the media

I became a big fan of the Midwest Teen Sex show after a link to their website was posted on Feministing. Personally I find them witty and fun to watch, a far cry from the scare tactic sex ed videos used in my sex education class. I guess not everyone likes their humor however.

Today on the Morning Show with Mike and Juliet (a day time talk show I was only watching because it was on our TV after the Today show) they had the creator and stars of the show, a sex expert and a psychologist to debate about the web casts. I was pleased that in general the show was positive about the show and about teens learning about sex. Their sex expert even talked about how parents should start talking to their kids about sex as early as possible. Awesome info. The only negitive comments seemed to be from a parent of adults who was worried about younger teens watching the episodes and the phycologist who worried about "isolated" teens who would get the wrong message from the show and take it literally. I'm not sure what she meant by that, because it's not like they are encouraging kids to have sex, just safe sex for the right reasons, if they choose to. I also like how the Midwest Teen gets that their audience is mainly either adults or teens thinking about having sex or are having sex. I know it's a pretty big assumption that most teens will want to have sex, but how else would they find an online sex education show online if they weren't looking to have sex?

I just got back from the coffeeshop here, and got a chance to talk to Jayne. Jayne's a workingclass, 60something, matriarchal, peacenik feminist who does a lot of work w/the local homeless population. Last year Jayne came to the annual Women Studies party, and tonight she and I reminisced about how wonderful it was that she boldly expressed her opinions to academic, upper-middle class feminists, really exposing them to some of their unexamined class prejudice that, even as feminists, they didn't want to discuss. Jayne is a revelation and a national treasure.

And I was thinking how great it would be for all of you bloggers to take a minute and try to find a woman whose life you feel is totally different than your own, and write about how this is so. Now, it may be hard to do this in real life, so think about women and girls in the movies, tv shows, or in books that you're familiar with. Maybe she's from another country, or another class, or another agegroup- but somehow you feel that she's 180-degrees different from yourself.