- [Jan] Good evening and welcome to A Feminist Perspective. This is Jan Sanders, Assistant Dean of Women at the University of Kansas. And I'd like to welcome you tonight to our program. The series of Monday night programs is brought to you by The Women's Resource and Career Planning Center located in 220 Strong Hall. the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center has a collection of multimedia materials, books which can be checked out, notebooks of media clippings, films, tape recordings, and resources and resource people designed to help you find information and answers about concerns relating to women and men in today's society. We invite you to come into the Women's Resource and Career Planning Center, 220 Strong Hall, browse through our materials, visit with our resource people, and make yourself at home. Tonight's program is the first in a series dealing with choice and sexuality. Our guests tonight are Helen Mimarchov, Assistant Dean of Women at KU and director of GSP Corbin Residence hall which houses primarily freshmen women. Helen has a background in counseling and has worked at Indiana University with undergraduate residents. Our other guest is Richard Orr, who is director of the American Baptist Center in Lawrence. He has a background of a local pastorate, a teaching ministry and youth ministry. Our specific topic this evening is choice and sexual activity. The decision to be sexually active or not. I guess probably the best place to start would be defining our terms. I know that in my work at the office I use the phrase sexually active, generally as a euphemism for someone who is having intercourse. But I think that we, we can probably expand that definition. What, what should we consider this evening that we mean when we're talking about being sexually active?

- [Richard] Helen, you had some things that you were sharing with us earlier that I thought were important to, to recognize the whole continuum of sexual activity might not just mean intercourse, but it might mean something that comes both prior and post.

- [Helen] I can, - [Richard] Can you share that?

- [Helen] Right. I think sexually active has to be looked at on a continuum basis. First of all, a person has to make a choice. And that choice usually involves moving from quote the virgin stage to the non-virgin stage. If you will, let me put it that way. Once that choice is made then a whole other continuum develops. And from that you're, a person is deciding whether or not to sexual activity means having intercourse with one person, restricting it to that one person. Another consideration is how often have that sexual activity with that one person. It can also expand to whether or not a person decides to have sexual activity with a number of people.

- [Richard] I think probably also in terms of choice-making about sexual activity, it has some other considerations. For instance, who you are and, and what kinds of things you want to do with certain kinds of people and how much of an investment you want to make. And also whether you can segment your life into physical activity and emotional activity, or whether it has to be in the context of a more permanent or lasting, or at least supportive relationship or not. I think those are part of the choices.

- [Jan] I think maybe one place that we could start is looking at sexuality. Finding out what it is that someone is expressing and how actively that can be. I know that I've gone through a long thinking process about what is sexuality. And for me have decided that people are born with a set of physical equipment, with a set of genitals that define them as male or female. And they are born into a world where there are two opposites, male, and female. And there are a variety of activities that you can undergo using that set of physical equipment, by yourself or with people of either of those sexes, and that all of that potential that starts with you and the physical definition, and then all of the potential existing in the world for expressing that, to me, comes together to be sexuality. And I'm starting to think about even very small children of course have a sexuality. And I think that they usually start out, there are some sexually active children, in a sense, of they discovered masturbation very early, and, and some more frequently than others. And then you always have the sexual curiosity and children becoming active in expressing their sexuality. Sometimes just by infantile exhibitionism, little girls pulling their dresses up, they kind of, I'll show you yours if you show me mine, phase that children go through.

- [Richard] I'm just feeling this,

- [Jan] Sexual activity also.

- [Richard] Right. I, and I think that we need to see it as coming from early childhood. I have preschool children in my family and it's very interesting to see them kind of discovering their genital sexuality. But also I think there are other clues that are important in sexual activity choice that you can see in preschool children. And that is that, as people grow and maybe even from the womb, there is the emotional desire for intimacy, or I just call it warmth. - [Helen] M-hmm. I remember a couple of years ago I was talking with somebody about my own life and some of the lacks of it. And the person was a counselor and asked me, well, where do you get your warmth? And they were talking both about emotional support as well as sexual intimacy? The kind of thing that comes from, I identify it with holding. That the need to be held. I was talking with a group of students yesterday, freshmen students who were talking about spring, you know, spring fever brings out some new needs. And I said, well, what are those needs? And they finally sort of, gee, I'd like to just be held a lot, have somebody who loved me and held me. And so it's that need, that's motivating some choosing for for university students. I'm sure it does for me too.

- [Helen] Something happens though, as you go from the child stage and you get into the adolescent stage. There's it, there seems to be great separation of the emotional from the physical, for example, I don't know of many schools, certainly when I was in high school sex education was one of those kinds of things you'd learned about supposedly in gym class, but usually you just asked your best friends about it and said, psst, psst, do you know, what's happening to me? Are you experiencing the same thing? And we had such a great concern, especially women I think entering the menstrual periods and things like that. We had such a great concern for our physical bodies and nobody would sit down and really be honest with us and say, this is what's happening. You have a body. You should be proud of it. And this is just a normal thing.

- [Richard] I think that the discovery of menstruation can really be traumatic. You know, I've heard of young women who nobody told them what was happening. And so it was just a horrible trauma, but I've also talked with young men who in discovering their own needs, and kind of dream masturbation, just were frightened to death too. Came to me and said, well, what happens? Is this okay?

- [Jan] M-hmm. M-hmm. Am I weird? I'm afraid to tell anybody about this.

- [Jan] I really liked the insight that this in some way it's the separation of the body from the other parts that are so important to sexuality. And it seems like this might be one of the ways that we, not out loud, not overtly, that society infringes on choices. Because the, all of the the social norms and sanctions, in general tend to say this is something we don't talk about. We don't share these facts that are occurring between people, people go into this in ignorance. And then that divorces what they know from what they are feeling and observing in their body

- [Richard] Kind of go along with this separation of physical and emotional. And don't do a lot to coordinate them, for instance, where do we get any kind of emotional education? Even if we get sex information, which is not necessarily information for sexuality, who helps us to understand our feelings and our need for intimacy? Not very, you know, we don't get much help for that. So society does kind of go along with the separation, which it makes it harder later to make some intelligent, mature, -[Jan] Definitely.

- [Richard] Holistic choices.

- [Jan] Exactly. All right. Maybe we're, we're skipping ahead. I don't think we've completely exhausted being sexually active yet, but we're really getting into choice. And I think this is so important, what it sounds like we're talking about right now is the, is choice has to be informed choice. You cannot choose an option that you don't know exists. You cannot pick an alternative that you're not aware of. And so when people are operating out of ignorance then they argue, they really don't have choice. Do you buy that?

- [Richard] I believe that. Yeah,

- [Helen] I think that's true. And I think we find that to be true, simply because when women, for example, I deal with freshmen women primarily, when freshmen, a freshman one will come to me and say, well, I'm trying to decide. And most of the decisions that she is concerned about are some of the physical consequences. Whether or not she would become pregnant, whether or not she might contract gonorrhea, or something like that. And she really often suppresses or neglects, to talk about the emotional aspect. And it seems that we have failed somehow in getting people to realize that, whenever you're going to enter a relationship with someone, if you're a heterosexual person, it will be someone of the opposite sex, homosexual someone of the same sex. If you're going to enter a relationship with that particular person there's always the chance that you can go from the early expression of sexual intimacy such as kissing, or hugging, or something like that, into a more complex stage, such as having intercourse with a person, or mutual masturbation or something like that. And I think that's something that a society has tend to put out of their minds. They don't think about that. They, they react the same as like, well, nice girls don't have to think about that. Good boys. You know, boys who really want a good woman will, they will respect her. And all these kinds of myths that had been built up and it gets people into a lot of trouble.

- [Richard] Yeah, religion has helped headlong. I remember in my high school days the days when we couldn't dance for religious reasons. We used to make a whole lot of non-sexual choices in the backseat of the car. We weren't dancing, but we were doing a lot of

- [Helen] Right. - [Richard] other things - [Helen] Exactly.

- [Richard] And, and nobody helped us to think about those. But we knew we needed closeness. -[Helen] M-hmm.

- [Jan] Okay. I think that we're pretty much of the same generation, which is not completely removed certainly from the college age now. But we did grow up in a different time, at least when the public norms seem to be different than, than they are now. And yet I have seen some figures, some statistics, that indicate that sexual activity or having intercourse, the rate of that has not really changed that much since Cusie was doing his studies in the forties. But what has changed is disclosure about that? They say, we don't really have a sexual revolution but a sexual revelation, people are being more open about it. And yet, well, you know, you can think of the X-rated movies, the sex in the advertisements media. And they say, we are bombarded with sex all around us. And yet more surveys show, that especially teenagers are appallingly ignorant of even the basic terminology about their own body, what the different parts of it are called, how it functions. So it seems like we've still got the same rate of sexual activity, a lot more publicity about it, but people are still ignorant. Of course, this is just what the surveys show. From, from your experiences in working with young people, would you agree?

- [Helen] I think there's still a lots and lots of women. And I speak mostly about women because that's the type of person I'm dealing with. Many women are very ignorant about their bodies and they still have questions about things that should have been explained to them or they should have found out about when I first started having menstrual periods. So I find that oftentimes to even start talking with a woman about making a choice of being sexually active or not, we have to go back and get out and get out a book. There's several books that the Dean of Women's office has. Some that I have myself that show diagrams and pictures, and give some fairly concise explanations just about what a woman's body is all about and what it does and the functions. And sometimes it's really interesting just to watch a person's face. You can just see the fear draining out of their face because they realize that they really don't have that much to be afraid of but they really didn't know what was happening to them.

- [Richard] That, that is really true in my experience, that basic information about bodies, whether it's the man and information about his body, or his lack information about how women's body is even constructed, or, you know, where things are, or how they react. And I was at a meeting this last weekend where some women confessed that they were surprised that men had pubic hair. Goodness, we didn't know that men were constructed that way. And the sad part is that I have met a number of married couples. Who've been married as long as 15 years, who still are not conversing intentionally about their sexual life and desires and wants because our society is, no, they still do not ask one another, after 15 years of marriage, - [Jan] M-hmm.

- [Richard] you know, what do you like? What do you appreciate? How did that feel? -[Jan] M-hmm. Intentional choice making and intentionally exploring is still not a viable option, even for married couples. And I think that's really tragic the lack of information, and the inability for us to share about our bodies, and to know our bodies. That's, we know how they run and how they sweat, but how they function as intimate organisms. We really don't know.

- [Jan] M-hmm. Perhaps I'm, I am really over-simplifying, but I can, in my own mind, take a lot of this back to the idea, back to the separation between mental and physical, back to the idea that this is my body and every now and then I have these urges, and it just happens. Now with my mind, my mind is a rational organ, and I think and choose, but when these two things are very separate, and when I don't see a necessarily linking, then for example, a woman will just be swept off her feet. The passion just happened. The situation was there, and I don't know what happened, but, but we made love. And it just happened. Again, through my experience in counseling, and also the facts and figures, show that about 75% of the, of the women who when they first had intercourse, this was a completely unplanned intercourse. They really, they say they didn't know it was going to happen. They don't quite know how it happened. It just did. This to me is letting the excuse that my body is very separate from the rest of me take over.

- [Helen] Right? It goes back to the point I made earlier, that you have to consider the emotional and physical aspects of, of a sexual being together. And we have to, I think in counseling with people and working with students, get them to see what is, - [Jan] It is really threatening for a person, because after all, there are so many moral judgments made about sexuality. And if somehow it isn't quite so bad, if you say it just happened to me. But if you said I wanted to make love and I chose to do it, that then the responsibility is on you. And that means that people can blame you and say, bad, how bad you are, not how bad society is, how bad the situation is.

- [Richard] It's definitely a way of not taking responsibility for the situation. And I think it, it maybe is appropriate in terms of the kind of conditioning and learning that we've had, for that kind of defense to be there, you know, to protect people from all the things that they have learned. That they really have to expend tremendous energy to unlearn in order to make a good, intentional choice.

- [Jan] M-hmm. Well, this comes to kind of a prickly question. And I think we pretty much agreed the idea of choice, informed choice, is what is necessary for making a decision. But first of all, how do we inform people? You know, what is, how do you educate someone without indoctrinating, someone? What about the idea that if people really know all of the facts about what their body is like and what to do with it, they might do it more often. And if, if you give them the idea that sex is a very normal and healthy fun thing, well, then we're going to have lots of 14 year olds who will want to do a very normal healthy fun thing. And look what we could be getting into if we tell the people all of these things. So,

- [Richard] Yes, that's true. That, that we run the risk that we might have people doing normal, healthy fun things that they enjoy, and feel spontaneous and warm and intimate about. But on the other hand, I, I really think that we need to rescue sexuality in it's both physical and emotional forms from the kind of a horrible world of fear that it's in. So I, I think that we should begin to talk about some criteria for making choices. And then, maybe even how we feel personally about our own warmth seeking. So - [Jan] Okay. - [Richard] even at that, I think that that will help people deal with their fears more intentionally, and more responsibly. So maybe that won't, we won't have a rampant sex revolution.

- [Jan] All right. Well, let's start looking at some criteria and then maybe we can come back to this and figure out how these criteria can be applied without indoctrinating people. How these can be education without being indoctrination. So, what kind of value criteria were you thinking of Dick?

- [Richard] Well, I think one of the first things is something that relates to all of, of learning in life. And in order to have a whole life, you need to be in touch. And I think that's a good word for sexual choice, too. You need to be in touch with yourself. You need to know your body. You need to know what frightens you. You need to know how much, how much emotional stress you can handle from your past and present, and how much you can't. And you need to know how you communicate with people. And I think those are all kind of important things in being in touch with other people.

- [Helen] I think you can't upon one of the basic problems that I see in almost every woman I've dealt with who's exploring becoming sexually active. And that is communication. -[Richard] Right.

- [Helen] And that old phrase, it takes two to tango, really applies, because so many times the woman has not even thought about discussing with her male partner, the way she feels about her own sexuality. The way she interprets what he's giving off to her in forms of what he does, how he touches her, how he holds her, what he even says to her. And so that, it's like, there are two people and they're trying to touch each other, and reach each other. And they've got a big wall standing between them. And, and either that wall has been put there from their moral background, their upbringing from their parents, influences from peers, social pressures, all those kinds of things. And it's just like, they're trying to touch and they want to very badly, and that wall exists, and they don't know how to break it down. And so they try and ignore it. And the woman will say, well, I feel like it's, I want to be sexually active. If they were ever the opportunity that I could sleep with this male, I would like to. And so she says, well, then it's my responsibility. Okay. So we talk about, well, yes, contraception. The pill, foam, et cetera. And she takes it all upon herself. She's got to be the one to make sure that if she does sleep with this man and she doesn't want to have, doesn't want to become pregnant, then it's her responsibility, and hers alone.

- [Richard] It's, it doesn't belong to the relationship.

- [Helen] Right. Right. - [Richard] It just belongs to her.

- [Helen] It's not a, yes, exactly. - [Richard] It becomes an objectified thing. Again, rather than a communication, it's not dialogical. It's not conversational. Even the touching is not conversational. -[Helen] Right.

- [Richard] It's just here I am an object. I'm well-prepared well equipped, protected you. I'm now ready to be used. -[Helen] Right!

- [Jan] I think that again, that is the minority of women who even come prepared physically like that.

- [Helen] Certainly.

- [Jan] I know that in some of the problem pregnancy counseling that I've been doing, I asked whether contraception had been used, and so often a woman says, I didn't know him well enough to talk about it. She knows him well enough and cares about him enough to sleep with him, but not to talk about the fact that she isn't taking a pill, and he doesn't know her well enough to ask. And,

- [Richard] He's afraid he might offend her, her sense of intelligence. You know, maybe he's going to say, well, I know this sounds dumb, but are you on the pill?

- [Jan] But they don't.

- [Richard] No they don't.

- [Helen] Right. The kind of person I was talking about was the person that usually is making a choice on whether to forego her virginity or not. Based on my own personal experience in dealing with women. But I think, I think you're definitely right about the other.

- [Richard] To get back to what I was saying about knowing who you are as a first criteria, that, that has a whole range of things within it. But I think that we need to do, and persons need to take aggressive responsibility, for getting into some kind of situation where they, they really learn how to communicate, and how, what their feelings are, how to identify a feeling and how to share it. So many people are just afraid to share the fact that they would like warmth.

- [Jan] How do you learn that Dick?

- [Richard] Well, I don't know. I, I, the only way I have is just, I've just been in some support groups, you know, where I've shared my own need for it. And we have kind of contracted together to go through a process of talking about our feelings,

- [Jan] M-hmm. - [Richard] and learning about trust, and things like that. But now to set up a whole system of groups is unrealistic, because in the back seat of the car, there isn't any group.

- [Jan] I think that idea of support is so important.

- [Richard] Ah hah. - [Jan] I think each person,

- [Richard] Yeah, yeah. - [Jan] if they have one good friend -[Richard] At least that. Right.

- [Jan] if they have a very good relationship with a parent,

- [Richard] M-hmm. -[Jan] or with a teacher or, or anyone else that they feel, I trust this person, I know this person cares about me. Then I think they can explore themselves with that person.

- [Richard] Okay. That's good. I think that's an important, that they have one person they can check out, and get some feedback from about, what do you think of this? How does this feel to you? This is how I'm feeling. What do I do about it? - [Jan] M-hmm.

- [Jan] I know that one of the greatest experiences for me and from being involved in the women's movement, is having groups of women that I feel it's all right to ask them things that I've wondered about for a long time, and have kind of been alone in my ignorance, and thinking is this me? Has, did anyone else have an experience like that when they were growing up? -[Richard] M-hmm. Did they use to have these fears and worries? Or am I just strange? And I find out by tentatively saying, you know, did, did you ever worry about, you know, when you wore a bathing suit? And the pubic hairs kind of came out the legs. Am I just hairy, or does everybody else's like that? Or do people shave? Or what? And then you find out what other women have been doing and thinking all of their lives. But this has been something that's just been inside and a worry. So this is something that's always been. This has become, recently, very valuable for me. And I guess I found that taking a risk once and talking about something with a person makes it easier the next time. And it builds the support back and forth.

- [Richard] I hope that men who are listening hear that, because I think the women's movement has given women this tremendous opportunity to share their past and their wonderings. And men have this blick about being strong, so they won't share their questions. And as a result they're so much more ignorant and frightened about intimacy, because they have to seem strong. So I, I hope that men who are listening will seek out some men friends that they can talk to about how their body functions.

- [Helen] Talk to realistically. - [Richard] Right.

- [Helen] I have been in programs where men were kind of confessing, and they said men talk about sex a lot. You get together in the residence halls, and you sit around, and that's what they talk about. But they said you can kind of divide what they say by 10. You've got a man who said, Oh yeah, we, I've been scoring for the last three weeks. You say that means he kissed her on the fourth date.

- [Richard] For sure.

- [Jan] Is it the whole thing men must be,

- [Richard] They talk about conquests! You see.

- [Jan] Uh-huh. -[Richard] It's not about, Golly, is this happening to the rest of you?

- [Helen] Right.

- [Jan] I think the idea that, that perhaps the, the natural urgings of your body are not bad. That other people will not think they're bad, because they've experienced them too. And the idea that talking about things that you, talking about ignorance, does not mean that you are a weak person. I think that those are probably the two social norms that, that we really need to get rid of. I don't know how to get rid of a social norm like that. But that's what I identify as the problem.

- [Richard] Well, intentional choice making is not bad either. - [Jan] M-hmm.

- [Richard] And we need to say that.

- [Jan] That. Yes, in fact, that to me seems like a very strong person who is willing to take the risk, and take the responsibility, and say, this is my decision. Now, before they can be, take that strong position, they have to confess their ignorance, and find out the information necessary to make an informed choice. And then, they are so strong.

- [Richard] And they may be choosing to restrict their sexual activity rather than to be more involved.

- [Jan] Exactly.

- [Richard] But at least it's, you know, they know themselves.

- [Helen] Right. They've made the choice. Too many times people rely on outside forces saying, all my friends do it. So I better go sleep with my boyfriend too. And of course, that's - [Jan] And that's an excuse. So weak having a bunch of somewhat anonymous people run your life for you.

- [Jan] I can see that our time is about up. Of course, this topic is certainly not exhausted. We're going to continue for three more programs in this series of choice related to sexuality. So I invite you to listen next week. I'd like to thank our guests Hellen Mimarchov and Richard Orr, for joining us this evening on A Feminist Perspective.