I finally begin to see how much of a disservice I experienced by going to high school in Pahrump.

I’m, of course, referring to Russian cheerleaders.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not dumping the ESO for one or anything.  I mean, I don’t trust anything that lives in communist countries for seven days and doesn’t die.  Besides, I couldn’t stand teenage girls when I was a teenager; I somehow doubt Russian ones are more sane and levelheaded than their evil, soul-sucking American counterparts.  Even so, I can still appreciate the allure of kneepads, right?

Right?

That’s probably because it is:

GLOUCESTER, Mass. — The city’s mayor said Monday there is no evidence a group of young girls made a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together, seeking to dispel an explosive theory put forth by the high school principal.

“Any planned blood-oath bond to become pregnant - there is absolutely no evidence of,” Mayor Carolyn Kirk said Monday after a closed-door meeting with city, school and health leaders.

That’s right - the same story that I and so many others dealt with recently is probably a hoax, all perpetrated by someone who wanted to make a point about teenage pregnancy.

There’s an old and often repeated saying that I’ve heard time and again:

Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by stupidity.

In short, it’s possible that the girls had a pact before they got pregnant in some sort of Lifetime Channel-style American Pie-esque virginity pact.  It’s also entirely possible that a lot of the girls got pregnant at roughly the same time (intentionally or otherwise) and one or two of their friends might have been disappointed that they couldn’t join in the “fun”.  Of course, the end result is the same, but, without the story of the pact, there wouldn’t be anywhere near the kind of media speculation that we’re seeing today.

Now, are pregnancy rates at that school higher than usual?  Sure:

Kirk cited privacy concerns in refusing to answer many questions about the 17 girls who became pregnant this school year - more than quadruple the number who generally become pregnant as the school.

The key fact to keep in mind, though, is that, when 17 is quadruple the number who generally become pregnant in a year, that means that the normal number is no more than four, which is a pretty small number, unless this particular high school has ten students per grade or something.  That would be like me saying that I got drunk twice as much this month as normal without detailing how many times I get drunk a month.  If I only get drunk once a month, getting drunk twice as much isn’t a sign of a burgeoning drinking problem.  On the other hand, if I’m normally drunk ten times a month, well, that’s a different story - that means I’m now getting drunk 2/3 of the month.

In short, the signal-to-noise ratio on this story is off, and the latest on this story is only helping to drive that point home.

I heard about this a while ago when it first came out on MSNBC, but, after Rachel’s article on it, I think I’ve finally figured out what I want to say about it.

Back story:  Some teenagers in Massachussets thought it would be cool to have a “pregnancy pact”.  At least one of them slept with a homeless guy to make it happen.  They were largely successful, created a nice little media storm, and generally made asses of themselves.

Way to go.

Naturally, the supposed problems are all over the place.  They’re being oversexualized.  It’s all Paris Hilton’s fault.  The Spears family makes being a slut look so gosh darned cute. Their parents didn’t teach them sense.  The community thinks they need access to birth control (I’m with Rachel on this one:  Pregnancy Pact + Birth Control = You’re kidding, right?).  The list goes on and on and on.

They’re all wrong.

Look, I’m sure there are some cultural factors at play here.  However, oversexualized teenagers were around when I was a teenager, and that was ten years ago.  I mean, does anybody remember The Crush?  Heck, every single Nightmare on Elm Street movie started with a couple of teenagers getting frisky.  Teenagers have been sexualized since, oh, I don’t know, puberty. Besides, we didn’t see this sort of thing happening when Britney Spears was still in her prime.  Oh, I know, teenage stars weren’t always this slutty, but, let’s get real here - before we had open sluts to lust after, everyone just went after Farrah Fawcett or something.  Point being, it really doesn’t take much for teenagers to feel frisky and decide it’s okay to act on that.

Friskiness, however, is not what this is about.  Girls don’t have babies when they’re feeling frisky - oh sure, they’ll do things that lead to having babies, but they’re not going to intentionally impregnate themselves.  This is something very different.

The trouble is that the girls had absolutely zero concept of what responsibility over a living thing entails.  Consequently, they thought, being the usual strain of narcissistic bitch that most teenage girls are, that this new being that would take over their lives in under nine months would exist merely for their personal amusement.  This could have been solved any number of ways:

1. Buy a dog and make them take care of it.
2. Tell them to get a job.  Then start cutting off their food supply until they make rent.
3. Give them a little sibling so they can see how much work a small child is - this kept me celibate through high school, by the way.  Thanks, Mom.
4. Make them babysit obnoxious family members.
5. Buy them a dildo so they can stop thinking with their dick-equivalents.  I’m betting that, if female masturbation was encouraged, fewer teenage girls would feel the need to entertain the sloppy desires of teenage boys.  I could be wrong, though.

Look, nobody - that’s right, nobody - that has direct experience with children says, “Boy, I should go lose my virginity to that homeless guy so I can have one of those.”  I guarantee you that, even if your daughter watches nothing but Tila Tequila reruns and the porn you leave in the DVD player, nothing will keep her legs shut faster than having to deal with the consequences through someone else’s child.  If, after being around a child, your daughter says, “Boy, I want one of those,” what you should conclude is that she clearly hasn’t spent enough time around them.  The solution to this is to give them night duty over an infant, make sure they lose desired freedoms while you use them as your personal babysitting slaves, that sort of thing.  Make it inconvenient to take care of the children (y’know, like real ones) and they’ll pull their heads out of their vaginas before you can say, “Stop letting your teenage daughter live with college-age boys, Mrs. Spears!“  Yeah.

That’s a David Colborne Guarantee.  You can take these to the bank.

I mean, why else would they smear Preparation H all over themselves?

New York bouncer, blogger and author Rob Fitzgerald has noticed a trend among many of the macho young men waiting outside his clubs. He says the guys are slathering up their torsos with the hemorrhoid cream Preparation H to make themselves look “ripped” for the ladies.

Fitzgerald asked one of these guys to describe the practice for his blog, Clublife, “The way you use it is to take your shirt off and rub it all over yourself before you go to the club,” a man who gave the alias, Peter Minichiello, says. “If you want to get [lucky], you have to know how to dance, and if you want girls to dance with you, you have to look ripped.”

If by “ripped”, you mean “treat yourself like the giant, throbbing hemhorroid you are”, uh… wait, where was I?

“Applying it to one’s chest is an off-label use of Preparation H,” said Milicent Brooks, a representative of Wyeth Consumer Healthcare. “We don’t approve or endorse any off-label uses.”

Well, glad we have that established.  I wonder what other random crap I can pour on myself to convince the ladies that I’m “hot”?

“If anything, it would make your chest smaller,” said Dr. Darrell S. Rigel, clinical professor of dermatology at New York University Medical Center in New York City. “Medically, there’s nothing in there to make you bigger. If you put cayenne pepper on you, now that would do something — that would be the opposite of Preparation H.”

Cayenne pepper!  Of course!  That way, instead of being less of a hemhorroid upon society, I can instead become a giant puddle of flaming diarrhea upon every single woman in sight!  How can I, or every person unfortunate enough to be around a giant walking asshole like myself, lose?

Other products that do fun things to clubbers when poured on the body:

1. Hydrochloric Acid
2. Laboratory-Grade Hydrogen Peroxide
3. Leprous Tissue
4. Leeches
5. Urine
6. Raw Salmon
7. Iodized Salt
8. Borax
9. Any movie featuring Lindsay Lohan
10. Duct Tape

Army of Dog and Rachel Lucas both touched on Beyonce’s new line of whore-chic children’s wear. Since bringing that up is completely and utterly meaningless without the pic, well… here it is:

Rachel’s thoughts?

Malkin has the full ad. Be prepared to be blown away by the wholesome cuteness of 4-year-olds looking like they’re in need of pimps.

They don’t need pimps - they already have one. I have proof right here (H/T Fazed):

LAKE PARK, Fla. — A 7-year-old boy who took his grandmother’s car on a joyride last month has been taken for a mental health evaluation after he allegedly beat her up inside a South Florida Wal-Mart, WPBF News 25 reported.

Latarian Milton told WPBF on April 28 that he took his grandmother’s Dodge Durango on a joyride because he was mad at his mother and because he enjoyed doing “bad things.”“I wanted to do it because it’s fun. It’s fun to do bad things,” Milton said. “I wanted to do hood-rat stuff for my friend.”

Of course, our pimp search would be highly incomplete without an accompanying picture, right?

He was last heard uttering, “Give me my fitty cent, bitch, otherwise I’m gonna have to do to you what I done did to my grandma!“

Getting back into the swing of the blogosphere after a week-long absence is not entirely dissimilar to merging on to a freeway while doing 35 MPH - if you plan on not getting run over, you better damn well hit the accelerator and hard.  To that end…

Rachel Lucas gets really, really close to a very important point:

So there’s really not a lot of mystery about what everyone agrees a “real” man is. We all know “real” men are:

Mentally, emotionally, and intellectually strong, even if not physically (crippled and elderly men can still be “real” men). Hardworking, honorable, honest, dutiful, protective of family and country. Brave, courageous, rational, reasonable, kindhearted, and respectful. Knowledgeable about how to survive in rough times and how to solve problems. And so on.

What I started wanting to know when I was about 16 was just how in the hell any of those things were (or should be) exclusive to men. I realized even then that in fact, they are not. All adults should have every one of those personality and character traits as a matter of course.

So then I started wondering why anyone bothered with the phrase “real man” at all. Don’t they just mean “real adult”? As a young girl, shouldn’t I strive to be exactly the kind of person I kept hearing a “real man” would be? I thought so, and I still do. Maybe that’s why you never hear me whining about how my butt looks in these jeans or crying that no one pays enough attention to me. Who gives a crap? I don’t need any reassurances about silly shit because apparently, I am a “real man”, secure in my own “manliness”. Even though I’m a woman.

I say close for a reason:

Now, what the fuck? Why can’t I just say I’m a “real woman”? Because no one ever talks about that. Except in the context of how “real women” have curves and “real women” don’t look like Heidi Klum. Of course, of course it always comes back to looks and sex when you’re talking about women.

Here’s the deal - I know that everyone likes to belong to some group or some tribe.  I understand that, historically, men and women had distinct roles - men were the breadwinners while women were the homemakers.  What almost everybody seems to forget is that this division of labor is only a division of labor, not a division of responsibilities.  Consequently, talking about “manifestos for men” or “manifestos for women”, as if men and women are really different enough to require entirely different assumptions of behavior is absurd.  It’s not about being a “real man” or a “real woman”.  It’s about being a “real adult”, a concept which seems to be completely missing from a lot of people’s lives.

I’m going to lay it out right here and now - I don’t care if you’re a man or a woman, you should not:

• Completely ignore basic hygiene.  Being a guy is no excuse to not take care of yourself a little.
• Not know the absolute basics about maintenance of anything you own.  I’m not saying everybody should know how to disassemble a DVD player, but everybody (man or woman) should at least have a basic understanding of how to check their oil, where the fuse box of their house is, be able to cook something, and what to do with a hammer and a set of nails.
• Fly off the handle or panic whenever something goes wrong.  I don’t care if you’re a man, woman, or hermaphrodite, that is absolutely no excuse to become hysterical.  Take a deep breath, shut up, and get over it.
• Assume that because you’re having an emotion, you must react to it.  This bugs me to no end.  At some point, it seems that most people just collectively decided that, if they’re feeling something, they must respond to it, as if emotions are somehow sacrosanct or something.  I suspect it has something to do with the so-called “Holy Ghost”, where so many people were taught that there is this little voice that instinctively tells you whether something is right or wrong.  Well, guess what?  Instincts suck. Your instincts will tell you that you should go hit on that hot blond over there.  Instincts will tell you to load up on extra bacon with your hamburger.  Instincts will tell you that you should sit on the couch instead of going for a walk.  In short, instincts tell you all kinds of things that are completely and totally wrong.  What separates the men from the boys, and the women from the girls, is the use of reason.  Reason, you see, is that hopefully-not-so-little part of you that lets you take a look at what’s going on around you, processes it, and tells you what you can do to benefit yourself, both short term or long term.  It can be wrong from time to time, and, in fact, probably will be, but I guaran-GOD DAMN-tee you that it will be wrong far less than any gut emotional reaction you’ve ever had.  The use of reason is not an explicitly male trait - it’s an explicitly adult trait.
• Assume you don’t have to work.  Housework is hard.  That’s why nobody likes to do it.  In fact, work in general is hard - that’s why it’s work.  If it wasn’t work, we’d call it something else, like play or fun.  I don’t care how pretty you are, you better do something useful.  If it’s make more money than me, I’m okay with that, but it better be something.  “Looking good” is not useful, and, even if it were, you will fail at that after about 10-15 years, so, uh, if that’s all you’re good at, don’t be surprised if your wrinkly useless-assed bitchiness is suddenly and wantonly abandoned for someone else who does your “job” of “looking good” better than you… and, I guarantee you, for enough money, we will always be able to find someone that looks better than you.  Always.

Look, I can go on like this for hours, but I’m going to stop now.  Here’s my point - Cassy, Melissa, Rachel… heck, even Dr. Helen, you’re fighting the wrong war.  It’s “us vs. them” all right, but it’s not “men against women”, or “real men against fake men” or anything of that sort.  It’s adults vs. children, and I, for one, not only refuse to lose to my intellectual and emotional inferiors, but I refuse to let my enemy misguide me into fighting a war that doesn’t exist.

Courtesy of FoxNews.com, I bring to you Eight Sex Myths You Should Not Believe. The key quote, however, isn’t any of the myths. It’s this:

Florida teens gravely misinformed about sex. Florida lawmakers are looking to overhaul their state’s sex education after learning that Florida teens believe that drinking a cap of bleach prevents HIV and a shot of Mountain Dew prevents pregnancy. The state, which is currently implementing abstinence-only sex education, has the sixth-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we have sex ed. When you don’t provide knowledge to your children, they will make shit up. Humanity has been doing it for centuries. That’s why some people believe the world is only 6000 years old and dinosaur fossils were planted by Satan to tempt us. Do you really want your children making up random “facts” about their sexuality?

Didn’t think so.

Since all the cool bloggers cuss, I’m going to try to ramp it up a little bit myself…

Yesterday, Supreme Overlord and Excessive Provider of Dog Snacks posted a rather interesting entry on the nature of reality, teenagers, and sex education:

I have a whole post drafted up about abortion, but it’s mostly about adults, so I’ll post it later. Plus, it seems to me that all the things I have to say in that post can only follow what I have to say in this post; otherwise, the subject of this post would be a big empty question mark in the other one.

Okay. Let’s do this. The catalyst for this discussion is something Barack Obama has said:

“This is an example where good people can disagree,” the Illinois senator said. “The question then is, are there areas that we can agree to that everybody can get behind? We can all agree that we want to reduce teen pregnancies. We can all agree that we want to make sure that adoption is a viable option.”

The exchange appeared to be prompted by Obama’s earlier comments that he does not favor abstinence-only education, but rather comprehensive sexual education that includes information on abstinence and birth control.

“Look, I got two daughters — 9 years old and 6 years old,” he said. “I am going to teach them first about values and morals, but if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. I don’t want them punished with an STD at age 16, so it doesn’t make sense to not give them information.”

A lot of conservatives are going to hate him really hard for that statement. They’re going to say he’s an asshole for equating a baby with “punishment”, and so on. I understand this reaction, but I also think that his overarching point is exactly right. Stick with me here.

She then provides a rather lengthy explanation of why she agrees with this stance - teenagers have hormones, they don’t have perfect self-control, they tend to ignore authority figures after a while, etc. Read the whole thing. I wouldn’t do justice to it if I tried to give little snippets of it.

I’m going to say right here and now that I agree with her overall point. That’s not what I’m going to write about today. Instead, I’m going to discuss the comments provided by her readers. She’s already done that, too, but I’m going in a slightly different direction.

The debate in her comments section, and, in fact, the general cultural debate on this falls under two categories:

- Children have a pre-natal right to exist, but, until they turn 18, they have no rights; they should only have a series of privileges provided and vetted by their parent or guardian.
- Children do not have an intrinsic pre-natal right to existence, but, upon birth, they have certain inalienable rights that are independent of their parents’ wishes or desires and are supported by the society at large.

The first position is traditionally the “conservative” view. The second position is traditionally the “liberal” view. What’s interesting about them is that both positions are compromises between maximizing the freedom of the parent and maximizing the freedom of the child. On the conservative side, after conception, the parent does not get to choose whether to be a parent - it’s assumed that, by engaging in acts that could potentially lead to conception, the parents have already made that choice. However, upon conception, that child is yours to do with basically as you please, upon the sole conditions that you don’t kill or physically abuse your child. On the liberal side, the parent has the right to decide, even after conception, whether or not they truly wish to be a parent, but, upon making that choice, the parent must abide by the rights and values that society enforces upon them regarding the upbringing of their child.

I’m somewhat conflicted on this, as I’m sure quite a few people are. On the one hand, a parent should have the right to raise their child as they see fit. On the other hand, should the child be punished because he or she happens to have parents that decide to teach the child that, say, Jews are evil, or willfully lead them to ignorance about the world? This is an issue that they’re facing in Europe right now - there are tons of parents from Middle Eastern countries that are raising their children to believe that Western values are inherently evil and against Allah’s way. Amusingly, many of the conservatives that would normally preach about “parents’ rights” would be the first to say that the state should intervene. Even more comical is that many liberals are the first to preach “parents’ rights” when dealing with Muslim fundamentalists but are also the first to subvert the rights of fundamentalist Christian parents. The hypocrisy is blinding.

I believe in consistency - what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Either we declare that parents have complete, total, and absolute control over what information and values their children are instilled with, or we declare that society needs some say on what information and values are passed on to children. Unfortunately, there are no good “libertarian” solutions to this problem - we’re either going to screw the child or the parents. There is no way we can provide both groups with complete freedom on this. We need to decide where the line should be drawn.

One big issue that I have with the conservative stance relates to personal responsibility. In order to have responsibility, you have to have free will - you can’t take responsibility for a choice if you’re never given choices to freely make. To illustrate this, consider the following scenario:

A man, wife, and child are taken hostage by a terrorist. The terrorist approaches the man and tells him to pick who dies - the wife, or the child. If the man does not pick either of them, the terrorist will kill both the wife and the child.

No matter who the man picks, is the man required to take responsibility for the death of either the wife or the child? Of course not - the man does not have free will. The terrorist is the one who made the choice to kill at least one of those people, and is also the one who made the choice to require the man to pick who should be killed. It is the terrorist that has genuine free will in this case, not the man.

This brings me to teenagers under the conservative system. Under the conservative system, teenagers, being children, do not have any rights - any “rights” that their parents may deign to give them may also be taken away at a moment’s notice. Consequently, they’re not really “rights” - rights are inalienable and cannot be removed by anybody. This is why I stated earlier that children only have a series of privileges. Consequently, these children do not have free will - they are not allowed to freely make choices regarding their life. Their parents make those choices for them. This becomes a bit sticky, however, when you start talking about teenage pregnancy. According to the conservative viewpoint, it is the teenager’s parents that ultimately get to choose whether that teenager is going to become a parent or not. It is true that the teenager gets to decide whether to have sex or not, but it’s a heavily restricted choice - unlike adults, who may choose to educate themselves about contraceptives and use them as they see fit, the teenager is at the mercy of the parent.

There are a couple of problems with this arrangement:

1. Can a teenager bestow privileges upon a child that the teenager itself does not have? Since the teenager has no rights, how can it confer any privileges upon its own child?

2. Who has responsibility for the new child - the teenager or the teenager’s parents? The teenager does have a choice whether to engage in sex or not, but it’s a false choice, with purposefully incomplete information and with most of the possible options intentionally disabled. This is functionally similar to “letting” a teenager drive a car, but teaching them that driving a car leads to car accidents and intentionally cutting their brake lines. The person responsible for the inevitable crash isn’t necessarily the teenager - it’s the person who decided the teenager shouldn’t be allowed to use the brakes.

In short, conservatively-minded parents try to teach their teenagers about personal responsibility by effectively denying them the ability to ever claim personal responsibility. You cannot be held responsible for something which you have no control over, and you certainly cannot be held responsible for something when you have absolutely zero control over the consequences or your available reactions to said consequences.

Consequently, I believe we either need to do one of two things:

1. If society decides that parents have complete and total control over their children and what information is provided to them, we must recognize that parents must have complete and total responsibility over the actions of their children. Consequently, all legal actions and punishments must be borne by the parents, not the child. In the case of teenage pregnancy, for example, it would be the parents of the father that would be responsible for providing child support, not the father himself.

OR…

2. Acknowledge that children have certain inalienable rights, including the right to do what they will with their body, and must therefore bear responsibility for their actions. However, all children must have equal opportunity to acquiring information that would help them make informed choices, and all children must have equal opportunity and access to the tools available and required to act on that choice. In the case of our topic today, that would mean that children must have access to acquire contraceptives (albeit not necessarily for free), information about contraceptives, and access and information about the current post-conception alternatives available to adults (keeping the child, adoption, and abortion).

So, which is it going to be?

Let’s start with something nice and fluffy… I’m, of course, referring to Vanessa Hudgens. Now, I just want to start by pointing out that watching the Disney Channel, even with my four-year-old son, ranks up there with watching BYU-TV as one of the cornerstones of my own personal vision of the seventh circle of hell. Watching a Disney Channel show about high school students making a musical, on the other hand, would undoubtedly transcend that, leading to a serious psychotic episode on the part of yours truly, especially since:

1. I hate musicals.
2. I hated high school and can’t stand teenagers.
3. I hate theater people. Seriously, they’re annoying.
4. Did I mention that I can’t stand the Disney Channel?

So, until Vanessa decided it’d be a good idea to expose herself in front of her boyfriend who, in turn, decided it’d be a good idea to share those pictures with 2,000,000 of his closest friends on the Internet, I didn’t even know “High School Musical” existed. In hindsight, I could’ve lived another 80 years without that knowledge and lived a much happier, more fulfilling existence, but I digress. What kills me about this incident is that, since they’re on a show targeted towards ‘tweens (has a stupider word for pre-teens and teens been created? I think not), they’re basically required to pretend they have no sex life.

Dear America: People over 18 have sex. In fact, many people under 18 have sex, too.

I understand where the problem is, don’t get me wrong. Parents get squeamish about sex in this country, and somewhat understandably so. Nobody wants to be a parent of a teenager that comes up to you and says, “Mom, Dad… uh… how do I put this… so, I had sex with this girl and I’m now a father.” The answer to this problem for a lot of people is abstinence education, which, in theory, is a great concept - if you want to stop teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, don’t have sex. Sounds great. There are a few problems, though:

1. You have to start abstinence education at a very early age - if you don’t start pushing it until 14, it’s way too late. Come to think of it, this holds true for traditional sex ed, too.
2. There has to be support from the parents. If your parents are sleeping around before marriage, well, why wouldn’t you?
3. It’s very difficult to do abstinence education without pushing a religious agenda.

I want to expand on #3 here. If I came up to you and offered you two choices:

1. Don’t have sex. There’s no chance for sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancy. It will take some work, though - your body will be fighting you every step of the way.
2. Have sex but use protection. Condoms give you 97% protection against unwanted pregnancy when used correctly, and is also highly effective against HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. If a woman uses the pill, unwanted pregnancy rates go down to less than 1% if used consistently. So, as long as you’re using the tools available properly, there’s a 1 in 20 chance that something will go wrong while you satisfy your urges.

What are you going to choose? Tell a teenager that, if they have sex with protection, they have, at most, a 5% of having something bad happen if they do everything properly, do you really think they’re going to not have sex? These are the same people that, at least when I was going to high school, saw nothing wrong with taking ordinary passenger cars on dirt roads and doing over 60 MPH. Risk assessment is not their strong suit. Denying them information about protection isn’t going to work, either - what’s going to happen then is, at some point, they’ll have a friend that has sex unprotected and nothing bad happens. Having unprotected sex doesn’t immediately give you AIDS and pregnancy 100% of the time, at least in the short term. All it takes is for a teenager to have one friend that got lucky before they’ll decide that maybe they’ll get lucky too - nothing bad happened to my friend, so why would anything bad happen to me?

So, where does religion factor in all of this?

Since teens don’t respond to risk assessment, and, if you deny them information that tells them how to responsibly do what they desperately want to do anyways, they’re just going to make up their own information, you have to come up with another way to encourage them to make the choice you want them to make. There are only two ways to pull that off:

1. Public shame. Nothing keeps a woman’s legs shut faster than telling her that all of her friends will shun her if she has sex with someone. This worked with great effect in the 1950s.
2. Make up an all-seeing deity that will send them to hell if they stray. Think “Santa Claus”, only with a backbone.

Guess where religion comes in? That’s right - you get an all-seeing deity (God) and, in the “right” circumstances, public shame for free!

Oy.

For better or worse, some teenagers are going to have sex. If you really want to do something about it, here’s all you need to do:

1. Encourage the most nerdy and anti-social behaviors you can come up with at an early age. Get them involved in Linux vs. FreeBSD threads on Slashdot as soon as possible. Take them to renaissance fairs, but make sure to cut them off at 13 so they don’t take advantage of the relatively permissive atmosphere. Get them involved in role-playing games. Buy them a WoW subscription. Give them a book on regular expressions. Buy their clothes at thrift stores. You get the idea. Nothing is guaranteed to keep a kid from having sex before their 21st birthday better than being a complete nose-picking, booger eating, Slashdot flaming nerd.
2. If #1 is completely unacceptable to you, give them enough information to have sex with relative safety. Make it clear that it’s not 100% and that, ideally, they shouldn’t do it at all, but if they really, really must, at least be halfway intelligent about it.

Wow… this post went all over the place. I apologize. I’ll try to have a coherent thought before I post in the future.

This post will be short and sweet.

The Perils of a Sexualized Society:

Misogyny and the misconception of beauty have been woven into the fabric of our society so much that it is less offensive and more conventional. This has everything to do with why sex offenders are running rampant - not just Chester the molester but the lifestyles of sexual promiscuity, crime and addiction.

Really? They’re running rampant, eh? According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), since 1993, rape/sexual assault has fallen by 69%. Looks to me like sex offenders aren’t running rampant - if anything, our ‘hyper-sexualized’ society has just eliminated over 2/3 of the most serious of them.