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The Source: Volume 2, Issue 5, July/August 1999

New Reports

What Congress Didn't Tell You: a State-by-State Guide to the Welfare Law's Hidden Reproductive Rights Agenda
NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund
Designed for advocates, this 50-state report tracks state responses to welfare reform in the area of reproductive choice. It specifically focuses on the out-of-wedlock bonus, the family cap, and abstinence-only-until-marriage sexuality education funding.
1999; $15; NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, 395 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014; Phone: 212/925-6635; Fax: 212/226-1066.

Emergency Contraception Handbook
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA)
This is a handbook on emergency contraception. It also includes a list of organizations with more information. The handbook is also available in Spanish.
1999; $6.50;PPFA, 810 Seventh Avenue, New York , NY 10019; Phone: 212/541-7800; Fax: 212/245-1845; Web site: http://www.plannedparenthood.org

Expanding Access to Emergency Contraception: Issues and Answers
Planned Parenthood of New York City, Inc. (PPNYC)
This report is intended to increase awareness about emergency contraception among clinicians, counselors, educators, and administrators. It provides an overview on emergency contraception and also includes commonly asked questions and general issues of concern. It also addresses PPNYC’s experience in providing emergency contraception.
1998; $10; PPNYC, Margaret Sanger Square, 26 Bleeker Street, New York, NY 10012-2413; Phone: 212/274-7328; Fax: 212/247-7300; Web site: http://www.ppnyc.org

Four new resources are available from The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy

Start Early, Stay Late: Linking Youth Development and Teen Pregnancy Prevention
This report highlights major points and strategies discussed at the Campaign’s 1997 meeting on youth development programs called "Creating Safe Passages for Youth." The report also lists resources and conferences about the subject. 1998; $5.

What About the Teens? Research on What Teens Say about Teen Pregnancy
This report is based on discussions by 12 focus groups of teens on the choices and attitudes surrounding adolescent pregnancy. It also includes the screening questionnaire, specifications, and discussion outline and guide for the focus groups. 1999; $10.

Peer Potential: Making the Most of How Teens Influence Each Other
This report analyzes peer influences on teen behaviors. The research findings will help parents and educators better understand adolescent relationships. 1999; $15.

Power In Numbers: Peer Effects on Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Debut and Pregnancy
This report provides extensive analysis on the data from a large national survey of adolescent girls on the effect of peer influence on the timing of girls’ first sexual intercourse and on girls’ pregnancy risk. 1999; $15.

The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 1776 Massachusetts Ave, N.W., Suite 200, Washington, D.C. 20036; Phone: 202/478-8500; Fax: 202/478-8588; Web site: http://www.teenpregnancy.org

Helping Teens Make Responsible Choices
Planned Parenthood Federation of America
This guide is designed to help educators plan programs for teens to help them make responsible choices in their lives. It discusses current efforts to reduce teen pregnancy from both an individual and a community perspective. It also includes an annotated bibliography, fact sheets, and focus group outlines.
1999; PPFA, 810 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019; Phone: 212/541-7800; Fax: 212/245-1845; Web site: http://www.plannedparenthood.org   or http://www.teenwire.com

Upcoming Conferences

WORLD CONGRESS OF SEXOLOGY, sponsored by the World Association for Sexology, is scheduled for August 23-27, 1999 in Hong Kong. Workshops include: "Sexuality Education in Primary and Secondary Schools"; "Sexology on the Internet"; "A Sexual Health Approach to HIV Prevention and Education"; "Using Information Technology to Expand Sexuality Information"; and "Gynaecological Aspects of Sexology." Participants will also have a chance to meet with local groups to learn more about sexual cultures and attitudes. On-site/US$650.

1999 NATIONAL HIV PREVENTION CONFERENCE is scheduled for August 29 - Sept. 1. Subjects will include: "Behavioral Interventions," "Surveillance and Epidemiology," "Biomedical Interventions," "Program Design and Dissemination," "HIV Prevention Policy," "HIV Prevention-Treatment Interface," "STD Prevention and Treatment As an HIV Prevention Strategy."

Reviews from Volume 27, Number 5 of the SIECUS Report

The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls

Joan Jacobs Brumberg
Vintage Books, New York
1997, 268 pp.
Hardcover: $25, paperback: $13

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, whose previous work includes a history of anorexic nervosa, has written a troubling, provocative, and fascinating history of American girlhood.

In The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, Brumberg explores the history of girls’ bodies: both what it means to grow up in a female body and how that meaning has changed. She finds that girls’ bodies are an "enormous problem" for them (xvii) and that this problem is rooted in an increasingly sexualized society that, rather than supporting girls through adolescence, provides them with little guidance and much misinformation. This lack of leadership and advocacy is particularly distressing as American girls more and more consider their bodies and sexualities the defining projects of their adolescence and personhood.

In chapters on the changing meaning of girlhood, menstruation, skin and acne, dieting and other forms of body modification, sexuality, and girls’ advocacy, Brumberg explores the stories that girls’ diaries and other historical sources tell about girls and their bodies.

While all of the chapters are strong, the one addressing "The Disappearance of Virginity: Sexual Expression and Sexual Danger" will be of particular interest to SIECUS Report readers. Here Brumberg explores the history of a late-twentieth-century American girlhood characterized be an ever earlier age of physical maturation in a permissive and sexualized world. Contemporary girls, Brumberg writes, "have to negotiate between their desire for sexual expression and the prospect of sexual danger" (142-43). Earlier generations did not face such challenges. Victorian adolescent girls were ideally pure, and their chastity was marked anatomically by the hymen. As with other aspects of girls’ bodies--their skin, menstrual cycles, diet, and more--doctors monitored their virginity. Through pelvic examinations, turn-of-the-century American physicians documented the existence--or absence--of a girl’s hymen and thus of her sexual innocence. During the 1920s and ‘30s and America’s first sexual revolution, gynecologists adopted a new but no less problematic practice: They began performing premarital hymenotomies, lacerating the membrane in order to alleviate wedding-night discomfort and even to heighten sexual pleasure. Not surprisingly, the doctors appeared to have been most concerned with new husbands’ experiences and not with those of young women. Since the 1940s and 1950s and the advent of, among other things, tampons, girls have come increasingly to know and touch their own bodies. In the process, Brumberg claims, the "once hallowed membrane has been consigned to the junk heap of women’s history" (165).

Since the 1960s, Americans have seen further changes in girlhood and sexual values. Girls have become more sexually active, knowledgeable, and autonomous. They seek and receive routine gynecological care-and thus some sexuality education-in private relationships with their physicians. In 1972, the Supreme Court granted minors the right to seek and obtain contraceptives without the involvement of their parents or guardians. Lesbian girls increasingly come out to their families, their friends, and themselves. As girls’ sexual lives are less and less restricted by traditional moral concerns, many girls and their parents allow that the bounds of sexual expression-straight or lesbian-are best informed by the issues of personal safety and comfort. As Brumberg notes, this "hands-off" attitude "may have been an improvement over the censorious overprotection of earlier times," but it often leaves girls with little guidance and support in a world characterized by greater sexual pressure and vulnerability (185). The risks are medical, social, personal, and vast. "As we approach the millennium, we need to acknowledge that American girls are both the beneficiaries and the victims of a century of change in sexual mores and behaviors" (192).

Race and racism necessarily inform the history of American girlhood, and Brumberg is consistently attentive to these issues. In the chapter on "Perfect Skin," she discusses the differences race and ethnicity made to girls’ experiences of acne and finds, for example, that African-American girls, whose darker skin was already considered inferior, struggled to "subdue pigment as well as pimples" (77). Additionally, Jewish girls in the early and mid-twentieth century were especially vulnerable to a social logic that linked acne with a dirtiness attributed to the lower classes. The daughters of Jewish immigrants found that their skin could belie their claims to middle-class status and suggest that they were naturally of a lower social grade. Despite Brumberg’s attention to these and other implications of race, however, I left The Body Project wanting to know more about the specific histories of African-American, Latina, and other girls’ relationships to their bodies. As Brumberg claims early in the book, "Understanding what has happened historically to girls’ bodies and to their relationships with those who surrounded them . . . provides the first step in crafting an effective, progressive response to a predicament that already threatens the prospects of young women who will come of age in the twenty-first century" (xxxiii). This argument, so convincingly made in The Body Project, compels us to write, with similar care and exhaustiveness, about the intimate histories of American girls of color.

Brumberg’s goal in writing The Body Project was to provoke the "intergenerational conversation about female bodies" necessary to changing the relationships we allow girls and others to female bodies (xxxi).

Already I have seen this happen for me. The chapter on acne prompted my sister, mother, and me to explore for the first time our different experiences of our adolescent skin-one struggling with chronic acne, one fighting occasional outbreaks with ointments and creative hairstyling, and the other relatively blemish-free.

This semester I am reading The Body Project with undergraduates in a class on Girlhood and Adolescence. I look forward to a discussion of bodies and girlhood that is more sensitive to questions of racial, class, and historical difference than those I have facilitated in previous terms. These and other conversations are crucial to restoring the intergenerational organizations and relationships in which women advocate for and work with girls.

Brumberg’s has done us all-educators, students, researchers, and advocates-an enormous service with this history of American girls. She focuses our attention on the adolescent female body as a fundamental site of the crisis in girls’ confidence, sexual health, and pleasure; and, in her critique of the privatization of girls’ socialization, cultivates an investment in American girls that extends beyond the normative bounds of family.

The Circle of Life

Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma
619 N.W. 23rd Street
Oklahoma, OK 73103
(11 minutes)
$30 plus $3 shipping and handling

The "Circle of Life" is an 11-minute video produced by Planned Parenthood of Central Oklahoma and aimed at Native-American teenagers. Even though the video raises more questions than it answers, it and the accompanying discussion guide could spark lively debate on important topics.

The video focuses on the fictitious story of Toma and Sunny, Native-American teens who meet at a powwow and quickly enter into a sexual relationship. Toma equates sex with love and assumes that the two are in a loving and committed relationship until she sees Sunny with another girl, Bineshi, at another powwow. Toma tells the viewers that she never realized anything could hurt so much. The viewer is given a different side of the story when we meet Sunny who explains the macho pressures he feels as a man. He wishes that girls and guys could just have fun without all the physical stuff.

Reliable information is given by the video’s narrator, also a Native-American teen. The narrator starts by explaining that sexuality is a part of life from birth until death. She goes on to give a brief explanation of gender identity and gender roles and suggests that men and women in today’s society are not held to strict gender roles, as they once were. The video is quick to point out, however, that gender stereotypes still exist. Bineshi, the other young woman whom Sunny was kissing, has a "bad reputation" because she has slept with many young men. Two characters discuss Bineshi and suggest that she is using sex to find love but that the young men are just using her for sex. They go on to say that there is a rumor in school that Bineshi has AIDS.

At this point, the narrator returns to provide information about HIV and AIDS. She suggests that there is a false sense of security in the Native-American community that Indians do not have to worry about AIDS. She goes on to dispel this myth and tells viewers that everyone is at risk of contracting HIV regardless of ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. She says: "It is not who you are but what you do." HIV transmission is then illustrated on a map of the country and risky behaviors are listed and briefly explained.

The last myth that the video tackles involves teen pregnancy. Toma admits that she has thought a lot of getting pregnant in order to keep Sunny. She visits with Linda, a single mother of a toddler. Linda, like Toma, had thought that having a baby would make her boyfriend love her forever. Instead, he left when he discovered how much was involved in a raising a child. Left on her own to raise her son, Linda was unable to finish high school.

The Circle of Life is one of the few resources available for sexuality educators working with Native American teens. As such, it provides a great opportunity to reach an often ignored segment of the American population. It offers a good starting point for discussing sexuality issues and ends with an important message: "For our tribes to stay strong and healthy, we must stay strong and healthy." And so, this video may be of interest to and spark discussion among a broader more universal audience, as well.