dear internet, let me tell you some things about my public-school-in-georgia sex education.
pictured above is my abstinence til marriage card, given to me in my eighth grade health class. as you can see, i did not sign it, so it is non-binding. they were “optional” but the teacher placed the basket at the front of the class and stared us down. my 13-year-old self had a very brief dilemma between 1. making a stand and not getting one or 2. getting one because it’s fucking hilarious. i am very glad i chose the latter, because as i predicted, this is now something hilarious to show everyone.
that year in health we also learned “how to spot the identifying features of a crack baby” which is literally nothing but lies. we had a system of anonymous questions, and once someone asked “how do i know if i’m a lesbian?” our teacher looked disgusted and she replied “how would i know? i’m not a lesbian!”
EDIT i forgot to mention when she gave these to us she suggested we “cut up our cards together with our husbands on our wedding day” and i remember thinking, fuck if i marry someone from my middle school
the next time i had sex ed in high school it was taught by a dude gym coach who spent the whole time talking about his daughters. the book we were learning from listed “low self-esteem” “stunted social growth” and “depression,” among others, as consequences of premarital sex. at one point, it asked us to fill in the disadvantages of having an abortion. our teacher went, “well, i’m personally against abortion, so we’re just going to skip this section,” which confused me, because it was explicitly asking for an argument against abortion.
the last time i had sex ed it was pretty good and there were free condoms and we got little bottles of lube every time we answered questions, but i don’t think that counts cause it was in an intro to women’s studies class.
yep, this is the state i went to middle and high school in…
The solution is drugs and an unrepentant commitment to bad ideas.
omg. anxiety over tuesday. stop.
Flowchart of Skyenana.
Too many goddamn martyrs.
I don’t think I understand the impulse that people have to strap a dead kid to the front of their movement like a body on the front of some kind of Road Warrior style marauder tank.
It doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It is a little problematic considering you’re using someone’s name when they are physically incapable of consenting to you doing that, but it isn’t the worst thing you can do. I don’t think people marching for Trayvon Martin are doing a bad thing. I don’t think Occupy Oakland and Occupy Atlanta are doing anything negative by putting the names of Oscar Grant and Troy Davis on their sites.
But I also don’t really understand what happens when we do that. Are we saying “This could have been us. This is what happens to people like us, and we aren’t going to take it!”
Or are we just trying to remind ourselves that no matter how things change, there are some that won’t get to see the better day?
Maybe we just want Road Warrior corpse tanks. I’m going with that.
#Occupycorpsetank
A friend of mine, who is awesome and on tumblr, is very active and vocal about gender issues around campus.
All about that stuff in between blue and pink.
She put up a ton of signs (with an adorable cartoon) that said “No Shave November, No Matter Your Gender”.
There was a picture of a dude with a beard and a girl with a raised fist exposing hairy armpits.
Someone wrote over the dude: AWESOME!
Then over the girl: GROSS!
Way to sum up an entire cultures shitty relationship with bodies and hair I guess?
Last night the state of Georgia killed a man.
There were protests and vigils in countries all over the world and the Internet exploded with people talking about the execution.
It was the second time this year the whole world had gotten intimately involved in a trial that way, and both times genuinely scared me.
The first was the Casey Anthony trial. There were a lot differences for me between the two, starting with the fact that I had known about Troy Davis for years and didn’t know a single thing about Anthony until photos started popping up on the news and Nancy Grace started an around the clock shriekathon to get her convicted.
With Casey and with Troy, social media and news coverage put crowds nd crowds of people outside of courthouses screaming for an outcome they wanted. And both times there were people on the news minutes after the verdicts saying “We’ve seen a failure of American justice today.”
There’s a reason we don’t vote on murder cases. There’s a reason we shouldn’t. And it’s the idea of doubt. What a lot of people screaming to hang Casey Anthony from the nearest tree didn’t seem to get was that there was still a chance that she might have just been cought in a rough place. There wasn’t enough conclusive. And maybe that’s what happened to Troy;s jury too. Or maybe he was guilty.
While cases where the public decides a person is guilty and turn into screaming hatemobs scare me, massive screaming groups trying to overturn a courts decision to convict sometimes backfire too. What if we’re wrong?
It’s hard to think about. But mercy wins. If the court is wrong or the lynchmob is wrong, a wrongful death occurs. If we let a murderer go free, we’ve done an injustice to the victims but we have also released a person to constant scrutiny. And murder is the least repeated crime. This seems callous, but it just keeps coming up the same. The cost to every party means we have to err, if we’re going to err, on the side of clemency.
It’s why I don’t think an irreversible decision has a place in the justice system. Because I don’t trust the mobs and I don’t trust the courts. And I’m not sure what anyone has actually learned from either one.
“There are so many different kinds of marijuana; you find the kind that suits you.” —Patricia Troy, 65, fibromyalgia patient and part of our “Medical Marijuana and the Seniors Who Rely on It” slide show
BEST. PHOTO. EVER.
