My favorite is when a guy gets asked about the birth control pill and he says this: “I guess that’s the one I have most indirect experience with, and I guess that it would be my favorite.” I bet it is, buddy. (To be fair, some guys knew what they were talking about. The guy with the hat is pretty smart.)

But on a serious note: can I reiterate that sexual health knowledge is not just a woman’s realm? That men should know about birth control, the statistics on date rape, abortion access and other such essential life info? Cause I’m tired of being the only one who gets lectured on sex and how to protect myself. Throw us a bone, guys. (No pun intended.) It’s not cute when you don’t know anything about our lady parts.

That said, I’m wondering how women would fare with the same kind of experiment. Something tells me that a lot of us women don’t know what goes on with our bodies, either. What do you think?

This rips open a wound for me–I spent most of 2007 contemplating this issue. But I’m gonna weigh in afresh now that I’ve just celebrated 2 years in my healthiest, post-high-school, Completely Committed Relationship (technically marriage, but that’s another story)–the sex-and-love “holy grail,” according to the many women’s and teen magazines Kate lists in her Salon piece. Before, it was my “sorta” this or my “fuck buddy” that or my “I wish I knew what he was thinking” friend-with-benefits. And I gotta say, no matter how much I railed against Laura Sessions Stepp and Dawn Eden and Miriam Grossman and all the other rightwing, anti-feminist cautionary matrons, the facts remained: I knew how it felt to agonize over a text message. I knew how much it hurt to hear that the guy I’d been hooking up with “didn’t do relationships.” And I knew what it was like to use sexuality to coax a guy into being with me, only to have it fail miserably.

Feminist or not, that shit sucks. And it happens a lot, to women and girls everywhere. And yet, if you consider me and the vast majority of America who eventually couple up, it seems to end up okay. What to make of all this?

Rachel asks in the aforelinked post:

Now, just to be clear, I’m all for the freedom to hook up. But let’s face it: despite our desire to give women the freedom to plunder the bar scene and flex their sexual appetites, it would appear a whole lot of them are pretty happy playing by old school rules, thank you very much. Incidentally, one of the women smart enough to figure this out just sold her 5 billionth book, or something like that.

Does that make me a right-winger? Can I still be a feminist and say that I’m against this brand of sexual freedom? I fear feminism has been backed into a corner here. It’s become antifeminist to want a guy to buy you dinner and hold the door for you. Yet – picture me ducking behind bullet proof glass as I type this — wasn’t there something about that framework that made more space for a young woman’s feelings and needs?

I do feel where Rachel is coming from. But those old models are based on the idea that girls are fragile, that they need to be sheltered from the ills of the world. They’re based on, as Kate says, being the girl that guys want. They’re based on, as Amanda outlines, sexism plain and simple. So if we don’t want to go the “Girls Gone Mild” route and start waiting for dudes to ask us on candlelit dates, does that mean it’s hopeless to find a happy sexual medium as teens and young, single women?

Kate says no. “[I]f we teach all kids that there’s a wide range of potentially healthy sexual and emotional relationships,” she says, “and the only real trick (granted, it’s a doozy) is finding partners who are enthusiastic about the same things you want, then there’s room for a lot more people to pursue something personally satisfying at no one else’s expense.” That’s one of the smartest statements I’ve ever read on this topic. Amanda, meanwhile, says we need to stop making women shoulder the burden of keeping men in check, and concentration on getting “boys to appreciate girls more as human beings.” A-fucking-men. (No pun intended.)

But there’s also this: We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity. This is, to be sure, skewed by sexism and restrictive gender roles to make sexual coming-of-age worse for girls. But beyond that, maybe discovering what you want sexually and emotionally is just part of growing up–and that’s okay.

And for that matter, what’s with this still-dominant narrative that all teen girls should want a monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend? I wanted relationships from fantastic fucks all through high school and college, but something tells me that I repeatedly confused lust for love and convinced myself that I wanted a boyfriend, when really I just wanted a screwfest (although I can’t be sure). For the record, I am not–I repeat, am not–saying that when girls write Rachel about the pain they’re going through, they’re not being honest with themselves. I know better than anyone how that pain feels. It’s just that we never consider the power of cultural messages amid the mysterious phenomenon of girls wanting relationships more often than boys. I agree with Amanda that I don’t think it’s biological–there are societal patterns at work here. If we’re told that casual sex is unfulfilling and that we’re going to want relationships, chances are we’ll end up wanting them. And why not? That’s what Seventeen, Glamour, and all my friends always told me.

The interesting thing about my particular sexual history–the kind of narrative that I have yet to read about in all these books and articles about hooking up–is that I had great, pleasurable, safe sex in high school and college with guys who were nevertheless emotionally immature and noncommital and who hurt my feelings all the time. Does that mean I shouldn’t have had sex with them at all–or does it mean I should have been honest with myself (and them, too) about what our relationship was really about? I do remember obsessing, crying, wishing he’d want a “real” relationship with me, as many girls who write to Rachel express. But do I regret the sex, do I feel like I “gave myself away” too early at 15? Hell No. It was one of the most exciting, fascinating, and interesting things about high school. Girls deserve to discover themselves sexually at their own pace, to be neither rushed into having sex nor shamed into not having it. They deserve to have their very own “This is bullshit” moments without wearing a chastity belt.

So, as Rachel worries: Was I permanently affected by this nebulous, masochistic phase, from accepting less than what I wanted emotionally? Yes, but not in a bad way. In fact, I’d venture to claim that without all those past experiences, I wouldn’t have been equipped to be in the honest, nuanced, decidedly modern relaish I am in now.

The “hookup culture” must not be that new of a phenomenon if I was experiencing this stuff in the late nineties–and now at 25, I can employ my 10-year-old hindsight. Today, I found a fascinating piece of writing in my diary about “E,” my first “boyfriend” and first lay in high school who made it perfectly clear he was not into a relationship. In a rare moment of clarity, my 15-year-old self wrote this:

“I think people are wrong when they say that sex and love HAVE to be together. I figured out why me and E have good sex. Physically, we’re in love. Our bodies are perfect for eachother, we satisfy eachother’s sexual urges like we were born for one another. And we’re not really like that personality-wise. But that’s okay! I don’t know why that’s a bad thing, and why everyone looks down upon it. Just because mentally we’re not in love doesn’t mean it’s emotionless sex. It’s not. It’s kinda like our bodies have emotions. Like our minds don’t particularly click, but our kisses and heartbeats and waves of sex drive do. What’s wrong with that???? We’re not USING eachother; we just have a connection that is very hard for people to understand. If they saw us together, they would know what I mean. I’m fine with it, and I think it will go on as long as it takes for me to find someone I have mental AND physical perfectness with, because that’s what I need to be in a relationship…And as long as I got one half, why give it up because OTHER people think its morally wrong? I mean, I wish me and E had both, but it’s been clearly established that we don’t, so fine. It doesn’t automatically turn into a bad thing.”

There you have it. Love and sex don’t always go together, especially for horny 15-year-olds. I could be totally off-base, but I don’t think I was a freak for thinking this. If you’re comfortable with accepting that teens are sexual people with their own desires, there’s no getting around that boys and girls sometimes feel this way. I said this in 2007 and I still believe it now: Sex is the ultimate risk, a risk that makes human relationships complicated, intoxicating and wonderful. It’s an emotional risk when you’re 18 the same way it’s a risk when you’re 40. Each time, as long as you’re safe and armed with the right info, it’s amazing to feel alive and take that risk.

Granted, I was armed with the right info. I had good sex education and candid parents. But many girls are getting scolded by their elders and pressured by their peers. Some are in abstinence-only education classes and told they’ll be too “used” or “dirty” for their future husbands if they have sex. The vast majority are not given the space they need to figure out what they truly want from their sexual relationships.

I agree with Rachel that it feels awful to have to compromise yourself, but testing out your sexual and romantic bottom lines may just be a rite of passage for teenagers experimenting with their sexuality–which is what the sexual revolution should have been about, rather than expecting women to simply indulge men’s fantasies. I doubt things will ever be perfect the first time a girl tries to define a sexual reality that works for her–especially if she’s told to follow age-old dating rules that clearly didn’t work the first time around. What I do hope for the future is that young women be allowed to take moments of sexual confusion in stride without conservatives breathing down their necks, without being called sluts by their peers, without feeling like they’ve ruined their chances at marriage forever, without being made to think that boys are emotionless sexbots, without letting an unsatisfying relationship cross over into the abusive zone–all while getting factual information about sex and STIs from their schools and families. Don’t girls deserve that much?

*Most of the freakouts over the “hookup scene” happens in the context of heterosexual relationships, since according to the majority of sexual conservatives, queer teen girls don’t have peen-in-vadge sex and therefore, as Kate puts it, “don’t exist.”

UPDATE: More C & G being awesome on the Today Show.

May I present Girl-drive.com’s first guest blogger Julie Block (remember when I linked to her post-feminist manifesto and declared that she should be a famous writer? Well, she’s starting here). Julie, who is 23, originally from Evanston, Ill. and a student at Cornell where she writes for the Cornell Daily Sun, will be posting approximately twice a month about feminism and pop culture issues. Here, Julie continues the pregnancy/TV convo by ruminating on Lifetime’s new movie, The Pregnancy Pact.

Also: I’m going to be adding more guest-bloggers as the year goes on. If you have something to say about young women or young feminism, and want to guest-blog here, shoot me an email at nona@girl-drive.com!

“Oooh, look at the baby!” Or, rather, “Look at the babies having babies!” That was all I could think when I watched Lifetime’s The Pregnancy Pact — a made-for-TV movie based on the case of a rumored pact made by a group of teenage girls in Gloucester, Mass to get pregnant at the same time. I’m not just being facetious; the girls are all so young, you can’t help but hear that diatribe. But “look at the babies having babies,” has been running through my head a lot lately — not just this week, nor this month, but the whole TV season.

Teen pregnancy is on the rise for the first time in the last decade, according to a recently published study by The Guttmacher Institute. According to the study, teen pregnancy rose 3%: In other words, 4% more teens gave birth in 2006 than 2005, and 1% more had abortions. The study breaks down the study racially and on the state level, although they don’t have results past 2005 yet. (It would have been especially interesting to see the breakdown by economic status.) They also don’t have results past 2006 — needed to prove if the change is just, in CNN’s words, “a blip or a trend.” However, the study does say, preliminarily, that there’s evidence for a higher increase in 2007.

I could wax on and on about what in the world happened in 2006 (I was this close to blaming Diablo Cody or Judd Apatow, until I remembered I was a year off), but that would be too easy, a cross between a Chuck Klosterman-like reach for mythical connections and a post-modern witch-hunt. Instead, I’ll talk about the only thing I ever feel knowledgeable enough to talk about: television.

TV, that behemoth known for its “supposed” way of holding up a mirror to cultural phenomena, has made teen pregnancy a fairly central focus this season. These days, I can’t change the channel without seeing adults (or at least those adult-children prancing around on shows like Grey’s Anatomy) sitting in a bar, woefully staring into a beer and lamenting how it is that their immature selves have suddenly gotten so old as to not only have to raise their teenage children, but now grandchildren as well. If it’s not morose 30-something grandparents, then it’s teenage girls looking into the intimidating plastic lens of a pregnancy test with two pink lines and wondering how in the world it happened. Remember that anti-smoking commercial that came out a few years back? The young (white, affluent) parents stand worried in the doorway of the bathroom, the wife showing her husband the pregnancy positive stick. The tag line reads: They’re about to come the youngest —PAUSE for dramatic effect, as the camera pulls into the bathroom, revealing a freaked-out teen, still squatting on the toilet — grandparents on their block. Basically, TV this past season has decided to create a bunch of fictional young, usually affluent (although not always white) grandparents to keep the PSA grandparents company.

First, the obvious: Juno, Knocked Up, The Pregnancy Pact, Secret Life of the American Teenage, MTV’s 16 and Pregnant and its sequel, Teen Mom, Glee, Desperate Housewives, and Grey’s Anatomy. As if that weren’t enough, on Private Practice, a show I only watched this one time, Pete and Naomi find out their 15-year-old-daughter is also pregnant. While Pete retires to the bar, staring forlornly into a bottle and declaring he has no say in the matter, Naomi tries to force her daughter to have an abortion, even if she thinks she’ll go to hell for it. Daughter opts out of pregnancy.

And that’s only part one. Moving on, we still have: Friday Night Lights, Lost, 90210, Life Unexpected, the Jamie Lynn pregnancy, Sarah Palin’s daughter, and, the most freakish of all …. Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Dawn, in which (spoilers!) Bella gets married at 18, becomes pregnant with a half-vampire baby that starts killing her, and refuses to terminate the pregnancy. After the damn thing breaks her spine, she has the baby via a vampiric-C section, and then is turned into a vampire herself. Everyone lives happily ever after. I can’t wait until that movie comes out.

I wish that were all, but there are probably many more I’m not aware of. Teen pregnancy, young mommies, and other such things are not new to network TV, by any means; in fact, most television shows with teenage characters have had a pregnancy scare at one time or another: once upon a PSA, the FCC allowed shows to skip out on a requisite PSA if they did a “very special episode” showing the repercussions of unsafe sex.

What’s changed is that now televised pregnancy “scares” have turned into full-on pregnancies, often with the young mothers deciding to carry the babies to full term, and often raising their kids, usually to an unrealistically upbeat soundtrack. But while the birthrate is up on TV as well, that 1% abortion rate is not only not reflected, it rarely seems to come up at all. (You can’t say “abortion” on Fox.) In fact, I can only think of two instances where abortion is mentioned by name: First, on Friday Night Lights, and then last week on Private Practice, when Naomi comes off as a tyrannical mother for trying to force her daughter to have an abortion. It’s an interesting and troubling twist on the usual question of personal agency, and while I found it a worthy episode, I do have to wonder why, on a network surrounded by very young baby mamas who keep babies, the only discussion about abortion is framed in an evil, agency-stealing light. (On a side note, ABC and ABC Family have the greatest teen pregnancy storyline per capita, and are owned by Disney — not really known for its unconventional or diverse values. A lack of abortion-related story lines seems disturbingly apt when even pro-choice legislators are supporting limiting access to abortion in the proposed healthcare bill.

There’s been a fair amount of kudos given to The Pregnancy Pact, and programs like it, for at least talking about a wholly taboo topic. And I have to say, I didn’t hate the movie — it didn’t make teen pregnancy look like rays of sunshine. And yet with all this air time of teen pregnancy, I wish the discussion surrounding it were more well-rounded: a little more potential abortion discussion, a little more adoption, and definitely a little more “Did no one tell you what a condom is?!” From Secret Life to Grey’s Anatomy, it seems like TV writers these days just think that teenagers are too stupid to understand what birth control is, or think they’re too impermeable to suffer any consequences from their actions.

The data may reflect this … data that, just like The Pregnancy Pact, is used by both sides as ammunition for blame. While the study itself cites Bush-era abstinence-only education as a reason behind higher birthrates, conservative parent groups are just as openly, and loudly, blaming “Planned Parenthood-style sex education” for the magic 2006 button that sent everything swinging in the wrong direction. Kate Harding does a good job explaining this], and I have to agree, since I’d really, really love to blame these teen pregnancy rates, and any pregnancy pact, real or fake, on Stephenie Meyer. Women and their bodies are often the terrain ideological wars and culture battles are fought over; pregnant teenagers aren’t exempt from the objectification.

And while I do agree, like some, that at least the situation is getting air time, I’m hesitant to get behind this particularly baby train just yet. Glamorizing pregnancy or making it seem at all easier than it is in any way can’t be a responsible decision; nor does not having any characters make decisions past keeping the baby. Forgive me for getting my pro-choice all over your boob tube, but just once, just once, I’d like to see more than one of these teenage girls making the tough but understandable decision to have an abortion; for a high school principal to back the decision of the high school nurse to give out condoms; for a religious parent to suggest their daughter get’s an abortion without being completely villanized. ABC, I’m looking at you. After all, if (as the studies show) watching sexy TV leads to teens having sex, whose to say that watching babies have babies on TV doesn’t lead to babies having babies in real life?

–Julie Block, guest blogger

P.S. I tried to get this up for the New Year in time for the official Scarleteen fundraiser deadline, but I’m sure they won’t refuse your money now! Seriously, Scarleteen needs to survive–it is an essential resource for teens, considering all the false and harmful info there is out there. (Miriam Grossman, I’m looking at you.)

How did Scarleteen get started in the first place?

I launched the site in 1998. It originally started as a website called Scarlet Letters, focusing on women’s sexuality. At that time, there were very few things about sex online at all that weren’t porn. So I launched this site and started getting questions from younger people. I’m a teacher by background, so I thought, “Let me at least find somewhere to refer these kids to,” but there wasn’t any place. So I just went ahead and started Scarleteen.

When did you start relating to feminism?

I’ve been a feminist for a while. I did some Women’s Studies in college, but it was just kind of the era in which I grew up. Title IX passed when I was 9. I grew up in Chicago, in a poor but progressive community, so it was tough for us to really miss feminism, which was up front and center. I absolutely walked into the door doing Scarleteen as a really active feminist.

Do you think an explicit feminist message comes across on the site?

Our users are international—only 40 percent of site traffic is from the U.S. So the perspective of someone from Sri Lanka or the Phillippines is very different from Western ideas of feminism. That said, feminism is a strong message at Scarleteen and always has been. The site traffic is pretty balanced in terms of men and women, but always skewed to women. Globally there’s been a really strong sentiment to keep sex information away from women; some of that is very clearly a patriarchal effort. Just the fact of providing this information right on the Internet is a feminist act, and making it so that it is inclusive, diverse, and coming from a standpoint of authenticity is really important. Scarleteen encourages women to look inward to find out what sex is, rather than the messages about what its supposed to feel like, be like. The message out there is: Your sexuality is this way so that it can please your partner this way. We’re trying to change that.

What’s the number one question you get from readers?

Definitely, “Am I pregnant?” When you first become heterosexually active, pregnancy is really freakin’ scary, if you’re not ready or if you don’t want a baby now. People aren’t necessarily prepared for how different it feels when it’s actually real. People will ask, “If my brother masturbates on the toilet and if I sit down, will I get pregnant?” Some people don’t know whether they’ll get pregnant from oral sex. When you put yourself in the brain of the person earnestly asking this question, that’s a pretty extreme level of fear to be walking around with.

Teens just don’t get the right information, largely because of abstinence-only education programs. They just scare the shit out of people when it comes to sex. Some are better than others, but for most of them, they’re thinking, “Whatever we do, if we can scare them from having sex before they’re married, that’s the goal.”

Can you give a little perspective on ab-only? When was it actually established, and how was the sex ed when you were growing up?

Bush is the one who gave these programs over a billion dollars a year, but Clinton started it—1996 was when it first went into effect. So we have a long history of cultural messages that scare people out of sex, but it’s never been quite so institutionalized. When I was growing up, there were comprehensive sex education initiatives that were building. I went to an alternative high school that was open and anarchist.

Now teens are coming to Scarleteen a lot more fearful than they used to—their questions are crisis-based rather than from curiosity. We’re established as a crisis-safe space, so that might influence it, but i think it has a lot to do with what kind of sex ed people are walking in the door with. A lot of the youth sound more like my parents, rather than the youth I grew up around. If you were putting together a time capsule and put sex ed from the 50s and abstinence-only stuff in the same place, they’d be scarily similar.

What differences do you see between the younger generation and your youthful experience with sex? What do you hope for young women in terms of our relationships with sexuality?

I generally had a great time with my teen and young adult sexuality. It was exciting, it was fun, I grew in it, I was able to express myself very authentically in it, I didn’t feel ashamed about it or like I had to be very concerned that it looked like someone else — a partner, friends, culture — wanted it to. I also knew enough about how to take care of myself, and felt very able to assert myself with partners about care and safety that I wasn’t freaking 24/7 about pregnancy or STIs.

And in the midst of some really challenging parts of my young life — the assaults, an unhealthy home, serious poverty, etc. — having that one area that was not stressful, but a place to release stress and just enjoy myself, explore myself and others freely, was a very big boon.

What worries me is how many young women I see having sex with partners who are clearly not having experiences that are satisfying for them, that leave them feeling good (about the sex and about themselves), that feel like a place for self-expression and exploration. Given what I do, I’m bound to see more women having problems than not, but still.

Another big difference I see between my generation—or at least with my experience—and the new one is that we had a lot more room for certain freedoms. Young people today, because of the economy, stay at home at a later age, it’s harder for them to pick up and move. So sex and sexual relationships are the only rite of passage left, the only thing where kids can say, “This is my very own thing.” Freedoms for young people, opportunities for self-discovery, are less and less supported. If you don’t have a “you” to bring to the table, it’s a lot harder for it to really be comfortable with the sexual part of you.

It’s about effing time, especially in light of this study announced today on CNN. Jesus (no pun intended).

Related: My thoughts on sex ed

If you know me at all, you’re aware that abstinence-only sex education, or even preachy abstinence-plus sex education, is a huge pet peeve of mine. I’ve always been boggled by how much information about sex our culture witholds from teenagers, exactly when it’s needed most—when they’re first becoming independent, curious, and sexual. The way I see it, as long as a teenager is self-aware and safe about sex, then it’s fine for them to explore, and that there’s no grounds to shame teens (which really means teen girls, since I can’t recall a teenage boy ever being publicly shamed for having sex) for being sexual if they do it in a mentally and physically healthy way.

So imagine how much my heart was warmed when I found out about this project. The Midwest Teen Sex Show isn’t necessarily promoting teen sex—it’s promoting a “discussion of teen sex.” It owns up to the fact that yes, teens have sex, and no, most of them aren’t going to become depressed dropouts because of it (HEL-lo Miriam Grosssman!).

The episodes drop knowledge on how to navigate the sexual minefield of prom night and all you’ll ever need to know about birth control (posted below). There’s also a community page, which includes convos about herpes, orgasms, and Bristol Palin, among other juicy topics. There are even some burgeoning “groups,” including “Parents who support discussion,” and products you can buy, such as a “Thanks, masturbation!” t-shirt.

Now this is the kind of sex education I can get behind—honest, fun, informative, and realistic, not moralistic.

UPDATE: While we’re on the topic, progressive sex ed website Scarleteen needs your help!!! Scarleteen really has the right idea in terms informing young people about sex and their bodies, so donate if you can. (via Women’s Glib)