Awesome message from Chelsea Lewis YWCA

Thanks to Lucy Cirocco, Manager Women's Health Statewide for passing this on

"My emails often draw attention to the things we lament when it comes to the advancement of women’s rights, women’s leadership and women’s safety. So I thought it is appropriate to end the year with some positive reflections on the good things we have seen happen in 2011.

Rebecca Richards at the age of 23 became Australia’s first Indigenous Rhodes Scholar. She arrived at Oxford University in September.

Brazil has its first female President in Dilma Rousseff, and closer to home Lara Giddings became Tasmania’s first female Premier.

Patricia Waria-Read was the inaugural winner of the new Australia Day Council of South Australia award to recognise outstanding women, the Women Hold Up half the Sky Award. And at the same Australia Day awards at the start of the year Anne Levy, the fourth woman ever elected to South Australia’s Parliament, became an Officer of the Order of Australia in recognition of her life-long fight for equality.

Christine Lagarde became the first woman to be Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, and IBM appointed its first-ever female CEO – Virginia Rometty.

Eleni Glouftsis made amateur football league history in August as the first woman field umpire to officiate a division one game. And the sports pages in the newspaper had one woman on its back page … that was Sam Stosur when she won the US Open.

Legacy – the organisation that assists war widows – appointed the first ever woman to its Board. You go Dianne Fairhead.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard appointed Penny Williams as Australia’s first Global Ambassador for Women and Girls, making Australia one of only a small group of countries to have a special women's ambassador. The Prime Minister also announced the Federal Government will fund the outcomes of the Equal Pay Test Case; and then ended the year with a Cabinet with more women Australia has ever seen and the announcement that Nicola Roxon will become the nation's first female attorney-general.

Here in South Australia the revised State Strategic Plan featured – for the very first time – a Target to reduce violence against women. And the new A Right to Safety Strategy was launched; and on 9 December, the new Intervention Orders (Prevention of Abuse) Act came in to effect.

The ASX has seen the highest level of percentage increase of female appointments across the Boardroom Diversity Index. From a low base of 8.3 per cent in 2008 the percentage of ASX200 board positions held by women had grown to 10.9 per cent by March 2011.

Here at the Y some of our 2011 highlights included the launch of our Aboriginal Young Women’s Leadership Program; and the launch of women@work – an intensive arts based education program for long term unemployed women.

Award winning local filmmaker Sophie Hyde was our inaugural Conversation 1:5:1 guest; and thousands saw our powerful positive self image projection project in Rundle Street.
YWCA’s Go Girls! Healthy Bodies Healthy Minds program reached more than a hundred girls and here is what three participants from Enfield Primary School had to say at the end of the 8 week group mentoring program: “I learnt how to look at life from a different perspective, learn to be more assertive and confident, learn new physical activities and other activities. Go Girls! is AWESOME!”
“In Go Girls! I learnt that you have to be yourself no matter what and you also have to be careful with the friends you have, and you should always feel safe anywhere you go.”
“I don’t know where to start from because I’ve learnt so much but the best ones are to be proud of myself and feel confident by not caring what other people think. I’ve learnt a lot of balanced eating, and what healthy foods are. I’ve learnt how to be a good friend and open up myself with friends. I’ve had more self-esteem.”

The Y was quoted in the media 33 times advocating on behalf of young women; and our inaugural WordUp Advocacy Workshop inspired young women to advocate for themselves.
And that’s just scratching the surface really.

In 2012 we look forward to further expansion among our programs, reaching even more girls and young women, and in particular we are quite excited about our first Young Women’s Leadership Conference - SHE Leads.
We will be releasing our SHE Speaks survey results on International Women’s Day; holding another WordUp workshop; developing our next Policy Platform; and supporting hundreds of young women on their leadership pathways.

We look forward to seeing you along that pathway, and we wish all of our members, volunteers, stakeholders, supporters and friends a festive season marked by a true sense of safety, contentment, pride and love.


Chelsea Lewis Communications ManagerYWCA of Adelaide
17 Hutt Street Adelaide, South Australia +61 8 8203 9412 direct+61 425 286 064 mobile+61 8 8203 9498 fax http://www.ywca.com.au/"

Men? Women? Who is most likely to go in for an STI test

I was just looking through the clinic 275 statistics for 2010 in one of the  quarterly surveillance reports in 2010. what really struck me was that males only accounted for 30% of the people that go in for testing. This means that women account for 70% of those being tested. Of course we are going to continue to have spiraling numbers of young people with an STI if this trend does not reverse. We ( workers/parents/friends) need to support young men to go in and get tested. Stay tuned for a short mp4 of a young Adelaide man telling his stiry of getting tested.

Good question

Recently I was working with some young women. We spoke of many things around sexuality and diversity. I was explaining that orgasm doesnt have to be the number one - be all end all- to sex play. As we were discussing why we have been conditioned to believe this , one of the young women asked " Well how can I tell if Ive had an orgasm, I enjoy sex but I dont know if I have ever had an orgasm"

I won't go into our discussion here but suffice it to say that if this question was asked of her friends the reponse would probably be something like " If you've had one you would know". This response is not true and is a sure way of shutting down the conversation.

Below is a response by one of my favourite bloggers ( Cory Silverberg) to the same question he received. What do you think?

If you only do one thing for your sex life, try and stop yourself whenever you are comparing your sex life to someone else’s. It’s not easy, but in the long run I promise you’ll be much happier, and think of all the time you’ll save by getting rid of all those anxious moments. Also, you never know if someone is describing something accurately, and, regardless, it doesn’t matter. Your sex life is all that matters, and possibly the sex life of the people you’re having sex with.

If you do two things for your sex life, you should make the second thing an effort to masturbate more. Sex educators don’t refer to masturbation as the “cornerstone of sexual health” for nothing. The best way to explore your sexual response, including what orgasms feel like, is to do it on your own first, before you get one or more than one person involved.

As for how to tell if you’ve had an orgasm or not, there isn’t a test you can take. After all, orgasm is not just a physical experience, it happens in your body, your mind, possibly even your spirit. And there is no single definition of orgasm. So what would the test measure? However, there are some tell tale signs of what we could call an orgasmic response:

• Increased heart rate and blood pressure
• Increased muscle tension
• A flush of your skin
• A release of tension followed sometimes by a feeling of deep relaxation

But you might experience one or several of these things and not “feel” like you had an orgasm.

So how can you tell if you’ve had an orgasm? Most people would probably respond by saying “you’ll know when you’ve had one”. This always sounds a little condescending to me though, and if you’ve never had one, how could you know?

Instead I would just ask you whether or not the sex play you’re having is pleasurable. Does it feel good? Does it feel like something you want to do more? Are there times during sex when you want to say or do something but you hold yourself back? Holding back is one way you might be reducing the pleasure you’re feeling, including orgasms.

Trying to figure out if you’ve had an orgasm can also be a dead end, because if you’ve had one, does that mean you stop exploring other ways of feeling good or having orgasms? It’s a cliché, but a true one, that sex is about the journey not the destination. Focusing on orgasm is like driving down a one way street that stops at the river. If you focus instead on sexual pleasure, on how you respond and what you can feel, you don’t have to stop at the river bank; you get to jump in the river and float with the current, and you never know where you’ll end up.

JESS3 x Economist: Women's Economic Opportunity from JESS3 on Vimeo.

Thanks to Informed Decisions twitter account for this link

Female Sexual Dysfunction

This is a great article that describes the use of using our media made fear of sexuality as a money making enterprise.

Female Sexual Dysfunction: A Case Study of Disease Mongering and Activist Resistance
by Leonore Tiefer:2006

The creation and promotion of“female sexual dysfunction”(FSD) is a textbook case of disease mongering by thepharmaceutical industry and by other agents of medicalization, such as health and science journalists, healthcare professionals, public relations andadvertising firms, contract research organizations, and others in the“medicalization industry.”

Go here to read more

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/archive/1549-1676/3/4/pdf/10.1371_journal.pmed.0030178-S.pdf

Frank Team

This looks like a great website - FRANK TEAM. It's kinda for young female entrepreneurs - social and the like - young women with ideas. Here's a blurb from the home page, have a look around;

Ever wondered where all the good people have gone? In our rollercoaster world, it's hard to know what's genuine. When it comes to life satisfaction there's stacks of things to distract us from what's real - celebrity magazines, dodgy politics, 'reality' TV...

So we got to thinking, if we're a company made up of enterprising people who value the real over the fake, people over profit, where can we make the biggest difference?

They have a free online magazine called Frank Mag, the most recent issue has a story in it on an event YWCA staged in Adelaide on International No Diet Day - there you go, i didn't know such a day existed.

Determined to take the focus off food, the YWCA wanted to mark the day with a message of positive body image. So they set up a stall in the city's central Mall, armed with two Polaroid cameras, black textas, and a blank canvas. The idea was to ask people to have their photo taken and write on the photo what they love about themselves.

Just as excited about the concept as we were, one woman noticed us, stopped, and was delighted by the idea. She smiled as her photo was taken and simply wrote 'Breasts' on her image. She spoke lovingly of how they had fed her children, and that they were without question what she loves most about her body.

Violence against women is WRONG

Violence against women is in epidemic proportions in this country and many countries around the world. Here is an organisation that is doing something about it. www.whiteribbonday.org.au/

YOU CAN TO