Global Female Condom Day, September 16

WHY DO WE NEED FEMALE CONDOMS?

• 222 million women in developing countries who wish to avoid a pregnancy have an unmet need for contraceptives.
• According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than 1 million people acquire a sexually transmitted infection every day.
• UNAIDS reports that in 2013, an estimated 2.1 million people became newly infected—the majority through sexual transmission.
• A UNAIDS 2014 report estimates that young women 15–24 years old in sub-Saharan Africa are twice as likely as young men to be living with HIV.
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Black women in the U.S. are disproportionately impacted by HIV, accounting for approximately two-thirds of women living with HIV.
• The CDC reports that young Black gay men and other men who have sex with men comprise the overwhelming majority of new HIV infections in the U.S.
• Globally, gay men and other men who have sex with men are 13 times more likely to be HIV-positive than the general population.
• Female condoms can be used by women and men living with HIV to meet their family planning needs and claim their rights to healthy, mutually respectful, and fulfilling sexual relationships.

10 FACTS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE FEMALE CONDOMS

1. Female Condom is a sexually transmitted Disease prevention tool and a contraceptive tool which prevents unplanned pregnancies
2. It is 17 cm long which is about the same length of the unrolled male condom and wider than a male condom
3. Female Condom shouldn’t be used together with male condom because it could be damaged during sexual intercourse due to the friction
4. Female Condoms are made of polyurethane or nitrile, which make them strong and durable. There is no need to store it in a special storage conditions as it is resistant to humidity and high temperatures
5. It gives women the opportunity to share responsibility for the condoms with their partners. It also provides the alternative if the partner is unwilling to use a male condom due to personal, cultural, religious or other reasons
6. The female condom is safe, simple, and convenient
7. You can insert it ahead of time or as part of sex play
8. Globally, female condom distribution increased by 10 million between 2008 and 2009.
9. Today the female condom is available in over 90 countrie
10. In 2008, donor countries supplied 18.2 million female condoms globally, compared to nearly 2.4 billion male condoms

On Global Female Condom Day, Sept. 16, we’re showing the world that women and men want access to female condoms by dancing for demand! Anyone can participate, alone or with a group!
Get started: www.femalecondomday.org. #Dance4Demand

Sunday is for horizons: Elizabeth Pisani

This Sunday piece is for everybody interested in HIV/AIDS epidemics. Our heroine is Elizabeth Pisani who will break all your (wrong) stereotypes about it and will call things by their name. The title of her book The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS gives you a taste of her no-shit writing style.

She'll explain you the difference between the epidemics in Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of the world. Also, why exactly because of these differences and generalized social (and therefore decision-maker) squeamishness around the men having sex with men, commercial sex-work and substance use so little success has been achieved. It is as good as it can get: no-nonsense fun writing and well researched.

A special treat: If you feel like deepening your knowledge on the Sub-Saharan epidemics and the Miracle of Uganda, get also Helen Epstein's The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West and the Fight Against AIDS. With those two you are perfectly set to understand HIV/AIDS. And make sure that the prevention work you can do, is worth it and based in sound evidence. 

Sunday is the day when #GirlsDecide: Odeta

#Girlsdecide

We close the #GirlsDecide series with Odeta's* story.

She shares her journey that involves her partner and a decision to not to use a condom... several other decisions will have to be taken afterwards, with the information, support and advice available.

Condoms, condoms, CONDOMS!

This is a public service announcement:  Following the educational example of The Golden Girls,  I ♥ Being a Girl reminds you that using condoms is the socially and ethically responsible thing to do. So is talking about them, promoting their use and challenging the weird people who would not mention (and/or use) them while having no idea about their sero-status!

+ Going on a condom buying mission is a good way to star your SRHR/feminist activism. Figure out how good are the salespeople in your neighborhood. 

If you find a especially nasty place that make people uncomfortable, go again and again (with your friends to make it a rave-like party) until they do sth about it. Make inquiries about the types of lube they have. Write angry notes in their "Customer suggestions" book. 

Make the access to supplies your little rebellious mission!

AIDS 2012: No, objectification of women is NOT OK!*

* Yes, even if that's your way to get people to use condoms!

We attended a non-commercial satellite session yesterday morning TUSA07 Everything You Have Ever Wanted to Know About Pleasurable Safer Sex but Were Too Afraid to Ask. Instead of having a very early (7:00 AM, mind you) breakfast and a conversation about bringing pleasure and sexuality back to all the people-scaring prevention messages, we got

This how MYX Annaïs recounts her experience:

On Tuesday I woke up bright and early to attend a session at the International AIDS Conference titled Everything You Have Ever Wanted to Know About Pleasurable Safer Sex but Were Too Afraid to Ask. The session was led by Pleasure Project which “builds bridges between the pleasure/sex industry and the safer sex world by avoiding negativity, and by ensuring that erotic materials include examples of safer sex, and that sexual health materials include pleasure as a key element”.

To say I was excited is an understatement; you see I make it my personal mission to talk about pleasure whenever and wherever possible. In a society that sexualizes everything and everyone we seem increasingly scared to acknowledge our right to pleasure. Yes, we have the right to pleasure, whether it be physical or sexual pleasure, to the immense pleasure you may get from being in bed with a tub of ice cream… But back to the point at hand, I believed this session would look at how we can position condoms (and indeed other forms of contraception) within the sphere of immediate sexual pleasure. In other words, I was hoping this session would address the idea that condoms can and are sexy and can and does enhance sexual pleasure.

Instead, I heard from two representatives from DKT (a family planning services, and reproductive health products provider for the developing world) about how they have advertised and marketed condoms in recent years. I’ll give you all two guesses on how they have gone about doing this. Not that you need any clues, but the first clue is naked women. Yup, it turns out if you want to sell condoms you have to objectify women and reduce their sexuality and pleasure to a tool to excite men. Below are a couple of examples of the ad campaigns DKT Brazil have employed, they don’t look all too different to beer, perfume, or car commercials do they? Now I understand that selling condoms kind of requires sex and I’m not against that at all, what I am against is the idea that a woman’s sexuality is only good for the pleasure of a man.

When asked by a YSAFE member why images that reinforce negative images of womens’ sexuality, race, and beauty, were being used, they responded with (and I paraphrase) ‘Well everyone else is doing it so why can’t we? And we all know SEX SELLS!’ Now I don’t know about you, but that it the laziest answer ever. So what, because everyone else is presenting women as an object of mens desire in the media you can too? Wouldn’t it be a greater accomplishment to portray sexual pleasure as something for all partners? Wouldn’t it be better to illustrate safer sex within the confines of a healthy relationship?

What are your thoughts on the ways in which DKT are marketing condoms is it different from how women are represented in the media as sexual objects?

The right-outside-the-session example on how "DKT does not objectify women".

You can respond to this on Facebook or Twitter, and share your excitement or disagreement about the way it has been done in campaigns they do. Oh, an they have a Twitter account too, in case you are interested...

Nevertheless, while ranting and raving about this, we still love The Pleasure Project that does a wonderful job transforming the "if you use a condom, all the hot babes will jump on you" discourse into an honest dialogue on safe and pleasurable sex. So, our hope is that this is just an unfortunate hook-up they've had with DKT.
Or, Pleasure Project could do some training for DKT just to make sure they finally get the difference between performing hegemonic heterosexuality in a "sexy" way and actually bringing the sensuality back to safer sex.

Girls + pregnancies

In the SRHR community, we spend a lot of time talking about maternal morbidity and mortality, about the need to insure access to health care services and supplies. We insist on need for access, real access to education for girls. We advocate for mandatory Comprehensive Sexuality Education since very early in one's life.

But the curious thought that sums it all up, as presented by Hugo Schwyzer, somehow surprised me

"Sperm kills.* For hundreds of millions of women over the course of millenia, the riskiest action they ever took was having sex (consensual or otherwise, married or not) with men. As medical historians will tell you, until the 20th century, childbirth was the leading cause of death for all women of childbearing years; in some societies that maternal mortality rate may have reached 40%, while other researchers prefer a lower figure of 1 in 5. Given that many women in the developing world still have half a dozen children or more, as they did in previous centuries, the overall risk is compounded by the sheer number of pregnancies carried to term. (1 in 7 Afghan women today die in childbirth.)

To put it even more bluntly, men have killed far more women by ejaculating inside of them than they have by any other method. Semen has killed more people than any other body fluid."

He concludes that, culturally, as a collective unconscious knowledge, it might be one of the reasons to fear the patriarchy-wise channeled male (hetero)sexuality even in places where the feminist fight is not anymore about the legal right to say "no".

A thought-provoking read, anyways.
 

Sista Queen "Try Being A Lady"

"Try being a lady?
Use me as your trophy so you can parade me...
Use my vagina to only birth babies...
Be your damsel in distress so a brother can save me...
[...]
If my tongue was a trigger, you'd have been shot...
Get real - I'm gonna stay inappropriate until I fucking rot...
I don't talk about love,
I don't talk about sex,
I don't talk about things that'll put your dick on erect"

Sista Queen

"I wasn't expecting much when a 19 year old newcomer from Atlanta with the cliched name of Sista Queen was announced. Well, this performer blew me away, and I hope that anybody who wants to see Def Poetry at its best will find a way to catch her three minutes. She's an intense, loud, fast talker with an endless supply of breath. Her piece is about the self-cheapening of womanhood, and as her performance built to a crescendo she shot back and forth between mocking poses of cute fawning femininity and furious denunciations of the same poses, switching so quickly you were still catching up with the last change as she shot off into the next one. This is the kind of performance I want to see when I turn on this show. I don't know how Sista Queen got so good at such a young age, but I'm pretty sure we'll be hearing more from her." (Levi Asher on July 25, 2005)

Girls & Contraception (Renata)

"It's easy now to choose your method of contraception what you want to use because there is lots of information – researches online, but… when it come to talking about it… its not so easy. I can talk with my closest friends about contraception, I can explain almost everything, but when I have to talk with others – strangers, like writing here… mmmm… it becomes a bit uncomfortable… because it's personal, some people can look at you very negatively… it is still a taboo, and that refrains many girls from talking about contraception openly.

We live in 21st century and it shouldn’t be like that. It is sad but not all girls can access internet to read about different methods or get the prescription from doctor because they live in small communities or they are scared of something. But Sex happens! We have to protect ourselves, It’s our bodies and we have to love it! So it’s much better play this game securely, than have big headache after that. Girls let's talk about Sex, and let's talk Contraception!!!"

Renata

Girls & Contraception (Marius)

"I asked some girlfriends “what’s the first thing that pops to mind when they hear the word contraception?”. To be more exact I asked 57 girls this question.

• 22 said “condom”
• 25 said “sexual protection”
• 7 said “the pill”
• 3 said “no babies”

Those 7 girls that said “the pill”, they’re all in a relationship. They trust their boyfriend so they consider this being the best contraceptive method for their sexual relationship.

From the 22 girls who said “condom”, 13 of them have a boyfriend, but they prefer this method of contraception. When I asked why, 4 of them told me because “taking the pill can get you fat” and they don’t want that. The others said they haven’t discussed the subject with their boyfriend, they just started with the condom and kept on going with it.

Myths exists, and they influence peoples decision. Taking the pill doesn't get you fat. It's true some of them can increase your appetite for food, but that can be controlled.

I asked the girls who said “sexual protection”, what do they mean by this? The majority said protection against STI’s and unwanted babies, but there were 6 that focused only on the unwanted babies, on the STI’s part, they weren’t very concerned. They had the idea that "it won’t happen to me. I don’t know anyone who had/has an STI.”

The thing is that you can't tell if a person has an STI just looking at him/her, and sadly people lie. Ignorance it's not the way.

The 3 girls that said “no babies” are concerned in both ways, unwanted pregnancies and STI’s, but they said no babies, because getting pregnant would complicate their life a lot more. As what contraceptive they use, they all said the condom.

Contraceptive methods are there, and if you're informed enough you can decide which method you want to use, which one is best. They don't necessary take the pleasure away, they can even change the mood sometimes. From different condoms to pills, you can decide which one you want to use, but always take in account the risks that you are putting yourself to if you don't use one."

Marius

Girls & Contraception (Ada)

"Girls have very different experiences and stories to tell when it comes to when they first find out about contraception. Often times these stories come from learning about the pill and not so much about emergency contraception or negotiation to use a condom. Being able to feel comfortable to admit that, as a girl/young women, we have sex and then to be able to feel comfortable to talk about which contraceptive methods we would like in order to prevent pregnancy or an STI still seems like an ideal situation for girls.

We aren’t having sex to prevent these outcomes of sex, we are having sex for other reasons. Still, it is important that girls have contraceptive knowledge and choice and that girls can feel comfortable to talk about this.

I come from a family of all girls, and I asked my sisters the question, “when did you first learn about contraception?” Interestingly, we all had different answers and different stories around this question. Here’s my slightly funny and a little depressing story of my first memory of learning about contraception:

My school sex education (not about sexuality at all), similar to many young people, focused on abstinence only scare tactics as well as the biological/anatomical background of sex. During sex education we were shown huge pictures of STIs to know what some STIs, i.e. chlamydia and warts looked like. We ended up saying things like ‘eww gross’ and shielding our eyes and in utter disbelief that that could actually happen to someone. The message from this was supposed to be to either not have sex or wear a condom. The teachers never really thought that young people will never admit to having an STI if there is so much stigma around having one. For some reason, the school decided to address this topic in the same week as wearing a safety belt when in a car – the pictures for this one were major trauma car accidents on what has happened to people who don’t wear their seatbelts…. The message was clear: never have sex and never get in a car!

Luckily for me, talking about getting on birth control was an easy discussion to have. I do remember girls saying “yes, but I’m only on the pill to prevent acne and so my menstrual cramps aren’t so bad”. We still have a lot of work to do to help support girls who want to have sex, feel good about their choices and live healthy sexual lives that protect themselves."

Ada

Girls & Contraception (Maya)

"Contraception gives me control over my life and future, over my health, family status or work aspirations. And what is most important about it - IT GIVES ME A CHOICE!

How and when to protect myself it all up to me. And remember, there is a method for everyone. The pill and the female condom offer girls the chance to be independent and make their own decisions while the condom can help generate trust and security between partners. So make good use of your right of choice and enjoy yourself safely!"

Maya

Girls & Contraception (Luīze)

"I find so weird to be the one insisting that it’s going to
be either with a condom or nothing is going to
happen. Why would it have to be a fight and negotiation?
As if it would be only about me..." (Luīze)