I have read, and seen newscasts, about parents who wish to bring on their daughters' periods EARLIER than usual, generally in an effort to stunt their growth.

My own parents considered doing this to me. But they didn't, perhaps because Nature intervened and put me into puberty naturally, at age 12. I, too, am 5'8" tall. My parents didn't want me to be "too tall to attract boys," which is why they were considering imposing on me what I feel to be a somewhat-radical violation of my physiology. At the time, I thought that my parents were the only "overly-controlling nut-jobs" who'd consider doing such a thing to their daughter. I've since learned that it's not all that uncommon. I have to wonder why doctors consider this to be ethical and if they consider such a thing to truly be in a young woman's best interests, rather than being a capitulation to outdated and sexist cultural imperatives.

Incidentally, puberty does not necessarily equal sexual activity. I believe that sexual activity has a lot more to do with peer pressure and with a pervasive feeling that one is somehow inferior/unworthy if one doesn't have scads of the opposite sex drooling all over oneself than with feeling out-of-control and needing to act-out due to raging hormones. I say this in large part because I wasn't sexually active when I was a minor, this despite my turning into a full-blown and full-grown woman at age 12 (with all of the sexual expectations that looking that way entails). Maybe I was able to resist being sexual because I had a deep-seated mistrust of the motivations of adolescent boys instilled in me from an early age? Maybe a lot of it had to do with never having been very popular--AND not agonizing over it--and therefore being better-able to resist peer pressure? I do know that a large part of it had to do with the knowledge that "sex makes babies", and my knowing--from the age of 5(!)--that I never wanted to be a mother (abortions were difficult to get back then [pre Roe Vs. Wade], and they required parental consent in any case--consent that I wouldn't have been able to obtain).

What wasn't stated in the Broadsheet article was that the mother was made to watch her young daughters being murdered while she held their three-month-old son in her arms. It seems to me that the father was willing to "suffer" having daughters just so that he'd have some sort of progeny....but once his son was born, those girls were seen as nothing but an all-too-expendable liability.

Let's imagine, for a moment, that this is an assumption that is based on fact. For whom is this a "tragedy"? Any woman who has a lick of sense knows darned well that being alone is 1-NOT equivalent to being "lonely" and 2-far, far better than being stuck with someone with whom one is incompatible.

Numerous statistical studies over the past few decades have come to the same conclusion, which is that it is single MEN who seem to suffer the most from being in an un-mated state. In terms of overall happiness and success in life, unmarried women and married men have consistently come out at the top of the heap in these studies, followed by married women, with single men winding up down in the (sometimes literal) dumps.

Is this some "feminist plot, " one that is designed to break up families and denigrate males? I seriously doubt it. The studies have been repeated numerous times, by different research groups, and no radical feminist organizations sponsored any of them (although some of the individuals were part of the teams doing the research projects may very well have been feminists, radical or otherwise). What the feminists DID do was to pick up on the research once it was completed and widely publicize it. I mean, really: How many women who have been told, all their lives, that they'll wind up alone and lonely--pitiful "spinsters with cats"--would welcome hearing that married-women-in-general tend to be LESS-happy than single-women-in-general? And how many women who have been subjected to attempts to brainwash them into believing that (most) women "need" men would feel vindicated to learn that the truth is actually the other way around?

Furthermore, the high divorce rate would seem to indicate that people (both male and female) need to be MORE picky in choosing their mates, not less. We have already lowered our standards far too much. What nerve to state that we need to lower our standards even further!

And do we really need to be co-parenting with guys whom we don't even respect? Better to have a vial from the sperm bank as a Dad then a man who's a "Dud."

...those prisoners have been accused/convicted of rape, for the sake of the safety of their fellow inmates and the prison staff. After all, jails are violent environments, and there is a lot of potential for bloodshed (not to mention man-on-man rape).

That much having been said, I feel that it's a good idea to offer a wide range of medical and psychological treatment and follow-up support for all victims of violence, and that all patients being treated for rape should be offered prophylactic courses of antivirals and antibacterials, along with the option of taking a course of hormones as a pregnancy preventative. (The patients, of course, would always have the option to refuse any or all of these drugs, after being informed of all of their medical options.)

The substitution of nonsense words for obscenities and cuss-words seems to be a time-honored tradition in SciFi writing. Who could forget the liberal sprinklings of "frells" (the F-Word) and "drens" (the S-word) in "Farscape"? And, given that I don't understand Mandarin, my mind always imagined that an "unacceptably-colorful" phrase was being uttered by the crew of the Serenity in "Firefly" (who, incidentally, cussed "Gorram" [the G-D-word] a fair amount, but used the plain-spoken word "rut" in place of the F-word).