feminist blogs

The headlines out of the American Sociological Association’s Atlanta meeting this past week have been catchy: Love makes teen sex less academically harmful, study says; Teen sex not always bad for school performance; Sex in romantic relationships is harmless. There’s a nice summary of the conflict between social scientists and journalists in this Oliver Wang piece in the Atlantic.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before reading this very important discussion from Heather Corinna at Scarleteen. I might have written a very different piece had I read it first! Please do read Heather’s excellent analysis, based on having read the actual study quite carefully.

What the study showed, of course, is that encouraging teens to delay sexual activity in order to boost academic performance isn’t necessarily the most helpful strategy adults can take. The study did indeed find that sex within relationships did not have a deleterious effect on adolescent grades, but casual sex sometimes did. From the AP summary:

Teens in serious relationships did not differ from their abstinent counterparts in terms of their grade-point average, how attached they are to school or college expectations. They were also not more likely to have problems in school, be suspended or absent. (But) compared with virgins, teens who have casual sex had lower GPAs, cared less about school and experienced more problems in school. For example, female teens who have flings had GPAs that were 0.16 points lower than abstinent teens. Male teens who have casual sex had GPAs that were 0.30 points lower than those who do not have sex. Teens who “hook up” also were at greater risk of being suspended or expelled and had lower odds of expecting to go to college.

First off, in my experience (a couple of decades worth of work with high school and college students), students who are high-achieving tend to be the ones most likely to be dishonest (or at least, less than entirely forthcoming) about their sexual behavior. Teens are notoriously sensitive to reputation and image. One negative stigma that I’ve often seen teens associate with casual sex is that kids who do engage in sexual activity outside committed relationships lack ambition or seriousness. Remember the tremendous power of the “one mistake can ruin your life” narrative, particularly in the lives of adolescent girls. As a result, teens tend to associate casual sex with recklessness and the absence of motivation. Teens, especially young women, who are sexually active outside of committed relationships and are also intellectually serious and highly motivated tend to feel tremendous pressure (often self-imposed) to be quiet about that aspect of their lives. In the hyper-competitive world in which many bright adolescents live these days, someone who has casual sex isn’t necessarily immoral, but foolish. And for a certain kind of highly ambitious young woman who has been raised to be risk-averse, being called “reckless” or “frivolous” or “unthinking” has almost the same power to wound as “slut.” In other words, who is willing to admit to casual sex may well be tied not only to class and cultural background, but to important perceptions about one’s seriousness. I suspect some hefty underreporting. (more…)

What is the right size for a clitoris? Pharyngula (2010-06-30):

I don't know. They seem to come in a range of sizes; when they're as large as a small male penis, I suppose it might be unexpected, perhaps a little confusing, perhaps a little ambiguous to people intolerant of the idea that the human form is found in intermediate shapes....

Dr. Dix Poppas has attracted special notoriety for his sexually abusive experiments on the girls that he sexually mutilates. Of course, the more basic issue here is the non-consensual surgical sexual mutilation forced on girls by doctors and anxious parents, in the name of patriarchal Genital Correctness exercised at the point of a scalpel. Which is alarmingly common, and a far wider problem than the special case of Dr. Dix Poppas. There's every reason to say something about the special awfulness of this child rapist in scrubs; but the notion that mutilating girls' clitorises for seeming "too big" (for what purpose?) to adult observers could ever possibly be ethical medicine -- rather than what it is, pointless medical torture in the service of carving patriarchy into a girl's skin and flesh.

There’s been much talk this week about the adventures of Abby Sunderland, the Southern California 16 year-old whose attempt to sail solo around the world ended when her boat lost its mast in the Indian Ocean last Thursday. For several hours, there was fear — much of it hyped by the media — that Abby was “lost at sea”. The story is on its way to a happy ending, as Abby is now on a fishing boat headed for Madagascar, and, eventually, home to her family.

The debate, of course, is whether her parents ought to have allowed her to make this journey. (Her brother had undertaken a similar adventure a few years ago when he was just a little bit older than Abby.) That Abby had the technical skill to handle her boat is not in question; what befell her could easily have befallen an experienced sailor thrice her age. But lots of teenagers have the capacities of adults, but are still denied all the freedoms of adulthood. We all know 15 year-olds who know more about politics than their parents, but we don’t let 15 year-olds vote. We know, certainly, that plenty of 17 year-olds are capable of making responsible decisions about alcohol — and that plenty of 27 year-olds aren’t.

It’s not news that our lines of demarcation that separate children from adults are somewhat arbitrary. Whether we draw those lines at 16 (Austrians can vote at that age, which appalls many Americans; Americans can drive at that age, which appalls many Europeans) or 21 (a ridiculously late drinking age in the eyes of many around the world), any sensible person recognizes that some of those beneath the line are capable of handling the responsibilities that at least of some of those above that line are not.

Sensible people, however, recognize that society must draw lines somewhere. (This debate is as old as classical Athens, if not older.) We can’t test every young person to see if they are “ready” to vote, or to drink, or to have sex, in quite the same way that we issue driver’s licenses. And even with driver’s licenses, while turning 16 doesn’t automatically grant the right to have a license (the test must be passed), being under 16 automatically bars a young person from be licensed.

These lines are drawn based upon many things: history, tradition, collective assumptions about risk and maturity. These lines shift based on social trends and evolving beliefs about young people, rights, and responsibility. In the Vietnam era, a growing sense that it was unjust to send 18 year-olds off to die in wars while not permitting them to vote led to the passage of the 26th Amendment; a decade later, anxiety about other risks led to a Reagan-era mandate to raise the national drinking age from 18 to 21. These shifts don’t always make sense; they lead to the obvious silliness that a young soldier can operate a machine gun in combat but can’t buy a beer. That kind of arbitrariness grates. But the alternative to arbitrary line-drawing is far more grating: a kind of intellectual or maturational means testing that would be subject to abuse and overt politicization in a hearbeat.

We have no laws regarding the minimum age to operate sailboats on the high seas. (They are unlikely to come, as they would require an international convention that would end up banning teens from working in the fishing industry.) Abby’s parents broke no laws, but in the minds of many, they broke an unwritten rule about the diligence parents ought to show in protecting their children from harm. As a youth leader and a father, I’m emotionally conflicted about that charge. On the one hand, I can’t imagine being comfortable sending my own child off around the world on a sailboat by herself. But if I’m honest, I know full well that protectiveness won’t vanish when my Heloise turns 18; I’d worry just as much if she were 18 as if she were a few months younger. Lines of demarcation don’t have much effect on the heart. (more…)

In their usual attempt at disguising religious fundamentalist distortions as legitimate research, the American College of Pediatricians have now distorted the work of University of Minnesota Professor, Greg Remafedi. The ACP has sent over 14,000 emails to superintendents across the United States, claiming that Remafedi’s research, among others, proves their argument that gay and lesbian youth deserve zero resources and/or support in their struggle to come out. The email references Remafedi’s 1992 study, claiming that it proves gay teens are simply “confused.” According to Professor Remafedi, on the other hand, the study in no-way-shape-or-form proves or validates this homophobic assumption.

The ACP argues that schools shouldn’t support gay teens because they’re probably just confused. “Most adolescents who experience same-sex attraction…no longer experience such attractions at age 25,” the letter says, citing a 1992 study by Remafedi.

Except that’s not what Remafedi’s research suggested at all. His work showed that kids who are confused about their sexuality eventually sort it out—meaning many of them accept being gay.

“What was so troubling was that these were fellow doctors, fellow pediatricians,” Remafedi says. “They knew better, and they have the same ethical responsibilities to their patients that I do, but they deliberately distorted my research for malicious purposes.”

The ACP also made the claim that Professor Remafedi’s research proves that the longer you can keep adolescent children from identifying as gay, the less likely they are to commit suicide. This is also a complete distortion of his research. What the study actually revealed is that kids who come out at a younger age are more likely to kill themselves because they are forced to live in isolation and fear. To any rational person this would seem to indicate that more support and resources are necessary. For right wing religious nut-jobs, on the other hand, this means we should provide less support for LGBT youth.

Unfortunately, this is no isolated incident either. In fact, religious organizations in the United States have made it a routine to fabricate and distort medical, scientific, and academic research in order to justify their flawed and discriminatory belief systems. The organization Truth Wins Out has put together a laundry list of physicians, professors, and researchers who have complained about religious organizations distorting their work on LGBT issues. Not surprisingly, the list is pretty extensive. Some examples include

University of Utah professor Lisa Diamond, who complained that NARTH (the National Association of Research and Therapy of Homosexuality), a group that also shares board members with the ACPED, distorted her research on sexual orientation.

Dr. Carol Gilligan, Professor of Education and Law at New York University, who complained that former Focus on the Family head James Dobson misrepresented her research to attack LGBT families.

Dr. Kyle Pruett, Ph.D., a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, who has also complained that Focus on the Family distorted his work.

Dr. Robert Spitzer, Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University, who has consistently complained that religious right groups distorted his study to claim that the LGBT orientation is easily changeable.

Judith Stacey, Professor of Sociology at New York University, who has had to, on more than one occasion, cry foul over how religious right groups distorted her work on LGBT families.

I think this is a pretty clear example of why so-called “research” and “evidence” can’t be blindly accepted at face value. Scientific and academic research is never value-free and objective. It is always already informed by a particular perspective and interest. The American College of Pediatricians, for example, was formed in response to the American Association of Pediatricians decision to endorse same-sex adoption. The ACP will go to any unethical lengths in order to validate their heterosexual fantasy of a world without gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer individuals.

Driving to school on Monday morning, I passed a billboard on Robertson Boulevard. Part of the immensely tiresome “Most Interesting Man in the World” campaign for Dos Equis, a Mexican beer, the slogan on this particular sign read “The Bulk of Your Life Should Be Off the Record.”

I’ve loathed some of the Dos Equis slogans. The worst one so far features an image of the hirsute interesting man and the words “He wouldn’t be afraid to show his feminine side, if he had one.” My favorite: “At museums he’s allowed to touch the art.” Clearly designed to appeal to young men (though one suspects the boys most easily amused by this sophomoric humor are under legal drinking age in the USA), the Dos Equis campaign is typical of much modern advertising: it plays on young men’s longing for reliable, hyper-masculine father figures. The Most Interesting Man in the World dispenses something even more valuable than tips for how to get rich or get laid: he offers certainty about what it means to be a man. He is notable for a complete absence of self-doubt. Given that so many young men are crippled by the absence of mentors and a nearly paralyzing degree of uncertainty about their lives and their roles, the appeal of this sort of advertising is obvious.

But while most of the advice in the Dos Equis campaign is silly and puerile rather than truly misogynist, the suggestion that the bulk of one’s life should be off the record infuriated me.

At the very heart of what it means to be an adult — for those of you who like to gender everything, a man rather than a boy, a woman rather than a girl — is the commitment to matching one’s language and one’s life. To be a grown-up means to live with integrity; integrity literally means “wholeness” or “congruence.” Put another way, an adult lives his or her life as if they are always on the record, with no disconnect between public pronouncements and private practices.

This commitment to congruence doesn’t mean one speaks to toddlers the way one speaks to one’s lovers. It doesn’t mean one doesn’t save some behaviors for behind closed doors. To put it another way, the rest of the world doesn’t get to know what my wife and I do in the bedroom. The point is, if they were to find out or stumble in, they would see that how we connect intimately and privately is radically compatible with the public aspects of our lives.

The world needs grown-ups. And grown-ups know the shabbiness and the heartbreak of a life lived in compartments. They know that young people — and all of us, really — need role models whose words and actions match. And whether in the public eye or not, they’re always on the record.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from my comments as a response to those who think I’m taking this much too seriously:

As we all know, irony gets lost in translation (especially with American adolescents, who tend — despite their affected sophistication — to live in an irony-free zone). Think about the old Miller Light “Man Law” ads; the boys I knew in youth group adored them, quoted them, and, despite their awareness that the commercials were tongue-in-cheek,tended to take them very seriously.

All advertising is didactic. It teaches something, even as it flatters the audience into believing that they are in on the joke. That’s the thing about ads like this: they aren’t ironic. They appear to be; Dos Equis may want an urban educated audience to think “Hah, look at how we’re playing around with the problem of contemporary masculinity in a hyperbolic way”, but they know damn well that a substantial percentage of folks out there aren’t going to be able to do that kind of rapid meta-analysis. Particularly teens, who are always the target of alcohol ads, as they are the ones whose brand loyalties have yet to be firmly established.

And though I was never much of a beer drinker in my day, I drank a lot of Dos Equis in college. It was, for a long time, my favorite beer.

Rachel, who blogs at Musings of an Inappropriate Woman, poses this question from her 16 year-old self: how do I stop creepy old men from hitting on me? Rachel writes of a recent encounter with her favorite advice columnist, Melissa Hoyer:

Me: “OMG, I loved you column! When I was 16, I was going to write in to asking for advice. I wanted to know how I could dress differently to stop attracting creepy old men and start attracting guys my own age instead.”

Melissa Hoyer: “Er, I don’t think I would have been able to help you with that one.”

Rachel explains:

At the time, I had come to the conclusion that the reason I was attracting more attention from men who were 18 or 20+, right through to 40 or so, than guys my own age (the ones I was actually interested in) was because I dressed in manner that was too “adult”. I wanted to write to Hoyer because I was searching for a way to reconcile my desire to dress in clothes that I felt an aesthetic affinity with, with my desire not be designated an “adult” - an identity I was far from ready to take on at 16 - or a piece of meat because of it.

It was a question that was about far more than fashion, though - and I suspect that’s the reason Hoyer told me she wouldn’t have been able to answer it (although I like to think she would have been touched had I ever sent it off). At its heart, it was a question from a girl/young woman trying to come to terms with and navigate her own objectification.

As a feminist and a father, a professor and a former youth leader with years of experience working with teens, I thought I’d take a shot at answering Rachel’s query.

If I were writing to a 16 year-old named Rachel, I’d say:

Dear Rachel,

I wish that I could offer you specific fashion tips that would guarantee that creepy older guys wouldn’t hit on you. For that matter, I wish I could share with you how to dress in a manner that would assure that your peers wouldn’t frequently judge you, either to your face or behind your back. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to ensure those things — because the sad truth is that no matter how you dress, no matter what you wear, you will be perceived by some men as a target for their unwanted advances.

You may have heard people say things like “girls who wear short skirts are asking for ‘it’”. By “it” they may mean anything from rape to crude comments and penetrating stares. But as you may already have noticed, girls aren’t immune from harassment when they’re wearing simple or “modest” garb either. I’ve had plenty of students who’ve been accosted while wearing sweatpants or long dresses. I’ve had Muslim students who chose to wear head coverings, and they’ve been harassed both religiously and sexually. The bottom line is that there’s nothing you can wear that will guarantee respect from others. And the reason is that the root of this problem isn’t skin or clothing, it’s our cultural contempt for women and girls.

Have you noticed the way this works yet? If a girl is thin, she’s accused of being “anorexic”; if her weight is higher than the cruelly restrictive ideal, she’s “fat” and “doesn’t take care of herself” or “has no self-control.” If she wears cute, trendy clothes she “only wants attention” and if she wears sweats and jeans, she “doesn’t make an effort.” If she’s perceived as sexually attractive, and — especially — if she shows her own sexual side, she’s likely to be called a “slut.” If her sexuality and her body are concealed, she’s a “prude.” As you’ve probably figured out, the cards are stacked against you. You cannot win, at least not if you define winning as dressing and behaving in a way likely to win approval (or at least decent respect) from everyone.

The advice I’m going to give may sound clichéd, but it’s important nonetheless: you should dress in a style that makes you comfortable. (more…)

I wrote last Thursday about professor-student relationships, a topic I’ve turned to quite a few times. I had been inspired by this post at Alas and the subsequent comments.

As I often do, I posted a link to my own post on my Facebook page. A very small discussion then broke out on FB, and one of my friends, Carlotta, wrote about her own very positive memory of a sexual relationship with an older professor of hers:

Help me out with the unethical part though… honestly, for me my relationship provided me with an oasis of sexual comfort amid a desert of sterile academia. I remember mine with affection and (sincere) gratitude.

I’ve heard some stories like Carlotta’s. Heck, I had one in my own past. One of the last students with whom I had a sexual relationship, back in 1997-98, was a remarkable young woman, Marie. Marie and I were lovers for a brief period both while she was my student and immediately afterwards. She later transferred back east as a women’s studies major, a major she selected after taking my History 25B course the semester our affair began.

Not long after our relationship ended, I got a birthday card from — of all people — Marie’s mother. The note was attached to a box, and in the box was a fine MontBlanc fountain pen. Marie’s mother, who knew about our recently-concluded affair, wrote that she was grateful for my influence in her daughter’s life, and that as far as she could see, her daughter had changed for the better as a result. Though she admitted that she had had some concerns about her daughter’s involvement with a professor, Marie’s mom said that she could see that nothing but good had come as a consequence. She wanted me to have the pen as a token of appreciation. I still have it. (I need new ink cartridges for it.)

A few years later, sober and filled with repentance for my earlier behavior, I spoke to Marie and attempted to make amends to her for having “abused my power” with her. Marie was exasperated. “Bullshit, Hugo”, she said. “I was a legal adult too, and I’m not sorry that it happened. I had happy memories of it, and it pisses me off that now that you’re a ‘reformed man’, you’re trying to make it sound like it was unhealthy. It wasn’t. I liked what we did, I’m not sorry.” We’ve only touched base a few times since that conversation eight or nine years ago. What I do know is that Marie now lives in New York where she’s finishing a doctoral dissertation, and that now — well into her thirties — she remains adamant that she has nothing but fond memories of her relationship with me. I’m certainly not going to try and continue to convince her she shouldn’t. (more…)

One of the things about blogging for a few years is that one regularly has the opportunity to reflect upon — and revise — old posts. Mind you, I don’t dip into my archives and surreptitiously rewrite old pieces. Rather, I sometimes find that the passage of time has given me a different perspective. It is so with an issue freshly in the news once more: mixed-sex dorm rooms.

I wrote about the subject of colleges assigning different-sex students to the same dorm room in 2006 in this post. What troubled me then was not that folks would seek out roommates of the opposite sex. What I wanted was to encourage bonding with one’s own gender. Boys who find it difficult to relate to other males; girls who’ve found relationships with other females to be characterized by competition and judgment — these were, I argued, the sort of young people who could benefit from confronting their own discomfort with living with the same sex. Rereading that post three and a half years after I wrote it, I wince at my willingness to be so prescriptive of what young people need. And while I stand by my conviction that we do need to do more to encourage some young folks to fight through their fears of bonding with those who share their biology, I’m much less willing to insist upon it.

I’m thinking about this because the Los Angeles Times, a few years late to the party, ran a front-page article yesterday on what is no longer as much of a novelty as some might imagine: Mixed-gender dorm rooms are gaining acceptance.

The number of colleges offering the option increases each year, though the total number of schools at which it is possible to room with someone of the other sex is still only about fifty. The Times profiles the situation at nearby Pitzer College (an institution to which I have seen a number of my best and brightest transfer over the years), and interviews students there and at my alma mater, Cal. (In the 1980s, the innovation at Berkeley was bathrooms shared by both sexes. After the first week, having women walk past men standing at urinals became old hat.)

What heartened me was the willingness of so many young people to separate the idea of close physical proximity from sexual intimacy. The assumption of an older generation, of course, is that the power of desire is so overwhelming that it makes uncomplicated friendship (or, simply, roommate-ship) impossible between two heterosexual young people of different genders. Read the comments after the Times story; lots of predictions of rape and distraction. The myth of male weakness raises its head in the thread over and over again.

The comment that caught my attention was this one from someone called “cmfreedom”: I guess “gender-neutral housing” means asexual. I worry for both of them that they aren’t tempted! Bold is mine.

What impressed me about the young people in the article is the same thing that depressed me about cmfreedom’s remark. Our dominant cultural narrative is the discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire. We believe that men — particularly those of college-age — are so in thrall to raging hormones that they are constitutionally incapable of seeing women as anything other than sex objects. The peddlers of the discourse sneer contemptuously at those who insist that men are, in fact, are both quite capable of self-regulation and frequently not as sex-crazed as their elders believe. To claim for men the capacity to exercise control, to insist that young men do not all think about sex every seven (or sixteen, or thirty-five) seconds is to invite derision. (more…)

I wrote last September about “Holly”, a girl who was in my old All Saints youth group. Holly’s now a senior in high school, headed off to college in the fall. I recently got a Facebook message from her, a message which opened:

Is it possible to have feelings for someone and not be physically attracted to them? Aren’t they supposed to go hand in hand?

Holly gave me her permission to write a response here, though I did give her a more personal one as well.

I’ve gotten this question from others before — and not just from young people. I dealt with that issue in this February 2008 post on the indispensability of passion. Writing contra the infamous Lori Gottlieb, I said

Yes, passion may fade over time. But trust me on this one: there is a world of difference between being in a marriage in which the passion has cooled and one in which there was never any “heat” to begin with. Expecting sexual heat to endure (without any increase in effort) for years is unrealistic; settling for a marriage where there isn’t even any memory of fire and passion is, I think, too great a compromise.

That was true for marriage. But what of Holly, still just seventeen, still in high school, contemplating what it is that she should do about a budding relationship with a classmate?

Depending on our stance, we tend to either oversell or dismiss young women’s sexuality. It is certainly far from true that adolescent girls aren’t interested in sex, just as it is far from true that adolescent boys are interested in nothing but. But even as we resist the traditional straitjacket narratives about teenagers and desire, we do need to acknowledge that we raise our sons and daughters to experience desire differently. And we need to acknowledge something else, something that forms part of a gentle warning to Holly: young women often overestimate their capacity to make things work.

Anyone who works with teenagers knows that grandiosity and low self-esteem often go hand in hand. I wrote about that in a post called I have so much love to give: young women and self-flattery.

Teenage girls are renowned for their vicious self-criticism. Time and again, I’ve heard young women criticize their own appearance, their academic shortcomings, their bad habits. But those same young women will often hasten to say, if they are or have been in a relationship, “You know, I’m a pretty awesome girlfriend.” Or if they haven’t yet been in one: “I am an incredibly loving person, and I would give so much to the right guy.”

There’s a corollary to that. Some young women overestimate their capacity not only to love with great intensity, they overestimate the malleability of their own emotions. I’ve often written that to some extent, sexual identity is fluid — for both sexes. But that fluidity has its limits, and that’s something that on occasion, the young fail to understand. Holly hasn’t said this, but I’ve heard things like this from many of her peers: “I really like Leroy. I think I could fall in love with Leroy. I’m not physically attracted to Leroy, but he’s perfect in every other way. And you know, I think if I work at finding things about him that are desirable, I can make myself want him. And if I can’t, I think I can learn to live without that passion. I can make anything work.” (more…)

My sources tell me that today, the immunization committee at the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is debating whether to recommend the use of Gardasil, a vaccine against HPV, for use with male patients. HPV, or the human papillomavirus, is the most common of sexually-transmitted infections; the CDC estimates that 50% of sexually active adults will acquire HPV at one point over the course of their lives. Some suggest that the percentage is higher still.

HPV has been conclusively linked to cervical cancer. Since 2006, Gardasil has been approved by the FDA for use in inoculating women against HPV. Because the best form of protection is prevention, many health experts recommend vaccinating girls before they become sexually active. Given the grim reality that HPV can be easily transmitted through non-consensual sex, and given the ease with which the virus is spread through oral sex, vaccinating girls before the onset of puberty is encouraged. (This has led, of course, to predictable howls from the religious right, who are less concerned with protecting young women’s health and more concerned that a vaccine against HPV might encourage pre-marital sexual exploration.)

But as an article in the brand-new issue of Ms. Magazine makes clear, HPV poses a greater threat to men and boys than was previously known. The Adina Nack piece is not available online, but here’s a quote from what’s available on your newsstand:

While it is fears of cervical cancer that
have motivated young women to get HPV vaccines,
that’s not the only cancer caused by this virus: It can lead
to oral, anal and penile cancers as well. In fact, the combined
U.S. death rates for these cancers are at least twice
that of cervical cancers… Some researchers, in fact, believe that
HPV may soon cause more oral cancers in the U.S. than
alcohol or tobacco combined.

As a result of this research, the CDC may well soon recommend that boys and young men also be inoculated with Gardasil, as the connection between HPV and oral/anal cancer becomes as apparent as it already is with cervical cancer.

Nack emphasizes that men’s health is a feminist issue:

Women’s health—especially reproductive health—is usually
the focus of sexual-health discussions but men’s health
also deserves women’s attention—and not just because
women care about their sons, male partners and male
friends. It almost goes without saying that women can also
be infected by their intimate partners, and since the great
majority of women primarily have heterosexual relations,
that usually means by men.

In fact, men’s health is an even larger feminist issue.
“Feminists have a vested interest in advocating for policies
and circumstances around the world that shape men’s ability
to develop healthy sex lives, which, by definition, has
to include respect for the rights of those with whom they
partner, regardless of gender,” says Patricia Rieker, Ph.D.,
a sociologist at Boston University and Harvard Medical
School and coauthor of Gender and Health (Cambridge
University Press, 2008).

The truth is, if women don’t prioritize men’s health,
we’re not just losing a chance to foster the overall health
of our communities, we’re actually putting ourselves and
future generations at risk

It is axiomatic that women of all ages are more willing to seek medical treatment than are men. The “sturdy oak” myth of robust masculinity makes it difficult for boys and men to acknowledge vulnerability. Our cultural narrative about heterosexuality tends to suggest that women are emotionally and physiologically more fragile — and more likely to “suffer” from sex. That “expectation of female suffering” (associated with everything from first penetration to pregnancy to increased vulnerability to STIs to the guarantee of heartbreak after a break-up or abortion) is matched with a narrative of male imperviousness to harm. We like to pretend that boys are dense, violent, and comparatively shallow. But boys do cry, and boys do get hurt, and as the latest research shows, boys do get HPV-related cancers too.

Feminists have done much to dispatch the myth of female frailty. They have also been on the frontlines of fighting against this myth of the invulnerable male. It is no surprise then that we find this important clarion call for male sexual health in the pages of Ms. Magazine.