplace created several self-esteem issues for me at that time. I started buying more into depictions of sex in the media around me. For instance, I remember reading a survey in a mainstream newspaper, which stated that the average American man slept with about 8 different women before marriage. Statistics like that made me feel horribly inadequate and ashamed for lagging behind. I was angry at my race, my culture and myself for not making me man enough. Real men were supposed to be tall, white jocks with perfect six-packs or black basketball players. Even today, I find it a bit difficult to be friends with French or Italian men or appreciate those cultures. I feel envious that their romantic stereotype seems to gives them a highly unfair advantage in the playing field. A colleague who was into the pick-up artist culture, tried to educate me out of, as he eloquently put it, "being a chump". I went out with him to bars and attempted to use some tried-and-tested techniques of getting a woman into bed. However, I still found myself unable to pretend to be something I wasn't in order to get laid, even if it seemed to be all fair game out there. Another friend decided to take pity on me and dragged me out to strip clubs a couple of times, but the fakeness of it all did nothing for me. In the end, when I finally did have my first proper sexual experience at the ripe old age of 26, it was both anti-climatic and life-altering at the same time. It was anti-climatic in the way it just happened; I met a girl, we talked, one thing led to another and we ended up in bed. We slept together for a few months Perspectives
and broke up quite amicably. No, I did not tell her that she was my first sexual partner until months later. It was life-altering because my worst fears and nightmares proved to be completely unfounded. Sex turned out to be an extremely fun activity. I did not feel like I'd lost my innocence. I did not feel like I'd done anything morally wrong or committed a sin against my culture. I did not feel like I was inextricably tied to my first partner. When I have sex with someone now, I don't see my first partner's face, and I still don't have any overarching urges to have sex with a virgin. In a nutshell, I am still who I am, just another perpetually horny 28-year old guy who enjoys it when he gets some, likes to see his partner enjoy it too, and is always looking for some more. An Indian epic, the Mahabharata, has a story describing a wise prince who was given a riddle by a Sphinx-like demon. The demon asked, "What is the greatest mystery in the world?". The prince answered, "The fact that we all have to die, but we spend our lives denying it". If I had to answer the question today, I'd say, "The fact that sex is such a fundamental part of human existence, yet we refuse to talk about it". As my struggle with writing this article has shown, sex is a difficult topic even for somewhat liberated people to discuss. It should not be that way. My views on sex are aligned with my views on religion and culture in general. There's a vast buffet of dishes we can try, which may all be satisfying in different combinations, and there are no fixed courses. I believe that no matter who your partners may be and whatever genders they identify with, an act that brings satisfaction and joy to everyone involved cannot be morally wrong, and does not have to come with a dose of guilt or shame. Acknowledgement: I'd like to thank my friend Rhonda Ragsdale, the most sexually liberated person I know, for helping me get these words out of my system, then proof-reading and giving her invaluable feedback.
Interview with a Buddhist Monk
JianYing FaShi Dharma Master of Chung Tai Zen Center of Houston
What kind of Buddhism do you practice? In Chinese it is called Chan, more widely known as Zen in the West. It emphasizes what people normally know as meditation. Yet, meditation in Chan is perhaps different than what people usually think of; it is not only about learning techniques like how to sit, how to breathe, and how to calm oneself down. It also involves a different kind of view or attitude when looking at the world. It teaches us how to see what is going on around us and how to interact with it. In short, Buddhism asks us to always have a calm and clear mind, and with it, one spontaneously embraces and immerses in life without confusions. What made you decide to become a Buddhist Monk? After I got my PhD in Electrical Engineering from Ohio State University in 996, I was seriously asking myself what I wanted to do with my life. I could have just gone out to find a job, made a living, got married, had kids, and go on with a "normal" life … Not that there is something wrong with that, but I was not content. I was not so sure, I was seeking something more, I was asking questions … I think it is important to ask questions instead of just following what traditional paths society and family have constructed. Anyway, the situation got me thinking that even though I was not unhappy and in fact I had no particular reasons to be unhappy, I was still not at ease. I had healthy social life; I had friends, we went out for concerts, movies, talks, etc. But at the end of the day, when I went home, I would find myself still searching … It was as if I was not comfortable by myself. I would turn on the TV or radio even though I was not watching or listening. I think that this sounds familiar in modern society, right? And some people would say that is life. But, I was asking questions. Why? Can we find "real stability" in life? If there is, what is it and where can one find it? So, I went back to Taiwan, my homeland, and stayed in a Buddhist monastery for a month. To make the long story short, I found that real stability can only come from one's own ground, one's spiritual homeland, one's inner source. It cannot be just from the outside; whatever is from the outside will be taken away. On the other hand, it is from the inside that the outside can be truly connected without unnecessary entanglements. The key is to find the openness inside each one of us; this ; openness, I believe, comes from one's willingness to participate 's s in situations with complete flexibility and calmness. In that way, we will find an inner connection with others and explore the full potentiality to interact with seemingly hectic, confusing situations 2 with compassion and wisdom. It is to find this inner stability, compassion and wisdom, that inspires me to become a Buddhist monk. Why are monks supposed to be celibate? Do you find the restrictions of this lifestyle hard to follow? To find inner stability, the open nature of reality and inner potentiality requires one to be always clear and serene. The main source of confusion that disturbs our clarity and serenity lies in the act of understanding physical phenomena and mental ideas in conceptually fixed ways. For example, one may understand oneself to have certain personality and think of oneself only in terms of that personality without the understanding of its constructed nature and the possibility of its change. This act of reifying our thoughts brings attachment and desire; ultimately it is to tackle this act of mental reification and the associated ication attachment and desire, that Buddhist monks and nuns practice celibacy. Of course, this is based on a Buddhist understanding of what the nature of human beings is. In the state of no confusion, we become awakened or a Buddha which literally means an awakened one. When awakened, we interact with others with clarity and serenity; we know what we are doing and perfectly understand why we do that. In so doing, we also find inner stability and exhibit wisdom and compassion under all situations. And, to be able to achieve this state, Buddhists employ various practices, and celibacy is one of such important practices, especially for monastic members. Is it difficult to practice celibacy? Of course, it is not without difficulties. Yet, when one understands why one practices celibacy, it becomes apparent that the practice is not asking us to simply suppress desire, but, it asks us to understand the nature of desire. Buddhists believes that desire is conditionally arisen. . Hence, when one does not reinforce desire by reinforcing its hen physical conditions and reifying its mental urges, the desire will have no "nutrition" to grow and thus naturally ceases. s. . Let me emphasize: desire is the result of a series of thoughts put together and reinforced and reified by the doer. When the doer cuts off its reinforcement and reification, the desire will naturally cease. So, with such understanding of its nature one gradually learns to transform desire. In addition, this understanding of non-reinforcing physical conditions and non-reifying mental urges can be applied to other things in life to make us more creative and flexible to participate in situations as well as to make us more open to new possibilities. Consequently, we Perspectives
expand our capacity as well as sensitivity, immersing more fully in life to understand that the importance of human relationships ultimately lies in the spiritual closeness, which cannot be directly translated into physical closeness. Understanding human relationship in this way, Buddhist monks and nuns focus on developing their spiritual connections with all people without entangling themselves with attachments. Thus, they develop deep human connections without tangling strings, which, in my view, tremendously helps Buddhist monastic members to not only cope with but also transcend what you referred as "the restrictions of this lifestyle." What do Buddhist teachings say about sex for people practicing Buddhism (and for nonBuddhist people?) Buddhist practice is meant to clarify confusions and entanglements. It thus leads its practitioners to be more aware of their own thoughts, words, and actions. And, it also teaches its practitioners to understand that each thought, word, or action has its respective consequence which we cannot run away from. Depending on the quality of thoughts, words, and actions associated with the doing (including sex), it leads us to corresponding consequence. Put it simply, if one's doing is associated with selfishness, the effect of this selfishness will surely show up in the consequences. On the other hand, if one's doing is associated with love, this love will also bring about spiritual closeness which in turn gives rise to true happiness, peace and harmony. Buddhist ethics also specifically teaches its non-monastic practitioners to refrain from improper sexual acts, such as promiscuity and adultery. This practice of no sexual misconduct is asking its practitioners not only to be mindful of one's strong desires but also to transform these desires to promote healthy relationships with others. Intimate actions such as sex have intimate effects that require their participants to first understand each other intimately. That is to say, physical closeness should be based on spiritual closeness without which physical closeness is not only fragile but also a source of confusion and frustration. What advice do you have for young people today who are looking to reconcile sexual desires with a sound spiritual Perspectives
life? Do you think the two are compatible? I believe that a sound spiritual life comes from inner stability. To develop stability is also to develop a close connection with oneself. One who has a close connection with oneself will surely be more successful in establishing close connections with others. But, how to develop inner stability? Meditation is a very important tool to do so. For me, meditation is also a contemplative attitude toward life. Meditation is not just sitting there quietly, but more importantly it is bringing a clear and calm mind to all life situations. Thus, with different meditation techniques, we learn to deepen our sensitivity and expand our capacity; we learn to catch our wandering thoughts and transform them into mindful thoughts; we learn to discover our habitual thoughts and reinvigorate them with flexibility and creativity; we learn to know our reified or frozen thoughts and dissolve them with patience and openness. It is only in the wake of a clear and calm awareness that desires can be soundly integrated into one's spiritual life. In the process of learning meditation, I also want to encourage people to utilize critical thinking; ask questions and don't simply take answers, especially convenient ones, for granted. Our mind can be as wide open as we want it to be. With an open heart, we can also discover an openness and creativity to foster a confidence in dealing with inevitable uncertainties in life and even develop a joyful playfulness to act according to the situation. One of my living philosophies is that what happens to us does not define the quality of our life. It is how we interact with the situation at hand that gives us the quality, and that is completely up to us. When we are open, life will be spacious and full of possibilities. In that way, I am sure we will not only participate more fully in life, but we will also enjoy its small and even ordinary details, a sip of coffee in the morning, a silent walk around the campus, sleepless nights studying Heidegger, heated debates over the possibility of transforming sexual desires, etc. Yet, the key, for me, is openness which is based on a clear and calm mind. In openness, we appreciate differences. With a clear and calm mind, we embrace seeming contradictions and rejoice over the colorful spectrum life has offered to us.
Photo Credits: Rachel Solnick
Short Stories
Artwork By: Rachel Gibbs
Short Stories
Puzzle Pieces
When they were hanging out, lots of times in the late afternoon, sometimes in the middle of the night, it usually started the same. Neither voiced a desire more than "come here…" or "lay down with me," or usually nothing at all, just simple body language. That was all it took. Maybe chit-chatting for a while, pushing playfully, a little bit more each time, finally a gaze lasting just long enough for mutual confirmation. She rolled over, her back to him; he followed of course, kissing her just by the ear. Somewhat hard to get, perhaps more come hither, she glances back over her shoulder with a sly smile, knowing and teasing. Spooning casually, ever so slightly he slides a young arm in, practiced though not too self-assuredly, under her arm to her waist, narrow but still soft. She always inhales barely audibly at this moment – anticipation or maybe just sucking in her selfconsciousness. Her hand on his hand on her stomach is just a reassurance for both. Sometimes the light is off and when it is, her eyes are open, concentrating on each slight movement of his arm tighter around her, his breath in her hair. Almost immediately his other hand is under her shirt, just grazing the skin of her back – comforting and familiar. The blood rushes warmer through them both, circulating, pulsating – skin on skin, just enough so that she knows she wants to feel the warmth of his shirtless chest on her bare back, or navel to navel when she finally turns into him, inviting him closer and accepting him at once. By this time he has slowly unbuttoned the top button of her jeans and takes three full seconds pulling down the zipper, slowly, as each metal tooth unlocks aloud. She waits, almost ignoring the advance, as if it's too subtle for her attention. His hands slip down behind her, slow warmth from his palms on the cool skin underneath her back pockets. His bottom lip moves over her mouth. The kissing is soft, just lips now, not at all the amateur make-out intensity her friends will envision when she summarizes this encounter briefly, days later. This kind of nonchalant tenderness warrants no elaboration for the nosiness of teenage girls – it's the stuff of lazy evenings alone – moments built slowly from the talk of the day and sidelong glances rather than particularly passionate confessions. She subtly rolls away, now on her back, inviting him to gradually move his way to her. They both know that she draws him in artfully, hands on his face and neck, ignoring his fugitive fingers that pull her jeans by the front zipper of the crotch to her knees. She helps, finally encouraging, sliding them over her ankles with her feet while he pulls her closer, slyly nudging them to the floor Short Stories and out of the way. She swings a leg over him, rolling him to his back as she straddles him, pulling her tank top over her head and off to the floor, all in one fluid movement. She leans over, her hair falling around their faces as her pale areola move down to meet the darker brown of his. Her renewed energy warms him; she feels his readiness through the thin fabric that separates them, but not for long. She moves slowly but deeply, wisely for her innocent youth. They roll into each other now simultaneously – on her back, her legs around his naked waist urge him closer while her expression maintains some pretense of virginal acceptance, a face she brings out just for these moments of blameless desire. This is his signal - he knows by her movement. By this time their eyes lock between breaths, airy and then heavy kisses fall on his throat and between her breasts migrating as far down below her rib cage as he can manage, still bound by her thighs holding him close. She smiles, laughs even, sometimes inappropriately, covering her face with her hands as her legs give way, loosening their grip when he kisses his way down her waist, over her hip to the inner thigh and back up, hovering for a moment that she cannot bear to watch – toes straighten and curl as his shoulders slide under her knees. Her breathing accelerates and she pulls him back up and into her. He monitors the tempo but it's really her hips that dictate the rhythm, her hands barely guiding his narrow hips. His feet lie upturned between her curling toes; legs move up and then slowly, slowly extend back down to the sheets, feet tense and relax over and over again. Moments pass, she's long since stopped kissing him, breathing instead while he drinks in her scent and the look on her face, tension in her eyebrows. She gives in. He pulls her now languid shoulders to bring her neck to him, bottom lip dragging up to the tip of her chin with her head fallen back. He relaxes and lays his body over her, sweat mingling in the space between their chests. Lips search for hers, missing and hitting the corners of her mouth as she turns away, smiling she offers her neck instead. She exhales the smell that hangs, heat and thick air and her all combined and settled over them. He inhales deeply – she laughs and relents, kissing him, lips to lips. They whisper between quick bursts of kisses, his hands following the arch of her back, exactly where she wants them, this he knows from all the other times. She sighs and searches for the soles of his foot with her wayward toes, legs entangled. Her feet cradle his arches, a perfect fit like puzzle pieces. 5
Sexy Little Thing
Ann Wang
John and I had an argument as we were leaving the lingerie department. We had been dating for six months and it was his birthday. He kept pushing me to buy ridiculous things—things with feathers, things with fur, things with attachments, things with missing pieces, things I couldn't figure out how to get on or get off. He was mostly interested in the items filed under a gilt cardboard frame which read "Sexy Little Things" in playful font. He went through each item methodically, running his fingers over the cloth to check the texture. He decided his favorite contraption was the merrywidow, a corset with detachable garters. He held it up high for me, each black strap hanging from an index finger. I thought about wearing that in his apartment; I would be wearing the merrywidow, and John would be wearing his wife-beater. This language. John wanted me to wear the thing with leopard-print stockings and gloves, maybe even stilettos. He signaled the sales rep. The woman working the floor was very attractive; she wore a plunging, squeezing black suit with no undershirt. This seemed to be the uniform. A hint of lace peeked out where her suit jacket was buttoned together. I caught John eyeing her breasts as he read her nametag. John said, "Cindy, would you happen to have this merrywidow in 34B?" Cindy looked at my bust. I looked away. I was embarrassed. She said she would look in the back. The sound of her heels hitting the wooden floor made my head hurt. John put his arms around me, from behind. He kissed my neck. I thought I saw another customer, a college-aged blonde, smirking from across the room. I opened my arms to open his. "What the hell is wrong with you?" John asked me. Cindy came back with my merrywidow. John was getting impatient, so he grabbed some stockings, but no gloves or shoes, and pulled me to the register. The merrywidow was very expensive, but John was paying for it, even though it was his birthday. At the top of the escalator John let go of my hand and put his arm around my waist. His other hand held the bag, which was bright red and advertised the name of the store in big block letters. Anyone could read it from far away. John asked, "Do you like what I bought you? Are you excited?" His hand slid down my waist. He kissed me on the neck again. It made me shudder. "John," I said. "Let's not do this in public." 6
"Why not?", he asked pulling me to him. The bag was crushed between us. I was afraid of falling down the escalator. I had always been afraid of being sucked into escalators, between the jagged steps. John kissed me. Our teeth clicked because my mouth wasn't open. He took one step forward, pressing my back against the partition that separated up from down. He unbuttoned one of my shirt buttons and called me a dirty name. His other hand was on my thigh, at the edge of my skirt. The rubber belt on the handrail ground uncomfortably against my back as it went up and I went down. I heard some teenagers snicker on the going-up escalator. Forcing my hands between our chests, I pushed John back to his side of the escalator. John put his hands on my waist and stepped forward again, closer this time. His lips touched my left ear. He said, "If you don't want to sleep with me, Julia, just say it. Stop fucking around." Then he let go and stepped back to his side of the escalator. We both looked down. Almost there. I stepped toward him and put my hand on his face. "John," I said. "Do you have to be like this?" "Fuck you, Julia." He swatted my hand away. As the last steps rolled under, he stayed on his side of the escalator. When he stepped off, he threw the bag into the trashcan and looked at me. Behind me, the steps kept rolling under. I bit my lower lip. "So?" he said. I reached into the trashcan and fished out the bag. Then we went back to his apartment.
Short Stories
Petite Mort
Liz Mallett
Inspired by Charles Baudelaire's poem, Flowers of Evil He saw her only for an instant in the moment before the shutter snapped closed and darkness took over. Medium height; a yellow dress marked with bits of darker color that might have been polka-dots or a flower print. Balletic artistry of the outstretched arm, silent song of her waterfall hair and the sun's slow dance – Paul felt it in his heart, in fact literally brought his hand up and clasped it to his chest where he thought his heart might be. When the shutter opened again she was gone, swallowed by the crowd. Paul tried to take a few more stills, but the moment had somehow marred his aesthetic sense; the angles were off, or maybe the light was fading already. Winter comes early in Montreal. So he packed up his equipment, meticulously placing camera, film, stand and lenses – these with particular care – into his dusty travelers' pack. On the way back his distraction was such that he ran into a girl from his apartment complex who he generally made an effort
Short Stories
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
to avoid. Generically pretty and rather vapid, she had too-open eyes that looked longingly at him out of her silly-putty face. He saw in those eyes a half century of placid, dumb docility met with petty spite and ennui, and shied away from this dull, monotonous future. She kept him long enough to write her number on his arm in blue ballpoint pen; he responded with evasive promises of hypothetical non-events. Then he was walking away, thinking again of the woman in the yellow dress. When he looked back, Sarah was still watching him, dumb and trusting and altogether repellent. Later, back in his apartment, film developed, he spread the stills across the living room floor. The apartment as yet had no furniture; against the white ceiling and bare white walls the photographs made an almost grotesquely incongruous tapestry of color. Paul sat on the floor in their center and combed through them one by one until he found the photo he was looking for. There she was. Though she was situated unimposingly near the left-hand bottom corner of the still, she made the framing edifices that formed the background, a few street-side cafes on the one side and an old dilapidated Portuguese church on the other, fade into relative insignificance. She was too small to see clearly, for it had been intended as a panoramic, but he could almost see her face, could imagine the laughing note of her voice, a hint of a French accent. Her name, perhaps, was Adelaide or Leisel. All pictures, to Paul, were in some sense beautiful, for they were the closest things existing in his life to instantaneous experience free of consideration of past or future, something he found resonated with him both philosophically and intuitively. But this – this was exquisite. She was exquisite. Paul pocketed the picture, signing and dating the back, and then reluctantly settled back to the laborious process of sorting the rest, in order of artistic merit, for sale to local magazines. That night, before falling asleep under his single blanket on the still-unfurnished floor, Paul stole a last glance at the photograph. Perhaps this allowed its essence to steal into his thoughts, for it dominated his dreams with the all-encompassing unavoidability of the Sun's pull on the Earth. He was in a park, empty except for a playground and a few trees, black-trunked with pale yellow leaves. It was night. The stars were pulsating to the tune of a Mozart Requiem in full chorale. Paul sat down on the swing set and began to swing in time, up and down and up, trying to reach the source of the music. In the midst of this, an old man stepped up, opened a book, and proceeded, in French, to monotonically recite a poem in his deep, slightly cracked baritone: "Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici!
trop tard! jamais peut-être! Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,.."
were over the hill and in the city, black and maroon and crimson, scented with sweat and smoke. Cars the color of red wine drove past in ominous silence as the stars continued their Mozart dance and the old man continued to intone bits of Baudelaire. Then the sounds stopped completely, and a woman stepped to the street corner from out of the sudden silence. It was her. Her dress was yellower than her yellow hair, and it danced with her as she swayed across the scarlet streets. Paul stepped forward and clasped her wrists; they were slender reeds from which her hands blossomed delicately like flowers. She smiled. He saw nothing in her eyes, and the nothingness in itself was mystery and intoxication, so that he in turn was intoxicated anew. She smiled with lacquer-painted lips like gems, dimpling her rouged cheeks. The old man, silent now, stepped forward, leering, and reached out to stroke the skin of her cheek with one withered claw, resting the other on Paul's shoulder. "Five hundred and she's yours." Paul hesitated for a single shattered fragment of a moment, then reached into his empty pockets and pulled out air. The man looked at him and tapped the strap around his neck. "Your camera, then." And then the camera had changed hands and the girl smiled and beckoned. Paul followed without a word. The next day Paul awoke to the usual symphony of city sounds. Looking around the room, he was relieved to see his camera lying safe on the floor in the corner of the room. He reached out and took the photograph from beneath his pillow. It was smudged already with fingerprints, any aesthetic value buried beneath the hollow weight of meaning. Suddenly, in one uncalculated motion, he ripped it in half, opened the window, and threw the pieces onto the breeze. He watched as they fell, tumbling haphazardly, towards the street below. Paul looked at his arm. Sara's number was still there, smudged but legible. Hating himself, damning and twicedamned, he reached for his cell phone.
Paul leapt down from the swing and took the man's hand in his own. They walked together up and over a hill, past stores with swinging wooden "Closed" signs and past streetlamps surrounded by clouds of moths yellow as lily petals. Then they 8
Short Stories
Artwork By: Myrth Killingsworth
On the Sexuality of Cocktails
Haley Richardson
Mahmood Ali took me out to a Mexican restaurant, a fancy "shrimp-wrapped-in-bacon fajitas" kind of place. I was seventeen when I dated Mahmood and suffering through my junior year of high school. It's easy to recall these facts because my hippocampus, that cherished part of the grey matter that stores memory, uses boys' names as its Dewey decimal system, each moment filed under a large heading: "The Anthony Years" or "The Dan Months." Each school year brought in a new boy; each school year advanced my education in serial monogamy. In my junior year, though labs on Helmholtz's coils and lectures on the slaughters of the Civil War weighed me down, I found someone who made me lighter. It's sometimes hard to remember that, with the bitter taste of the end masking the sweets of the middle, the richness of the beginning. But for today, I'll admit it: at the time, I was happy with Mahmood, that prince from Bangladesh. On a Friday evening he took me out to Abuelo's. We sat down in a psuedo-courtyard indoors, and the waitress came by to take our drink order. Here I was with my devilishly gorgeous boyfriend—who knew he was devilishly gorgeous, who loved The Picture of Dorian Gray a little too much for comfort—the boy I would never have thought "snaggable" by me. Between my button-bursting vanity and the soft lighting from the faux cloud-dappled sky painted overhead, I was feeling like a woman. I decided I wanted to go for a little more of an adult feeling, something Coke didn't quite provide. What did I want to drink? Strawberry daiquiri, please. I had ordered one before with my parents, but never on my own, never with my boyfriend. The waitress left, and we settled down into pecking at our chips and salsa, chirping on in that pseudo-intellectual manner high school prodigies love most. Then the waitress came back. She apologized for interrupting, but she needed to see my ID. My ID? What for? Oh my goodness, for that strawberry daiquiri, did I forget to order it virgin? Idiot! Didn't I remember the right lingo my parents had taught me? Oh my goodness, she must think I want to drink alcohol. She must think I'm trying to pull one over her, that I am a punk minor, that I am one of those Short Stories girls who disobeys what Dad says and what society says and drinks at seventeen because she's that cool. She doesn't get it. She's totally misread me. Doesn't she know? "I'M A VIRGIN!" I yelled this out, my cheeks so red and hot you could cook fajitas on them. I had made the classic comedic mistake. I had wanted to say "I'm underage" or "Make it virgin, please," but no. It came out: I'm a virgin. My cheeks only got redder and hotter. Mahmood laughed his pinchable ass off. But now the waitress understood me, and I got the drink I wanted. I tell this story to friends because it's an embarrassing moment, and I laugh at it every time. I get to share laughter with others, and everybody likes a jokester. More importantly I show that I can laugh at myself. That's a strength. Right? But there's more to the story. And I don't ever tell the "more." Before going to Abuelo's, right after school Mahmood and I drove into the countryside. Branching off one of those fabulous FM roads was a long lane through a hay field with just enough space for one car. I drove through it. He asked me to. We stopped the car by one tightly wound-up hay stack, so tight you wouldn't want to touch it for fear of it bursting. Ourselves rife with passion needing immediate harvest, we crawled into the back seat. I crossed my arms and grabbed the bottom of my shirt, trying to lift it over my head in one seamless move, as I had seen it done in all my favorite Hollywood movies. Of course my head got stuck in the neck hole—a mistake Catherine Zeta-Jones would never make, a blunder no one would wolf down popcorn to. I eventually broke free, embarrassed, the understudy who just can't deliver the part. There went my bra. Mahmood undid it in a one-handed snap, a "perfect in one take" move. And then we didn't know what to do with one another. He looked at me. He gave me The Look, The Look so full of longing and desire, tenderness and aggression, all wrapped up in a pair of dark chocolate eyes. And I melted. I melted into his kiss, syrupy-sweet, rich and warm. His hand started to wander into roped off territory. "No," I said. He gave me The Look again, but the Hollywood magic had gone. I was lucky. If he had coaxed me with kisses a little longer, our little scene could have earned 9
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
an R-rating. And I had just reached the legal age where I could see that type of movie on my own. I stopped. I thought about my virginity, this arbitrary and abstract concept. Okay, I remembered, it's not completely abstract. Its basis is in the woman's body, the hymen, or so my mother had taught me at age ten. So it's something only a woman can lose. By seventeen I knew the hymen was named after the Greek goddess of marriage. I knew it was something that made the village proud or ashamed, a whole ritual: the bloody spots on the wedding sheets paraded around the community, billowing proof that the goods were good, or tears shed on unstained sheets, a return of the item to the father's house, a woman broken beyond repair. I thought about how worried I was every time I rode a horse after age ten because I didn't want to disappoint the village. I thought about how men think of virginity, how it gets them so ready, but gets the girl's brothers, fathers, grandfathers, just as ready to shoot the bastard. I thought about how it's mine, a part of my identity, an identity I didn't want to change yet. I thought about what my father would say if he knew, which groups at school would start calling me "slut". What I might start calling myself. I didn't want to become "that girl," the one who drinks behind adult backs, who trashes the house when her parents leave, who loses her virginity after school in the back seat of a car parked next to a haystack. I thought about next year, senior year, and how it would (and did) bring in a new guy, and about the guys waiting to excite me in college, and about that guy I would love more than the rest. I feared opening the floodgates if I started this soon. We settled into making out, even that most ridiculous of "teenage-girls-who-like-their-virginity" solutions, dry humping. Lovely phrase. It's like "play sex", like making a plastic hamburger in a Fisher Price kitchen and expecting it to satisfy your playmate's appetite. They never show that in the films. But at that time I no longer wanted to be a part of a movie. So we dry humped to our bodies' content and then talked about Kant. We got hungry. We went to dinner. And then I yelled out, "I'M A VIRGIN." The waitress, no question about it, had gotten my order wrong. But my words didn't get me wrong. My unconscious had just flexed all sixteen muscles of my tongue. It was the chance to let slip what was really pressing my mind that day, that my virginity was still very much a part of me. I yelled it out with passionate frustration as if I were a witness at my own trial and now was the time to tell the jury what really happened. That nothing happened. I wanted to shove back inside me the heart that had just jumped out of my mouth and slammed itself onto the table. Did I really have to tell everyone? By eighteen, my hymen and I were in college. In the middle of the night during my first week, a group of sixty fledgling freshmen snuck out of their new rooms and met seniors and juniors to take the Purity Test. The Purity Test must be some guy's 20
internet invention. It rates how pure or impure you are—sexually. At age eighteen—with guys at their sexual peak and girls at their most curious—we all wanted to know where we stood. How did our lives rate? It was meant as a quirky joke, a hundred questions from if you have ever "held hands with a member of the preferred sex?" to "had sexual intercourse with a virgin?" From "undressed or been undressed by a member of the preferred sex?" to "committed an act of voyeurism?" But by the end of the test, this quirky joke gave you a label, a number. For each act done, you subtract a point. I scored a fifty-four—likely the lowest number you can get while still being a virgin. The juniors and seniors, our surrogate parents for the first week, lined themselves up from lowest score to highest, to illustrate how the Rice University student culture offers a wide range of numbers. The scheme of "be comfortable as you are" didn't really work on me that night. Seeing that line, I still wondered what they all thought of one another, if Miss Ninety-Seven really could get along with Mister Ten. The next afternoon, the guy I had been crushing on since Day One sat next to me at lunch and admitted, not without a smile, a score of twenty-seven. Whoa, whoa, whoa…twenty-seven? That was half my score! And I thought: can I still crush on this guy, hope someday his lips brush mine, maybe even wish to more-than-lie beside him in bed, when he has a score of twentyseven?!? But what did that mean, really? It meant he had enjoyed his sexuality a good deal before college. Did that mean I should stop crushing on him? That a girl like me should not like boys like him? Did that score degrade him as a person? No. No, it didn't. It was his sexuality, and who was I to judge him for his judgments. And was I any better or worse a person for fifty-four? No. And as I tried to swallow macaroni and cheese soup, sitting at a table with new acquaintances who a week earlier were complete strangers, I saw my story stretched out in a timeline, tacked up on the walls: every single moment in the history of my sexuality. Age seven: I was playing "sex" instead of "house," with a stuffed panther as my partner. I didn't really understand what I was doing, and I was shocked at myself when the memory of the game came rushing back to me, post-puberty. I thought: didn't I worry that Mom or Dad would come into the game room and see what I was playing? Wasn't I afraid of their punishment or my mortification? I thought it weird that I hadn't been afraid. That it was just another game to me, as innocent as setting up a school room and teaching the stuffed panther my favorite book. Age twelve: I attended an "Aim for Success!" assembly that separated the sexes, showed slides of STDs, used Velcro gloves ripping apart to represent the sound of your heart tearing (if not your hymen), implied that success and sex were mutually exclusive, pushed a card in front of me asking me to pledge abstinence until marriage. I signed it, without having started my first period. Age thirteen: I went to bed wearing a t-shirt I bought on my Short Stories
trip to New York, the shirt from the Virgin megastore that boldly proclaimed my status, the t-shirt I had planned to give away to Him some day. I dreamt I was pregnant and all my friends abandoned me. I still tried to tell them: I'm a virgin! I've never had sex! But they just turned their backs. The clouds parted, rays of light poured on my face, and God, in a perfect James Earl Jones voice, said: "Haley, it's my baby." But even that didn't bring my friends back. Seventeen: I was raging that TV commercials and teen maga-
"Aim for Success!" and mortally ashamed that I had signed that card. But six years later, six long years of experience later, though I would never own up to that card, I still owned it. Late eighteen: As I sat at the lunch table, I owned fifty-four in the same way I own anything else about me. It was mine to tell or not to tell, to define me or not to define me. If I wanted to, I could tear down this whole timeline thing, never post another moment, never tell anyone. My virginity didn't have to be a pledge card or a hymen or anything I could wrap in festive paper and hand over with a bow on top. I didn't even have to grant it a name. Here was my chance to build a new identity, and with insular hedges, scores of books, and a society of young twenty-somethings all searching for themselves,
Short Stories
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
zines and my parents had all failed to assure me that embracing female sexuality is okay, because my boyfriend kept touching me and I kept liking it and I didn't know exactly what a girl like me should do. I watched "Talk Sex with Sue" every Sunday at 0:00 when I could, trying to learn more but constantly hovering over the remote's return button, so it would look like I was watching an episode of Friends if anyone came into the room. Seventeen and a half: dinner at Abuelo's. Eighteen: I was fighting against abstinence-only education, doing class projects and newspaper reports on how Garland High School's only sanctioned sex education was administered to girls who were already pregnant. I was revolted when I remembered
college could be a haven from the voyeuristic village, that Big Brother, peering, watching me in the back of the car, ready to pronounce a blasting judgment through the speakers. In college, I didn't feel so many eyes on me. I owned my virginity again, but this time in a different sense than that day by the haystack. I realized it didn't have to be a part of my identity. I didn't have to be Miss Virgin, Miss Fifty-four, unless, of course, I wanted to be. Just as I realized it was my crush's business what his score was, so was it mine. As I asked who was I to determine his whole character off just another piece of him, I realized, and who was he to define me by my virgin or non-virgin status? Female or not female, I could shut the door, play around in the game room, because it was just another part of life. The story is one for me to tell or not tell.
Julia Bursten
I was a sophomore, and we had never had an easy relationship. We were dating and having sex regularly, although he always pulled out before coming. He could never stay hard when I tried to put on a condom, he said. I believed him, and I still do. It was a stupid solution, but I loved him and wanted to please him. And I still do, in a twisted way somewhere at the back of my psyche. I was not afraid of emergency contraception—I've used it twice, but never with him. It's not so bad, really, and I never got the stomachaches they warn you about. I was annoyed that he had latex aversion syndrome, but we did try to work around it. I went on the Pill and reacted violently. I hated it. I stopped. We returned to square one. I never wanted to lose control long enough to come when he was in me. I was afraid it would make him come, and I didn't really have time to go to health services for free anti-baby hormones and a healthy dose of judgment. So I told him I had never come during sex, and didn't think I ever would. I figured I was safer this way, since he was being so risky. And it wasn't a complete lie: I'd come during sex only once. Well, it was eight times, during one anonymous night. One blissful condom. I never felt selfless enough—nameless enough, safe enough, hidden enough—to have sex like that with him. And I didn't like having sex with him when he drank too much, because he started to scare me, to remind me of scary times growing up: out of control, manic, domineering. Alcoholic. Not safe. He had drunk too much that night, and I was suffering from post-midterm exhaustion. I fell asleep next to him, like we always did. I was half-intoxicated with sheer fatigue. I did not know how much time passed, and I still don't. I woke up, and he was inside me. I was annoyed at the REM disruption, but I wasn't consciously scared. I had already walled off such emotions when it came to sex with him. I shoved him away, mumbling accusations that he was drunk and should stay on his own side of the bed, and I turned away to protect myself. I fell back asleep. His groans were what awoke me the second time; I'm normally a light sleeper, but I was so tired that he was able to flip me over and enter me without my knowledge. He was throbbing, and I could feel him starting to come. His roommate was asleep in the next bed and never woke up. All I did was shove a hand over his mouth, to stifle the moans so he didn't wake up anyone else in the dorm. So I would not have to face the event as a reality outside the two of us and explain how all my walls had just come. crashing. down. Some22 times, I still don't think of it as real. He finished. He slept, unaware of the sabotage, and purring like a kitten full of tuna. He would have been cute if I weren't in terrified, ugly, blind shock. I laid awake, knowing I still cared for him and wondering if I could ever put this behind us. Three nights later, my body finally fought off my fear of sleep and the nightmares began. He held me when I woke up shaking. I told him what he had done. He said he did not remember. I believed him, and I still do. He said he was sorry, and I said I forgave him. I told myself to blame the alcohol, to blame my weakness, to blame Y chromosomes and the hormones they carry. But my heart and my sex drive blamed him. And they still do. We do not fall asleep next to each other any more. It took a few seasons for me to realize that as long as he was there, I could not wall off the nightmares he had seeded inside me. There is no morning-after pill to flush away fear of the people you love.
Short Stories
Artwork By: Rachel Gibbs
The Love Handbook
"And when we do fall, why do our faculties of reason--and decency and self-respect and even right and wrong--sometimes not come along? For that matter, why would anyone reciprocate the love of a partner who has come so romantically unhinged?" I remember how it started. It was night. I could hear a distant murmur of people laughing from a place where I was supposed to be. There was a familiar electronic rhythm in the air, as if from nowhere. I felt the stars and the orange sky filter through dark leaves. An uplifting. Vague echoes. I was alone and walking away. The wind blew by— exuberance! It was like a sacred promise being made, as if I could find what I knew was missing. As if my plunge into solitude would make me unique, as if God or Fate or the World or this, would begin to see me. After that night, there were many times, alone, on my roof, when I would listen to the simultaneous stillness and the quaking leaves, waiting, listening for an answer that has long since been hidden. I didn't know it then, but I was in love and waiting for someone. "Romantic infatuation is different from both raw lust and the enduring commitment that keeps lovers together long after their besottedness has faded. We all know the symptoms: idealized thoughts of the loved one; swings of mood from ecstasy to despair, insomnia and anorexia; and the intense need for signs of reciprocation." My heart falls. She's the first girl I said I loved. Long, dark bruises stand out on her neck. I don't understand. Who would hurt her like this? I plead with her to tell me who, and why. Why? Finally, frustrated, she says they're hickeys. Only
Short Stories
Photo Credits: Edward Merritt
when I begin to drive home do I begin to connect. It is late, my parents are asleep, and I walk into the kitchen. The silence awakens tears, but this time there is no hope because it goes much deeper, as if a law has been broken. The scene becomes impossible. I pull a knife out of the cupboard and push it into my skin. It begins to truly hurt. I try to pull it, through the skin, but I simply can't. Silent crying. I force myself outside. I collapse onto the same place on the roof that I had before; a thousand unfriendly pebbles push into my back, and again I try to listen. Only after the hysteria subsides do I begin to understand that pain is created for a reason. "In infatuation, even the brain chemistry is different: lust is fueled (in both sexes) by testosterone, and companionate love by vasopressin and oxytocin. Romantic passion taps the same dopamine system that is engaged by other obsessive drives like drug addiction." I lost my virginity that summer, in Lovett. I clearly remember the room. A dull, uncertain light pouring through the humid window. Everything in the room is disheveled but I don't care. Her stare is blank, the stale dorm light brushes her lush-wire hair and smooth face, the darkness underneath her eyes. In this empty space her face looks blue and tear stained, as if it is manifesting her soul. I look behind and see her legs spread out wide. We are kissing, floating. She grabs me, rolls on a condom, and gently pushes inside. She moans and whispers my name. It feels great and that is all. Each moment lives only to feed the next. Vacancy. Splendor. Embarrassment. Joy. Time continues, and for a moment, rhythmically locked inside of her, I believe I am happy. But after the climax, there's that draining feeling, and time and reality begin to coexist again. I laugh because it's truly too hysterical. She is a painter, full of dark thoughts and untraceable emotions, but now... now I know her. Only then do I realize we are both naked. We exchange vows, but somewhere behind the words there is a glimmer of 'no'. She mentions past loves, I try to smile and make her feel better, but it inevitably fails. I remember the resolve written on her face, and the pinching feeling. Don't take the exit I left for you. Please, please don't remember. Don't, don't turn away. Time goes by and I am lost for years until the forgetfulness eventually returns. "We may become morose, obsessive, even violent. Lovesickness has been blamed on the moon, on the devil, but whatever is behind it, it doesn't look like the behavior of a rational animal trying to survive and reproduce." She was different, so young and vibrant. It was the music 24
she played. I remember when she graced the stage, her dress the white and black of music sheets. I close my eyes, and let the sound fill me and shake me to my spine. I just couldn't help it. "Somewhere in this world lives the best-looking, richest, smartest person who would settle for you. But this ideal match is hard to find, and you may die single if you insist on waiting for such a mate to show up. So you choose to set up house with the best person you have found so far." Beyond the pain there is a strange open feeling. As if I swam under a glacier and reemerged to find a warm island. Above the steep walls is a clear expanse of clouds and the cleanest blue. I was being pulled upwards, spiraling. I try to smile, like hers, like the nights of laughter and love, of free, soft brown curls and brown eyes, the shape of her body and breasts pulling the buttons of her shirt, of a diamond in the ruff and the grandest time. Those are gone now. I look up again and think to myself this is college. I try to think of a time when I will look back at that. I look at my pile of papers and try to gather the courage to go to her door. I got to see her one last time. The last words she spoke to me were, "I'll call you." "If the emotion moving that person is not triggered by your objective mate value, that emotion will not be alienated by someone who comes along with greater mate value than yours. And there should be signals that the emotion is not faked, showing that the person's behavior is under the control of the involuntary parts of the brain--the ones in charge of heart rate, breathing, skin flushing and so on." I had never gone kayaking before, and I never expected to be so calm and excited at the same time. We slide the heavy craft into the water, and she balances me as I settle in. It wasn't like flying, but more of a floating, drifting, motion with a dual sided oar. I remember the water and the trees and the expanse above me. I hear the sound of gentle water in the nearby stream and the wind in the pine trees as she pushes her kayak past mine. I've known her for ages and I feel safe. Everything is so bright, but familiar, as if it had been waiting. We paddle to a nearby island and pick blueberries. I follow her as she pushes interesting rocks and leaves into my hand. I remember her voice, her kind face, her hair, her skirt fluttering against the wind. She was beautiful, but we had never kissed, nor was I expecting to. Perhaps that was what was so new. Or maybe it was the smile. She was a person who stuck around. Pinker, Steven. "Crazy Love." Time Magazine. 17 Jan. 2008 Reprinted with permission from Steven Pinker.
Short Stories
Grand Theft Panties
Kristina from the United Kingdom
Recently I realized I have a problem. I keep running out of panties! It seems like however many I buy, the drawer is always empty. As it happens, I discovered one likely reason. I'd been running the other day and when I got back in, only Danny, one of my housemate's friends, was in. Danny's quite sexy, sort of reminds me of Sawyer from Lost. Anyhow, after an exchange of a few mutual flirts, I went upstairs to my bedroom and got undressed. I distinctly remembered putting my panties in the dirty clothes basket last, as I remembered thinking they felt quite damp as I put them in. I put on my dressing gown. It's a little obscene for when guests are around to be honest; it's rather see-through and very short. But I thought I could make it downstairs to the bathroom without Danny seeing. No such luck. The moment I got to the top of the stairs to head down, Danny was at the bottom walking up. I don't know who was more shocked, me or him. Bizarrely, although from his angle my pussy was in full view, my instinct was to cover my breasts as my nipples were showing through. With embarrassment we passed half way up the stairs and I went for a shower. I turned on the shower, and waited for it to warm up while I brushed my teeth, the usual. I realized I didn't bring down my shampoo. Not taking any chances, I wrapped a thick long towel around me and headed back up to my room. Just as I got to the bottom of the stairs, Danny shot out of my room looking very red, and asked me if I knew where the phone was. I pointed to it and said "where it always is stupid!" He mumbled something as he came down the stairs, grabbed the phone, and headed off to the kitchen. When I got back to my room, my panties, which I distinctly remember being placed in the basket, were hanging over the edge. I put them back in, noticing they were still warm, and wetShort Stories ter than I remembered them. I thought that quite strange. It didn't occur to me until later that night that it could have been Danny that moved them. From there, it wasn't long before I realized it was normally when Danny had been around a lot that I had become short on panties. It's a bit of a turn on having a guy steal your panties for his own pleasure. But too expensive! I came up with quite a simple strategy. I left a note in my laundry basket. It read: Dear Pervert. Although I find your theft of my panties quite arousing, this is too expensive! My deal with you is this. I will leave you a pair, freshly worn, behind the sofa in a plastic bag, every Friday and Saturday night. In return, I expect 2 new pairs in my panty drawer every week. And none of that Primark crap, I want M&S or better. Pick out what you like and I'll wear it for you. I'm size 8 in case you didn't figure it out from the labels. Love, Kristina For about two weeks, nothing happened. Then, sure enough, the plastic bags started dissappearing, and very nice sexy undies and even a remote control vibrator, minus the remote control, have turned up. My panty drawer overfloweth. I've left a note in my laundry basket saying I'll be wearing the vibrator at a house party we are having this weekend. Hopefully, someone there will be sending me vibes as I wander around in my new lacy number. I can only imagine what will happen!
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
She's Crafty: The story of a girl who enjoys her body
I hadn't had an orgasm in months. I didn't even realize I had been neglecting myself to such an extent, but now I saw what the consequences could be when a girl lets her body go unsatisfied for so long. I had no idea my problem was sex. I was in a nice, comfortable relationship, where we'd have sex every once in a while. Overall it was okay – rarely spectacular (though there were times) – but I thought it was alright. However, being in a sexual relationship made me feel like I should stop masturbating. Why should I do it myself when there was someone who wanted to do it for me? The problem was, he didn't do it for me. Sex was one thing, but having an orgasm was a completely different subject. I never came when he made love to me. I didn't see how I could. The sex usually felt great, but it never felt like I was going to have an orgasm. So it happened without me even noticing: months and months went by and no eruptions! Well, we broke up. One of the first things I wanted to do as a newly liberated girl, was find someone who could show me how sex leads to an orgasm. I wanted someone to make sweet, sweet love to me, not just in and out for twenty times and then a shower. I wanted to find someone who would relish the opportunity to help me discover how to 26 come with him. I realized that this might be a very long quest indeed, and I wasn't willing to wait around until some mystery, miracle lover came in and solved my problem. So, I went on a search for the girl I once was in high school, before I let silly boys take my fun away from me. I locked my bathroom door and watched myself in the mirror as I peeled my clothes off. I saw how beautiful, smooth, and flat my stomach was. I noticed how incredibly sexy the curve of my waist was. I stepped into the shower and kept the curtain pulled back so I could watch myself in the mirror while the water streamed down my breasts and legs. Letting the hot water soak my hair, I stood in awe of myself. I put the plug in the shower drain and let the tub fill up with steamy water. I slid down into it and felt around for the first time in far too long. It seemed like it wouldn't happen at first, but I was patient. I thought of all the things I wanted and I did everything I could to give them to myself. I was rewarded with a series of tremors that resonated through to my bones. In my ears I heard the quickened pounding of my heart. Currents of pleasure ran through my flesh and made my lips tremble. I had finally found the place where I was the only person I needed in order to be happy again. I let the tub drain and dried off. I turned on the music and danced around my room, naked, for a few songs, letting it all rush back in. Having sex is undoubtedly wonderful, but a girl needs to remember how to unlock her own doors whenever her body needs it. Short Stories
One Hit Away
Darren Arquero
"I love you." He mumbled these words to me, words I heard with such clarity as he clumsily stumbled out of my pick-up truck, his weedblown eyes struggling to keep concentration on mine. It didn't matter that we had been dating for only five months, it didn't matter that he was four years older than my 8, and it didn't even matter that he fucked over one of my friends to pursue a relationship with me – all that mattered was my happiness, which was something that I had found with him. ----I met him on the night of March 6, a night I found myself sitting precariously on one of those black leather couches in Houston's premiere gay night club of South Beach. Being in the heart of Montrose, I always viewed its foreign atmosphere as one meant only for entertainment, not one where I could find a potential relationship. But there he was, amidst the loud techno music, quietly attached in a relationship to someone I considered a friend. His black unbuttoned polo, checkerboard Vans and nonchalant manner ironically increased my attraction to him. And as he leaned over and placed his hand on my leg, I took the opportunity to initiate a conversation with him that would ultimately lead us to becoming something more than just friends. It was strange that this person was already familiar with the people I was with that night. As it turned out, he had graduated from my high school in 2003 and had a younger brother who was in my grade. From having the reputation of a heartbreaker with the ladies to being voted "Most Attractive", it didn't make sense to me that I had no prior knowledge of who he was, a fact that he later revealed was something that made him even more attracted to me. Engaging in deep conversation and learning that we shared mutual friends, I couldn't believe I was talking to somebody I viewed as being out of my league. His glossy blue eyes and a smile that screamed perfection, the physical chemistry coupled with our verbal communication led me to Short Stories give him my number. And sure enough, he called. The following night found me sitting in his brother's Ford pick-up truck in the parking lot of our local Valero corner store; but after he purchased two 6 ounce bottles of hard liquor, my outlook on a potential future with himchanged dramatically. Did he want me to "drink-up" in hopes of having an easy lay? Was his reason behind getting to know me sexually motivated? Although uncertainties began to overcome my thoughts, they were soon laid to rest when we spent nearly four hours just talking in his car, driving to random parks and neighborhoods in our hometown without ever taking a sip of alcohol. There were no awkward silences, no trying to come up with conversation starters – our personalities just clicked, and it seemed as though I had jumped-the-gun to question his intentions. "Why did you decide to buy the alcohol?" I asked. "I felt I needed it to loosen up a bit since I haven't really had any interest in pursuing something with a guy, but I feel different about this. It's not necessary if I'm actually enjoying the time I'm spending with you." With that said, my first PDA experience with the same sex took place. Getting out of his car, he took my hands in his and kissed me. I felt ridiculous that I was lightheaded and that my heart fluttered like a pubescent school girl's – I just never thought that I would be comfortable enough with my sexuality to do
Photo Credits: Darren Arquero
something like this so soon with someone who I barely knew, let alone in public. Being naive and too damn ignorant to know the difference between right and wrong, I gave no thought to the fact that he was already in a relationship, and that was something that would soon come to haunt me as our relationship progressed. ----I had just come back home from Germany earlier than planned because of my father's second heart attack. Second semester back home would be monotonous. With the majority of my credits taken care of, the time spent in school seemed worthless. Granted, I occupied myself with exchanging text messages with him. He knew how to wake me up in the morning or keep me entertained while sitting in class. I was never annoyed by his sappy messages – they made me feel wanted – and it was great to know that I finally met someone around whom I wasn't afraid to be myself. Coming with me to meet my friends for parties and dinners; driving up to Rice with me before matriculation to get fitted for my cheer uniform; coming home and having conversations with my mom about fishing for hours on end… it was the little things that made the relationship perfect, and the main reason why I decided to be intimate with him. I felt I had fallen further than I wanted to, but I had no intention of getting back up. Despite it being the first relationship where I was brutally honest with my heart, I pushed aside the fact that he had an affinity for marijuana, that purple haze, AK-47, Mary Jane. I didn't want to pass judgment based on the blunt he rolled the second day I was with him, that this was all he did, all that he was. But knowing that his younger brother dealt, and that his family was notorious for drug deals, how naive was I to think he would stop his habit for me? This was the topic of our conversation one night, while trespassing into private property and driving to the edge of a lake that engulfed my view from every direction. I never thought those "movie moments" would happen to me, and I found it ridiculous when people talked about wanting such experiences to happen to them. But there we found ourselves: lying in the bed of my truck, embracing one another and letting the wind do the talking as the moon provided the hint of light that only caught the contours of his face. From past conversations I knew we were both in similar personal situations - coming out was a process that was hard for both of us to accept, resulting in feeling as if we had let society down in not conforming to what was expected from us. It was hard trying to lend him an ear when everything he said to me was exactly what I was feeling. I was so relieved to have him, as both of us were ready to love without pride or selfishness. That's when he revealed, that his conflict with sexuality was the reason behind his smoking. It was amazing to watch his gradual transformation as he slowly dropped the habit, saying there was no need for it now since his happiness had finally come. I used to have arguments with him in the past about how much it hurt me to see him lose 28
himself to weed, but it finally seemed as if he was ready to just be himself, and I was happy that we were helping one another to get to that position. We had everything planned for the summer: going to his hometown of Ranger, Texas and spending three weeks at his ranch house; going to weekly showings at The Showboat DriveIn Theater when the city was too much for us; traveling up to Dallas and riding rollercoasters and being silly together – it was supposed to be a summer of fun before I entered my freshman year at Rice. These plans never materialized. Despite promising that he had lost the habit, he became its prisoner again. It slowly crept back into his life and became his obsession. It was the one thing I knew he would be doing when he was with his friends. It was the one thing I knew he was on when we kissed. It was the one thing I got my car searched for by HPD, when we talked outside of his house. It was the one thing that I was furious about when he nearly got arrested for possession. And it would eventually be the one thing, I decided, that would end our relationship. How could I ever know if the person who talked to me was the person I knew or the person who was high? How could I take his emotions seriously when he could not remember how he acted the next day? I had already tried to compromise in order to make the relationship work, but it seemed to me that the more effort I put in, the less I got back from him. I didn't want to be that person who laid their heart on the line and got nothing in return, nor did I want to become the person who becomes so emotionally attached that it's hard to let go. But there I was, listening to Unsaid by the Fray and crying, after realizing I had taken all I could handle. ----Our relationship ended abruptly, just as quickly as it had began. I never realized how much I had been riding on our relationship until it was over, realizing that because of him I had come out to my friends and more importantly to my family. He became such a significant part of my life for that short period of seven months that I hardly knew where to start when the relationship ended. Since then, I've tried to cloud my mind with negative thoughts of him, wanting myself to believe that I hated him much more than I loved him; but I can't get over the smallest things that made our relationship special, sharing our hopes for the future and the faith in our relationship. Although he is no longer present in the intimate sense, it's hard for me to move on, for he became a template for all my potential partners. He exposed me to feelings of sadness and hate that I never felt before, but the pleasure I experienced in just being with him cancelled them out. Despite being the cause of my mental anguish and heartache, he made me aware of the hardships that come with a relationship. He made me disappointed in the idea of love, but ultimately he prepared me for future relationships. And for that, I thank him.
Short Stories
Artwork By: Chris Beekman
When the Teacher is Gone: Sexual Assault in Poland
Katherin Sudol
High school in Poland. The third period of the day. Thirty-two pairs of eyes wandering, trying to find a point of focus, to kill the remaining twenty five minutes of class. A knock on the door. Hope rises as the teacher leaves the room, and so does the noise level, a rather abrupt transition from a subtle buzz of teenage voices to utter chaos. Among this blissful disarray a sudden, rather-too-organized movement occurs in the direction of the two girls sitting in the fifth desk, middle row. Some voices hush down; eyes turn away, suddenly peculiarly interested in the dull verses of Pan Tadeusz, while others stare, strangely aroused; some girls giggle, but glance with moral condemnation in the direction of the fifth desk; the remainder of the class becomes tense, their attention sharpened, prepared for what is to come. And then it happens. Six pairs of hands get hold of the two girls in the fifth desk. Six pairs of hands touch their breasts, slide under their shirts and into their pants. Six pairs of hands violate and degrade two girls in front of twenty four other people. And what is their response? Only two or three people spring up and try to pull the assailants away, but without success. Threatened to be next, they withdraw and watch, powerless, hoping it will end soon. The two girls in the fifth desk fight back at first, but eventually give up, realizing their resistance is futile against the aggressive advances of their colleagues. Eventually the boys return to their desks with repulsive grins of satisfaction on their faces, proud to have demonstrated their machismo and obtained whatever meek sexual gratification they had wished to obtain. The incident was not an isolated one. My friends and I have watched such assaults many times throughout seventh grade. We tried bringing up the issue to the teachers – without success. Sex and especially sexual abuse are topics that still remain taboo in Poland. You don't speak about it out loud; you simply pretend it doesn't exist. I mean, those girls had to be sluts, right? They must have done something to provoke the assaults. Their ostentatious make-up, tight fitting jeans, and shirts, maybe slightly too low-cut for fourteen-year-olds were all obvious signs of invitation to neglect their worth as human beings. They deserved it. This was the mentality of the assailants, a few of whom I spoke to, in an attempt to understand. In their eyes no harm was done; in fact justice was served andboth parties enjoyed it. Whether it was means of self-justification or a genuine conviction, those boys actually believed that their advances were welcomed by the victims. The assailants' blind neglect encompassed not only the two girls but also the other students in that classroom forced to watch the assaults. Even if, through some twisted logic, those boys concluded that the slightly higher-than-average promiscuity 30 of the two girls from the fifth deskwas an invitation for them to degrade and violate them, there was still fourteen other girls and their feelings to be considered. I cannot speak for others, though I clearly remember what I felt. I was disgusted, not only by what they'd been doing to those girls, but also disgusted with myself, my own body. I felt dirty, violated vicariously through those girls. This nauseating aversion towards my own body was accompanied by an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. I realized then that if, by some wicked twist of faith, I became labeled as one of those girls, there would be no escape. They had lost all ownership of their bodies and became public property. They were there to relieve any pent up sexual emotions accompanying the development of a fourteen-year-old boy. They were mere toys. No one ever asked or considered how experiencing such a simulacrum of prostitution would influence those girls later in life. My return to Poland this winter break resurfaced many memories and feelings associated with the seventh grade events. I had a chance to meet with my classmates, one of whom six years ago was among the assailants. I always hoped that what he did in the past was simply a transitory, albeit serious, teenage blunder caused by raging hormones and perhaps a poor judgment in choosing role models. However, my opinion of my friend needed to be reevaluated. As I brought up the issue, my friend declared that he did not regret anything he had done and proceeded to state that he still considered both of those girls worthless, and deserving of exactly what they got. This time I did not feel ashamed. I didn't even feel disgusted, or nauseated anymore. I was simply pissed off. I had moved beyond internalizing the dehumanizing chauvinism and saw the reality: six years later, he was the same person, holding the same sick, distorted views. Despite my anger, I cannot dismiss the possibility that his views are the product of the culture he lives in. I am not trying to make excuses for him, but merely suggesting that his choices might be colored by the values present in his community. I am also not saying that he lives in a community of sexual assailants, but rather in one where the interaction of religious moral codes and traditional norms regarding gender roles creates an environment of disadvantage for women, while favoring and protecting masculinity, sometimes in its darkest forms. The strong authority of the Roman Catholic Church dictates a life of purity and chastity, one in which the family and its values ought to take central stage. Such a view propagates stereotypical gender roles, with the man as head of the household, and the woman as the housewife, the mother, whose obligation and foremost reason for existence is rearing another generation of bigots. There also still exists a subtle cult of virginity, hence a heightened sense Articles
of moral duty to condemn those who do not abide to the seemingly natural code of pure conduct, an unwritten agreement that single, young women (but only women) ought not to engage or display their delight in any kind of even mildly sexual acts or promiscuity, unless of course they are in some form of a committed relationship, someone's property. Combining this belief with the still very prevalent attitude of male superiority over women, and perhaps arousal or sexual cues in the environment, we end up with six pairs of hands getting hold of two girls in the fifth desk… So how did the events six year ago affect those involved? It's
They coped well immediately after the assaults though I do not know how the events influenced them in the long run. Despite the tragedy of the events six years ago, they were certainly fortunate to have friends who were there for them, willing to listen and provide necessary support. A year ago an incident similar to those in my school, occurred in a middle school in Gdańsk. A few boys assaulted a fourteen year old girl while the teacher was away. They sexually harassed her, tore her clothes off in front of her classmates and simulated sexual acts, while recording everything on a cell phone camera. The next day that girl com-
Artwork By: Tamisha Anthony
hard to tell. Some I spoke to completely erased the assaults from their mind, having no recollection of them whatsoever. I personally became interested in women's issues, and today consider myself a feminist. Some, like my friend, were unaffected. I am unable to tell much about how the events of seventh grade affected the two girls who were assaulted. One of them became pregnant in high school, and now has a daughter and husband. The other is currently studying, trying to finish up high school.
mitted suicide. Today, these boys merely face a 2 year sentence in a penitentiary for juvenile delinquents. The assault was not their first one either. But in this case, just as it was six years ago some three hundred miles south, there were enough hands to ruin someone's life, but not enough hands pulling them away.
Ground Zero
Derek Workman Reporting from Gaborone, Botswana
"Just double bag it!" The word choice here is critical. My drinking buddy, Mateo says to me, "Just double bag it!" He does not choose words like "you had better," or "It would be a VERY good idea to" or (a more appropriate reaction) "Better not touch that with a ten foot pole." Instead, he says "just", as if this were a detail hardly worth thinking about, merely a suggestion, with a 'dat-a-boy' tone. Mateo tells me this after the girl I have been flirting with for most of the night goes to get another drink. Mateo uses the word "just" after he informs me with words and a casual wave of his hand that she has "been around the bar." Normally this would be no big deal. However, from where we sit at our usual Thursday night bar, Kwest, it is only a short half-mile walk to what is effectively ground zero for the HIV/AIDS epidemic: Princess Marina Hospital complex. This is not a normal place. This is a place where the infection rate is always teetering close to three in five. This is a place where 33% of the people ages 25-29 are infected; the percent jumps to 40% for people 30-35. This is a place where the evidence and effects of The Virus can be seen everywhere: in the constant presence of awareness campaigns, the condom ads (on billboards, in bathrooms, in the newspapers, on the radio). In the free condoms that are distributed at border posts, hospitals, the national museum, virtually everywhere. In the government-run and funded Anti-Retroviral Therapy Program, and the unceasing number of funerals. This is not the Africa I grew up in. Things have changed so fast over the last ten years. I look at Mateo. He must be joking, or at the very least more drunk than I thought he was. "How many did you have before you came?" I say. "Condoms are not a guarantee." Mateo and I both have friends, family, co-workers dying of AIDS. Mateo, only half-joking (everything he says is half-joking, except when he says he wants another beer): "It's only a three percent chance." Again, the word choice! "ONLY THREE PERCENT! Eish Man!" All of this is said in a very tongue-in-cheek way. Still, I can tell he is just barely kidding. (Maybe, I think, all this joking and alcoholism it is just the national coping mechanism.) Only a three percent chance of certain, possibly very horrid death… only! Botswana-style Rolette, anyone? Another friend, Bokamoso, throws this sound bite at me: "Don't worry, I always condomize!" 32 She says this as we trade tales from the weekend, over coffee. Bokamoso tells me the club was great, the dancing was fun. She tells me about the man, whom she meet, danced, and then hooked up with. I hear a story like this from her about every other week. When I ask her if she is concerned, if she ever worries about catching something, she uses this word, "Condomize!" "Condomizing" is a campaign catchword here at ground zero. It seems to be having a positive affect. Condoms are used more now than ever, up to 84% in the 5-24 year old age group. Due to awareness campaigns, most people know condoms can be used as a way to prevent the spread of The Virus. There are other campaigns, which seem to be getting positive results as well. One, which uses the national soccer team as spokespersons, urges people to "know your status". There is free testing in several locations here. With fast-results testing, it only takes 5 minutes to learn whether you are healthy or infected. There is a similar program that urges couples to get tested together before they sleep together. With these programs in place, more people are taking the dreaded test and knowing their status. Nevertheless, it is still slow going. I have another friend, (yes, her name really is) Queen, and when I ask her how sexually active is she is, she says proudly, "I highly active! I have been with ten guys since January." This she says in December. Again I ask, don't you worry about getting The Virus? She says, "Yeah, I worry sometimes. But if I don't have a regular boyfriend, what do you want me to do? Mastur-
Photo Credits: Rachel Solnick
bate? Use a dildo or toys or whatever?" The tone she uses tells me that this is not a valid option in her mind. These friends of mine, they are examples, not exceptions. They are middle class, educated. Mateo went to University in Australia. Bokamoso is in her final year at a university here. Queen owns a business. They are good people who hold down good jobs, have friends, are perfectly normal. The things Mateo, Bokamoso, and Queen say to me echo the sentiments of nearly all the young people I meet here. They are very sexual people and really, HIV/AIDS does not factor into their weekend plans. In fact, it does not factor into any plans, until they test positive. They are just like their peers everywhere else: they want to go out, dance, drink, have a great time and hopefully get laid. And "Do you have AIDS?" is not exactly the most romantic question one could ask during foreplay. And it is not just the Batswana people either. I have other friends, from America or Europe, most of them students of some kind, who come here and fall into the same behaviors. Gaborone, lovingly referred to as Gabs City by us locals, can be a great place to go out and have a good time. The clubs are open until 5 or 6am you. You can party all night and we often do! You might think that of all places, at ground zero, the epidemic would have an affect on the culture of sex. It might squash the thought of sex out of everyone's minds. You might imagine it would squash everything out of life. You might imagine everyone would just be sitting around waiting for a cure.
The reality seems to be the exact opposite. The culture of sex is thriving here (as is the rest of life). In fact, I have found people here to be far less inhibited than their American peers. Clubs are packed every weekend. There are whispers of a growing trend of orgies at the local university. Even the sex trade is alive and well. Sometimes when you are out, it strikes you. You are sitting around a table with a dozen or so friends, listening to jokes and stories, laughing. Then you think. "Good God! Three in five!" It can make you look around, count, and wonder. It makes you think about the human sex drive as well. Just how powerful is the human sex drive? Most of us have done a thing or two we are not proud of because of our inherent drive. Yet, is it so powerful that it can throw off our instinct for self-preservation? It is a strange thought, but the more I look around, the more it seems to be true. Even under the weight of such a huge threat, the people of Gabs City prefer to party, enjoy, be carefree and just hope for the best. After all, what does the alternative look like? A piece in a recent issue of the local magazine Lapologa, talks about some of these realities. The young, good-looking, educated, up-and-coming, the ones with everything to live for, are enjoying their weekends, but being awfully cavalier with their lives in the process. The article goes through all the standard arguments. Yet, the article closes ominously with the line, "we've heard this all before, but are we listening?" This begs the question: if any of us were in the same situation, would we be any different? Would we be listening?
Women of the Magdalene Program Find Hope After Prostitution
Claire Berry Yale University Student
If you aren't looking for the house, you will certainly miss it. Tucked away behind an Episcopal church and surrounded by a thicket of trees, it is barely visible from the road. Furthermore, dwarfed and outshined by the other houses in Nashville's most affluent neighborhood, once spotted it doesn't even seem worth a second glance. Every morning, several women gather on the front porch, taking long drags on Kool cigarettes. More women come, walking from the nearby bus stop and up the dirt path to the house. The church's back parking lot slowly fills as more arrive, and at nine o'clock, as the hour peals from the steeple, the porchwomen quash their cigarettes and join the others inside, closing the heavy door behind them. The Women of Magdalene begin another workday at Thistle Farms. The Magdalene Program is a recovery community for women who have criminal histories of prostitution and drug use. At present, 2 women are enrolled in the program; they live in four area houses where they abide by communal principles as they work toward staying clean and reclaiming their bodies and lives. A place of shelter is the first gift of Magdalene; over a woman's first few months in the program, she receives any dental work, medical attention, or therapy that she may need – and at no cost. After six months at Magdalene, the program requires the women to find a job, though they may continue to live rent-free at one of the houses for two years. Many of the women have felony charges, usually for prostitution or drug possession, which can make finding a job very difficult. In the face of this predicament, Thistle Farms was born. Founded in 200, Thistle Farms is a cottage business embedded within Magdalene where women in the program make all-natural bath and body products by hand. Within Thistle Farms, Magdalene women have the opportunity to take job skills classes and advance to more managerial 34 positions over time. Though the business has a small staff of non-residents, residents and graduates of the program are sales representatives, store managers, floor managers and shippers. --One sweltering August afternoon I sat down with Becca Stevens, the Episcopal priest who founded the Magdalene Program, for a conversation over iced green tea. As we settled into oversized armchairs on her screened-in back porch, she began to tell me the story that has made her a local celebrity: the story of Magdalene. The seeds for the Magdalene Program were planted in the early 990s. At that time, Becca Stevens was working at the Campus for Human Development, a local ministry to benefit the homeless. While she was there, one aspect of the Campus program began to disturb her: the shortage of women. "Women were not being served at all," she told me. "You would do different programs with thirty men and one woman, and it was like, where are all the women on the street?" Sure that they existed, Stevens set out to find and serve these women. With help from various friends in the community, she started visiting women in jails and researching ways to help them. "I had a friend that had given me an article about people who were giving sandwiches to prostitutes in New York, and I thought that sounded fun but then also kind of depressing… [because] they're still not getting off the street," she said. In 996 Steven's Magdalene Program began to satisfy a similar need in Nashville and did so, as Stevens saw it, more completely and thoroughly. For the next several years, Stevens ran Magdalene out of small office at St. Augustine's Church at Vanderbilt University, where she continues to be chaplain. She describes the period as a volatile time of learning. In the house where the women lived together, conflicts arose as the residents struggled to form a community, and Stevens found herself a sort of improvisatory referee as she set boundaries for them. Furthermore, she faced financial challenges working through her project's growing pains without any staff.. "It was always feast or famine," she recalled. "[Magdalene] would have a fundraiser…and we'd make enough money. Then [I] would Articles
Photo Credits: Marlei Olson
Photo Credits: Marlei Olson
breathe – and go back to doing church work – and then all of a sudden Magdalene had 32 dollars left." Stevens believes that these ups and downs brought out one of her greatest strengths, her eloquence as a speaker. In times of financial crisis, telling the story of Magdalene in the larger community was the most effective way she knew of to get donations and keep the program running. With an ironic smile, she related how one of the first women in the program, after hearing Stevens speak to potential donors, told her she was "a great hustler". A bit aghast at first, now Stevens agrees: "I am hustling. And I'm doing it so [the women] don't have to." --Dealing with prostitution continues to be a hotly discussed issue even within feminist communities. Magdalene presents what might be described as a radical feminist stance, operating under the belief that women cannot be bought or sold, and that the very idea is the utmost degradation of humanity. Radical feminists see prostitution as little more than institutionalized rape, and as a practice that cultures ought to eradicate. "Pro-sex" or "pro-prostitution feminists", on the other hand, present an alternate viewpoint. They hold that prostitution can allow women self-determination and power over their lives, and that "sex work" is just another industry in the national and global economy. Some pro-sex feminists support the legalization of prostitution, arguing it is a common practice that does not seem to be ending any time soon. They also argue that, as criminals within the current system, women engaged in prostitution come to fear police and thus often do not seek help when their occupations put them in danger; decriminalization would allow the women to be safer. I asked the Rev. Stevens about her views on the subject; it seemed a question she was used to fielding. "I am just of the ilk that we need to be a culture that doesn't buy and sell women," she said bluntly. Stevens also pointed out that to "dignify" the "abusive and horrific" world of prostitution with the term sex-work is a serious misnomer. "I haven't met a woman on the streets of Nashville who hasn't been raped or beaten. You hear the stories of it, and it's not work…it's a lifestyle, it's a cycle – and its violent, dangerous, and drug-ridden." Stevens is well aware that while each Magdalene woman has lived a different story, these stories often share devastating plot points. One is childhood sexual abuse, the trauma of which Stevens herself endured. Another is abuse within adult relation-
ships; it is a given that each of these women has been raped at some point in her life. Yet another common denominator is an introduction to crack cocaine through a boyfriend or other male acquaintance, often a dealer. Crack looms in each of the women's stories, great and indomitable, the source of chaos and despair. It represents for them the loss of possessions, homes, family, and most of all, control. For each of them, an addiction to crack has led directly to street life, where the violence only continues. Stevens cited one woman's experience as a graphic illustration that prostitution is so much more than free trade of a woman's "resources." This particular woman, before coming into the program, had suffered irreparable damage to her brain and one of her eyes when a client plunged a screwdriver into her head. Her special needs were part of the inspiration for founding Thistle Farms, because she required a workplace where she could find care. In the woman's state, Stevens could not bear throwing her back into the real world. In her life as a prostitute, she had already endured more in that world than anyone should. --Measuring the successes of any endeavor can prove trying – especially when the goal is as vague and subjective as "recovery." Magdalene graduates leave the program with a new place to live, a job with Thistle Farms or another employer, and considerable clean time, though many will wrestle with drug addiction for the rest of their lives. However, the challenges of recovery extend beyond these concrete accomplishments. Tracey, a petite Black woman in her late thirties, graduated from the Magdalene Program this past June. At Thistle Farms she manufactures the company's variety of balms – lip balms, body balms, an all-in-one balm – and has trained to take on new responsibilities in the shipping department and lotion manufacture this summer. She has dark, glittering eyes and a loud, infectious laugh that echoes all the way through the house. It is difficult to believe that when she first entered the program, Tracey was not known to be very communicative at all. Sitting down for a short conversation amid the bustle of the shipping room, Tracey revealed the reasons for her initial silence. "For the first three months, I did not talk…because I didn't know nothing about recovery; this was my first time being clean, my first time going through anything like this. All my life I had just wanted to use [drugs]," she told me. Also at that time, apart
from adjusting to a drug free life within the program, Tracey was wading through various legal issues surrounding the event that led her to Magdalene: the murder of her abusive ex-boyfriend. Such an offense could have resulted in a sentencing of fifteen years or more. Instead, Tracey received eight months probation and a chance at a different life. As the months went by, Tracey began to speak her mind – and found a supportive community in Magdalene that was willing to listen. "A lot of people helped me," she says. "They all loved on me. They let me be who I was until I got comfortable enough to just open up; they didn't pressure me." Like Tracey, many of the women attest to the self-affirming power of the community. It seems that one of the tenets of Magdalene is to encourage individual growth within the group setting and to establish the value of each voice. For women so long silenced by violence and their place in society, finding a voice is a major benchmark of their recovery. While Tracey stands as a more drastic example than some, another woman attested in a group conversation, "Now I know how to talk and finish what I'm going to say; I know how to share my opinion." Meditation circles, which take place daily in all the houses and at Thistle Farms, serve as practice for readily sharing one's mind. As each woman in the circle reflects on her life through the day's reading, she has license to express whatever she is feeling. In the circle, one woman tearfully expresses her fear of relapse into drug use; another expresses anger and frustration with her recovery; another admits that she sometimes still engages in prostitution. Regardless of what she has to say, each woman finds a room full of compassionate listeners and the knowledge that the truth she speaks is just as valid as anyone else's truth. Her power to speak is no small power. On the other hand, building strong bonds, after having endured so many traumatic and fractured relationships, is another challenge entirely. As the women of Magdalene move through and out of the program, they have varying success with learning to trust again. Kristin, who has been in the program for eight months, expressed in an interview how much joy she can now find in friends. "The best thing [about Magdalene] is probably just a feeling a kinship with certain people…an actual, for-real sisterhood with people…[because] you don't really build any kind of relationships when you're using [drugs]," she told me. Many women find healthy sexual relationships even more difficult to make and maintain. Being repeatedly raped for years can make women struggle with relationships, to say the least. Some have experienced serious trauma while "on the job," making relationships with men are at best confusing and at worst impossible. During our conversation, Stevens talked about the experience of one graduate who now works for Magdalene. "[She] will tell you – she, ten years down the road – the biggest …[question] is to figure out what a healthy relationship is," Stevens said. "She cannot spot it, she cannot choose it, she cannot be in it; and it's very painful for her." That such a 36
successful graduate experiences these troubles a decade out of the program shows limitations in the program's ability to solve all the women's problems, but more importantly sheds light on the debilitating and destructive power of prostitution and the psychology of shame that underlies it. Some women in the program have pursued homosexual relationships or expressed interest in homosexuality post-recovery. Though she acknowledges the complex biological and cultural origins of such desires, Stevens believes that these desires are, at least in some part, another response to trauma centered around past sexual encounters with males. Stevens is concerned that the discourse among the women regarding this response is limited, casting taboo on the possibility of the lesbian relationship. I encountered this shy interest in homosexuality in a morning art class at one of the Magdalene houses. The instructor, a volunteer, had shown the women in the class artworks from the PostSecret Project, a nationwide discourse in which participants send in anonymous postcards artistically emblazoned with their deepest secrets. The women were to create collages in the spirit of the project. One of the program women, also a Thistle Farms employee, was putting finishing touches on her own secret. When had she finished, she handed it to me, with considerable giggling, for me to read. Dominating the page was a photograph of a model, staring straight into the camera, and next to the photograph, some lettering, done in a magic-markered secret that was the cause of all the giggling: "I want to be with a woman but I don't know why?" --"I still feel like this sometimes," Gwen says, handing me her collage. On the dark green page is a cropped picture of a yellow-skinned nude, taken from an art journal. Gwen's collage bears no written confession, only a word: NONENTITY. I still feel like this sometimes. Not all the time. Maybe today, but not two days ago, and perhaps tomorrow will be the best day yet. The struggle toward self-love is not an easy journey: its paths can seem impassable, and its ways are not smooth. But the women of Magdalene are traveling onward together, empowered by faith and sisterhood. "I know that I am not lost because I am teachable, loveable, and free." Rossana, a Magdalene resident from Honduras, came up with this maxim during a community-wide free-write. There are no better words to describe the way toward recovery for these women. Though the trauma of addiction and prostitution is an immense obstacle, the women of Magdalene are not lost because of their individual, deep desires to learn, to love and be loved, and to make their own choices.
The Kama Sutra and the Ananga-Ranga
Dr. Anne Hardgrove
Dr. Anne Hardgrove, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio, discusses two texts which she argues are fundamental to the understanding of the history of sexuality. These texts are the Kama Sutra and the Ananga Ranga. The Kama Sutra is the world's oldest book on the pleasures of sensual living. There is no one single author for the text. It was originally compiled in the 3rd century by the Indian sage Vatsyayana, who lived in northern India. Vatsyayana claimed to be a celibate monk, and that his work in compiling all of the sexual knowledge of ages past was for him a form of meditation and contemplation of the deity. Written in a rather complex form of Sanskrit, the Kama Sutra is the only surviving textual account of that period of ancient Indian history. In scholarly circles it has been widely consulted by scholars trying to understand the society and social mores of that period. The title of the text, Kama Sutra, literally means "a treatise on pleasure." Far more complex than a mere listing of contortionist sexual positions, the Kama Sutra provides a comprehensive manual of living for the good life. Although the central character of the Kama Sutra is the citizenly man-about-town, the text was written to be read by and provide detailed advice for both men and women. The basic tenet of the Kama Sutra is that in order for marriages to be happy, both man and woman should be well-versed in the arts of pleasure, both carnal and cerebral. The topics explored include Society and Social Concepts, On Sexual Union, About the Acquisition of a Wife, About a Wife, About the Wives of Other Men, About Courtesans, and On the Means of Attracting Others to Yourself. The book contains detailed advice on what a man must do to win over a woman, what a woman must do to win over a man, the states of a woman's mind, the role of a go-between, and the reasons why women might reject the advances of men. In terms of choosing a mate, the Kama Sutra
Photo credit: Creative Commons Attribution
Photo Credits: Creative Commons Attribution
advises on whether to consider fellow students or childhood friends. It provides charts that categorize male and female physical types and their compatibility with their lover's body. Varieties of embracing, kissing, scratching, biting, oral sex, and sexual intercourse are elaborated. The text also incorporates instruction on extramarital relationships, including with "the wives of other men," and devotes many pages to the methods of seductionand methods of extortion-practiced by the courtesan. Finally, in case all of that knowledge should fail in winning the love that one seeks, the final chapter of the Kama Sutra contains recipes for tonics, powders, and foods that have the power to help attract others to oneself. Some people refer to the Kama Sutra as a marriage manual, but it is a far cry from the monogamous and dutiful tomes that westerners produced as part of the proliferation of advice manuals in the Victorian era. One of the central figures of the Kama Sutra is the courtesan, who must also master and practice a variety of arts in learning how to please and coerce her man. What is especially unique about the Kama Sutra is that it maintains a special focus on creating pleasure for the woman. A man who fails to provide and bring about those pleasures is subject to a woman's recourse, that is, to seek pleasure elsewhere where she may find it. As the 'original' study of sexuality, the Kama Sutra became the fountainhead of all subsequent compilations, including the 5th century Ananga Ranga which is a revised version and builds upon Vatsyayana's basic tenets. Yet because of the complex and rather inaccessible style of Sanskrit in which it was written, the Kama Sutra for many centuries fell into obscurity. Scholars of Sanskrit and ancient India did not much consult it. It was not until the late 9th century that the Kama Sutra again began to resume its former prominence in the textual traditions of India. That resurgence came about after the 870s when Sir Richard Burton, the noted linguist and Arabic translator, was working with his collaborators, both Indian and British, on producing a translation of the Ananga Ranga. In pursuing the many references to Vatsyayana with the text, Burton led the Pundits back to the Kama Sutra and an English translation was produced. Burton's persistence in publishing the Kama Sutra in the west, and the interest the text generated in both India and abroad, has led to a proliferation of translations and versions of the original masterpiece. The Ananga-Ranga The 5th century Ananga-Ranga is an updated version of the Kama Sutra, written in far more accessible Sanskrit than its earlier predecessor. As a result, for many centuries the Ananga Ranga actually superceded the Kama Sutra in being the text of choice to consult for knowledge about sexual pleasure. The writing of the Ananga-Ranga was commissioned by the nobleman Ladakhana for one of the Lodi Dynasty's monarch. The Lodis were part of the powerful Delhi Sultanate who ruled northern India before the Mughal Dynasty took its place. Kalyanamalla, 38
the author of the Ananga-Ranga, was a Hindu poet, who drew heavily upon the Kama Sutra in preparing his text. Kalyanamally wrote in an accessible Sanskrit style, and its royal Muslim patronage assured that the text enjoyed a wide circulation among the medieval Muslim empires. Versions of the Ananga Ranga also appeared in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Opening with a dedication to Ladakhana, the text's patron, the book contains prescriptive advice for married couples, and for their conduct both social and sexual. It begins with a detailed description of female bodies, and includes "centers of passion," erogenous zones, classifications of body types and the timeliness of their potential sexual pleasures. Classification and compatibility of males and females by their genital size is explored in various combinations and to their degree of passion. Many scholars speculate that Kalyanamalla lived in a more sexist society than earlier writers, noting that Kalyanamalla deviates from other writers by neglecting to provide normative advice for producing women's pleasure, such as the use of fingers, a method that other texts heartily endorse. The title of the book, Ananga-Ranga, has been variously translated as "Stage of the Bodiless One," "The Hindu Art of Love," and "Theatre of the Love God," among others. As part of the romanticism of colonial rule, Europeans sought out eastern texts to bring ancient wisdom to the modern world. However, the Orientalist engagement in the Ananga-Ranga ironically led to the text's decreased relevance, and the prominence of the earlier Kama Sutra. Burton's experiences living in India as a part of the British military and his fascination with the sexual practices of Oriental societies, coupled with his desire to bring this knowledge to the attention of his co-citizens of the British metropole, led to his interests in the canon of sexual knowledge preserved in Sanskrit texts. Because of the relative popularity of the Ananga Ranga among the Sanskrit specialists, it was natural that it should be the text of choice for Burton's purposes. When reviewing their translations, however, Burton made note of the many references made to an earlier compilation by Vatsyayana. Burton believed that his earlier text, the Kama Sutra, was a far more foundational work, and requested that the Pundits locate a copy. Because of its centuries of relative neglect, the Kama Sutra at this stage only existed in parts. The text had to be re-compiled from Sanskrit manuscript library collections across India and in the Princely States. Once the text was translated into English, its popularity grew, and Indian scholars set aside the Ananga-Ranga with a renewed interest in its predecessor. For more information on both of these texts, Professor Hardgrove encourages interested readers to see her longer introduction to the Barnes & Noble edition of these works, published together in 2006. Sections from the introduction are reproduced here with the permission of Barnes & Nobles.
Geishas and the Floating World
Celestine Shih
Karyukai, the "flower and willow world," originated in the reign of the Samurai as an oasis of teahouses ,theaters and gardens for those who wanted to escape the mundane. It is the world of the geisha. They are one of the most iconic images associated with the Orient, and associated with them are elegance, beauty and sex. Contrary to popular Western thought, however, true geisha do not offer sexual favors in exchange for payment. The word "geisha" literally translates to a "person of arts," and to be a geisha, one must devote herself to the study of Japanese arts. She is first and foremost an artist and performer, even if her reputation is shaded with erotic nuances. Sex is integral to the geisha's charm, and she relies a good deal on her sexual appeal to maintain her career. In that respect her profession is similar to that of a prostitute's; but unlike a prostitute, she wields her sensuality subtly instead of flaunting it. Although the geisha have diminished in popularity since the early nineteenth century, they still exist to this day. Basic training for a geisha was, and still is, rigorous. It requires the patience to undergo strict training and the endurance to practice music, dance, and singing for hours on end. Once a woman has thoroughly studied the arts, she ascends to the rank of maiko, an apprentice geisha. But she still has a long way to go before she Articles can join the order of full-fledged geisha. An older, experienced geisha will take the new maiko under her wing and become her onee-san (older sister) , teaching her apprentice skills that cannot be taught in a classroom during a period of minarai, or "learning by observation." A geisha's true stage lies not in the theatre, but in the party. She is the entertainer and the perfect hostess to a party of men. Her guests come to the karyukai to leave behind life's stress and strain; she strives to create a distinctive atmosphere where her guests may enjoy themselves and glimpse ukiyo, the illusory "floating world" of perfection. The philosophy behind ukiyo comes from the Edo period and believes that life may be painful and transitory, but since we must live in it, we may as well indulge in what worldly pleasures we have. For this reason, a geisha aims to attain excellence in all matters worldly and stylish. When she is working at a party, she projects the sense of unattainable perfection and shapes herself into the feminine ideal. A maiko is given a mentor so that she can learn how to fulfill this ideal of grace, charm, and flirtatiousness. To complete the illusion of the ideal woman, the geisha epitomize iki. It is an aesthetic of understated chic and effortless elegance; to be iki is to be bold without being brazen, simple 39
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
without being plain. The eroticism of a geisha's dress is implied, not pretentious. Classic images of iki centered on the geisha at the height of their popularity: her bare white feet outlined by her black lacquered sandals as she stepped in the snow; one stray hair curling down from elegantly styled hair; the glimpse of crimson at the collar of a black kimono; an unpainted neck revealed as she bent over to pour tea. The eroticism is meant to be noticed by those who appreciate subtlety. Perhaps the only aspect of the geisha's career that, to an outsider, seems to lack iki is mizuage. As Arthur Golden publicized it in his historical fiction "Memoirs of a Geisha," it is when a maiko openly sells her virginity to the highest bidder, marking her initiation into the ranks of full-fledged geisha. This is the closest a geisha ever comes to prostitution. In the past, a maiko's sexual awakening equated to her maturation as an adult. She shed the girlish, brightly colored kimono of her apprenticeship and donned the more subdued, elegant kimono of mature women. Not only was she ready for new kimono, she was also ready for a danna – a patron (who was not always the man who bought her virginity). Geisha earn their livelihood as entertainers and performers at parties, but it is not uncommon for a geisha to have a danna as well. In return for his patronage, she serves as his confidant and companion while inspiring iki in his life. An inexperienced, eager maiko would not attract a danna; she lacks the sophisticated sincerity characteristic of iki. For a woman to be iki, she needs to have experienced life, to have tasted the bitterness as well as the sweetness of love. Thus, only geisha comfortable with their sexuality could describe themselves as truely iki. The most celebrated geisha exuded a charisma that established them as an object of fantasy, one where the perfect woman is knowledgeable yet innocent, sexual yet pure. Mizuage is seen as outdated by geisha nowadays and is no longer practiced. Most of them already feel comfortable with their sexuality, thanks to the more liberal standards of today. However, although sex is less taboo than before, Japan is oddly split on the subject. On the surface, its culture considers sex to be shameful and turns a blind eye against it. But in the underbelly of society, beneath the layers of propriety, a fascination with sex is rampant throughout Japan. Vending machines on the street dispense hentai magazines (sexually perverted manga); shops sell Hello Kitty-themed dildos; extravagantly built "love hotels" resemble miniature Disneylands for couples; sex clubs run by the yakuza (Japanese mafia) cater to a wide range of sexual fantasies; and so many women have complained of being groped on Tokyo's crowded commuter trains that gropers have their own name, chikan, and the city has introduced "Woman's Only" carriages, enforced by security guards. The Anti-Prostitution Law of 956 only prohibits sexual intercourse, leaving the door open for a plethora of services that dance on the edge of sexual intercourse, often legally including oral sex: "Delivery Health" services which regularly place not so discrete advertisements in home mailboxes, "Soaplands," a brothel where clients 40
are bathed and "Health Fitness" massages which have little to do with either. The Japanese seem to have a freer attitude towards the selling of sex than Americans do, while formally disapproving of sex itself. It then comes as no surprise that this societal dichotomy also extends to the geisha. As the ancient ways are slowly lost or forgotten, they are valued as the keepers of the nation's cultural heritage. Modern geisha dress like their predecessors did centuries ago and excel in the arts highly prized by Japanese society. They practice the same repertoire of classical dance or traditional music that well-bred Japanese girls are expected to learn; yet at the same time, no proper Japanese parents would want their daughter to become a geisha. The geisha do not earn enough money to be considered people of a desirable economic status, and because of their profession's sexual overtones, they are viewed with a critical eye by the public. Both scorned and respected, the reputation of these women lies outside the bounds of normal social classifications. However, they were not always held in ill repute. Pro-imperialist forces plotting to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate made certain teahouses in Kyoto their headquarters, where the geisha served them tea and fed them information from spies. Some of the geisha were lovers of the leaders, and when the revolution ended, they became the wives of the new Meiji government's most powerful men. Tokyo and Kyoto's geisha were the Meiji equivalent of today's celebrities; people admired them for their style and fashion sense, while novelists praised their virtues of discretion and intelligence. But after World War II, the geisha dwindled in number and, unfortunately, respectability. Prostitutes working where Allied forces were stationed imitated the look of the geisha to attract more business, and from this came the Western misconception that a geisha equals a prostitute. The Japanese, who until now had thought favorably of the geisha, began to see them as a relic of a shameful, decadent past. The Allied occupation introduced new conservative ideals to Japanese society, ideals that censured sex – and by association, the geisha. They never recovered from the fall, and few women now choose to enter geisha training. But despite their low numbers, they are still favored by Japan's top businessmen and politicians, the only ones who can afford to hire geisha for social gatherings. The continued patronage of these elite clients shows that something about the geisha keeps them coming for more: the geisha's mystique, a subtle, seductive allure.
References: Dalby, Liza Crihfield. Geisha. Berkeley: University of California Press,1983. Dutt, Nabanita. "Geishas of Japan - A Snapshot." Things Asian. May 2002. Japan's Children's Rights Network. http://www.crnjapan.com/abuse/en/legalagesinjapan.html
Health and Body
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
Getting Tested: An educational account of relief and responsibility
I'm sitting on an exam table, paper crinkling under my butt every time I shift nervously. It's office-building cold, and I shiver. I look at all the posters on the walls to distract myself, but they only remind me of why I'm here in the first place. After the longest seven minutes of my year, a fussy little man in green scrubs and a lab coat bustles in. I stare at his goatee as random, politically incorrect thoughts wander through my head, thoughts like, "I wonder if he's gay?" He greets me in a high-pitched voice. He's very professional, and asks me some preliminary questions about my health and habits. Then he utters the dreaded question I've been anticipating for the past hour: "Would you please stand up and undo your pants?" --So why did I expose myself to this doctor? I did it for a girl. I'm writing this article now because I would have appreciated someone else's perspective on going to get tested for STDs. There are numerous resources available online about the technical side of it – what tests are available, where to go in discrete confidentiality, how samples are obtained, what results to expect. Just do a Google search for "STD testing" and you'll do fine. But what I was missing was the view from the trenches. I went in nervous. I had heard that getting a Q-tip stuck up your winky really hurts. At the time, I hadn't bothered to do any real research, mostly because I was so uncomfortable with the idea that I avoided it until the day of my appointment. I didn't even know what different kinds of tests there were. I'd had sex on two occasions in my life, with two different girls. Things hadn't gone particularly well for me in either case, though they seemed to enjoy it. Now, a couple years later, I had found someone really special. She and I got along great. She seemed open to sex in general, and with me in particular. But I was worried, because the second girl I slept with had called me about eight months after we'd had sex. She said she had HPV. She was fairly certain she had caught it from a guy with whom she had had sex after she and I had sex. We had used a condom, but she suggested that I should go get tested. At the time, I had no idea where to go, and I was too chicken to ask on-campus health services. So, while it was likely a non-
Health and Body
Photo Credits: Celso Duran
issue, I did the worst possible thing: I waited. I deferred it until I met my third interest. I didn't know what HPV was, and I barely remembered the name, after two years. So I did some online research and opened up to a friend of mine who used to work at the Montrose clinic (now www.legacycommunityhealth.org at 25 Westheimer). He said I was probably fine, but I should definitely go get tested, just in case something else came up. I didn't want to be giving a higher incidence rate of cervical cancer to anyone, so I gathered my resolve, made the appointment and promptly blotted out all thought of it for a week. When the day came, I was unprepared. I went in, waited for my appointment, and was shown to an examination room. I had no idea what questions to ask, what procedures or options were available, or even how much it would cost. I told the doctor about the HPV, that the timing was unlikely to have affected me, but I wanted to be certain. I used a condom on both occasions, no anal penetration, did engage in oral sex, was not a drug-user, did not share intravenous needles, did not engage in sex with multiple partners or with animals, etc. The more questions I answered or filled out on the patient intake questionnaire, the better I felt. My own experiences were so modest that it would take the act of a vengeful god to strike me down with an STD, I was sure. Then the pants had to come down, and the Q-tip came out. I hesitated before yanking down my boxers. I was mortified as I straightened up to … absolutely no reaction at all. The doctor put on some gloves, calmly peered at all sides of my manhood. Between nerves and temperature, it had just about curled up out of sight. He had to maneuver it around a bit, and the whole time I was staring straight ahead, trying to ignore the manhandling. Then he pulled out a long-stemmed Q-tip with a low-profile head. I don't remember now what he said then – probably a warning about how it might irritate a little. I just remember the burning, itching jolt of pain as he stuck it in and swabbed twice. For female readers, I can only speculate that the sensation Health and Body
was akin to jabbing 3-4 tampons in simultaneously when you're noticeably dry. The rest of the exam was very anticlimactic. I remembered to thank the doctor as I was escorted out. I had a blood sample taken. An STD counselor finished up, asking me some more questions about sexual practices. I was reminded that any contact between mucous membranes and genital mucous membranes can transmit STDs, with open cuts or sores dramatically increasing risk of transmission. I learned that it's actually worse to brush your teeth right before engaging in oral sex, due to the microabrasions caused. I was handed some free Durex condoms, and that was it. Two weeks later, I went back to pick up my results – a clean bill of health. I went on to never have sex with the girl in whom I was interested, but at least I knew I was set if it ever came up again. I've read that "Sex education is one part folklore, two parts anecdotal, and three parts speculation." While this quote is apocryphal, I think in general it is pretty accurate. I can only supply the second part, and hope that this mildly cautionary tale will encourage you to do your own research to remedy the other two parts of a typical education on sexual health and practice. I also hope that you will be inspired to act more decisively if issues ever arise. Think of questions. Know what your options are. The biggest lesson I learned from all this is that every mature person you deal with only wants the best for you. My friend at the clinic, my one-time partner, and all the clinical staff were nothing but helpful and considerate. If you are so inclined, enjoy sex, but take care of yourself and your partners. The real shame isn't in having a condition – the shame is in passing on a condition that could have been prevented to a loved one. Editor's Note: Most STD tests for men do not require a cotton tip swab anymore, but can be done just from urinating into a cup.
Debunking the "Ulitmate Sex Diet," Exploring Health Benefits of Sex
Victoria Trinh
So, you're at Kroger's, standing at the checkout line to purchase the typical college fare (hopefully stuff that isn't immediately carcinogenic): Diet Coke, Gushers, and a healthy dose of chocolate, primed for a hectic week of exams and whatever else keeps you up until 3 in the morning. Glancing at the latest doped/trashed/knocked-up celebrity on the magazine covers, you are accosted by the obnoxious banners "Sex will bring you great hair! A great body! Improve your complexion!" My favorite is "Want to become a successful part-time model and television star and lose 23 pounds? Don't be shy, try the ultimate sex diet!" While glossy women's magazines will have you believe that sex is the panacea of beauty enhancing techniques, in reality the health benefits of sex have a very legitimate foundation. A variety of scientific research has been conducted on the health benefits of sex, which may be physical, emotional or psychological. Studies on sexual intercourse have shown that there are general physical health benefits too, including better sleep, youthfulness, and general fitness (Planned Parenthood). Today's discourse about sexuality is preoccupied with the risks and dangers, especially with teen pregnancy and STDs. Thankfully, there is an emerging body of research that has demonstrated the physiological and psychosocial health benefits of sex. The volume of this research doesn't compare with the amount of literature on sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancy, but research exposing health benefits provides important insights, and highlights the need for more careful research in this evolving field. ◊ Fountain of youth? - While sexual pleasure is NOT the fountain of youth, studies suggest that there is a positive correlation between sexual intercourse, pleasure, and longevity. In a study that followed 252 people in North Carolina over the span of 25 years, the frequency of intercourse was a significant predictor of longevity for men. While for women, frequency of intercourse was not correlated to longevity, those that reported previous enjoyment of intercourse had greater longevity (Palmore, 982). It's important to take these studies with a grain of salt, as causation is difficult to demonstrate with these epidemiological studies, but sex definitely doesn't hasten the aging process! ◊ Heart Disease & Stroke - Sexual intercourse may not pull you back from the brink of death, but there has been some research done on the relationship between sexual intercourse, heart disease and stroke. For men, research suggests there is a correlation between the levels of hormone dehydroepiandrostone (DHEA), released during orgasm, and a reduction in the risk of heart disease (Feldman, et al., 998). Besides the release of 44 DHEA, testosterone has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attack and the long-term effects of heart attacks by reducing the strain to coronary muscles when heart attack does occur (Booth, et al., 999; Fogari, et al., 2002). Given that heart disease is the number one killer of women, there is the need for more rigorous research on the relationship between sexual intercourse and heart determinants for women. ◊ Quality over quantity - It's true what they say- for women, quality over quantity! A study of women conducted from 972-975, found there is a statistically significant positive correlation between being sexual "frigid"-- sexual dissatisfaction, and a history of heart attack (Abramov, 976). ◊ Vaginal Orgasms - A study done on ,256 Swedish women showed that having an orgasm from penile stimulation of the vagina (as opposed to clitoral stimulation) indicated greater satisfaction with sex, life, mental health and relationships. Vaginal orgasms were also associated with more sexual desire and lesser masturbation frequency. ◊ Oxytocin & sleep- Orgasms cause a surge of oxytocin and endorphins that may perform as sedatives (Odent 999). Therefore, sexual release may help people go to sleep easier. Ellison's study found that 32 percent of ,866 U.S. women who reported masturbating in the previous three months did so to help themselves fall asleep (Ellison, 2000). ◊ "Superyoung" study- In a study conducted over 0 years among 3,500 European and American women and men, a panel of judges viewed subjects through a one-way mirror, examining factors correlating with youthful appearance. Among the women and men who were underestimated as being "superyoung" by 7- 2 years, an active sex life was one of the strongest determinants associated with youthful appearance. In addition to being more comfortable and confident in their sexuality, the "superyoung" reported sexual intercourse three times a week, in comparison to the control group's average of twice a week (Weeks & James, 998). ◊ Fitness & sex – It's important to be upfront about this –sex in itself will NOT make you skinny! The figures provided by fitness websites that claim sexual partners can burn 4 calories/ per minute during sex operate under the assumption that people are seriously working at sex- which no one does more than a few minutes. However, sexual activity does burn calories and fat, and there is a positive correlation between people with active sex lives and dietary habits. Ellison's study indicates that people with active sex lives tend to exercise more frequently and have better dietary habits than those who are less sexually active (Ellison, 2000). Health and Body
◊ Not only is there an association between sex, longevity and youthful appearance, but sexual satisfaction is closely associated with overall quality of life and psychological mental health! It's crucial to recognize, of course, that sex is associated with a positive lifestyle; there has been no casual relationship established between sex and happiness yet. ◊ Quality of Life - A 2002 analysis of the sex practices of adults in mid-life found that sexual activity may be an indicator of current and future quality of life. The study showed that people who experienced greater sexual satisfaction tended to have a higher quality of life. Additionally, people who had frequent and enjoyable sex during midlife reported more active and satisfying sex lives during later maturity (Weeks, 2002). ◊ Orgasms & Happiness- A U.S. survey of 3,500 women and men indicated that personal happiness is associated with the frequency of sexual activity, especially with orgasm among women (Laumann, et al., 994). ◊ Masturbation- In our culture, masturbation is stigmatized. The Rice Thresher police blotter about someone masturbating in the Hanszen computer lab shocked a lot of people. While public masturbation may not be the way to go, there are positive heath associations with masturbation. A 982 study of 30 elderly heterosexual U.S. women and men found that masturbation was associated with a decreased risk of depression (Catania & White, 982). Also, women who masturbated had a more positive body image and less sexual anxiety (Hurlbert & Whittaker, 99) contributing to a reinforced self-esteem. Masturbation not only improves individual sexual satisfaction; it may be associated with improved relationship satisfaction as well (Coleman, 2002; Zamboni & Crawford, 2002). A 99 study of young married women found that those who reported masturbating also reported greater marital satisfaction (Hurlbert & Whittaker, 99). ◊ Stress- The surge of oxytocin before an orgasm has been shown to reduce stress. Orgasms relieve tension in part because oxytocin stimulates feelings of warmth and relaxation (Weeks, 2002). Health and Body
◊ Spirituality & Sex- A study conducted from 997-998 surveyed 3,80 American men and women, including heterosexuals, homosexuals, and bisexuals. People that associated sexual experiences with spirituality were "more likely to report a better quality of life and better relationships" (Ogden, 200). ◊ Not having sex? No worries! Sex is generally good for you, but sex with love is way better, and heck, love is way amazing too! Dr. Dean Ornish's research into intimacy has shown that "anything that promotes feelings of love and intimacy is healing." His study has shown that an intimate connection—emotional and physical—can lead to the reduction of premature death and disease by a factor of three to five times. And the power of touch goes a long way- Dr. Crenshaw's research shows that caressing, hugging, stroking, and cuddling can change the chemical composition of your body, triggering a chain reaction sparking off pleasurable, nurturing sensations in the brain. Another alternative to "normal" sexual intercourse is the "erotic massage" to achieve "extended, multiple or "whole body" orgasmic states" (David Sebringsil). Ultimately, we cannot make informed decisions if we are not equipped with the full spectrum of information on sex, including the heath benefits. Yet, America's tradition of abstinence-only education and an existing sentiment that premarital sex is shameless means that "funding for research exploring the potential benefits of sexual expression will be scarce" (Planned Parenthood). While European countries and Australia promote safe sex and invest more money into studying the health benefits of sex, America is woefully behind the curve. We need dialogue about sex somewhere between Cosmopolitan and abstinence-only education. It is important to approach sex openly, to engage in honest dialogue about sexual intercourse in order to promote a more accepting, well-informed and healthy population. For more information about the studies cited, go to the Open website at http://www.rice.edu/openmagazine
Plan B -FAQ
Katherin Sudol
What is Plan B? Plan B, otherwise known as the "the morning after" pill, is a type of emergency contraception (EC) designed to help you deal with the potential consequences of a night of carelessness or an accident due to a failure of your birth control method. As the name implies though, Plan B is to be used in emergencies only and not as a regular birth control method. Plan B is not to be confused with the abortion pill, also known as RU486 or by the brand name Mifeprex. Plan B is strictly used to prevent unwanted pregnancies and has no effect on ongoing pregnancies. How does Plan B work? Plan B contains levonorgestrel, a hormone found in regular birth control pills. This hormone acts to prevent the release of the egg from the ovary. If the egg has been released, it prevents fertilization or attachment to the uterine wall. In the case when the fertilized egg has already managed to attach itself to the uterus, Plan B will have no effect. How do I use Plan B? Plan B works best when taken within 72 hours after unprotected sex. The Plan B packet comes with two pills. The first one is to be taken no later than 72 hours after having unprotected sex. The second one needs to follow 2 hours later. Are there any side effects to using Plan B? Some temporary side effects of using Plan B include nausea, dizziness, vomiting, headaches, stomach pain and drowsiness. Plan B may also cause some changes in your menstrual cycle. How effective is Plan B? According to Duramed Pharmaceuticals Inc., the makers of Plan B, this type of EC can reduce the chance of pregnancy by nearly 90%. The sooner you take it, the more effective it will be. It is most effective if taken within the first 24 hours after unprotected intercourse. How much does Plan B cost? The price ranges anywhere from $0-50 depending on location. Where do I get Plan B? Here are some of the options available to Rice students: ◊ Rice Health Services - provides free EC in the form of high dose birth control to Rice students with a same day appointment. All you need to do is call 73-348-4966 and make an ap46 pointment. However, if you need EC during the weekend you will need to rely on a pharmacy instead, because Health Services is closed. ◊ Pharmacy – if you are over 8, Plan B is available over the counter at any pharmacy. The downside of this option is the price – be ready to pay somewhere between $45-50. Also make sure to have an ID with you. If you are younger than 8, you need a doctor's prescription to be able to purchase Plan B. A pharmacist may decline dispensing EC due to personal moral beliefs, however in most states he or she must at least refer the customer to another pharmacy. ◊ Planned Parenthood – provides EC for a nominal fee during the weekdays as well as the weekend. You can either call -800-230-PLAN or visit their nearest location on Fannin. Is there anything else I need to know about Plan B? ◊ Plan B does not protect you from sexually transmitted diseases or HIV infection. It is only designed to prevent pregnancy when taken as directed. ◊ If you vomit after taking either of the two pills, contact a health care professional in order to determine whether you need to repeat the dose. ◊ You might be pregnant if your period is more than a week late. Where can I find more information about EC and Plan B? www.plannedparenthood.org, www.pphouston.org, www.go2planb.com, www.ineedec.info Although ideally you should not need to use EC, accidents do happen. Whether you forget to take the pill, the condom breaks while you are having sex, or you don't use any protection – Plan B is there for you. Access to EC is not a birthright, but a recent privilege. It was just two years ago, that the FDA approved Plan B for over-the-counter sales, and while it does have the potential to lessen the consequences of sex, it's not a crutch for casual sex, but should be used responsibly, as a last resort. If you find yourself in a situation where you need to use EC, and think you're alone – think again. According to the Open Magazine survey, approximately 2 percent of the female Rice students have used EC in the past. Accidents happen to all of us. Talk to your partner or close friends, they'll help you out – they might even accompany you to the pharmacy. The key is to remember that if an accident does happen, and you aren't ready to be a parent just yet, you can rely on Plan B.
Health and Body
Photo Credits: Celso Duran
Gardasil and What it Means to Men
Guyton Durnin
Lately there has been considerable debate about whether Texas should require all girls to get Gardasil, the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Although I consider the current debate an important one for women and for preventing cervical cancer, men have been left out of the debate, even though they are just as susceptible to contracting HPV as women are. Currently, the vaccine cannot protect men against infection, as the FDA will not allow men to receive it. I only know this because I tried. What exactly is HPV? This group of viruses can infect the skin and mucous membranes. There are over 00 human papillomavirus strains; they can cause anything from cold sores to genital warts in men and women and can even lead to cervical cancer. HPV is transmitted through skin-to-skin contact, so condoms, or even avoiding sexual intercourse will not always prevent an infection. High risk HPV strain infection appears to be necessary for women to get cervical cancer. The disease kills 3,900 American women each year, even with widely available screening. Although a large percentage of the population carries some strain of HPV, having it or even having a high risk strain does not automatically mean a woman will develop cervical cancer. The chances are relatively low; nevertheless, 6 million Americans contract a strain of HPV every year and about 90% of women will have HPV at some point in their lives. Researchers estimate 5% of women between the ages of 4-59 have one of the high risk strains at any given time. While most of these women will avoid cervical cancer, it still is a significant killer. In general, heterosexual men are not threatened by the high risk HPV strains and there are currently no FDA approved screening methods to let men know if they have the high risk HPV strains. Gardasil was created by several researchers and is currently produced by Merck. This vaccine prevents infection of several HPV strains including two that cause 70% of the cases of cervical cancer and two that cause 90% of genital warts. There has been a lot of talk about vaccinating the female population at a young age to prevent cervical cancer. However, no one mentions allowing men to get the vaccine. I asked several doctors about it and I got very confused looks - "Why would you want the vaccine? It's designed to protect women against cervical cancer. Besides, it's not FDA approved for men." While I wouldn't mind being vaccinated against most genital warts, I'm much more interested in making sure I don't give my partner cervical cancer. While I get tested for most STDs every year, I can't be tested for HPV, as there are no FDA approved tests for men. This means that I may have it today, but there is no way for me to find out, until it is too late. Health and Body To me the biggest problem is that there is no way to know. If tomorrow an old girlfriend was to call me up and say, "I had a pap smear come back irregular," what can I do? I can't be tested. I don't even know if the strain she has is possibly cancerous. Do I tell everyone that I've dated? HPV can lie asymptomatic for years; maybe I gave the girl HPV or maybe she gave it to me. Do I call up everyone I dated before and since and suggest they get screened? Hopefully, they are already doing so, but I fear the day I get a call from someone saying, "I've got cervical cancer." I wouldn't even know if it was my fault and right now I can't even protect against it. The government won't allow me to do so. If I start to date someone new, do I tell them I may have HPV? In all likelihood, I'll have received one of the strains by the time I'm 50 or 60. Do I even worry about it? Many types of HPV strains are essentially benign. Will people assume the words "I've been sexually active" mean the same thing as "I probably have HPV" and react accordingly? If I was to tell someone that I might have HPV, would she not want to date me? For these reasons, I think it's important that guys be allowed to receive the HPV vaccine. I understand that it may not work for men and there could be risks; however, I believe the risks are low and the benefits great. Dr. Bradley Monk, an associate professor of gynecologic oncology at UC Irvine, wrote a paper in August of 2006, which recommended that men receive the vaccine as well. According to the National Cervical Cancer Coalition, male clinical trials have begun, but I haven't heard anything and one would think they wouldn't take very long. Hopefully the FDA will soon approve male use of Gardasil, so that men can be reasonably certain they aren't passing the major cancerous strains of HPV on to their loved ones.
Photo Credits: Celso Duran
Evolution of the Orgasm
Sergio Jaramillo
The pursuit of passion is as old as the human race itself. Whether hedonistic or not, it is in our nature to act out of our volition. We are beings that need relationships varying from amorous to purely social interactions. The pleasure that comes along with sex helps to guarantee the continuity of our species. Many of the things we admire in nature through art, poetry and photography come from the sexual manifestations of nature: fruits, flowers, colors and aromas are only some of the sexual features of mother nature. Shakespeare once said in his play A Winter's Tale that "art which adds to Nature is itself Nature." Evolution is the driving force of the sexual beauty we see in flowers and the exotic insects and birds that spread them (coevolution). colorful plumage, long beaks, and other unexplained structures would not be profitable if it were not for the theory of sexual selection. Energy expenditure through courtship and plumage is worth it if one seeks to achieve successful sexual reproduction and to pass one's genes to posterity. However, the sexist regard of muliebrity during Darwin's time led many scientists to wrongly conclude that women were too weak and unpredictable to exert the necessary selection pressures. These days scientists have come around to Darwin's reasonings, but what is still uncertain is the role that the orgasm plays in the sexual selection. The human orgasm, characterized by arched backs and feet, grimacing faces, marginally intentional vocalizations, jumping
Health and Body
Photo Credits: Brenda Rangel
Because of evolution we are able to enjoy the tastiness of sex through fruits- an apple's flesh is analogous to a fertilized ovary with seeds analogous to egg cells, a interesting twist on the symbology of Eden's apple. And for mankind, the orgasm is an evolutionary mechanism, one that makes sex so pleasurable and euphoric that for many it is a reward in its own right. The theory of sexual selection was first proposed by Charles Darwin; he proposed that sexual ornaments seen in many birds and species--like showy plumage--are influenced by female preference. The energy input required for the production of
blood pressure and thoughtlessness, has fascinated scientists for many years. After characterizing the physiological aspects of the human orgasm, scientists have begun to study the reasons behind the evolution of the orgasm. There must be a functionally designed reason for such a complex psychological state. The evolutionary framework of the male orgasm is simple. The physiological aspects of the male orgasm, namely the ejaculation, are accompanied by a pleasurable incentive that ensures that the male continues to seek out sexual encounters in an effort to regain that state of addictive euphoria. Although in modern
times ejaculation during sexual intercourse does not always lead to pregnancy, in the past, increased sexual encounters increased the male's possibility of passing on his genes to future generations. But what about the female orgasm? A woman can become pregnant without ever having experienced an orgasm during intercourse. Although some scientists have found that the orgasm's associated vaginal and intrauterine contractions help pull semen into the reproductive tract and make fertilization more likely, female fertility is more directly controlled by endocrine factors rather than by the presence of an orgasm during intercourse. It has been suggested that there might not be an evolutionary basis for the female orgasm, and if there was one, it would be very different then the male's. Some evolutionary biologists have suggested that the orgasm could serve as a method for selecting a male with the appropriate desired phenotypical characteristics. In other words, the female orgasm could serve as way for the woman to select the male with the best physical characteristics and thus the best genes for her child. Women enjoy sex more with a partner they are attracted to; attractiveness therefore leads to a higher chance of an orgasm. It was first shown by behavioral ecologists that many species, including humans, prefer mates with higher degrees of bilateral body symmetry. Deviation from bilateral body symmetry could indicate genetic defects, malnutrition, disease, immunological problems and even psychological problems, meaning that perception of attractiveness could be relevant for the selection of good genes rather than just a matter of aesthetics. A recent study released in the Journal of Animal Behavior by Thornhill and Gangestad concluded that those whose partners had a higher degree of bilateral symmetry enjoyed a significantly higher frequency of orgasms during sexual intercourse than did those with less symmetrical mates. If the female seeking orgasm from a symmetric mate gives her evolutionary power, studies show male chimps have compensated for this. According to an article in Science, male chimps, infamous for their sexual promiscuity, have developed features to subvert the female's influence on sexual selection. As female chimps sometimes mate with more then one male right after one another, male chimps have evolved testicles three times the size of human's and sperm that contains semenogelin, a protein that coagulates to form a plug in the vagina, keeping out potential future mate's sperm. No matter that the presence of a female orgasm could encourage one mate over the other, the chimps' quantity over quality process overrides it. Conversely, Stephen Jay Gould, a well-known Harvard evolutionary biologist, and others have argued that there is simply no known function or reason for the emergence of the female orgasm. In human fetal development, the sex-determining region of the Y gene which encodes for testis determining factor leads to the differentiation of the gonaedal cells into the testes. The absence of the testis determining factors allows the gonads to continue developing into the ovaries. According to anti-adapHealth and Body
tationist evolutionists like Gould, developmentally speaking, the clitoris can be thought of as an underdeveloped penis. It is this peculiar leftover of evolutionary development which could explain the existence of the female orgasm as an emulation of the male orgasm. It would be similar to the presence of male nipples, a body part with no known evolutionary reason of their own. Although critics compare the theory to Freud's penis envy in females, there is other scientific and physiological backing besides the already known embryological knowledge. The clitoris is known to fill up and harden with blood during sexual excitement – mirroring what happens to the penis and lending credence to the "leftover of development" theory to explain the female orgasm. Adaptationist critics of functionalist thought like Gould and others point out that the female orgasm promotes attachment between mates. Hormonal factors such as oxytocin have been suggested to promote attachment during sexual intercourse since they are secreted by both sexes during an orgasm. Oxytocin is involved in social bonding, trust and feelings of generosity, and could possibly play a strong role in promoting sexual attachment after the orgasm. These recent discoveries in the scientific study of sex have fueled a contentious debate between the theory of baggage (developmental leftover) versus the theory of adaptation (selection of symmetric mates, enhancing of hormonal attachment factors) to explain the female orgasm. While oxytocin has also been proposed as an explanation for love, love is definitely not involved in the frequency of orgasms since it is quite possible for a female to experience an orgasm without being in love. In fact, a study in Evolution and Human Behavior suggested that better looking, highly symmetrical males tend to take substantially less time before they have sex with the woman they date and have a higher rate of infidelity than less symmetrical male counterparts. The female orgasm is very complex as a psychological, evolutionary and biological phenomenon. It challenges our social assumptions about love, our ideals and perhaps male pride; it can be a complex statement on the male attributes. But the beauty of nature is in its complexity. While the evolutionary conundrum of the female orgasm might never be resolved entirely, we can be certain that the female orgasm will continue to attract attention for its elusive and mysterious nature. Gangestad, Steven W., and Randy Thornhill. 1997. "The Evolutionary Psychology of Extrapair Sex: The Role of Fluctuating Asymmetry." Evolution and Human Behavior 18: 69–88
Photo Credits: Dave Rosales
Abstinence-only Sex Education is Anything But
Dane Powell
Teaching kids not to have sex means teaching them not to have safe sex If you were a parent, would you tell your children not to use seat belts because they are not 00% effective at saving lives? Would you refuse to tell them about helmets, out of fear that it might encourage them to ride a bike? Would you restrict their access to sunscreen, and instead tell them to never go outside? Obviously the answer to all of these questions is a resounding "no!" Why then are we so afraid to teach our children about safe sex? Why is it that the government mandates the use of bicycle helmets and safety belts but spends over $300 million per year discouraging the use of condoms? I suspect that in a magazine focused on de-stigmatizing sex, other people will answer the "why" of this question much better than I can. What's of immediate concern are the profoundly negative effects this stigmatization is having on our society, effects which are being exacerbated by the American government and its abstinenceonly sex education program. The current abstinence-only program endorsed by the federal government has been in place for over a decade now, and ostensibly aims to teach: .The health, social, and moral gains from abstinence 2.That abstinence outside of marriage is the expected social standard 3.That abstinence is the only way to avoid STIs and pregnancies 4.That mutually faithful monogamous heterosexual marriage is the expected social standard for human sexual relationships 5.That any sex outside of the confines of marriage (as defined above) is considered deviant and harmful to one's self and society 6.That bearing children out of wedlock is harmful to one's self, the child, and society 7.How to resist sexual advances and urges 8.To be self-sufficient before engaging in sexual activity Editorials/Opinion
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
The merit of most of these points is superficial at best, and when taken as a whole they are clearly nothing short of propaganda on how people should be living their personal lives. I'm not going to delve into every single point- it should be glaringly obvious why most of them are wrong- but let's just consider a few. For one thing, where does this leave gay students? Under these definitions, they are expected to never engage in sexual activity or will risk dangers that heterosexual couples apparently don't have to face. Are we really this naive and narrow-minded? The list of high-risk sexual behaviors is a long one, and absolutely anyone, homosexual or not, can engage in them. In fact, because the above goals discriminate on every ground except specific sexual acts, they imply some very bizarre things. For instance, by this reasoning a heterosexual couple engaging in unprotected anal sex is at a lower risk of spreading disease than a homosexual couple having only oral sex and using dental dams. Such a claim is patently ludicrous. The whole idea of there being some concrete social standard is equally ridiculous in its simplicity. As long as we're defining social standards, why stop with sexual orientation? Being right-handed is clearly the societal norm, but we don't go around accusing people who are left-handed of being a danger to themselves and society! One tactic that these programs use to promote abstinence-until-marriage is some sort of virginity pledge or
promise. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that teens who take such pledges are slightly more likely to delay having intercourse, but are less likely to use protection when they do so. Additionally, they are more likely to engage in oral and anal sex without protection, presumably because these fall outside of a strict definition of sexual intercourse and are not perceived as affecting virginity. Most alarmingly, teens who have taken a pledge and subsequently engage in sexual activity are very likely to lie about having done so. This points to a major problem with pledges- they set up an impenetrable barrier to communication about sexual health. No teen wants to admit to failing to live up to what they perceive to be society's expectations of abstinence. As such a pledging teen will be much more likely to conceal their sexual activity from their parents. If anything does go wrong, he or she will be afraid to ask for help. This is assuming, of course, that they can recognize that something has gone wrong in the first place, since they haven't been taught how to responsibly use protection, know how it can fail, or monitor the health of their own bodies. All of this leads to a bigger point- that the vast majority of people will have multiple sex partners during their lives, and if they are not taught safer sex practices they are extremely likely to hurt themselves or someone else. This is not to mention the profound psychological effects they will face from engaging in behavior that they have been conditioned to believe is "deviant" or "dirty." Such an effect is already clearly present in our society, which allows scenes of unimaginable brutality on network television but balks at the sight of a nipple. The biggest shortfall of abstinence-only sex education is that it fails to acknowledge that as humans and as mammals, sex is in our very nature, to almost the same extent as eating or breathing. Sure, these things can be abused- no one denies that obesity is one of the biggest issues facing our youth. But we don't just tell our children to stop eating or eat less – we tell them to eat responsibly! The statistics already show that by teaching children to avoid sex altogether instead of using safe practices, we are dramatically increasing the rates of teen STIs and pregnancies! In fact, they also show that comprehensive sex education programs are better than abstinence-only programs at delaying sexual initiation, decreasing the number of sexual partners and increasing the use of adequate protection against pregnancy and STIs. The reason for many of these shortcomings is that any school receiving federal funding for sex education is not allowed to even mention condoms, except in terms of failure rates. In fact, the program redefines the very word "contraception" as something being characterized by high failure rates. As such, abstinence is actually forbidden from being referred to as a method of "contraception," since it is technically perfect. However, the fact is that abstinence is a form of contraception just like any other, and one with an alarmingly high failure rate at that. Statistics show that nearly 90% of teens who take some form of 52
abstinence pledge will still engage in sex before marriage, and will be less likely to use protection when they do so. By contrast, the actual-use failure rates for condoms and birth control pills are 4% and 5%, respectively. If proper condom and birth control use were taught in schools instead of abstinence, these rates could potentially drop to 3% and 0.%! Unfortunately, by imposing an abstinence-only sex education program the government is actually bolstering the statistics against the use of condoms by ensuring that people aren't properly educated on how to use them. This isn't the only way that they are "boosting" the statistics, however; approximately 90% of the programs approved by the government actively lie about them, making outrageous claims that either misrepresent or flat-out falsify the data. For instance, one program claims that condoms fail to prevent the transmission of HIV 39% of the time they are used. Another one claims that sexual intercourse results in pregnancy one out of seven times when condoms are used (this is actually higher than the success rate for couples trying to get pregnant!) Yet another presented for review to the Texas Board of Education claims that "a good way a teen-ager can prevent a sexually transmitted disease is to get plenty of rest so he or she can have a clear head about sex and choose abstinence." This statement doesn't even make common sense; if anything is a cause for low sex drive it's fatigue and exhaustion! Forcing such ridiculous claims on our children in the hopes that it will somehow turn them "straight and abstinent" can't be considered anything short of government propaganda. All of this is not to say that we shouldn't be promoting abstinence; obviously, when used correctly it is the only form of contraception with a 00% success rate, and there are all sorts of reasons to pursue it besides simply as a means of birth control. However, these reasons should be presented on their own merits, and not bolstered by feeble and narrow-minded attempts at misinformation and indoctrination. So how can you make a difference? The truth is that change has to start at the individual level. Bring this up with your friends, host a debate at your college, write about it on your blog, write your legislators, school board, governor, school principals- do whatever it takes to simply start a dialog! Vote. Local and congressional elections may not seem as glamorous or exciting as presidential ones, but they are critical to sparking a change, since this is where the decisions on what programs to offer are made. Many health centers sponsor comprehensive sex education at local schools – consider donating to these programs or becoming a volunteer or teacher yourself. If nothing else, know and use the facts about abstinence-only education and contraceptive use, and be able to use them when confronted with misinformation and fear tactics. Whatever you do, don't stoop to using these same tactics; stay rational, be informed, and be open.
Sex Education in Tennessee
Margaret McKeehan
The first time I can recall knowing about sex was in second grade. Someone whispered the word sex while I stood in line to leave the classroom. We giggled. I'm not sure I knew what it meant, but I knew it was taboo. Later that year one of my friends was given detention for kissing someone under the art room table. I didn't understand the punishment; I didn't understand that kissing was bad. In fourth grade I had my first sex ed course, if that is the appropriate designation. Much like the course I would go through during the next year, its primary focus was puberty, not sex. Teachers were willing to answer questions about sex, but most of our questions were unrelated. One girl asked what would happen if someone gave birth while going to the bathroom. Would the baby drown in the toilet? Perhaps my biggest sexual education of elementary school was on the bus in fourth grade. One of my friends had seen a porno. He whispered, "I actually saw the guy put his thing inside her." Wait. That is what sex is? Finally informed, I would giggle even more when it was mentioned- I was nine. By the time I reached middle school hormones had hit and I had real questions to ask, but I didn't ask any of them. The class was co-ed and traditionally composed of more goofing off than education. It was also my first encounter with scare tactics. The context of these tactics is important. I attended an inner-city school where most of the students lived in the projects. Pregnancy in middle school was fairly common. My high school, although more than twice the size of my middle school, had fewer pregnant students. At both schools we had the same abstinence-only speaker, known ironically as "the sex guy." The class made it clear how conservative his stance was. We had practice babies to take home for a few days that cried and needed to be fed by a key every three hours or so. One girl had been so irritated by it that she put it in toaster, or so the rumor goes. We tried on pregnancy suits and were told the costs of raising a child. We were shown uncensored footage of childbirth. Most of our time was spent discussing STDs. Although some demonstrations were reasonable, several were just scare tactics. One of the more reasonable demonstrations began with every-
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
Photo Credits: Taylor Johnson
one being given a cup of clear liquid. Two students had cups with a clear dye that represented an STD- a person could look healthy but harbor a disease. We were then instructed to exchange part of the contents of our cup with three other people in the class. After we had done so they dropped an indicator into our cups to reveal the dye was now in many students' cups; a large portion of the class had an STD. In another example we were shown a wheel, like the kind you can win prizes off of at fairs, except we spun for different types of STDs. The chances of escaping the STDs with one spin were very slim. One tactic I experienced was particularly disturbing to me, an example I initially thought persuasive. The instructor offered two chocolate bars. One contained laxatives and the other was a regular chocolate bar. We were offered both, but not told which was which. When we declined, we were told sexual partners are like chocolate bars- the risk isn't worth the pleasure. These implications are unsettling- sexual partners are presented as untrustworthy and as deceitful as a chocolate bar. In retrospect, it was an incredibly unfair way of presenting sex. My middle school sex-ed class left me with one distinct impression: sex is painful. Nothing depicted it positively. My hormones were raging, but the actual idea of sex was repulsive and frightening. Now that I feared sex and anything close to it there was only one last step in this sexual education course- abstinence commitment. It was a public school, so they couldn't justify saving sex for marriage on religious grounds. Instead, they justified it with social custom. A person is more valuable to their spouse if they wait until marriage. Virginity is a gift. Waiting is a gift. They split us up by gender and asked the guys if they would want to marry a virgin, and supposedly, they all said yes. This was particularly interesting because there was a sexually active couple in my class. The girl was devastated. They actually told her that her boyfriend probably didn't want to marry her because he was having sex with her. But the real topper for this class was signing a promise- a promise for a chicken sandwich. Oh yes. Sign this paper saying you'll wait until marriage and you can get a free sandwich from Chick-fil-A. I don't mean to state the obvious, but nothing could devalue a person more than selling his/ her virginity for a chicken sandwich. Still, even if this example is extreme, there is something genuinely insulting about saving sex because of social standards. When to have sex should be a decision we think is important enough that we an-
swer it for ourselves. And I don't care what that room full of high school boys said. If someone looks at me and sees "virgin" or "slut," I could never consider them a friend, much less a romantic partner. For me, the most upsetting aspect of my public school sex ed class was its emphasis on waiting until marriage. The other sex ed class I took in middle school was much more open-minded. We talked about sex outside of marriage and we put condoms on bananas. There were no scare tactics, no implications of being devalued by sex. My minister led the class. It's fair to do a double take here. I grew up in the Bible belt, a place notorious for being socially conservative. A neighboring county actually tried to legislate against homosexuals living within their jurisdiction. Certainly a minister with a box of condoms standing in front of middle school kids at a Presbyterian church is taboo. For me, nothing could speak more against the Bible belt stereotype. It isn't fair to assume every church is teaching the same thing, that the churches are the roots of this sex ed phenomenon. I would argue that the condemnation of sex is much harder to trace. Something powerful worked the system to make abstinence-only education the priority and it is incredibly self-sustaining. Making sex a taboo topic keeps children from finding reliable information outside of the classroom. This early negative perception of sex is almost impossible to escape from. How is a society to overcome false information when it is the only information that it trusts? We need to start having another discussion. We need alternatively taught sexual education, even if we have to ask our ministers to do it. We need to talk about sex outside of the classroom. Most importantly, we need to treat sex fairly.
On Women and Assertiveness in Dating
Misha Teplitskiy
I believe there is a cultural problem. It's a problem for progressive guys like me, not for everybody. But before we get into all that, let's define some terms. We'll take "progressive" to mean those men and women who strive to rid their lives of gender roles, whereas "traditional" people embrace gender roles. Gender roles are the implicit roles you'll find in books Victorya Rogers' The Automatic 2nd Date: "You, my dear, don't chase men ... you are compelling them to chase you ... Men want to do the chasing, because they are natural-born hunters." These gender roles refer to the assertive man who woos the coy woman whose main task in the budding relationship is to hold out on sex as long as possible. The problem: progressive women are not proactive enough in dating situations and even when imagining their ideal woman, they do not give her the same level of assertiveness that the assertive male possesses, the amount required for truly egalitarian dating. Disagree? Then tell me what you make of Shauna in the excerpt below. In season four, episode eleven of Family Guy, Brian goes to a PTA meeting. He sees a black woman sit down in a central chair in the only unoccupied row. She keeps her eyes straight ahead, anticipating the principal's upcoming talk. Brian nervously approaches. Brian: Wow, that's a, that's a lovely color. Uh, your dress! Your dress . . . the color of your dr . . . You're very pretty. Woman: I'm the th grade history teacher, Ms. Parks. Brian: Oh, like Rosa Parks. Or! or someone white . . . named Parks. Parks: [Laughter] Nothing cuter than a nervous white dog. The camera pans to Brian, gloating in the compliment and then to Parks, who gives Brian "the eye." Brian: Well, uh, I'm Brian and, uh, gosh, if I'm not being too forward, it's lovely to meet you Ms. Parks. Parks: Oh, please! Call me Shauna. Auspicious music plays in the background as the camera fades out. There will be a date. Joking aside, the situation above appears improbable to both the average guy and girl. The average girl knows that women do not usually behave like this, not off the bat anyway. She might think, "Shauna's so forward, even calling Brian cute to his face!" The average guy vicariously enjoys Brian's good fortune. His only experience with anything close to this, especially if he's at Rice, was that inebriated party girl who yelled "You're hot!" in his general direction as her friends pulled her away. This scenario disappoints me because people view Shauna's assertiveness as the ideal. Shauna needs no improvement. Editorials/Opinion But why should we admire her for doing nothing but unambiguously reciprocating an advance? After all, Shauna did not enter the venue and approach the most appealing male. No, that was Brian's deed. She didn't initiate any behavior involving a modicum of risk. She didn't up the ante once the mating dance began. No, that's Brian again. She just reciprocated an advance. The readiness with which she accepts Brian's advances suggests that Shauna is single-and-looking. A progressive female may object here that perhaps Shauna was not thinking about finding a date and therefore had no desire to initiate anything. Possibly. But do single-and-looking people only remember the fact that they are single-and-looking when approached by an attractive mate? Or does the thought arise earlier; say when they simply see an attractive person? I believe most people fall in the latter category. Therefore, chances are Shauna saw Brian and found him attractive, but, being a female, waited for him to make the move. There is little that's admirable about Shauna in my eyes. With the problem established, let's consider two consequences. For one, having to make nearly all the moves your entire life – being a male – is annoying. Secondly, and this may be less obvious, consistently making first moves makes it difficult for some men to treat women as equals. First moves, be it kissing or simply starting a conversation, can be nerve-racking. Thus, the progressive man who successfully completes a first move treats it as an accomplishment and a source of pride. He knows the personality characteristics required for the feat and admires them in other people. This man is also struck by the fact that the so called progressive recipient of his attention will verbally praise egalitarianism in dating, will go Dutch, but then like our beloved Shauna, will wait for him to make nearly all the substantial moves. At least in some cases, progressive women also desire dates or sex, but defer to the man to affect these goals. The man naturally concludes that women's systematic failure in taking action to achieve the common goals is due to a deficiency (e.g. insufficient self-esteem) in her ability to apply assertiveness, an attribute which he values and prides himself upon. It is in this way that a failure to take charge in early dating, a fairly limited part of life, can spill over and tempt a man to decrease his overall respect for a woman. A truly assertive woman may be scary, because men are so unaccustomed to her. She is scary in the same way skydiving would be scary. However, both are exciting. Furthermore, doing things like asking for the guy's phone number, something that may feel to a woman like jumping out of a plane, may be required if she wants full respect from a progressive, assertive guy. 55
Photo Credits: Rachel Solnick
Beach at Evening
An escaping sky falls down on pebbles, Underneath, my feet caught in the waves, Pulling like moist gravity, like memories. The sound of your voice, rising and falling, A dull trance, pulling me in, The hazel of your eyes, the scent of sunscreen on your skin, like laughter. Curves of your skin, Fond, mushy sand, A soft undertow. The dull drone of falling streams, Salty, tears pulsing on breathing flesh A heart beating. I remember, the taste of salt in your mouth, A noxious contagion That I loved so much. I remember, Being caught in the undertow Of the riptide.
Courtney Ng
The hook was floating on the surface of the water, teasing me in the sway of translucent waves, all perilous and predictable, its shadow so vivid yet, I imagined, invisible. The bitterness came before the sharpness of metal bursting through my flesh. I shuddered but you held me still murmured words of sweet regret. But were you truly sorry? I couldn't feel it in your fingertips, as you ran them along my shiny scales and let me believe that, for a moment, I could swim apart from the school, that freedom was dispensable as long as you held me in captivity. And even though I found the air thin while within your grasp, I did not count on being thrown back into salty depths so fast. I did not foresee drowning in the desire to be needed. I did not fathom that I could ever miss being owned, that the ocean could ever feel too vast to call home. 57
Photo Credits: (Top)Taylor Johnson (Bottom) Simon Bucknell
Anastasia Harris
Sliding up my thigh, past my navel and circling around my breasts Is what you have now done since I first became undressed You slipped silently behind me and came right back around Melting all of me slowly to the ground You have never made love like this to me before But this new technique I'm sure I can come to adore You touch me, and I immediately begin to freeze Unbeknownst to you all of the places you please Your light presence which then loomed over my body Is now everywhere and inhibits my body This love is so hot and yet so cold As our bodies into one we lavishly mold You captivate my first moments with one quick stare And this chilling power you have exudes from you everywhere From your mind, your body, your words, your soul And with your frozen cubes you can always fill my bowl How do you have this incredible effect on me? Sweet, manipulative, cooling and icy The way you change into so many shapes and forms Always turning my love into liquid, never leaving me scorned All of me you envelop share and entice And yes, it's true, you are my ice.
Photo Credits: Ted Mebane
Haley Richardson
Pero por mas que intento, no me contento Porque aunque perdí la esperanza, no perdí el recuerdo. Y ni con los años aprendo... Quitándole la pila al reloj, nunca mataras al tiempo.
Photo Credits: Amanda Hu
you call me in and sh!— ut the door call me with eyes to Come Close lips unlocked find treasures to take! but my jaw begins to ache. need air thu-heat-in-uh-beat rises and i strip you downuparound shirt stuck.—there! as you manly sweep through robes and clothes and still fumble with my bra. beside you in nuded vulnerable i am morethanme Woman proud and blushing you fill me anxiouspassion, lushrush sh u dd er in g yes! in a smelly stew of pro— finding love silent awkward descends —what to say next.— interuppted by a kiss this our quietaria divinehumble mixture of poetry! and unpoetry. union
Mil y Un Maneras de Olvidarte
Luis Zuleta
He intentado mil y un maneras de olvidarte Borré tus fotos de mis albums, tus canciones de mis compactos Ya tiré tus cartas y tus notas. Me deshice de todas tus cosas. Saqué de vacaciones todas tus mentiras, y me reí de nuestras tonterías. Ya doné todas tus camisas. Y entregué todas las sonrisas que te robé cuando no estabas mirando. Reciclé nuestras miradas y puse en venta mi pecho, que fue tu almohada. Me sacudí tus besos y barrí las cenizas de lo que fue aquel fuego. Le cambié a mi tele la estación de tu mirada y a mi radio la frecuencia de tu voz Ya no sé que falta, pero sé que es poco. Solo me quede con la sabiduría de admitir cuando me equivoco.
Hope for the Hollow Woman
Haley Richardson
March into the room—yes, the dreaded dressing room where goodness knows what mirage of Goya monsters or Munch cadavers, or worse: Rubenesque women—will Appear to you. Swallow hard and think of him: it's for him, it's for him the blackwing weaved Panties (the ugly word!) and the chimerical negligee, the body terror-anxious at the thought. Take that prison walk. Make that sudden about face and now the booming bolt locks in your chamber. All other beings become dead to you save that one Unbeing, that Demonreflection Quivering menacingly. Wish: that overheard song they're playing, that manufactured squeak, would just go away. Turn around. Disrobe— Quickly now! Ok. Good. We're almost done. Now…slip the insubstantial thing on, this Fear in a handful of chiffon Steal a full, stabilizing breath and Turn around. Look. Behold! the phantasmagoric UnYou clad in an ebony clinging blob, frills and lace tumbling here and there. The parts free of that cloth's curse are recklessly abandoned to exposure and these parts are Everywhere. See? She Shakes her gory flesh at you. Think: that this image will haunt you to the End of your body's days. Don't return Her gaze. I wonder why no one else is dancing? 60 Poems Take it off! Just…please. Take it off. With eyes sternly shut, throw the ghostly mantle in a corner—rumpled—but the ghost lingers. Cry, maybe a little, and think of him maybe a lot and hear the cell's wall echo your— Wait—what's that song? That chord so familiar, that beat so full of assertion. And now…the voice, above it all, Singing the Unwavering Self. Think: you know You think you I think I think I know this song! I do! And then that guitar strumming me, and that bass thumbing me, I can't help but dance. I'm not trying anyone or anything more on. Enough! My song is a perfect size. In my open revelry, I catch a glimpse of that square reflecting pool with its harrowing sentinel but she's gone. Vanished. In her place, I see— I can't believe what I see! —I see a woman wild and radiant, in nude triumph. Beautiful. Now I hear some faint sounds, familiar sounds, Some shuffling, some locking, some sighing. So there are others! Each shut in her own cell Trying to please her own him With her own grotesque mantles Each confronting her own ghostly image. Each with her own glorious body Tucked away deep in the back of Her own eyes. I stop my dance. I stop and listen. And I wonder…
Exceptions and Mapmaking
Ann Wang
Exceptions You who Forked grapes Used the wrong spoon Ate the garnish Dribbled soup Chewed while laughing Licked your fingers Picked your teeth with your nails Stained your blouse You whom I began to miss-Satin sheet slipping off a round shoulder A smooth sudden brightness in the soft blue light of Sunday morning Dark bruise on the nape-At the moment of your rising
Mapmaking Sunday morning we decided We'd share our birthmarks and their myths. Your mother told you the one on your wrist meant you were destined to write And my mother told me the one on my thigh meant I was destined to run But you can't write to save your life and I can't run to save mine. I suggested we move on to scars.
Photo Credits: (Top) Brenda Rangel (Bottom) Ryan Botts
You told me about the time you boxed that boy on the playground, and won and the time you wrecked your car and lost a little of your invincibility Having broken no bones I composed heroic stories for you about Risks taken and rewarded But you knew I was lying and told me so. I showed my resentment by drawing my nails across your back and holding you too close when we slept again. Poems 6
Courtney Ng
Bodies aligned Two ropes Intertwined Her leg searches for his beneath a comforter, marshmallow-thick patterned by darkness and dim, honeyed light seeping in through venetian blinds, like sand dunes, shifting with the passage of time: black, yellow, black, yel-Lowers her leg, Hooks it around his, Forms a helix of limbs. He runs his fingers along the shadowed Contours of her face: The sharp bone of her jaw The labyrinth of cartilage lining the inside of her ear tunneling inwards to the point where all light disappears and there are only the whispers only the waves of sound She can hear. He brushes the waterfall of her softly curled hair splayed across the pillow. And in a strip of the sand dunes marked by yellow light, sees the ends of the hairs glowing, splitting apart, branching into many thin shreds from one splintering like the frayed ends Of two ropes pulled too tight.
Photo Credits: Brenda Rangel
Dancing Zoetrope
Rachel Solnick
Flashed faces between erected shadows, spinning, flung through the dance with the momentum of falling constellations. Above, psychedelic lights smash against the ceiling and fly across the walls echoing with a cello's cry. I find him, one against the movement, stationary The strobe catches his face, glimmers of pale midnight flick backward through the flip-book, zoetrope of his decline. WHO? dark YOU dark YES! dark PLEASE dark DON'T Eyes plow through the crowd, toward his apparition. WHY? dark NO dark AWAY dark STOP dark STop stop? Press his body to mine, fingers entwine, dissolved into automatons for beats, pulsating through chests. Reasons and mind melt in the seat of muscle memory. His body speaks to me. "What are you doing?" Lost in his twirling poetry, yield gracefully in a back lunge, pivot with precision under the command that beckons from his every tensed muscle, each step a punctuation pulled taunt. " This is all I ever wanted." I whisper a lie into the ear, So close that I can feel its betrayal Breathing back from his hot skin. A dip he leans forward, lets his breath caress my neck. Poems
Stops time. On his leash, captured by a memory of exhaled longing. Then: lift, up, spin. Flung back to an axis of stifled desire. A swirl of faces on the compass rose, merge a dizzying dread of never. Lurch to a stop. Halted by realization, this compass was without a pole. Orchestra exhales the end of the tanda. And between the buzzing pairs, the last glimpse of his back disappears. The room slowly disbands looses the flowing alleyways, the synchronized push and I stand there amongst the dispersing crowd.
Inspired by the intimacy and power of the postcards featured in Frank Warren's PostSecret books , Open Magazine invited Rice undergraduates to fill out postcards with their artwork, private thoughts and confessions about sex, relationships, love, or whatever they wanted to share with the world. Submissions ranged from humorous to unsettling, foreign to familiar, but all remind us that beneath our individual public selves, we share a common humanity. If you would like to submit a secret for next year's issue, please fill out a post card and address it to: Open Magazine 6340 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005 Also included in this section are several quotes from the February discussion topic, "When is it appropriate to have sex?" of the online community forum, BigTalk. Launched in 2007 by two Rice students, BigTalk features a question each month to spark more meaningful conversations on topics such as religion, social issues, and politics. To find out more and join the discussion, go to: http://betweenaduck.com/
A culture of abstinence, the common answer, carries risks as well, chief among them being the stigma against sex education that hinders young people's abilities to make an informed decision. --Andrea Leyton-Mange
I don't think that accepting the possibility of parenthood is a necessary prerequisite to making responsible decisions about when to have sex. -bubblexw
I personally think G*d made us kinky. I hear often about preachers saying "God is watching you." Well sure, G*d likely is. But it's not the use of an anal dildo or porn or unmarried sex that incurs holy wrath.- Ani Fox
I lost my virginity on my 8th birthday. It was a present to myself,and I happened to be hooking up with a marvelously casual, easygoing,and experienced partner at the time. He waited up for me while myfriends threw me a last-minute birthday party, and I spent exactly 23 minutes of my legal-voter status as a virgin. -Julia Bursten 65
Given the incredibly long history of contraceptive practices and superstitions, It seems pretty clear to me that procreation is the antithesis of what most people desire from sexual relations. -bubblexw In answering the question "When is it appropriate to have sex?" many of us would want to say "whenever were horny, thank you". However doctors, parents, sociologists, psychologists and court judges would argue with that answer...sexuality, like eating requires understanding and balance to be able to be enjoyed and be healthy. .- Nashwan Hamza
The body can never truly be separated from the soul. -Sarah Wulf 66
If you can glorify God in song then you can glorify God in sex. -Jordan Myska Allen
Spiritually, sex ends innocence in the same way reading books, stealing and beating your father at arm wrestling end it: experience transforms the psyche and it cannot be undone, unlearned or unremembered. -Ani Fox
If someone succeeds in complete abstinence from any sexual activity until marriage, they may be faced with other problems. One of these is the risk of discovering that they are sexually incompatible with their spouse. -Andrea Leyton-Mange