MEGAPOST: China’s One Child Policy

Unhappiness Over China’s One Child Policy

February 15, 2012 – China’s one child policy prevents some elder care. CNN’s Matthew Chance reports.

Research shows porn stars not as desperate as you think

Study published in The Journal of Sex Research

Published on Nov 30, 2012 by RTAmerica
According to a recent study, adult film actresses are happier, spiritually healthier and have higher self-esteem than other women. This is contrary to the belief that most of the women who have chosen the career path are drug attics and compelled to the industry due to a history of sexual abuse. Chanel Preston, adult film actress, joins us for more on the study.

Sex Trafficking Report Finds Some States Lacking

Published on Nov 29, 2012 by AssociatedPress
Shared Hope International released its annual report card for how different states are dealing with the problem of child sex trafficking. Fifteen states improved their marks this year, but 18 received failing grades.

Kenyan survey finds 1 in 3 females abused before age 18

Published on Nov 28, 2012 by NTVKenya
The Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Development on Wednesday released grim statistics on Violence against children in Kenya. The statistics indicate that violence against children is a growing vice that is hindering growth and development in the country.

Money woes limit Irish abortion options

Published on Nov 3, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish
Many countries are condemned in the West for organised religion and its effect on peoples lives. Societies throw their arms up in horror if countries like Iran or Afghanistan deny women basic rights. They tend, however, not to mention Ireland. In Ireland, a woman cannot have an abortion if she has been raped. She cannot have an abortion if the man who made her pregnant is beating her. She cannot have an abortion if the baby will die outside her body. She cannot even have an abortion if the fact of being pregnant is in some way threatening to her life. The absolute ban on abortion in Ireland creates some very stark choices for women. The choice has traditionally been for women to travel, often alone, to England for a termination. There is just one small organisation which exists to help women who want an abortion but cannot afford it, but it is in England. Requests for financial help have tripled in three years, mirroring Ireland’s financial crisis, as women discover they are pregnant with a baby they cannot support and with no recourse to help where they live. Al Jazeera’s Laurence Lee reports from Dublin.

NYC Schools Expand Birth Control Availability

Published on Oct 24, 2012 by VOAvideo
More than 7,000 girls in New York City become pregnant by the age of 17 each year. Nearly two-thirds have abortions. Now, some New York public high schools are expanding a program to provide birth control to students as young as 14 who request it. That expansion has become controversial with some parents. VOA’s Carolyn Weaver has more.

Peru’s forcibly sterilised seek justice

Published on Mar 10, 2012 by AlJazeeraEnglish
After years of denying any wrongdoing, Peru has reopened investigation into forcible sterilisation of women, what human rights groups say was a crime against humanity.

During the 1990s, more than 300,000 women were pressured into being sterilised by the government.

Doctors and nurses under Alberto Fujimori’s administration, between 1996 and 2000, were assigned monthly quotas and given bonuses based on the number of sterilisations they performed.

Al Jazeera’s Latin America Editor Lucia Newman reports from Anta on the women’s quest for justice.

Attempting to Bridge Burma’s HIV Treatment Gap

Published on Sep 10, 2012 by VOAvideo

Burma’s AIDS epidemic mostly affects marginalized groups, such as the gay community. In a country where homosexuality remains illegal, finding and treating gay patients is a challenge for the few health workers devoted to their treatment. VOA News reports that an annual religious event called a Nat festival, however, is one time when the gay community can network – and talk to health workers about treatment.

Perversion for Profit (1965) and Printed Poison – Citizens for Decent Literature

Perversion for Profit is a 1965 propaganda film financed by Charles Keating and narrated by George Putnam. A vehement diatribe against pornography, the film attempts to link explicit portrayals of human sexuality to the subversion of American civilization, and briefly draws a parallel between pornography and the Communist conspiracy. The film is in the public domain, and it has become a popular download from the Prelinger Archives. Perversion for Profit illustrates its claims with still images taken from various soft core pornography magazines of the period, though with some portions of human anatomy obscured by colored rectangles.

To bolster his position, Putnam makes several references to “Dr. Sorokin, the renowned Harvard sociologist”. This individual is Pitirim Sorokin, a Russian-American who founded Harvard’s Sociology department and served as the American Sociological Association’s 55th president.

In an article discussing the Prelinger Archives for the San Francisco Chronicle, Peter L. Stein observes that the film has gained a different sort of utility than its producers intended: …as the parade of girlie magazine covers, men’s physique pictorials and campy S&M leaflets continues, the film betrays a kind of prurience the filmmakers could hardly have intended. What results is a remarkable visual record of midcentury underground literature and sexual appetites, and a gloss on the values of the society that condemned them.

At the time the Chronicle article was written, Perversion was the Archive’s second most popular download, superseded only by Duck and Cover. Ephemeral film scholar Rick Prelinger, founder of the Archive, views the popularity of such films as a sign the “unofficial evidence of everyday life” has become more interesting than “‘official’ documents from Washington or New York”.

In 2004, a Prelinger Archive user going by the pseudonym “Trafalgar” produced a remix, in which short clips from the film are rearranged to make a pro-pornography advocacy video. Trafalgar’s remix, entitled Come Join the Fun!, is available from the Internet Archive’s open-source movie collection. The electronica band 3kStatic sampled audio from the original Perversion film for the title track of their 2005 album Perversion: for Profit.

Printed Poison – Citizens for Decent Literature

the “infection” of “so-called” nudist mags in a community and “abnormal perversions”

Lil Wayne – How To Love (2011)

Wikipedia – How To Love

The video first shows a young woman deciding to not get an abortion and running out of the hospital. Her child is born a girl and lives through tough times with her single mother, due to her father being in jail. When the girl is an adolescent, her mother’s boyfriend molests her. When she becomes a teenager, she is promiscuous. When she became an adult, she has two children and soon becomes a stripper. A customer from the strip club pays her to have sex with him and she is diagnosed with HIV. She runs out of the hospital, like her mother at the beginning of the video. The music video then rewinds and shows a different life that the girl could have lived. Her mother would move into her own mother’s house and even marry a better man, with her little daughter as flower girl. In the end, the daughter grows up to be smarter and more mature, and graduates from high school, making her mother and grandmother proud. When she becomes an adult, she is in the same hospital again awaiting a test result and the doctor tells her she is pregnant, she is happy and hugs her mother, thanking her for teaching her “how to love.”

Tales of two Chinese women – space travel and forced abortion

Published on Jun 22, 2012 by linktv

(LinkAsia News: 6/22/12) A tale of two women: Liu Yang, the first Chinese female astronaut, blasted off earlier this week. The other, 22-year-old Feng Jianmai, was forced to have an abortion at seven months pregnant by local government officials. Host Yul Kwon reports on how people reacted to these two women’s stories.

Human traffickers take advantage of legalized prostitution in Spain

Published on Jul 20, 2012 by TheNewYorkTimes

Human traffickers take advantage of legalized prostitution in Spain.

Related Article: http://nyti.ms/QgTWQv

MEGAPOST: 1940s-1950s Sex Education

Disney ’46 The Story of Menstruation

The Story of Menstruation is a 1946 10-minute animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions in 1946.
It was commissioned by the International Cello-Cotton Company (now Kimberly-Clark) and was shown to approximately 105 million American students in health education classes.

It was one of the first commercially sponsored films to be distributed to high schools. It was distributed with a booklet for teachers and students called Very Personally Yours that featured advertising of the Kotex brand of products, and discouraged the use of tampons, where the market was dominated by the Tampax brand of rivals Procter & Gamble.

The Story of Menstruation is believed to be the first film to use the word vagina in its screenplay. Neither sexuality nor reproduction is mentioned in the film, and an emphasis on sanitation makes it, as Disney historian Jim Korkis has suggested: “a hygienic crisis rather than a maturation event.”

Condom shortage in Kenya

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention…but this an adage Isiolo residents have taken to another level, quite literally…this because there are people in the area who have finally decided to take all necessary measures to combat the high rate of HIV prevalence in the area … Only that their way of going about arresting the spread of the virus is not one you would consider orthodox. Here’s Evelyn Wambui with the story of people that have resorted to re-using condoms or plastic paper bags, due to the scarcity or unavailability of condoms in the area.

There was rare excitement in Witimire slums in Nyeri after a non-governmental organization supplied the residents with condoms. The government yesterday admitted that condoms were out of stock. The Kenya Red Cross has also moved in to supply another consignment to Isiolo town which is one of the areas hard hit by the condom shortage. Pamela Asigi reports.

Hormonal Contraception May Double HIV/AIDS Risk

Oct 6, 2011

A new study finds that the use of a hormonal contraceptive popular with women in eastern and southern Africa doubles their risk of becoming infected with HIV. And when it is used by HIV-infected women, it doubles the risk they will infect their male partners. The large study was conducted in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV – the virus that causes AIDS – has been spread mainly through heterosexual sex.