There is value in teaching girls to treat sex seriously. It's a scary world out there, I don't see anything wrong with teaching girls to wait to have sex.... as long as it's done responsibly. Sure, a lot of these fundamentalist programs are rather fire and brimstone about the carnal arts, but I can't outright point and laugh, either.

I work in an inner city school where many of our girls don't have any contact with their fathers. While I would be less than ecstatic to have them in contact with dads who make them take a weird and very-hard-to-keep promise, I can't honestly say which has more of a negative effect on girls.

As to swearing to be good husband for your daughter, I think that has some value in it, too. We all know that sometimes a spouse isn't enough to keep one faithful, as romantic as we'd like things to be. Staying the course for one's family as a whole seems pretty wholesome.

In the enthusiastically Southern Baptist church in which I grew up (and later abandoned during my collegiate "enlightenment" period) the "don't do it or you'll go to hell and shame your mother" message was drilled equally to the boys and girls. Heck, the boys were specifically told not to participate in the self-love. The bible apparently doesn't specifically ban female masturbation. One of a handful of wins in the Good Book for women, I suppose. While the boys may not have Purity Balls, I would imagine the abstinence message is equally distributed.

While the balls themselves raise an eyebrow at the very least, I think there are some good intentions behind them. Can't we find a way to teach girls and boys that sex isn't dirty or shameful, but it's certainly important and worthy of being taken seriously? There has to be a happy medium somewhere that we all can agree isn't utterly dreadful.

PS - Svutlana rocks. She makes me laugh so hard I hurt myself nearly every day. *high fives*

Between the brain articles and Brightstar's, um, piece, I've certainly got an education. (I call bs on BS65, btw, there's no way you can make yourself orgasm just be thinking about it and still be so cranky.)

In a metaphorical way, I can see the silent brain angle... I'm a busy woman, I have to think lots of thinks simultaneously most of the time, a good deity invoking O does a lot to filter out the crap so I can just enjoy being for a few minutes.

Spouse and I bought in 2001, in one of those fascist HOA run cookie cutter communities. We bought new construction because we thought it would limit maintenance costs, at least for a few years while we figured out what the hell we were doing.

Ha. We didn't know at the time exactly HOW shoddy many new construction homes are, but live and learn, and spend a ridiculous amount of money in the process, huh? Seven years later, we've undone all but a few of the things that were half-assed in the original construction. (The driveway is still cracked, the shower in the master bath is sinking) And boy do we know a lot more about home repair. Being happy here took a lot of work, but at this stage it's finally getting a little easier. Maybe because we're more efficient at fixing things, maybe because it's become so routine to do house stuff it doesn't seem like as much of a chore.

Mr. Almond, you'll get better at keeping up with your house, keep your chin up. Fixing drywall/plaster isn't hard or expensive, it's just time consuming, which makes it a good place from which to jump. It's also pretty forgiving, if you really screw it up it's not hard to start over from scratch. Get your foundation fixed as soon as you can - that's going to cause a series of ripple effects in the rest of your home you'll be swearing at for years and years to come. The sooner you fix it, the less damage there will be to the rest of your house. Spending an ungodly amount of money now saves you from spending an ungodly amount of money squared later.

I really enjoyed the article, I love a good rant liberally sprinkled with a sense of humor.

I just read a good chunk of the Not In Our School website. Lots of false information about Planned Parenthood, sexuality and pretty much everything.

In other words, it's all about the parents outrage and ability to read anti-PP propaganda and not about helping or teaching the kids at all.

Nice.

And if the post above isn't link spam, then I gotta say I'm curious as to why ANYONE would be more outraged about what a celebrity wore than teen sex ed. Curious, but not necessarily surprised.

I'm passing out cookies and milk. It's almost impossible to be mean while eating cookies and drinking milk. The entire democratic party would do well to sit down together with a heaping platter of warm chocolate chip goodness.

Stay classy, kids.

You lose your right to gripe about politics.

It is totally your choice to vote or not vote; to vote democrat, republican, independent or for Lance Armstrong to be on the Wheaties box. God bless American, land of the free! If you choose not to participate in the politics, however, I believe you should give up your right to complain about how it all pans out.

In addition, if you choose not to vote because people on the internet act like assholes, maybe you should lose access to the internet until you figure out how it works.