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"…scientific evidence does not support the notion that abortion of any kind raises the risk of breast cancer or any other type of cancer."

- American Cancer Society (via klondikebar123)

Safer Sex September Giveaways! (Reblog to Win)

becauseiamawoman:

It is finally September! That means a couple of awesome things: (1) Many of us are starting school again (2) All the tasty pumpkin themed treats are out, and (3) We should celebrate these things with a sexual health themed giveaway! For those of us away from home, we all know how nice it is to get a care package…. and how many of us couldn’t use a bag of safer sex goodies for ourselves and/or to share among our friends?

That is where I come in! This month, I will be giving away four safer sex care packages. Each care package will contain at least 10 condoms, some lube, informational brochures, a mix of stickers and pins, and if you’re lucky maybe a little extra sex toy. 

Winning is easy- just reblog this post. Likes will not count as entries, but you may enter more than once. Although you do not need to be following me to win, It’d be really wonderful if you were! One winner will be announced every Friday, so stay tuned to see if you’re one of them!

*Due to shipping issues, I am unable to extend this giveaway to those outside of the US.*

Good luck! 

Safer Sex September Giveaways! (Reblog to Win)

becauseiamawoman:

It is finally September! That means a couple of awesome things: (1) Many of us are starting school again (2) All the tasty pumpkin themed treats are out, and (3) We should celebrate these things with a sexual health themed giveaway! For those of us away from home, we all know how nice it is to get a care package…. and how many of us couldn’t use a bag of safer sex goodies for ourselves and/or to share among our friends?

That is where I come in! This month, I will be giving away four safer sex care packages. Each care package will contain at least 10 condoms, some lube, informational brochures, a mix of stickers and pins, and if you’re lucky maybe a little extra sex toy. 

Winning is easy- just reblog this post. Likes will not count as entries, but you may enter more than once. Although you do not need to be following me to win, It’d be really wonderful if you were! One winner will be announced every Friday, so stay tuned to see if you’re one of them!

*Due to shipping issues, I am unable to extend this giveaway to those outside of the US.*

Good luck! 

Just a friendly reminder that any post about Birth Control that quotes 1Flesh or claims hormonal BC causes Infertility

geekingsexuality:

Is NOT a reputable source of information.

The National Cancer Institute Fact Sheet on Oral Contraceptives and Cancer Risk

A very detailed discussion about the recent study on Depo Provera and Breast Cancer Risk

Studies repeatedly show no link between birth control and infertility

One of the many reasons why I will never shut up about Sex Ed

becauseiamawoman:

geekingsexuality:

…Most Americans by now have a passing familiarity with the way the anti-choice movement has grown past attacks on abortion and is moving on to attacks on contraception access, from defunding Planned Parenthood to fighting the Obama administration on an HHS requirement to make contraception available without a co-pay to women with insurance. What they may see less of is the war on contraception that’s going on in the culture. Anti-choice activists have been turning up the volume on misinformation campaigns aimed at creating doubt in the public, especially among young people, about the efficacy of contraception. These efforts started in earnest under the Bush administration, with the explosion of federally funded abstinence-only programs. As those programs have mostly receded due to utter inability to convince kids to abstain from sex, efforts like 1 Flesh and the Pill Kills have stepped up to try to sow doubts about the use of contraception.

Abstinence-only programs were justified by claims that they were about discouraging teenage sex altogether, but considering how much anti-choice literature tells romantic stories about how unintended pregnancy led to ecstatic proposals and happily-ever-afters, one gets the feeling they also would be happy with an uptick in the unplanned pregnancy rate. Sites like 1 Flesh make the “more pregnancies” agenda clear; the site specifically argues against the use of contraception even in marriage, which can’t serve any other purpose in the reality-based world except to increase the rate of unintended pregnancies.

Unfortunately, the new strategies that 1 Flesh is using might actually be effective in achieving this goal, because unlike the old church lady-style methods of anti-contraception efforts, 1 Flesh is tapping into preexisting cultural myths and narratives about contraception that are already known to cause people to be inconsistent in their contraception use.

They go straight for some common beliefs: 1) condoms ruin sex (as Dan Savage has noted, if condoms decreased sensation that much, you’d think men would notice more when they broke); 2) the pill has a lot more negative side effects than it actually has; and 3) condom breakage is more common than it is. In other words, the usual comportment of myths that sex educators find they have to debunk coming from all sorts of people, even those who don’t have any relationship to the Christian right whatsoever.

1 Flesh also promotes the idea that birth control doesn’t do anything to reduce the unintended pregnancy rate. That this idea might have traction in the public at large already might seem asinine (what are people using all that contraception for, if not to prevent pregnancy?), but even without Christian right propaganda, the idea that birth control doesn’t do a very good job at preventing unintended pregnancy is surprisingly widespread. Earlier this year, Guttmacher released a study where it quizzed over 1,000 young people between ages 18 and 29 about their contraception knowledge. Unsurprisingly, the usual myths about condom failure and pill danger were well-represented, but the big surprise was that the myth that birth control doesn’t actually matter was also widespread.

A shocking 40 percent of the young people surveyed believed that using birth control doesn’t actually do much to prevent pregnancy, agreeing with the statement, “when it is your time to get pregnant, it will happen.” In other words, they had a magical belief that somehow the universe would prevent them from getting pregnant when it wasn’t time, even if they’re not using contraception at the time. This preexisting belief is one that groups like 1 Flesh are trying to encourage by spreading lies about how birth control doesn’t change the unintended pregnancy rate.

Why is it so easy for people to underestimate not just the effectiveness of birth control, but also how likely they are to get pregnant if they don’t use it? Part of the problem is, ironically, that birth control is so effective, but so hidden. Much as the anti-vaccine movement could only erupt in a culture where the diseases the vaccines prevent are out of sight and easy to dismiss, contraception works so well at suppressing fertility that many people have no idea how high fertility rates would be without it. Sex is everywhere: TV characters have it, songs on the radio are full of it, and most friends gossip about it. But contraception is rarely discussed in much detail, if at all. It’s easy for someone to look at all this booty-knocking and the relatively low birth rate and conclude that it’s not that easy to get pregnant instead of concluding, correctly, that contraception use is widespread.

To add even more confusion into the mix, heavy media coverage of infertility in light of exciting new technologies to fix the problem has had the side effect of encouraging people to overestimate their own chances of infertility. Researchers at John Hopkins University found that 19 percent of women and 13 percent of men ages 18-29 believed that they were likely to be infertile, though they had no evidence to believe this. The drumbeat of stories about couples who have a hard time conceiving might also contribute to the misconception that getting pregnant without contraception is more infrequent than it actually is.

In reality, a sexually active woman who uses no contraception has an 85 percent chance of getting pregnant within a year. Anti-contraception activists go out of their way to conceal this fact, hoping women feel that their risks of skipping contraception are much lower than they are. It would be laughable if the only audience for this anti-contraception propaganda were folks with good sex education and a solid knowledge of how effective contraception really is. Unfortunately, they’re speaking to a larger audience already rife with misinformation about contraception and fertility; an audience that might not like the anti-sex message, but could be influenced by the anti-contraception one.

Amanda Marcotte exposes 1 Flesh and other campaigns spreading misinformation about contraception. 1 Flesh doesn’t just promote condomless sex, they are aggressively anti-birth control of any kind, which presents a serious threat to the health and well being of young folks.

I already posted an excerpt from this article but now that 1Flesh has a Tumblr page that is tagging its posts to get into sexual health related tags it is time to post it again.

Rant

Read More

virgin: Via @IAmDrTiller

virgin:

Via @IAmDrTiller

"

One thing I am going to do differently as a parent is go easy on the “save sex for someone special” rhetoric with my kids – both with my daughter and my son. I noticed some unintended consequences happened among my friends and I when we were growing up with this. The “save yourself for when you really love someone” thing comes from a good place – being nice to yourself and only choosing people who are also nice to you – but it pairs up too easily with the general culture of slut-shaming that’s out there. The “precious vagina” can easily become the “shameful vagina”.

“Saving yourself” can obviously also lend itself to an exploitative situation where male sexual pleasure is centred in sexual activity. Here’s how that works. You’re a girl and you’re having sexual encounters with boys (is it different for girls only hooking up with other girls?), and they’re very nice and you’re very attracted to them but they are not “the special one” so for as long as possible you end up choosing sexual activities that don’t involve your precious, precious virginity. The safest activities for this are those aimed solely at his sexual pleasure. With some friends I think this established a pattern that took them years to overcome in their sex lives.

"

- Andrea O’Reilly, “Why I will go easy on the “save yourself” rhetoric with my daughter” (via morecoffee)
SEX EDUCATION LINKED TO DELAY IN FIRST SEX

prolongedeyecontact:

Excerpt from Guttmacher press release:

Teens who receive formal sex education prior to their first sexual experience demonstrate a range of healthier behaviors at first intercourse than those who receive no sex education at all. This is particularly so when the instruction they receive includes information about both waiting to have sex and methods of birth control. These findings come from a new study, “Consequences of Sex Education on Teen and Young Adult Sexual Behaviors and Outcomes,” by Laura Duberstein Lindberg and Isaac Maddow-Zimet of the Guttmacher Institute.

The authors analyzed data from 4,691 men and women aged 15–24 who participated in the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth. They found that 66% of sexually experienced females and 55% of sexually experienced males reported having received information about both abstinence and birth control prior to first intercourse. Eighteen percent of sexually experienced females and 21% of males had received only abstinence instruction, while 16% of females and 24% of males had had no instruction on either topic. However, these measures do not correlate directly with any specific “abstinence-only” or “comprehensive” sex education programs (see below).

Respondents who had received instruction on both abstinence and birth control were older at first sex than their peers who had received no formal instruction and were more likely to have used condoms or other contraceptives at first sex; they also had healthier partnerships. Those who had received only abstinence instruction were more likely to have delayed first intercourse than were those who had had no sex education, but abstinence instruction was not associated with any of the other protective behaviors at first sex. Moreover, condom use at first sex was significantly less likely among females who had had only abstinence instruction than among those who had received information about both abstinence and birth control. The study found no relationship between sex education and current sexual behaviors, suggesting the need for ongoing education after the onset of sexual activity.

…

“Consequences of Sex Education on Teen and Young Adult Sexual Behaviors and Outcomes,” by Laura Duberstein Lindberg and Isaac Maddow-Zimet, is currently available online and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

For a comprehensive review of research findings on the effectiveness of comprehensive and abstinence-only sex education programs, click here.

_________________________________________________________________

I’m looking at you Utah.

Would be interesting to know if there are any studies on sexual debut or sexual behavior which aren’t focused on cis and binary demographics. If you know of any, I’d love to read them!