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This is an interesting take on sexuality and those who do not identify with a specific sexuality. I talks about how being able to label oneself is so much more empowering than having a label placed on you.

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Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, I didn't really see too many mainstream young adults and teens in media who were out as queer. Ellen DeGeneres didn't come out until 1997, and by then, she was nearly 40 years old. Thankfully, these days, there's much more widespread knowledge about how sexuality is a fluid spectrum, and that's amazing. But that does make it potentially harder to pinpoint exactly what your sexuality is. If you don't know what your sexuality is, know that this more common than you think.

I know when I was trying to figure all this out in college, my biggest obstacle with my sexuality was trying to figure out what my label was. Bisexual? Pansexual? Go broad and use queer? "Queer" made me feel most comfortable at first because it meant I didn't have to define my non-straightness and pinpoint it in words. Then, I found more solace in using "pansexual" because it encapsulated the realization that my attraction was to anyone, and gender didn't play as much of a role. But identifying as pansexual comes with the string attached of usually having to explain to people what it means, so sometimes I just want to say I'm bi. Oh, the struggle is real.

Some people stray from sticking to a label - maybe because of the rigidness a label can make you feel (even though you can change your label at any moment you want!) - and that's legit totally OK.

I spoke with Rena McDaniel, a gender and sex therapist, about how not knowing how to label your sexuality is 100 percent normal.

"The thing about labels is that their usefulness and power lies in getting to decide what those labels are for yourself," McDaniel tells Elite Daily. "When others apply labels to you, the intention is to put you in a box of some sort. It feels confining and is someone telling you who you are without your consent. When you apply a label to yourself, it can be a source of power that connects you to a broader community of people with similar labels and experiences."

In recent years, celebrities including Demi Lovato and Shay Mitchell have refused to publicly label their sexuality. That doesn't necessarily mean they don't know who they're attracted to. It could mean that they want a more fluid interpretation of how they perceive attraction and love. If you skip labeling yourself, you're never restricted.

"People always ask me, 'You play a gay character? Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you this? Are you that?'" Mitchell told Maxim in August 2017. "Look, Emily [Mitchell's Pretty Little Liars character] doesn't label herself, and I don't label myself either. I fall in love with the spirit of somebody. Love is love, and that's something that I'll keep saying."

Lovato also takes a similar approach to sexuality.

"I'm very fluid, and I think love is love," Lovato told InTouch this month. "You can find it in any gender. I like the freedom of being able to flirt with whoever I want."

McDaniel explains, "I imagine these celebrities, who get labeled by others in the media so often, don't want to feel boxed into a label without their consent."

But sometimes finding a label that you identify with helps you find other people who identify that way - not just for romantic pursuits, but also as a support system.

"When you apply a label to yourself, it can be a source of power that connects you to a broader community of people with similar labels and experiences," says McDaniel. "When you look at labels from a queer theory perspective, applying a label to yourself does not mean that label cannot evolve and change as you grow as a person. Sexuality is rarely black and white and is rarely static."

Whether you want to choose a label for your sexuality or not, know that there are resources to support you if you're questioning. Check out GLAAD's numerous resources page for a topic you may need to discuss. Or, if you want more one-on-one time, seek out a therapist that specializes in sex and gender, like McDaniel does.

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Why It's Completely Normal If You Aren't Sure What Label Best Fits Your Sexuality

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Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, I didn't really see too many mainstream young adults and teens in media who were out as queer. Ellen DeGeneres didn't come out until 1997, and by then, she was nearly 40 years old. Thankfully, these days, there's mu...

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Post #12: A Gentleman's Guide to Rape Culture

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Post #12: A Gentleman's Guide to Rape Culture

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I have to say, after our discussion on rape culture, this article hits all the major points and talks about it from a man's perspective. It is powerful to hear a man talk about his realization of the part he plays in rape culture, by not acknowledging it and fighting against it.

"No woman should feel she has to explain rape culture to me just because I want to know what it is...Even my curiosity, a trait that always made me proud, was marred with the same sort of male-centric presumption that fuels rape culture. I expected to be satisfied"

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If you are a man, you are part of rape culture. I know ... that sounds rough. You're not a rapist, necessarily. But you do perpetuate the attitudes and behaviors commonly referred to as rape culture.

You may be thinking, "Now, hold up, Zaron! You don't know me, homey! I'll be damned if I'm gonna let you say I'm some sorta fan of rape. That's not me, man!"

I totally know how you feel. That was pretty much exactly my response when someone told me I was a part of rape culture. It sounds horrible. But just imagine moving through the world, always afraid you could be raped. That's even worse! Rape culture sucks for everyone involved. But don't get hung up on the terminology. Don't concentrate on the words that offend you and ignore what they're pointing to -- the words "rape culture" aren't the problem. The reality they describe is the problem.

Rape isn't exclusively committed by men. Women aren't the only victims -- men rape men, women rape men -- but what makes rape a men's problem, our problem, is the fact that men commit 99 percent of reported rapes.

How are you part of rape culture? Well, I hate to say it, but it's because you're a man.

When I cross a parking lot at night and see a woman ahead of me, I do whatever I feel is appropriate to make her aware of me so that a) I don't startle her b) she has time to make herself feel safe/comfortable and c) if it's possible, I can approach in a way that's clearly friendly, in order to let her know I'm not a threat. I do this because I'm a man.

Basically, I acknowledge every woman I meet on the street, or in an elevator, or in a stairway, or wherever, in a way that indicates she's safe. I want her to feel just as comfortable as if I weren't there. I accept that any woman I encounter in public doesn't know me, and thus, all she sees is a man -- one who is suddenly near her. I have to keep in mind her sense of space and that my presence might make her feel vulnerable. That's the key factor -- vulnerability.

I don't know about you, but I don't spend much of my life feeling vulnerable. I've come to learn that women spend most of their social lives with ever-present, unavoidable feelings of vulnerability. Stop and think about that. Imagine always feeling like you could be at risk, like you were living with glass skin.

As modern men we must seek out danger. We choose adventures and extreme sports in order to feel like we're in jeopardy. We make games of our vulnerability. That's how differently men see the world from women. (Obviously, stated with full acknowledgment that there's a vibrant community of extreme athletes that are women, who regularly risk their safety as well. However, women don't need to engage in adrenalin sports to feel at-risk.)

Now, I stand about a finger of tequila under six feet. I work out and would say I'm in decent shape, which means when I'm out alone at night, I rarely ever fear for my safety. Many men know exactly what I mean. Most women have no idea what that feels like -- to go wherever you want in the world, at any time of day or night, and feel you won't have a problem. In fact, many women have the exact opposite experience.

A woman must consider where she is going, what time of day it is, what time she will arrive at her destination and what time she will leave her destination, what day of the week is it, if she will be left alone at any point ... the considerations go on and on because they are far more numerous than you or I can imagine. Honestly, I can't conceive of having to think that much about what I need to do to protect myself at any given moment in my life. I relish the freedom of getting up and going, day or night, rain or shine, Westside or downtown. As men we can enjoy this particular extreme luxury of movement and freedom of choice. In order to understand rape culture, remember this is a freedom that at least half the population doesn't enjoy.

That's why I go out of my way to use clear body language and act in a way that helps minimize a woman's fear and any related feelings. I recommend you do the same. It's seriously, like, the least any man can do in public to make women feel more comfortable in the world we share. Just be considerate of her and her space.

You may think it's unfair that we have to counteract and adjust ourselves for the ill behavior of other men. You know what? You're right. It is unfair. Is that the fault of women? Or is it the fault of the men who act abysmally and make the rest of us look bad? If issues of fairness bother you, get mad at the men who make you and your actions appear questionable.

Because when it comes to assessing a man, whatever one man is capable of, a woman must presume you are capable of. Unfortunately, that means all men must be judged by our worst example. If you think that sort of stereotyping is bullshit, how do you treat a snake you come across in the wild?

...You treat it like a snake, right? Well, that's not stereotyping, that's acknowledging an animal for what it's capable of doing and the harm it can inflict. Simple rules of the jungle, man. Since you are a man, women must treat you as such.

The completely reasonable and understandable fear of men is your responsibility. You didn't create it. But you also didn't build the freeways either. Some of the things you inherit from society are cool and some of them are rape culture.

Since no woman can accurately judge you or your intentions on sight, you are assumed to be like all other men. 73% of the time a woman knows her rapist. Now, if she can't trust and accurately assess the intentions of men she knows, how can you expect her to ever feel that she can accurately assess you, a complete stranger? Rape prevention is not just about women teaching women how not to get raped -- it's about men not committing rape.

Rape prevention is about the fact that a man must understand that saying "no" doesn't mean "yes," that when a woman is too drunk/drugged to respond that doesn't mean "yes," that being in a relationship doesn't mean "yes." Rather than focus on how women can avoid rape, or how rape culture makes an innocent man feel suspect, our focus should be: how do we, as men, stop rapes from occurring, and how do we dismantle the structures that dismiss it and change the attitudes that tolerate it?
Since you are a part of it, you ought to know what rape culture is.
According to Marshall University's Women's Center website:

Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women's bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women's rights and safety.

When a woman first told me I was part of rape culture, I wanted to disagree for obvious reasons. Like many of you I wanted to say, "Whoa, that ain't me." Instead, I listened. Later, I approached a writer I respect. I asked her to write an article with me, wherein she'd explain rape culture to me and to male readers. She stopped returning my emails.

At first, I was annoyed. Then as it became clear she wasn't going to respond at all, I actually got mad. Luckily, I've learned one shouldn't immediately respond when they feel flashes of anger. Thunder is impressive but it's the rain that nourishes life. So I let that storm pass and thought about it. I took a walk. They seem to jangle my best thoughts loose.

Blocks from my house, in front of a car wash it dawned on me. If rape culture is so important to me I needed to find out for my self what it is. No woman owes me her time just because I want to know about something she inherently understands. No woman should feel she has to explain rape culture to me just because I want to know what it is. No woman owes me shit. I saw how my desire for a woman to satisfy me ran deep. Even my curiosity, a trait that always made me proud, was marred with the same sort of male-centric presumption that fuels rape culture. I expected to be satisfied. That attitude is the problem. I started reading and kept reading until I understood rape culture and my part in it.
Here's a bullet-point list of examples of rape culture.

Blaming the victim ("She asked for it!")

Trivializing sexual assault ("Boys will be boys!")

Sexually explicit jokes

Tolerance of sexual harassment

Inflating false rape report statistics

Publicly scrutinizing a victim's dress, mental state, motives, and history

Gratuitous gendered violence in movies and television

Defining "manhood" as dominant and sexually aggressive

Defining "womanhood" as submissive and sexually passive

Pressure on men to "score"

Pressure on women to not appear "cold"

Assuming only promiscuous women get raped

Assuming that men don't get raped or that only "weak" men get raped

Refusing to take rape accusations seriously

Teaching women to avoid getting raped instead of teaching men not to rape

Now that you know what it is, what can you do about rape culture?
You'll quickly find that rape culture plays a central role in all the social dynamics of our time. It's at the heart of all our personal interactions. It's part of all our social, societal and environmental struggles. Rape culture is not just about sex. It is the product of a generalized attitude of male supremacy. Sexual violence is one expression of that attitude. Again, don't let the terminology spook you. Don't get hung up on the term "male supremacy." The term isn't the problem. The problem is that rape culture hurts everyone involved. Antiquated patriarchal notions of society make it difficult for men to come forward as rape victims just as much as they foster a desire for a man to be seen as powerful and sexually aggressive. Men shouldn't feel threatened or attacked when women point out rape culture -- they're telling us about our common enemy. We ought to listen.

· Avoid using language that objectifies or degrades women

· Speak out if you hear someone else making an offensive joke or trivializing rape

· If a friend says she has been raped, take her seriously and be supportive

· Think critically about the media's messages about women, men, relationships, and violence
What else can you do about rape culture 1. Men can confront men. when you experience it IRL?
· Be respectful of others' physical space even in casual situations
2. Men can correct men.
· Always communicate with sexual partners and do not assume consent

· Define your own manhood or womanhood. Do not let stereotypes shape your actions.

No one is suggesting violence. In fact, that's what we're looking to avoid. But sometimes, a man needs to confront another man or a group of men in a situation. When I'm out in public and I see a man hassling a woman, I stop for a moment. I make sure the woman sees me. I want her to know I'm fully aware of what's happening. I wait for a moment for a clear indication from her of whether she needs help. Sometimes, the couple will continue right on fighting like I'm just a hickory tree. Other times, the woman will make it clear she'd like backup and I approach the situation. I've never had to get violent. Usually, my presence alone makes the guy leave if he's a stranger, or explain himself if they're familiar. It changes the dynamic. That's why I always stop when I see a woman getting hassled in public. For any reason. I make sure any woman, in what could become a violent situation, one I may or may not be correctly assessing, feels that she has the opportunity to signal to me if she needs assistance. I'm a big brother to a sister so that response is practically instinctual.
3. Men can make other men STFU.
But, I don't limit this to women. I've also done this for two men who were clearly in a lovers' spat. Whenever you see a situation spiraling out of control, and especially if someone is crying for help or being attacked, you should confront the situation. You don't need to "break it up." But engage, get involved, take down pertinent information, alert authorities, call the police. Do something.

If you hear a guy say some jacked-up slurs in front of you and there's no one from that particular community around to be offended, you can still say something. This is also true when you hear misogynistic language. Speak up. Tell your friend or co-worker that rape jokes are bullshit and you won't tolerate them.

Trust me you won't lose your "man card." If you're older than nineteen and you're still worried about your man card, you don't understand what respectable masculinity is about, anyway. It's not about cultish approval from others -- it's about being "your own man" and doing the right thing. You might be surprised by how many other men will respect you for doing what they wanted to but didn't. I've heard it plenty. I'm not some social justice cop, but I have and will argue with whole roomfuls of men. Later on, some dudes will approach me and say how much they respected what I did. I always tell them it gets easier to speak up every time you do it. I promise you that's true.
4. It's our job to have standards for ourselves, and thus, for all men.
No one is suggesting you go around policing everybody. I don't make it my business to make sure everyone live by my yardstick. No one needs you telling them what you think about every little thing they say and whether it meets your criteria for social awareness. But when some dude says some foul shit, and you know it -- we all hear those jokes -- you can let the dude know his rape joke or his "she's a whore" analogy didn't play.

Let's say, you're in a group of men, and one of your friends starts hollering at a girl -- tell him to knock it the fuck off. You won't be a punk for speaking up for the woman. As long as you don't try to score points with her for "defending her," you won't be white-knighting it either. You're just doing the right thing. No one needs some sexist clown hollering at her because the dude popped a mental woody. Cat-calling is one of the worst advertisements for male sexuality there is. Those assholes make us all look like complete tools. You get that, right? We need to cut that shit out.

Working construction is when I learned to speak up to a group of men. You have to do it. Mostly, you do it because you want to respect yourself. Otherwise, you're another pathetic man that allows a guy to mistreat a woman in your presence. When a guy cat-calls a woman and you don't say something, he just treated her like a cheaply degraded sex object for his satisfaction and he turned you into the punk-ass that's willing to allow him to mistreat a woman in your presence ... while you say nothing.
This piece first appeared on Medium.
What would your grandfather think if he saw you in that moment? Would he be proud of you? Are you proud of yourself? Male pride is good for something -- use it to be your better self. Don't be that silent punk that goes along with the crowd to get along with the crowd. Speak up when someone cat-calls a woman in front of you. Tell them to shut the fuck up. As a man, you have power. Use it. Men respect conviction.

You may think, "Zaron, man, lighten up, brother. Cat-calling is not that big a deal. Aren't we making a mountain out of a molehill? Some women like it." You may be right. Maybe some women do like it. That doesn't matter. I like to speed. My cousin likes to smoke pot in public. Neither of us gets to do what we like. That's just how it goes sometimes when you're a member of a society. If you find that woman who likes to be cat-called, go for it, just do it behind closed doors. When you're in public, respect the physical and mental space of others.

Don't limit yourself to being a man. Be a mensch. Be a human being.

When something like # YesAllWomen occurs in our cultural conversation and women the world over are out there sharing their experiences, their trauma, their stories and their personal views, as men, we don't need to enter that conversation. In that moment, all we need to do is listen, and reflect, and let their words change our perspective. Our job is to ask ourselves how we can do better.

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If you are a man, you are part of rape culture. I know ... that sounds rough. You're not a rapist, necessarily. But you do perpetuate the attitudes and behaviors commonly referred to as rape culture. You may be thinking, "Now, hold up, Zaron! You don't know me, homey!

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Post #11: Hippie Christian Cult and Sexual Abuse

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Post #11: Hippie Christian Cult and Sexual Abuse

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This is yet another example of religion, specifically Christianity, being twisted to fit the agenda of the leader. This article dealt with all the sexually perverse ways this cult leader used to ultimately control his following.

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This is one 'Family' you don't want to be a part of

In the beginning, it was innocent enough.

Teens for Christ seemed like many other liberated hippie crews in 1968. They wore long hair and colorful caftans. They played acoustic guitars at the beach. There was nothing unusual about them.

But the group existed on the fringe of the era's explosive youth counterculture. They were considered Jesus People, a growing movement comprised of different faiths, but which generally preached simple living and good deeds. No wonder they got along with flower children.

But their founder, David Berg, would eventually pervert Teens for Christ into his own international religious cult, exploiting young people to accomplish it. Horrific reports of sexual violence, incest, and brainwashing haunt the religious organization, which still operates today.

David Berg was an itinerant preacher who traveled to various churches with his children in the 1960s. They sang hymns and spread the word, encouraging "a teenage witnessing revolution to prove that Christ is more than the Monkeys [sic]."

The message wasn't catching on.

Discouraged and running out of money, the family moved to Huntington Beach, California, in 1967 to run a coffee shop. As they worked, they preached, and more Jesus People began to listen. It was at this point Berg realized that, in order to attract the day's youth, he had to completely change his approach. In a 1979 newsletter, Berg recalled his lightbulb moment:
"I saw something was really happening and was really going to explode! I just knew it! I saw the Lord was really doing something! That's when I began to come down and teach in my dark glasses, beret, baggy pants, old torn jacket and tennis shoes..."
He changed the name of his religion from Teens of Christ to Children of God, hoping to appeal to a wider group of vulnerable, disaffected youth.

By early 1969, COG counted 50 converts, and eventually Berg hit the road with his "family." Over eight months, they grew to 200 members. People dropped what they were doing to join this caravan of pious revolutionaries.

COG returned to southern California in early 1970 - and that's when it all got really weird.

Members of the COG moved in together around the country. Communes housed a dozen adults and their children. Each was called a "home," its occupants referred to as "families." Members did not work in traditional jobs, but dedicated their lives to proselytizing for more followers, like an ecumenical Amway.

Now living in seclusion, David Berg (also known as "Moses David") communicated to his converts through letter writing. His teachings and prophesies were known as "MO's Letters."

In a February 1971 letter entitled "A Shepherd-Time Story," Berg described his "happy folds," where COG members protected little lambs who "laugh and sing and dance and play and fuck and bear lots of little lambs! And the shepherds like it!"

In public, COG was invoking the name of God. In private, its prophet was running a child sex ring.

Berg's own daughter, Deborah, described her father's actions in a 1984 exposé. She claimed he attempted to have sex with her several times, and engaged in a continuous sexual relationship with his other daughter, Faith.

His actions weren't confined to his immediate family. Starting in the late 1970s, Berg preached "sexual sharing" to all of his followers - and their children. "God created boys and girls able to have children by about 12 years of age," Berg wrote in one of his letters. One photo pictured mothers orally copulating a little boy. In another, an adult woman and a toddler lay naked in bed, her hand suggestively near his penis. The caption read, "Well, they told us to go to bed!"

"It's just a piece of educational material," a father and COG member told 20/20 in 1988. "It's actually fun to watch a child, in this case, experience life." Parents like him were reassured that by allowing kids to explore sex at any age, they were "raising children the natural way."

"The free expression of sexuality, including fornication, adultery, lesbianism (though not male homosexuality), and incest were not just permitted but encouraged," writes Richard Kyle in The Religious Fringe: A History of Alternate Religions in America (1993).

In 1993, TV host Larry King asked former member Ricky Dupuy how he knew such policies existed in the COG. Dupuy replied, "Because I was ordered in the group to have sex with a 10-year-old by the leadership of the group."

"Did you?" King asked.

"Yes. It was to get me in so deep that I would be afraid to ever come out and speak against the group."

In 1977, Berg issued another edict: female members should have sex with men in order to convert them, in a maneuver he dubbed "flirty fishing." Even if women were married, Berg called on them to sacrifice their bodies in the name of God.

In Berg's own 1979 annual report, he stated that his FFers (flirty fishers) had "witnessed to over a quarter of a million souls, loved over 25,000 of them, and won about 19,000 to the Lord." By 1981, hundreds of "Jesus Babies" had been born as a result of flirty fishing. Eventually, the cult stopped the practice due to AIDS-related concerns.

"It was religious prostitution," Berg's daughter Deborah said. "I had to quit looking at the man as my father but as the leader of a worldwide movement that was destroying lives.

By 1977, COG had established more than 130 communities around the world. In 1983, the group reported more than 10,000 full-time members living in 1,642 homes.

The Children of God was officially renamed "The Family."

Years later, the cult attempted to distance itself from Berg's pedophilic dogma, especially after his death in 1994. It wanted to be seen as a legitimate international religious sect, and issued charters that allowed for personal careers and independence from the residential family unit. The Family engaged in goodwill marketing campaigns. A group of children even sang for Barbara Bush at the White House during the 1992 Christmas season.

But controversy resurfaced in the 1990s and 2000s as more and more Family members defected. Specifically, original members had given birth to a second generation, children who were raised in communal, religious environments-and in some cases, households of sexual criminality. Such isolation meant these children knew nothing outside that existence. Even celebrities like Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan were part of the cult.

Ricky Rodriguez was an extreme example. Rodriguez was born to one of Berg's wives in 1975, whereupon the cult leader adopted him into their personal Family. Berg renamed his new son "Davidito" and prophesied the young boy would be the religion's next leader.

From toddlerhood, Davidito watched people have sex, fondled his nanny's breasts, and was touched on his genitals. These actions were photographed or described for The Davidito Book, which Berg published as an instructional manual on how to raise kids.

When The New York Times got in touch with the Family International in 2005, a spokesperson said, "He was never taken advantage of. Rather, he was allowed to explore his sexuality freely. He was allowed to explore as a young boy what comes naturally, and usually in our society, we do not allow such exploration."

The paper interviewed more than a dozen former members who confirmed experiencing or witnessing sex as minors. Some were forced.

"At the time, I didn't think of it as abuse," said Peter Frouman, who left in 1987. "I had no concept that normal people didn't do this sort of thing. I thought it was perfectly normal for parents to have sex with their children, and children to have sex with each other and with adults.

"When I was 11, I had sex with a 28-year-old woman, and it was with the approval of everyone in the room. I found out later that my mom was watching."

Despite his father's prophesies, Rodriguez defected in 2000. In 2005, he recorded a home video where he sat behind a table full of knives, tasers, duct tape, and gags. He sounds very rational, matter-of-fact: "The goal is to bring down my own mother."

Instead, the following night he found his former nanny. They went to dinner, then he invited her back to his apartment and stabbed her to death. Hours later, he shot himself dead.

Though not all families experienced sexual abuse, defectors who integrated back into mainstream society had to grapple with the consequences. Sometimes their mothers and fathers remained behind. Lost and isolated, they turned to drugs and alcohol to cope. Several second generation former Family members killed themselves.

"Sex wasn't the only thing stolen from them. It wasn't even the biggest thing," James La Matterly, a member in the early 1970s, told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. "Their spirituality was stolen. God was stolen from them."

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The hippie Christian cult that encouraged sex with children is still around today

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This is one 'Family' you don't want to be a part of In the beginning, it was innocent enough. Teens for Christ seemed like many other liberated hippie crews in 1968. They wore long hair and colorful caftans. They played acoustic guitars at the beach. There was nothing unusual about them.

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This article shares the story of a woman who survived sex trafficking as a child. I think this is so important in learning about sex and sexuality to also learn about the hard, dark side of it. In terms of sex trafficking, it is also important to remember that it is not just little girls (or boys) getting kidnapped and forced into the sex trade. Sex trafficking also includes families, becoming a generational issue that is passed down. This article is particularly important to me because I know someone who survived a similar, but much more horrific situation at the hands of her own family, justified by a crooked view of religion. Do you think that this issues is talked about enough in society? Or is it something that people are just uncomfortable with so it is not talked about?

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My childhood was not a childhood, it was a sad tale of sex trafficking. In my family, men had sex with little girls. It was our normal. It was our culture and it was generational. My parents grew up with it. Their parents grew up with it. Most of the victims in our family didn't even remember it because the trauma caused memory loss. We were a family of traumatized individuals who were doing whatever it took to survive ... usually at the expense of the others.

The extreme abuse in our family might seem easily discernible to outsiders. In our case, it wasn't. We were a typical suburban family. We lived in a four-bedroom house as a middle-class family with a mother, father and two children. We had plenty of social circles. The parents worked. The children attended school and after-school activities. We didn't move around all the time. We didn't request government or social services that may have shined a light on our family dysfunction. Nobody suspected anything. We just seemed like a "normal" family.

My parents, uncles and grandparents started sexually abusing me when I was 2 years old.

This was necessary to break me. I was indoctrinated in to a way of life. I was brainwashed. But there was a problem. As I got older, they realized I was a talker. They had not successfully broken me. I was actually telling people. The good news for them ... nobody believed me. Or if they did, they didn't do enough to help me. I was visited by social services a few times. My father even had to threaten a few people to shut them up. But in the end, my family maintained the secrecy ... and control.

My talking (and fighting back) led to some additional abuse. My father became physically abusive with me. I was suffocated, physically assaulted, abandoned, strangled, starved and hit many times in the head. I went to the hospital on multiple occasions. I am not sure how my father talked his way through those visits. But he did.

My mother handled the emotional abuse. She could manipulate a child better than anyone. Actually, she could manipulate anyone. She could get me to trust her just long enough to tell her what she wanted to know. She ensured that I knew how worthless I was. She told me all the time ... in many ways.

My father didn't stop with the incest. He realized that there was money to be made.

And he never passed up an opportunity to make money. So he sold me to his friends. He traded me for his friends' daughters. He sold me to groups of men who were having bachelor parties. He sold me to gangs. And he sold me to a pimp. I would spend my Saturdays working for a pimp right outside the Quantico marine base. Most of my customers were men in uniform.

By the age of 9, I was fully indoctrinated. I had given up. I remember the moment when I realized there was no hope of being saved from this terrible life. In that moment, I made a conscious choice to forget. Not only did I forget my abusive past, but I forgot every abusive event in the coming years. I could forget almost instantaneously. It is a powerful defense mechanism. It is a common reaction to trauma.

I was severely traumatized, and it manifested as intense anxiety.

Although my abuse and trafficking stopped at adulthood, the affects did not. I was constantly having panic attacks. I suffered from chronic pain and inflammation in most of my joints. My fertility was highly questionable. I had severe problems with vaginal scarring and my ovaries were not going to function. I had been prescribed countless anti-anxiety medications, but generally, the side-effects were too much to handle. So I just dealt with the anxiety.

My self-esteem was so low that intimate relationships and friendships were difficult.

I was the subject of bullying on a regular basis. I could not trust anyone. I usually dated men with substance-abuse problems. I was also married twice for very short periods of time.

In my second marriage, I was able to conceive my beautiful twins with the help of fertility treatments. And the twins changed everything. The triggers and painful flashbacks started almost instantaneously. My children were reminding me of my past. They would cry and I would feel my own suffocation. They would express anger and I would feel threatened. They needed my constant attention and I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know how to practice self care and I started to fall apart.

The twins were three months old when I started my recovery process with a therapist. Of course, I didn't know why I was there. I didn't remember anything. But I knew something was very, very wrong. For the next several years, I employed several intense therapeutic remedies. I saw a therapist individually. I participated in groups. I did several forms of body and energy work. I read countless books. I wrote hundreds of pages. I experienced intense emotions.

Now, I am in my sixth year of recovery from sex trafficking.

I have recovered hundreds of memories. I am no longer a prisoner to my family and have severed all ties with them. I can parent my children without intense triggers on most days. I have a much better understanding of who I am and what I want from life. And I have found my voice again.

So now I speak and I tell my story because there is nobody stopping me anymore. I tell my story so I can heal and I tell my story so other survivors can heal. I tell my story so everyone can understand that child sex trafficking is real and I tell my story because enough is enough.

About Elisabeth

Elisabeth is a survivor of family-controlled child sex trafficking and ritual sex abuse. Her education in social work and her personal experiences as a survivor inform her intimate discussion about the biological, psychological, social and spiritual aspects of trauma recovery, which she discusses on her blog, " Trafficked: A Survivor's Story About Beating Childhood Trauma ." She writes about breaking the cycle of abuse through conscious parenting, navigating intimate relationships as a survivor, balancing the memory recovery process with daily life, coping with self-doubt, and overcoming the physical symptoms of a traumatic childhood. Visit Elisabeth's insightful blog at www.stolenchildhood.wordpress.com .

About Ginger

Working to improve the world one child at a time, Ginger has made it her life mission to raise awareness of the world-wide epidemic of child abuse and sex trafficking. An impassioned child advocate, trainer, speaker and child forensic interviewer, Ginger can be contacted via her website "Ginger Kadlec: 4UrKids™" at or find her on Facebook at facebook.com/gingergkadlec .

Share small business news, blogs and social media tips with Project Eve's community of small business owners and entrepreneurs . Our contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds; so whether you are a small business owner, social media strategist, financial adviser, serial entrepreneur, or write an amateur blog we urge you to contribute a blog to our 350,000+ community today. For more information, please refer to our Content Submissions Guidelines.

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A Survivor's Story of Child Abuse and Sex Trafficking

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My childhood was not a childhood, it was a sad tale of sex trafficking. In my family, men had sex with little girls. It was our normal. It was our culture and it was generational. My parents grew up with it. Their parents grew up with it.

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Post #9: Men and Women Differing Expectations of Sex

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Post #9: Men and Women Differing Expectations of Sex

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The main points of this article include:
1. Almost 1/4 Of Men Think Women Have To Be "Convinced" To Have Sex
2. 31% Of Women Have Had Unwanted Sex Because Someone Persisted
3. Too Many Men Think Alcohol Changes Everything

"As a society, we don’t prepare young people for having this conversation with others and as a result, many people struggle to separate practices they see on television or in porn from what a healthy and ethical relationship looks like. One strategy is to find ways to break through this awkwardness or hesitancy to discuss sex and to help people realize their misperceptions about sexual relationships."

Do you agree or disagree with the points of this article?

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With the recent sexual misconduct allegations in Hollywood and fictional stories about gender dynamics in dating like "Cat Person" going viral, it's brought up a lot of dialogue about sexual consent, pleasure, and enthusiasm. But it really doesn't seem like it should be that complicated. Having happy, consensual sex means that you pay attention to your partner's cues, whether verbal or non-verbal, and only have sex if they're as enthusiastic and excited as you are. Ignoring or pretending you don't understand their reservations is not OK. It sounds simple, so why is sexual assault and unwanted sex still so common?

Well, new research from Confi, a digital health startup founded at Harvard Business School, shows that expectations may have something to do with it. Their survey of 1,200 young people between 18 and 25, the majority of whom identified as straight, found a worrying disparity between male and female expectations when it comes to sex. Forty-five percent of men surveyed said they expect vaginal sex from someone who goes home with them after a party. Now that's fairly disturbing on its own - nearly half of men expect sex from someone who goes home with them. Not just a kiss or some touching - they expect penis-in-vagina penetration. But when you consider the fact thatjust 31 percent of women said the same, you can really see the problem: there's a 14 percent disparity of expectations. That means that 14 percent of the time there may be men expecting sex that women aren't planning on having.

The truth is, sex should never be expected, from anyone. Consent is a conversation - and an ongoing one. Even if all the signs are there, even if you're in a relationship with someone, you still need to make sure that the consent is always being discussed.

"While we were not surprised that more men than women expected sex when going home together, we were surprised by how expectations differed across the types of sexual activity that could happen when you go home with someone (i.e. kissing, oral, vaginal, anal)," Rachel Hanebutt, a co-founder of Confi, tells Bustle. "Something that surprised us even more was how big the difference was between an individual's perception about two other people going home together, versus their own expectations about going home with someone. These discrepancies in expectation vastly increase the likelihood that two people going home together will have different expectations of what is going to happen. It's especially problematic that someone might have a skewed perception or make assumptions about the expectations of the person they are going home with."

But that's not the only unsettling finding from the survey about the disparity of expectations. Here are the other key findings from the survey:

1Almost 1/4 Of Men Think Women Have To Be "Convinced" To Have Sex

Andrew Zaeh for Bustle

Well, here's something unsettling: 24 percent of male participants agreed that "women usually have to be convinced to have sex," which is just not OK. When you consider that more men expect sex than women, that sounds to me like a lot of convincing and coercing women who aren't interested in having sex in the first place. It's a really damaging viewpoint that fuels rape culture.

231% Of Women Have Had Unwanted Sex Because Someone Persisted

Andrew Zaeh for Bustle

The survey also found that 31 percent - almost one in three - of women have had sex that they did not want to have because the other person "persistently tried to make moves even after you said 'no'."

In fact, I'd count myself among those people. It's ridiculous and horrific that sometimes we think just going along with it is easier than continuing to fight it, but it's obviously incredibly common. This type of sexual coercion is a huge part of rape culture that needs to be addressed.

3Too Many Men Think Alcohol Changes Everything

Andrew Zaeh for Bustle

Sixteen percent of male respondents thought (oh so wrongly) that if both people were drunk, it can't be sexual assault. When you combine that with the fact that 28 percent of men agree that "many accusations of sexual assault are the result of women regretting sex after the fact", it sounds like there are far too many men out there who think alcohol means anything goes. The "get drunk and anything can happen, and women who claim otherwise are just having hungover regret" mentality is disgusting.

Picking apart the reasons why sexual assault and unwanted sex are so common is pretty unpleasant, but we need to look at the facts head-on. As hard as it is to imagine, myths like women need to "convinced" to have sex are far too common, and they're fueling rape culture. It's only by acknowledging it and addressing it that we can start to change it.

"It is so incredibly hard for most people to talk about sensitive topics, like sex," Hanebutt says. "As a society, we don't prepare young people for having this conversation with others and as a result, many people struggle to separate practices they see on television or in porn from what a healthy and ethical relationship looks like. One strategy is to find ways to break through this awkwardness or hesitancy to discuss sex and to help people realize their misperceptions about sexual relationships."

Keep talking about sex and consent, because that's the only way things can change for the better.
Editor's note: This story has been updated from its original version.

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1 In 4 Men Think Women Have To Be "Convinced" To Have Sex, According To A New Survey

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With the recent sexual misconduct allegations in Hollywood and fictional stories about gender dynamics in dating like "Cat Person" going viral, it's brought up a lot of dialogue about sexual consent, pleasure, and enthusiasm. But it really doesn't seem like it should be that complicated.

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This article is directed at parents and their responsibility in combatting our current culture of sexual harassment. Something that we have talked about in class already is the importance of teaching young children correct anatomy terms.

"By the end of high school, 90 percent of girls have been sexually harassed at least once – name calling, unwanted contact or bullying"

After reading the article, do you agree with the stance the article takes on parents responsibility in educating their children?

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By the age of 3, children already have an awareness of gender stereotypes and societal power dynamics.

"Kids start to know ... who's strong, who is weak, who likes to cry, who's aggressive. You start to see girls deferring to boys for things - and boys assuming they are in charge," said Christia Spears Brown, a developmental psychologist and the author of "Parenting Beyond Pink & Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes."

In the midst of the #MeToo movement, experts are drawing lines from the culture of sexual harassment to the gender norms laid out in childhood. And they're trying to explain the early role parents can have in shifting society.

Patterns

Coming into the world without language, babies are constantly looking for patterns to understand everything around them. Research shows that when we constantly use gender to label and sort or color code, it leads children to focus on it more and look for differences, often leading to the formation of gender stereotypes. So, with her own daughters, Brown avoids phrases like, "Good morning, girls!"

"I just try to say gender is not the most important thing about people, so I'm not going to constantly label it," she said. "Some people think you raise your kid gender neutral, but it's not. It's really just helping them recognize a stereotype when they see it. You have to be aware of it to battle it."

Media and books play a part in the formation of stereotypes - with images commonly of boys doing the action and adventure and girls being more passive. Parents often treat sons and daughters differently.

"I don't think any parent does it purposefully, but their own implicit biases of what girls and boys are like seem to shape how they treat kids," said Spears Brown. "Boys are played much more rough and tumble with their parents, girls are treated much more delicately, and kids seem to detect those messages."

Consequences

Long before the #MeToo movement took off, Brown has thought about the links between development in childhood and adolescence and sexual harassment. Her research shows that rates of harassment - unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, unwanted touching - are rampant in middle school.

"And yet girls are taught to be nice and not rock the boat," she said.

By the end of high school, 90 percent of girls have been sexually harassed at least once - name calling, unwanted contact or bullying. Some programs aim to intervene with middle school boys and educate them about consent, but there are ways to break the cycle earlier with age-appropriate conversations.

Safety

As with most parenting topics, there's no silver bullet in this space, but child safety expert Pattie Fitzgerald believes that teaching boys and girls to trust their instincts and speak out when they feel uncomfortable or unsafe is a piece of the puzzle.

Her organization, called Safely Ever after, which focuses on keeping children safe from predators. Since 2001, Fitzgerald has been going around to schools and child care centers sharing her Super-Ten Safe-Smarts Rules with parents and kids.

The first rule she wants children to know: I am the boss of my own body!

"You start out with your kid is four telling them they're the boss of their bodies, but that really carries on to when they're 24 and 34 and 44 and 84," said Fitzerald. "At 20 years old, I still remind my daughter she's the boss of her body. She went to Coachella this year and I was like, 'Marissa, don't forget you're the boss of your body.' And she was like 'Oh my God, mom, I got it!' "

Her other rules include, "I don't keep secrets from my parents," and "I always listen to my own inner voice, especially if I get an 'uh-oh' feeling."

Lately more parents have been asking in her sessions have asked about how to empower their daughters and make sure they are safe out in the world. She sees her safety tips as a bridge to build confident adults who are able to speak out.

"Hopefully that's what my work does, is that it makes that connection that when your children are young, we're empowering them to watch out for tricky people and know what's appropriate," Fitzgerald said. "But that carries over to when they're young adults and they're interacting with other people who may or may not have power over them."

Touch

The doctor's office is a great place to start conversations about body anatomy and autonomy.

"Around the time when we get to children who are fully potty-trained, I usually start talking to parents about who should be checking, what kind of touch is OK, what do you do if you have a concern," said Dr. Ashaunta Anderson, a pediatrician at Children's Hospital Los Angeles and an AltaMed clinic in South Gate.

She uses the well-child checks, the physicals for young children, as an opportunity to encourage parents to talk to their children about identifying boundaries and enforcing them. She recommends that parents teach their kids the names of their genitals, just like they would any other body part, so they feel comfortable talking about them. The American Academy of Pediatrics lists this as one way to prevent abuse.

And when parents normalize these conversations, Dr. Anderson said, the easier it is to have a natural progression to talking about safe sex and consent.

"Socialization - in general, how we teach our children to interact with others in society and in the world - is a parent's job and we do it at all stages of a child's life, so this is just another part of it."

MISCONCEPTIONS

Now, as you know if you've ever talked to a preschooler, they are constantly making observations and coming to their own (often outlandish) conclusions, so they will inevitably form stereotypes.

"It's a good idea always to find out what a child has heard and what their ideas are because they might have misconceptions," said Doni Whitsett, a a clinical professor at the University of Southern California School of Social Work. "You never know how particularly little children process what they've seen in movies and what they've heard, so that parents and teachers can clarify."

Parents and those working with young children should seize opportunities to point out stereotypes and give counter examples. Brown started having conversations like this with her pirate-loving daughter when she was three years old.

"If the pirate birthday party theme was in the boy aisle, I would say, 'It's a shame they put this in the boy aisle, because anybody can like pirates - both boys and girls like pirates.' "

Brown says, while they won't understand rants again the patriarchy, they can understand concrete examples.

"If you point that out to them, it helps them correct the patterns that you're seeing," said Brown. "It is hard but it's not impossible and I think the importance of it makes it worth the effort."

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How parents can help change the culture of sexual harassment

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By the age of 3, children already have an awareness of gender stereotypes and societal power dynamics. "Kids start to know ... who's strong, who is weak, who likes to cry, who's aggressive.

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This article talks about the rise of hookup culture, specifically on American college campuses. The rise of these sexual norms coincide with the association of college and drinking. "The "hook-up culture" refers to the idea that casual sexual encounters are the best or only way to engage sexually".

How do you think "hook-up culture" affects the norms and expectations of dating relationships? In college? After college? What are the harms other than the obvious, possible STI's

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Cultures - sets of widely-endorsed ideas reflected in rules for interaction and in the organization of our institutions - are powerful social forces that shape individuals' lives. In colleges, "hookup culture" refers to the idea that casual sexual encounters are the best or only way to engage sexually; and the concept also refers to rules of social interaction that facilitate casual sexual encounters and organizational arrangements that support these encounters.

Today, almost all of America's residential college campuses are characterized by a hookup culture - large and small, private and public, secular and religious, and left- and right-leaning campuses. Students must contend with this culture even if they are not especially sexually active. In fact, many students are not very active. The average graduating senior reports hooking up just eight times in four years; and a third do not hook up even a single time. Individual students can and do opt out of casual hookup sexual encounters, but few can escape dealing with that culture.
The Origins of Campus Hookup Culture
Hookup culture is simply the newest stage in the evolution of sexual norms and behavior in America. Its roots lie in the early city life of the 1920s, the first time in U.S. history that young people routinely socialized in mixed-sex groups beyond the supervision of chaperones. This created intense media interest in "youth culture," as college attendance became accessible to large swaths of the American population. After a couple hundred years of conflict with higher education administrators, fraternity men starting setting the social tone. Their way of experiencing college life - irreverent, raucous, and fun-oriented - was suddenly the way to experience college. Attending college was linked to the idea of being young and carefree.

After a couple hundred years of conflict with higher education administrators, fraternity men starting setting the social tone. Their way of experiencing college life - irreverent, raucous, and fun-oriented - was suddenly the way to experience college. Attending college was linked to the idea of being young and carefree.

The Great Depression and World War II put the brakes on such revelry. Young women initiated "going steady" - monogamous, long-term dating - as a response to the loss of young men to war. Yet going steady, a kind of "premature monogamy," was both new and short-lived as an ideal for young people. By the 1960s, young people wanted to remain unattached; and meanwhile, gay men in urban enclaves were experimenting with a culture revolving around "hookups." The dangers of AIDs infection slowed down the process by which casual sexual encounters spread into the mainstream for young people, but this process proceeded nonetheless.

In 1978, the popularity of the movie Animal House ratcheted up expectations for college fun. Beer and liquor companies took advantage of the moment, spending millions in the 1980s to convince students that drinking was a mainstay of college life. Starting in 1984, when the U.S. government financially pressured the states to raise the legal drinking age from 18 to 21, control over campus parties was thrown increasingly into the hands of men who occupied large, private fraternity residences in which they could flagrantly break liquor laws.

Fraternities again came to dominate the campus social scene. Until today, this remains true on many campuses, but many other factors also reinforce hookup sexual norms on college campuses - including media portrayals of college life, rising individualism, and a halfway transition toward women's equality. Social and sexual norms originally embodied in fraternities now reign supreme on college campuses.
The Destructive Sense that Hookup Sex is the Only Option
After hearing about hookup culture, many older Americans wonder whether today's students actually enjoy it. The answer appears to be both yes and no, as I learned from years of fieldwork. About a quarter of students thrive in this culture, at least at first. They enjoy hooking up and adapt well to hookup culture's rules calling for fun and casual, short-term encounters.

At the same time, about a third of students opt out altogether; they find hookup culture unappealing and would rather not have sex at all than have it the way this culture mandates. The remaining students are ambivalent, dabbling in hookups with mixed results. Overall, about one in three students say that their intimate relationships have been "traumatic" or "very difficult to handle." Many of them experience a persistent malaise, a deep, indefinable disappointment. And one in ten says that they have been sexually coerced or assaulted in the past year.

Notably, my research suggests that hookup culture is a problem not because it promotes casual sex, but because it makes a destructive form of casual sexual engagement feel compulsory. Students who don't hook up can end up being socially isolated, while students who do engage in this way are forced to operate by a dysfunctional set of rules.

Hookup culture encourages a punishing emotional landscape, where caring for others or even simple courtesy seem inappropriate, while carelessness and even cruelty are allowed. At its worst, it encourages young men and women to engage in sexual competitiveness and status-seeking while meeting impossible standards of attractiveness. It privileges immediate pleasure-seeking and heightens risks that students will become either perpetrators or victims of sexual crimes.
Changing Power Structures and Destructive Sexual Norms
Understanding that the forces shaping sexual relationships on campuses are cultural - that problems lie not so much in particular encounters as in hookup culture overall - is the first step toward clarifying what needs to change. Because culture is a type of shared consciousness, many people need to work together to make changes happen. And they can. Especially because of the strong ties in student bodies, campuses can transform themselves faster than one might suspect.

Research shows that today's young people are more open, permissive, earnest, hopeful for the future, and welcoming of diversity than any other generation in memory. They are well-positioned to usher in the next new sexual culture. But colleges as institutions must change, too. Institutions of higher education need to put substantial resources and time into shifting cultural norms in two ways: promoting casual sexual encounters that involve an ethic of care, and diversifying the kind of sexual encounters that are seen as possible and good.

Colleges also need to change the institutional arrangements that give too much power to subsets of students who are most enthusiastic about hookup culture and who benefit from it at the expense of their peers. Doing this may mean disbanding fraternities and sororities as they have existed, because as long as these organizations and their ethics remain power bastions on U.S. campuses, hookup culture will persist.

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The Rise of Hookup Sexual Culture on American College Campus

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Cultures - sets of widely-endorsed ideas reflected in rules for interaction and in the organization of our institutions - are powerful social forces that shape individuals' lives. In colleges, "hookup culture" refers to the idea that casual sexual encounters are the best or only way to engage sexually; and the concept also refers to rules [...]

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This article discusses valid points in the debate surrounding gender reassignment in children that are classified as intersex. This article holds the opinion that parents should wait longer before making a decision on reassignment.

What do you think you would do in this situation if your child was born as intersexual?

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When Mark and Pam Crawford took their family to Great Wolf Lodge, a water adventure park, for a week's vacation, their seven-year-old made a request.

"Since we don't know anybody," S asked her parents, "can I be a boy?"

The Crawfords, who adopted S at the age of two, had seen signs for years that she did not think of herself as female.

S didn't want braided hair; S wanted a haircut "like dad's." At Halloween, S wanted to be a superhero, but not Wonder Woman. S wanted to use the men's bathroom and liked to be referred to as a boy. S already tended to be perceived as a boy by strangers, after requesting a buzz cut about a month before the family's vacation.

The Department of Social Services had told the Crawfords their child was born with an intersex condition, meaning the baby's gender was unclear. S's genitals had been surgically reconstructed to look more female.

So at Great Wolf Lodge, S's parents thought, "Okay." Maybe, the resort, where no one knew S, would be a safe place to try out being a boy.

The week went well. S picked out a new, male name "M." When the family arrived back home in South Carolina, things snowballed. M kept up his requests to be a boy, first at gymnastics class, then at the family's Jewish temple and at school. His parents helped as M told the world step-by-step what he had known all along.

In retrospect, Mark Crawford said, "He never gave us any indication that he was not a boy."

* * *

M was born with genitals that were not clearly male or female. Also known as disorders of sex development (DSDs), the best guess by researchers is that intersex conditions affect one in 2,000 children.

The response by doctors is often to carry out largely unregulated and controversial surgeries that aim to make an infant's genitals and reproductive organs more normal but can often have unintended consequences, according to intersex adults, advocates and some doctors.

A long and gut-wrenching list of damaging side effects-painful scarring, reduced sexual sensitivity, torn genital tissue, removal of natural hormones and possible sterilization-combined with the chance of assigning children a gender they don't feel comfortable with has left many calling for the surgeries to be heavily restricted.

The Crawfords are bringing a landmark lawsuit on behalf of M against the hospitals and doctors who treated M, and the South Carolina Department of Social Services, which allowed the operation when M was in foster care.

A state lawsuit against the hospitals and the South Carolina Department of Social Services alleges medical malpractice and negligence, while a federal suit accuses the individual doctors and Social Services employees of violating M's due-process rights under the 14th Amendment, which says that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law."

Part of what spurred the legal action, which is supported by the intersex civil rights group Advocates for Informed Choice and the Southern Poverty Law Center, is to prevent the surgery from happening to more children, the Crawfords say. But advocates have been pushing back on these surgeries since more than a decade ago.

During the 1990s, intersex adults who had received surgery as infants came forward speaking about their sense of mutilation. At the same time, an experiment from Johns Hopkins University that claimed to prove young children could safely be assigned any gender with surgical "reinforcement" was revealed to be a failure. The study had been initiated in 1967 by psychologist John Money, who claimed to have successfully given a boy female anatomy and had the child live as a girl. The child, whose penis was burnt off in a circumcision accident, was castrated and operated on to look female at the age of 22 months-eight months before the age at which Money claimed gender became fixed.

Until the 1950s, intersex children had largely been left alone, but Money's experiment provided support for early surgical intervention. However, one of Money's rival researchers tracked down his study's subject and, in 1997, showed that the child had never been happy as a girl and had converted back to living as man, sending shockwaves through the medical profession. Nevertheless, the surgeries continue.

* * *

On April 18, 2006, when M was 16 months old, Dr. Ian Aaronson operated on him at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC). He reduced M's penis to look more like a clitoris, cut up his scrotum to form labia, and removed his internal testicle tissue. Two other specialists also treated M: Dr. Yaw Appiagyei-Dankah, who worked at MUSC, and Dr. James Amrhein from Greenville Hospital.

In a letter to M's pediatrician, Dr. Amrhein wrote that initially, M's condition was "confusing." He had been identified as a boy at birth because of his "rather large" penis. Routine blood tests showed his testosterone levels were extremely elevated. However, he had a small vaginal opening beneath his penis and both ovarian and testicular tissue. "Surgical correction" was necessary, the doctors noted in medical records. It took the trio about four months to decide which gender to assign M.

All three doctors and the Department of Social Services declined to comment because of the pending court cases.

"I was ... able to reassure both her social worker and her [foster] mother that as far as the external genitalia are concerned, this can be corrected surgically so that the baby looks either a normal boy or girl," Aaronson wrote to Amrhein on January 18, 2006 according to the court complaint.

Fertility is one of the factors doctors take into account when considering which gender to assign a child. Some medical literature describes children with M's condition, ovotestiuclar DSD, as having a higher potential for fertility by assigning them as girls and keeping their ovarian tissue.

Whether or not M's female or male reproductive organs were fertile is likely to be a contested point in the case. The legal complaint claims that the removal of M's testicular tissue removed M's potential for male reproductive function but the defendants' response denies this.

By late February 2006, Aaronson seemed to be coming to a decision based on the fact that S's foster parents were raising the toddler as a girl and the child's vagina seemed fully formed.

"My bias at the moment is towards female, although I have raised the possibility because of the substantial virilization of the external genitalia that there may have been sufficient testosterone imprinting to question ultimate gender identity," he wrote in February according to court records.

The doctors decided to do feminizing surgery in April.

Aaronson was aware of the controversy surrounding the procedure. "Carrying out a feminizing genitoplasty on an infant who might eventually identify herself as a boy would be catastrophic," he wrote in a medical journal in 2001. He acknowledged the arguments that surgery on infants should be postponed, but concluded, "most parents are disturbed by the appearance of the genitalia and request that something be done as soon as possible so that their baby 'looks normal.'"

* * *

There is a vacuum of reliable data tracking the number of surgeries performed on intersex children. The few figures that exist reinforce the doctors and medical literature that describe the surgeries as continuing.

A government database, the Kids' Inpatient Database (KID), suggests that in 2006 there were 139 clitoral reduction surgeries-the same operation that reduced M's penis. This was a drop from 1997 when there were 204 procedures, but the estimated number then rose to 156 in 2009. KID data is compiled from estimated averages from a sample of more than 2,500 children's hospitals but for rare conditions like DSD, the margin of error is high.

Dr. Arlene Baratz, a medical adviser and board member of the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome-Disorders of Sex Development (AIS-DSD) Support Group, one of the country's largest organizations for families of intersex children, said she was concerned that the medical recommendations parents received seemed inconsistent.

"Each doctor is saying something different in cases that we would view as pretty similar," she said. "At some hospitals there's a lot of pressure. Others are more flexible and encourage parents to take more time making decisions on irreversible procedures."

Aliya, a mother of 10-year-old twins in Florida described the challenge of being caught in the crossfire of medical opinion.

"I can see how people can be swayed," she said. "They led me to question myself because of how adamant they were."

When Aliya's children were born, her son weighed only one and a half pounds and had a very small penis. His urethral opening was near his perineum, not the tip of his phallus.

Multiple doctors told Aliya that she should do surgery immediately. The first time was in the hot, bustling, intensive care unit at the University of Florida where she was uncertain whether or not her son would live. A doctor Aliya didn't know recommended that she raise her son as a girl. Then, after the baby's condition had stabilized, a surgeon told Aliya that she should allow him to operate to make her son's penis appear more normal, "if you want your child to be a real man."

By that stage, Aliya had researched some of the risks of the surgery-urethral tissue that is unable to withstand urine and becomes damaged; nerve impairment; scar tissue; loss of sensation. The surgeon acknowledged these complications when Aliya raised them, but she says he didn't want to discuss them. Fearing her son "might come out of surgery worse off than he went in," she walked away.

When he was seven, she told him about the operation. "I like my penis just the way it is," he said, and hasn't brought it up since.

Amber, a mother based in Arkansas, described herself as "furious" that she allowed her daughter's internal gonad to be removed during an exploratory procedure. While Amber's eight-week-old baby was on the operating table, the doctor said that what he found might cause cancer, and he needed Amber to sign off on removing it.

Her daughter, now six, was born with a DSD called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS), meaning she has XY chromosomes but her body does not process testosterone. People with CAIS look like and typically identify as women, but have internal undeveloped testes. These contain germ cells that some specialists theorize could be used to contribute to an embryo, making people with CAIS potentially fertile with the help of reproductive technology. These gonads also produce hormones the body converts into estrogen.

Amber later realized from further research that the risk of cancer was probably similar to the chance of a normal woman developing breast cancer.

"I don't plan to lob off one my daughter's breasts because there's a chance she'll get breast cancer," she said. "They robbed my daughter of half of a chance to have a natural puberty."

* * *

Now that he is nine, M sometimes asks his parents questions like, "When will I grow a penis?"

"We're always really matter-of-fact about it," Mark Crawford said. "He gets sad as he realizes more and more what has happened to him."

Chances of assigning a child the wrong gender vary depending on the intersex condition.

M was born with a relatively rare intersex disorder called ovotesticular DSD, which doctors say makes it particularly difficult to predict gender.

One of the more common DSDs, Congenital Adrenal Hypoplasia (CAH), is often considered by doctors to be a safe bet for predicting female gender. But even children with CAH end up identifying as boys in between 5 and 10 percent of cases, according to researchers. Based on these figures, opponents of surgery point out that in one operation out of 20, doctors are cutting off a little boy's penis. But the risk of assigning the wrong gender, along with other outcomes of surgery, has not been definitively quantified with long-term controlled studies and large sample sizes.

"If you don't have data, it's left to people's subjective opinions," said Dr. Douglas Husmann, a pediatric urologist at the Mayo Clinic.

Dr. Barry Kogan, the president of the Society for Pediatric Urology, said that for more extreme cases of genital difference, "it's really easy to say [that] the outcomes of surgery are not as good as you think they are, but we don't know the outcomes of not doing surgery."

Husmann said he tries to give parents an unbiased opinion that presents the risks and benefits of surgery. Privately, he believes there could be negative consequences of not operating. Four of his patients who didn't have surgery were "ostracized," he said, after they were seen naked in locker rooms at school. Some of these families had to move cities for their children to start over, he said.

"I'm frustrated by the good work that's been questioned by the vocal minority, who in my opinion wouldn't be happy in any gender," said Dr. Howard Snyder from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

He said that most of his cases, between 7 and 10 a year, were children with CAH. Although he is aware of studies in which some children later identified as boys, Snyder says those sample sizes were "a drop in the bucket" and don't match up with the observations of his patients. Holding off on operating, he says, is "simply unrealistic." Not every parent shares this sentiment.

"We're very fortunate that our son didn't have a situation like M," said Marie, a mother of two children with DSDs from the East Coast.

Her nine-year-old son, adopted from Asia, has a condition called gonadal dysgenesis. Marie and her partner brought him home as a little girl, but he gravitated toward boys' clothing, and haircuts, and asked at the age of five to live as a boy. If he were operated on as an infant, he would have missed out on having a penis.

Meanwhile, Marie's daughter, who is 12, had her genitals surgically reconstructed to look more feminine in a medical center in Asia, before she was adopted at age two. One day when the girl was six, she left the living room where she was playing to use the bathroom. Marie suddenly heard her yell. "Ow, Mom, ow." She rushed into the bathroom and found her daughter crying, stuck on the toilet.

Marie coaxed the screaming child onto the floor and opened her legs to figure out what was wrong. The girl's vagina, which had been a one-centimeter opening, was now four centimeters of red, open wound, "stinging and hurting and scary."

Marie took her shocked and silent daughter to an emergency medical appointment. It was confirmed that as the little girl had grown, the tissue in her vagina, which was inserted during her operation, was not stretching at the same rate as the rest of her body, and had ripped.

Luckily, the wound had torn cleanly. Marie took her daughter home; it took a month to heal.

About a year later, nerve endings emerged at the surface of the girl's vagina, forming sensitive nodes. She could not ride a bike, struggled to wipe herself with toilet paper and avoided restrictive pants like jeans. The nodes reduced after she turned nine, but she is still "hypersensitive" around the groin area, according to Marie, and refuses to wear clothing like skinny jeans that are popular with the other girls at her school.

Vaginoplasties are widely acknowledged by surgeons to have a high risk of stenosis-the narrowing or loss of flexibility of the vagina, often accompanied by scar tissue. There are also fears that some surgeries, in particular those the clitoris, will reduce sexual sensation. Surgeons say their new techniques spare nerves, unlike the older, outdated procedures.

"It's safer than it used to be," Husmann said. "Do we have adequate tests on sensitivity? It's very difficult to do those tests."

* * *

"M and his supporters clearly do not agree with what has long been the dominant treatment plan for children born with intersex conditions," states Amrhein's brief in the appeal of the federal court's decision to accept M's case.

This is why in the past it has been difficult to bring legal action against doctors for performing surgery on intersex people: because the standard of care to which medical professionals are held consists of the actual practice of doctors. With such a long history of medical intervention, many legal experts, doctors, and bioethicists say that decisions to operate on intersex children are likely justified in many cases, despite the concern some have over surgeries.

A consensus statement by doctors from 2006 addresses the treatment of children with DSDs. And in its report on torture last year, the Special Rapporteur to the United Nations' Human Rights Council called on member states to end laws allowing "forced genital-normalizing" surgeries on intersex people.

In the United States, guidelines and statements made by medical professionals on areas of consensus are strong evidence for what the standard of care is considered. The 2006 statement does call for caution on surgeries in some situations, but some doctors and bioethicists call it vague.

Dr. Charlotte Boney, a professor at Brown who refuses to allow clitoral reduction surgery at Rhode Island Children's Hospital where she practices, said the 2006 statement, "didn't go far enough. It leads you to believe surgery is a viable option. If you read it, you would never know there's a huge battle, an ethical dilemma, and potential harm."

The lack of strong scientific evidence either way is the reason the guidelines will not be made more restrictive at this stage, according to surgeons. A working paper drawn from a group of leading pediatric urologists, did a comprehensive literature review in 2012.

"It is clear that outcomes studies lack the necessary detail to base further recommendations upon," they wrote.

M's case takes a different route. The fact that he was in foster care and treated in state-run hospitals allows the federal court case to claim a breach of his constitutional rights. The case has been accepted by the district court to go to trial, but the decision is being appealed. If M's case is successful, it may set a precedent that surgery on intersex children is unconstitutional in at least some situations, such as when it is very difficult to predict gender. This would not apply to many doctors, who do not practice in state hospitals and have to have the consent of a child's parents to operate. But legal experts say it would influence public opinion and send a strong message to doctors and hospital ethics boards.

M's thoughts of the future now involve wanting to be a firefighter or fixing cars, but the Crawfords anticipate his teenage years will be "tough."

"It's difficult for everyone," Mark Crawford said, but M will have added challenges. He will have to start hormone replacement therapy and, without a penis, will become aware, "that there is this life of sexual behavior that he's not able to participate in."

"The real intent of the lawsuit is just to uphold these constitutional principles-integrity of a person's body and some kind of due process for infants where people around them in power are considering doing surgeries like this," Mark Crawford said.

"I would give anything for this not to have been done to our child," Pam Crawford said. "I want to see that his suffering will not be entirely wasted."
* This piece originally stated that the Crawfords decided to do feminizing surgery on M, rather than the doctors. We regret the error. Reporting for this article was supported by the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University.

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When Mark and Pam Crawford took their family to Great Wolf Lodge, a water adventure park, for a week's vacation, their seven-year-old made a request. "Since we don't know anybody," S asked her parents, "can I be a boy?"

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Post #5: Gender Stereotyping & Education

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Post #5: Gender Stereotyping & Education

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This video highlights some of the common gender stereotypes that males and females face in education. Even from an early age, males are geared towards STEM careers and women toward the humanities and arts.

What stereotypes have you encountered in your education either based on things teachers have said or other students?

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This article talks about a book on sex within Christianity, written by Bromleigh McCleneghan, an associate pastor in Chicago.

She makes many assertions pertaining to sex and sexuality in the Christian faith, pointing out her interpretations of Biblical texts pertaining to sex. The last question in the interview portion asks her about her thoughts on polygamy and she does not explicitly endorse or shut down the idea.

When it comes to intimate relationships, is a committed marriage important before sex? What are your thoughts on her final answer about polygamy and polyamory?

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Sex outside of marriage can be holy, according to this Christian minister

"Good Christian Sex" is a Chicago pastor's attempt to free Christians from shame about having sex outside of marriage.

What you thought was naughty may actually be holy.

That's the message of Good Christian Sex: Why Chastity Isn't the Only Option-And Other Things the Bible Says about Sex, a new book by Bromleigh McCleneghan, an associate pastor at Union Church outside of Chicago. The book is McCleneghan's attempt to free Christians from shame about having premarital or extramarital sex.

At a time when many conservative Christians are already frustrated by shifting social mores when it comes to sex, McCleneghan's book may feel antagonistic. Her way of interpreting the Bible is not systematic, for example, and she tends to feel her way through the text. And she also admits in this interview that her sexual ethics might not rule out polyamory. It's not the kind of content that will draw traditionalists en masse.

Yet I suspect that McCleneghan's book will be persuasive to many believers who feel some cognitive dissonance when it comes to sex. (While Christians are likely to say that avoiding sex outside of marriage is a good thing, most engage in it anyway.) For this reason, I decided to chat with her about her views on sex and why she believes the church needs to change its thinking.
RNS: Many Christians believe it's best to remain a virgin until marriage. You say this issue is complicated because people have varying definitions of "virignity." What are some of the most common?
BM: Part of what I want to point out is that what counts as "sex," or what activities count "against virginity," varies in both Christian and public health circles. We tend to think of a virgin as someone who hasn't had heterosexual intercourse, but surely oral and anal sex are just as intimate, right? Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) can also be spread through the other forms of sex.

"Virginity" is such a fraught and gendered term, involved through the centuries in policing the ownership of women's bodies, or some harmful forms of purity culture, that it's not really useful. And for some queer folks, the emphasis on heterosexual acts means that it's not a good line, or norm, for ethics.

I am less concerned with which "acts" are "okay" for unmarried Christians and more interested in helping people ask questions about healthy intimacy, experiencing pleasure and desire in holy ways, and in learning to be vulnerable with a partner in ways that affirm their mutual identity as children of God.
RNS: You root some of your thinking in Genesis 2:25 where Adam and Eve are naked but unashamed. Many would agree that sex and bodies aren't things to be ashamed of, but some would also say that the principle here is specifically about the way a "husband" and "wife" are relating to each other. Your response?
BM: The thing that changes, that causes Adam and Eve to feel ashamed and sends them off to the sewing table, isn't a change in their marital status. It's that they've been caught in their disobedience.

Ideally, in marriages, partners won't feel shame. But the question of feeling at home in our bodies, at coming to terms with our vulnerability, is a lot more complicated than that. Marriage is no guarantee. And, indeed, our vulnerability, our embodied nature, our relationships, and our institutions are affected by sin. Sometimes we feel shame because of our own sin; sometimes those feelings are undeserved. I am trying to explore the difference.
RNS: You argue that early Christian fathers negatively shaped our perception of sex due to their "body/soul dualism." What were the positive and enduring elements in early Christian thought on sex, in your opinion?
BM: When talking about lust and fidelity in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus counters that mind/body duality, suggesting that you don't actually have to commit adultery to sin against your partner. In an age witnessing the rise of emotional affairs that discussion seems particularly prescient.
RNS: Drawing from theologian Christine Gudorf, you argue that we can reason that sexual pleasure is good because "it feels good." Many who commit sexual crimes claim that it feels good, but we still condemn those acts. Is feeling good sufficient for concluding that something is good?
Also powerful is the way the church offered alternatives to the dominant culture, a culture that was often oppressive or dangerous. Living into vows of chastity could offer freedom from the potential of disease or death. Chastity in that case was not about limitation for many-especially early Christian women in religious orders-but about new freedoms to live fully into grace.

BM: Gudorf calls sexual pleasure a premoral good, and I talk about it in terms of "solo-sex" in order to explore it without asking questions about right relationship. So, no, feeling good isn't sufficient. We need mutuality and consent, for starters.
RNS: You follow this up with citing Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 6 and ask whether it is good to "deny our bodies...the things they need for health and joy." What do you say to the many Christians who are not currently sexually active and claim to be joyful and healthy? Are they lying? Do they still "need" to find a way to experience sexual pleasure despite their claims of contentment?
But the idea that something that feels good could actually be good is often overlooked in Christianity, and so too many folks don't know how to pursue pleasure in healthy and holy ways. I have three kids, and we've watched the " Elmo's Potty Time " video roughly 600,000 times. One of the most enduring lessons in it is "listen to what your body is telling you." Do you have to use the bathroom, are you hungry, do you feel safe or scared? Knowing if something feels good or bad is a baseline thing that we Christians, with some of our sexual moralizing and fear mongering, have failed to teach people.

BM: We all need to experience pleasure, relaxation, calm. We're learning how stress and trauma have physiological effects that are passed on through generations. Does that mean we all need the exact same type of pleasure? To experience the rush of endorphins in response to the same stimuli? No.
RNS: You talk about the "inner conflict" Paul experienced and mentioned in Romans 7. How do you interpret this and why is it relevant?
Another analogy: we all need protein. Some of us are beef eaters, some of us eat a bunch of tofu and beans. We can satisfy our needs in lots of different ways - some of which are better choices morally than others (ie, if we care about the earth we should all eat a lot less meat) - but there's not much point denying that we have some pretty universal human needs. Denying the facts of our humanity seems like a theologically problematic move.

BM: One thing I've encountered with this book, mostly from folks who haven't read it, is the assumption that because I argue that marriage is an insufficient norm for healthy and holy sexuality, I am also arguing that "anything goes." I totally believe that there are such things as sexual sins: lust, infidelity, participation in rape culture, treating your partner poorly.
RNS: Your subtitle claims this book is about what the Bible says about sex. Give us one or two passages that you think should radically change the conservative Christian's mind on sexual ethics.
I love Paul's articulation of the knowledge that something is wrong, is sinful or harmful, and yet the feeling of temptation to do it anyway. That feeling of standing outside yourself, almost watching yourself choose poorly. It's vulnerable and wise, and deeply instructive for us, I think, as we try to identify what sin feels like.
RNS: You seem to take some Bible verses on sex as prescriptive but not others. What determines whether you think a passage should be taken literally or prescriptively and which ones do not apply?
BM: Christians have tended to read the biblical story of Onan as a prohibition against masturbation or non-procreative sex. But it's really not about that at all. Onan's sin is that he is shirking his duty to his sister-in-law, having sex with her (and presumably enjoying it) without fulfilling his obligation and actually doing injury to her. The practice of sleeping with your sister-in-law, or giving your dead brother an heir, was a means of providing economic security and protection to a woman who would otherwise be without support, set adrift in a society where women were pretty much only sustained through their relationships with men. Onan has sex with Tamar, but denies her the means to protect or sustain herself. Pursuing pleasure at a cost to another, especially a vulnerable other, is displeasing to the Lord. Shame on Onan.

BM: I think a systematic hermeneutic, or interpretive lens, is not particularly helpful when it comes to the Bible. It's worth pointing out that Christians throughout the ages have used a range of interpretive lenses in making sense of the biblical text.
RNS: What are your thoughts on polygamy? It seems a polygamous relationship could adhere to your principles here-fidelity, consensuality, etc. Can a polygamous relationship ever be "holy" in your view?
If a story, passage, or letter reflects what we know about God as revealed through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, who called us to love neighbor and enemy, and to know abundant life, then we should take it prescriptively. And if it blames a rape victim, incites genocide, or offers an apologetics of slavery or misogyny, than maybe not so much.

BM: Polygamy as it's usually practiced in fundamentalist cultures - one older dude with a bunch of younger women - doesn't pass the tests of equal power and mutuality. Polyamory, though, as a sexual and romantic relationship between three or more consenting people? I don't know. I think it would be really hard insofar as intimacy is hard enough in a dyad, and mutuality would be well near impossible given the even more complicated power dynamics and the reality of sin. I think there's something really lovely about long-term monogamy that would be hard to capture with additional partners. But, just because something is outside my experience doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong.

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Sex outside of marriage can be holy, according to this Christian minister

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"Good Christian Sex" is a Chicago pastor's attempt to free Christians from shame about having sex outside of marriage.

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Post #3: Gender & Sexuality Housing Plan

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Post #3: Gender & Sexuality Housing Plan

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Georgetown University, a historically Catholic institution, has announced that they will be including separate housing options for LQTBQ students.

“It makes a profound and radical statement that religion does not have to be mutually exclusive with the freedom to understand, challenge and grow through and with expressions of and reflection on gender and sexuality,” she said. “It says: Come as you are; be who you are; love how you do; and we’ll make a home for you.”

What do you think about this decision on behalf of the university? What do you think about the included quote? Agree or disagree?

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WASHINGTON - Georgetown University has approved a new housing arrangement for the upcoming academic year that is geared toward young adults who self-identify as part of the "LGBTQ" community, as well as friends and supporters.

But others are questioning whether the "Living and Learning Community" (LLC) dedicated to "Gender and Sexuality" will make any effort to engage students with Catholic formation and teaching.

After rejecting previous proposals for the "Crossroads" LLC over concerns for Georgetown's " Catholic and Jesuit mission," the university changed course and its Office of Residential Living approved the LLC.

"This is a major and unprecedented accomplishment for a Catholic university," Gracie Smith, co-chairwoman of the Georgetown University Student Association's LGBTQ+ Advocacy and Policy coalition, told The Hoya, the university's student-run newspaper.

"It makes a profound and radical statement that religion does not have to be mutually exclusive with the freedom to understand, challenge and grow through and with expressions of and reflection on gender and sexuality," she said. "It says: Come as you are; be who you are; love how you do; and we'll make a home for you."

LLCs are small communities within Georgetown's residence halls that are open to any student. According to Georgetown, approximately 500 students (less than 10% of the student body) live in 13 LLCs. They typically house 12-45 students, although the Spirit of Georgetown Residential Academy, which aims to help students live out Georgetown's Catholic and Jesuit identity, has 148 student residents and occupies all of Ryan Hall and Isaac Hawkins Hall.

LLCs have different themes, such as the "French Floor," "Explore D.C." (for first-year students), and "Entrepreneurship." Magis Row has smaller themed communities for approximately 60 juniors and seniors, such as "Sustainability in Dress" and "Gratia Plena" (for women seeking to live out the Catholic faith).

Georgetown confirmed that "Crossroads" will be offered in 2018-2019. The university explained Crossroads will follow Georgetown's current housing policies, but did not explain why it changed course on approving the "Gender and Sexuality" LLC, after rejecting it for the 2017-2018 academic year.

"Crossroads will provide a community space for discussion on gender and inclusion, while upholding the Jesuit values of community in diversity and educating the whole person," Todd Olson, vice president for student affairs, told the Register in a statement. "Our Catholic and Jesuit values call on us to engage with 'respect, compassion and sensitivity' with our LGBTQ community."

The "Crossroads" LLC webpage explains it will help provide students with a safe, affirming space for all students, where they can reflect, grow and form a "deeper connection to Jesuit values, especially cura personalis [care for the entire person] and identity formation."

The learning goals include education on both "the history, culture and politics of gender and sexuality" and the importance of "allyship," as well as a focus on service opportunities.
Concerns About the Decision
Georgetown's decision to approve the "Crossroads" LLC did not come as a surprise to Amelia Irvine, president of Love Saxa, the student club that had been at the center of a public battle with the Student Activities Commission last fall over its constitution affirming the Church's teaching on marriage and healthy relationships.

Irvine said Love Saxa did not receive support from Georgetown's administration when Love Saxa had to defend beliefs "that are in line with Georgetown's Catholic values" in front of a hearing board. She did not believe that the LLC would involve Catholic formation on gender and sexuality.

"Georgetown's Office of Residential Living, which will oversee the program, is perhaps the most liberal and progressive office at Georgetown," she said. "The Office of Residential Living cannot provide robust, Catholic programming in its 'Jesuit Values' LLC in which I live."

"If they cannot do so there, I can imagine that the new 'Gender and Sexuality' LLC will encourage students to 'explore' their gender and sexuality in a way that is contrary to Church teachings," she said.

The Register reached out to campus ministry for questions about whether it would have any role in "Crossroads" LLC's programming, but was unable to obtain a response.

Patrick Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, an organization that seeks to promote the religious identity of Catholic institutions of higher education, expressed dismay and told the Register the university is promoting confusion "instead of truth about the human person and sexuality."

"The distinct advantage of a Catholic university is that it rests upon the truths of our faith, yet Georgetown keeps acting like that truth doesn't exist and that Catholic moral teaching is just plain wrong," he said.

Community Needed for Faithfully Catholic 'LGBTQ' Students

Joseph (real name withheld by request), a recent graduate of Georgetown who identifies as "part of the LGBT community" but also tries to faithfully live Church teaching on sex, marriage and chastity, told the Register that most LLCs are "not visible presences on campus." At most, he said, they comprise fewer than 50 students on a dormitory floor.

He said the new "Gender and Sexuality" LLC would probably appeal to students that are already active members of the Georgetown "LGBT" community, but not students "experiencing loneliness, isolation, alienation or pain in trying to abide by the Church's positions on gender and sexuality while also grappling with their own personal questions about gender and sexual orientation."

Joseph knows these struggles personally and came out publicly as same-sex attracted during his junior year. He received a lot of counseling and help from campus ministry and student health services, but never from Georgetown's LGBT Resource Center.

Since he is committed to the Church's teaching, Joseph said he has "found friends, community and spiritual guides in Georgetown's campus-ministry groups and in off-campus religious groups."

However, Joseph indicated he would have appreciated, as a student, the opportunities of a community of "LGBT" students trying to faithfully live out the Church's teaching that the LLC concept might have provided.

"I would have loved to have found a place at Georgetown where I would feel welcome to talk about both my personal experience with same-sex sexual desires and my love for Christ and his Church - and all its teachings - in the confidence that I would be received with compassionate and Christ-centered love and patience, without fear of demonization from either the doctrine-suspicious or the gay-suspicious," he said.

Whether the "Gender and Sexuality" LLC will be such a place, Joseph added, will "depend almost entirely on the individual students who lead it and apply to live in it."

He said, "Short of knowing how involved campus ministry has been or will be with this LLC, I am not confident that Christ will intentionally be made the focus of many, if any, conversations fostered by members of this community."
Peter Jesserer Smith is a Register staff writer.

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New Georgetown 'Gender and Sexuality' Housing Plan Sparks Questions

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WASHINGTON - Georgetown University has approved a new housing arrangement for the upcoming academic year that is geared toward young adults who self-identify as part of the "LGBTQ" community, as well as friends and supporters. But others are questioning whether the "Living and Learning Community" (LLC) dedicated to "Gender and Sexuality" will make any effort to engage students with Catholic formation and teaching.

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This article, written by a man, commentates on the churches involvement in the objectification of women, specifically dealing with the issue of modesty.

"Since at least the 1950s, conservative evangelicalism’s overarching sexual ethic has put a substantive emphasis on “modesty” — that is, how [Christian] women dress, specifically in terms of highlighting their sensuality"

Do you believe Christian women have a duty to adhere to rules of modesty, so as not to lead others astray? What message is the church sending, to both male and female, when they support these ideas?

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S ince at least the 1950s, conservative evangelicalism's overarching sexual ethic has put a substantive emphasis on " modesty " - that is, how [Christian] women dress, specifically in terms of highlighting their sensuality.

I admit that I hesitate to make a blanket statement like this, because I don't mean to belittle the entire conversation around sexual ethics and how our Western culture's obsession with sex and perfect bodies is unhealthy for anyone to immerse themselves in, Christian or not. That's another post for another time, and well worth exploring. BUT - my opening statement is not at all an unfair assessment. Modesty has undeniably enjoyed front-page headline status in Christian conversations about sexuality for decades, almost irrespective of particular church tradition.

I'm hoping to push back hard on this narrative that has dominated the evangelical landscape for some time now. I grew up in the 1990s, in a very extreme group that would have liked to place the blame for all of society's woes squarely at the feet of miniskirt- and bikini- clad women. It was about as Puritanical as you can imagine. When I left that tradition for more mainstream evangelical circles as a teenager, I encountered a much more subtle and "balanced" sexual ethic that, though less extreme (and therefore less obvious to me at the time), had a lot in common with the cult in which I was raised.

One of the chief commonalities was this theme of modesty. Side note: in case it's not already obvious - it really only ever applied to females. So... really, female "modesty." Or, in other words, cover up your sexy parts, ladies,
Modest Is Hottest.
(Yes, this was actually a slogan, printed on t-shirts, and became an entire movement, with events and conferences behind it.)

Usually the idea of modesty was presented innocuously enough, often at big concerts and conferences led by eloquent, attractive young artists and writers like Joshua Harris and Rebecca St. James (on whom I most certainly had an adolescent crush), and, I would venture to assume, with largely good intentions. The idea, or so I gathered as a teenage male, was that young ladies ought to respect themselves enough that they don't have to wear "scanty" clothing (whatever that means) to attract the lustful attention of men/boys. Furthermore, our good men and boys who are trying so hard to fight the onslaught of increasingly sexual images against their virgin eyes are having a hard enough time because of the wicked times in which we live, so let's act charitably and not " cause our brothers to stumble " with how we dress. After all, church/youth group should be a safe place, no?
Harmless, right?
While I agree wholeheartedly that we all have a responsibility to each other to love one another and not intentionally lead one another down destructive or unhealthy paths, there's at least three glaring problems with this line of teaching/thinking:
1. No one really knows what "immodest" means.
I'm dead serious. Every man is different with what turns them on. According to Granny Clampett in The Beverly Hillbillies, Ellie Mae's search for a husband ought to include the occasional flash of her ankles to attract a man's attention... (I guess men in rural Tennessee have a thing for a little Achilles action?) Just listen to a couple hip-hop songs, and you'll quickly discover that some dudes are really into butts, while others are boob guys, and for some strange reason lost on this blogger, some dudes are into neither. Moral of the story - what might seem "modest" to one person/tradition/culture might seem immodest to another. There's no universal agreed-upon standard for what turns men on. It's a self-defeating exercise from the outset.
2a. It puts the responsibility for a man's lust and fantasies squarely on the shoulders of women.
Many conferences and books have even gone so far as to name women the "gatekeepers" of sexuality. He will go as far as you let him, the narrative goes. Wow! This a staggeringly unhealthy narrative to promote to our children about the way sexuality works, and plays directly into the hands of a rape culture such as the one in which we live: if you are a female and ever get catcalled, abused, molested, raped, or any number of other sexual advances, you are probably at least partially to blame. What were you wearing? What did you say to him? Did you bend over to pick something up? Was your perfume too sensual?

How is this a complex we want to instill in either our girls or boys? Aside from the profound shame this places on the shoulders of girls and women when they are violated, think about what this narrative is teaching boys: you don't have control over your own body and urges; if you "stumble" sexually, it's because some slutty woman influenced you to it, or wasn't sufficiently careful to "guard your heart" and eyes from the sensuality she exudes. This thinking only exacerbates what is becoming more and more a cultural epidemic of men objectifying and abusing women as sexual playthings.
2b. It grants men and boys amnesty from the responsibility of their own sexual choices.
Not only is this insulting to men, as though we are merely creatures of instinct, like dogs that can't control their incessant need to hump everything in sight, but I would argue that it conditions boys and young men forthe "struggle!" I have a 3 year old boy, and one on the way, and I don't want them to grow up thinking that they are incapable of controlling their sexuality. Of course they are going to "struggle" in the sense that they are males with a sex drive, and they will notice beautiful women and be attracted to them, but there's no need to condition my little boys to notice every time a woman is dressed "immodestly," as I was as a child, pointing out "inappropriately dressed" women at the beach in bikinis, or drawing attention to every hint of cleavage, bare midriffs, or even tight pants. This only conditions a child's mind to notice these things and view them as forbidden, rather than training them for self-control through the simple acknowledgement that humans are by nature sexual beings, and that the female form is beautiful, something to be appreciated and not objectified.

This is the legacy I want to leave with my sons: they, as well as you and I, can notice beauty and curves without immediately letting our minds go to sinful places. Anything less than this dishonors both the character of men as well as the women and girls we are hoping to protect.

But perhaps the most profound problem with the "modest is hottest" teaching is that
3. The Bible does not breathe a word Are you catching what I'm catching? of such nonsense.
There is verse in all of Holy Scripture in which the word modesty is used - the Greek word , and it's the one verse perennially pulled out in defense of the MiH argument by its perpetrators. The verse literally says, "I also want the women to dress modestly [respectably, decorous], with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, appropriate for women who profess to worship God" (I Timothy 2:9, NIV).

This passage, which is about proper attitude and decorum in the church, though it may have a vague implicit reference to the sensualkind ofmodesty, is actually very explicitly referring to a materialistic kind of modesty. Scripture is chock FULL of references to this kind of modesty and humility (the actual definition of the English word modest).
we communicate these values even with little things like how we dress, act, and speak in our worship gatherings.
The early church (and the modern church!) is full of people of different races and socio-economic status. The church Timothy pastored in ancient Ephesus would have had rich businesspeople and slaves worshipping side by side, temple prostitutes, artisans, soldiers, beggars, trust-fund babies, and everything in between.

Paul was telling Timothy to shepherd his people in such a way as to communicate the values of the kingdom of heaven - that in Christ there is no Jew or Gentile, rich or poor, male or female - all are one and of equal status in his kingdom. Why would you wear expensive clothes and fine jewels to a worship gathering when you know that the woman next to you doesn't know where her next meal is coming from? Paul is encouraging here a kingdom reality check, the hope that the church would be the kind of community that communicates radical welcome to everyone, where all are on equal footing with God regardless of race or riches, and

Jesus himself had some pretty radical things to say about lust and sexuality, and never once did he invite women into the blame game, something we are told our first fallen father, Adam, did from the very beginning. Instead, Jesus makes the following scandalous statement, contra MiH teaching:

"But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell."
(Matthew 5:27-32)

Whoa! Not only does Jesus say nothing about female culpability in a man's fantasies, he absolutely destroys any excuses a man might make about his inability to control his own urges. No, Jesus says, a man's culpability begins and ends with his own dang eyes and right hand.

(Please tell me this cracks you up... I can only imagine Jesus preaching this with a little twinkle in his eye, as his good Jewish co-ed audience chuckles uncomfortably.)

Jesus is always pointing back to the broken human heart as the spring from whence our sin comes. Men don't lust because women are immodest. Men and women alike lust ( Hebrew/Greek: covet) because we want what we can't have. Men in Afghanistan or Turkey will lust after a woman in a burqa or niqab, men in Tennessee apparently will lust after an ankle, while men in the Amazon apparently don't think twice of topless gals, if National Geographic is to be believed.
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We are discontented creatures, all of us, including the woman who intentionally dresses to seduce the man that she wants but can't have. But not Jesus nor any of the other writers of Scripture so much as insinuate that women are in any way responsible for men's choices, sexual tensions, or fantasies. Even the well-known passage about "helping your brother not stumble" is a serious stretch to apply to women in how they dress. It's not the original intent of the passage, though again, it does seem reasonable to me that all of us should live with an awareness of how we might be placing unnecessary stumbling blocks in our brothers' and sisters' lives. But this does not equate to a command for women to obsess over clothing choices. Each man (and woman) is responsible to God for their own choices. Scripture is surely clear about that point.

So, speaking as a man who knows well this "struggle" of holding faith and purity in an over-sensualized culture, I hope today that you my sisters feel free to dress with both charity and charm, with dignity and dazzle, to adorn yourself in a way that makes you feel beautiful and confident, in a way that allows you to experience solidarity with other women of different bank account and/or breast size, to make your clothing choices based on the values of God's kingdom (which includes wearing clothing that is ethically manufactured), and to feel free to let men take the responsibility for their own right eyes/hands and figure out how to be respectable men who treat all women, regardless of cleavage or legs for days, with dignity and respect.

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"Modest is Hottest" is not in the Bible - Joel Michael Herbert - Medium

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S ince at least the 1950s, conservative evangelicalism's overarching sexual ethic has put a substantive emphasis on " modesty " - that is, how [Christian] women dress, specifically in terms of highlighting their sensuality.

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In an effort to be more gender inclusive, a high school in Massachusetts has asked students to not use the word "freshmen". Instead, they suggest students use "first-year students" to describe the new incoming students.
Do you think it is unreasonable for the school to ask students to not use the word "freshmen"?

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A school in Easthampton, Massachusetts has asked its students not to use the word "freshmen", and has proposed a gender-neutral alternative.

The Easthampton High School is facing minor controversy for saying that students should instead use the term "first-year students". ﻿

The move comes as the school plans to be more gender inclusive.

Students were informed of the change in language in the handbook on Wednesday.

One student, Eileen Corbeil of Easthampton, told WWLP: "Changing the way we use pronouns has been a challenge for me.

"I want people to feel comfortable and if it means that I have to change the way I use my language, I'm ok with that."

The change comes after the Gender and Sexuality Alliance Group made suggestions to the handbook committee on how the student handbook can be more gender-neutral.

The handbook is given to Student and School Councils before it is given to the school committee for approval.

But the school has stopped short of enforcing the change in language, and the school's superintendent Nancy Follansbee said students can use the term freshman if they wish.

The school was previously investigated by the Attorney General's office in Massachusetts for racial incidents.

After the investigation, the school undertook diversity and inclusion training, including the appointment of a diversity officer.

This was intended to bring the school in compliance with civil rights law.

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School unveils gender-neutral alternative to the word 'freshmen'

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A school in Easthampton, Massachusetts has asked its students not to use the word "freshmen", and has proposed a gender-neutral alternative. The Easthampton High School is facing minor controversy for saying that students should instead use the term "first-year students". ﻿ The move comes as the school plans to be more gender inclusive.