Survey: Teens Sharing Nude Images Online, a clip from The Today Show on a survey released by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and Cosmogirl.com reports, "22 percent of all teen girls — and 11 percent of teen girls ages 13-16 years old — say they have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude images of themselves."

"One-third (33 percent) of teen boys and one-quarter (25 percent) of teen girls say they have had nude/semi-nude images — originally meant to be private — shared with them," the article reports.

Why would girls and boys do this?

I'll do anything for you. Like me. Please like me! This will make him like me! I'll do anything to make him love me back! This will really make him love me.

Does that sound familiar to anyone?

Also, it would be ideal if a human being's sense of consequence developed before age 35. (Maybe that's just me.)

Thank God there was no Facebook, MySpace or the ability to send photos via cell phone when I was a teen or in my 20s.

R.B. if you're out there . . . Please tell me you hit delete when you got married.

Sexuality Education should include THIS phenomenon.

Read my So Sexy So Soon series.

10 Steps to Undo Sexualized Childhood

So Sexy So Soon, Sexualized Childhood

So Sexy So Soon: Sex Education Quiz

So Sexy So Soon: Premature Adolescent Rebellion

Support reviews like these by purchasing So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids

Yesterday, we discussed Self-Objectification and Low Self-Esteem.

I loath problems without solutions and complaints that make us feel powerless. So, here's a list of 10 Antidotes to Self-Objectification and Sexualization of Girls.

* Media Literacy - talk to girls about the images they see. Point it out when there is obvious digital retouching like in Keira Knightly Stands Up for Her Girls and Yours.
Watch Dove's Onslaught campaign with her and discuss it. If it's age-appropriate take her to the Natural Breast Gallery and talk about how different the images of women in media are than the bodies of real women. Tell her about Photoshop and discuss the motives of the media to sell products by misrepresenting women's bodies.

* Athletics - A focus on the body that is nonsexual, athletics focuses on competency, agency and action. As participation in sports increases, participation in risky sexual-activity decreases. Taekwondo and soccer are good choices. The report sites cheerleading and dance as less empowering types of athletics due to the focus on appearance, sexiness, and thinness.

* Extracurricular Activities - Girl Scouts, band, after-school programs like Girls Inc., drama club, band, computer or video gaming clubs give girls an alternative to activities that focus on their appearance.

* Comprehensive Sexuality Education - "A central way to help youth counteract distorted views presented by the media and culture about girls, sex and the sexualization of girls is comprehensive sex education. Programs must include accurate information about reproduction and contraception, the importance of delaying intercourse initiation for young people, and the building of communication skills, and promotes a notion of sexual responsibility that includes respect for oneself and an emphasis on consensual, non-exploitative sexual activity."

* Co-Viewing Media with Parents - Parental comment on media children are exposed to is key to altering the influence of the messages. Watch TV with girls and comment on the messages. Contradict stereo-typical behavior when you see it, share your insights on advertising and media. Co-viewing also reduces the amount of inappropriate material children see.

* Religion, Spirituality and Meditation - organized religious and other ethical instruction actively combat the values conveyed by popular culture. When parents teach girls they are "more than their bodies" girls benefit. Talk to your kids about your idea of her whole self, and that "who they are" makes them valuable outside of their sexuality or gender roles. Insisting that girls remain girls and not be pushed into a precocious sexuality is something many churches do. Encourage meditation, yoga, tai chi, and prayer to teach girls to get in touch with their bodies and themselves as spiritual beings.

* Activism by Parents and Families - encourage girls to become their own activists by being one yourself. Join Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood to fight sexualizing and objectifying messages in marketing. Get involved in The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Take your daughter to a Dove BodyTalk, Campaign for Real Beauty Self Esteem Workshop. Sign your daughter up for the Girl Scouts Uniquely Me program.

* Alternative Media - Cancel the Tiger Beat subscription and subscribe to Girl Zone. Get your daughter involved in writing or producing her own media - a website or blog is simple enough. Stone Soup is a literary magazine written by children. Write your daughter a book about her. Most digital photography websites like Mypublisher.com will allow you to publish a storybook about your daughter, using images of her, in a beautiful hardbound book for $30. Throw out the Disney Princess books and videos and get some empowering alternatives like Princess Bubble.

* Confront Your Body Issues - If you, the mother, have a history of self-objectification or poor body image confront it and deal with it before you pass it down. Refuse to self-deprecate or equate your own value to how thin you are or how you look.

* Be The Empowered Woman - If you find yourself buying into gender-stereotypes in your own life, being too passive, not saying "no", holding yourself to an impossible standard of perfection, running yourself ragged to be everything to everyone - Stop It. She will emulate you. A mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance vaccinates her daughter against a low self-esteem, said Naomi Wolf.

Compiled from the APA Report on Sexualization of Girls and articles originally published on Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me.

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By Tracee Sioux 

Abstinence Only Sex Education, the news has recently come out, has been a complete and utter failure.

Why? Because though we've poured $1 billion into these programs kids kept having sex.

Unprotected sex.

Turns out not educating children about prevention against sexually transmitted diseases has translated into an STD epidemic leaving one out of every 4 American teenagers infected, according to the Center for Disease Control. That's 3.2 million girls. Nearly half (48% of all African American girls are infected, compared to 20% of white young women.

That's a big huge consequence for not properly educating them about disease and pregnancy prevention.

These teenagers, 25% of all girls, are now at risk for cervical cancer, Cesarean section to avoid transmission during the birth of a baby, transmitting herpes or HPV to future marital partners, infertility, self esteem and self worth issues, blindness, and death.

The numbers of teen pregnancy did not decrease during our abstinence-only experiment either.

Because we didn't want to tell them about condoms?

Who is ignorant in this picture? Them for not knowing due to innocence or us for being too afraid to educate them about prevention?

As parents we have to grow some guts to challenge the flawed-logic of generations past. No one wants their kid to have sex. No one thinks teenagers should be sexually active. But, the reality is that it's not our decision. We can influence their decision by talking about sex as much as possible, leaving an open door for dialogue about sexuality and its consequences, we can even brain wash them with a strong expectation of abstinence as the very best and safest way for them to mature. I'm highly in favor of all that.

But, ultimately, we have to face the fact that it's a choice we, as parents, have limited control over. We should love them enough, however, to arm them with enough prevention education that we minimize the permanent consequences should they choose to have sex anyway. It's evident that they are.

There should be 5 goals in sex education in public schools in America.

1. Encourage abstinence as the safest route. 
2. Prevent pregnancy.
3. Prevent contraction and spread of STDs.
4. Educating girls about the biological facts of their own bodies. (By avoiding sex education we've also left girls ignorant of their own human biology of which they have a right to know.) 
5. Educate both girls and boys about sexual assault, date rape, sexual harassment and coercion tactics. We must arm girls with enough knowledge and tactics to demand respect. We must also educate boys about what is offensive and what will not be tolerated in their behavior toward their girl counter-parts. We should at least try to reduce the number of rapists and woman beaters in our society. Studies show that males develop this type of behavior in their youth and continue to escalate during adulthood.

Up before congress is a Prevention First Act (S.21/H.R. 819) which would expand access to contraception and preventative health care services that help reduce unplanned pregnancies, abortions, and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases while improving access to women's health care. It would also provide a federal funding stream for comprehensive sex education in schools. Currently, there are three separate federal programs that fund abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, but no federal funding exists specifically for comprehensive sex education. States can only receive funding if they agree to teach abstinence-only-until-marriage while excluding information about the health benefits of contraception to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. The Prevention First Act includes a comprehensive approach to sex education - age appropriate education that promotes abstinence but includes information about contraception.

The consequences of teenage sex very obviously falls more heavily on girls. Girls are more at risk for exploitation, harassment, rape, and prostitution. Girls are at risk for pregnancy. Girls can die of cervical cancer and pass on STDs through the birth canal and shared blood. Girls are at risk of being labeled "sluts" or "whores" trashing their self image, girls are more at risk for quitting school to become mothers, girls are more at risk of becoming dependent on welfare programs, girls are at risk for infertility.

It's morally wrong to keep putting our girls at risk by not arming them with an expansive education that relates to the issues they face today. We should not pour another single penny into Abstinence Only programs that have failed our girls.

Take action right now by following the Two Minute Activist link at the American Association of University Women encouraging the representatives that work for us to require schools to incorporate comprehensive and effective sex education.

See the press release issued by the Center of Disease Control on March 11.

By Tracee Sioux

Population Connection just sent me a letter that made me feel totally empowered. I had sent letters to all of my representatives insisting they vote in favor of extending and expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). I had also asked readers of So Sioux Me to write their Representatives as well. I feel proud to have participated and I feel proud of my readers who participated.

The only way Americans can be empowered is if we use our power to demand what we want from our elected Representatives. Writing letters, is, I believe, an effective way to communicate with those we've put in office about our expectations of them.

The State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was passed by the House by a vote of 224-204.

The President has threatened to veto the expansion of SCHIP.

The controversy, an extremely relevant and important one for girl empowerment, extends to the federally funded abstinence-only sex education provision. The provision will require that programs be medically and scientifically accurate and that they be based on a model that has been proven effective at reducing unintended pregnancy and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

From a girl empowerment standpoint misinformation or uninformation about how she can get pregnant or how she might contract a sexually transmitted disease, both of which carry lifelong consequences, is never to a girls' benefit.

A girl is entitled to know how her body functions and what the medically accurate consequences for her sexual behavior might be. Not telling her how she might contract an STD or become pregnant has the practical effect of leaving her with a baby and an STD through ignorance.

Withholding or giving inaccurate information is patently unfair, and I believe, immoral, from the girls' standpoint.

I understand that parents want the right to tell their children what they feel is appropriate about sex. Feel free. Please, tell them abstinence is the only way to be 100% safe. By all means, encourage them to wait until they are more mature and totally committed. No one wants teenagers to have sex - it's a bad idea. Teenage sex has real consequences.

However, since parents aren't the ones facing parenthood at 14-years-old and they aren't the ones contracting cancer-causing HPV or life-threatening AIDS, the girls' right to medically accurate information supersedes the parents' right to withhold information from their children.

In practicality, parents are the last ones to know what kind of actual sexual activity is going on with their kids. How many parents have had to sit through the terrifying and shocking news that their teenage daughter is pregnant? The whole design of having sex as a teenager is to keep it from the parents, especially the really, really devout Christian ones.

Not telling girls the truth about how their biological reproductive systems work leaves a lot of room for a boy, whose objective is to get laid, to tell girls oh, you can't get pregnant if I pull out, you can't get pregnant if you do it in a hot tub, if I don't put it all the way in you won't get pregnant, that's not an STD it's just a scab from too much masturbating, I've been checked out and I don't have anything, condoms are just not intimate enough I want to be able to feel you, a blow job isn't really sex.

It's been a while, but I'm pretty positive such ploys are still in being used in parked cars and parentally vacant houses all over America, not to mention all the illicit sexual activity that goes on between teenagers in the church youth group.

We owe our girls enough medically accurate information to be able to take care of themselves sexually. Without medically accurate information, we make victims of them needlessly and that's never empowering.

It is also relevant to point out that under the provision, states and school districts still have the right to determine which curriculum to present in their schools, as long as it's medically accurate information. Obviously more conservative areas will choose to focus more on abstinence.

An empowered girl understands the consequences of sexual activity, and God willing makes better decisions, because she's been given accurate information about her own body.

By Tracee Sioux

I have been a little surprised at the reaction to a vaccine for HPV (human papillomavirus virus), which causes cervical cancer.

I suppose I thought most of the planet, like me, have spent some time hoping that mad-scientists will eventually eradicate cancer. So, when I heard they had an actual vaccine, Center for Disease Control , Approximately 20 million people are currently infected with HPV. At least 50 percent of sexually active men and women acquire genital HPV infection at some point in their lives. By age 50, at least 80 percent of women will have acquired genital HPV infection. About 6.2 million Americans get a new genital HPV infection each year.

My brain is trying to wrap itself around the fact that 80 percent of ALL women will acquire a form of HPV.

Hypothetically, this means out of my grandmother, mother, self, daughter and sister only one of us will NOT be infected. I’m going guess my 83-year-old grandmother might be the safe one.

You know what the whole argument feels like to me? It feels like the same hypocritical puritanical judgment we have always inflicted on our girls and their sexuality.

If you weren’t a slut you wouldn’t get cervical cancer. Serves you right!

However, in this case, it is patently unjustifiable. A girl’s virtue will not keep her from contracting HPV. There is a large population of girls at risk of contracting HPV through cheating or abuse.

A woman is at risk for dying of cervical cancer if she has the bad luck of being married to an adulterer.

* Though they vary from study to study, the most widely accepted figures indicate that between 50 and 70 percent of married men (between 38 and 53 million men) have cheated or will cheat on their wives, according to Ruth Houston, the author of “Is He Cheating on You?-829 Telltale Signs.”

Sexual abuse victims are also at risk of contracting HPV, which can develop into cancer.

* During FFY 2005, an estimated 899,000 children in the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico were determined to be victims of abuse or neglect. Approximately 9.3% of them were victims of sexual abuse, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children’s Department, 2005 Child Maltreatment report.

* Twenty percent of teenage girls and young women have experienced some form of dating violence, according to the United States Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women.

Not requiring the vaccine is unfairly denying basic healthcare to ALL girls period. According to the intercourse is not required to contract the HPV virus. One should assume that many young girls participate in foreplay or sexual experimentation for years prior to having actual sex.

Condoms or other contraceptives do not prevent the spread of HPV because an exchange of fluids is not required to pass the virus from person to person. HPV can be spread from skin to skin and condoms do not cover all contagious areas.

The only thing to protect girls from cervical cancer is the Gardasil HPV vaccine. The vaccine prevents 70% of cervical cancer. Other drug companies are developing similar vaccines which may be more or less effective.

What breaks my heart is the inevitable image of a woman in her early 20s finding out that she may die or never be able to conceive because she contracted this virus. Maybe she had sex with her steady boyfriend in high school and they broke up and she married her college boyfriend and they became a typical young married couple who goes to church every Sunday. Oh, but instead of wearing a scarlet letter “A” she gets to fight cancer. With chemotherapy, hair loss, infertility and possible death.

This cancer kills around 26% of women who are diagnosed with it.

Maybe her parents are people with conservative family values, or maybe her insurance company won’t cover it because the state doesn’t require it to enter school, or her parents are just ignorant and irresponsible.

Either way, no girl deserves to die of cancer because she had sex, not even a promiscuous girl. The punishment, and really lets just admit it’s punitive to deny someone basic healthcare in an attempt to prevent sex, is not equal to the crime.

This scare-tactic method of encouraging abstinence has been ineffective in the face of AIDS, pregnancy and every other sexually transmitted disease. Why, would we think that it would be effective just because cancer is in the forbidding sentence? Adolescents have no sense of mortality. They have no sense of future long-term consequences. It’s the curse and blessing of the teenager that they are blissfully unaware that they will ever be 30.

Nor is cervical cancer or HPV a natural consequence or an unforeseeable circumstance from having sex anymore. No more than having babies is a natural consequence of sex. I have sex all the time, but we have chosen to have only two children and have used information and scientific advancement to prevent the natural consequence of children. Now that we know what causes cervical cancer and we know we can vaccinate girls against it, then there is deliberate harm in withholding the vaccine. Now that we have the knowledge and access to a vaccine, cervical cancer is now a natural consequence of neglecting the health of our girls.

I don’t agree with the argument that it’s the parents’ right to choose whether or not their daughter should be vaccinated. I believe it is every girl’s absolute right to be protected from cervical cancer. The only way to ensure that a girl has access to her right to basic health is for the government to require the vaccination.

The reason all vaccinations are required to enter school is to prevent the spread of communicable diseases that pose a significant health threat to society. HPV and cervical cancer represent a significant health threat to ALL girls, promiscuous or not, and HPV is a very wide-spread communicable disease.

The reason the immunization should be given upon enter the sixth-grade is because a lot of sexual experimentation occurs in junior high school. By high school, for a lot of our girls, it’s already too late. By the time a girl reaches 26, coincidentally around the same time she’s considering marriage, so many girls have already contracted the virus the CDC doesn’t even recommend the vaccine.

The reason parents, in general, are not a good option to guard their daughters’ health in the case of HPV and cervical cancer is that parents usually aren’t the first to know about their daughters’ sexual activity. If seven out of 10 girls have sex by the time they are 17, it’s reasonable to assume that six of those girls’ parents don’t know about it.

Texas was the first state to confront the issue. They confronted it with puritanical judgment and a complete denial of reality.

I encourage you to write your legislature, governor and health department and request that the vaccination be required for girls in your state.

If you’re a parent, please be pro-active and responsible for your daughter’s future health by getting her immunized against the HPV virus. This is a prime teachable moment to talk to young girls about the potential consequences of sexual experimentation in an honest and open way. I really believe if we are open and honest with girls about sex, instead of punitive, forbidding and secretive then we will be much more effective in encouraging them to make better decisions about their sexuality.