So long, farewell
I don’t feel qualified to write one of these ?“goodbye columns.”
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I don’t feel qualified to write one of these ?“goodbye columns.”
I’ve spoken to an on-duty police officer maybe three times in my life. Each time was a traffic stop.
Indulge me, for a moment, in a thought experiment.
As a fertile human woman (not to brag, but an OB-GYN once told me my cervix is “perfect”), I sometimes worry about pregnancy. As a 12-year-old girl, there were about 3 months where I was convinced I had immaculately conceived. Turns out, 12-year-olds just have notoriously irregular periods.
I’ve seen the bit several times at open mics and IU comedy shows.
For 18 years, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill forgot its own mission and sacrificed its own good name at the altar of college athletics.
I’m enrolled at IU-Bloomington, but I’m not just an IU student. In my almost 3 1/2 years here, I’ve been a student of Shanghai, China, and Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan.
Stop talking about your opinion of other women’s bodies like it matters.
Health care is a human right.
Only one in four American millennials is “definitely” planning on voting this year, according to a Harvard University Institute of Politics poll.
The Class of 2019’s acceptance letters have already started arriving, prompting a string of #IUSaidYes tweets, which are really quite adorable, along with a tough ?decision.
Election season is nearly upon us, which means the time to dredge up year-old grudges and vote is near.
Feminism is popular in part because it’s so open-ended.
No matter your fluency with Mandarin, it doesn’t take long for you to learn the word for “foreigner” when you’re in China.
In a hilarious turn of journalistic malpractice, the student newspaper of the University of Western Ontario, the Gazette, ran a column in its “Frosh edition” advising students on how to get it on with their teaching ?assistants.
Almost 10 years ago, Dave Chappelle walked away from his hit Comedy Central TV show and $50 million dollars, in part because his audience didn’t “get it.”
What is happening in Ferguson, Mo., is “modern history,” according to Edwardsville High School senior Abigail Wilson, as reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The school district has reportedly banned any discussion of Ferguson in the classroom.
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Many of us are familiar with Jenny McCarthy’s antics: famous for some reason, the (actress? singer? model? What does she do? Why do we listen to her?) mom became staunchly against vaccines following her son’s diagnosis with autism.Or, as she puts it, “I am not anti-vaccine.” Rather, if given the choice between autism and measles, she would “stand in line for the fucking measles.” Despite the fact that absolutely no one is making anyone choose between protecting children against debilitating diseases and forcing them into the autism spectrum, thousands of people are falling in line behind McCarthy, and their excuses for denying modern medicine are beyond creative. First there’s McCarthy, whose son started presenting symptoms of autism a few months after his measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) shot. Or maybe immediately. Jenny’s a little unclear on this point. The only study that ever supported the vaccines-cause-autism panic was written by Dr. Andrew Wakefield and published in 1998 by The Lancet, a British medical journal. Since then, The Lancet has retracted the article and Wakefield’s medical license was revoked. With that track record, the idea that vaccinations cause autism has even less support than the idea that global warming is a hoax. Following in McCarthy’s wake, parents and commentators alike have noted the harsh mix of chemicals used to make vaccines. Writers for this very newspaper have panicked over the “trace amounts of mercury” present in vaccines.But the type of mercury found in vaccines is actually less harmful than the kind of mercury found in fish. The amount of other “toxins” present in vaccines is similarly innocuous. And to put the cherry on top of this inane sundae is Michele Bachmann, whose insistence that the HPV vaccination causes “mental retardation” was the unsubstantiated claim that launched a thousand unsubstantiated claims. Full disclosure, I am up-to-date on all my vaccines, including a few extra in preparation to study abroad. I opted for the HPV vaccine, too. So maybe I’m biased, considering I’ve personally enjoyed never getting the measles, the mumps, rubella, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B or cervical cancer. You know who wasn’t so lucky? The 34 people who contracted measles in West Lafayette after an unvaccinated girl’s trip to Romania where she picked up the virus. The record-worthy nearly 300 people who have already come down with that virus this year. The 10 children who died from whooping cough in California in 2010 and the 800 cases in that state in the past two weeks. These are ailments most of us haven’t thought about since our desktop tenure on the Oregon Trail. Thanks to anti-vaccination nonsense, people are actually dying of viruses once thought to be nearly extinct.Stop listening to Jenny McCarthy, and start listening to actual, licensed medical professionals. Vaccinations save lives.casefarr@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>I don’t believe in virginity. This position tends to make people kind of upset.For some reason, climate change deniers can gather a dandy troupe to march behind them (looking at you, Fox News), but when I insist that virginity is a myth, people start yelling at me.I suppose it’s one of my many unpopular opinions.According to the myth, virgins exist in a pure state.They haven’t mucked themselves up by engaging in intercourse, which is defined by most as penile/vaginal sex. Following this logic, your average lesbian will never lose her virginity, and she’s in good company.Blow job aficionados, anal sex enthusiasts, independent orgasmers, porn archivists and good listeners — all virgins.Only they can light the mythic candle and bring forth the Sanderson witches for a night of spooky family fun. Hymens are especially important to the purveyors of this myth. Sexual activity can be physiologically determined just by breaking it.Bleeding is a mark of true purity. Hooray, women bleeding.In reality, hymens are not reliable indicators of anything.The hymen is a fleshy membrane covering part of the vaginal opening that often wears away because of things such as riding a bike, being a gymnast, using tampons, putting fingers up there, putting other stuff up there and yes, sexual intercourse. Many women don’t bleed the first time they have penile/vaginal sex. Bleeding is sometimes a sign that something is wrong. So no, virginity is not real — at least not in the pseudo-medical way we often discuss.People can be experienced or inexperienced, confident or hopeless when it comes to their sex lives, but I don’t find the word “virgin” to be a useful term.It’s a concept that can actually hurt people.If penile/vaginal sex is the magic key that releases one’s virginity, it follows that digital stimulation, oral sex, anal sex and other types of intimate touching are not as good or important.Getting to second or third base isn’t as good as scoring a home run, it seems.This is unfortunate, considering 75 percent of women can’t orgasm from penetration alone. My understanding is that most gay people don’t particularly enjoy penile/vaginal sex, either.Though most of America is cool with gay marriage, there still seems to be some debate as to whether or not lesbians can actually have sex. In addition to denigrating most forms of pleasure, our constructs of virginity impose harsh value-judgments on sexual activity.Men are worthless if they hold onto virginity for too long. Women are worthless if they let it go too early.Virginity is treated like a precious stone; the boudoir like a trading post.Imagine being raped and existing in a society where this narrative is not only present, but it dominates.Instead of being virgins or not, we should talk about our sex lives in more open, inclusive ways.Maybe someone has tried one sex act but no tanother.Maybe they’ve never orgasmed with a partner. Maybe their sexuality is undefined.Maybe they’re not ready to do anything sexually.All of these experiences are different and valuable, and the modern conception of “virginity” does none of them justice.casefarr@indiana.edu
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>We’ve been making jokes about prison rape for years. About dropping soap in communal showers, about the origin of sagging, about who would be whose bitch.It’s an easy punch line because we don’t conceptualize prisoners as real human beings.Instead they are bad men, locked safely away in some impenetrable tower, breaking rocks and being mean.But these are real people — only 8 percent of whom are violent — forgotten to fester in a system rife with abuse.The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that almost 10 percent of former prisoners report having been sexually victimized by other inmates and/or facility staff the most recent time they were imprisoned. In any given year, about 4 percent of prisoners will be subject to sexual abuse. And yet, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence refuses to comply with the Prison Rape Elimination Act.Passed in 2003, the act was recently green lit for implementation following an investigative period that helped clarify the problem for policy makers. The Act requires each state to ensure inmate safety by performing background checks on all potential hires, refusing to house juveniles with adults, providing anonymous reporting channels and counseling for any victims and practicing a zero-tolerance policy toward any sexual abuse.Gov. Pence insists Indiana already has an infrastructure to deal with prison rape.But how good of an infrastructure can it be if it falls short of these basic guidelines?Regardless of the population affected, we should never hesitate to protect others from sexual victimization.If Pence really wanted to save money, he would stop pushing for more draconian drug laws that will only worsen the economic burden of Indiana’s prison system, like he did this past spring. He would expand the Hoosier Initiative for Re-Entry program (that he signed into law), to hire more former inmates and reduce the recidivism rate among participants, which would cut long-term prison costs.He would be working to improve prison conditions so inmates could walk out rehabilitated and ready to participate in society rather than be alienated from it.Pence is abandoning Indiana’s prison population, and we are letting him.In failing to enact this law, our state won’t just lose $350,000 in federal funding. We’ll lose face.We’ll be the state that allows harsh prison conditions, such as rape, to become a tool of punishment.We’ll be the state where government employees can more easily get away with abuse.We’ll be the state where prisoners’ lives don’t count.If allowing rape to endure just to save a few dollars is the new Hoosier hospitality, I want nothing of it.casefarr@indiana.edu