Sex education

Our intern Kristine deGuzman, a junior at UC Berkeley, says she feels like she spent her entire summer discussing birth control and safer sex with her friends. "I guess that's what happens when half of your friends used to be avid churchgoers."

I grew up in a conservative Catholic environment for the great bulk of my existence, all the way from Kindergarten to my senior year in high school. I learned the exact opposite of safe sex--I learned that birth control would kill me, condoms would fail and I would get pregnant, and that abstinence was the only way to save me from the wickedness of sex and the deadly effects of birth control. It seems like, of all my friends, I should be the one with the mental handicap concerning sexual matters. I mean, I had to look up "how to do a ----- " halfway through my freshman year in college. Seriously, I did that.

Yet somehow I've become the sex guru among my friends, and I can't believe how many times I've had to tell them, "No, birth control pills do not fail 90 percent of the time" and, "No, Plan B is not the abortion pill."...
Read More »

We love anything that makes safer sex not only easier, but stylish. After our post last week on the pros and cons of the "safe sex" license (our quotation marks), a reader brought our attention to Mad BJ, an organization founded to help stop the spread of HIV and STDs by offering funky safer sex kits under the name "Ready two Go." Each kit comes with a tin for safe storage and easy toting, one or two Lifestyles condoms, a little container of lube, and an STD information card (it's got "how to put on a condom," CDC numbers, a few statistics with a referral back to the website for more info and legal disclaimers--all in both English and Spanish). Read More »

New York appears to be riddled with STDs, and New Yorkers are not using condoms any more. And when I read that, I said, out loud, holy crap, are you serious? As far as I can tell, STDs still exist, AIDS has not been cured and unplanned pregnancy is still an option. Maybe it's just New York--but I have sad and worried doubts about that. Read More »