By now, you’ve probably heard that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a mandate requiring New York City’s public schools to teach age-appropriate sex education. In theory, according to the Wall Street Journal, students will receive their first sex ed dose in middle-school (ages 10 – 13) and they’ll receive a second semester in high-school (ages 13 – 17). New York City high schools have passed out condoms for more than 20 years. The New York Times explains, “in the new sex-education classes, teachers will describe how to use them, and why.” This is a fantastic idea–especially considering how many NYC teens are having sex. Statistics below are for New York State. If you’d like to know the statistics for your area, click here.

Teaching kids to use condoms so that, if they choose to have sex, they’ll be less likely to get (someone) pregnant, contract HIV, or spread sexually transmitted infections like Gonorrhea or Chlamydia should hardly be controversial. Nevertheless, Time magazine writes, “Sex education has become the most hotly debated topic in American elementary education.” Critics believe education belongs in the home or at church, they warn. You know what’s really fucking sad about that article? It was written in 1969! It often still holds true. So, thank the sweet little baby Jesus for Michael Bloomberg understanding that New York City needs a sex education initiative. Let’s talk about some of the mandate’s limitations and discuss how it could be made stronger.

Sex Ed Won’t Be “Required”

Despite descriptions of it in the media, the new mandate doesn’t make comprehensive sex education mandatory. Just like under the city’s previous sex ed curriculum–which primarily focused on HIV/AIDS–parents will have the ability to opt their child out of specific lessons. If a mandate is an order that someone do something, it’s not really effective if they don’t have to do it.

Teachers May Not Be Equipped to Teach Sex Ed

I work in the sex industry; That is, for a living, I write about sex & relationships, and I also teach and manage sex education programs for teens and adults (bio). Technically, throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world, my lusciously diverse industry includes everyone who provides sex-related products and services. Podcast hosts who talk about sex. Dominatrix. Sex education teachers. Church & Dwight Company employees. (Yep, the folks that peddle ARM & HAMMER baking soda also bring you “America’s #1″ Trojan brand condoms.) Pickup artist book authors. Gynecologists. Burlesque dancers. Certified sex therapists. Columnists like Dan Savage. Dungeon owners. Would you trust everyone who works in my field to teach your kid about sex education? How about people who don’t even work in the field? Often, the responsibility for teaching America’s teens about sex falls into health and P.E. teachers’ laps. As The Nation notes, while Bloomberg’s sex education mandate includes teacher training, “one essential element [is] missing: a program monitoring system, i.e., accountability.” Read: Sex, Lies and Michael Bloomberg.

The Public May Not Understand Why Pubic Matters

To ensure the mandate’s success, Bloomberg may need to do a better job at increasing awareness of how sex education is linked to public health as well as economic issues. In short, letting people know NYC students need sex ed is awesome, but it also helps if they know why. Decreased access to sex education is linked to increased poverty, decreased levels of health/wellbeing and increased abortion rates. Also, Teen and unplanned pregnancies cost U.S. tax payers $11 billion annually.

Don’t Forget to <3 the Internet!

One of my favorite things about my job is that I regularly have opportunities to speak about sex & technology to conference, teen and university audiences. At present, I have a South by Southwest proposal up for consideration: Sex, Dating and Privacy Online Post-Weinergate. Please vote for me! Fellow panelists include the amazing Feministing Executive Editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay (Outdated: Why Dating Is Ruining Your Love Life), the incredibly prolific writer and lover of big guys Rachel Kramer Bussel, and the talented Forbes Web Celeb / one of Wired’s Faces of Innovation Violet Blue. Among other things, we’ll tell you 5 things you need to know about balancing the public/private divide (that you can only learn from people who write about sex professionally). Here’s that link again if you’d like to vote: Sex, Dating and Privacy Online Post-Weinergate. Now, back to sex education in NYC.

New York Daily News interviewed a mother named Yvonne McDowell whose 14-year-old son James is entering 9th grade in the Bronx. “I would prefer for my son to get [sex education] from the school than for him to get it from the street or from peers or from TV or social media,” she said. Truth is, even though NYC schools will follow Bloomberg’s sexy mandate, students will still go online to learn about one of the world’s oldest activities. In fact, ISIS conducted a study about this last year. When they asked teen and young respondents, “How do you learn about [birth control, menstruation, pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases]?” 89% replied “online.” That tops doctors, family, friends and, of course, school workshops. Given this, sex education mandates targeting middle and high school students should combine sexual and reproductive health education with digital media literacy.

That’s all, my friends! I hope this roundup helped explain Bloomberg’s new sex education mandate. As always, if you have any questions or you’d like to contribute to the conversation, please feel free to use the comments section below.

Finally uploaded clips from the other weekend. Click to load video: http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=498965809467. It’s 24 hrs of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in less than 5 mins. Waking at 4 am. Crowding with Arianna Huffington’s 10,000+ folks at Citi Field. Riding a packed bus 5 hours from NYC to DC. Scrambling on DC’s subways to get from RFK Stadium to the rally. “Seeing” Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the distance. Partying with friends & hanging on the roof.

I hope I don’t oversleep. I’m supposed to wake at 4:00 a.m. tomorrow to roll out of Manhattan on The Huffington Post‘s pre-dawn party bus to DC. I’m going to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or March to Keep Fear Alive. Yay Stephen Colbert! (Watch him tell congress he doesn’t want his fruits and veggies picked by Mexicans, or buy his book I Am America (And So Can You!).) Yay Jon Stewart! (View his Obama interview; buy his book Earth: A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race). For those of you not going to DC, I’ll take pictures, videos and post tweets of the rally to take you along. Good times to be shared by all! By the way, if any of you know of other not-be-be missed events, exhibitions or other shindigs in town during this weekend, let me know. I’ve heard about a couple Halloween costume parties, and I might attend. A friend of a guy friend is throwing a yacht party, and I’ve stopped just short of threatening him with physical harm if he doesn’t take me along ;) I’ve never been on a yacht. I’ll let you what, if anything, happens with that invite. In the meantime, since we’re talking about political stuff, here are a few reader favorites from the news & politics section of FUNKY BROWN CHICK® over the years:

• I’m Twanna, And I’m Running for President. If you were to run for public office, what would your platform be?

• Divorce & the Nip Tucked Kidney. Samirah said one of her coworkers gave her sickly husband a kidney, but then the dude left her. I joked: “In the divorce settlement, I would have asked for my kidney back.” I figured I’d never actually be in that hypothetical situation. No one would. Well …

• Would You Raise an Intersex Child? A mini-documentary from Current TV. It’s short.

• I’m Straight, And I Say Fuck Hate. “If you don’t want gay marriage, then don’t marry someone with the same fucking junk in their undies. Pretty fuckin’ simple.”

• Do I Sound Black? A fellow black woman in media casually told me black people don’t have sex.

• In Pictures: Tuesday, November 4, 2008. Election Day.

Direct Video Link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TMTrpugT0E
fckh8.com

Credit Paid:

Thank you, Heidi, for letting me know about the video. Shout out to Queerty for the transcript.

Love Letter To Each of You:

By the way, apologies for the slow-posting week. A bit of private, personal stuff going on plus I’m working on book stuff. Back to the regular Monday – Friday posting schedule next week! In the meantime, heads up: you can subscribe to my site via EMAIL or RSS to be automatically updated when I post.

Transcript:

Hi. Are you one of those fuckwads that has a fucking problem with my gay son getting married?

And my two moms. You fucking wanna stop them from getting married?

Then listen up haters, for some fuckin’ straight talk on gay marriage.

Number 1

If you don’t want gay marriage, then don’t marry someone with the same fucking junk in their undies. Pretty fuckin’ simple.

Number 2

So if you were really all about “protecting marriage”, you’d be fucking making divorce illegal for straight people, not cockblocking Adam and Steve from getting a fucking bridal registry.

Don’t fuck with my two gay dads.

Number 3

The Christian fucking Right? You’ve got it all fuckin’ wrong. Don’t fucking talk to me about “family values” when you want to fuck gays and their kids out of emergency hospital visitation, custody of their children and health insurance benefits.

Number 4

Fuckin’ hypocritical Republicans. So, it’s cool for Rush Limbaugh to be on his fourth fuckin’ wife, but if Cathy wants to marry Karen, then that’s an “attack” on the institution? …HELLO?

How the fuck does ripping up state constitutions and the rights they protect make this the “Land of the Free”?

So…if you hate gay marriage, it’s really because you hate gay love.

Then, you’re gonna fuckin’ hate this. [Two gay couples kissing.]

GET THE FUCK OVER IT! Some dude’s marry dudes. Some chicks marry chicks. GET. THE FUCK. OVER IT.

I’m gay.
I’m straight [laughing]…well, not really.
I’m straight.

And we’re standing together to FUCK HATE.

Across the country, in the courtroom and at the ballot box, the right to marry who you love is under attack.

We’re fundraising for that fight. Marry this shirt! Do good, and look good doin’ it. Proceeds from each shirt goes directly to fund the fight for equal marriage rights. Tell people what you think, take a stand in pink. Share this video with five friends.

I’m getting my Facebook all up in this thing’s Twitter! Spread this shit! Totally!

Don’t fuck with my gay friends. Don’t fuck with my husband. Don’t fuck with my wife. Don’t fuck with my queer daddies. Don’t fuck with our families. FUCK HATE. [whistles] FCKH8.COM!

(And, scene.)

Sexual predator Dharun Ravi and his pal Molly Wei really piss me off. I posted Student Who Was Secretly Filmed Having Sex Commits Suicide to Facebook. If you haven’t already joined our conversation, do it now. Reading about Tyler Clementi’s death, one of my readers asked a wider question: “How are we going to keep the cyber community a safe place for our children?” Rabidly online since coding my first website in 1995, I know we need to strengthen laws and get our courts up to speed with technology.

For a moment, pretend the internet doesn’t exist — because, quite frankly, that’s when most laws were written. I could be wrong, but I’d be hard pressed to believe Dharun would’ve placed an ad in his local newspaper, thus broadcasting his plan to create a secret porno of his unwitting roommate. Also, I don’t necessarily believe Dharun would’ve hid in the closet with an old fashion camcorder, filming his roommate so he could burn the tape to DVD, CD or VHS and distribute it. That’s not to say people haven’t done shit like that in the past. My point is this: Had Dharun Ravi done those things, people might more readily consider him a sociopathic sexual predator. Further, criminal punishment might be more stringent and the hard evidence against him would be stronger — that is, a copy of the paid, printed advertisement instead of a deleted Twitter confession. Judges and juries understand newspapers, camcorders and spying. They don’t always understand ustream, iChat and “the Twitter.”

When you strip away the bullshit, what we’re left with is this — Dharun Ravi sexually violated Tyler Clementi by forcing him to unwittingly star in gay pornography, then actively promoted and distributed the footage. I can only imagine Tyler felt raped and violated by the betrayal. Though they haven’t pulled the body from the water yet, his family and witnesses say Tyler Clementi jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge. Read Virtual Homicide, Real Suicide. Dr. Keith Ablow is both right and wrong. No, technology isn’t the problem — dehumanizing another human being is. However, he’s correct when he says, “If guilty, Wei and Ravi are killers, though they will never be charged with murder.”

Let’s talk about Dan Savage’s latest project. While I appreciate what he’s done to push sex information out to the public, I disagree with his blame-black-people views on the very real problem of American homophobia. Having said that, I totally commend him for launching his deeply touching It Gets Better Project to combat LGBT teen suicides. LGBT youth are up to four to eight times more likely to consider suicide than their straight peers. In recent years, kids such as 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover and 13-year-old Ryan Halligan have hanged themselves simply because their schoolmates thought they were gay. I give a damn about Tyler Clementi and LGBT youth because I write about sex for straight, gay and otherwise-oriented people. Professional terrain aside, I’m saddened whenever any child or young person kills themselves. What decent fucking human being isn’t?

———-
Image of GW Bridge by Mary. Excerpts of this post originally appeared as a Facebook conversation.
Shout out to Nicky for reminding me to post the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number 1-800-273-8255 as well as info about the Trevor Project for LGBTQ youth in crisis.

Quick update. So, the Washington Post is reporting marriage counselor Dr. Laura will end her radio show at the end of the year. Last Saturday, for the Huffington Post, I wrote Black Women, White Men & Dr. Laura’s Views on Interracial Marriage. In the comments section, I noticed rumblings about listeners organizing to get Schlessinger’s advertiser-supported show yanked.

Black Women, White Men & Dr. Laura’s Views on Interracial Marriage was one of the most popular articles on the Huffington Post’s “Living” section, and it reprinted by specialty new websites such as Carnal Nation. Judging from the reactions to my piece as well as others’ articles, I figured Dr. Laura wouldn’t be on air much longer. If you haven’t already, read my piece. What do you think Dr. Laura’s next move will be? Another radio show? Television? A sex tape?

“I’ll be whatever you want me to be,” shrugs the broomstick-thin guy wearing glasses and a low cut shirt. Stepping away from his character in FOX’s “Lie to Me” the latest addition to Tim Roth’s filmography* is quite saucy! (Pssst, yesterday on Twitter and Facebook, I said this was coming. Link up with me on either site for advance notice of posts and other stuff.)

Sexing it up in a new documentary, Brostitute with Tim Roth is distributed by Funny or Die and penetrates the “secret world of bro-on-bro non-sexual love for profit.” How can you NOT love this movie?!?! ;) I usually avoid film reviews because I like to enter theaters without any expectations. However, for this one, I made an exception. I highly recommend Tim Roth’s Pimp Hand is Strong in ‘Brostitutes’ by Cinematical‘s Alison Nastasi.

——————
*Of course it’s totally a spoof of bromance movies. But, I still love the idea. See Wax On, F*ck Off for something similar if you haven’t already.

If you’re registered for BlogHer 2010, I’m leading a panel discussion — Bringing Sex Out of the Closet — and warmly invite you to attend. It takes place 2:45pm to 4:00pm next Friday, August 6, at The Hilton New York in Midtown. We’ll discuss how to engage the internet to the fullest in order to meet your sexual needs. Panelists include: Kristen Chase, Mominatrix sex advice columnist & author of  The Mominatrix’s Guide to Sex: A No-Surrender Advice Book for Naughty Moms; Tess Danesi, BDSM blogger; Anaiis Flox, BlogHer’s Love & Sex Contributing Editor; and Genia Stevens, host of lesbian and gay talk radio, SistersTalk. This isn’t going to be an esoteric “What Is Sex?” discussion. We want you to get laid. We’ve compiled a “Best Of” list of online sexual health resources. We’re going to tell you how to safely and/or anonymously experiment with your sexual identity online. We’ll even tell you how it may be possible the internet could save your relationship. BlogHer conference sessions are extremely participatory. So, if there’s something you want to know, ask! Come armed with tons of questions.

I’m excited about the panel because, among us, we’re straight, gay, black, white, married, single, moms, happily childfree and a bunch of other things in between. We don’t agree on everything. For example, Tess wrote Time Out New York article “I Want To Be Raped.” I’m not into BDSM, and rape fantasies aren’t my thing. Kristen’s a mom. We know how I feel about kids. Genia likes vagina. I’m a dick chick. And, AV Flox? She’s ride or die West Coast. For now, I’m still in New York City. My thoughts when pulling these women together was: The audience isn’t going to be a homogeneous bunch, so the panel shouldn’t be either.

Interestingly, when I told someone about the event, their response was an audible “Eww!” Yes, eww as in: You’re going to BlogHer to talk about sex? How frivoulous. How vulgar. How titillating and unimportant. That’s called sexual repression. And, that’s exactly why we’re doing this panel. What’s more? I’m very proud to announce our sponsor, EdenFantasys, is hooking attendees up with free, sex toy-filled, KICKASS swag bags. Here’s a sneak peek of the goodies people attending our session will receive:

Video link: http://video.edenfantasys.com/videos/bringing-sex-out-of-the-closet/
Yeah, sexual repression isn’t my thing. So, hope to see some of you at Bringing Sex Out of the Closet! If you drop by, be sure to say hi and introduce yourself if we haven’t yet met.

If you needed further proof I’m a tech geek girl, now you have it ;) And, yes, I was so happy about the shoot, I actually painted my nails with my favorite polish. If the video above doesn’t load, here’s the direct link to CNN: Is Foursquare the new Twitter?

On a good day, upwards of 3,000+ people visit this site. Funky Brown Chick isn’t huge. It isn’t extremely tiny either. But, enough about me and my site. A bit on Haiti. I’ve given up on closely following the news about the series of earthquakes and aftershocks; It’s too heartbreaking to repeatedly look at the pictures and watch videos. That said, that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in (or haven’t donated to) the Haitian people’s struggle. And, sooooo, because today is a special day, here’s my birthday request: If you are able and you feel moved to do so, please make a donation to YELE, Red Cross, Partners in Health or one of the other humanitarian organizations. If every FBC reader gave only $1 today, collectively, that would be a nice little chunk. But, here’s the thing … I’m kind of “over” fashionably loudmouthed Haiti supporters. So, whether or not you choose to give today, feel free to make it your own little secret if you’d like :)

I have a story for you. By now, you’ve probably heard the U.S. has a black president, right? :) During the 2008 election campaign, A Peach-Skinned Guy Friend Who Shall Remain Nameless (APSGWSRN) gave me shit because I didn’t originally contribute to APSGWSRN’s fundraiser or go to a lot of the events he arranged.

HIM: “I really expected you to be there. Obama would be our first African-American president. This would be really historic.”

By way of context/background … APSGWSRN comes from privilege. Elite boarding school. Ivy League. Etc. I was proud of his volunteering/service to Obama. That said, I didn’t appreciate him spoon-feeding me guilt about not being as (visibly) active as he was. Just because I didn’t specifically contribute to APSGWSRN’s cause doesn’t mean I didn’t contribute to the cause. Plus, I thought, but didn’t say, “By the way, where were you in 2004?” Because, you know what? Even back then, Obama was still black. And, he was running for a seat in a U.S. Senate that hadn’t seen anyone who looked like him since 1999 when Carol Moseley Braun was there. However, in 2004, Obama wasn’t fashionable. Many people outside of Illinois hadn’t heard his name — nor could they pronounce it. And, it wasn’t hip to say “I volunteered for Obama” because, quite frankly, who cared. Yet, had Obama not won the Illinois seat, he wouldn’t be APSGWSRN’s president right now.

Same with Haiti. The country was poor and in need of help before the earthquake … and still needs help. Sometimes, it’s not about putting your money where your mouth is. It’s about shutting your mouth, and putting your money where your heart is.