http://jezebel.com/5402302/why-men-should-learn-to-like-period-sex?skyline=true&s=x

Why Men Should Learn To Like Period Sex

An article in Cardinal Points, the SUNY Plattsburgh student newspaper, confirms what we've always suspected: that dudes who won't have period sex kind of suck.

Here's the horror story that begins Jon Hochschartner's recent "Sex in the SUNY" column:

I woke up slowly, pushing the naked girl beside me for more covers. Eventually it was time to get up, so I reluctantly rubbed the sleep out of my eyes.

That's when I realized I was wet. I threw the sheets off myself and saw I was covered in blood - from my chest to my dick. I started looking for some kind of mortal wound but couldn't find anything.

So finally, I looked down at her and she was covered in it too. Then it dawned on me: menstrual blood.

I don't remember if we were drunk the night before, but clearly there was some serious miscommunication. I mean, damn, scarred for life.

Obviously we can't expect opinion columns in college newspapers to be models of enlightened views — if memory serves, my college paper once ran a screed on why no one should ever have to take English classes, and another on how gross it was to have to stand next to poor people at Wal-Mart. Still, Hochschartner does deserve a wake-up call: the "naked girl" taking up space in his bed was actually a living, breathing — and yes, bleeding — human being. I'll admit that stained sheets are an annoyance, but getting menstrual blood on oneself is a monthly occurrence for women, and yet we somehow manage to avoid PTSD. Understanding this, and accepting that the vagina is part of the female reproductive system and not just a sterile hole for your dick, is an important step toward becoming a man worthy of fucking. Hochschartner did talk to some women for his column — their recommendations include towels, shower sex, and, Dr. Ruth's favorite, diaphragms. I'd advocate that these ladyfriends involve him in regular discussions of menstruation, at least until he's desensitized. Because there's really no excuse for a guy to be afraid of a little blood.

Yesterday I recommended that women quit treating periods as a female-only topic, and I'd like to reiterate that recommendation now. Last year I had to teach a 25-year-old man — who had previously lived with a long-term girlfriend — that women do in fact need to use more than one tampon per period, and I think it's high time that guys started getting this information early. Comprehensive sex ed can help — while the girls in my fifth grade class were getting our first "changing bodies" lecture, the boys were watching The Mighty Ducks or something, and there's no reason boys shouldn't get the opportunity to hear the gym teacher say "uterine lining" too. But more than that, if boys and girls and men and women would all stop treating menstruation like some ultra-private phenomenon, the world — and the vagina — would be a happier place.

It's true that not every woman likes period sex (especially on heavy days, there can be cramping issues). And guys' tastes do deserve respect — if they really prefer to abstain until a woman is ritually pure, that's up to them. But I'd argue that learning to like period sex is worth some initial discomfort, both because it adds three to seven days per month when you can bone, and because it represents a level of comfort and familiarity with the actual female body, not the sanitized version pushed by "lad mags." And while I wouldn't advocate kicking a guy to the curb just because period sex isn't his favorite, I would wager that someone for whom menstrual blood triggers "post-trauma flashbacks" may not be a keeper.

If It's That Time Of The Month, Go On Vacation [Cardinal Points]

Earlier: Dr. Ruth Personally Advises Us On Period Sex

Poster campaign on TV

http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/News/Canada/Edmonton/ID=1320501528

Posters continued . . .

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2009/11/05/edmonton-university-posters.html

Student won't be punished for satirical posters

Last Updated: Thursday, November 5, 2009 | 12:42 PM MT Comments5Recommend11

CBC News

A University of Alberta student whose satirical posters had him facing probation or expulsion learned Wednesday he won't be punished after all.

Derek Warwick, a fourth-year women's studies student, said the posters were supposed to be a humorous way to get people talking about comments from the university president about a decline in male enrolment.

University of Alberta student Derek Warwick says a misunderstanding led campus security to tell him he had violated the student code of conduct by putting up posters that poked fun at comments made by the university president. (CBC)The posters carry slogans like "Only white men can save our university" and "Women are attacking campus."

"Our posters were in no way hateful or malicious," Warwick said. "I think that we were again using humour to create dialogue, and I don't think there is anything wrong with that."

Warwick said he was called to the security office at the university and told he was being charged with the distribution of malicious material under the Code of Student Behavior and that he could be put on probation or expelled over the incident.

"We were told that there had been complaints about the posters that had been put up — that some people had interpreted them as being sexist," he said.

"I think there are very few people who would agree with campus security's decision to press charges."

'Clever and creative'

"I thought the posters were clever; I thought they were creative," said University President Indira Samarasekera.

She said the discipline threatened by security did not come at the instigation of her office.

One of the satirical posters that got student Warwick into hot water. (CBC)"I was flattered that somebody actually read what I said in the newspapers," Samarasekera said. "So, I thought, that's what the university's all about, expression of people's ideas and opinions. I didn't find them a problem at all."

Samarasekera's comments referred to the decline in the proportion of male students at universities across Canada. She says she stands by those remarks.

"They were based on emerging facts," Samarasekera said. "If you look at the last 15 years, for example, there has been a much more significant growth of women attending university relative to men.

"Society needs the best of both genders to develop passions for a particular area and to come into a university and contribute."

The Now Famous Poster Campaign

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/edmonton/story/2009/11/02/edmonton-samarasekera-white-male.html?ref=rss&loomia_si=t0:a16:g2:r5:c0.043861:b28727449

Posters take swipe at U of A president

Last Updated: Monday, November 2, 2009 | 11:34 AM MT Comments41Recommend25

CBC News

A satirical poster campaign has sprung up on the University of Alberta campus in reaction to comments made by the president, Indira Samarasekera, about the issue of attracting more men to universities.

About 400 posters were put up. One states: "Only White Men Can Save our University!" Another reads: "Women: Stop! Drop! Men: Enroll."

This is one of the posters that was put up at the University of Alberta last week by a group of students protesting comments made by university president Indira Samarasekera. (Tina Faiz/CBC)

The posters are in response to comments made by Samarasekera in an interview on Oct. 21, when she said: "Presidents of the major universities are very concerned we are not attracting young men in the numbers we should."

"I'm going to be an advocate for young white men, because I can be. No one is going to question me when I say we have a problem," she said.

Samarasekera made the comments in response to new statistics that show females make up about 58 per cent of the student body in Canada.

Samarasekera said her concern is that in 20 years, there will not be enough male talent at the heads of companies and elsewhere.

Men can be their own advocates

Derek Warwick, a women's studies major, spearheaded the poster campaign to protest Samarasekera's assertion that young white men need help.

"They don't need advocates, they can be their own advocates, it's a white man's world," he said Monday.

"White men are the most privileged group in the world, if we say they have problems then, well, other groups in the world have a whole heck of a lot more problems." Warwick said.

"Women CEOs aren't the issue ... because women are facing a plethora of other issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace. They're not making as much money as men ... those are the issues we should be looking at," he said.

Agricultural student Carly Huvenaares thinks Samarasekera has a point.

'Women had to work that much harder to get up to those positions, and to say that now it's a trend towards more women, I feel that's a good thing.'— Mehek Mather, student

"In our classes there's about 10 girls and one guy," she said.

There are also many scholarships available only to females, Huvenaares said.

Dietetic intern Mehek Mather views the comments as a throwback to the times when women were rarely seen on university campuses.

"Women had to work that much harder to get up to those positions, and to say that now it's a trend towards more women, I feel that's a good thing," she said.

If the university president feels the need to advocate for someone it should be women and people of colour, Warwick said.

Samarasekera was not available to comment on the poster campaign.

What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent h1n1?

http://www.bitchmagazine.org/post/swine-dandy-what-if-we-did-as-much-to-prevent-rape-as-we-do-to-prevent-h1n1

Swine & Dandy: What if we did as much to prevent rape as we do to prevent H1N1?

Science and Politics blog post by Meg Stone, November 3, 2009 - 8:05pm; tagged H1N1, Health care, pandemic, prevention, rape, swine flu.

I spent most of this past spring and summer rolling my eyes every time I heard a news story about the swine flu. Almost every day local reporters got hysterical about 5 or 10 or 20 confirmed cases. Entire schools closed in response to a handful of kids with fevers, and as if there were no war in Afghanistan, no economic crisis, and no other epidemics claiming ten times as many lives, newscasters talked about H1N1 (the proper name for swine flu) for hours.

I have a degree in public health and my work focuses on preventing rape and other acts of violence and supporting survivors in healing from abuse. When I see all the attention swine flu is getting, I’m jealous. Other than intermittent news stories about sex offenders on the loose or why women who accuse professional athletes of rape are lying, sexual violence rarely gets any widespread coverage. Certainly no state of emergency declared by the President of the United States.

Now, I don’t want to diminish the grief of those who have lost loved ones to H1N1. I don’t even want to question the scientific validity of the Center for Disease Control’s decision to declare it a pandemic. But the fact remains that the impact of H1N1 is far less than that of other public health crises that receive a fraction of the attention and resources. The CDC reported just over 43,000 cases of H1N1 between April and July of this year and estimates that it will affect a million people, or 0.3% of the total population of the United States. Compare this to the 2.5% of women and 0.9% of men who reported being raped or sexually assaulted in the past year. The most recent statistics about rape available from the CDC are from last year. Swine flu? Last week.

What would our media, our public discourse, and our institutional responses look like if people cared as much about rape as they do about H1N1?

I imagine the federal government urging colleges to stop the epidemic of rape by developing protocols for quarantining students who have tried to use drugs or alcohol to incapacitate women who would otherwise not consent to sex. Or university officials directing students to stay off campus or out of public areas until they are free of the belief that they are entitled to sex any time they want for a full 24 hours. Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

I dream of public health departments so inundated with the demand for educational programs that teach kids about healthy relationships that they can’t keep up. Of public outrage that there are not enough doses of self-defense training to inoculate everyone against rape, and of medical experts having to go on television to reassure people that more of these self-defense vaccines are on the way.

Then I wake up to a phone conversation with a principal who tells me there is no dating violence in his school and another with a teacher who desperately wants to offer rape prevention resources to her high school classes but can’t because the entire budget for health education in her district was cut. So much for the dream.

But if I stop resenting H1N1 for getting so much attention for a moment, I realize that what I’m complaining about is actually public health at is best. It is probably true that the coordination of government urgency, media attention, medical system mobilization, and common sense precautions will succeed in thwarting a pandemic. We will probably not look back at 2009 and say it was the beginning of a swine flu crisis that devastated a generation.

What feels like hysteria or over-emphasis is actually the way prevention is supposed to look. It is supposed to be widespread and coordinated. Messages about the importance and seriousness of the public health threat are supposed to be so pervasive that they are almost impossible to ignore. I’m so used to caring about public health crises that don’t get the attention and resources they deserve that I almost can’t recognize what the public health system looks like when it does work.

This kind of focused attention is my wildest dream for our society’s response to HIV, rape, domestic violence, drug addiction, racial health disparities, cancer-causing corporate pollution, food system injustice and every other area of public health that is marginalized.

So why is the public health infrastructure working so well? Because it’s not being undermined by shame, stigma, and denial (you know, the way rape and sexual assault are). Even in the highest drama evening news stories there is almost a complete absence of victim blaming. Personal choices and individual behaviors spread the flu, but our government, our health workers, and our media understand that this crisis is too serious to waste time arguing over whether people who don’t wash their hands or share cubicles with co-workers who fail to stay home from work the recommended 4 to 7 days deserve what they get.

It would be unthinkable for a person to avoid seeking treatment for swine flu because s/he’s afraid that if s/he tells her/his doctor s/he’ll be blamed for touching her/his eyes and nose or lose her/his housing because no parents want to raise their children in a neighborhood where people don’t sneeze into their elbows

As if invoking the finale of High School Musical, when it comes to H1N1, we’re all in this together. Swine flu is not concentrated in any population that people already hate or devalue, so raging debates about whose immoral lifestyle caused it don’t get in the way of an effective public health response. (Even Fox News is posting stories that are sympathetic to people whose jobs don’t have paid sick leave and the hardship they face in missing work as the authorities direct.) Wouldn't it be nice if other health crises were treated the same way?

In watching the rapid mobilization against this virus I know that the public health infrastructure works when our government, our media, and our medical leaders are motivated to mobilize it. H1N1 is not getting any attention it shouldn’t – it’s getting the attention all public health crises should.

The Good Wife Charter

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article6892447.ece

Women Have Never Striven More for Less

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/style/women-have-never-striven-more-for-less/article1345668/

Women have never striven more for less

Females are willing to do more work than men for less credit, a reality that will always keep our daughters down no matter how diligent they are in school and work. And it isn't a new story

Leah McLaren

Published on Friday, Oct. 30, 2009 4:16PM EDT Last updated on Sunday, Nov. 01, 2009 1:02PM EST

Good news, girlfriends: It was a banner week for women.

According to the University of Alberta, the salaries of recent female business graduates narrowly exceeded those of their male counterparts for the first time. In the U.S., a recent study called the Shriver Report found that half the American work force is now composed of women.

Women, the report said, currently make up an amazing 40 per cent of the country's breadwinners. On this side of the border, Statistics Canada also reports a dramatic increase in primary female income earners over the past four decades.

So, my sisters, it's time to pop the champagne, put on the Beyoncé and do the Single Ladies dance until ... hey ... wait a second. If you stop the pelvic-thrusting long enough to read the fine print of the 400-odd-page Shriver Report, which was conducted by California first lady Maria Shriver with the help of a think tank, the Center for American Progress, the news is actually not so great.

Despite working harder and in greater numbers than ever before, women are still earning less than men in the same jobs over all and taking most of the responsibility for housework and child care.

In essence, the plight of women is like that old morale-boosting management trick: the no-compensation promotion (also known as the non-raise raise). It's all very flattering until you realize that you have just taken on twice as much work and responsibility for no extra pay or respect.

It's a raw deal. And here's another bitter pill: Working harder than men is not going to help us renegotiate the terms.

If you want proof, just look at the plight of women in the developing world. Of the roughly one billion people who live in extreme poverty, 70 per cent are women and girls. It's a situation that has prompted Plan International to launch its new Because I am a Girl campaign, a global initiative to change to the lives of women through education and community development work. According to the mission statement, “investing in girls is the key to wiping out the cycle of global poverty.” This is because women are the donkeys of the developing world. You don't need a statistician to tell you that African women on balance work much harder than their male counterparts and have far less to show for it.

Of course, there are fewer opportunities in the developing world – it's estimated that 20 million poor women never go to school or learn to read. But when we do get a chance at education, we work our tails off. For every 100 women enrolled in a U.S. university, there are only 77 men. In Canada, a similar gender gap exists.

The question is: Where is all this hard work actually getting us? As one perennially exhausted breadwinner/mother of three young children recently said to me, “As the mother, you just have to work harder at everything. You might as well accept it; otherwise you'll just be miserable.”

No wonder the Shriver Report found that women “feel increasingly isolated, stressed and misunderstood.” We have cast off our patriarchal shackles, but in exchange for enforced hard labour.

In this new world order, women get to support their partners, remain the primary child-care givers and earn less money for doing the same jobs as men. See? Promotion without compensation.

At least in the 1950s, middle-class women got to stay home and drink martinis like on Mad Men. Maybe they were miserable, but they could wallow in it. Most working mothers I know wouldn't even have the time to register if they were on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

While women around the globe are working more in exchange for less, what are we worried about here in Canada? Boys. Apparently, they're struggling so badly that we need to dismantle the public education system to accommodate them. In Ontario, experts are recommending extra recesses and special “active learning” classrooms where boys can swing from the rafters while learning long division. We're concerned not enough of them are going to university and that, by extension, girls are going to take over the world.

But don't fret, all you protective parents of hyperactive boys, that will never happen. Because what the Shriver Report really tells us is that women are willing to do more work than men for less credit, a reality that will always keep our daughters down no matter how diligent they are in school and work. And it isn't a new story – just ask any African woman.

I'm not saying that men don't work hard – just that, when they do, they are much better at reaping the benefits of success. While men work toward outward status – the double brass ring of power and success – women tend to be driven by intrinsic reasons: duty, loyalty, the need to be “good.”

Joanne Lipman, the former deputy managing editor of The Wall Street Journal and editor-in-chief of Portfolio magazine, recently wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times responding to the Shriver Report. In it, she revealed that, during her years as an editor, “many, many men have come through my door asking for a raise or demanding a promotion. Guess how many women have ever asked me for a promotion? I'll tell you. Exactly… zero.”

Maybe while we're letting the boys out at recess, we should take the girls aside and teach them how to demand a raise. If our daughters are going to get a promotion, they might as well get compensated for it.