cwilliams's Amplify Diary

Sex Ed for Teens...through cell phones?

Sat, 02 May 2009 16:14:00 -0500

North Carolina recently instituted this pretty interesting program. ANyone (but especially teens) can text any and all of their questions about sex and sexuality to a specific cell phone, owned by the Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Campaign of North Carolina, and get a non-judgemental, comprehensive reply from an anonymous sex educator at the center. Check out the full story from the New York Times.

Free STI Testing event!

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 22:44:00 -0500

Yesterday, UNC--Chapel Hill Campus health service brought the Alliance of AIDS Services--Carolina to campus to provide free STI testing to students. The testing covered gonorrhea, syphillis, chlamydia, and HIV. They were supposed to be there for 3 hours, but the event was so succesful that the testers ran out of supplies and hour and a half into the event!!

Luckily, they've agreed to come back to campus on Monday and continue to offer these testing services. This organization is great, by the way, partially because they always provide these services free of charge. I highly encourage other people and schools to set up events like this--they are hugely necessary and extremely popular.

Every breath you take...I'll be watching you

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 15:35:00 -0500

So I just finished talking with one of the women who works in my building. She's cleaned my floor's bathrooms, hallways, kitchen, etc. for the past four months that I've lived here--in fact, she was hired around the same time as I moved in. She's as worried as everyone else today about the state of the economy and what that means for her job, particularly with an unemployed husband and a young daughter at home. But Leia (I've changed her name for this) has another thing to worry about that most people don't have to contend with--something that no one should have to contend with.

Leia is being stalked by a man who also works in this building, albeit on a different floor. He follows her, watches her while she works, waits for her in more isolated parts of the building. She finally mentioned it to the assistant supervisor, who said the stalker would be spoken to, but Leia is terrified of what might happen now. This man has not been moved to another building and none of his privileges have been revoked. He has simply (supposedly) been verbally reprimanded.
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The most amazing day!!!

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:33:00 -0500

I don't even know how to bgin to express my joy.

This morning, both houses of the Vermont state legislature overrode the Vermont Governor's veto of the marriage equality bill - and the process in Vermont is now over. Marriage equality will take affect in Vermont on September 1st. After nine years of a civil union law, Vermont legislators have seen that civil union laws do not provide equality and will NEVER provide equality as real marriage equality would.

And.....condoms are flowing out of the envelope on the door.

And......my beloved TAR HEELS are NCAA Champions!!!

Dating "race-blind" in a not-so-post-racial society

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:45:00 -0500

This is a portion of something I wrote for my Women's Studies class, and it's something I've been thinking about for about a week or so now. What does it mean to be "Race-blind" and is it even feasible? I mean, how do we turn off all of our sunconscous nonsense and evaluate one another for who we actually are when all of society is around us, informing our judgements in a racialized way?

It’s funny. These vestiges of colonialism pop up everywhere if one is a person of Color, but they are especially insidious in the ways they inform our intimate relations with others. Some of us actively search for a White partner, for the protection it will afford us in the face of a power structure that is skewed towards the pale end of the scale. Others seek other people of color, feeling that there is unity in minority status (think of the South Asian guy in Mean Girls). Still others look for members of the same racial/ethnic group, hoping for the preservation of traditions and values. And then there are those of us who try to be race-blind in our dating, and find how difficult that can be.
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Whose informed consent?

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:04:00 -0500

A few weeks ago, I attended the Duke University Journal of Gender Law & Policy's annual symposium. It was, in a word, FABULOUS. If you're ever down here in lovely North Carolina for this conference, you absolutely MUST go (registration is free).

The speakers for the day touched on a lot of things: HIV/AIDS, domestic violence, infanticide...you get the picture. But the topic I'd like to devote this post to was Maya Manian's discussion of Gonzalez v. Carhart, a hugely important court case, and the most recent Supreme Court decision on abortion.

Gonzalez upheld Bush's Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003 (never mind that "partial birth" isn't a medical term, so to a doctor there's no such thing as a "partial birth" abortion). Part of the reason Gonzalez spurred such a furor had to do with its health exception, or lack thereof. Ever since Roe v. Wade, abortion restrictions have had health exceptions--provisions that allow a restricted procedure to be performed if the woman's life is in danger, with the understanding that if the mother dies the fetus probably will also. This is the case with third trimester abortions (at which point a fetus is often considered "vaible" with today's medical technology). However, the PBAA doesn't have any such provision, and Gonzalez doesn't require that it does. So now, in the eyes of the law, the life of the unborn fetus is superior to that of the living mother. Gonzalez moves us one step closer to Brazil, where women are kept on dialisis and other life-support machines for months until their fetuses are viable outside of the womb and can be removed--at which point the women are left to die.
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Pope vs. Condoms

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:07:00 -0500

Thank you to Avaaz.org for putting together this petition!!

"Last week, on his first visit to Africa, Pope Benedict said that "[AIDS] cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems".

The Pope's statement is at odds with the research on AIDS prevention, and a setback to decades of hard work on AIDS education and awareness. With powerful moral influence over more than 1.1 billion Catholics in the world, and 22 million HIV positive Africans, these words could dramatically affect the AIDS pandemic and put millions of lives at risk. Worldwide concern is starting to show results and a willingness by the Vatican to revise the statement - sign our urgent petition asking the Pope to take care not to undermine proven AIDS prevention strategies:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/pope_benedict_petition

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It's raining condoms...hallelujah!

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 16:37:00 -0500

The condoms are finally here!!

My roomie and I have posted an envelope full of 'em on our door, and so far 10 have been taken! Just wait till Friday night...

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