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Published Letters: 29
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The only thing I would add to Cary's answer is that the best thing you can do for your daughter is for you and your husband to do your best to stay friends with each other.
Your marriage dissolved because your husband is a woman trapped in a man's body (which is nobody's fault) and you aren't the kind of person who can be married to a woman (which is nobody's fault). But your marriage must have been based on more than just that you're a woman and he was a man. There must be some underlying friendship that has nothing to do with sex or gender. Try to hold onto that, both of you. Obviously, sex change and marriage breakdown aside, it's not the same when you're not living in the same household and seeing each other every day. But when a question or problem or decision or funny story comes up and either of your find yourself thinking "You know, this is really the sort of thing I'd talk to my former spouse about," go ahead and do it. It will be easier for your daughter to understand that your father is still the same person, just a different gender, if you can maintain the parts of your friendship taht aren't gender-based.
When I was that age, I got really into Castles 2. In that game, you're a French nobleman trying to take over the throne after the king unexpectedly dies without a heir. You have to recruit armies, build castles, attack enemies, suck up to the pope etc. to earn enough points to claim the throne before any of your enemies do. I quickly learned that the morality of the game world isn't always the same as my own morality - slaughtering pagans raised your diplomatic points, marrying the princess with the big tits made your subjects happy, kicking your enemies when they're down was always a prudent choice, and sucking up to the pope with large cash bribes was the sine qua non of succeeding in life.
And none of this affected the fact that I'm an atheist pacifist, because I never once took the game universe to be reality. This isn't due to some great big Life Lesson or any kind of good parenting or anything, it's just the basic fact that a computer game is a game just like a board game is a game. When you win at monopoly you don't get real money and some hotels on some street somewhere. When you lose at snakes and ladders you don't get eaten by a snake. And following the rules of the game universe in order to win has no bearing on your personal values or life choices.
Actually, Miss Bimbo sounds a lot like Sims 2. Your character has to achieve set goals to get points, just like Sims aspirations. If you play a Sim with a "Romance" aspiration, they get points for having sex with lots of people, but lose points for getting married. If you play a Sim with a Family aspiration, they get points for getting married and having lots of kids. If you play a Sim with a Fortune aspiration, they get points for making lots of money and buying expensive things. But no one would think for a minute that this would make kids into sluts or breeders or materialists. Miss Bimbo sounds like exactly the same thing, only with a far less diverse range of goals.
But I don't feel safe posting it without the anonymous option.
Condom use would foil it. Different sex acts than the tester anticipated would foil it. A nice thorough shower would foil it. A douche would foil it. Doing laundry would foil it.
Or is that just Alberta money?
I find the guy with the fuel-efficient car the most attractive not because I'm impressed by fuel-efficiency, but because he is not trying to impress me with his car. I find people (of all genders) who try to impress others with their possessions tend to be boring and not worth my time, so a car chosen primarily for a reason other than to impress is a good sign.
So the fact that 88% of women would prefer the man with the fuel-efficient may actually indicate that women aren't attracted to men based primarily on their possessions.
You just destroyed any credibility in the rest of the article with that statement. What you (and whoever the rest of this "we" is) want is irrelevant, and it's disrespectful of the girls' personhood to talk about them that way.
Think about whenever you got your first kiss. There were some people in the world who didn't want you to be going around kissing people, they wanted you to be a little girl. But that doesn't make their opinion relevant or valid or helpful or productive.
You can do better.
Personally, the trump card for the Pill is that it gives me predictable periods, so if my period was ever late or otherwise amiss I would notice right away. Blindly trusting that I'm not pregnant because of how a device should work in theory isn't good enough, and having never been pregnant I can't assume I'd be able to tell based on how I feel (especially since an implant or nuvaring would regulate my hormones in a different way than I'm used to, so my hormones would feel off anyway).
Re: fertility awareness - interesting idea, and I wouldn't mind knowing how to tell if I'm ovulating. But can you learn it when you're on hormonal birth control (and therefore probably not ovulating at all) or do you have to go through a few unregulated cycles to see what happens?