LOL, ok now that I have your attention, today is the day Shannon Boodram's book, "Laid: Young People's Experiences with Sex in an Easy-Access Culture" (Seal Press/ October 2009) is release into the world!! I'm so excited for you mama!
Shannon says, "LAID is a collection of true stories from males and females 18-25 across North America. It covers hookups, amazing sexual experiences, consequences (STD/ abortion/ pregnancy), date rape/ sexual abuse and abstinence. It is shockingly real... - I am the editor with contributing stories."
"My American University experience was extraordinarily educational but not in the way you migh expect – what I learned from others easily trumped whatever was fed to me in my classes. There are many in Baltimore who made a strong impact on my education but there are three individuals who particularly stand out: a young girl living with HIV that I met through a local mall modeling competition, a homosexual girl who was my age as well as one of my dorm mates and finally a serious boyfriend who took far more interest in respecting my sexuality than I was accustomed to.
I had a wonderful experience in Maryland but I chose not to stay on scholarship since my love for track had dissipated. So, at 19 I came back to my home city, Toronto. I felt like a brand new person and what changed the most was my view on sexuality. At age 16, for several frivolous reasons (friends, media, pressure, stupidity) I became pretty promiscuous. I took this mentality with me to Baltimore but it certainly did not make it on my return flight. My self-sexual education had begun but it was far from over. I began to read books, search on-line and talk to others but I could not find the raw candor I had become accustomed to in Baltimore. To boot my youngest cousin, whom I was extremely close to, was 16 and way too much like me. I did not want her to make the sexual same mistakes based on ignorance or misconceptions."
"In what seemed like an overnight whim, I launched a website called Save Your Cherry (http://www.saveyourcherry.com/), a small, poorly designed site that shared my own experiences and encouraged others to write in and tell theirs. I went on Much Music, a National TV show as a contestant for a show wearing an airbrushed marina with the site name and a huge cherry on the front. After that I couldn’t turn back and the e-mails began to poor in. My sex site, which graphically described how I lost my virginity to a near stranger, initially broke my mother’s heart, but it went on to help hundreds of thousands of curious and perhaps a little fed-up young people like myself. Based on the site’s success, I decided to try and turn the collection into a book. I obsessively recruited writers using youth networking services like Myspace, Facebook and Urbis. There is no way to calculate just how many hours I spent telling others about a book that needed their voice."
You guys have no idea how much I respect this lady's grind and her determination to educate others and the honest, no-holds bar way she's doing it..... GO GET HER BOOK!!!
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