The Fortune says "Look Ahead for a New Beginning"

The Natural World has developed a wonderful way of continuing itself through the act of reproduction, combining some chromosomes with some DNA, and bam! you've got yourself a new generation. Humans added another component to the mess and developed these emotional relationships where we all go through this intense ritual of dating, having emotional sex, getting involved in in each others lives, and then maybe spending life together or maybe one day it bluntly ends. We also have a psychology behind all these intense romantic relationships that more or less guide us to finding what we want in a romantic relationship, including what needs to be compromised and what cannot.

Now relationships are not easy, that is a fact. They take work, they take time, they take lots and lots of patience. Sometimes we get in fights and we wonder if we will will work it out, or if the whole shebang is lost. There is no doubt that it is extremely hard to suddenly not think only about yourself 100% of the time and acknowledge that there is someone else there, someone who cares about you and the relationship. Its hard when you've always toughed it out on your own to adjust to opening up to your significant other, to spill your problems and your insecurities. So if relationships are so hard, why do we even bother? If break-ups are so nasty, so disgusting, so brutal, why do we still give love another chance?

Now I'm no pro when it comes to true love and all that blah blah, but I do know what is it like when someone cares about you and listens with open ears and an open heart to your problems and issues. There is something magical about this kind of deep respect that someone has for you, and it makes you want to return the favor. Loving someone is beyond just doing things with them, its about being there through the tough times and the fun times. Its about being interested in their lives as much as they are interested in yours. Its about being honest and opening up, not keeping them in the dark. Its about feeling comfortable with them, feeling like someone is rooting for you, always having a cheerleader.

I know this is not sociological but for some reason I feel it necessary to share to whoever is reading this how I feel about love. Love is an awesome feeling that no one should deny themselves. Not loving or denying yourself the ability to love is sad and I feel very sorry for you. Life without love must be a very dark, cold, and lonely life.

All you need is love!

Ah Public Radio

So I'm starting to get annoyed with The Rivers constant repative music... always Blue Oyster Cult or Eric Clapton or Heart... can't even play The Beatles all that much anymore. So I switched the dial to WABE (public Radio 90.1 FM) yesterday and discovered Gringo Star! A play on my favorite drummer, Ringo Starr, they have a little garage band sound that I'm actually really digging.

Perhaps my lack of television has also made me rediscover public radio a little more, but radio is a dying art that is more and more being headed up by mass radio companies, so for once this station has no commercials and great programs, like BBS News and A Prairie Home Companion... one of the best (and perhaps only) radio shows with Garrison Keillor. A must for the nostalgic and the nostalgic at heart!

Anyways, Gringo Star! They are awesome may I suggest you check them out... even though they've been around for a while. Their debut album, All Y'all, is for sale on iTunes too. Enjoy!

http://www.myspace.com/thegringostars

My Raging Functionalist...

I'm currently enrolled in this Sociology course called Race & Ethnic Relations. The basis of the course is to talk about issues and complications in racial and ethnic discriminations and prejudice. This class was right up my alley until I realized that if you bring up the "wrong opinion" you will chastized. Now I'm all for opinions and sharing ideas, I like to hear all about people's opinions and whatnot, but there are some people that are getting on my nerves.

Here is my philosophy on race & ethnicity: The basic concept is that we seperate ourselves based on skin color, but we also attach historical and political significance to it. People totally play the game of race & ethnicity when it suits them (St. Patricks Day, Black History Month, Cinco de Mayo...) and when it sets them apart in a positive light. But the moment that one is faced with negative consequences of these seperations, then its racism. But its all racism, its all seperation, and its all going to keep going on unless the idea of visual discrimination and prejudice had never existed in the first place.

I also believe that we like to place ourselves in groups, we like to belong to groups that set us apart from the vast billions of people in this world. The tighter and smaller our group we belong to, the more we find individualism: for example, I am a white female who goes to college, is a Sociology major, and has a religious obsession for The Beatles... now how many people are in my same boat, based on just those three things? Probably only a handful, which makes us all a tight group and we are able to set ourselves apart. This is how race and ethnicity works. It is a social construction that allows us to set ourselves apart that much more, thus we are seperating ourselves.

Also there is historical context in this, as we like to constantly teach in classes.
The enslavement of African people in the USA took a greater toll on our society than most of us even realize. It was dirty, it was power-driven, it was humiliating, it was wrong, it was pretty much the most horrible, disgusting slave-business ever run in the history of humanity, and it happened only about 150 years ago. And now the problem is that now we are still fighting it. We can fight it by learning about different races and ethnicities and by understanding that all this idea that one group is less superior is complete bogus, but to completely understand and solve a problem you have to understand it first... Oh my god look Functionalist Theory! If you want to solve the problem, you have to understand first HOW it functions in society! You have to look at the reality, the historical context... theorizing about ideal solutions and fantasty worlds where "everyone is equal" isn't going to get anyone anywhere. To eliminate racism, you have to completely stop seperating people and you have to stop making such a big deal about racism. I know it sounds ignorant and very blunt, but if you're not thinking about something, its not an issue. Period.

I needed to vent, those girls just made me mad. Seriously, I'm not ignorant, I'm trying to understand all perspectives of the problem. I'm a Functionalist, get used to it!

ASSHOLE! Did I get your attention? Ok good...

One of my close friends has come up with possibly the greatest website ever... and I encourage you to check it out! Not only is it an excellent place to vent, but you can read about other people's misfortunes and such, PLUS you will learn what not to do to piss people off!

Check it out: http://www.dearasshole.net/

It will change your life!

My Inner Sociologist and My Raging Liberal... all-in-one!

This afternoon was the most inspiring I've had in a while. I went to library with the intention to brainstorm on some potential and perhaps original research topics. I don't really know whats going on with my research work load (three projects with Professor Greif and now I'm adding my own...) but since all my classes overlap, I need something to do! I've heard the phrase "informed consent" way too many times this week in three classes, so its time for some work to distract me.

Now the trick with a research topic is you have to come up with something useful that people will care about, but it has to be original. If you're studying something that people already have written about, you need to put a new spin on it. Well after I toyed around with my typical interests (sex-ed, teen pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, etc) I began to wonder how differently sex-ed is taught in a public school versus a private. Inspired with my creative twist, I began to think about why anyone would care... and I concluded that if one group of kids were less likely to get pregnant than the other group, then maybe I had my topic! But just to spice it up, I decided to draw comparisions between two cities: a "liberal" one and a "conservative" one.

So here it is folks, my Objective: to compare and contrasts the depths of sexual education & abstinence programs in public schools and private schools, and to see if there is an affect on that city's teen pregnancy rates.

It needs a little work, I feel like I have two objectives in one in there, but maybe I can make my case. Now there are some obvious questions I have to ask myself, like what two cities I want to study. Because I'm already studying Atlanta and Los Angeles, I think I'll avoid those two... instead I was considering New York City (the "liberal") and Houston (the "conservative"). Both are major cities in major states with a heavy political influence.

I like these two cities because they have distinct minority groups that are actually comparable (Mostly Hispanic, which are interestingly heavy on the Catholocism...), and both are large enough to include a variety of public and private schools. It would be interesting which of the two has the lowest teen-pregnancy rate, and also the ratio of public schools to private ones. My inner Sociologist begs to ask so many questions: What are the racial/ethnic rates in each school system? Where are the schools located? What is the property tax in these areas?

Then I'll have to look into each school system's sexual-education program. At what age or grade to they begin to administer the programs? Do they encourage abstinence in middle school, high school, or both? Are the programs co-ed, seperated, or a mix of both? How much weight is put on abstinence versus sexual-education? Are the kids taught to put on condoms, and if they are, is it all the kids or just the boys? Do they teach the girls about Birth Control, or even how to insert a tampon?

I'm still toying with the teen-pregnancy rate bit though. My meek, quiet side feels like its too much, like I'll have to do a study on the public and private schools and compare them in both cities, but my raging political side sees no point in comparing the two if I can't prove something, and this case would be proving that one program decreases teen pregnancies... but I won't go there because thats just my Raging Liberal that will get the best of me. Objective Research Claire! Stay Objective!

If you've stuck out this long, would you have suggestions? I love new ideas... and if you see a flaw or something that can be improved on please let me know! Or just let me know what you think... My Inner Sociologist and Raging Liberal thank you.

Sowing the Seeds of Love

First and foremost... its back to school and back to action! Its looking like a pretty kick-ass semester at GSU... with two classes about sex and some sociology courses on methods and race relations, my love. Plus I've been hired as an official Sociology research assistant... with a small but still awesome pay! And who says you can't be paid to do what you love.

So today in my Sexuality and Society (Soci 3156) course we discussed sex and how we view at a society. We started off with an icebreaker which I found particularly engaging... come up with as much jargon and slang for "sex". Some typical ones came up like "screw," "doing it," "getting it on," and so on. But I was really fond of "snuzz"... I had not yet heard of that one! Then we searched for themes for all this slang, and we came down to sex slang is generally violent, masculine, and lacks intimacy. There are more words like drill, fuck, screw, bang, etc. than "make love to..." when you think about it, and this definitely says something about our society.

Now I know this seems like a risque topic for a blog... but lets take a moment and think about what sex means to us. Most of us can agree that its enjoyable, pleasurable, and that its a moving experience we can share with someone else... or more if you're into that. Plus its how we multiply... by being fruitful! So whats not to love, really. Well the part that's not to love is how we've turned it into a violent act through our slang. Who wants to think that they're banging the one they love? But I cannot speak for everyone, some people like that kind of violent talk, and that's ok. The point of this exercise in class was to acknowledge that there are different kinds of sex as well (besides PVI) and that 1.4% of women consider deep kissing as sex (statistic taken from overhead in class). Some people consider oral sex as a way to loose your v-card, as others see PVI the ultimate virginity taker. Some people don't even think their virginity is taken until they orgasm!

How does this affect how our social institutions influence us about sex? Think about religion, government, family... all of these are fundamental social institutions that dictate more or less how we feel about sex... our families teach us what sex is (recall "when a daddy and mommy love each other...") school teaches us about consequences of sex, government regulates what kind of sex we have with whom (two gay men having sex? Doesn't fly in every state does it?), the list goes on. Do you think parents teach their kids to bang each other, or are they tend more to encourage sex with someone you care about? The church sure loves it when two people who care about each other have sex... they have a whole ceremony for it: Marriage!

All in all, I won't get into the nitty gritty details... mostly because I am so tired. Its good to be back in school, where I can stress about school work and learn new things. Never again will I take such a long break with almost no work to do! But I will say this: we must never assume that what is natural, normal, and moral for us is the same for everyone else.

Journal Articles: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Recently I have acquired a journal article out of The Journal of Marriage and Family entitled "Racial Differences in Sexual and Fertility Attitudes in an Urban Setting." Based on the title, I was expecting a sort of study on comparisons of sexual behavior among people in an urban area, perhaps comparing richer neighborhoods to the poorer ones, and certainly including comparisons between major racial groups (Black vs. Hispanic vs. White vs. Asians... etc). Overall, though it didn't come from a particularly fantastic journal, I was expecting a good read and to perhaps some juice to satisfy my curiosity.

Sadly, I was deeply disappointed by the low quality of the article, and for several reasons that no article with any sort of scholarly merit should have. First and foremost, the article was actually concentrated on a specific age group (adolescents) which would have been nice to know in the title, as I am not interested in teen fertility in my research! Not only did the authors focus completely on teens, but they spent the whole paper talking only about Blacks, only vaguely touching on other racial groups. In the title "Racial Differences" I would expect a more in-depth analysis of all major racial groups, not just one. It does not make a good basis for comparison.

Second of all, the authors had all these bold statements but lacked all sorts of references and evidence that their statements were true. For example, stating that "evidence suggests that African American adolescents and young adults hold attitudes more favorable to non-marital intercourse and childbearing than adolescents and young adults of other races" (Browning 239)is very bold. It is basically saying that Black kids have more non-marital sex as oppose to their other racial peers, which is fine to say if you can back it up. But instead the authors go right on by talking about how these adolescents are having sex at every given opportunity. There is no "HOW" or "WHY" and it just irks me because these kinds of judgements deserve at least some reputable evidence.

Another thing that got under my skin was how the authors brought slavery back into the field. At this point, one wonders if that is the explanation to turn to for everything. In the conclusion, there is no suggestion of what can be done in the urban Black community to better the situation to pull their kids out of these teen pregnancies. Instead the audience gets fed the same anecdote of "its all because of slavery that they are like this" not accepting that the slavery excuse can only be true for so much. Instead we need to look at how our society is run and see that, in fact, just as much blame can but put on our society for always giving the Black community the shitty end of the stick (excuse my French). Are teens having babies because their great-great-great-great-grandmothers had kids at 15, or because their school sex-ed programs are inadequate? If our society has evlolved from the horse-and-buggy to the Toyota Prius, I have faith that our sex-ed programs and our journal articles do not have to be so pre-historic either. What this article lacked was some analysis of the sexual education in schools and some in-depth research on what the kids do after school, not an overused excuse of inhumane enslavement.

Thus ends my vent of this lame journal article. Hopefully there is one out there to redeem it.

HIV/AIDS Among Transgenders in LA County

Recently I have come across a very short but well written article from The American Journal of Public Health (and if anyone knows anything about journals, this is definitely a top-notch one). Researchers Jordan W. Edwards MA, Dennis Fisher PhD, and Grace L. Reynolds, DPA obtained the annual survey done by the Los Angeles (LA) County Department of Health Services Office of AIDS Programs and Policy (OAPP). Their goal was to investigate the education of AIDS/HIV prevention education to the transgender/transsexual community of LA county. They were interested in this county because they wanted to draw comparisons to San Francisco, where there is a big population of LGBTQIQ and also because they wanted to understand why this particular community had an HIV seroprevalence of 22%, "higher than that for all other groups except for gay and bisexual men in selected high-risk groups" (Edwards, 1030).

Before I get too much into the research itself, I'd like to give some background information on transgenders and transsexuals. A transgender is someone who feels or believes that they were born the wrong sex, so a man actually feels he should be a woman. A transsexual is a type of transgender, but he or she is actually a candidate for "gender-reassignment process: the process of transsexuals to change their body to the other gender" (Hyde 349). There are two types of transgenders: Male-to-female and Female-to-male. There is also talk of transgenders being neither one or the other, but instead of being the "third gender". Beyond that, transgenders (that see themselves as either male or female) that are attracted to women are known as gynephilic (guy-nuh-FEL-ic) and those that are attracted to men are androphilic (andro-FEL-ic). "For example, if we think of a female-to-male [think man] transsexual, he would be classified as androphilic if he is attracted to men and as gynephilic if he is attracted to women" (Hyde 350).

Transgenders generally only take hormones to bring out more male or female features, engage in cross-dressing, but they don't want to undergo gender-reassignment surgeys. Edwards, Fisher, and Reynolds focused mostly on transgenders since they were interested in how the use of needles spread AIDS/HIV. Their survey was sent to 2514 clients of the public health center, and "interviewers returned 2126 surveys (84.6% survey return rate [pretty high as far as Sociology Stats are concerned!]). Of these surveys returned, 96 (4.5%) participants "self-indentified as male-to-female and 11 (o.5%) identified as female-to-male transgenders" (Edwards 1031). 52.44 % (at a 95% CI) reported that they were AIDS positive, which although it is not a lot of people, bear in mind that this is a very large proportion of AIDS positive clients for such a small sample of people: more than half!

Two major factors are responsible for this high rate of HIV/AIDS. First of all, transgenders who engage "in commercial sex work, workers are more likely to in unprotected anal sex" (Edwards 1032). Because that (ahem) region of the body contains so many more blood vessels than your typical sex organs, the HIV virus is even more easy to transmit and to develop into AIDS. Second of all, the high cost of needles and their availability make using a new needle everytime a very hard standard to live up to as far as hormonal injections go. But recently (like in the past 2 years) "California has authorized counties to allow the sale of new needles without a prescription" (Edwards 1032) so the use of new needles for every hormonal injection may go up, therefor perhaps decreasing HIV infections. With new data like this readily available by the LA county, we can better understand sexual health in neighborhoods and the kinds of trends that lead to the spread of diseases and bacterium.

Some like it hot...

As we continue to explore behavior amoung LA residents, part of our research is to observe their (gasp) sexual behaviors... so basically are they getting enough nookey? But before we obsereve sexual habits in LA, lets take a trip in a time machine and explore the history of sex.

Though it is kept under covers, sexual behavior is possibly (one of) the most fundamental social behavior that humans engage in. The early Chinese religion of Taoism has this to say about the deed: "If you can avoid mortification and injury and attain the arts of sex, you will have found the way of nondeath" (Raun, 1991 pg. 56). So basically if you're good in bed, you are an immortal, a god, a Zeus (good job!) Greek gods and goddesses were often depicted engaging in intercourse, and some gods were even half male, half female so to pleasure themselves (I'm getting a sort of human photosynthesis vibe here... for all you bio majors). "Muslims believe that sexual intercourse was one of the finest pleasures of life" (Hyde 3) and the big cheese Muhammad always was in good company himself. Only in the Christian faith do we see that sexual activity is heavily condemed. For example, a "person who had wet dreams was considered guilty of sodomy and witchcraft" (Hyde 3).

So from a very early time humans been interested in sex, and we should be: its how we keep going! But across different cultures we find different habits and taboos. In the LA region, our research will focus on mostly African-Americans/Blacks, Hispanics/Latinos, and Whites/Caucasains. More interestingly, each group have different qualities and attributes that they find attractive in the opposite gender (to avoid confusion, I use gender to describe male and female). And within these groups are different expectation between males and females, for example it is much more socially acceptable for a Latino to loose his virginity before marriage, whereas female Latinas are expect more to stay at home and save it for marriage (Hyde 337).

In the African-American/Black culture, bonds between men and women become more intense because of the deep history of African enslavement in America. Black men today are faced with a "central theme (of) pain" (Hyde 336) because they conitnue to live in a world of negative stereotypes. Within their own culture, they are often seen as the "bread-winners" but often African-American/Black women will hold the "bread-winning" role because of high unemployment rates for Black men (11.3% in 2004, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics). And for women not only do they depend on themselves to "wear the pants" but "mother-child bonds continue to be extremely important... status and honor are accorded to motherhood" (Hyde 336).

So as we continue to explore sexual behavior in our neighborhoods in LA, we must keep in mind these cultural and gender expectations. Assigned male and female roles in society play a huge role in how we dictate our daily lives, outside and inside the bedroom.

Research Ideas... forming hypothsi...

Though I am focusing on sexual and mental health in LA, right now I would like to focus just on the mental. When it comes to mental health, it is more interesting to think about how certain types of mentel disorders could form, like depression and anxiety.

Some ideas that I like to think about are how do neighborhoods interactions (or lack of) affect someone's mental condition? Looking at poor neighborhoods, one could argue that people work together collectively to survive, but one could also argue that people distance themselves from their neighbors because they fear each other. This is also the true for rich neighborhoods... they can work together on a "neighborhood watch" or always avoid each other to not appear to be in each other's lives (aka living up to the Joneses).

Also neighborhood turn-over can affect the outcome of the communities around it. For example, if a certain race/ethnicity move into a neighborhood, often the "majority" race/ethnicity will feel threatened and people will start to move out. How do these kinds of trends affect the outcome of a community? In our real estate economy, people cannot as easily move in and out of their homes, so how are these kinds of trends affected?

All of these of just a few options that I'm weighing out to study... and we haven't even touched on the sexual health stuff yet...

Here's to trying new things!

Hey everyone, here's a blog for everyone that's into social problems/issues/challenges. I'm currently working on some research that deals with mental health and sexual health in Los Angeles, CA and I've discovered lots of interesting little quirks about the subject. Hopefully soon I'll have more stuff posted up, as we're still in the beginning stages of the research (if only the program would open...) but things should but up and running soon!