As a journalist and published author (though not of fiction...yet), I am very, very concerned by what is being advocated here. I've written some very disturbing things. I've worked out some serious issues with my writing. I am, by the way, thoroughly harmless. I'm not going to kill myself or anyone else. I've have been vilified by readers on more than one occasion because I'm "advocating" this or that politically incorrect thing that describes how people really ARE and not how we wished they were. I've never been called dangerous, but that's the next step.

There's a word for this. It's called being "Nabokoved." Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita about pedophilia. And at the time, he was widely vilified and criticized, even called a pedophile--which he most certainly was not. He wrote something terribly disturbing. It was of lasting literary merit because he was a good writer (Cho, apparently, was not).

But how did Nabokov get to BE a good writer? He practiced, writing probably thousands if not hundred of thousands of words of fiction. Some of that fiction must have been--like some of my early fiction--both disturbing... and BAD.

Student writing by its very nature is bad. Few writers spring fully formed from the mind of Zeus. Most of us develop over the course of our first million words. Yes, MILLION. Shut someone down in their first hundred thousand words and they will never develop. There will be zillions of false alarms and more writers broken before they ever rise from the muck.

Don't THINK about THAT. Don't WRITE about that. It's scary. It's disturbing. Push it under the rug.

We will catch a few murderers at the cost of a million minds.

What's wrong with wanting to have a sex drive?

Something like 60% of women past menopause report decreased sex drive. The studies tell you that. What they don't tell you is that a significant proportion of women in their mid-30's and 40's in peri-menopause ALSO report highly reduced libido. These are not old "dried up" women who "should stop wanting sex" they are young, vital women who are mad as hell that their sex life has up and abandoned them! BTDT. For women with a loss of libido due to aging who don't WANT to let sex go (sex-positive much?), this sounds almost too good to be true!

Not to mention for the half of us who are obese and need to lose weight for health reasons but have difficulty doing so. Also BTDT. I'm all for doing away with the starving model on the the Vogue cover, but that doesn't mean there are not real women who actually need to lose weight for health reasons. What's wrong with wanting to lose weight when you actually NEED to?

It's one thing to fix a problem that does not exist. It's quite another to fix a problem where half the people suffer from it in silence. Sexual disfunction in women is exactly that--something that we suffer in silence.

Only $75K?

The $75K is just for the money she spent going to college, not for the loss of income she will suffer without her teaching degree. How much do nannies make compared to well qualified teachers?

I thought so.

When is this idiocy going to stop? ADULTS DRINK ALCOHOL. Sometimes, they get drunk. While I personally have literally never been drunk (actual truth), I'm still not such a big idiot to think that adults can't and don't get drunk. Was she driving? Was she offering alcohol to kids? How did they know it wasn't lemonade?

Honestly. This is just getting stupid.

Well, it was true of MY mother when I was 20.

She hated the fact that I had sex at all in college. Didn't matter if it was inside or outside of a relationship. In fact, it became very clear as time went on, she didn't want me to have sex with anyone.

Don't believe it?

When I was 26, the mother of a 2-year-old, and very happily married, my mother and I had an exchange about the imminent homecoming of my military husband who had been away for 90 endless days. I was happily thinking about seeing him--and not about sex--when my mother made a catty, negative, really quite aggressive comment about what my husband and I were going to do when he got home.

I was just dumbstruck. She had been making these evil little digs since I became sexually active (at the advanced age of 18!), at any boyfriend (or crush) she met, even guys I WASN'T having sex with. I had told her more than once that regardless of what she thought about my sexual activities, her comments were beyond the pale and were quite unacceptable.

Finally, I said, "Mom, we're MARRIED, I'm allowed to have sex with my husband!"

To her credit, she hasn't made any awful comments since.

I have 3 daughters. I'm sure that one of them will have my over-self-realized sex drive. Perhaps they will "act out" in college and have a lot of really great, wild sex. I hope, for their sake, that I react better than my mother did.