* * *

“I did training for more than 5,000 women across the country, and all their stories and all their experiences are in Our Bodies, Ourselves. Along with the stories and political activism, we started brokering power at the personal as well as at the political level. As of this moment, we have something to celebrate.”

Those words were spoken by Renu Rajbhandari, a prominent women’s rights activist in Nepal, during our 40th anniversary symposium, Our Bodies, Our Future: Advancing Health and Human Rights for Women and Girls, on Oct. 1. Co-hosted with Boston University, the event marked four decades of activism and celebrated our evolution from a small group around a kitchen table in the United States to a vibrant network of social change activists at the table in countries around the world.

Held in conjunction with the release of the ninth edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” the symposium was also an opportunity to meet 12 of our global partners, including Renu, and listen to their extraordinary journeys of claiming and transforming this landmark book for the women and girls of their countries. Renu referred to the effort as a “transcreation.”

Many women talked about the cultural, political and social challenges to their activism and the relationships and networks they have built in order to effect change. (View videos from symposium, including the global panels.)

The book’s impact and legacy was described by many speakers, including local luminaries. In a video welcome, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick recalled how he was 15 years old when “Our Bodies, Ourselves” was first published; it was considered “racy,” yet filled with information that made him “a better person, and certainly a better partner.”

Robert Meenan, dean of Boston University School of Public Health, offered a formal welcome, followed by an all-star cast of women’s health advocates, including Byllye Avery, founder of the Avery Institute for Social Change and the Black Women’s Health Imperative, and Adrienne Germain, president emerita of the International Women’s Health Coalition. Marie Turley, executive director of the Boston Women’s Commission, brought greetings from Mayor Tom Menino, who had declared Oct. 1 Our Bodies Ourselves Day in the city of Boston.

These terrific presenters, and our energetic emcee, Jaclyn Friedman, executive director of Women, Action and the Media and a contributor to the new edition, spoke about the personal impact “Our Bodies, Ourselves” has had on their lives and the important role played by organizations like OBOS in realizing health equality and human rights, while at the same time reminding the audience of the sizeable challenges ahead.

They symposium paid tribute to the 14 OBOS founders who changed the world of women’s health 40 years ago. Sam Morgan Lilienfeld and Judah Rome, sons of deceased founders Pamela Morgan and Esther Rome, shared memories of their mothers – not only as feminist moms, but as powerful and positive role models.

“My mom viewed birth as an experience that has the power to change and define the life of a woman,” Sam said, “and her spirit of embracing and celebrating these major life events, which we sometimes may welcome and sometimes greet with trepidation, is something I’ve always admired.”

In his remarks about Esther completing the manuscript of “Sacrificing Ourselves for Love” just before her death in 1995, Judah said: “Watching my mom through the final months of her life was very painful for me, but it taught me how to live.” He told the audience he had hoped that her legacy would live on, adding, “I can tell from the energy in the room that it does.”

Our courageous global partners have used “Our Bodies, Ourselves” to develop and bring culturally unique health and sexuality information to their own communities. In addition to the challenges they encounter, they also discussed their success negotiating with power brokers – from men and matriarchs in the family, to religious leaders and heads of institutions.

Their stories of transformation, in Tanzania, Turkey, Japan, Israel, Serbia, India, Nepal, Senegal and Latin America, were reminiscent of the journey taken by OBOS founders 40 years ago. The parallel between the two groups of women was palpable and confirmed that not only has the book gone global, but it continues to inspire movement building by and for women and girls in every region of the world.

Loretta Ross, national coordinator of SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, closed the day, firing up the audience by reminding everyone of the very real threats to women’s reproductive and sexual rights in the United States and around the world. Even so, she said the global partners’ activism and their use of the human rights framework made her “excited and optimistic” about the future.

As the day started with reminiscences of the 1960s and 70s, it ended with a freshly-stoked fire in the belly. OBOS is at the forefront of changing the lives of women and girls and will continue this work in the U.S. and around the world — into the next 40 years and beyond.

June Tsang is the program associate for the Our Bodies Ourselves Global Initiative

The story starts by comparing identical twins, two boys who grew up with distinctly different personalities and interests. As Bella English writes:

Jonas was all boy. He loved Spiderman, action figures, pirates, and swords.

Wyatt favored pink tutus and beads. At 4, he insisted on a Barbie birthday cake and had a thing for mermaids. On Halloween, Jonas was Buzz Lightyear. Wyatt wanted to be a princess; his mother compromised on a prince costume.

You see where this is going. What makes it a must-share read is the family’s forthrightness in discussing the difficult decisions they made to ensure Wyatt, now 14 and named Nicole, is able to grow up in a world in which she feels loved, safe and welcomed.

Having read so many superficial or gee-whiz stories on transgender children and adults, this one will be remembered for its honesty and emotion, especially coming from Nicole’s father, Wayne, 53. Here’s just one example:

Last winter, Maine state representative Kenneth Fredette, a Republican from Penobscot County, sponsored a bill that would have repealed protections for transgender people in public restrooms, instead allowing schools and businesses to adopt their own policies. The bill was a response to the Maines’ 2009 lawsuit against the Orono School District.

Last spring Wayne and Nicole roamed the halls of the State House, button-holing legislators and testifying against the bill. “I’d be in more danger if I went into the boys bathroom,’’ Nicole told the lawmakers, who ultimately rejected the bill.

“She knows how to work a room,’’ her father says proudly. “She even convinced a cosponsor to vote the other way.’’

In October, the family was honored for its activism in helping defeat the transgender bathroom bill. The Maineses received the Roger Baldwin Award, named for a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, from the Maine chapter of the ACLU.

Surrounded by Kelly and the kids, Wayne told the audience that he and his wife have had top-notch guides as they confronted the unknown.

“As a conventional dad, hunter, and former Republican, it took me longer to understand that I never had two sons,’’ he told them. “My children taught me who Nicole is and who she needed to be.’’

Go read the whole thing. And also see “What If Your Child Says, I’m In The Wrong Body?” — an NPR interview with endocrinologist Norman Spack, co-founder of the Children’s Hospital Gender Management Services Clinic at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. Spack has worked with 30 transgender youth (including Nicole) and their families on the emotional and medical issues, particularly in adolescence.

Plus: In related news this year, the Massachusetts Legislature passed and the governor signed into law the Transgender Equal Rights Bill, extending civil rights and hate crimes protections to transgender residents of that state. At left is a photo of Gunner Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition, an advocate of the bill, and Craig Norberg-Bohm, coordinator for the Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe.

Both men contributed to the new edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves“; Scott’s piece, an adaptation of his remarks at the Jane Doe organization’s White Ribbon Day rally in 2010, explains how violence against transgender people is related to violence against women.

Finally, we’re looking forward to hearing more in 2012 about the forthcoming book “Trans Bodies, Trans Selves,” a resource guide for the transgender population, covering health and legal issues, along with cultural and social questions, history and theory. Check out the list of contributors and topics.

Library Journal notes the incorporation of global perspectives and says the updated and revised title is “aging superbly.” Other recent mentions in the journal have called the edition “essential for public and medical libraries,” and “…still the bible for women’s health; an outstanding resource that belongs in all health collections.”

We’re always excited to get some love from the library community. In fact, the chapter on Navigating the Health Care System includes the following mention of librarians and libraries alongside other information about accessing and evaluating health information:

Increasingly, people can obtain access to research studies and other professional publications such as clinical guidelines through open access journals, through public access articles, or by requesting articles from a library. One benefit of using a library is that a trained librarian may be able to search for you or show you how to make the best use of databases. Some hospitals or treatment centers have libraries and services to help patients learn more about their condition. State universities with medical schools are often required to make their medical libraries open to the public, and the medical librarians at those institutions can offer expert assistance.

Still need to buy a copy of the new edition for yourself, a gift, or your library? Check out our information about online ordering and clinic discounts!

As The New York Times Magazine reported this past weekend, a truly comprehensive sex-ed class does exist — one that gives as much weight to female orgasm as to navigating complex emotional and physical terrain. Sexuality and Society is a highly regarded senior elective at Friends’ Central School, a co-ed, Quaker, college preparatory day school in Philadelphia.

Now what if there were a book — a workbook of sorts — that could be used in a class like this, and made available to teens and young adults everywhere who don’t have a progressive forum for discussing sexuality?

Luckily for everyone, that book exists.

“What You Really Really Want” is the latest title on sex and sexuality by Jaclyn Friedman, co-editor of the 2008 hit anthology “Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape,” and a contributor to the 2011 edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” In her new book, Friedman takes on the role of your smartest, most honest, least judgmental, down-to-earth friend, serving as a helpful guide through 11 chapters on defining, understanding and owning your sexuality.

The book’s subtitle — “The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety” — explains the roadmap within. To make the most of this excursion, Friedman encourages readers to do two things: Write every day, with a pen or keyboard, and love your body — and not just in general; you should spend at least 30 minutes a week doing something that “makes you feel nothing but good.”

One of the book’s elements that readers will find particularly useful are the “dive-in” exercises that encourage thinking through how to apply what you’ve read to your own circumstances. At various times, Friedman pauses and encourages you to ask questions, assess your comfort zone, and identify the tools you need to overcome barriers to expressing your sexuality. These check-ins come across as authentic, which is difficult to pull-off on the printed page. That success is largely due to Friedman’s engaging writing style and genuine concern for women’s health and safety; she is the founder and executive director of Women, Action & the Media, which works for gender justice in media, and has been an outspoken advocate for challenging the ways society shames women.

The first chapter, aptly titled “You Can’t Get What You Want Till You Know What You Want,” opens with a discussion of influences on sexuality, from family and religion to our peers and partners. Friedman also provides a concise summary of confusing media messages that limit women to a “teeny window of ‘correct’ sexuality” combined with artificial ideals, followed by a dive-in exercise on media representations of women:

Dive In: Think back to some adolescent media crushes—that song or album you listened to over and over, the magazine subscription you thought would change your life, the book you picked up again and again, the movie you imagined yourself starring in, the video game you played and played and played, the TV show you just couldn’t miss. What drew you to these particular experiences? What, if anything, did they say to you about sexuality? What lessons did you learn from them that you’ve since rejected, and what did you learn that you still adhere to today? If you could go back and tell your adolescent self something about your media choices, what would it be? Get out your journal, and write about it for five minutes.

“What You Really Really Want” gradually shifts from looking at external influences that can prevent women from developing their own sexual identity to exploring different identities and assumptions about sexuality. Following sections on gender and sexual orientation, readers encounter this exercise:

Dive In: Make a list of all the words you can think of that you’ve used yourself or heard someone else use to describe someone’s sexual orientation. Don’t hold back—list the slang and slur words right alongside the more formal terms. Next, cross out every word that you think no one should ever use about anyone. Then cross out every word that you personally would never use to describe someone else. Then, of the remaining words, cross out every one that you wouldn’t want anyone else to use when describing you. Lastly, cross out any word that’s left that you would never use to describe yourself.

Write all of the words that are left in a new list. How do they make you feel? Do they describe your sexual orientation? Are there facets of your orientation that words don’t exist for? If you feel like it, invent a word that helps fill in those gaps.

It may seem like a lot of self-analysis, but that’s exactly what’s needed. As The New York Times Magazine article points out, teens have a difficult time articulating their own desires, in part due to the abundance of manufactured sexual imagery that creates false and harmful standards for what we (or our partners) should look like naked and how we should act.

Friedman wisely concentrates on the individual reader before expanding the discussion to include sexual partners. And even then, Friedman doesn’t offer advice on how to find a compatible sexual partner; rather, she helps the reader to define what compatability even means:

We all get dealt a different hand when it comes to what we’re capable of, and we all need partners who contribute different things. Is it important that your sexual partners are funny? Smart? Good dancers? Sweet with children? Great at communication? This is where you can get specific about bedroom skills, too: How talented does your partner need to be in the sack, and what qualifies as sexual talent to you?

Once you figure out what qualities you want in a partner, it’s time to add another layer of choosiness: How important is each quality to you? Because, let’s get real, nobody’s perfect, and you’re unlikely to find someone who simultaneously checks all of your boxes. Maybe you’d love to have a partner who is really athletic, but you wouldn’t rule out someone who was less active. On the other hand, it may be a total deal breaker if your partner doesn’t like to read. Get clear on what’s cake vs. what’s icing, and you’ll be steering yourself toward what you really really want before you know it.

Making a list for ourselves is one thing, but healthy sexual relationships require honesty with our partners about pleasure and safety.

“Talking freely about sex and safety with your partners not only makes sex more fun and relaxed—because you’re worrying less and getting more of what you really really want—but also makes it easier to tell the great partners from the ones you want to avoid before you get too hurt,” writes Friedman. “And that information means your intuition will get better and better, which means you’ll get even better at knowing your own desires and boundaries and finding people who can simultaneously respect and satisfy you. In short: It’s the best possible kind of positive-feedback loop.”

Besides offering examples of what, how and when to communicate, Friedman also provides an exercise that returns to the personal history and influences that can block us from advocating for our own needs:

Dive In: Pay attention this week to the times when you’re not speaking up. Do you want seconds at dinner but are afraid to say so? Do you actually want to wear that outfit, or are you doing it because you think someone else will like it on you? Did your friend or partner hurt your feelings, but you aren’t letting them know? Make a note each time it happens. Then, when you’ve got some time, pick one example and write about what it felt like. And then write about what it might have felt like if you had gone the other way and spoken on your own behalf.

Students at Friends’ Central School are fortunate to have a terrific teacher and a supportive educational environment that encourages exploration of these issues. Maybe, just maybe, other schools will start to follow suit. For the rest of us — and for those forward-minded sexuality classes — “What You Really Really Want” can make a lifetime of difference.

Excerpts of “What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety” are printed by arrangement with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Photo credit: Mandy Lussier. This post is a stop in Jaclyn’s blog tour. Check out yesterday’s stop at WIMN’s Voices. If you’re in the Chicago area, join me on Nov. 30 as Jaclyn reads from her book at Women & Children First (7:30 p.m.).

To submit your own story of how OBOS has touched your life, visit http://www.ourbodiesourblog.org/story-submission.

Stories will be posted to the blog; you can remain anonymous if you prefer. Check out the great stories others are sharing at http://www.ourbodiesourblog.org/blog/category/obos-stories.

Believe it or not, 2011 is the 40th anniversary of the first edition of the book. As part of the celebration, OBOS is releasing a new edition of the book and hosting a symposium that will bring together women who are culturally adapting and transforming “Our Bodies, Ourselves” into different formats for use in their own countries.

We’ ll be writing more about these events over the course of the next year, but for now, we invite you to share your own stories. If you have an OBOS story – however brief, or however “small” it may seem to you – please share it with us. We love to hear it, and plan to use the stories in conjunction with our 40th anniversary celebration and book release next year.

For more information on the upcoming anniversary and book, including how to support the new edition, check out our anniversary page.  Also check out our history section for lots of cool and interesting information about how the book came to be and the impact it has had over the years.

Henrietta Lacks was a poor, Black woman whose cervical cancer cells were taken in the course of her treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s. Her cells were the first “immortal” cells — cells kept alive in culture – and went on to be widely used in medical research.

Henrietta’s cells were used in the development of the polio vaccine, were sent up in early space missions, and are mentioned in tens of thousands of research papers.

Rebecca Skloot’s book chronicles the history of Henrietta Lacks and her cells (dubbed “HeLa” cells), as well as Skloot’s  journey uncovering the story.

Lacks and her family never knew about the vast body of research that was being conducted using the cells, or even that the cells had been taken and used for research at all.  She and her family never benefited financially from the selling of HeLa cells. While Henrietta is long dead, her children and grandchildren still struggle to get medical care, and do not have health insurance.

In the course of her talk, Skloot read snippets of the book and discussed questions of ethics, race and class raised by the story. She talked about whether the family should be compensated, the kind of medical care Henrietta received in John Hopkins’s “colored” ward,  and the past and current use of cells and tissue from people’s biopsies and other procedures for later medical research (which may make money for biotechnology corporations). It was really interesting, and I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in these issues.

Skloot has established the Henrietta Lacks Foundation to fund scholarships and medical care for members of the Lacks family. She also blogs about her work. The text of an interview earlier this year with Skloot on NPR’s Fresh Air is available here.

More poignantly, Jaclyn Friedman recently broke the silence around women’s sexual freedom with a must-read post at Feministe titled “My Sluthood, Myself.”

Now comes a new sexual guidebook for the 21st century entitled (are you sitting down?) “Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk.”

The satire comes to us from The Association for the Betterment of Sex, a male collective of sorts that includes comedy writers from “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and the publications McSweeney’s, The Onion and Esquire.

I’ll qualify this by noting I haven’t read it (review copy, hello?), but a few compelling topics include everything from outmoded masturbation slang (“Going on tour with Midnight Oil” is apparently out) to the top five pastry-related euphemisms for female genitalia. The book also lists “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” dry-cleaning services “for freshening up your vinyl fetishwear or adult-sized Tigger costume.”

For a bit of a preview, the Huffington Post has posted a slide show of favorite info-graphics from the book. You can also enjoy short bits of wisdom from the book’s Twitter feed. Most recent tweet: “Ever made love in a cranberry bog? Sound off!” (Where’s the hashtag?)

For a another satirical perspective, check out “The Sexy Book of Sexy Sex,” written by “Daily Show” correspondent Kristen Schaal and her boyfriend, “Daily Show” staff writer Rich Blomquist.

“Given the couple’s impeccable comic credentials and the evident affection they showed during a joint interview at a Midtown bar not far from the Daily Show studios, it’s no surprise that The Sexy Book Of Sexy Sex is a charming comedy love-child, mixing The Daily Show’s textbook parodies with extended prose pieces that riff on romance novels and pornographic science fiction,” writes Sam Adams in the intro to The Onion’s Q&A with the authors.

We’re used to the appropriation of OBOS for satirical purposes. It wasn’t too long ago that Steven Colbert was throwing the latest edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” on the yule log as part of the book-burning extras on his “A Colbert Christmas” DVD. And Colbert has long used a skeleton reading OBOS for his “Cheating Death” segment.

You know what they say: A sense of humor is really sexy.

Plus: Speaking of the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” book, we’re in the midst of writing a new edition — the 40th anniversary edition (!) — due out in fall 2011. Watch this space for more info on how to submit personal stories for revised chapters. You can also share your story about reading OBOS for the first time and the impact it had on you and your friends. And if you’d like to support these endeavors, you or someone you’d like to honor can be listed in the book. No kidding!

For those interested in an even more thorough exploration of this topic, Lori Freedman’s “Willing and Unable: Doctors’ Constraints in Abortion Care” is a great resource. In fact, the Times piece mentions Freedman, in the context of a study she co-authored.

In the study, researchers interviewed 30 OB/GYNs with abortion training who said they wanted to provide abortions after residency. Once they were in practice, though, most of the OB/GYNs were not providing abortions, and the study examines the professional, personal and social reasons why they weren’t.

“Willing and Unable” provides more detail on these discussions with providers, focusing on the providers who are trained to provide abortion and not opposed to the practice — the willing — but who for various personal and structural reasons are unable to do so.

Freedman discusses the isolation of abortion into freestanding clinics, and the physicians she interviews describe the barriers to integrating abortion into normal medical care in group practices and hospitals, including group practice owners, personal attitudes, fear of stigma, financial and professional vulnerability early in their careers, HMO referral rules, and Catholic hospital networks that have made them unable to provide abortion to patients.

Ninety-seven percent of non-metropolitan U.S. counties lack abortion providers, and dedicated abortion clinics currently provide 93 percent of abortion procedures. Looking at these statistics, Freedman concludes that “threats, overt abortion prohibitions, and a medical culture of practice that distances itself from abortion” results in a “multilevel, institutionalized buck-passing that marginalizes abortion practice.”

She explains that “ultimately, willing and even highly motivated physicians find the current organization of health care all but prohibits abortion practice within mainstream medicine.”

In some cases, providers were more ambivalent and simply did not feel a degree of personal responsibility for providing abortions that would lead them to tackle certain barriers and inconveniences that could be overcome. In other cases, however, the providers would have liked to provide abortion but were prevented from doing so by strict policies and conditions of their employment or other structural barriers.

Freedman examines not only the reasons for but the outcomes of these barriers — such as cases encountered by interviewees who currently work in Catholic hospital networks and have been frustrated by their inability to provide abortions, even to women whose pregnancies were clearly unsuccessful and, in some cases, life-threatening.

Freedman makes the following recommendations for advocates to move beyond increasing access to abortion training (a key focus in previous decades):

• Target physicians later in their careers, as they may experience less financial and professional vulnerability;
• Work to increase the number of advanced practice clinicians (such as nurse practitioners and CNMs) who provide abortion services;
• Call on HMOs and private physician practices to stop outsourcing abortion care to dedicated clinics and reduce the segregation of this service from mainstream medicine.

Overall, I found “Willing and Unable” to be a nuanced and fascinating exploration of the reasons why providers who are trained in and willing to provide abortions may not be doing so, which in turn contributes to the high percentage of U.S. areas with no local abortion provider.

While I have personally been more attuned to the issue of medical student training with regards to the provider portion of the access equation, Freedman’s work was quite informative in pointing out other important ways in which trained and willing physicians are currently prevented from reducing the provider shortage in the United States.

Readers may also be interested in this RHRealityCheck podcast discussion with Freedman, and two articles in the June 2010 issue of the journal Contraception by Freedman and her colleagues.

Note: “Willing and Unable” is published by my larger workplace’s university press, and I know the press’s marketing and new media staff.

in 1960, women were prohibited from serving on juries and it was perfectly legal to not hire women because of their sex. The book opens with the story of a woman who was kicked out of traffic court for daring to wear pants (and she was there to pay her boss’s ticket).

One of today’s biggest problems, said Collins, is that “half the workforce is female now, and we still haven’t figured out who’s supposed to take care of the kids.”

Colbert appeared shocked. “The women take care of the kids,” he said.

The reason, he added, is simply biological.

“I cannot produce milk. I’ve tried. It’s painful and it doesn’t work.”

Enjoy.