No More Excuses! campaign {featured resource}

At least 1 in 6 women in the U.S. will be raped in their lifetime. An estimated 1 in 10 rape victims are male, and studies have suggested that 1 in 2 transgender people will be sexually assaulted. But unless a rape fits the FBI’s 82-year-old definition, “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will,” it will never be counted in the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report (UCR).*

Ms. Magazine has launched a No More Excuses! campaign to update the definition of rape used by the FBI, which still uses "an impossibly narrow and outmoded definition of 'forcible' rape to gather its statistics."

Barcelona Sex Project {featured film}

Barcelona Sex Project (2008) by Barcelona-based Erika Lust affirms the natural joy and sexiness of women and men masturbating. Shot as a documentary featuring three women and three men, we first get a sense of their everyday lives and likes through one-on-one interviews, before we see them masturbate individually for the camera. Both the interviews and the masturbation scenes are shot in a more subdued style than Lust’s short films, further emphasized by the white backdrop and minimalist furniture used for this documentary.

Lust is among a new generation of women creating films that feature women masturbating. Read more about them here.

From Traditional Marriage to New Forms of Intimacy

The United States is one of the most sexually conservative countries in the industrial world. In 2002, 42 percent of Americans told pollsters that homosexuality was morally wrong. Only 16 percent of Italians, 13 percent of the French, and 5 percent of Spaniards felt that way. (Marriage, A History by Stephanie Coontz, 276)

That said,

even in America attitudes toward homosexuality have changed immensely over the past fifteen years ... And ironically, as views have polarized over the question of whether gays and lesbians should be able to use the word marriage to describe their relationships, the once-radical demand for same-sex civil unions has become a compromise position. "Let them have the same rights as me and my wife," one businessman told me. "Just don't call it marriage." (274-75)

Close-up on the Cervix

Drawing by Suzann Gage

While teaching women’s studies at a college in town a few years ago, and discussing genital self-examination with my female students, I remember several saying they would never do that; they would never look at themselves “down there,” – why would they?

As Suzann Gage who runs Progressive Health Services in San Diego, California, explains, there are in fact many important reasons for young women to know their bodies, in particular in a culture where women are bombarded by ideals for how their bodies—including their genitals—should look. Where women beneath the gynecologist’s white sheets can be made to feel bad for the way even their cervix appears.