Jason T.
School: University of Alabama
Major: Journalism/History
Hometown: Harvest, AL
Favorite writer: Don't have one. Love them all.
Favorite sex scene from a movie/TV/book: Joan Allen's masturbation in Pleasantville
Hidden Talent: Boxing, Trumpet
Posts By: Jason T. Frost
Universities need to offer child care facilities, student housing
Recently, I wrote an article for my college newspaper asking them to consider opening a childcare facility on campus for student parents. In it, I reference statistics from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research that claim that only around half of all public universities in the United States offer childcare for prospective student parents. Broken down, the study shows only 48 percent of community colleges offer basic childcare services, and 57 percent of public four-year colleges. Of the 3.9 million student parents enrolled as undergraduates at these institutions, 57 percent of them are low-income earners. Single parents, primarily women, have the toughest time of it, often having to work 40 hours a week to provide for their families. According to this same study, only 6 to 7 percent of private… Read more »
Young People Need More Than “Don’t Have Sex”
I know at least three people who didn’t know how babies were made until they were old enough to drink. To me, that’s a problem. The state of sex education in the state of Alabama, like many Southern states, is abysmal. The only sex education I ever personally received was in my eighth grade life science class. A nurse from a nearby health center came in and, instead of telling us what was going to happen to our bodies during puberty, what sex was, or anything about STIs, the only useful information we got was that we needed to start buying deodorant. This was reiterated to us nearly a dozen times, but we still never found out exactly what sperm was, or how it mingled with the egg to make… Read more »
What I Learned Escorting at an Abortion Clinic
When a friend of mine told me she went “escorting” on weekends I wrongly assumed she meant either she was joking or working nights to pay for college. What she actually meant, I learned, was that she helps escort people into an abortion clinic in town. On Saturday mornings, she will stand in front of a local abortion clinic with a bright orange vest and an umbrella, offering to walk into the clinic with patients. Her job involved calmly talking to the patients, offering to help them into the clinic, asking them about their day, and other things of that nature. This may not seem necessary to some readers, except these patients have to, on a weekly basis, deal with overt and cruel harassment from a crowd of people standing… Read more »
I Have a Problem With the Confederate Flag, but not Because It’s Racist
Fewer than 7,000 people live in Lynchburg, Tennessee, if you count the residents of the entirety of Moore County. Most of them find employment at the Jack Daniel Distillery just off Main Street, which is where over a dozen old-timey shops sell whiskey-soaked fudge, moon pies and cowboy apparel. One such shop caught my eye the last time I was there: a store specializing in confederate flag merchandise. I have no way of verifying its existence now, as I could not find a listing on yelp or on the Lynchburg tourism website, but it existed at least a few years ago. I’d been there. Inside, you could purchase just about anything under the sun styled with the flag. Everything from mint tins to belt buckles to Fuzzy Dice and a… Read more »
Open Letter from a “Cherokee Princess”
When I was in elementary school, I met a lot of people who claimed to be Cherokee. Every white person I knew, it seemed, had a Cherokee great-grandmother or distant ancestor they heard of who was in a tribe. It was odd, then, that when I first started Indian Education classes it was with only a handful of other students. We had some white kids, others black, but very few people who “looked Indian.” Half of the “full-blooded” natives that ran the program had straight hair and blue eyes- a testament to the interracial history of that particular nation. And though we had a Mohawk student and a Creek girl, our class seemed to focus heavily on Cherokee Immersion, since they had the most infrastructure in that region to do… Read more »
Alabama Continues to Make it Harder to Vote
Thinking of voting in the state of Alabama? Better have a photo ID. And if Governor Robert Bentley has his way, the Alabama Black Belt might find soon be devoid of Driver’s License Offices altogether. In the aftermath of Alabama’s recent budget debate, which carried such controversial decisions as shuffling money from education to fund the prison system and raising taxes on things such as cigarettes, pharmaceuticals and retirement homes, Bentley decided that the worst possible thing he could do would be to raise any direct taxes, especially the state’s extremely low property tax. As a trade-off, Bentley plans to close a number of state parks, something that had been discussed at great length during the budget gridlock earlier this year, as well as 31 driver’s license offices (all conveniently located… Read more »
Planned Parenthood Sues Alabama Governor Over Cut Medicaid Contract
Not a month after being sued for removing a Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol, Alabama Governor Robert Bentley is once again being taken to court, this time by Planned Parenthood. Amid national controversy concerning an anti-choice video claiming that the organization sells fetal tissue — a video that has been repeatedly criticized for heavy editing that misrepresents the content of the video by independent transcribers — Bentley canceled the state’s Medicaid contract with the organization. The case began its hearings last week. The suit against Bentley is being reviewed by a federal judge. A similar recent case in Arkansas may inform the Judge’s decision, as well as an ongoing suit in Louisiana. Planned Parenthood also receives $500 million annually from the federal government, funding that has been repeatedly… Read more »
What is Feminist Porn?
Can porn be feminist? A member of my family, who would be appalled if I mentioned her name on this website, worked for a while in a video store. While there, she took it upon herself to view all the softcore pornography offered in “the back” (such a phrase, such a phrase), arguing that in her day, “women wanted porn for the plot, men want it for everything else.” To her, there was porn for women, porn for men, and the stuff they can’t sell. The Internet has since leveled the digital playing field. Every sexual proclivity can be found and satisfied on the World Wide Web, from such innocuous kinks as threesomes and role-playing to highly illegal activities like child pornography and “crush porn”- where people crush animals for… Read more »
Telemedicine Bans Hurt Rural People
Last year, I found a woman bleeding through her dress at a gas station 20 minutes from where I live. She asked me for a ride to Winn-Dixie, where she proceeded to tell me about all the terrible things her family had done to her and how it had left her with STIs she couldn’t cure because she can’t afford to get anywhere in town, let alone pay for repeated visits to a doctor. And that’s not to mention the children her marital rape left her with — children she could neither afford to care for, and whom she deliberately punished for being the result of her husband’s abusive attitude (note that this is not the norm). She lamented the fact that she could not get an abortion, but did… Read more »
Building a More Inclusive Boy Scouts
Joining the Boy Scouts of America can be a tricky thing for someone who identifies as anything other than cisgender and heterosexual, and despite recent changes to their membership requirements, the BSA is still wrangling with conflicting factions within its own organization. Now, some scouts are trying to build a more inclusive organization at the ground level. In 2013, the BSA made national headlines when they openly debated changing membership requirements to allow scouts to join regardless of their sexual orientation. As a compromise measure, the BSA still excluded hiring lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer leaders until last July, when the executive council passed a new guideline stating that scout troops may hire whomever they wish to fill leadership roles. However, troops chartered by a religious organization may still… Read more »
