Really? Because I do. Has this smart, successful woman never heard of a damn condom? Sometimes being in charge of your sexuality means saying, "Sorry, we shouldn't do this if we don't have a condom. Maybe we could just do oral."

You seem to be making the argument that if lots of people make stupid, irresponsible choices, somehow it's improper to criticize those choices. I disagree. Millions of people watch American Idol, it doesn't change the fact that that show is terrible and watching it is stupid.

This is a two-way street, ladies. Being responsible for your own reproductive choices also means taking the blame when you act irresponsibly.

"And to the poster who suggested oral sex when no condom can be found: many STDs including gonorrhea can also lead to infections of the mouth and throat. Oral sex is not safer than other forms of intimacy without a condom."

This article was about pregnancy, yes? I've never heard of anyone getting pregnant from oral sex, have you?

Also, oral sex is marginally safer than vaginal or anal sex: http://www.sfcityclinic.org/stdbasics/stdchart.asp

Does this mean guys in their early-to-mid-20s will stop being passed over ("They're too immature," "Older men are so much more romantic!" "Older guys really know how to please a woman") so quickly? We may not be able to drop $300 on dinner, but if we knock you, at least the kids won't turn out defective.

And most of you have no idea what the hell you're talking about. We get fantastic little pissy quotes like this one:

//It's a given in the book that what you want -- what WOMEN want -- is junk food, sweets, chocolate, and deep fried stuff. Oh -- and loads of sodium.//

Yes. That is a given. You know why? Because the human body--including WOMEN's bodies--has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to crave high-energy, high-calorie foods. Until very recently, being fat was not a problem that our species had to contend with.

Other commenters have gibberish like this:

//processed, chemical, foods will make you lose your looks and bring illness to you. It's devoid of minerals and vitamins and the "chi" that natural foods brings to give us health and energy.//

First, this nonsense about "fake" or "chemical" foods. Newsflash: EVERYTHING IS A CHEMICAL. Your precious whole, "natural" foods are full of "chemicals" like dihydrogen monoxide, aldohexoses, and complex poplypeptides.

Second, if your food doesn't contain enough vitamins and minerals, a simple daily multivitamin will fix that problem easily.

Third, chi is new age nonsense. You write that, //There needs to be more food/nutrition education in this country ESPECIALLY if are going to have national health care. I don't really want to be paying for people who purposely give themselves chronic disease by eating this stuff.//

Please, next time you get ill, go to your local alternative medicine practitioner, or get some homeopathic remedy. That way, you'll avoid the scary evil chemicals, and when you the placebos don't work and you die, the rest of us won't have to pay your high healthcare bills incurred by continued acceptance of garbage pseudoscience.

Everyone who has commented on this thread so far needs to read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemophobia

And then stop thinking of food as some sort of big moral test where you get to show what a good, enlightened person you are for eating only whole grain breads from Trader Joe's and drinking only overpriced "fair trade" coffee shipped thousands of miles to your local alternative coffee shop.

Nor does it mean that "natural" things are necessarily better.

There are myriad examples of situations where human ingenuity has improved upon the natural condition of our species. Since this a feminist blog, I might mention the use of analgesics to relieve the pain of childbirth, prophylactics to give women greater control of their own reproduction.

Somebody earlier made reference to the fact that our bodies didn't evolve to ingest high fructose corn syrup, aspartame and xanthum gum, to which I say "So?"

High fructose corn syrup is composed of a mixture of the monosaccharides fructose and glucose. Regular "natural" cane sugar is primarily sucrose--a disaccharide--which, during digestion gets broken down into its component parts of...you guessed it, fructose and glucose!

High fructose corn syrup is a cheap, locally-available, high energy sweetner that includes the same "natural" sugars as other sweeteners. Aspartame is an artificial sweetener that stimulates taste receptors at much lower concentrations than natural sugars, without much in the way of energy (caloric) value. I'm personally not a huge fan of the taste, but it has undergone extensive testing for more than 30 years, and the overwhelming preponderance of reputable science suggests it's completely safe at the levels found in food.

I dont really know enough about xanthum gum to say anything on that subject.

Look, the point is that there's plenty of incredibly nasty, poisonous things in nature (try chowing down on some all-natural, unprocessed hemlock!), and there's plenty of healthy things that humans have made or extracted from nature.

Almost everyone on this comment thread seems to be operating under this completely false dichotomy of natural/safe/healthy/good vs. chemical/dangerous/unhealthy/bad. Relax. Have a diet coke or something.

Steele The First also suffers from the "responding in the wrong thread and being too eager to pound the publish button" fallacy.

Also, if you're eating too damn much high fructose corn syrup, that's your problem, not society's, or the food industry's, or the corn syrup's problem. There's no great unexplained mystery about chemicals as basic as sugars. If you were spending all day, every day, running marathons, or tracking herds of game across wilderness, you'd burn those calories off, whatever form they came in.