"...the unpleasant-but-natural reality of sexual attraction to post-pubescent teenagers..."

Speak for yourself, please. Your personal kinks shouldn't be extrapolated to the general populace (as Freud should have known!).

better headline.

is sexually attracted to teenagers.

As far as I can tell, the US military routinely enlists people of both sexes who are as short as 5 feet tall and weigh as little as 100 pounds. How do they deal with small-sized men? Do they classify jobs by how much must be lifted for what period of time and test applicants to make sure they can do it? That would be fair.

Rape is the fault of the person doing the raping. In a situation where the raper is a captive, voluntary or not, the responsibility also lies with the ones that are in charge.

Great letter, psalmanazaar. I agree, men need a movement, too. They can call themselves whatever they want (e-masculists! ha!) but they'll be like 'feminists' in that they want to be freed from the strictures of societal gender roles and allowed to be whatever kind of human they damned well please to be.

Men get mocked, bullied, threatened, beaten up, tortured and killed for stepping outside gender roles. To fit in, they stunt their emotions, erode their innocence and allow themselves to have essential parts of their humanity amputated. They have a lot of benefits from being in a patriarchal society, there's always someone lower on the totem pole to feel superior to, but at what a devastating price.

Conforming to the status quo under enormous pressure does not equal weak and stupid. It's understandable, if depressing.

The police thought they had the suspect in custody. That's why they didn't "lock down" or notify campus earlier. Not because "it was just a woman, so what" or "it was just a 'domestic issue' so we don't care." I'm a feminist, but not everything is a feminist issue. Making this your political hobbyhorse puts you on the side of the monsters.

We agonized about this. Why did they wait? Why didn't they tell us, cancel classes, etc.?

Well, now we know why. The police thought they had the suspect in custody. That's why they didn't "lock down" or notify campus earlier. Conflicting information from the victim's roommate and the victim's boyfriend made it seem that they had the right person and that the situation was under control. How were they to know it was a random killing? They did the best they could with the information they had.

Why does everyone equate Girls Gone Wild with Mardi-Gras style breast flashing and think that it's an empowering 'choice?' It's not about high spirits or women enjoying their bodies. It is about pornography (and ripping off those foolish and crass enough to order the videos from the stomach-turning commercials incessantly shown on late-night Comedy Central).

The GGW sponsored events at bars and beaches are just the lure. Their payoff is to get drunk young women onto their bus where they are pressured to masturbate or have sex while being filmed. The GGW employees get bonuses for finding virgins or women that are just turning 18. I don't understand why there is any debate on whether or not it's 'empowering.' It's even less empowering than most porn, as the women being filmed are drunk amateurs.

Article about GGW, including info on bonuses for virgins and teens: http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-gonewild32aug06,0,2664370.story

Consumers with horrible taste complain at being ripped off: http://consumeraffairs.com/misc/wild.html

Online comment form for Comedy Central: http://www.comedycentral.com/help/questionsCC.jhtml

Mailing addresses for Comedy Central's parent corporation: http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2007/04/22/sexploiters-gone-jailedwatch-07-giveem-enough-rope-dept/#comment-53801

I'd like to see a culture that didn't fetishize breasts, one in which women could be shirtless when mowing the lawn without anyone batting an eye or running for their camera or keyboard. Obviously that's not where we are. But in the meantime, let's stop pretending GGW is about simple flashing and stop characterizing resistance to its activities as prudery or anti-breast.

I like these bulbs a lot. I won't buy them at the grocery store because the markup is so high. I'd wait and get them at Lowe's or some other place that had them for a more reasonable price!

Claire Fontaine said "There's always a "more worthy" cause that can be used to distract people from working on the problem at hand."

I see this tactic used a lot, to try to distract from whatever is being debated. "How can you spend so much time talking about ____________ when children are starving/there's a war in Iraq/the sun is going out" etc.

What is this tactic called? I've looked around some sites on common fallacies in debate but not found it.

Cosmo asks "And I'd like Mr. Wolpert to explain how--or even, *gasp*, the atheist's least favorite question: why?--evolution selected for those who found an answer to a question that has no meaning."

That's a pretty easy one. The religious ones tend to kill the ones that don't believe in their particular flavor of supernatural entity.

You can't fight objectification with more objectification. Everyone loses.

Ms. Clinton is not electable. It's obvious that she's out for no-one but herself. She doesn't give a flip about justice or doing what is right. I read somewhere that "She sleeps with the window open so she will know which way the wind blows" and I think that sums it up pretty well. If she gets the nomination, we'll be looking at four more years of Republican rule.