rebelraising (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rebelraising) wrote2004-01-21 04:24 pm
rebelraising) wrote2004-01-21 04:24 pm
(no subject)
I thought I should really just post to note that just as I sat down to plan our consultation on the Sexual Health Strategy, look what came on my random playlist!
Hmm. So I'm trying to devise a questionnaire about where queer women get their information and advice from. And it occurs to me that there are several such women on my friends list. So: tell me.
Where did you get your sex education about sex between women?
What do you think "safer sex" means, between women?
Where do/ would you go for help with a sexual health problem?
Where do/ would you go for relationship advice?
Who do you talk to about sex and sexual health?
And, in an ideal world, how would you have answered those questions?
And, just as an injoke for those of us who've spent days reading this document: would you use a dental dam if you were in prison, but not otherwise?
I do actually want to know, by the way - both because I'm interested generally in other people's experiences, and because I need to put some shape to this consultation I'm planning. So: talk about sex! Now!
Hmm. So I'm trying to devise a questionnaire about where queer women get their information and advice from. And it occurs to me that there are several such women on my friends list. So: tell me.
Where did you get your sex education about sex between women?
What do you think "safer sex" means, between women?
Where do/ would you go for help with a sexual health problem?
Where do/ would you go for relationship advice?
Who do you talk to about sex and sexual health?
And, in an ideal world, how would you have answered those questions?
And, just as an injoke for those of us who've spent days reading this document: would you use a dental dam if you were in prison, but not otherwise?
I do actually want to know, by the way - both because I'm interested generally in other people's experiences, and because I need to put some shape to this consultation I'm planning. So: talk about sex! Now!
no subject
Um... hands-on experience? ;-) It sounds like a joke, but I was thinking about it and it's really not. I don't think I read a graphic description of sex between women, or heard it discussed, till years after the first time I had sex with another woman. (Not many years, admittedly. One or two.) All the lesbian novels I read were really fairly ungraphic. I had a friend who bought a copy of The Joy Of Lesbian Sex, which I borrowed and read, but I'm fairly sure that wasn't till I was 19. And I was older than that before I read a fictional or autobiographical graphic description of two women having sex (that was written from a lesbian POV, that is: not that I think only a lesbian can write woman/woman sex scenes, but I had read several graphic woman/woman sex scenes where the point was evidently to have two women mimic heterosexual missionary position intercourse as far as human ingenuity enabled them: and I just dismissed this as absolutely nothing to do with me.)
What do you think "safer sex" means, between women?
Means having sex in such a way as to avoid, as far as reasonably convenient, all the nasty bugs that two women can transmit to each other. Herpes is the obvious one that's easily transmissible: HIV, hepatitis, syphilis, gonorrhea are less likely, but feasible depending what activities you take part in: genital warts, crabs, etc.
Where do/ would you go for help with a sexual health problem?
Probably the local Well Woman clinic, though if I were worried about HIV, I'd probably get an anonymous test done at the GUM clinic at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, first. But I've been to the Well Woman clinic before and I like the attitude there.
Where do/ would you go for relationship advice?
Friends.
Who do you talk to about sex and sexual health?
Friends, and sometimes random acquaintances online, and sexual partners.
And, in an ideal world, how would you have answered those questions?
In an ideal world I'd be happy about going to see my GP about any sexual health issues I might have. I'm not, at least not as a first step, and that's partly because I don't like one of the partners at the practice I go to, and I'm not comfortable talking about sexual issues with two out of the remaining four.
In an ideal world, I think all adolescents (or even younger children) would get to watch volunteers having sex as part of their sex education - people of all ages, pairings and triplets and quadruplets of all combinations. People would grow up without the straitjacket idea that sex=intercourse, that in order to have sex at least one person has to have an erect cock or a simulacrum thereof. And in an ideal world, I don't think that people would have to figure out what their sexuality was.
I was sixteen before I figured out I was a lesbian. It took at least two years from discovering that lesbians existed (source: an article in Spare Rib, as I remember) to when I realised/accepted that the feelings I had for other girls were real, even if completely unacknowledged, and that I didn't have any feeling like that for boys. It wasn't really until I first met other lesbians that I could accept that my feelings were real, and weren't going to disappear.
In an ideal world, I wouldn't have had a problem figuring out that my feelings were real, because I would have known that of course women are attracted to other women, just as a matter of normal growing up. But I think in an ideal world it might have taken me just as long - if not longer - to figure out that I am exclusively attracted to women. It's not that I think in an ideal world we'd all be bisexual: I think that in an ideal world, bisexuality would be assumed the norm as heterosexuality is now, though without deviations from the assumed norm being persecuted or discriminated against.
no subject