I always thought people made too much of Barbie's figure. I never thought of Barbie's boobs and weird proportions when I was growing up. Most dolls have weird proportions. But Barbie was different from other dolls because she wasn't a baby doll or a little child doll. She was an adult doll, and so, she could be the center of adult adventures. You could act out scenarios featuring Barbie doing all kinds of things - going to work, or climbing a mountain, or marrying Ken, or running off with Skipper. Those play scenes just wouldn't work as well with a doll that looks like a baby or a 3 year old, which were the other alternatives, at least when I was growing up. (There were some attempts to make adult dolls that looked more "normal" but the alternatives were stereotyped as Mom Doll and Dad Doll - and never had any fun accessories like Barbie did. And you could never add any new friends, since only the one family was available. Any wonder I preferred Barbie, who had her own Townhouse and a great 70's plaid office suit?)

Especially as an only child who played alone much of the time, I really appreciated the imaginative play that I got from Barbie. It fulfilled a different purpose than reading a book or playing a sport - it gave me a creative outlet and let my imagination run wild. I came up with all kinds of scenarios for Barbie, and then acted them out - it was like the Barbies were my own acting troupe, ready at any time to play out my little dramas. It seems like children have less time for that kind of free, unstructured play, but I think it's a loss. And adult dolls like Barbie give kids a different kind of play experience than baby dolls or little girl dolls. I don't know if there are other "adult dolls" on the market today, but Barbie still seems to be the only one that's widely available. Playing with Barbies didn't stop me from becoming a scientist who doesn't care about appearance - but it did spark my imagination. I sometimes with I still had my Barbie Townhouse to play with!

I'm wary of any healthcare plan that varies from one state to another. In this economy, we can't always choose what state we live in. I've been laid off three times in the last five years, and I've had to move where I could find work. (Lots of layoffs for scientists over the last few years.) Do we make people choose between moving to a new state to find work and getting switched from one health plan to another one when they move? If you get a job in State A, will you have good health insurance, but if you get a job in State B, will you will be stuck with a high-deductible plan that doesn't cover preventative care?

Although I think single payer makes a lot of sense, there are many countries that have private-public hybrids for their health coverage. That kind of system might work here. But the idea of having vastly different health coverage from one state to another will create a lot of problems, especially for the people who need health coverage the most - people who lose their jobs and have to move to find work.

I'm not a lawyer, but I have to wonder if the Provider Conscience rule applies in this case. The nurse was asked to trim the patient's IUD strings. If she had refused to do so, since she thought IUD's were wrong, then she would have been protected by the rule. But instead, she pretended to trim the strings and used that as a cover to pull out the patient's IUD. If the lawyers can prove this (and it wasn't just "an accident"), then it's hard to argue that she's covered the conscience rule.

The parallel would be a pharmacist who didn't just refuse to dispense birth control, but secretly replaced the patient's birth control pills with fake ones. I don't think that's covered.

The author's conventional wisdom is that women have fewer "outlying sexualities". But I wonder if that's really true, or if it's just been hidden. There is an incredible variety of romance and erotica written by women for women, especially in the last few years when it's become more socially acceptable. (I was amazed to discover bookstores in the Bible Belt that wouldn't sell racy romance novels ten years ago and are now selling fairly hardcore erotica.)

I think this romantic erotica isn't noticed, because on one hand, romance isn't considered "feminist" and so it's not discussed by female critics, and on the other side, it's not visual like traditional porn and it tends to have an emotional component as well as just the mechanics. But there's certainly a market for this kind of thing.