Interesting Links for 06-06-2016

[andrewducker]

The in-built racism of much of science fiction

(tags: race racism scifi )

Why Not Teach Girls to Masturbate in Sex Ed?

(tags: sex school masturbation women )

Fact-checking both sides of Brexit

(tags: facts europe referendum )

Uber have moved into the debt-slavery business

(tags: debt transport OhForFucksSake )

Former Ticketmaster CEO explains why you can't buy good --or sometimes, *any*-- tickets to any popular events

(tags: music business )

Cutting benefits does not make people more likely to find work, Government-backed study finds

(tags: welfare work uk )

Why We Can All Stop Worrying About Offshoring and Outsourcing

(tags: work employment globalization )

'Longest' Muslim holy month of Ramadan in 33 years begins (19 hours of fasting in the UK)

(tags: islam time religion )

Edinburgh trams carry 5.38m passengers in a year (9% up on last year, 6% ahead of revenue targets)

(tags: edinburgh trams )

Comments

[liv]

The Orenstein interview is really interesting. I thought Emily Nagoski's review made an interesting point to make, that a lot of educators (she's talking primarily about parents, but it's generally applicable) have hang-ups and even trauma around their sexuality, especially if they are women themselves, so it's not just that people are gratuitously refusing to teach girls about this stuff.

I was at school in England, not the US, which makes a difference, but I can tell you that I was taught to masturbate. I think the intention was feminist in some way, but it was more creepy than helpful. One teacher in particular thought that masturbation was the solution to all possible teenaged emotional problems, and would constantly go on about it in far too much detail. In my case she prescribed masturbation to deal with the "problems" of my mother being deaf and my lack of interest in fashion and make-up.

But lots of other teachers, not just in PSE / sex education, but at other times when they happened to be giving us advice, taught us that we should masturbate because men in general don't know how to give women pleasure and don't understand about clitorises. The message was that if we masturbated instead we wouldn't get trapped in bad relationships for the sake of what was assumed to be poor quality sexual stimulation. It more or less belonged with the background message of, don't let men pressure you into sex or you'll get pregnant and get diseases.

I didn't masturbate until after I'd started having partnered sex, in spite of these messages. I don't think my teen years or my adult sex life particularly suffered because of doing things in that order.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I don't think that it's The Answer, and I'm not convinced that not starting until a bit later is a bad idea. I do think that not having hangups about your own body, and having some idea of what you like, are both good things, and I'd hope that good sex education would help with that. But I'm by no means convinced.

(Sorry for late reply - I can't get to DW from work, and I arrived home at 9-ish to 50-odd emails in my inbox.)