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Arizona School Superintendent Tom Horne has lost his ever-loving mind.

In yet another example of state politicians abusing their power to harass the state’s minority population, Horne has filed a subpoena against researchers at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University. The subpoena seeks the release of confidential, personal information that can identify participants in a study looking at the effect of the state’s English Language Learning (ELL) policy.

Here’s the deal: Arizona’s ELL programs require that all ELL students be segregated from general classes for four hours every day, and taught English language skills, until the student is capable of passing a standardized English test. Critics of the program, however, assert that ELL classes provide sub-standard teaching of course material, causing ELL students to lag behind their English-speaking peers.

Researchers at The University of Arizona and Arizona State University addressed this question by looking at the quality of education in ELL classrooms. One investigator assessed ELL implementation in 18 classrooms in five school districts and found the instruction to be inferior than that received by other students. In January 2000, Arizona was cited by the U.S. District Court for Arizona for failing to provide equal funding for ELL classes compared to non-ELL classes, thereby violating the Equal Educational Opportunities Act.

Currently, the January 2000 decision is being reconsidered in a federal court case, Horne v. Flores, which contends that changes in Arizona’s ELL policy and funding once more make the program compliant with federal regulations. However, the studies cited above are being used as part of the case against Arizona’s ELL classes.

Which is why Horne’s lawyers have filed for a subpoena, demanding that the researchers involved turn over their raw data, which includes the names and addresses of study participants.

The problem is that it would be unethical for investigators to turn over their data. All researchers who work with human subjects — every single one — must have their studies reviewed and approved by their institution’s Institutional Review Board (IRB). This is a lengthy and detailed process that includes a requirement that the identities of subjects be protected under all circumstances. There are even instances in some studies where the identities of study participants (or other sensitive information) are even protected from certain investigators.

Horne’s lawyers argue that they require the raw data from the studies in order to determine if they were appropriately collected and analyzed. Magaret Dugan, Arizona’s Deputy School Superintendent, suggested that study authors may have deliberately picked school districts critical of ELL, and thereby biased their study. 

However, Dugan and Horne fail to acknowledge that the study methodologies of these studies have been peer-reviewed by the IRB committees of their respective institutions. Any issues of bias or sample size have already been addressed by these scrupulous reviewers. Furthermore, if the study is to be published (I’m not sure if it has been), than the methodology will undergo a second round of peer-review. It’s naive for Arizona’s Superintendents to insinuate that the investigators in this study deliberately biased their sample, and that none of the study’s peer-reviewers caught on; they are, in essence, accusing an entire community of researchers of conducting bad science.

In fact, the accusation would be insulting, if it weren’t hilariously ironic. Explaining the state of Arizona’s reasoning for requesting release of the study participant’s information, Dugan characterized the classroom selection as“slanted”. She further said, “At least I would like for them to have surveyed districts and teachers who are positive about the model.”

In other words, Dugan takes issue not with the possibility that the studies were biased… but that they were biased in the wrong direction! And how should we correct it? Choose to sample classrooms in such a way as to fix the outcome.

I don’t think Horne and his colleagues can even spell “scientific method”, let alone recognize the flaws in Ms. Dugan’s proposed solution.

(And Ms. Dugan is running to replace Tom Horne as Arizona School Superintendent, folks. This state is so fucked.)

I’m easing back in from hiatus with a fresh post.

In 2006, I wrote about the historic drop in the onset of menstruation and the rising age of marriage. It’s a topic familiar to many of my women’s history students. The basic premise is that the average age of first menstruation (menarche) dropped by about five years (from about 16 to about 11) between 1900 and 2000 in America, while the average age that women first married increased from about 21 to about 27. Meanwhile, studies have shown that the average American girl (if there is such a thing) loses her virginity around age 16.

What’s the interesting point? Call it the “constancy of five”. Today, the “average” American girl first has heterosexual intercourse approximately five years after menarche. In 1900, if we can make the dangerous assumption that at least a fair percentage of American young women were virgins when they wed, they too were having their first intercourse approximately five years after they began menstruating. The five year gap is the one constant even as all the other variables have shifted.

This is statistically intriguing, but has huge implications for those who wish to foist nineteenth century morality onto twenty-first century minds and bodies. Parents who expect (as many parents from traditional cultures expect) their daughters to marry as virgins, but to only marry after finishing a degree and starting a career, are asking their girls to “wait” three times as long as women “waited” a century ago. When the old folks lament the “declining morality” of the younger generation, they miss the fact that what they’re asking their daughters to do is considerably more than was expected of their great-grandmothers.

I thought of all this when the study came out last week showing that girls are continuing to enter puberty earlier and earlier. Since 1997, when Joan Brumberg’s indispensable Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls was published, the percentage of girls aged 6-8 who exhibited early breast development has doubled among whites and gone up 50% among African-Americans. (Thelarche is the term for the beginning of secondary breast development, btw.) There has been a corresponding increase, other studies report, in the percentage of girls who have their first period before their tenth birthday.

Whatever the reasons (obesity, a diet heavy in meat, etc.) there’s little question that the real challenge for feminists is to focus on the needs of this very vulnerable population. There’s no question that fifteen year-olds are better (if imperfectly) equipped to deal with the challenges of menstruation and changing bodies than are girls five years younger. There has been no concomitant rise in the rate of emotional maturation to go along with the declining age of menarche. As school nurses across the country can attest, adapting advice about menstruation to an ever younger group of girls presents special challenges, the anxieties of parents not least among them.

It’s important to remember that earlier maturation doesn’t need to lead inexorably to premature sexualization. We need to distinguish these as two separate issues. Physiological changes that cause preteens to develop breasts and hips do not cause adult men to leer. The fetishization of young women (pedophila chic, as some have dubbed it) is a cultural response to men’s anxiety about women’s increasing power. Part of the anti-feminist backlash is the sexualization of the very young. For those who fantasize about a pre-feminist world in which women are pliable and submissive, it makes perverse sense to focus desire increasingly on the very youngest girls whose capacity to set boundaries and to exercise agency is obviously limited. The growing physiological reality of early puberty serves as justification for sexualizing preteen and “tween” girls. The vulgar expression “Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed” dates back at least as far as the Second World War (and may be much older) — but read in the light of a dramatically falling age of menarche, it becomes more unconscionable to repeat with each passing decade.

We can start to carve out safe space for this vulnerable population of pubescent youngsters by committing ourselves individually and collectively to a zero-tolerance policy on their sexualization. This doesn’t mean forbidding your eleven year-old daughter from wearing a miniskirt. It means holding adults (parents, teachers, strangers on the street, Uncle Bert) responsible for seeing these girls in women’s bodies as children still. It means watching our language; for some, it may mean watching their eyes. It means sending a message to girls and to everyone who interacts with them that their bodies are theirs and theirs alone. It means redefining our notion of development so that ten year-olds who have already entered puberty continue to be allowed to be children safe for as long as possible from the harassment, the leers, and the judgment that is so much a part of female adolescence in our society.

The next time you hear an adult man make a sexualized remark about a teen girl –even a celebrity such as, say, Miley Cyrus — call him on it. Make it clear that a girl in what appears to be a woman’s body is still a girl, and that adult men are fully capable of distinguishing between eroticising a well-developed 13 year-old child and a woman twice her age. Men are not so weak, so stupid, or so blind that they cannot make these distinctions in their actions, in their words, and in their very thoughts. Now, more than ever, we need to commit ourselves to empowering a generation of girls who are confronting unprecedented challenges. And we empower them by giving them the safe space to mature emotionally at their own pace, regardless of the ever-increasing speed at which their bodies are developing.

You may come across more graphics like these in the future here on Spare Candy. (Sometimes you just need something different, right?) If you click on the link under it, you should be taken to a bigger image.


Via: Online Nursing Programs

Previously on Spare Candy: "15 Things You Should Know About Caffeine"

In a huge win for women's health, a new study published today found that a gel applied by women before and after sex slashed the chance of acquiring the AIDS virus by 39% and the genital herpes virus by 51%.

From Akimbo, the blog of the International Women's Health Coalition:

The Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA) has announced that a microbicide it has been testing has shown to be 39% effective in prevention the transmission of HIV to female receptive partners. The microbicide gel contains the drug tenofovir, an antiretroviral drug used widely in the treatment of HIV, and is designed to be used vaginally both before and after penile-vaginal penetration.

Woh. This is a huge deal because of how few woman-controlled methods of HIV prevention really exist: prior to this most recent development, female condoms were really our only option. Here on Feministing, we've posted before about some of the awesome attributes of the female condom, as well as some of its drawbacks. But no matter your views of that particular method, I think we can all agree that it's pretty amazing to have more alternatives for safer sex.

Though this gel is obviously not yet something that could be used by itself to afford total protection, (at 39% and 51% effective against HIV and herpes, respectively, it's hardly a sure thing), its current success is very promising and bodes well for future versions of the technology. The development of an even more successful microbicide gel could mean that further down the line, women could have the option to protect themselves from HIV without needing a barrier method at all, and thus without having to negotiate condom usage with a partner. This is all kinds of awesome for all kinds of different reasons, one being that a major factor in the recent feminization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been that too often, violence, coercion, economic dependency, and other factors make it difficult to for women to negotiate condom use on their own terms. Just another reason why I'm psyched about this new technology.

Check out the full study in Science magazine here. Read more about what UNAIDS and the WHO think about this in their joint release here.

Wow! Thanks to Bust Magazine for publishing this article on a new Japanese video game called "RapeLay," in which the objective is to rape female avatars (and I think you get extra points for their family members or something?).

Focusing on the possibilities of using technology to facilitate alternative representations of women doesn't mean that we can ignore the ways technology and male-centered technology culture is still being used against us. If anything we should be more aware of these things and use them as examples of patriarchal control over technological fields (in academic papers, blogs, zines).

Which leads me into my next point. I didn't want to even bring up this whole mess that is the Olivia Munn debate BUT being a blogger that focuses a lot on women's roles in technology fields, I kinda have to. So if you aren't familiar with The Daily Show's newest addition, it is Olivia Munn from videogame network G4, known primarily for making dweebs horny (see below).



Jezebel did a really nice write-up on sexism in The Daily Show, using information from former TDS employees of the female persuasion. I thought it was awesome that Carmon took on an issue like sexism in liberal media, something that feminists have been frustrated with for decades. Why should "leftist" TV personalities be exempt from cultural criticism?

With the choice of Munn as TDS' new "Asian correspondent," the need for cultural criticism in these areas is apparent. She exemplifies female misogyny, giving guys a pass to woman-bash because "she's a girl and doesn't see what the big deal is." It's all in the title of her book, Suck it, Wonder Woman; Munn is the new Wonder Woman, a hyper-sexualized female character invented to make geeky men feel like they, too, are entitled to manhood and the misogyny that that entails. Except for instead of fighting evil men and exerting physical strength (yeah, Wonder Woman was WAY cooler than Olivia Munn-dane), she shoves hotdogs down her throat on cable television, uses douchey male phraseology (how cute! she said "suck it" like she has a penis!) and spends her time fighting with other women. Bitch's Sara Reihani posted Munn's response to Jezebel's criticism, and a response to Munn's response here.

And now here's some more: in the interview with Salon, Munn says "these women [Jezebel bloggers] sit behind this very thin veil that I can see right through, this idea that 'we stand up for women.' If you stand up for women, then don't bash me." This quote reveals a strict adherence to what I'll call the Palin Feminist Fallacy: the idea that if a woman does something, it is automatically a feminist action. Being "okay" with a sexist remark doesn't mean that it's automatically no longer sexist, and being a female who makes misogynistic jokes doesn't somehow cancel out the misogyny.

Everyone knows women that adopt behaviors associated with maleness and constantly claim that they "don't get along with girls" or they're "not like other girls." And frankly, it's understandable; this survival tactic in a patriarchy is more popular (and safe) than feminism. But feminists don't have to be friendly toward these women, they are working against us to the same extent as male misogynists. All we can do is try to educate them about how they're screwing themselves over and civil criticism is a fine way to do so.

So I will leave you with this photo of Miss Munn in a Leia slave costume because I know how to drive a point home.
And John Stewart, thanks for being SOOO understanding about this whole thing. I honestly didn't expect you to react like a whiney 6-year old boy, but now I know better than to assume that a political critic could handle a little political criticism.

For a long time, I thought blue balls was something that dudes made up in 7th grade in order to get further around the bases than their girlfriends were comfortable with traveling. Turns out, the phenomenon is real and technically called vasoconstriction. But it's not just the guys who have trouble with, in the words of my old friend Carly Simon, anticipation. This just in from The Frisky:

Medical science has proven that women get a similar painful feeling when we don't get to finish properly either. There is nothing worse then being close to climaxing and losing it; just because we don't physically ejaculate (well, much) doesn't mean we don't get pink balls.

Stupid name, I know. But interesting finding. Let's just make a lady pact that we won't use our vasoconstriction as a form of manipulation, shall we?

In dudebro Science news, women having sex after the age of 26 is "explained" as a desperate attempt for women to squeeze out children while they still can. These strange, out of character behaviors are as follows, taken directly from the University of Texas at Austin research study published by EurekAlert:

• Frequent sexual fantasies
• Thoughts about sexual activities
• More intense sexual fantasies than their younger counterparts
• A more active sex life and willingness to have a one-night stand
• A willingness to have casual sex

Wait, so after the age of 26 we're supposed to stop fantasizing about sex? Well then that makes most 27 year old women and (gasp!) for-ty year old women icky! Who knows what kind of "intense" sexual fantasies they're cooking up in their tainted, immoral minds? Oh, what's that? Hugh Hefner? Well, whatever, guys are supposed to like casual sex until they're 100 cause they can still make babies. Women who can never make babies? That's easy, they never have sex. And most married women, you ask? They don't do it cause they want to. ...what's marital rape?

Our results suggest there is nothing special about the 30s, but that instead these behaviors manifest in all women with declining fertility.

See, women have no biological reason to like sex past the peak of fertility so these newfangled monster sex drives in women MUST be due to...their declining fertility (yes, the same reason they're not supposed to have sex drives!). OR the findings could disprove the argument that womens' libidos are dependent on fertility! But no, it makes more sense the other way.

This rise in sexual expression in women older than 26 couldn't be because as a society we're just starting to talk about women liking sex at all, let alone including experienced women in our societal beauty definitions.

EurekAlert and University of Texas at Austin psychologists, getcher act together. I've got my eye on you.

by Amanda Marcotte

Woof, the day really got by me.  My apologies.  Subsequently, I don’t have a lot of stuff bookmarked that I can come up with bloggeriffic insights for, but that doesn’t mean I want to keep you hanging without anything to talk about.  So, more fascinating research, this time from Amanda Hess.  She linked Charlie Glickman, who wrote an interesting post in the ever-rare vein of “both/and” discussion on porn and the effect it has on men when it comes to the way they view and treat women.  “Both/and” because both critics of porn and defenders of porn seem to have a point about the relationship between porn and aggression in men.  Check out this graph of research on porn use in men, once they broke the men down into groups based on a range of sexual aggression (click the graph to make it bigger):

Charlie summarizes:

For men at the lower end of the sexual aggression range, there was either no difference or only small changes in their sexual aggression due to porn use. However, for men at the level of moderate or high risk for sexual aggression, there was a correlation between more porn use and increased sexual aggression. We need to be very clear that correlation is not causation- there’s no way to tell from this research what the causal links may be. Porn use could increase aggression, aggression could lead to more porn watching, they could both be the result of another set of factors, or (most likely, in my opinion) all of the above.

In other words, it’s true that some groups of men don’t have a correlation between heavy porn use and sexual aggression, but some men absolutely do. 

I’ve noted in the past that I think the outsized role that misogyny plays in porn probably has to do with the fact that a small percentage of heavy duty porn users dictate the market.  I speculated that most men spend not very much time looking at porn compared to other activities, but that some men are complete pornheads who have to be staring at it all the time.  I suspect that men who look at porn well beyond the basic “get on, get off, get on with some other activity” amount are way more likely to be in it to see women hurt and degraded, on top of just wanting to get off.  And since they look at it way more and spend way more money on it, the industry caters to their demands.  Which is why, to quote a friend of mine, in a lot of porn videos there seems to be a need to have a winner and a loser of the sexual encounter, and the woman is the loser.  And men who are less interested in having their ego shored up this way simply tune out or refuse to analyze some of the misogyny in a lot of porn, because they see it mainly as a masturbatory tool. 

Well, I don’t know how well this research fits that thesis of mine, but one thing that it does show is that men are highly likely to assault women do often have an extremely intense relationship with porn.  And I’m guessing they prefer the meanest, nastiest shit you can find.  Again, I have no doubt that many porn producers are well aware of this, and cater to it because they make so much money off it.

The Food and Drug Administration will be deliberating the possible approval of a new drug meant to increase women's sex drive, Flibanserin, on Thursday of this week.

Jessica Vanessa already talked about how it's the least appealing name for a sex drug ever created, and the New View Campaign thinks medicalizing women's sexuality for pharmaceutical profit is a terrible idea.

I do think it's interesting that this drug was originally an anti-depressant, as Jessica Vanessa pointed out. They do say the brain is our biggest and most important sex organ, but it's hard to trust the pharmaceutical industry with a concern for women's sexual health and well-being. The application calls Flibanserin a "treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in premenopausal women."

Who decides what is hypoactive (aka not active enough or under active) sexual desire anyway?

In my opinion, sexual desire is not something that can be measured independently, most frequently what becomes an issue is how it compares to that of your partner (if there is a partner involved). Women are stereotyped with never wanting sex and men with always wanting it, but we all know it's never that simple.

This is what science has come to nowadays: Want lots of kids? If you're a man, find yourself a neurotic mate. And if you're a woman, look for a gregarious guy. That’s because extroverted men and needy, anxious women are the most fertile coupling, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers looked at a population in Senegal for the study