By Deb Levine, Exec. Director and Founder, ISIS

My ISIS challenge to you, for the next year, is to mash it up.

What’s a mashup you say?

“A musical genre that involves cutting and pasting samples and loops from two or more popular tracks to form a new track, often forming a suprisingly catchy new tune.” — Wikipedia

And here’s the key: The more different the genres of the source tunes, the more effective the mashup.

Here are 5 ways you can mash it up with youth, sexual and reproductive health and justice in the digital age:

# 1 Mashup: The Personal and the Professional

I keep hearing my colleagues talk about how they keep their work lives sepHIV, arate from their personal lives — both online and offline.

In this digital world without boundaries, we have to merge. Not all information, all the time – that would be TMI. But in order to get sexual and reproductive health out of its silo, we have to integrate our work into our personal lives and the personal into our work.

On that note, I finally got puberty education into my kids’ urban public school last year. Last week, marked the second year of the curriculum. In addition to my daughter’s revelation that s-ee-m-e-n isn’t pronounced semen, I received full support from parents, administrators and teachers, who have become used to seeing Internet Sexuality Information Services in my sig file on parent-teacher emails.

Take a few moments to consider how you represent yourself online and off -  Do you keep your personal and professional networks separate? We challenge you to integrate sexual health into all aspects of your lives.

#2 Mashup: HIV and Violence against Women Prevention

Many of you don’t know that I began my career as a rape crisis counselor, and then moved into training first responders around domestic violence. I worked at the largest agency serving crime victims in NYC. Yes, I had a career pre-Go Ask Alice.

This year, when ISIS and a team of collaborators won the White House HHS Apps Against Abuse challenge with Circle of 6, I wondered if I was backtracking to my former life.

Then, just last week: President Obama issued a presidential memorandum establishing an inter-agency working group on the intersection of HIV/AIDS, violence against women and girls, and gender-related health disparities.

This mashup challenge – if you work in HIV prevention, meet someone from sexual assault or dating violence prevention, and vice versa.

Mashup #3: Adults + Youth

In the 2.0 digital space, we’re all experts. Wisdom doesn’t always equal experience. Everyone’s voice matters, everyone’s voice counts, and without the cross-generational openness, no one will be heard.

ISIS is putting together a YouthTech Council, so that young leaders who are digital natives will be driving our technology projects and engaging their own friends and networks in this important work.

Mashup #4: Reproductive Justice & Rights with Economic Justice, Environmental Justice & Health Disparities

ISIS is working with millennial philanthropists to understand their thinking about the social issues of reproductive health, choice, and contraptive access. We have talked with many young women, in their 20s and 30s with successful careers who are engaged givers. They all tell a similar story  – reproductive health issues are personal, not political. This is not a social cause they can get behind. Tell us instead about women living in poverty, women in environmental hazard zones, and then, they will use their mobile banking services to give generously.

Challenge: Think about reproductive health and access in cross context with other social issues such as economic and environmental justice. Think about re-framing our advocacy work to involve younger women who don’t consider themselves activists or feminists in this important work, but who do care about the issues personally.

Mashup #5: Content and Technology

We still don’t have the tech folks in the room in significant numbers. Tech folks talk about the tech, with the content as user driven and irrelevant to the engineering.  Tech privacy folks talk about location-based services, but do not apply it to, say a woman being beaten by her partner who is trying to find a shelter, or a young person who is trying to locate free condoms. I am sure that everyone in the room knows an IT guy or gal, an engineer or a social media guru. Tell them about your work, and how valuable their input would be in your next project.

In summary, if we mash it up and collaborate, we are sure to find better outcomes in all our work, integrate sexual and reproductive health and rights into popular social causes, and create groundbreaking tech projects that have potential to change the world.

Arai Buendia is a college student at San Francisco State. The views of the bloggers/writers on the Sex::Tech blog do not necessarily reflect the views of ISIS, nor is ISIS associated with the content of these bloggers/writers on other sites.

Los Angeles residents may soon vote on an initiative to make condom use mandatory in the production of adult entertainment films, thanks to the proposal spearheaded by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. (Conley, 2011).

But why should we as adolescent sexual health educators and service providers care? What does adult entertainment have to do with young people?

In 2010, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act which funds abstinence-only programs with 50 million dollars per year; and this year they increased funding by five million dollars (Koebler, 2011).  According to Elia and Eliason, abstinence-only programs assume that all people identify as heterosexual, thus making the information irrelevant to youth who identify as LGBTQ, gender non-conforming, or question their sexuality. As a result, there is a blatant dearth of accurate, objective sexual health information related to gay, lesbian and transgender sexuality in these programs.  So what’s a young non-heterosexual person to do?  Take matters into their own hands and turn to the Internet, of course. Yet, what they often find at the top of their search is most often NOT a site with accurate and objective information on LGBTQ sexuality, but rather…adult entertainment sites. Adult entertainment films usually portray sex as adventurous, not “safe”.

And regardless of sexual orientation, this reliance on “Googling it” holds true for other typically underserved groups such as urban youth of color as pointed out in TECHsex USA.  This trend is such that it recently landed on the front page of the New York Times in an article that examines the role that digital technology plays in today’s sex education.  But as the article also points out, a key challenge when creating online programs is making it so these sites reach the top of teens’ online searches, rather than adult entertainment sites.

As such, we find the debate surrounding the potential voting measure in L.A. an interesting one for discussion.  Should an element of ‘safe sex’ be integrated to these voyeuristic episodes as a way to mainstream protection against STIs and HIV?  And most importantly, how can we as a field create viable, engaging sex education alternatives to adult entertainment for those teens who aren’t getting their questions answered by abstinence only (and in some cases comprehensive) sexual health education?  Programs such as the Impact Project, Sex-Ed Loop and websites like Sex, Etc are a few examples of technology-based solutions to fill this gap utilizing a relevant, youth driven approach.

Conversations and topics such as these will be featured at ISIS’ fifth annual Sex::Tech conference in San Francisco on April 1-3.   We are in the midst of creating an exciting program that brings together the work and voices of educators, experts and youth themselves which will make for a robust and well-rounded dialogue on topics such as this one.

But why wait for April when we can get the conversation started now?  What is your opinion on the debate surrounding the potential measure that would mandate condom-use in adult films?  What work are you and/or your partners doing to address the dearth of accurate, objective sex education accessible to underserved youth segments?

References
Boyar, R, Levine, D, Zensius, N. TECHsex USA: Youth Sexuality and Reproductive Health in the Digital Age.  Oakland, CA: ISIS, Inc. April, 2011.

Conley, M. 2011. L. A. may vote on mandatory condom use for porn stars. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2011/12/28/la-may-vote-on-mandatory-condom-use-for-porn-stars/

Elia, J., & Eliason, M. (2010). Discourses of Exclusion: Sexuality Education’s Silencing of Sexual Others. Journal of LGBT Youth, 7(1), 29-48.

Hoffman, J. (2011). Sex education gets directly to youths, via text. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/us/sex-education-for-teenagers-online-and-in-texts.html?emc=eta1

Koebler, J. 2011. Abstinence-only education debate resurfaces. Retrieved from http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/high-school-notes/2011/12/28/abstinence-only-education-debate-resurfaces

PhotoVoice gives a participatory voice through photography to vulnerable communities for social change. PhotoVoice designs and delivers tailor-made participatory photography, digital storytelling and self-advocacy projects for socially excluded groups. Cool!

At Sex::Tech this year, our PhotoVoice panel features:

Luis Guitterez-Mock from the Center of Excellence for Transgender Health at UCSF, using photovoice for  gender-variant, marginally housed youth.

Heather Alberda from Ottawa Public Health using photovoice to give youth voice around contraception.

Julia Reticker-Flynn from Advocates for Youth andChoice USA who used photovoice for their 1 in 3 campaign around abortion.