By Alba Mora/Special to Oakland North

Would you ever let two strangers crash on your couch? Recently reporter Alba Mora welcomed two couchsurfers into her Berkeley home.

By Huda Ahmed/510 Report

Jessica Fischer organized mysterious shapes made of plastic and metal, as well as spongy brightly-colored toys on the table and waited for her young audience at UC Berkeley’s International House to be seated. The dim yellow light bulbs gave the room a romantic glow. The whole room was soon packed with more than 45 international students from the University of California trying to figure out what these objects were and what the speaker would say.

Fischer a fair, skinny 25-year-old woman, is a masters candidate with the Department of Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University, and she was about to lead a workshop about pleasure physiology and sex toys. The workshop’s goal was to let students understand their bodies and feel comfortable with them, and to be as comfortable talking about sex with members of the opposite gender as with their own.

Sex is very sensitive subject for some international students like Cheryl Lo, a 22-year-old undergrad in mass communications, who was staring at the workshop flyer: “It was a bit shocking when I saw it. I asked myself, ‘Do they talk about sex and orgasm publicly?” she said. “I‘m curious and I want to ask some questions. I’m from Hong Kong and in our culture; it is embarrassing to talk about sex in public.”

Fischer began her lecture by asking the students who had taken any biology classes to raise their hands – only one student did. “Okay, in this workshop, we will talk about the history of sex toys, the use of them and the physiology of pleasure to understand how these things stimulate our body,” she said.

She produced two cloth dolls, a man and a woman, with spongy genitals.  The students passed them from one to another, making fun of them and taking pictures; some were nervous and shy about touching the toys.

The lecture lasted for more than two hours; Fischer spoke about the earliest days of sex toys when they were used for medical therapy, not as entertainment objects, and about the 19^th Century doctors who tried to find a way to enhance or increase the sense of pleasure for women who could not get satisfaction from their partners.

Fischer is originally from Arizona, and works as an independent contractor for the Good Vibrations OSSE (Off-Site Sex Education) program. Good Vibrations is a retailer devoted to providing “access to sex-positive products,” according to their Web site. Fischer realized her ability to teach when she was very young, “I have always educated people around me. I used to give my friends condoms to help them have safe sex,” she said, “I came from conservative state which is different from California, so I did not know how it was going to be and if I would be able to talk about sex topics in public.” 

The students were curious and they kept asking questions, especially the males. For many of them, the lecture was helpful and informative.  “I learned about the human body, differences between women and men,” said one Middle Eastern student, who asked that her name not be used. In her home country, she said, “We are mostly introduced to the subject as biology without going into details. Due to the culture we did not discuss it—it is not a public issue, it is completely private and prohibited. You can talk about it with your same sex but, not with the other sex.”

The sex workshop was not the first one for Angela Chang, a senior chemistry major at UC Berkeley, “This is the third sex workshop I’ve attended.  I was so nervous in the first workshop because I was worried how people would judge me but I felt so comfortable about my body after that,” she said, “My family is originally from China but I was born here. At home, we definitely never talk about sex with me. The only way my parents wanted to teach me is when they handed me a stack of sex books about the change the body goes through and that is it.”

The lecture wrapped up with sex toys in different colors and shapes being passed around by the students, who found it a chance to make goofy remarks. One of the students put a vibrator toy on the floor to make it look like a worm. Fischer does not mind her audience to play with the toys. “It is no harm to throw jokes in here and there to break the sensitive barrier of the subject, as long it helps people to understand and have safe sex,” she said.

Scenes from an Auction: As the number of Bay Area foreclosures skyrockets, so does the amount of auctions selling foreclosed homes at a fraction of their original price. Watch potential buyers vie for bargains at a recent auction.

[See post to watch Flash video] ]]> http://510report.org/2009/03/04/scenes-from-an-auction/feed/ 0 http://510report.org/2009/02/05/why-did-the-commuter-cross-the-road/ http://510report.org/2009/02/05/why-did-the-commuter-cross-the-road/#comments Fri, 06 Feb 2009 04:48:06 +0000 Casey Miner http://510report.org/?p=3218 BY CASEY MINER AND HUDA AHMED  The 12th St. corridor in Oakland is a 12-lane freeway sandwiched between two perfectly normal city streets. There are no crosswalks or traffic lights, but morning commuters don’t care; the quickest way to BART is to look both ways and hope for the best.

[audio:http://www.510report.org/wp-content/uploads/bikeshare_podcast.mp3]

Forty-four years ago, in the early hours of a late fall morning morning, police officers arrested nearly 800 students, ending an historic sit-in at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall. It was a turning point in the Free Speech Movement (FSM) and led to the university lifting a ban on on-campus political organizing. The leaders of the FSM made their mark on history and left a legacy of activism at UC Berkeley.

This anniversary this year coincides with another historic turning point, the election of Barack Obama as President. His campaign mobilized an unprecedented number of young voters, including many enrolled UC Berkeley students.

FSM veterans and current students, interviewed independently, see the last half century of Berkeley political activity as one long continuum.

“The FSM was sort of a small thing, although the ripples from it went far beyond the Berkeley campus,” said FSM veteran Lynne Hollander Savio. Her late husband, Mario Savio, gave a speech as the sit-in began that became emblematic of the movement. She is a retired librarian.

“It wasn’t the beginning, and it wasn’t the end,” said FSM veteran Jeffrey Brand, now dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law. He stressed that the FSM emerged out of the Civil Rights Movements.

Bettina Aptheker, a member of the FSM steering committee, was a junior in 1964. Aptheker is a Professor of Feminist Studies and History at UC Santa Cruz and spoke on a panel at UC Berkeley in February. It was part of the Activism Right There Festival and featured activists from each decade, from the 60s to the present. Aptheker said, “Anytime any of us mentioned Barack Obama, the place just exploded.” At that moment, she said she realized the level of support for the candidate.

“From my own experience in the FSM, I knew the power of a mass movement, and I knew the power of community organizing,” she said. Obama’s campaign, she said, was community organizing on a massive scale.

“They’re very different kinds of moments, but they share being unique and exciting,” said FSM veteran Karen McClellan.

Obama, McClellan said, is not a radical. “Those are two different jobs – being a radical and being a politician,” she added.

Margot Adler, another FSM veteran and today a reporter for NPR, said that the election was an enormous step towards removing the stain of slavery. However, she said, “He’s going to make mistakes, he’s going to break our heart, but it’s our country again.”

In the fall of 1964, Margot Adler was a freshman.

Kate Coleman, a FSM veteran and writer, said she was glad to see young people energized politically. “They have been so uninterested in politics for so long,” she said, adding, “Now that they’re facing a disastrous economy they might become more interested.”

At the University of San Francisco, Brand noted the high level of student involvement in the Obama campaign. He said he has a lot of admiration for students today. Although the 60s were chaotic, he said, “It was a time of economic expansion.” That is no longer true.

Brand was a junior in 1964 and received his JD in 1969. In the 60s, he said, “I didn’t want to be separated from the Berkeley campus.”

As a professor at UC Santa Cruz, Aptheker said, “I don’t see this generation as being any less conscious.”

She stressed that the FSM started out small, only a handful of people.

Kristen Hunziker, 20, was the chapter coordinator of Students for Barack Obama on UC Berkeley’s campus. Along with 300 other students, she traveled to swing states to canvass voters.

She downplayed this number in comparison to that of those 776 people arrested at the sit-in and said that there are still roadblocks for political organizing on campus. As one example, she said she couldn’t post flyers in dorms without approval from each resident adviser.

This was Hunziker’s first political campaign, but she said, “I definitely do intend to stay involved in politics.”

Freshman Ian Magruder, 18, served as the California Field Coordinator for Students for Barack Obama. Compared to the FSM, he said, “The way we organize has just changed. We don’t hold huge rallies and protests the way that they did, but we get thousands of people to sign petitions, join Facebook groups and vote.

In the immediate future, Magruder has further political ambitions. He said he plans to run for President of the California College Democrats.

Despite the many memoirs and amount of scholarship published, Brand said, “The definitive history of the 60s has yet to be written.”

If, 40 years later, this is the case, the definitive perspective on Barack Obama’s historic election will be a long time coming, but voices like these will shape it.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————

On Thursday, December 4, the annual Mario Savio Memorial Lecture, featuring Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., will take place at the Berkeley Community Theater. He will speak about “Our Environmental Destiny.” It will begin at 7 pm, and admission is free.

After negotiations with the university administration failed, Mario Savio began the sit-in with an address on the steps of Sproul Hall.

He told the crowd, “There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cannot take part; you cannot even tacitly take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the wheels, and the gears and all the apparatus, and you have to make it stop.”