Characteristics of Sexual Abuse in Childhood and Adolescence Influence Sexual Risk Behavior in Adulthood

Childhood and adolescent sexual abuse has been associated with subsequent (adult) sexual risk behavior, but the effects of force and type of sexual abuse on sexual behavior outcomes have been less well-studied. The present study investigated the associations between sexual abuse characteristics and later sexual risk behavior, and explored whether gender of the child/adolescent moderated these relations. Patients attending an STD clinic completed a computerized survey that assessed history of sexual abuse as well as lifetime and current sexual behavior. Participants were considered sexually abused if they reported a sexual experience (1) before age 13 with someone 5 or more years older, (2) between the ages of 13 and 16 with someone 10 or more years older, or (3) before the age of 17 involving force or coercion. Participants who were sexually abused were further categorized based on two abuse characteristics, namely, use of penetration and force. Analyses included 1177 participants (n=534 women; n=643 men). Those who reported sexual abuse involving penetration and/or force reported more adult sexual risk behavior, including the number of lifetime partners and number of previous STD diagnoses, than those who were not sexually abused and those who were abused without force or penetration. There were no significant differences in sexual risk behavior between nonabused participants and those who reported sexual abuse without force and without penetration. Gender of the child/adolescent moderated the association between sexual abuse characteristics and adult sexual risk behavior; for men, sexual abuse with force and penetration was associated with the greatest number of episodes of sex trading, whereas for women, those who were abused with penetration, regardless of whether the abuse involved force, reported the most episodes of sex trading. These findings indicate that more severe sexual abuse is associated with riskier adult sexual behavior

Choice-Disability and HIV Infection: A Cross Sectional Study of HIV Status in Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland

Interpersonal power gradients may prevent people implementing HIV prevention decisions. Among 7,464 youth aged 15–29 years in Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland we documented indicators of choice-disability (low education, educational disparity with partner, experience of sexual violence, experience of intimate partner violence (IPV), poverty, partner income disparity, willingness to have sex without a condom despite believing partner at risk of HIV), and risk behaviours like inconsistent use of condoms and multiple partners. In Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland, 22.9, 9.1, and 26.1% women, and 8.3, 2.8, and 9.3% men, were HIV positive. Among both women and men, experience of IPV, IPV interacted with age, and partner income disparity interacted with age were associated with HIV positivity in multivariate analysis. Additional factors were low education (for women) and poverty (for men). Choice disability may be an important driver of the AIDS epidemic. New strategies are needed that favour the choice-disabled

Cell Lineage Analysis of the Mammalian Female Germline

Fundamental aspects of embryonic and post-natal development, including maintenance of the mammalian female germline, are largely unknown. Here we employ a retrospective, phylogenetic-based method for reconstructing cell lineage trees utilizing somatic mutations accumulated in microsatellites, to study female germline dynamics in mice. Reconstructed cell lineage trees can be used to estimate lineage relationships between different cell types, as well as cell depth (number of cell divisions since the zygote). We show that, in the reconstructed mouse cell lineage trees, oocytes form clusters that are separate from hematopoietic and mesenchymal stem cells, both in young and old mice, indicating that these populations belong to distinct lineages. Furthermore, while cumulus cells sampled from different ovarian follicles are distinctly clustered on the reconstructed trees, oocytes from the left and right ovaries are not, suggesting a mixing of their progenitor pools. We also observed an increase in oocyte depth with mouse age, which can be explained either by depth-guided selection of oocytes for ovulation or by post-natal renewal. Overall, our study sheds light on substantial novel aspects of female germline preservation and development

Be Not Ashamed, women...You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.

Artist\u27s statement: I have lived in my body for twenty-one years, as long as it has taken me to develop into the person who I am today. Despite my increasing security and happiness with myself as a capable adult, since childhood I have felt uncomfortable with my flesh in fits and starts. Like most American women, I have learned to scrutinize my body as a jumbled assemblage of individual parts. I have been taught to do so via the media and, equally damaging, through experiencing others\u27 judgments upon learning my BMI (doctors) or jean size (saleswomen). I pinch, weigh, and measure myself like an unhappy baker. Nonetheless, I realize that I am a body, my emotions and memories all come from the meat of my brain, and often rest in the sensations in my limbs. How can I, and virtually all the women I know around me, be so uncompassionate towards our own souls? Paradoxically, all my life I have been drawn to the female form as a muse and inspiration in my art. Admiring the loving portrayal of female nudes in works by Gustave Courbet and Louise Bourgeoisie, I endeavor in my art to explore a subject\u27s personhood through the portrayal of her corporal self. However, as body-positive as my work is, and as neo-feminist my outlook, I have been unable to make the leap between finding the beauty I see in other bodies in my own. This, despite the fact that my own body contains many of the same features I find desirable in others\u27. This struggle as well of that of opposed limitations, is the conceptual focus of my studio art senior capstone. To that end, I recruited seven female volunteer models from Carleton College who are diverse in their identities and experiences. I positioned them in contorted positions in white boxes and photographed them, using those images as source material for my paintings. The size of board I cut for each painting is a 1:1 ratio of the box in which the models posed. The final paintings represent, therefore, the exact width and height of a space in which young women were crammed. I interviewed each woman about her relationship to her body, her struggles with it, and how other people perceive her because of it. While thus far I have painted four portraits, I plan to expand this series further throughout this next year. Because my work aims to tear down hierarchies of all kinds, I also painted and interviewed myself. I wanted there to be no atmosphere of voyeurism in which I, the ‘superior Artist,\u27 was looking possessively onto my models. These women were brave enough to bare their bodies and souls to me, Praxis compelled me to do the same. Each woman I have or am working with has an active say in her portrait, I have attempted to maintain an ongoing relationship with each model and invite them to periodically view and critique their portraits. In interviewing my brave models for my senior thesis, I have uncovered incredible stories of prejudice, disordered eating, and different body ideals across racial and familial lines, to name just a few important themes. The longer I continue this project, the more strongly I feel that my senior capstone is vitally important to not only myself, but to many larger communities. Works of poetry such as Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams, The Blue Suess by Terrance Hayes, and various works by Lucille Clifton inspired and influenced my work. I am especially guided by the wise words of this last poet: There is not an emotion in the world that someone else hasn\u27t felt or is feeling with you. These seven American women\u27s stories in and of themselves are too valuable to be not told. I am ardent to continue to make many more important stories from women available in my work in the future

Ono no Komachi Iconography in Ukiyo-e: Satire, Sex & Social Rebellion

In this paper, I examine why the figure of Ono no Komachi was so important within the floating world, or ukiyo, a realm that encompassed the woodblock printing and prostitution industries as well as kabuki theatre in the Edo period. I will pay particular attention to the social realities that restricted and, at the same time, propagated these industries. To further understand why the image of courtesans and that of Komachi were so easily associated in the minds of the Edo public, I compare the lives of female Heian aristocrats and Edo Yoshiwara prostitutes. I then examine the ways in which the seven Komachi legends, consolidated through noh plays generations later, were depicted through conventionalized imagery and subsequently altered in satirical texts in Edo period and woodblock prints. Finally, I argue that the standardization of Nana Komachi as a stock theme within ukiyo-e as a whole stems not only from market sensibility, but from an inherent need to challenge governmental stratifications by asserting the value of low-culture worldviews. This included reclaiming and parodying stereotypical high-class symbols, including that of Ono no Komachi