If my wife won't end up confusing me with my daughter (we look alike)... But seriously, of course the idea looks interesting. I hope it will catch on this time. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll be giving lectures in short kilts. Vive la new différence!

Is your point that if women started asking for sex more directly men would stop wanting to dress differently from them? Maybe I didn't quite get it.

You often make interesting points, despite your overly emotional rhetorics; but here, I really, really have to disagree. Dr_Dredd above has already expressed the main reason with respect to the topic of "practitioners not wanting to dispense birth control out of personal beliefs". If I need something -- an operation, treatment, medicine -- to which I am entitled by law (no crime involved) and a doctor doesn't want to give it to me because of his/her beliefs, this is not my problem: the doctor him/herself, or the hospital, should find me one who would. It's up to the hospital and employment laws to decide whether or not this doctor should be kept; but it shouldn't be my problem. By wanting the legal operation/treatment/medicine, I have done nothing wrong, and I don't deserve to be denied it.

Feminism may well be all about choices and respecting differences and not judging others. This doesn't mean someone has the right to "choose to do something right" if it harms others' rights to get that which they are entitled to by law. Feminism is not in favor of theft per se, for instance, no matter how much this pains the heart of potential thieves and prevents their 'right' to 'be different' from the mainstream of non-thieves.

I haven't seen people (among which feminists) forbidding the use of "silent scream" type graphics; I have seen them protesting against it and presenting arguments, which you can counterargue if you want. You're welcome to say why you think these shots are congenial to reasoned discourse if you have good arguments for that. If you also have arguments against photos of women who died from back alley or self-performed abortions as relevant, they please present them.

I actually agree that men shouldn't be necessarily forced to pay for children they didn't want -- the law should take the situation of conception into account, on a case-by-case basis: in each specific case, did the man exploit the woman, or did the woman exploit the man? (Not, it may very well be that the real situation in most cases is that the man did exploit the woman in some sense, and should pay. That's an empirical question; I don't see the statistics in your post.)

You are clearly overstating your case, MerelyMortalMan, and making yourself look wrong, aggressive, enmical without this being at all necessary. Dialogue is open. Get your arguments ready. Don't disparage other participants. Don't exaggerate, don't overstate ('women are frail children...') or else you'll be ridiculed by other people.

I had meant to write, in the second paragraph: "This doesn't mean that soeone has the right to "choose to do something that they see as right" if it harms others' rights to get that which they are entitled to by law." Sorry!

It isn't really about Edwards. Oh, of course people keep talking about him -- because we all have deep feelings about cheating, its morals and consequences. But it's not about Edwards as a politician. Cheating is not illegal; there he committed no crime, and it doesn't matter for his skill as a politician. Does the lying while cheating make it worse? If so -- depending on your criteria for 'bad lies' -- there would be few politicians left. Or few people of any kind. If he did pay money to hide his fatherhood, especially campaign money, that's another story; this should be investigated, especially if criminal charges can be pressed.

No, what really caught my eyes here this time was -- as Ms Clark-Flory pointed out -- the wife-whore dichotomy. Or, as MMM pointed out, the husband-horndog one.

It would seem men want sex more than women do. (Insert two bell-shaped curves with non-coinciding means and perhaps different variance here.)

Maybe women want love/affection more than men do. (This one's iffy; I'd like to see statistics; maybe men simply merge sex and love/affection more than women do. Anyway, the former one would be sufficient for there to be a problem).

Sex is a need. Not as strong as food and water, but maybe like going outside to see light and the world. We could life all our lives inside our houses, or inside our rooms, if we wanted; but this probably would have very bad effects on our psyches. Apparently -- cf. the bell-shaped curves -- more on men than on women.

So men and women misinterpret each other. Men would like women to be hotter; they fantasize about that. Women would like men to be more compassionate and interested in companionship; they fantasize about that. They happily look for the exceptional cases, the tails of the bell-shaped curves. They build illusions. And they judge each other based on these illusions.

So the cases in which a woman and a man not only fall in love with each other, but actually do fit well in terms of their sex drive for each other and in terms of their level of commitment, companionship, and partnership with each other, are actually exteremely rare? Perhaps forever unobtainable for 99% of humanity? And the only option is open marriages?

Could it be so simple? Do we really live in the world dick dworkin talks about? Could God(dess) -- or nature -- have really played such a bad, sad, tragic joke on us?

Scary thought. I hope you'll tell me it ain't so.