Mod 1 wrap.

I do a little bit of interning with a nutrition-based non-profit, and right now we're working on using social media etc to get the word out. It struck me, though, how much easier this is to do with something like nutrition than it is for sexual health sometimes. Start talking about kids or food, and everybody supports you with enthusiasm. The campaigns tend to focus on cute, on needy, on pulling on altruistic heartstrings, on making us feel good about what we already do for our own health; they are easily to identify with and generally well received by a really wide range of people. But, when you start talking about sex, I feel like you can easily lose half of your audience right away, another big chunk when you start in with details ("oh, that's not me"), and what's left might be mostly people who were already interested anyway. It seems like the subject matter creates a much wider gap between high and low involvement groups, and makes reaching the latter more difficult. Here's a video of a continuing ed lecture that talks about the issues of sexual health education/marketing and more. (I won't embed it because it's pretty loooong and not dramatically well presented, but the info is good if you've got the patience). I'm interested in what we can come up with as a group to overcome this challenge! As sort of tangential example, the free women's clinic I used to volunteer with had two very different logos for different purposes. The first and official representation of the clinic is an abstracted outline of a woman, highlighting the importance of, including sexual/repro/gyn health into holistic well-being, and is found on all official documents, letterhead, signage, education materials, etc. The other, less frequently circulated logo, is a uterus (well, not just a uterus- whole female reproductive system, actually). This image is on the sweatshirts, t-shirts, pins and underwear that staff and volunteers at the clinic wear and that patients buy to support it. It's a pretty usual image for clothing, and works with humor, "surprise" value, and the idea of an "inside" image that works well in getting people to ask and learn about the clinic or women's health in general. However, this image obviously works much better in certain settings than others-- for example, I was wearing my sweatshirt once in an upscale grocery store in La Jolla, and rather than a casual "sex ed op", I got a very stern lecture from an older woman about the "appropriateness" of my clothing choices :/ Related to this (I swear), I really appreciated the way the Elder, Ayala, and Vega articles emphasized the importance of knowing your audience (and the variations within it!), well before even thinking about developing an intervention. These were both "right on" as well as "aha" moments for me- the Vega article specifically.

Also, it's always nice to read about the work done by the people we're learning from and working with- glad these were included.

In terms of open questions and general feeling for this module, the biggest one in mind for me keeps returning to the idea of contextual information (what people are picking up through what's not necessarily being said, but taken as implication) and whether addressing it as a communication concern is the best way to handle it. I think it makes sense to do it this way- but I'm interested to learn more as we go forward.