No Sex-Ed for Asians

My parents never had "the talk" with me, and never will. They have never, to this day, in my presence, even uttered the word "s-e-x." I think I learned about sex through working at Sextv. Seriously. If you consider the fact that my claim to fame in university (yes, I think probably second year) was having to ask my roommate what a vibrator was, then you'll see why I love this Tyra clip so much. This is priceless: watch clip.

Posted by Emily
Monday, November 19, 2007 1:58pm

In'justice'

I'm all for respecting other people's customs and faiths. But some things I just do not understand, and this is one of them. How is this not a violation of human rights? And after centuries of debate is this really the best law they could come up with?

Posted by justa rankin
Friday, November 16, 2007 2:26pm

You are what you eat (and breathe and have sex with)

This blog post is for Berrygrl and Anatomy. I read this fascinating essay a couple weeks ago that I had refrained from writing about because I thought, hmm, I don't know if this has enough to do with sex. So I shelved it. But after a conversation in the office today about a town in Ontario that has an abnormally low ratio of boys to girls being born, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Check out this deeply engrossing article about a small town in Argentina called Aicuna. And then check out this article I came across today. It's frightening how sensitive our bodies and reproductive systems are to what we eat, breathe, and ingest from the environment around us, and who we mate with. Just something to think about on a rainy day...

Posted by Emily
Monday, November 12, 2007 1:46pm

Sex is Everywhere In Everything

Here at Sextv we are constantly beating the bushes of cyberspace for new ideas and stories. The experience can be either mind numbing, fascinating, horrifying, titillating or informative. Actually, it's usually a bit of all of those things at once. I have even kept bookmarks of some of the strange things I've come across, but for now I'll keep those for future blog fodder (and they are mostly sites that would get you fired from your day job - or left having to answer some delicate questions from your partner - if you were found looking at them).

Anyway, what am I getting at? Well I came across this photo somehow on one of my walkabouts in cyberspace. And whether or not it was because I had been researching sexual content that day, or because I've been working at Sextv so long that I see sex in everything, or because of my gender (nah let's not dredge up that stereotype), it just screamed sex. Have a look and see what you think.

Whether or not you agree or disagree I guarantee it will either make you ravenous, randy or repulsed. Or maybe even a little bit of all three.

Posted by justa rankin
Monday, November 12, 2007 1:38pm

My name is Corrina...

My name is Corrina and I am 14 years old. The two years that have separated me from when I was 12 seem like an eternity. My life, and the way I perceive life, has gone through some major changes that I would never have imagined. I can still remember my Grade 6 grad like it was yesterday. I was aware of the challenges that I was going to encounter in the future, but what I was not aware of was the challenges that I was going to encounter with who I am. Now I am in Grade 9, and I have been through my share of hard times, socially, sexually, academically, and in terms of my identity. During my elementary years I do not think I was aware of the word 'conforming', in the least, now it's like a burden to me. In Grade 7, in order to fit in, you had to dress a certain way, act a certain way, and be conscious of the trends that were constantly changing through out the year. I blame it on the insecurity everyone was facing in that year….how everyone was so desperate to fit in that they felt they needed to be judgmental themselves. Girls tried desperately to avoid the label 'slut', or took on the identity by testing how many boyfriends they could have in one year, how far they could go sexually, and were particular about cleavage exposing clothing. Boys tried desperately to avoid the label of 'faggot', mainly by acting as tough, macho, and as 'bad ass' as they could, or constantly hitting on girls. Everyone soon became enthusiastic about the latest brands such as Hollister and American Eagle, and soon it became the way that they defined themselves. The popular group judged anyone who didn't wear the right brands and riduculed the people who didn't have the money to spend for the right look.

Today is ' Take your kids to work day' at my high school, and I am here at Sextv writing this blog. I love expressing my feelings with writing. This summer I was involved in a summer workshop hosted by my best friend Aurora's mom, where we composed music, and grew more confident in our abilities to play music and write songs. I was interviewed by my mom in a story that she did, examining girlhood and the media. She was aware of how me, Aurora and Sophia, the three girls who were involved in this 'Girls rock camp' have all developed insecurities in ourselves and have been introduced to the challenges in life everyone must face as they grow up. This year, because of my mom's story, I've learned how important it is to develop your skills in life so that you gain true confidence in yourself. I personally think, when It comes down to it, being aware of who you are as a person, and knowing what your personal talents and skills are, is the strongest way to gain confidence in your self because it gives you a sense of how you can help, change, or add to the world.

Related:
Packaging Girlhood
girlsrockmovie.com

Posted by Corrina
Thursday, November 08, 2007 4:11pm

The Myth of the Asian Fetish

Slate ran an article yesterday, which details the results of a 2-year speed dating experiment done by a couple of economists and psychologists at Columbia Business School. I was really quite bored by the whole thing (they proved things like men really do put more emphasis on looks than women do, snore), until I made it to the end, where the author claimed that the "Asian fetish" is a myth:

"We found no evidence of the stereotype of a white male preference for East Asian women. However, we also found that East Asian women did not discriminate against white men (only against black and Hispanic men). As a result, the white man-Asian woman pairing was the most common form of interracial dating—but because of the women's neutrality, not the men's pronounced preference."

Please. Are you kidding me??? I dare you to find me an "East Asian" woman who has never had the experience of having a serial-Asian-woman-dater hit on her repeatedly and tell her how beautiful her exotic almond-shaped eyes are. Try Googling "Asian girls", and you'll come up with all kinds of very specialized porn, which probably isn't being viewed by an Asian-only population. Also, it's worth pointing out that the data was collected from a pool of 400 daters from Columbia's professional and graduate programs. Which is hardly an accurate representation of North American dating population. All I'm saying is that this study could benefit from the addition of some more qualitative research.

Related stories:
Dragon Ladies & Kung-Fu Masters
Reagan Louie

Posted by Emily
Thursday, November 08, 2007 3:57pm

Beating Around The Bush


In an episode of the Grey’s Anatomy a while back, a pregnant doctor who had gone into labor chided a male intern, “Stop looking at my vajayjay”. According to the show’s (female) executive producer, the euphemism was used in the script to pacify the concerns of network executives who wanted to script to cut back on the use of the word vagina. The producer – who had tried her best to challenge the censorship – pointed out that ‘vagina’ was used 11 times in the episode in question, while the same censors didn’t flinch when ‘penis’ had been used 17 times in another episode.

Then Oprah Winfrey started to refer to her “va-jay-jay”, pushing the term further into the mainstream. “I think vajayjay is a nice word, don’t you?” she asked her audience. According to a recent NY Times piece, What Did You Call It?, “The swift adoption of vajayjay is not simply about pop culture’s ability to embrace new slang. Neologisms are always percolating. What this really demonstrates, say some linguists, is that there was a vacuum in popular discourse, a need for a word for female genitalia that is not clinical, crude, coy, misogynistic or descriptive of a vagina from a man’s point of view.”

And yesterday, Tyra Banks dedicated her hour-long talk show to “‘DOWN THERE,’ ‘GROUND ZERO’ AND ‘HOO HA’ – OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE VAGINA.” The show’s press release went on further to stress that Ms. Banks would engage in “a no-holds barred discussion with her audience about the least talked (and looked at) about part of a woman’s body.” Fair enough.

The show featured a woman who looked like she was in her early to mid-30s (who happens to be an RN!) who was going to the gynecologist for the first time – and was terrified. Then Tyra introduced sex educator Dr. Debby Herbenick, who brought out a velvet vulva puppet to show the audience what’s where. The audience giggled and Tyra cooed, “it makes it cute and sweet and not scary; it’s like a stuffed animal.”

While I applaud Dr. Debby for stressing the importance and sensitivity of the clitoris, addressing women’s anxieties around the size, shape and color their labia, and pointing out that the vulva and the vagina are not the same thing, would it not have been more useful to use a realistic prop to inform women about their bodies? Are network executives that afraid of being censored? Tyra went on to further educate and enlighten her audience with the fact that women don’t pee out of their clitorises, or pee and have babies out of the same hole.

Come on. Given the fact that there are still women out there who somehow haven’t managed to acquaint themselves with their bodies, we need to have an open, honest and frank discussion about sexuality that doesn’t involved stuffed animals and cutesy pet names.

Posted by Lady Elaine Fairchild
Thursday, November 08, 2007 9:48am