Lara Riscol's blog

Sex and Dementia: Shrouded by Taboo

2009-09-09T08:00:00-04:00

Editor's Note: This is part of a series of articles on sexuality and aging, co-produced by the National Sexuality Resource Center and RH Reality Check. Read them all!

A man with Alzheimer’s and his wife of many years finish lovemaking when he rolls over and tells her, “You’d better hurry up and get your things because my wife will be home soon."

Sounds like a joke, but it’s at least one woman’s jarring reality relayed by the education director of Alzheimer’s Association Colorado Chapter. Whenever I mentioned writing a sex and Alzheimer’s story, many reflexively joked, “You mean there’s a link?” Even a nationally renowned sexologist with expertise in chronic illness responded to my request for his take on the topic with: “I like one and not the other.” Other jokes ranged from a gag about a wife’s Alzheimer’s or syphilis diagnosis to a proposed headline of “Honey, Did We Do It Yet Today?”

The funny thing is some people with Alzheimer’s do forget their randy romp, immediately pressuring their partner for another round—which might be fun in another time and place, say the exhilarating days of lusty romance when your lover didn’t call you by another’s name, forget to wipe himself or brush her teeth, or forget how to pleasure you or even that he should. Maybe before your life partner began slipping away from all that bound her to work, community, identity, and to you. Before you morphed into caretaker or parent to your heart’s desire.

With Alzheimer’s dementia, a brain disease of loss and loneliness, your only certainty is now, and that ground can shift at any moment. Talk about learning to Zen it. Really, you have no other choice if you’re the one afflicted, dropping pieces of your mind and daily functioning until the entirety of your needs—mundane and essential—rests on the tug of another’s goodwill and baggage.

As liberated as Americans appear given today’s hyper-sexualized culture, it’s the baggage of retro myths that looms scariest to those of us who choose the dignity and respect of sexual personhood no matter how ravaged our memory. Clinical sexologist Judith Steinhart says, “We all fear loss of control as we age or become ill and wonder who will make decisions for us, with whose needs in mind.” Spanning some three to twenty years, Alzheimer’s strips away all you’ve built over a lifetime down to your moment-to-moment core needs. Being dependent on others, who may choose to protect you from yourself as they would a horny teenager, can be the ultimate assault.

Another funny thing about sex and Alzheimer’s is that it touches upon so many hot button issues: the right to privacy and pleasure, sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, gender stereotypes, monogamy versus infidelity, sexual exploitation versus consent, masturbation, pornography, and icky denial over our parents, the elderly, or those with disabilities desiring or doing it. If we’re sexual beings from cradle to grave and the brain is our biggest sex organ, could “Alzheimer’s sex” be a cultural flashpoint? Ground zero, who wins when the absolute of religion and tradition clashes with the continuum of sexual sovereignty and human rights?

As we live longer and baby boomers creep into old age, long-term residential care is changing the American landscape. Most admitted to such facilities have dementia, with Alzheimer’s being its commonest cause. Alzheimer’s Foundation of America board member Donna Cohen reminds us in an advice article for caretakers: “Individuals with dementia have lived a lifetime with their sexuality, many years longer than they have lived with their dementia.” She adds that we all vary widely in our sexual experience, as does the way dementia affects that experience. So varies our response to Alzheimer’s intimacy.

In the film Away From Her, Julie Christie's character withers in an Alzheimer's care unit after her new beau and fellow patient is taken away and her cogent husband works through his pain to reunite them. Real life stories of extramarital “coupling” are remarkably common. In 2006 Justice Sandra Day O’Connor left the Supreme Court to care for her Alzheimer’s stricken husband, ultimately blessing his love affair with a resident who drew him back from deep depression. Though a relatively young woman I interviewed is supportive of her husband’s new sweetie, she’s still raw from friends asking, “How did you feel when you saw him holding hands?”

Author Melinda Hennenberger reports a different, devastating response in her 2008 Slate feature An Affair to Remember. An adult son tore his virile ninety-five-year-old dad, Bob, away from his eighty-two-year-old girlfriend, Dorothy, after finding them in bed—“She had her mouth on my dad‘s penis! And it’s not even clean!”—and after the vigilant assisted-living staff failed to keep the two Alzheimer’s patients from pleasuring each other. Sexual bonding had sparked new life in Bob and Dorothy, charmingly improving each other’s appearance, spirits, even memory. And forced separation would’ve killed Dorothy—who had become depressed, lost massive weight and was hospitalized for dehydration—if it weren’t for merciful memory loss, according to her doctor who calls their story a “twenty-first century Romeo and Juliet.”

“Family can be a big barrier to a person being able to lead a life that they would choose,” says Amelia Schafer, who teaches caretakers, including spouses, adult children and nursing home staff, as education director for the Colorado chapter of Alzheimer’s Association. Concerns over consent when a disease compromises the mind are real, but can be assessed by caretakers through communication or observation. Though the pros of sexual connection overwhelmingly outweigh the cons—evidenced by dramatic changes in behavior and demeanor, such as a person going from screaming out to serene—it’s hard to get past the biases and assumptions of what’s best for someone else.

Published research on sex and dementia is scarce and mostly centers on “inappropriate” sexual behavior. But Schafer suggests what causes problems is not the patient but those around them acting on myths and misinformation about what place sex holds in our lives. “Alzheimer’s strips away your protective filters until all that’s left is the person’s essence and core and pure reactions of that core,” says Schafer, who as part of a pioneering state task force helped create investigative guidelines for resident intimacy and sexual behavior. “Often you see someone hug a perfect stranger because they’re happy and they want to share that joy. I always say, ‘Don’t bend over in the Alzheimer’s unit because you’ll get goosed.’ People are so in the moment.”

Seeing how sex remains a taboo topic, Schaefer distinguishes between sexuality and intimacy in her certification curriculum for health professionals, which pushes them to see beyond personal values to patient needs. “Many think that parents in your care, like children, are not sexual. They can’t go there,” she says. Focus groups show that health providers “don’t see themselves as being part of someone else’s sex life, that the need to complete a sex act, versus the need for intimacy, is ‘beyond the realm of my job.’”

However, policy at the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale, New York, foundationally links intimacy and privacy to sexual experience and awareness, stating it is “the function and responsibility of staff to uphold and facilitate resident sexual expression.” Sex here clearly means more than “penis in the vagina” and is not seen as a behavior but as an expression of need and quality of life. The staff officially embraces the language of “pleasure” and “sexual gratification” as central to the larger rights and needs that make us human, including the dignity of sexual autonomy and self-determination.

“You don’t stop being human because of a diagnosis. We cannot deny basic human rights and needs because of a brain disease,” says Robin Dessel, Director of Memory Care Services at Hebrew Home, who speaks nationally on consent and capacity as being decision-specific versus a general domain. “An Alzheimer’s diagnosis isn’t a blanket verdict of incompetence. You don’t lose your rights and ability to make choices. For a lot of staff it’s a huge leap, especially with dementia when patients have lost the ability to toilet themselves…yes, you’re responsible for toileting needs, but they have choices with intimacy needs,” she explains.

“Dementia is so foreboding and insidious, it’s critical to uphold rights, pleasures, and life’s choices, especially so that everything you worked for in your life to build does not fall away,” Dessel says. “Memory impaired means out of context, no sense of person, place, time; you’re very lost. Those with dementia struggle to live in this world as we struggle to understand and reach them in theirs. Sexual expression is often the last gasp, connection, lifeline.”

Dessel jokes, “We don’t have a Woodstock going on. But we have an awareness that human needs don’t fade away when placed in a home.” That respect extends with oversights to all exclusive (for assessing consent) bonds, homosexual as well as heterosexual, within or outside of marriage. It also includes privacy for masturbation and access to porn. “There’s a very real and rising need to integrate sexual rights within the realm of healthcare,” says Dessel, who coproduced the nationally acclaimed DVD Freedom of Sexual Expression: Dementia and Resident Rights in Long-Term Care Facilities, which portrays diverse Alzheimer’s couples whose lives blossom in sexual bonding, consummated or not, plus a husband denied privacy with his wife because of her alarmed response to his overtures.

The Hebrew Home leads today’s industry movement from clinical to person-centered care, but its progressive sexual culture can still astound, given its grounding in Orthodox Judaism. Dessel explains that their rabbinical influence puts foremost the rights, needs, and life pleasures of anyone in the later phase in the continuum of life. “We’re blessed by that sanction. If you don’t support the human spirit, that’s gone whether or not you’re walking or sitting at a table. If the human spirit dies, we lose the battle. You can keep physiology alive, but personhood is lost.”

A year and a half ago Sol Rogers, now ninety, was losing his wife of sixty-one years to advanced Alzheimer’s and himself to depression and shakes. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Rita, now eighty-six, could barely move her arms or legs. She couldn’t talk or recognize him and would scream and yell in agitation. Sol says he got an idea and believes the idea came from God: though most nursing homes don’t allow even spouses privacy for fear of exploitation or other prejudices, he asked the staff at Briarwood Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in Needham, Massachusetts, to move Rita over to one side so he could get into bed with her and “love her up.”

Sol says he enjoyed it so much he immediately lost his depression and shakes and became a new man. Everyday since he closes the curtain and for two hours he cuddles, kisses, sings, and constantly tells Rita how much he loves her. And Rita, “other than her memory, acts like a normal person.” Both Sol and Rita recovered dramatically, so much so that his doctors and Alzheimer’s Association have called it a miracle. “She began to understand every thing I said,” Sol explains. “I told her jokes and she began laughing. She doesn’t remember anything so I’m able to tell her the same jokes over and over again to get her laughing. My wife is now a happy woman and I’m a happy man.”

Though Sol’s story has made The Boston Globe and CNN, he’s frustrated that he knows of no one following in his footsteps. He yearns to leave the legacy of healing touch, to know that other people have done what he has done. “I just can’t understand when knowing that it does so much good why others don’t want to do it,” he says. “Male or female, it’s something everyone should try.”

Call it intimacy or sexuality, but the giving and receiving of affection, affirmation, pleasure is a needed legacy no matter what our age, mental or physical ability, marital status, sexual orientation or gender identity. Funny how so many could find that threatening.

...With Sexual Liberty and Justice for All

2009-02-09T08:00:00-05:00

"COLORADO JUST OPENED ITS PUBLIC BATHROOMS TO EITHER SEX!"

The Focus on the Family ad screams above a waist-down shot of a man in combat boots waiting in front of a stall, toilet seat up, as a white girl in a long white smock, white shoes and bobby socks, sneaks open her stall door next to him. The message below blasts Colorado's Democratic governor and legislators for passing an anti-discrimination law to include sexual orientation and gender identity. After losing his campaign to kill the bill last spring, James Dobson, head of the Christian culture war powerhouse, warned "Every woman and little girl will have to fear that a predator, bisexual, cross-dresser or even a homosexual or heterosexual male might walk in and relieve himself in their presence."

Way to grind civil rights nuance into a black-and-white bathroom boogieman. As early as the 1970s, antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly reduced her fight against the Equal Rights Amendment to protecting women and children from unisex toilets. Equality, whatever -- do you really want men and ladies in line for the john together at a ballgame?

Even without an ERA in place, unisex potties have popped up in public places. At the recent 21st National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change, I smile as I walk into the first of the site's many labeled Gender Neutral Restrooms. Aside from a mild jolt when first spying the row of urinals, I rather enjoy the multifaceted landscape on my way to and from taking care of business.

Speaking of a beautiful view, about 2000 mostly young people of all shades pour into the Denver ballroom for the keynote given by civil rights legend Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers Union in 1962 with Cesar Chavez. For decades the Catholic mother of 11 has spoken out for queer folk in cross-movement struggles for social and economic justice, from campaigning for Harvey Milk to recording a bilingual ad against Proposition 8. Beaten 20 years ago so badly by police during an otherwise peaceful protest that she had to undergo emergency surgery to remove her spleen, she testifies to a religious right that scapegoats our communities for distraction.

"Feminists, gays and lesbians, immigrants are not the enemy," says
Huerta. She says we're forced to respond now, "We need to educate each other's movements to create change. We have a mandate to remove the ignorance from society until we get the human rights that we all deserve." She closes with leading the chant she made famous: Si, se puede! She adds, "When I met Obama he said, ‘I stole your slogan.' I told him, ‘Yes you did!'"

The crowd roars with joyful laughter. Looking around, I feel as if I've floated into an Obama rally of color, youth and hope. A glance at the program shows how vast the diversity here with five days of sessions on sexual freedom and literacy, various communities of color, youth, aging, disability, religion and spirituality, feminism and straight allies. Evenings you might choose a social, recharge at a 12-step recovery, or worship at a faith service. As John Lennon's "Imagine" fills the room I think, this is America. After 16 years bludgeoned by zealots wielding sex as weapon to divide and conquer Americans - from the smut of Clinton to the sanctimony of Bush - can it be time for a new sexual revolution in the age of Obama? Yes it can!

The last time I crammed into a room of 2000 around a pivotal election was the first Values Voters Summit in D.C., featuring conservative superstars, such as Dobson, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Rev. Jerry Falwell and four GOP presidential aspirants, including Gov. Mitt Romney. The ridiculed enemies were feminists, gays and liberals, who want to convert your kids to the dark side, who pose a greater threat to America than Al-Qaeda. One sexual demon summoned throughout the weekend to rally the evangelical troops was the children's book, "King & King," where the prince rejects the many princesses to marry another prince.

The Abstinence Clearinghouse annual conference I attended later wasn't quite as meanspirited or ethnically and generationally monochromatic. But themed "Abstinence: It's a Black and White Issue," speakers - from a former beauty queen to a former welfare mom and woman who disavowed her multiple abortions - made absolutely clear that God's truth allows for one path to sexual integrity. Same call to arms against the feminists, liberals and the "condom crowd" who condemn marriage, family and America with their anything-goes moral relativism.

Having covered for 10 years the sexual schizophrenia of our nation's culture war, I've noted how purity politicos package and sell a retro feel-good salve of simplicity for society's complex modern ills. Like tax cuts for the economy and bombing for security, abstinence-only unless married is the far right's hawked magic potion for social stability, the silver bullet to slay the sexual dragon we call freedom. With Talibanesque fervor, "family values" powerbrokers demand a leap of social engineering faith: if we corral sex within marriage, then we disappear teen pregnancy, abortion, unwed mothers, poverty, crime and AIDS. Dismantle sex education and services, and reverse 40 years of the sexual revolution "if it feels good, do it." Drink the traditional kool-aid and you're for purity and good. Reject on grounds of reality, reason and moral sense, and you're for perversion and evil. It really is black and white.

But then dogmatic morality has proven to produce the Ted Haggards of the world. Denial of one's truth reliably breeds hypocrisy, betrayal and filth.

"We got to talk about what renders sexual honesty," said long-time LGBT community organizer Urvashi Vaid at Creating Change. "Diversity does not equal ‘anything goes.' We got to get acceptance of the spectrum of sex, of the experience of being. No one wants to be pushed; we want our kids to be healthy and happy. Straight, gay, we have the same human aspirations." She pits our nation's clashing worldviews of pluralism, where we "relish diversity of opinion" against the fundamentalism of "one god, one truth." She adds, "Consensus doesn't mean conformity."

The overarching mood of today's political climate is to recognize commonalities and expand the movement for social change across feminist progressive identities. Vaid says, "Feminism is equality for both men and women. It's a re-imagining of the world. The push for women's freedom, liberation, and full equality is a precondition to any open society: freedom and opportunity for all. Feminist and queer movements share a framework: value of equality, social justice, and human rights. Not just civil and political equality, but moral equality."

In her State of the Movement speech, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force executive director Rae Carey said, "Obama's ‘we' challenges the culture of ‘I' that has been so core to this country's identity - the image of rugged individualism, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. This imagery has been bolstered and perpetuated by scenes like Ronald Reagan riding his horse and by George Bush clearing brush on his ranch.... We are now off the ranch and have moved back into the we of urban energy and creativity, the we of close family ties and community in rural areas, the we that has been at the center of the farm workers, civil rights, feminist and labor movements."

Carey includes among lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) playmates Planned Parenthood, AARP and NAACP. Where the Task Force and other progressive leaders have linked issues for years, new politics and new media have opened a door for perennial underdogs to make their collective case for respect.

Republicans have successfully shrouded themselves in family values while demonizing Americans advocating sexual health and justice for all, not just the storybook few.

"Each progressive movement has a common narrative: the valuing of many kinds of people, of many ways to contribute to our communities, of many different cultural traditions," says Sue Hyde, head of Creating Change. "In valuing all of us we make a more perfect union, as Obama would say," she smiles. "The connective tissue, or pillars of human rights, is self-determination, bodily integrity, and freedom of choice and expression."

“We’re cognizant that Roe v. Wade is about privacy and choice,” says Ana Hernandez, head of Causes in Common, a national organizing initiative for reproductive justice and LGBT liberation. “Lawrence v. Texas is about privacy and choice. It’s about picking up that thread and taking it to the next level, growing the analysis to sexuality, family formation, autonomy, peace, happiness and safety. It’s more than privacy, it’s about human rights.”

Lifelong sex education, but much broader than the current comprehensive model, is the link between reproductive justice and queer rights, according to Joy O’Donnell of the National Sexuality Resource Center, which “sexual literacy” mission includes aging, disability, and religion and faith. “We need a national dialogue that incorporates, respects and celebrates pluralistic health and well being,” she says.

Carey closes her State of the Movement speech with, "We will win complete equality! We will protect and defend our families! We will transform society!"

Sounds like a traditional culture warrior clarion call. Except that is the equality bit. Just no telling who might be sharing the bathroom stall next to you.

Lift Ev'ry Voice: Progressive Clergy Shout to Be Heard

2008-06-03T08:00:00-04:00

Since 2004, when righteous culture warriors took credit for President Bush's second term and for sweeping a Republican Congress back into power, talking heads have painted moral rot as a liberal problem and the "family values" GOP as God's cleanup crew. Embracing religion - understood to be inherently conservative - was to be America's saving grace.

But by framing sexual health and justice debates as battles between purity and perversion, or virtue and vice, traditional media misses the progressive religious voices that speak out for ethics, morality and faith with respect for the dignity and decisions of all families, all individuals. "Mainstream press treats conservatives as the only authoritative religious voice," says Rev. Deborah Haffner, director of Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing. "If they bring someone in from the religious right, they feel they've got religion covered."

Last spring conservative watchdog Media Matters for America released an unprecedented report that shattered the false dichotomy that equates values with conservatives and liberals with libertines. Left Behind: The Skewed Representation of Religion in Major News Media presented a simple analysis of the imbalance of conservative and progressive religious voices by counting who showed up how much where. Combining newspapers and television, the report found conservative religious leaders quoted, mentioned or interviewed in news stories nearly three times as often as progressive religious leaders were. On TV news, religious conservatives appeared nearly four times as frequently. The result is a skewed perception that only the conservatives have religion or values. "There are articulate, ready and waiting progressive religious voices not getting called," says Karl Frisch, Communications Director for Media Matters. "So if you're pro-life, you're a values voter. If you're pro-choice, you're just someone with an agenda."

The most thunderous voice for the religious right comes from President Tony Perkins of Family Research Council (FRC), a politically divisive smear machine promoting "marriage and family and the sanctity of human life in national policy." Despite the numerous global challenges to the FRC's championed three Fs - faith, family, and freedom - FRC and its partners wail almost entirely about progressive stands on sex-based controversies. When FRC, along with Concerned Women for America, denounced Congress for addressing skyrocketing costs of hormonal birth control for college students and low-income women, CWA's Wendy Wright used her platform to slime cultural foes, such as sexual health educators: "In fact, they want to encourage [kids to have sex]," she said on Fox News, "because they benefit when kids end up having sexually transmitted diseases, unintended pregnancies and then they lead them into having abortions, so you have to look at the financial motives behind those who are promoting comprehensive sex ed."Photo by Blosaurus

Other boisterous religious media stars are Catholic League's Bill Donohue and Southern Baptist Rev. Richard Land, named TIME Magazine's 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America, as was Bush cozy Rev. Ted Haggard, before his scandalous fall involving a male prostitute and crystal meth.

A major cable news personality, who spoke off the record, admitted the celebrity-driven corporate media "tends to use right-wing evangelicals as examples of morality much more so than progressive Christians, who aren't as high profile and don't seem to get as much air time." He adds, "As shows become more popular and well known, they're able to attract better-known guests, and so the people we put on, whether for religious, moral or sexual issues, are familiar faces to our audience. That creates a comfort zone, especially when discussing controversial issues."

Not shy of addressing moral controversies, Rev. Deborah Haffner agrees that authentic progressive religious voices that support sexual justice are ignored. Haffner's Religious Institute offers a declaration endorsed by almost 2,700 religious leaders from more than 50 religious traditions that reads, "Our culture needs a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts." But for controversial sexuality issues, mainstream media will pit a religious conservative as the moral voice against a secular activist, but will not match different faith perspectives. Haffner points to a PBS-related show she was invited on, who would use her only if they didn't have to identify her as Reverend. " 'We don't want to confuse the audience,' they said. Taking a positive view on adolescent sexuality--on educating youth and giving needed services--if they had to recognize me as religious, it would confuse the audience," Haffner says. "Audiences expect religious leaders to be negative on sexual justice. The show chose not to use me rather than to use my title."

The Left Behind report finds that Rev. Jim Wallis, head of Sojourners: Christians for Justice and Peace, who signed on to the recently released, and disdainful-of-"pelvic politics" Evangelical Manifesto, as the progressive religious leader who gets the most play. But in Haffner's book, anti-choice Wallis is actually negative about sexual health and rights. "Progressive religious leaders used by the media, by and large, do not support sexual justice issues," she says. "If you don't care about women, if you don't care about adolescents, if you don't care about GLBT, you don't get to call yourself progressive."

You might call Haffner's position absolutist, but you can't call it morally relative: one of the media arrows most often shot by culture warriors at sexual heath and justice advocates.

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Silenced in a Sex Obsessed Culture

2008-03-25T09:56:21-04:00

Spring fever has sprung! Just as a sobering CDC study report breaks that one in four American teen girls has a sexually transmitted disease, crime-busting Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigns for itching an eighty-grand, reportedly condom-free prostitution habit. Instantly the scandal storm blows bigger and more bizarre as New York's new governor holds an emergency press conference to confess -- also with wife by side -- to several affairs, one over several years. Meanwhile, journalists struggle for truth in the public dispute between New Jersey's former "I'm a gay American" governor and his divorcing wife about their alleged three-ways with their young male driver.

News hasn't been this salacious since the Starr Report. And camera crews still have to dispatch to spring break hot spots to capture the bouncing B-roll of oiled and bronzed female flesh so news pundits can opine on America's moral decline.

Family values conservatives are spinning the current chaos to pin the blame on sexual health education and to push for more abstinence-only programming, already a $1.5 billion social engineering boondoggle that mandates the expected sexual standard for children (up to 29 years old!) be within marriage. Never mind that most of us at some point explore our sexuality outside of marriage - even chastity champions like Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), a longtime patron of prostitutes. Never mind that real life proves that a wedding ring doesn't protect you from disease and despair, even if you're not a political wife. Never mind that the United States leads the free world in rates of HIV, other STDs, teen births and unwanted pregnancies -- purity pushers don't want to send our kids any mixed messages. "Our challenge is that the government wants to talk about preventing the spread of STDs and HIV without talking about sex," says sexuality educator Deb Levine.

In our sex-saturated consumer culture, abstinence-only-unless-married is a mixed message. How can we talk about sex in a way that makes sense to us, and to our relationships? What is healthy sexuality? And how can we teach it in such a toxic environment of extremes?

"We sell and promote sex with everything from soap to cars, but it's still for the most part a closeted discussion. It is most absent in a meaningful way in curricula geared toward our most vulnerable sexually active populations," says Lennie Green, who at John Hopkins University facilitates communication among groups of young African American men who have sex with men -- a community the CDC reports to have experienced a spike in HIV infections.

"We seem to have this Sunday morning church mentality when we discuss sexuality, but when we review societal practices there's a major dichotomy in our rhetoric and what we actually do," says Green. "The weakest link has been ‘family values.' They strike out against subcultures they find amoral, and crusade to establish law and order in bed. Even in the face of disease we hang onto old archaic beliefs that sex will not happen until marriage. Our public health record has been trashing that theory for decades."

"The biggest challenge is to be open on the subject of sex," says Kylee Darcy, a freshman at UC Berkeley and winner of the Fresh Focus Sex Ed Video Contest. "In spite of all the sexy messages out there, communication about sex is still shrouded with taboo. It's pretty ridiculous to think that an abstinence program is going to be able to outweigh the hundreds of sexual suggestions I get everyday from TV, the Internet, magazines, billboards, music, fashion, etc. Sex is something everyone, whether they want to do it or not, needs to be clear about. And the only thing that can create clarity is communication."

Darcy's animated video, showcased in January at Sex::Tech: Focus on Youth, the first STD/HIV prevention conference focusing on youth and technology, illustrated pop culture's sexed-up messages crushing the scale against abstinence-only messages. "The abstinence-only program is not productive, but sex ed that just addresses the physical act of sex and contraception is also outdated," Darcy continues. "Yes, students need to know about contraception and disease, but sex ed should be as much about the interpersonal as the physical. Good sex ed can help create rapport between young people and their parents as well as young people and their partners."

If speaking honestly about sex in person can be daunting, then the "perceived anonymity" of technology and new media can free youth to ask questions they might find uncomfortable, says Deb Levine, founder and executive director of the Internet Sexuality Information Services (ISIS). "Our culture promotes shame and embarrassment about explicit discussions of sex, sexuality and sexual health," she says. "We interviewed young men and women to find out how they wanted to receive sensitive information, and mobile phones were unanimously considered to be an acceptable and private way to talk about sexual issues." So ISIS engages in strategic collaborations to promote sexual health via cell phone, PDAs and the Internet.

"Overall, when people are asking about communication-building skills, they're wanting to know how to talk about sex without shame, how to talk to partners candidly without stepping too hard on insecurities or sensitivities, how to feel assertive in talking about it all," says Heather Corrina, founder and editor of Scarleteen.com, an independent online sexuality education resource and community for young adults that takes a feminist, inclusive and often humorous approach to answering sensitive questions. "For the girls particularly, lack of assertiveness is always a big area of need, and not just with birth control, but overall with negotiating sex and relationships. A lot of what would help is for adults to not just prepare kids to say ‘yes' or ‘no,' but prepare them for the fact that all of this communication and negotiation tends to be a lot less black and white than that, and a lot more nuanced," says Corrina, a passionate workhorse who runs Scarleteen -- which serves up to 30,000 users a day -- solely on donations.

Approximately a third of the content in the model sexuality education guidelines by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States focuses on relationship and communication skills, says Monica Rodriguez, SIECUS's Vice President for Education and Training. "The ultimate goal of sexuality education programs is to help young people grow up to be sexually healthy adults. We need to move beyond just giving information -- young people need to be given opportunities to practice skills in decision-making and communicating decisions to a partner," she says.

Fueling the myth that sexual health education causes promiscuity is blood sport in traditionalists' sex-driven culture war. "In our abstinence-only world today, people sometimes confuse providing sexual education with promoting sexual activity for young people," says Deb Levine. Debra Hauser, executive vice president for Advocates for Youth, agrees. "Even enlightened educators fear that parents and administrators will react negatively to a curriculum that promotes healthy sexuality -- that the perception will be that they are condoning or promoting sex," says Hauser, whose group lobbies for the stalled REAL Act to provide unprecedented funding for sex ed that goes beyond today's disease-prevention model. "The perception of many is that [sex ed] needs a heavy-handed message that teaches sex is likely to lead to negative outcomes. Thirty years of public health research shows that teaching young people about healthy sexuality does not promote sex." And since talking sex beyond bananas and virginity pledges is essential to facilitating healthy identities and relationships, sexuality educators and advocacy organizations like SIECUS make easy targets. To show that sex ed undermines parents and corrupts childhood innocence, culture warriors cherry-pick from sexual health programs to find scary words like "masturbation" and "pleasure."

"I am always interested in the way teachers are so afraid of discussing anything that might be pleasurable," says sex educator McCaffree. "Youth will want to know why people even have sex if there is no pleasure. They are very concrete early on, and it doesn't make sense to approach with all the negatives. Helping them see why and how people enjoy their sexuality is important...When a program only deals with teen pregnancy, STIs, rape and those topics, pleasure is replaced with fear-based negatives." McCaffree cites the United Church of Christ/Unitarian Universalist sex ed curriculum, Our Whole Lives, as a program that understands the importance of teaching about pleasure and the diverse reasons why individuals and couples are sexual. Rather than pretending our sex-soaked society doesn't affect young people, "Our Whole Lives is the antidote to an overly sexualized society," says Ann Hanson, Minister for Sexuality Education and Justice, UCC. OWL's "program assumptions" include the tenets that "sexuality includes more than sexual behavior" and "people engage in healthy sexual behavior for a variety of reason, including to express love, to experience intimacy and connection with another, to share pleasure, to bring new life into the world, and to experience fun and relaxation." "OWL doesn't focus only on the negatives of sex, but encourages exploration of all aspects of sexuality," says McCaffree. "When you include everything, pleasure can be more readily seen."

Such modern ambiguity conjures apocalyptic nightmares for the moral absolutists who distort the sexual health conversation we need to lead responsible, joyful lives. Talking about sex and sexuality doesn't do anything to young people's "innocence," McCaffree reminds us. "What makes any aspect of sex or sexuality so awful that innocence is removed?" Indeed, courageous souls are working against the tide of America's sexual schizophrenia to help young people communicate openly about their sexual wants and needs. But can we really talk grownup sex today amid the culture warmongering and commercial chatter of the next media sex scandal?

Deviance in the Time of Abstinence

2008-02-26T08:48:21-05:00

"...I wouldn't mind having a conversation that does not include the words dildo, fisting, squirting, orgasm, vibrator, latex, fucking, shibari, or three-way," writes Brian Alexander at the end of his latest book, America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction. From the aspiring "next teen anal queen" to the mewling man gone fetal on a domme's lap, a cast of colorful characters, conflicts and contradictions are revealed in the award-winning journalist's hilariously randy romp through mainstream America -- a journey that seriously questions our grasp on what is deviant versus what is normal.

A former altar boy from Ohio, the admittedly "vanilla" Alexander writes with self-deprecating wit and a willingness to engage in America's sometimes uncomfortable sexual conversation. His earnest questions, both personal and cultural, are what make his gonzo travelogue both so entertaining and so essential to current debates surrounding sexual health services, education and civil rights.

Originally a popular six-part online series of the same name, America Unzipped refers to the millions of average Americans unzipping themselves from religious, societal and familial restraints by carving out formerly forbidden sexual paths. Recruited a few years ago as MSNBC's Sexploration columnist despite no formal expertise, Alexander was caught off guard by kinky questions from otherwise "normal" readers (such as, "I hear Paris Hilton is into fisting, how do you do it?"). Sensing a "mainstreaming of perversion," Alexander set off on a quest to answer the burning question: "Who are these people?" What are they seeking and why? Are they happy? And regarding today's enflamed culture war rhetoric: are they really such a threat?

The author's traverse across America's sexual landscape also meant to make sense of the public dissonance in our nation's cohabitating hypersexual culture and moral crusade: "the way we seem ever more lusty even while we are supposed to be ever more puritanical." You know, how Jenna Jameson and Pat Robertson both can be household names while each spawning humongous moneymaking industries.

The meat of his book, however, centers on the private dissonance of the folks he meets while immersed as employee or trusted guest in America's various, mostly well-lit nether regions. Catholic, conservative Republican, military, Midwest churchgoer, married with kids, sheriff, school board member, nurse or small town firefighter - the uniting truth of the countless feasting on life's vast and varied sexual menu is that public perception and private reality rarely meet.

I totally got off on Alexander's first five pit stops, which include touring a sex retailer empire founded by an Ivy Leaguer who talks about love, intimacy and permission-giving and funds global family planning charities; participating in a marriage seminar by a once-fallen preacher named Joe Beam on hot Christian sex; working as a "romance consultant" turned "lubrication specialist" at an adult supercenter (his first sale was a Clone-a-Willy kit), and then as the only male Passion Party consultant selling sexual aids to raucous women of the Heartland (including daughter, mom and grandma); and exploring the no-holds-barred virtual world of reality porn, online sex chats and cams, and off-ramp hookups to make your fantasies real. Fantasy - escaping into the sexual realm apart from daily drudgery - is apparently serious business.

The question of taboo drives Alexander's final three sex tours, in which the author gets up close at a BDSM porn site with the Antioch-educated feminist queer performance artist who likes ropes and electro torture and hangs with sexuality hipsters eager to shock. He attends a fetish convention where he meets a divorced female Southern Baptist spankee who believes in the biblical order of man as head of the household, and later at a bondage seminar meets Sir Arthur, a huge Bill O'Reilly fan, who really hates it "when all the gays are out marching." Finally the author tugs on black PVC pants to attend a sex club party at the Wet Spot, sees a university dean of libraries named Paradox light naked women on fire, and fights his urge to free a naked sub looking up at him from her cage "like a puppy in the pound."

Adding a modern dimension to the adage "different strokes for different folks," America Unzipped underscores what renowned researcher Dr. Alfred Kinsey proved 60 years ago in what is still the largest and most diverse body of sexual case studies: there is no such thing as "normal" when it comes to sexual expression. There is no scientific or moral basis for the significant public policy that dictates a mythical sexual norm so universally violated. There certainly is no way to peg political or religious affiliation, occupation, patriotism, social standing, or family and community commitment to what people do behind closed doors.

In demonstrating the often radical disconnect between Americans' public and private positions on sex, America Unzipped obliterates the binary storylines that drive public debate in our media-conglomerated tabloid age: conservative vs. liberal, traditionalists vs. modernists, Heartland vs. Hollywood, Puritans vs. perverts, straight vs. queer, Godly vs. sinful. The character-driven book upends the worn stereotypes about female sexuality, gender, looks and aging, and dismantles myths entitling marriage, monogamy and family values.

Alexander succeeds in his quest to learn who the sexual explorers reading his column are: they're "not an extraordinary group of especially perverted people. Their questions are American questions, their curiosity part of the country's conversation." He answers the happiness question with more ambivalence but strong support for those "seeking one's own sexual place" in our impoverished culture.

He also offers that the moral crusaders have lost out to the sexual explorers. But Alexander diminishes the poisonous fallout of the culture war. Sexual deviance may now live on Main Street, USA, but theocons occupy the highest reaches of global power, thanks mostly to rallying against sexual deviance. Advocates of sexual health and justice continue to be attacked and marginalized as the abstinence-only-unless-married industry taps millions more in federal funding.

Alexander concludes that sexual moralizers and experimenters need each other and even feed off of the same outcast state of perceived oppression. Maybe. But many of the "perverts" he paints often cling to the same worldview as the moralizers. As long as they can still get their kink on (pleasure maybe heightened by taboo), most don't care about the mounting causalities in the theocons' well-funded, politically potent, sex-obsessed culture war. These are casualties Alexander is well aware of, having penned an award-winning feature for Glamour magazine that outlines the frightening reproductive health and rights damage wielded by purity politics. The power of culture warriors to harm women, youth, ethnic and sexual minorities, the poor and disenfranchised through fear-mongering and misinformation knows no bounds.

Perhaps burned out at the end of his cross-country sex adventure, Alexander says without quite knowing why, "I think we live in a very sick culture." I'd argue that sexually, we're a childish culture, one that can't move beyond our consumer-based reality or marital ideal, beyond smut or sanctimony.

True moral bankruptcy as a nation lies in our legislating against other sexual and gender minorities while winking at the more disturbing goings on in our neighbors' marital homes. It's time we stand up for sexual health education, services and civil rights so everyone can pleasure with dignity -- or without, as we choose.

Culture war general Pat Robertson has said that our society "has gone too far toward sexual freedom." Well, freedom requires grownups -- even if they sometimes escape to the Wet Spot's play space or aftercare.