Drawing A Blank

new article up online

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:32:30 GMT

Just in time for the Decemberween season, Reflection's Edge asked me for some ramblings on the topic of fiction and research. I obliged, and Verisimilitude and the Competent Con: Research for Fiction is now live on their site for your reading enjoyment.

In other news, I continue to plow through revisions to the virginity book. It's been occupying a huge amount of time, primarily because I've been tasked with shortening the book as much as possible. No small task, given that the ms. I handed in was 1069 pages long. I keep track of the starting and ending wordcount and page count for the chapters as I go, so that I have some idea of how much I've managed to shorten things (it helps me gauge how much shorter I'm making it, since I'm looking at it on a screen and not as a pile of pieces of paper that gets smaller as I throw things out). When I sent off the revised first half of the book last week, I totaled my revisions statistics for that half of the book and discovered that in revising I managed to cut 21,338 words out of it, a fairly respectable sum. 313 pages to 242.

Since then, I've revised two chapters of the second half and yanked about 9500 words out of those, and the work of shortening it -- while not leaving out anything important, and making sure that everything I leave in the book still works the way it should, which is the time-consuming part -- continues apace. It's very hard, not so much because I'm cutting my own writing (every writer needs to be able to do that) but because I already feel like there is so much that I have left out of this book that I would've liked to have included, and every time I shorten it the heaps of info on the cutting-room floor just get deeper.

And on that note, I was deeply amused to note the following bit in my December monthly horoscope forecast on Susan Miller's AstrologyZone site, in regard to an opposition between Saturn and Neptune in the current Piscean chart:

A writing project that is artistic / literary, journalistic, or commercial (in research, sales, marketing, public relations) seems to be taking up an inordinate amount of your time. You seem to have fallen behind again over the past two months and are frantically working to catch up. Mars in your solar third house of communication has been retrograde since October 1, so you may have had to revise part of the document in October or November. Doing so probably seemed harder than it would have been if you had started from scratch!

No matter - that difficult phase will be over by December 10 and you can make much better progress from that point on. Your income seems to be tied to this endeavor, so keep pressing forward and don't lose morale, dear Pisces.

She couldn't be more right, including that I should be done with the revisions by December 10 if I continue at my current pace. Score one for the astrologers, eh? Let's just hope that she's right about the rest of the (rather sunny!) forecast as well.

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 22:11:48 GMT

All queries, comments, etc. should go to the editors in question. I am not personally connected with this book, and am presenting the CFS as a courtesy to those of you who may be interested. -- HB

======================

She's Such a Geek

An Anthology by and for Women Obsessed with Computers, Science, Comic Books, Gaming, Spaceships, and Revolution

Slated for Fall 2006

Geeks are taking over the world. They make the most popular movies and games, pioneer new ways to communicate using technology, and create new ideas that will change the future. But the stereotype is that only men can be geeks. So when are we going to hear from the triumphant female nerds whose stories of outer space battles will inspire generations, and whose inventions will change the future? Right now.

Female geeks are busting out of the labs and into the spotlight. They have the skills and knowledge that can inspire social progress, scientific breakthroughs, and change the world for the better, and they're making their
voices heard, some for the first time, in Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders' book She's Such a Geek. This anthology will celebrate women who have flourished in the male-dominated realms of technical and cultural arcana.
We're looking for a wide range of personal essays about the meaning of female nerdhood by women who are in love with genomics, obsessed with blogging, learned about sex from Dungeons and Dragons, and aren't afraid to
match wits with men or computers. The essays in She's Such a Geek will explain what it means to be passionately engaged with technical or obscure topics ˜ and how to deal with it when people tell you that your interests
are weird, especially for a girl. This book aims to bust stereotypes of what it means to be a geek, as well as what it means to be female.

More than anything, She's Such a Geek is a celebration and call to arms: it's a hopeful book which looks forward to a day when women will pilot spaceships, invent molecular motors, design the next ultra-tiny supercomputer, write epics, and run the government.

We want introspective essays that explain what being a geek has meant to you. Describe how you've fought stereotypes to be accepted among nerds. Explore why you are obsessed with topics and ideas that are supposed to be
"for boys only." Tell us how you felt the day you realized that you would be devoting the rest of your life to discovering algorithms or collecting comic books. We want strong, personal writing that is also smart and critical. We don't mind if you use the word "fuck," and we don't mind if you use the word "telomerase." Be celebratory, polemical, wistful, angry, and just plain dorky.

Possible topics include:

· what turned you into a geek
· your career in science, technology, or engineering
· growing up geeky
· being a geek in high school today
· battling geek stereotypes (i.e racial stereotypes and geekdom, cultural analysis of geek chic and the truth about nerds, the idea that women have to choose between being sexually desirable and smart, stereotypes about geek
professions such as computer programmers)
· sex and dating among geeks
· science fiction fandom
· role-playing game or comic-book subcultures
· the joys of math
· blogging or videogames
· female geek bonding
· geek role models for women
· feminist commentary on geek culture
· women's involvement in DiY science and technology groups
· Stories from women involved in geek pop and underground cultures. These might include comic book writers, science fiction writers, electronic music
musicians, and women interested in the gaming world.
· women's web networks and web zine grrrl culture
· Issues of sexism in any or all of the above themes

Editors: Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders are geeky women writers. Annalee is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and writes the syndicated column Techsploitation. Charlie is the author of Choir Boy (Soft Skull Press) and
publisher of other magazine.

Publisher: Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, publishes groundbreaking books by and for women in a variety of topics.

Deadline: January 15, 2006

Length: 3,000-6,000 words

Format: Essays must be typed, double-spaced, andpaginated. Please include your address, phone number, email address, and a short bio on the last page.
Essays will not be returned.

Submitting: Send essay electronically as a Document or Rich Text Format file to Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders at sheissuchageek@gmail.com.

Payment: $100 plus two books

Reply: Please allow until February 15 for a response. If you haven't received a response by then, please assume your essay has not been selected.
It is not possible to reply to every submission personally.

Heads Up, Kansas...

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 16:15:16 GMT

Just a heads-up to any of my readers who are, or know, young Kansan women and/or their current or former sexual partners: a report in this morning's Kaiser Family Foundation newsletter states that the KS Attorney General Phill Kline (R) has been examining records of live births and subpoenaing medical records from clinics that provide abortion services and is apparently having all the records combed for any evidence of anyone under age 16 (age of consent in KS) having been impregnated by a legal adult (i.e., someone 18 years of age or older). It is being legitimized by the trotting-out of an (as yet not independently verified) statement on the part of the GA's office that approximately half of the cases the GA's office has subpoenaed involve a female between the ages of 10 and 13, which is a move to draw the public's attention to the idea that this investigation is related solely to nonconsensual, abusive sexual contact between pre-pubescent or pubescent children and adults.

Past experience in watching other stat-rape witch hunts in other states, like California's for example, tells me that this is not likely to be the case at all. Although there will probably be a small percentage of cases caught in the net that do constitute forcible rape/abuse, the bulk of cases that end up being brought as a result of these kinds of "law enforcement" efforts tend to involve people of lower socioeconomic brackets, frequently Latina/o, African-American, or poor (often rural) whites who were engaged in consensual relationships and consensual sex. One of the things you should be aware of here is that it looks like they're going after anyone who technically meets the conditions of violating the letter of the law. If a woman was under the age of 15 when she became pregnant -- even if she was over 16 at the time that she visited her gynecological provider or family planning clinic to either give birth or obtain an abortion -- and the AG's office believes that her partner was above the age of majority, there's going to be someone poking way into her business real soon now, and into the business of her partner(s) as well as soon as they can track them down, and I would not be at all surprised if the AG's office fully intends to bring statutory rape and/or child sexual abuse charges.

Please be aware that because Kansas law does not acknowledge the ability of women under age 16 to consent to sex, this means that these investigations may affect ANYONE who might fall under this category, even if their relationship and whatever sex took place inside it was fully consensual. This may include cases in which the partners are married. In some cases, statutory rape law is also applied to married couples (there are states in which a young person may legally marry with parental consent at an age younger than the state's age of consent); since minors can marry with parental consent in Kansas, this may apply to some of the Kansas cases in question.

If you are, or know someone who is, a young woman (or the current/former partner of a young woman) who might be affected by the current investigation and subpoena of records in Kansas, be advised that this is going down. You may wish to contact a lawyer if you consider yourself at high risk of being investigated, to find out what your rights and responsibilities are here according to Kansas state law.

Consider the Eunuch

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 23:53:47 GMT

Those of you curious about the virgin book can get a small sample of it by going here and clicking on the PDF for "Consider the Eunuch."

This is a section that is unfortunately, for reasons of length, being cut from the final version of the book, but which is fairly demonstrative of the way I write history, the sorts of issues I work with in the book, and the kinds of content and historical information you will find in the book as a whole.

I'll leave the PDF up for a couple of weeks. Enjoy!

-- Hanne

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 14:11:28 GMT

I'll be in New York next week to speak at this event. It's open to the public; all the info you could possibly need is right here. If you come, please feel free to come up and say howdy.

THE WOMEN’S NATIONAL BOOK ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK CITY CHAPTER
presents

Dangerous Books
When Wal-Mart won’t stock it, and The New York Times won’t touch it,
how do editors, authors and publicists deal with avant-garde, cutting-edge and
politically-unpopular books?

A discussion and Q & A with:
Hanne Blank, Author, Virgin: The Untouched History (Bloomsbury, 2006) and
Unruly Appetites (Seal Press, 2003)
Kim Dower, Kim-from-L.A., Literary & Media Services and Coauthor,
Life Is a Series of Presentations (Fireside, 2005)
Barbara Nitke, President, Camera Club of New York and Author, Kiss of Fire (Kehrer, 2003); Lead Plaintiff, Nitke vs. Gonzalez
Jeremie Ruby-Strauss, Senior Editor, Kensington Books
Amy Scholder, General Manager, Verso Press

Organized by:
Janet Reid, JetReid Literary Agency

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11
6 – 8 p.m.

Small Press Center
General Society for Mechanics and Tradesmen
20 West 44th Street

Admission: Free for WNBA members. $10 for nonmembers; $5 for students w/ID and Small Press Center members. No RSVP necessary.

General Information and media inquiries:
Janet Reid, 718-821-4996, wnba-events@earthlink.net

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:43:29 GMT

I just realized tonight that part of what I'm feeling is grief and loss. Not depression, thank you very much all the same, but the "post-partum depression" diagnosis doesn't fit: depression is an entirely different critter. This is grief and loss, frequently mistaken for depression but not the same thing at all.

I'm grieving the loss of the book. Yes, I said loss. I'm done with the virginity book because I had to be done, it had to get done. But I'm not done in the elated "I'm finally finished, I conquered it!" way. I'm done in the "We have unfinished business but we had to part" way... the way when you know you can't solve everything so you just have to tie up as many loose ends as you can, say good bye, and make the best of it.

Part of it is that I still feel like I have things to say, and things left unsaid. As huge as the book is, I left so much on the cutting-room floor and left out so many discussions because they were too theoretical, too political, too tangential, too esoteric, too stupid. (Yes, I mean "too stupid" quite literally and no, I'm not being self-effacing, I'm talking about discussions about things like the modern folklore of the thirty-year-old virgin geek dweeb or what-have-you: after several hundred pages of talking about virginity across all manner of demographics and ages and sexes and so on, I am NOT sinking to the level required to give that particular disquisition and if the reader can't bloody well figure it out by then, well, it isn't because I haven't done my job.) Truly, I could fill another book with what I didn't put into this one.

Part of it is that I don't feel like I solved the problem I set out to solve. I realized about halfway through the book that I wasn't going to, that the core question of the book -- basically the question of why virginity matters so damn much and continues to matter so damn much -- was never going to be answered in a way that would really satisfy me, not by me and not by anybody else either. When I realized that at root what I was trying to answer was the question of why patriarchy works the way it does and why women have consistently participated in a system of quantifying their own bodies and sexualities that ultimately serves patriarchal ends, I knew it was just going to be turtles all the way down and there was nothing for it.

Note that I don't for a moment think that this will be a big problem for readers. I don't propose anywhere in the book that I have The One True Answer And Unified Field Theory to the virginity question. In fact I spend quite a bit of time and effort on making it patently clear that I don't and nobody else does either, nor have they ever, and anyone who says they know is either lying, hasn't done enough reading, or both. But it's going to continue to be a nagging question to me, precisely because I have invested so much in trying to answer it and for so long.

And then there's the purely procedural aspect of the grief. Those who haven't written books often imagine that there's a sort of "and they rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after" when a book is turned in to the publisher. Really what it feels like is a lot like you've pushed and struggled and fought and worked and sweated and cared so much for so long and then you take what comes out of it and you put it in a box and you send it off... and there is a long, deafening silence.

It isn't a stony cold refusing silence. It's just silence. It's the silence of your book going off to enter the production cycle where it is one of a number of books, where it has to sit and take its turn in the queue for the agent and editor to read it and get back to you about what they want changed and how, for the managing editor to take a look at it and then (if you're lucky and you have the kind of ME who does this) confer with you about captioning and illustration and below-the-line formatting, for the ME and the art department to talk to you about cover stuff, for the PR department to start annoying you with author information forms you have to fill out so that they can appropriately pimp your book later on. It's a perfectly normal expected silence while the machine of the industry absorbs the wad of content you've just fed into it.

It's still wretched. And you have to sit on your hands when you're fairly aching to call your editor on the phone and pester him or her like a six-year-old on a car trip: "are we there yet? are we there yet? when will we be there? will we be there in one hour? is it one hour yet?" You have to give them time to deal with it; there's nothing else to be done. You couldn't have written it overnight and certainly they can't read and edit it overnight either.

The delay gives you more than enough time to assume the worst. In fact it gives you ample time to imagine an America's Top Forty of Totally Crap Outcomes, to cast them and costume them and direct them like Cecil B. DeMille in glorious blazing Technicolor and super Dolby surround sound with extra subwoofers for that rumbly feeling during the crash scenes. Even if you've been through it before and you know that really none of it is all that realistic, even if you know that Writers Is Nuts and therefore so are you, you do it anyhow.

But then you also stand aside from all of it, to some degree, observing, and knowing that you're just generating noise to fill the silence and the emptiness, the big vocation-shaped space where a book used to be and where the ghost of a book is still rattling around talking to you about all the things that you didn't do or might've done and all the things you and it still have to say to one another.

It's hard to know what to do with that. It's unfinished business. The book on the page never -- at least not for me -- exhausts the book in the head. You grieve when the book is done partly because it's a relationship that ends, and like losing any other partner with whom you spend so much time, the loss leaves a hole. You grieve because when it goes, it doesn't phone home for a while, because of the mighty, encompassing digestive silence of the machine that turns manuscripts into books. You grieve because of the ghosts, all the could-haves and might-have-beens and conversations you didn't get to have and that will never be quite the same in any other context: you can try to have them, sure, but it'll be another book that generates its own milieu, its own constellations in the sky.

It's inevitable, of course. It's part of the great turning wheel of getting ideas out into the world. And you know that. I know that. I suppose it could be said that the grief is part of the work: it's the work of having something that has been your book, constantly-changing and interior, and now needs to become everyone's book, fixed and exterior.

Catholics, Erasmus argued in what was a rather Protestant way for a Catholic cleric like him, had an obligation to marry: it was as senseless to remain a virgin purely for the sake of the virtue associated with virginity as it would be to keep an apple tree in blossom forever for the sake of beauty and fragrance. The breathtaking promise of a blossom is the price you pay for the nourishing fulfilment of fruit.

Sometimes you grieve for the blossoms even as you look forward to eating the fruit.

Aux armes, citoyens.

Tue, 13 Sep 2005 19:42:32 GMT

Preaching to the choir time, folks. I do hope that those of you who read this who are USAian will take some sort of action... if not on your own behalf, on that of someone who isn't yet old enough to know how much this stuff matters.

http://www.scarleteen.com/blog/index.html has the rundown, but here's the skinny: the FDA is holding approval for "Plan B" emergency contraception (the "morning after pill") hostage to an unprecedented "public comment" period. No other drug has ever had its approval subjected to a "public comment" period and indeed, the FDA is under no mandate whatsoever -- as you might imagine, given that they're supposed to be a public health agency run on principles of sound medical science rather than public emotion -- to provide same. Also as you might imagine, the religious right is all over this "public comment" period like white on rice, and I don't think I have to tell you what their feelings about contraceptives access are.

So. Please, if reproductive freedoms matter to you (and they damn well should), please take a moment to write a letter to the FDA weighing in. If only to tell them why they have no business at all subjecting drug approval for ANY demographic to the weight of public opinion. Deputy Commissioner Lester Crawford's email is : deputy.commissioner@fda.gov or you can send snail mail to him at the Food and Drug Administration / 5600 Fishers Lane / Rockville, Maryland 20857

My letter is below. Feel free to borrow from it at will.

Dear Dr. Crawford,

I am alarmed by the current "public comment" period in regard to the issue of over-the-counter Emergency Contraceptive pill access for young women.

Contraceptives access for all women, including unmarried women, has been constitutionally protected since Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965. Since then, the Pill and its hormonal contraceptive offshoots, such as Depo-Provera, Norplant, NuvaRing, Mirena, and so on, have proven to be popular, effective, and low-risk means for managing the risk of unplanned pregnancy for married and unmarried women alike, very much including the younger, unmarried women about whom the FDA claims to be so powerfully concerned.

I find it condescending in the extreme that the FDA feels that it is in any way realistic to claim that younger women should be barred from using EC / Plan B because they are incapable of following the dosage instructions properly. This is inaccurate, misogynist, and medically unfounded.

First, there is no research that proves this to be true. The assertion that this is true is a red herring. Former FDA Women's Health Director Susan Wood -- a name I presume you know -- has made it clear that these and other, similar contentions are untrue.

Second, there is no research available in the present medical literature (at least according to the reference librarians at the National Library of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's Welch Library) proving a risk of real and pertinent harm to patients who do not follow EC dosage instructions and instead double-dose themselves by taking both doses simultaneously.

Third, women are not stupid, even young women. If we assume for the sake of argument that the teenaged daughters of America are generally capable of such complex tasks as driving automobiles, and doing sufficiently well on the SATs to be admitted to college, it follows without exception that they are likewise generally capable of comprehending and following a simple one-sentence instruction on a pharmaceutical product.

This "public comment" period -- which I will note has never been enacted for any other drug, like, say, Viagra -- is an obstruction of the FDA's purpose and a perversion of the FDA's well-established role as an agency existing to protect the public health. The FDA does not have a mandate to have its drug regulations reflect public opinion, only public health and safety. The FDA is not a representative body but a scientific and research body.

Public opinion is irrelevant to the job the FDA is mandated to perform. Empirically tested and reproducible medical data are not only relevant to the job the FDA is mandated to perform, they are the ESSENCE of the job the FDA is mandated to perform. Flatly put, if there are no data that show that a particular drug protocol has an undue risk to a particular demographic of potential drug users, then there is no reason that such a drug protocol should be made inaccessible to that demographic.

The FDA has a mandate to promote and protect the health and safety of all Americans, not to promulgate a patently false misogynist theory about female incompetence as a way of removing access to a perfectly valid, multiply-tested, effective contraceptive protocol.

Yours,
Hanne Blank

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 15:35:36 GMT

You know, I just realized that a few entries ago there was a substantial typo. The book is not 101 pages long in typescript. It is 1001 pages long in typescript (12 point Courier, one inch margins, doublespaced -- standard format).

That's rather a difference. Sorry for any confusion.

Sing ho for the life of a writer...

Fri, 09 Sep 2005 15:30:51 GMT

For those who would like to get some idea of exactly what I've been doing lo these last couple of years, I've just updated my website to add an overview of the book and a FAQ incorporating the kinds of questions I've been getting most frequently since I began working on it.

And now that that's done, I think I'm going to go back to nursing an end-of-summer head cold and figuring out how to jump-start myself through the post-book ennui.

Fri, 02 Sep 2005 03:01:53 GMT

SEXUAL HEALING: HANNE BLANK'S SEX BOOK BENEFIT for HURRICANE KATRINA

How it Works:
1. Minimum donation pledges for each book or item are given following the title and before the item description. This is the MINIMUM donation; if you can donate more, great, but if you can't, don't sweat it... it's a sliding scale sort of thing.

2. Those wishing to reserve a book or other item should email hanne at hanneblank dot com and identify which item(s) you wish to reserve. When I get your email I will send you a PDF form to fill out and mail to me along with your check or money order (no, I do not do PayPal).

3. I will inscribe, sign, and ship out your book or other item either to you or to the recipient of your choice upon cashing your check/money order. Lipstick kiss-prints available at no extra charge.

4. ALL PROCEEDS FROM THIS BENEFIT WILL GO TO THE AMERICAN RED CROSS FUND FOR HURRICANE KATRINA RELIEF. That's right, I'm donating the books, the postage, the packing, etc. All told, I'm putting up about $760 in merchandise here and probably another hundred bucks in postage... the rest is up to YOU.

On to the BOOKS!

17 copies of Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica (2001, Cleis Press)
minimum donation $20

About the book: "Edited by Hanne Blank, Zaftig is a juicy romp of lusty stories celebrating big-bodied women. Voluptuous steamy tales of women and their male and female admirers spill over with sexual delight. Includes well-known erotica writers Heather Corinna and Lori Selke as well as Blank herself."
Get a taste of Zaftig in this excerpt published in Salon.

13 copies of Best Transgender Erotica, coedited with Raven Kaldera (2002, Circlet Press) Because this book is now out of print, the minimum donation is $25.

About the book: "Best Transgender Erotica is a profoundly moving and remarkable book. Born out of the trans community and co-edited by Raven Kaldera, an intergendered FtM transman and general mover-and-shaker in the trans world, it is the first book of erotica to address the myriad aspects of transgenderism. This collection of 23 stories features work from both trans activists and seasoned erotica authors (some of whom, it might be noted, hold claim to both titles). The stories range from side-splittingly funny lustful comedies to deeply poignant love stories -- but all with some of the hottest sex scenes I've ever encountered. And the characters are equally diverse and fascinating -- there are crossdressers, pre-ops, post-ops, non-ops, intersexed, genderqueers, androgynes, butches, femmes, and a few that simply defy definition." (from this review)

5 Copies of Shameless: Women's Intimate Erotica (2002, Seal Press)
Minimum donation $20

About the book: "A daring darling from the Live Girls series offers a collection of provocative, confessional stories sure to inspire one-handed reading. This isn’t dusty, for-ladies-only fiction, just high-quality erotica that doesn’t require a whips-and-chains appetite for thorough enjoyment of each sensual, sometimes wicked admission. Recalling the sweat and sizzle of an old affair, a woman wonders if her former lover can ever forgive her for having ended up with his wife. A Haitian couple reveals the passion born of desperation and the searing fires of loss and love. A young woman abroad loses her virginity to a sophisticated older man in a scorching-hot life lesson in sexual possibility. Ovulation brings sweet, slippery horniness--and volatile, supercharged impregnation fantasies--to a childless-by-choice bi-chick. And a pregnant bitch goddess recounts the night she took over her husband’s body the same way her growing baby took over her own: relentlessly and with delicious, paradoxical pleasure and pain. The memoir-like style of these stories allows the reader to devour private letters, peek into diaries, and listen to the most intimate confessions of women acting out in inspirational sexual abandon. Seasoned editor Blank has collected only the hottest, most “confidential” and scintillating erotic moments by expert eroticists including Dawn O’Hara, Adhara Law, Lisa Bland, and others." (Libido)

2 copies of Unruly Appetites (2003, Seal Press)
Minimum donation $20.

About the book: "This book is one of the more delicious erotic anthologies I've come across in a long time. Hanne Blank's writing is titlating, imaginative and will keep on the edge of your seat/sheets. There are so many stories with differing themes, combinations and moods that there is absolutely something for everyone. Finally, a writer who can combine hot sex and emotion together. I think my favorite story is Sauce for the Gander, a fun but unconventional look at a relationship with a woman who loves both her boyfriend and her girlfriend. Totally sexy, unexpected but not stupid cheesoid wacka wacka porn. Also The Princess and the Tiger will make the top of your head pop open with it's fantastically seductive story." -- a random Amazon.com reviewer (this is probably my favorite review of any of my books, just for the phrase "stupid cheesoid wacka wacka porn."

COLLECTOR ITEMS

2 copies of Big Big Love used as demo copies during seminars/book tour events. They're marked "BROWSER COPY ONLY" and "NOT FOR SALE" and have been handled a bit... own a little slice of smutty history for a minimum donation of $25.

1 copy of Penthouse, February 2003 -- this issue contains a version of my short story "Lust, Debt, and a Practical Education." The issue was an advance-of-release copy and bears an "ADVANCE COPY" sticker on the front cover. Minimum donation $50.

Almost There!

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 13:18:18 GMT

Having been heads-down for a while, I am happy to announce that all this work is indeed paying off: last night I finished a complete draft of my last chapter for the virginity book. All 101 pages of it. (No, this is not a short book.)

There is still an editing pass to do before it's really done, of course, but completing the draft is a pretty important milestone. After all, it's hard to edit anything if you don't have anything to edit.

Today's going to be devoted to tidying up bibliographical loose ends and to doing that editorial pass.

Rather than filling the book with footnotes or endnotes -- the book is intended for an intelligent and educated but non-academic audience, and I know that seeing all those spiky little superscript numbers turns off or intimidates a lot of non-academically-inclined readers -- I've made the decision to use footnotes only occasionally and for what is essentially color commentary. Documentation and bibliography are going into a "selected bibliography" section at the end of the book, with sources grouped first by chapter and then by theme. My thinking is that grouping the sources this way will give readers a good and intuitive way of navigating the bibliography, and additionally will let them zero in on specific subjects of interest more easily. I think this is a particularly important thing to be able to do with a survey-style history.

Anyhow, this means preparing a great big document at the end of the book that is all bibliography, and while I have 90% of the data all set and ready to go, bibliography is finicky in terms of formatting and suchlike and so I need to spend some time making sure that it all looks the way it should. It's boring and time-consuming work, but I think I'm going to try to look at it as being restful, particularly after the headache-inducing intense analysis and writing that I've been having to do throughout the writing process.

I also have a short epilogue to write. But that should go quickly. And then I will send it all off to my editor and my agent and it'll be their problem for a while.

-- Hanne

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 14:57:40 GMT

The writing is coming along for this last chapter. I'm thirty-odd pages in, and closing in on being halfway through the chapter, which is just about what I'd hoped for. If I can bring in the second half of the chapter in a similar number of pages it'll be just right.

In other news, it looks like the Irish Family Planning Association is mounting a substantial campaign to attempt to create legal provisions for safe, legal abortions on demand in that country. This coming at a time where there is so much anxiety here about the current vacancy in the Supreme Court, and the possibility that there might be an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade that could succeed if a sufficiently socially conservative candidate is chosen for the job, certainly gives me pause.

I'm now imagining a world where American women are refused abortion unless the life of the mother is in danger -- the current situation on the ground in Ireland -- but Irish women are able to walk into their local reproductive health clinics and obtain abortions without unnecessary restrictions when and as they have recourse.

I wonder, would American women (who could afford it) then fly to Ireland to get abortions, much as approximately six thousand Irishwomen now travel to England every year to obtain the abortion services they cannot get at home?

-- Hanne

Fri, 05 Aug 2005 13:23:41 GMT

A public service announcement:

Heather Corinna One-Woman Show Opening @ The Independent: 8.7.05

Sunday, August 7th
7PM - 10PM (guests may remain until close)
@ The Independent
(2nd floor, Calhoun Square, Lake and Hennepin, Minneapolis)

Eighteen photography and mixed-media pieces from women's sexuality activist, educator, artist and author Heather Corinna, showing through September 7th.

=======

Heather has been one of my dearest friends and partners-in-crime for many years now. If you're anywhere in the Minneapolis area, I do hope that you can go check out this wonderful show. And if you can't make it opening night, do stop in sometime during the month that it's up, won't you? (P.S. Art patrons who actually buy works by independent artists earn extra stars for their heavenly crowns. It's really true, I asked the Pope.)

From the No Comment department, Research Division:

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 21:46:10 GMT

I am not aware that it is known to the scientific world that the hymen of the negro woman is not at the entrance of the vagina, as in the white woman, but from one and a half to two inches from its entrance in the interior, with an opening below for the passage of the menses.

...Although more than eight years have passed since I published this anatomical difference in the races, and the journalists have called upon their readers for further information, yet up to this date there has been no refutation; therefore I conclude the profession has accepted the truths herein stated, as well as my claims of first pointing them out. The knowledge of the position of this membrane in the negro race is of vital importance to the profession, from two distinct standpoints: first, as one of the anatomical indications Providence has given us of the non-unity of the races; and, second, in a medico-legal point of view--cases under the criminal laws, such as rape, frequently occurring in the Southern States."

-- Dr. Edward B. Turnipseed, M.D., "Some Facts in Regard to the Anatomical Differences between the Negro and White Races" American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children, 10/1 (January 1877), 32-33.

At the end of this article, we also find the following Editor's Note:

"We trust this second communication will call forth decided facts either corroborating or refuting his observations, as to the correctness of which we ourselves, we confess, have not been able to overcome some doubts. Surely there must be many physicians, both North and South, who are able to throw light on this, if true, certainly very remarkable anatomical feature in the Negro race, which thus far would appear to have escaped scientific observation. -- THE EDITOR"

My job, welcome to it.

-- Hanne

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 15:33:41 GMT

As I type, I am printing out the 92-page resource/reference document I've compiled for myself for the purpose of writing the last chapter and the epilogue of the virginity book. Mind you, this 92-page research document is for a chapter which I am hoping to keep down to a relatively slender 75 pages or so, but no matter: this is how I have learned that I must do things as an historian-who-writes-books. The biggest and most important step is not just gathering the information, which is its own job, but digesting it to the point where I know roughly how the chapter needs to be structured, and then sifting through all the information I've gathered and digested and making my own personalized reference document containing all the bits of it that I feel I am in fact likely to use when I write.

The writing, when I finally get there, feels a bit like an afterthought. It's definitely anticlimactic. I've already had the thrill of discovery in the research phase, the plodding of coping with other people's statistics, the agony of fumbling toward synthesis (and the occasional joy of intellectual breakthroughs along the way), the optimistic pleasure of outlining, and the overwhelmed monotony of sifting back through all the research to transcribe and compile page upon page of direct quotations from the literature I've been reading. Writing it down, after all that, is a strange process. Throughout it, I must remind myself repeatedly that no, everyone in the world does not know all this stuff, that no, this is not a redundant exercise, it's just that I've been immersed in it 12 hours or more a day, every day, for the past N-number of weeks and after eating, drinking, and breathing it for that long it rather makes sense that I assume it's all old hat.

This afternoon I've got to go look at a few very last-minute resources at the Johns Hopkins libraries -- there may be one more trip, over to the Institute for the History of Medicine libraries, partway through the trip just to check on a few things, but I'm not sure if I'll need it or not. And then?

Well, then, to quote The Boss, and furthermore to cite the very song I'll be quoting from about 3/7 of the way through this last chapter,

"...my car's out back if you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride ain't free..."

-- Hanne

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 14:57:34 GMT

Reposted from the KAISER DAILY REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH REPORT
A service of kaisernetwork.org
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/reproductivehealth

Reposted from the KAISER DAILY REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH REPORT
A service of kaisernetwork.org
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/reproductivehealth

National Politics & Policy | Seven Female, Democratic Senators Insist Supreme Court Nominee Roberts State Abortion Views Prior to Confirmation
[Jul 29, 2005]

Seven female, Democratic senators on Thursday during a press conference said they will insist Supreme Court nominee Judge John Roberts state his opinion on privacy rights -- including his views on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that struck down state abortion bans -- before he is confirmed, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle, 7/29). Some observers say Roberts could tip the balance of the Supreme Court on the issue because retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the deciding vote in several cases that upheld abortion rights. Roberts, who in 2003 was confirmed as a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, has never written a legal opinion on the issue as a judge (Kaiser Daily Reproductive Health Report, 7/28). At the press conference, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said the lack of documents on Roberts leaves "some confusion where he stands" on privacy rights, including abortion, adding, "There can be no confusion" (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/29). Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said, "I want to hear a nominee say that the [right to privacy] is the basis for their philosophy," adding, "If an individual says that, then I will be convinced that they truly believe in the right to privacy and will not be a member of the Supreme Court that will unsettle Roe v. Wade." Cantwell acknowledged that the request amounts to a "litmus test," the Washington Times reports. When the group of senators were asked if they would support Roberts' confirmation if he were to say Roe was wrongly decided, Boxer said she would find it "impossible" to approve his nomination, while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said she would not speculate on her vote before the hearings. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) did not say whether she would support Roberts in that circumstance, but said that senators are interested in more than just abortion rights (Hurt, Washington Times, 7/29).

Web Site, Other Involved Senators
The group of senators on Thursday also announced the creation of a Web site -- http://democrats.senate.gov/askroberts -- dedicated to seeking public input on what questions should be asked during Roberts' confirmation hearings, the Oakland Tribune reports. Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) also participated in the press conference (Richman, Oakland Tribune, 7/29). Although Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was not at the press conference to announce the Web site, Mikulski said it has her support (San Francisco Chronicle, 7/29).

Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is my Senator, and she will be getting a thank-you letter in the mail from me pronto. If you are an American and are concerned with the upcoming confirmation hearings in regard to the Supreme Court vacancy and their potential impact on reproductive freedoms (as well as personal privacy and many other related issues), I strongly recommend that you contact your Senators as well. Pointing out the good example set by Sens. Mikulski, Feinstein, Stabenow, Murray, Landrieu, Boxer, and Clinton may encourage other elected representatives to join them in their efforts.

And if one of the Senators involved is your Senator, do consider writing her to say "well done!" Support is important... and when you consider that most of the letters people write to their elected officials are complaints, I should think that occasional bouts of praise mean that much more.

Mon, 18 Jul 2005 13:50:33 GMT

Last week our household was asked to participate in a major media survey conducted by a company called Scarborough Research. As part of the survey we were asked to fill out a television diary for a week, a la the Nielsen Ratings booklets that some of you might be familiar with.

This was a ridiculously simple thing to do because we don't watch TV in this household. It took about 3 minutes to go through the booklet and write "None" and put a zero in the "hours" column, sign it, and get it ready to send back to the survey people.

As I was doing so it occurred to me that while the Belovedary has only been a non-TV watcher for about 7 years, since moving in with me, in a little more than a year, I will have been a non-television watcher for 20 years. And, as I periodically do when something brings it to my attention, I got to thinking about television and not watching it and just how very different that makes me in a culture – in a world, honestly – where watching television is pretty much the norm everywhere the infrastructure and economics can support it.

I didn't set out deliberately to become a non-watcher of television. At first it was temporary. September 1986 was when I stopped watching TV because I didn't have one and I didn't have the money to buy one. But then by the time I had money, I had gotten out of the habit. It didn't occur to me to go spend the money on a television. And because I just didn't think about it, TV stayed outside of my life.

Later I tried watching TV with some friends a few times and discovered that stutter-cuts and handheld camera motion and other things that were (I guess) coming into vogue around that time were prone to give me headaches and make me feel motion sick. Avoiding television moved into the realm of "I feel a lot better when I don't do that, so I think I'll continue to not bother with it."

By now it's mostly just a habit, like anything else. My life hasn't had television in it for so long that in some ways, TV just doesn't exist for me -- I vaguely know that it's there and that some people I know really enjoy it, but it simply doesn't enter into my thoughts very often, and when it does it's usually in the form of "oh, right, they're talking about a tv show, that's what that is!"

I do watch movies and DVDs (even sometimes DVDs of TV shows!) on a television now sometimes -- the Belovedary had one when he moved in with me, and it's nice to have a monitor around for DVD/VHS and for the Belovedary's video gaming. We're very slowly making our way through Firefly and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but my patience for sitting in front of television, and even movies, is pretty minimal and I have to be in the right mood for it or I just fidget and get cranky.

Every so often it occurs to me that this is unusual or odd in the culture I live in, and in the circles I run in, which tend heavily toward media fandoms. It's hard to write about it or talk about it, though, because people automatically get defensive and bristly -- I have learned that for the most part I can't really raise the subject of being a non-television-watcher, because the people I mention it to tend to take it as my being critical of television and more specifically of their television preferences. They take it upon themselves to tell me what I'm missing and why TV is genuinely worth watching and so on and so forth, generally in rather tense tones, trying to make it clear that their choices are valid and making it doubly clear that they need me to show respect for their choices because otherwise, somehow, I am being an asshole by saying "It's kind of weird sometimes when you realize that you don't do something that just about everyone you know does as a matter of course.

This, mind you, always confuses me on some level, because as far as I'm concerned, I might as well be saying "I don't eat mangoes." It's not a denunciation, it's not a slur, it's just a statement of fact. I don't eat mangoes (they disagree with me). I don't watch TV (it also seems to disagree with me). And the two facts are about equally momentous insofar as they affect my daily life. So when someone's talking to me about TV and I say "Oh, I don't watch TV, I haven't seen that," I'm not saying "...and you're a ghastly Philistine because you do." I'm saying "I'm sorry, I can't really participate in this conversation very well, because I don't have the background with which to do so." And I may also be saying "I'm afraid I can't express a lot of interest in that subject because I don't participate in it and I don't know anything about it." But that's about it.

I do realize that in general TV has a bad rap and people are often encouraged to feel guilty about liking television. I'm sorry about that, really. I've seen some TV programming that I thought was pretty darned good. I'm sure there's plenty of crap out there too, but really I look at it as a continuum -- just like books or movies or music. Some of it is stuff I do like, or that I probably would like if I were of a mood to give it a whirl. Some of it is stuff I don't find particularly interesting at first glance and probably wouldn't like on second glance either.

Inside any mainstream bookstore, a Borders or B&N or whatever, you can find the classics and the award-winners and the critics' picks, but you can also find Firmer Buns in 30 Days and The Incredibly Incredible Adventures of Bulge Centurion and the Planet of the Lost Mary Sues. If someone wants to read about Bulge Centurion, I say bully for you and thanks for reading and my personal handshake for helping to keep the cogs of the book industry greased with your dollars and next time maybe you'll take a risk and buy one of MY books to keep ol' Bulge company, who knows.

I look at TV the same way. You want to watch Wheel of Fortune? Knock yourself out. You want to watch nothing but PBS and Alton Brown and Nick at Night? Get down with your bad self. You want to gorge on 120 consecutive hours of Buffy and Angel? Or sit and watch sports? Or swoon to a combination of This Old House, Invader Zim, and Touched by an Angel? Don't forget the popcorn! It's no skin off my nose what you watch or whether you watch at all. I am pro-choice.

Here's the thing: I don't watch television. It's not a political statement. It's not a social statement, or at least not one that's intended to be one in any critical way and particularly not in any more-intellectual-than-thou sort of way (given all the trouble I've had to go through in order to learn what I need to know to do even small amounts of pop culture historiography and analysis for my current book project? sssshyeah, right, I'll be finding a nose to look down real soon, you bet, because for me, doing this research has been almost like having to learn a new language – it's been difficult and demanding).

I just don't watch it. I haven't in nearly two decades. I'm out of the habit and I have been out of the habit now for longer than I was ever in the habit to begin with. I go into a hotel room and don't even see the television because I'm not in the habit of looking at them; when the Belovedary turns it on to get a weather forecast on the Weather Channel, I am always sort of stunned when the big glowy box comes to life and it's like suddenly there is another Presence in the room. Just last week I happened to look at a list of Baltimore area TV stations that was part of a survey I was filling out and realized that it was the first time I'd ever been aware of how many broadcast stations this area has or what their call letters might've been. It's a whole aspect of things to which I simply don't pay any attention. I spend about as many brain cycles on things televisual as I do on remembering the date of my next prostate exam, and for the same reason... it simply does not apply to me or involve me in any way whatever.

Think of me as a visitor from another planet, maybe it'll be easier that way.

-- Hanne

A Basket of Data, Having Spent All Week Shaking the Statistical Trees

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:20:31 GMT

I've spent the majority of this week looking over surveys and reports of behavioral research dealing with sexuality, and specifically dealing with virginity and virginity loss. I would estimate that I've gone through six hundred pages of written material, give or take a bit. I've examined statistics from the USA, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Finland, France, and Germany, and from the 1950s to the present.

Here's what we know, in a rough outline, about virginity loss (NB: when "virginity loss" is defined as "first experience of penis-in-vagina heterosexual intercourse) in the industrialized West, with an emphasis on the USA (since that is where the lion's share of the available researches have been carried out):

-- A relatively small proportion of people experience sexual debut prior to the age of 15, but percentages vary distinctly by population. Males are more likely to have intercourse prior to age 15 than females. In the USA, African-Americans of both sexes are disproportionately represented in this group, with males outnumbering females handily. Both in the USA and elsewhere, girls and boys from poorer families are more likely to experience earlier sexual debut than those from wealthier ones.

-- Socioeconomic status of families is directly linked to age at virginity loss in general. The higher the family's socioeconomic status, the more likely the daughters of those families are to lose their virginity relatively late. Males of high socioeconomic status families, however, are not likely to have a delayed sexual debut, but it is also not necessarily likely to be earlier than the average.

-- The vast majority of people lose their virginity somewhere between the ages of 16 and 20. There are some local variants on the average age, for example, in Ireland, the average age for women to lose their virginity hovers around 19, while in the USA, it hovers around 17.

-- About 50% of US high school graduates have had sex at some point prior to finishing high school. This rate hasn't changed substantially since the early 1980s -- it has hovered between 50 and 55% since 1984, depending on what survey one consults.

-- More of the US under-20 population, percentagewise, was sexually active in the 1950s than is sexually active today in the same age group. The difference? Marriage. During the decade 1950-1959, the United States had the highest 20-and-under marriage rate in the West. Since 1960, however, the average age of first marriage has gone up and the number of under-20 marriages have gone down, as well as the overall rate of marriage declining by close to 10%. Whereas in 1960, the average age of marriage for first-time brides was 20, it is now 26; for grooms it has gone from 23 to 27. In short, the ages at which people begin having sex haven't necessarily changed, but the ages at which they are likely to marry (if they marry at all) have changed quite a bit. It is now common for there to be a gap between the two, whereas 45 years ago, that gap was far less commonplace.

-- As of 2004, it is estimated that throughout the industrialized West, approximately 90% of heterosexuals who do marry will have experienced penis-in-vagina intercourse prior to their marriages. This appears to hold true across all demographics.

-- Women whose first experiences of penis-in-vagina intercourse happen before they are 15 are substantially more likely to have sexual partners who are 5 or more years older than they are. They are also substantially more likely to describe their first experiences of sex as being coercive. Their first sexual experiences are less likely to involve the use of contraception or safer sex practices than are the first sexual experiences of women who lose their virginity at fifteen or older. Women who lose their virginity before age 15 are at higher risk of unplanned pregnancy or STD infection. Women who lose their virginity before age 15 are disproportionately likely to be non-white and to come from families with low socioeconomic status. Some researchers also claim that women who lose their virginity before age 15 are considerably more likely to have experienced a history of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.

-- The role of self-esteem as a predictor of age at virginity loss is still under debate. The research currently leans toward a predictive model that suggests that for females, higher self-esteem is linked to later virginity loss, while higher self-esteem for males is linked to earlier virginity loss.

-- Teenagers surveyed about their sense of their sexual competence and sexual experience in comparison to their peers described themselves as being "behind the curve" or having less experience/competence than their peers the vast majority (80-85%) of the time. This is true regardless of whether or not they actually are less experienced than their peers. Only 10-15% of adolescents voluntarily characterized themselves as being more experienced than their peers. This suggests that adolescents tend to have exaggerated ideas about what other people are doing sexually, and very little actual knowledge of their peers' sexual realities. Some researchers suggest that this may just be because (gasp! say it isn't so!) teenagers often lie to one another about their sexual experience in order to seem more experienced or competent than they actually are.

-- Having lost one's virginity is no guarantee of ongoing sexual activity. Adolescents who are sexually active are not always consistently or frequently sexually active. Surveys of post-virginity-loss sexual activity among adolescent men often show that adolescent men are engaging in sexual activities with partners relatively rarely: one study showed an average of only ten times a year amongst its "sexually active" 15-19-year-old subject group.

-- A sizeable proportion of adolescents (some studies have seen rates as high as 55%) deliberately decide to delay losing their virginity at some point in their adolescence without the involvement of "virginity pledges" or "abstinence pledges." This may take the form of blanket decisions – "I plan to wait until [I am a certain age / a certain date / marriage / other projected time]" – or may simply take the informal, circumstantial path of turning down individual opportunities to engage in sex as those opportunities present themselves, until such time as they feel that the opportunity, partner, or occasion is the "right one."

There's more, natch, but these are the highlights of what's shaken down out of my research this week that's been particularly interesting and noteworthy to me.

-- Hanne

The Unasked, Unanswered, and Unanswerable Questions vs. What Little We Do Know , and Why It Matters

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 03:13:47 GMT

In working on this book, there have been three things that have repeatedly managed to surprise me: how much we don't know about virginity, how much we cannot know about virginity, and how frequently we manage to ignore the first two things.

The public health, behavioral, and sociological research is paltry and overwhelmingly of a vintage that is no more than my own (i.e., dating from the 60s or later). The empirical medical evidence is skimpy prior to the 1860s, and even then, medical methodologies used in assessing matters sexual have often been pretty iffy. The post-1960 research that does exist is primarily American, tends to approach virginity issues from the perspective of pathology (i.e., approaching it as a matter of "premarital sex" or virginity loss as the cause of STD transmission and unplanned pregnancy), and most studies are pretty limited in their sample size and scope. Regardless of the time period, the information (whether it is structured as research or merely transmitted as cultural truth) we have about virginity often also encodes some pretty overt political or social agendas; depending on the source and the era it also might have an obvious religious or moral agenda besides.

The overall picture is roughly this: prior to the last third of the twentieth century, what we know is very scattered and haphazard. With a few limited exceptions -- early C20th Brazil produced a number of fine and still relevant studies of decently large populations, for instance -- the information about virginity that was published was mostly anecdotal, often based on misconceptions or grounded in bias so overt that the evidence is useless except as evidence of the types of bias that come into play, and many times seems to appear almost at random. Finding information requires a lot of digging and a lot of close reading, and individual nuggets of data can only really be assessed on their own separate merits because the sources and methodologies behind those sources are too diverse and often too informal to allow for comparison.

Some kinds of information don't exist at all, in any real sense, for periods prior to the middle third of the C20th. Big sexological surveys, for instance. Behavioral assays of large groups of people's sexual habits are sporadic at best prior to Kinsey, and even then, questions about non-marital, pre-marital, adolescent, childhood, or virginity-related sex were rare as hen's teeth.

There's a reason that massive sexual information-gathering like Kinsey's work was so revolutionary: for all their flaws, these kinds of studies, now so common that they show up on a regular basis in glossy lifestyle magazines, were daring new inventions. They offered us a view on sex that we had literally never had before, a way of taking a sexual census, a means of polling the populace to figure out what exactly "average" might be and where the extremes of the bell curve might fall. They revealed the things that we did but didn't talk about (for instance, Kinsey's samples revealed higher incidences of same-sex sexual behavior than had been previously presumed) and the things that we didn't do but said we did (fewer men and women remain uniformly monogamous during their marriages than claim that they do).

Since the quantitative sexological revolution of the C20th, we've come to expect statistics about sexual behavior. What's more, we've come to trust them and to rely on them to tell us what is normal and what the trends are if behaviors seem to be in the process of changing. When a survey like the massive American ADDHealth (National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, begun in 1994 and with subsequent waves of survey activity between 1994-1996 and 2001-2002) generates an new report, the news media gather 'round like hogs to the trough for a heaping helping of steaming hot fresh factual evidence of just how much foolin' around our nation's youth are doing. And every time one of these reports, or their many siblings, hit the streets, what happens is that people assume they know more than they do.

It's not just a matter of misinterpreting statistics, though that happens all the time. It's a matter of not accurately representing what such studies tell us because we are only rarely aware of what we don't know by way of comparison. And what it generates is a sense of crisis that may or may not be appropriate or even applicable.

The kernel of the problem is history and historiography, the writing-down of history. When a new study comes out to tell us something about virginity, as so many studies have done in the very recent past, we are, it seems, incapable of taking the study for what it is: a limited representation of a particular group of people being asked a particular set of questions at a particular moment (or set of moments, in the case of longitudinal studies) in time. What neither ADDHealth nor any other sexological, behavioral, or sociological survey can tell us—at least not in isolation—is how those answers compare to what might have been true fifty years ago, or seventy-five, or a hundred and twenty, or four hundred.

The quantitative study of sex is new. The quantitative study of virginity, premarital sex, adolescent sex, and preadolescent sex (insofar as it exists) is even newer. There is some quantitative sex research that predates Kinsey, particularly in England, but Kinsey's work is still considered something of a benchmark, the exemplar of a rising tide of quantitative sexology. Kinsey's first major study appeared in 1948, after the end of the Second World War. Research dealing especially with adolescent sexuality and age of first penis-in-vagina intercourse (the usual researcher's criteria for "virginity loss" or "sexual debut") didn't really get rolling until the 1970s; most of the pioneering surveys of adolescent sexual behavior that I've looked at were performed during the decade that I was in grammar school.

This is where the problem starts. For an array of reasons we—parents, physicians, journalists, policymakers, religious authorities, public health workers—want our sex surveys about young people's sexuality to tell us where we're headed. We want to know how things are changing, how they are different from a generation ago, two generations ago, three or four or more. Are adolescents losing their virginity earlier than they did in our parent's generation, as many people seem to suspect? Are kids truly having sex at younger and younger ages, as everyone from the American federal government to Lifeway Baptist Ministries to the Heritage Foundation to worried parents seem to want (and want us) to believe?

Truth is, we don't necessarily know. We can't necessarily know. We don't have the right information to know, for the simple reason that no one was asking those questions of adolescents of my mother's generation or my grandmother's generation. We only just started asking them in mine.

This means that we cansay that we know that in general, the bell curve of virginity loss timing in the industrialized West tends to start somewhere around age 13, goes up slowly until age 16, shoots up dramatically between ages 16 and 20, and then descends at a rather stately pace between the ages of 20 and 30. But we cannot say with any great certainty that this represents a situation that is notably different from what existed for previous generations. Why? Because the data don't exist. They've never existed. They can't be had. No one was asking these questions then.

Yes, we can make educated guesses, and we do and we should. We can look at some of the known variables—the ages of mothers and first-born children, for instance—and extrapolate probable, but not necessarily actual, timings for those mothers' first experience of sex. We can look at ages of people getting married for the first time and assume that this is also more or less representative of when they would've started having partnered sex. These are the kinds of circumstantial evidence from which we've derived the lion's share of the data we say we have about virginity and virginity loss in the decades and centuries before quantitative behavioral surveys on the subject began to appear.

These types of "educated guesses," though, are problematic for many reasons: not all births are registered, not all people get married, not all marriages are recorded, and, most importantly, not all marriages or births coincide even remotely closely with when the people involved began to engage in partnered sex.

They're problematic on other levels too. Socioeconomic class, race, and cultural background often have a lot to do with whether one's marriage or birth is recorded at all, let alone in a source that is likely to have survived. Think about it: how likely do you suppose the births of slave children were to be recorded in the antebellum South? How many common-law marriages, particularly among the very poor and/or very rural, were never dignified by so much as an entry in a census? What about women whose babies were born and immediately put up for adoption, or women who became prostitutes, or women who for one reason or another never married? And they are problematic from the perspective of gender: due to the long history of the sex-based double standard and the fact that men don't get pregnant, we can never assume that marriage or the birth of a child tells us anything at all about when a male began his partnered sexual life.

To put it in the simplest possible terms: when it comes to virginity and particularly to virginity loss, we do not have enough information to make very many meaningful historical comparisons.

Where we do have enough information to make small historical comparisons they are extremely limited and of only circumstantial import. For instance, work by Judith Walkowitz, Ruth Rosen, and Francoise Barrett-Ducroq suggests that on the Continent, in Britain, and in the USA alike in the later C19th, women who became prostitutes and who bore children out of wedlock frequently seem to have begun having active partnered sex lives around the age of sixteen. This is roughly the same age at which teenagers from the 1970s to the present have tended to start embarking upon their own partnered sexual journeys. But does this tell us anything significant? Does it establish a relationship between those two things? Not unless you consider the simple fact that sixteen is typically an age at which human beings are likely to be capable of sexual activity to be a whole hell of a lot more illuminating than it really is.

In a similar vein, we know from work by a variety of anthropologists and social historians that various European and American cultures have permitted courting couples of various ages (the age would depend upon expected age of marriage in most cases) to engage in "night courting," also known in English as "bundling" or among contemporary Amish as "bed dates," a custom where a young man and young woman would be permitted to share a bed for the night, fully clothed, under her family's roof. (This occasionally took place with several such couples sharing several different beds in one room, depending on local custom.) These couples could kiss, touch, talk, snuggle, canoodle, and potentially quite a bit more, depending on their daring and the vigilance of whoever else might've been around. We also know that twentieth-century teenagers have incorporated various levels of non-intercourse physical intimacy into dating, a phenomenon which was being criticized by horrified journalists and clergy all the way back in the wee years of the twentieth century and is still being decried today. What we don't know is whether teenagers in the 1990s were doing substantially different things, or more or less of them, than their bundling great-great-grandparents might have done a century or more before them. No one ever inquired too closely of them what they got up to, you see, unless someone ended up needing a shotgun wedding.

In this information vacuum it become easy to manufacture crises based on the data we do have. All one really needs to do is compare it to the data that we don't have: data that we don't actually have can be anything at all that we want. Sixteen-year-olds having intercourse can be shocking, appalling, and a moral and cultural crisis if we stick our fingers in our ears and la la la la-ignore the possibility that just maybe it's actually nothing particularly new. Fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds wanting to explore kissing and touching and caressing can be a horrifying proof of the detrimental effects of our sex-saturated media culture if we're willing to pretend that great-grandma never ever would've gone to a public park to dance to the community band and perhaps enjoy the frisson of a few stolen moments of "sparking" behind the bandshell.

I'm not saying that we do not have social crises in the arena of adolescent sex. We do, and here in the USA we have some doozies. What I'm saying is that blaming the crises solely on behavior, which is an incredibly common strategy and is the strategy at the core of the "abstinence-based" sex education movement, is historically and scientifically bankrupt. A lack of information does not grant anyone license to create a history that is, in its 20/20 rose-coloured hindsight, engineered to mire the present-day situation in irrevocable ignominy. It's a cheap trick, it's ahistorical bullshit, and it's that much worse when it's used as the basis for shoving a reactionary social agenda down the throats of people too young (and too ignorant even if not too young) to know any better.

I have more thoughts on this, but this is already awfully rambly and it's getting late. Still, it's helping me organize my thinking a bit and do some strategizing about some of the ways I want to try to talk about this stuff in the book. I might try to continue with this here at a later date, we shall see.

-- Hanne

Harry Potter and the Age of Consent

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 03:42:34 GMT

As everyone (who has not been living under a rock for the past month or two) probably knows by now, the sixth of J.K. Rowling's legendarily, massively, enormously popular Harry Potter books hits the streets in a matter of days. While I am not a HP fan, don't find the characters particularly interesting, and in fact find the books pretty much unreadable, I am quite curious to find out what this next book holds.

Why? Because our teenaged wizard has reached the British age of consent, that's why.

As I work on the last chapter of my own book, which as many of you already know is a history of virginity, one of the topics I'm discussing is how virginity has figured in twentieth (and early twenty-first) century pop culture. I'm very curious to see whether Ms. Rowling -- who has been reasonably forthcoming with dealing with a variety of adolescent issues in the books to date -- decides to take on the problem of whether and how Harry gets his ashes hauled.

It could happen any time now. Or it might not happen at all. Rowling is writing what is, despite its massive popularity across age groups, nominally young adult fiction. Some YA authors steer clear of anything resembling genital sex, preferring to avoid any potential controversy or negative criticism that might be occasioned by their doing so.

Other YA writers, a few of whom I'm pleased to call colleagues and friends, do write about sex and teenagers and the collision of the two. I should note that those who do sometimes suffer fallout in terms of books being banned from school curricula and libraries and suchlike; on the other hand, the same writers sometimes mention getting feedback from adolescent readers who wish they'd written more and discussed things in more detail. Clearly there is at least sometimes a substantial disconnect between what adults who work with teenagers believe those teenagers are prepared to read and know when it comes to sex and the kinds of information and content those teenagers themselves need and want.

Doubtless Ms. Rowling knows all this, and she will make her decision by her own lights, perhaps with the input of her editor(s). But personally, I hope that she does decide to show us Harry Potter becoming actively sexual with other people.

Why? Several reasons, really, none of them having to do with the intensity of the glee (and also the inevitable disappointment) such an event would no doubt engender in the huge HP slashfic community... which is a whole different discussion and one I'm neither prepared nor really sufficiently informed to have.

First and foremost, Ms. Rowling has a chance to show us, from the inside, a sympathetic male character losing his virginity. Technically speaking, she could potentially give us more than one, and at least one or two female characters as well should she so choose (she has got a whole boarding school to draw upon, after all). But the subject of primary interest here is Harry himself. Male virgins get short shrift in fiction, in pop culture generally, and in our culture. As Smokey Robinson sang, "How come people say / a lady virgin, that's okay / but when the situation's turned around / a virgin man, they always put him down." It's true enough, and there aren't a whole lot of depictions of male virgins that are sympathetic... or that treat male loss of virginity with any particular sympathy.

Even in pathbreaking books like Judy Blume's Forever (1975), one of the first YA novels to treat virginity loss with dignity as a normal rite of passage without it having to trigger some sort of horrible payback, male loss of virginity is handled primarily offscreen, without allowing the reader into the heads (let alone the bodies) of any male experience of either virginity or its end. The relative lack of male virginity-loss stories in YA fiction only underscores the strange quality of the silence that is both expected from and imposed upon men in our culture on the subject: men are expected to lose their virginity (and it's often assumed that they'll do so at the earliest possible opportunity and if they don't there's something wrong with them), but they are by no means expected to voice any emotion about it that's any more complicated than "yeah, I got some" or at most "last night, I became a man." Rowling's Harry, whose adolescent emotions have been an enormous component of the books, constitutes a grand opportunity to do some long-overdue exploration of what the end of virginity, and the beginning of partnered sexuality, might mean to a young man... and from one of the most potent and much-loved bully pulpits currently available.

Secondly, Harry Potter's sex life doesn't have to follow muggle rules. And in fact, there's no reason it particularly needs to. Ms. Rowling has predictably not broached the subject of sex prior to Harry's sixteenth year, not only because of the real-life (and very muggle) British law that makes consent to sexual activity impossible for those under sixteen, but because on several fronts in our contemporary culture, sixteen is something of a watershed year where sex is concerned: sexologists have a fairly well-established tradition of limiting their research in most cases to individuals ages fifteen and up^†, and statistically speaking, the years between 16 and 19 are the years during which the greatest number of Western teenagers make the transition to partnered sexual activity. There is, in other words, a sort of critical mass behind the idea that one's sixteenth year opens the possibility of sexual debut.

But beyond that, there is nothing in the Potterverse that says that sexual relationships in the wizarding world have to replicate their muggle-world equivalents. This clearly opens the gate to the potential that Harry might indeed feel and express complex emotion about sexuality, but more than that, it opens the potential that Harry's introduction to sex could follow its own script on any number of levels. Think of all the cliches you know about virginity loss, all the worn-out tropes, all the thoroughly-flogged horses. Ms. Rowling is, simply put, bound to none of them. The Potterverse has its own social conventions and its own ways of handling things like finance, bureaucracy, political power, and even things like transportation and postal service. (And I may not be a HP fan, but in a world with potions, invisibility capes, flying Ford Anglias, time-twisting pendants, and patronus spells, there has simply got to be some efficient and reliable everyday magic in regard to things like contraception and STDs.)

I am loath to suggest what alternatives, or what combination of known or predictable quantities even, might be appropriate or most desirable instead when it comes to dealing with young Harry's sexual existence. That's Ms. Rowling's job, and if she's at a loss, I'm sure she can avail herself of what I know for a fact is a gargantuan supply of fan-generated exempla, some of which would doubtless be of interest primarily as examples of what doesn't, or wouldn't, work. Regardless of their quality, the reams and reams (pun intended) of HP virginity-loss fanfic do make one thing clear. Rowling has a huge territory to explore where Harry's sexuality is concerned, and his virginity and its end (if it happens in the span of the next two books at all) is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

I'm eager to see what happens in this respect in the next two books. To be completely honest, I hope it happens in the seventh book, not this one, but that's purely selfish, since I'll feel compelled to include it in my own book if it happens in the one that goes on sale this weekend and that'll throw something of a wrench into my schedule and my plans for the last chapter.

But I do wonder whether Ms. Rowling will include Harry's sexual debut in the remaining novels, and I do wonder what it'll be like if she does. And I have to be honest... the prospect of finding out is probably the only thing that would get me to read one of the books all the way through rather than waiting for the movie.

-- Hanne

^† Whether this is always the most desirable condition, from the perspective of the kinds of information that might be beneficial to social and medical scientists, is a whole different issue. There are many good reasons that sexological studies might reasonably include people of ages younger than 15, not least of which might be studies on things like, say, younger adolescent men's attitudes and emotions about sexual activity and virginity, a field about which almost nothing at all is empirically known.

Welcome!

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 00:28:55 GMT

Welcome aboard. This is the place where you can find information about me, my work, and upcoming appearances, as well as what will probably be fairly regular nattering about the process of writing and, well, whatever happens to catch my fancy.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy your visit.

-- Hanne