STI stigma is not difficult to understand. Since STIs are sexually transmitted, they’re easy to interpret as punishment for promiscuity. People with STIs are often characterized as slutty, dirty, trashy, or stupid and reckless. And when someone is diagnosed with HPV–no matter how confident she is in her choices, no matter how careful she is–she’s faced with the crushing weight of this stigma. She must try her darndest not to internalize it–not to believe that she is being punished for her sexuality, not to believe that she brought this upon herself, or that this viral infection is indicative of poor moral character. This is extremely difficult because no one has prepared her for this, and she will almost certainly go through it alone.

Since HPV and STIs are treated as a shameful secret, we don’t ever talk about what the process of diagnosis and its aftermath is like, and as a result, we never hear what it was like for someone else. We each have to figure out how to cope on our own, in silence, without the comfort or guidance of those who have been there and can understand. There are no celebrity spokespeople for HPV. No star athlete role models. And so very few narratives in television, film, or literature.

It’s rare to see STIs on television. Rather, it’s rare to see STIs on television outside of medical and crime dramas where STIs are used as a “who done it” plot device to reveal some unexpected twist regarding infidelity or some otherwise inappropriate sexual behavior. It’s rare to see a character simply living with an STI–getting diagnosed, experiencing treatment, navigating relationships, and dealing with shame and stigma in every day life. It’s rare, but it shouldn’t be.

HPV is the most common STI in the United States. The CDC approximates that 20 million Americans currently have HPV, with six million new infections occurring each year. (For reference, 20 million people is roughly the population of Beijing, New York state, and the entire country of Australia.) The CDC estimates that 50% of sexually active Americans (men and women) will contract HPV at some point in their lives, although the American Social Health Association thinks it’s closer to 75-80%. For women, the rates are even higher: the CDC estimates that, by the age of 50, at least 80% of women will have acquired sexually transmitted HPV.

So, if at least 50% of Americans will one day have the experience of being diagnosed with HPV, shouldn’t we be doing something to prepare them for that moment so that the bottom doesn’t drop out from under them? Shouldn’t we let them know that this is a shared experience and that they don’t have to feel so alone? Shouldn’t we be working to combat stigma at the social level so that we can reduce the emotional damage it inflicts?

Writing HPV and other STIs into television narratives is a great way to challenge and combat stigma. Especially when the character is able to make peace with the diagnosis, providing a model for the rest of us.

“All adventurous women do.”

In that one glorious sentence, Girls let us know that HPV is common and that instead of a being a sign of poor character, it’s a mark of an adventurous spirit. This one line erases the stigma and reframes HPV as something normal, even positive. “All adventurous women do” allows Lena Dunham’s character Hannah to own the diagnosis, to embrace it, to wear it as a badge of honor. And it teaches the rest of us–all of us girls who have felt the waves of shame and guilt crashing on top of us, suffocating us–that we are okay. That HPV, much like traveler’s diarrhea, is just another part of the experience of being an adventurous woman in the 21st Century.

There seems to be a dangerous misconception in the public health community that the goals of positive body image promotion and obesity prevention are at odds. That somehow, by helping people feel better about their bodies, we will inadvertently “encourage” obesity.

But body image promotion isn’t about glorifying fatness, just like obesity prevention isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about the glorification of thinness. More accurately, body image and weight management are interconnected elements of holistic mind-body approach to health and ultimately, the public health community has more to gain by thinking of them as complementary rather than competing interests.

Obesity prevention efforts may appear to benefit from a status quo that stigmatizes fatness and worships thinness, but the evidence just doesn’t support it. We live in a culture that idolizes underweight supermodels and relegates fat actors to fart and food jokes, and yet none of it has done anything to make people healthier.

A lot of people worry—myself included—that without body dissatisfaction, we would lose our motivation to slim down. It’s an easy trap to fall into because, for many of us, negative thoughts are the only motivation to lose weight we’ve ever known. It’s scary to imagine life without our internal “fat talk”; it takes work to imagine using positive feelings as a source of motivation.

But contrary to popular belief, shame is not a good motivator. In addition to reinforcing an impossible, demoralizing standard of beauty, using fat shame as motivation will always backfire. Fear, shame, and self-disgust may prompt people to change their habits temporarily, but once they start to feel better and the bad feelings dissipate, they are bound return to old habits. Motivation-by-fat-shame doesn’t create a culture of health; it creates a culture of yo-yo dieting and January gym memberships abandoned by March.

Not only does fat shaming fail to help people get healthy, it actively hurts people, leaving maelstrom of negative body image, low self-esteem, depression, eating disorders, and other pathological eating and exercise behaviors in its wake. This is no small matter, as these conditions cause pain and suffering for millions of men and women, of all ages, all over the country and the world.

Obesity prevention efforts that reinforce the thin-ideal status quo are doomed to perpetuate a broken system where body image dissatisfaction is normative, obesity rates keep rising, and the multi-billion dollar weight loss industry capitalizes on both. But obesity prevention efforts that embrace positive body image promotion, on the other hand, have a chance to break the cycle.

Meaningful body image promotion encourages women to reject the tyrannical and reductive thin-ideal portrayed in the media, and to understand that pursuing a healthy lifestyle for its own sake is much more rewarding than obsessing about dieting and weight loss. After all, “thin” doesn’t translate to “healthy.”

For example, the Health At Every Size (HAES) movement is based on the understanding that weight does not determine health, and that exercise and good nutrition are beneficial, whether or not they result in weight loss. Instead of using BMI, HAES advocates using more specific measures, like blood pressure and cholesterol, to determine one’s health status.

Instead of relying on body dissatisfaction, HAES teaches us to draw motivation from positive sources, like the desire to explore new hobbies (yoga, archery, kickball), to achieve new goals (run a 5k, learn to surf), or to enjoy the flavor and feeling you get from nourishing your body with healthy foods. This is the kind of lifestyle change that keeps people engaged and motivated for the long haul, and it will keep us healthier, whether or not we’re overweight. Also, it’s fair to say that by letting go of the “impossible dream” of one day looking like the (photoshopped) people on the cover of magazines and by learning to accept and love our bodies as they are, we’ll be happier too.

This type of holistic approach—incorporating positive body image, mental health, physical activity, and good nutrition—is actually sustainable because it promotes an understanding of “health” as a lifelong process rather than a set of restrictions or punishments to be lifted once you reach that magic number on the scale.

We know that there are no health benefits to negative body image. So why would we limit the scope of obesity prevention to exclude the potential benefits of positive body image?

Encouraging positive body image does not “promote” obesity. Rather, it helps people let go of the shame, fear, and unsustainable weight loss behaviors that are keeping them trapped in a state of bad health.

Yes, it’s just another (mostly) heteronormative pop video full of white, attractive, cis people. But. It’s also kind of adorable in an almost-progressive way.

First of all, it reverses the “girl next door” trope by making the boy next door the object of a girl’s fantasy. Second, Carly (or is it Carly Rae?) plays with the “sexy car wash pin-up girl” cliché by awkwardly trying to perform the sexual self-objectification that women know we’re supposed to buy into in order to capture the male gaze. (Oh and did you notice that her male band-mates are the one who suggest this tactic?) Then the romance lit analogy! Our protagonist has clearly bought into the hetero romance narrative (damsel in distress, hero as protector, etc) and fantasy and then, and then!, her hero turns out to be gay! Subversive? Just a little bit, maybe?

Okay, the “Surprise! He’s actually gay” narrative is not exactly new or progressive, but I still wasn’t expecting to see it in this video. I was expecting girl meets boy, girl rescued by boy, boy kisses girl. (Then again, I’m the kindof person that never suspects plot twists before they’re revealed.) And yes, they totally objectified the male neighbor and it would have been better if the male band member accepted his number with less of a shocked expression, but hey, what are you gonna do? Even though I recognize that a lot of things about this video are problematic, I was still pleasantly surprised by the way it played with tropes about gender, sexuality, and romance. Do you agree? Well, here’s my number. Call me, maybe!

Have you checked out Rebecca Cohen’s webcomic about Gyno-Star, the first explicitly feminist superhero?

Back in November, I blogged about Gyno-Star at Jewesses with Attitude:

Wonder Woman, created in the 1940s, showed the world that women could kick butt. Still, there’s a difference between a powerful woman superhero (i.e. a superhero who happens to be a woman) and a feminist superhero sworn to fight “forces of evil and male chauvinism.” Gyno-Star, created by Rebecca Cohen, is the world’s first explicitly feminist superhero.

In The Adventures of Gyno-Star, our feminist superhero takes on contemporary feminist issues like hiring discrimination and body image personified by different types of anti-feminist super villains, including the super sexist “Vlad Deferens,” fashion magazine editor “Anna Rexia,” the free-market touting “Glibertarian,” and her Sarah Palin-supporting, Fox News-watching nemesis, “Stay At Home Mommy.” Gyno-Star’s main superpower is the ability to make men feel the pain of childbirth.  Little Sappho, Gyno-Star’s sidekick, is a radical feminist-Marxist lesbian teenager with the powers of “gaydar” and righteous rage.

I’ll admit that I never much cared for superhero comics, I think because I didn’t really relate to them. But for the first time, there is a superhero champion fighting the same battles I do, whose frustrations mirror my own, and who takes action in ways I can only dream about. (How many times have I wished I could just punch a sexist idiot in the face with a “POW!” or simply zap a crowd of Tea Partiers with an “Enlightening Ray?”)

Continue at Jewesses with Attitude for an interview with Rebecca Cohen

Months later, and deeper than ever into a quagmire of government intrusion into women’s private and personal lives, it helps to fantasize about feminist superheroes. It helps us gather the strength and courage to keep going in this never-ending battle between gender equity advocacy and patriarchal evil-doing.

Fight on, super women.

Today I blogged about my abortion story on Role/Reboot:

If I got pregnant today, I would have an abortion

As a 16-year-old, I knew that if I got pregnant by accident I would have an abortion. Ten years later, I am in a completely different place—a place where I could, realistically, support and parent a child—and I would still choose abortion.

I believe in the power of telling stories. With the 80 new restrictions on abortion rights enacted by state legislatures in 2011 and more coming every day, I believe it’s especially important to tell stories about abortion and the role it plays in creating an egalitarian society that allows women, and men, to control their destinies. Until recently I felt like I didn’t have a story to tell because I haven’t had an abortion. I cannot speak to the experience of making that decision or undergoing the procedure. But I realized that I do have a story, a story that has grown with me as I matured from a 16- to 26-year-old adult who could, if I chose to, be a mom.

Continue reading at Role/Reboot.

The MBTA is where you’ll usually find ads for Jamba juice and Jansport backpacks, local research studies, and public health campaigns. Currently, though, much of this highly-coveted space is occupied by ads for Daybreakinc.org, an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center. The ads don’t tell you that Daybreak has an anti-abortion agenda; they claim to offer “compassion,” “empowerment,” “hope,” and most inaccurately, “options.” This is in fact the major criticism of crisis pregnancy centers—that they misrepresent themselves as neutral parties. They are not, and they should not be allowed to advertise their heavily-biased and manipulative services on the MBTA.

The point of a crisis pregnancy center (CPC) is to keep pregnant women from having abortions, often by delaying them with offers of pregnancy tests and ultrasounds until it’s too late. What is truly sinister about CPCs is their use of untrue or misleading information to scare women away from choosing abortion, with false claims such as: abortion causes breast cancer, abortion is psychologically damaging, abortion can lead to sterility, and birth-control pills cause abortion. A 2006 Congressional investigation found that 87 percent of the centers surveyed provided false or misleading medical information.

Daybreak is guilty of this type of misinformation, although they are careful not to appear so on their website. It’s no wonder they are covering their behinds—legal action has been taken against CPCs in a number of states regarding their deceptive advertising in New York, California, Ohio, Missouri, and North Dakota.

According to their website, Daybreak claims to provide “accurate information about pregnancy, fetal development, lifestyle issues, and related concerns” as well as offer “accurate information about abortion procedures and risks.” They say “our advertising and communications are truthful and honest and accurately describe the services we offer.” But when you dig in deeper, you will find a sample if misleading and just plain untrue “facts” on their website:

• Daybreak claims: “[Plan B] It may alter the uterine lining which prevents the fertilized egg from implanting, resulting in an early abortion.” (This is wrong—the dissolution of a fertilized egg is NOT “early abortion.”)
• Daybreak claims: “Complications may happen in as many as 1 out of every 100 early abortions,” when according to the Guttmacher Institute, “the risk of abortion complications is minimal: Fewer than 0.3% of abortion patients experience a complication that requires hospitalization.”
• Daybreak claims: “Women who have experienced abortion may develop the following symptoms: guilt, grief, anger, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, difficulty bonding with partner or children, eating disorder,” when the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Mental Health and Abortion reported that “the best scientific evidence published indicates that among adult women who have an unplanned pregnancy the relative risk of mental health problems is no greater if they have a single elective first-trimester abortion than if they deliver that pregnancy.”
• On the particularly appalling “For Men” section of the Daybreak website, they write: “Many women who have had abortions report that they were waiting for their boyfriends/husbands to stop them. Some even say that they sat on the table hoping the father of their baby would ‘rush through the door to rescue me and take me away somewhere safe.’” (Um, citation needed?)

I’m not trying to make the argument that free pregnancy counseling is a bad thing or that the people at Daybreak are “bad” people, but pregnancy counseling, or any counseling for that matter, should be unbiased and informative. No where on the Daybreak MBTA ads are women informed that the the “free pregnancy counseling” is actually anti-abortion counseling, and that is dishonest, manipulative, and ultimately wrong. Women facing unplanned pregnancies need to know all their options, without the implication that one is better than another, and they need real medical information, not the “facts” listed above.

The MBTA is currently under fire for proposed fare increases and service cuts. They may be desperate for funds, but that does not excuse this moral misstep. CPCs are a growing threat to women’s health and the MBTA is the last place Bostonians should be exposed to anti-abortion propaganda.

Ron Paul used “honest rape” as code for rapes that fit the prescribed, social narrative of rape: When an innocent, attractive, young woman is attacked by a criminal stranger in a dark alley. Of all the rape narratives that actually exist (incest, partner violence, date rape, acquaintance rape, etc.), this is the only one in which predators “look like” predators and victims “look like” victims. When our predators look like choir boys or world leaders or women, the Ron Pauls of the world are less likely to believe the rape was “honest.” When our victims are not pure and chaste, or young and beautiful, or women, they are less likely to believe the rape was “honest.”

Of course, this is bullshit.

All rape is “honest rape,” no matter who perpetrated it, no matter the victim is (or what she was wearing or drinking), no matter where or how it occurred. The idea that some rape is more valid than other rape is a device used to preserve the false notion that some victims are “asking for it.”

Ron Paul seems to believe that “honest rapes” are rapes that are reported right away. But anyone who knows anything about the reality of rape and sexual assault knows that the majority of rapes go unreported. Why? Because the very idea of “honest rape,” the very same that Ron Paul is propagating, deters victims from coming forward.

Victims worry that their rape might not be taken seriously because they knew their attacker or because they don’t have physical injuries. Sixteen percent of victims say that they fear reprisal, while about six percent don’t report because they believe that the police are “biased.” Biased by what?  The idea that only some rapes are “honest,” and therefore only some victims are credible.

One more thing.

Just as there is no such thing as an “honest rape,” there is no such thing as an “honest abortion.”  You don’t need to be raped–”honestly” or otherwise–in order to deserve the right to terminate a pregnancy. (#justsayin’)

For good looking guys, lets say, you approach someone in a club (CONSIDER YOU DONT GET HER REALLY DRUNK). it will take you atleast 1 week to get laid! or lets say 3x of meeting with her  )))))))),

It is a different story tho if you keep her drinking lotsa alchohol….if she is totally drunk (With tequila, and she pass out in the club, you could get her easy = this is one tactics those players are using!).

BUT KEEP IN MIND, It wont also work if you see this beautiful girls with their guy friends (you might end up in a fight with the GUYS….. LOOOL)

IN CONCLUSION, girls want it, but sometimes they are too shy, and guys need sweet talks if they want the sex 

[sic]

…

From Slacktory:

There’s this running joke on the internet about an acne-scarred C.H.U.D. (or Butthurt Dweller) finding fault with any and all images of women in order to alleviate the self-hatred and loneliness that goes along with being a neckbearded netizen — “I can’t find a decent woman, not because I’m just awful in every way, but because all the women in my town have such big foreheads and stubby toes. Disgusting!”

This mindset has borne a new meme, “2/10 Would Not Bang,” in which 4chan users post images of flawless women and compete against each other to find fault in increasingly creative ways, and then dismiss them with the Comic Book Guy-channeling verdict: 2/10, Would Not Bang.

According to Slacktory and the 4chan-ers themselves, this is not men judging women harshly — it’s satire of men judging women harshly. GET IT? Good.

I can see hints of that satire in some of these images. For example, criticism’s like “half of face too bright,” “forehead cut off,” and “being outside on a cloudy day,” are kindof funny because they mock  the judging by judging things that are actually more about the photo composition or staging of the image than the woman herself. Unfortunately, the majority of the criticisms miss the satire mark by a longshot.

These are all real things that women (and others) actually fret about. These are things that women are judged by in the harshest and most misogynistic of circles. “Would Not Bang” is the meme version of real-life sorority hazing where female pledges strip to their underwear and let frat boys highlight their flaws in red Sharpie.

I just don’t see any humor in that at all.

***Oh, and did I mention this meme is an excuse for racial bigotry?

(h/t to Tali for the link)