about obtrusive data and asking girls about their sex lives...You think the girls' answers might just so happen to 'fit' what the interviewer wants to hear? I don't have access to the full text, but it doesn't seem like Broadsheet does either, so I don't know how the questions were asked--open-ended? close-ended? it makes a big difference in terms of how the girls are going to answer the questions.

But my point is that there is a HUGE problem with taking a fourteen year-old girl and asking her in a clincal, research setting to justify her sex life to an adult (who is not only a stranger but taking a study of who she's fucked to boot).

How many fourteen year-olds do you know who can adequately articulate their desires, let alone to a stranger attempting to identify 'risky' behavior?

is great. I think my marriage is an important part of my feminism. Marriage doesn't just mean one thing--to buy into that belief is part of the problem. I think in academia we are often surrounded by people who talk more than they listen--they already know what marriage *means* and they're going to tell you all about it. blah, blah, blah.

I was very excited when I realized that I could make all parts of my life, and my marriage, mean what it means to me, not what other people think it should mean. Feminism taught me this. C'mon, you've read the feminist lit, if we can redefine what 'woman' means, we can redefine marriage.

Sorry, they just aren't.

Those parents on the MTV are performing more for the cameras than for their kids. I just look at the overindulgence of materialistic things and think, wow, you must have really never been there for your kid at all...Must be overcompensating for something. And you can see how deep the relationship is between the parents and children over the course of the show. Parents make big promises, kid asks for more, parents aren't able to give kid exactly what they want (usually a big celebrity to show up at the party), and kid proceeds to hate parent for about a half an hour until their sweet sixteen car rolls in. Kid then loves parents, much hugging and kissing and "daddy, you're the best" ensues.

Great relationship there.

And I won't even start on how fucked up the sixteen year-old kid is going to be for the rest of her life (guess what? life is never, ever going to be a big party about you ever again).

But I digress...I had prom just over ten years ago and the only senior girls mostly bought new dresses. Otherwise, we swapped. I only bought one new dress senior year, the rest of the time you borrowed so-and-so's winter formal dress, and then so-and-so's homecoming gown...By the time prom came around, it was so close to going away to college that we were mostly thinking our last few weeks together that we could care less about spending so much money.

Maybe the nouveau riche are charging their credit cards or tapping a home equity line of credit to give their kids the prom they never had, but I can't see this being the 'norm' by any stretch of the imagination. The economy sucks and anyone doing that for their kid will reap what they sow.

I agree with previous posters who get us away from looking at this as an individual problem.

I cringe at the reference to "choice" of raising children (aka society--you know, the people who will grow up, work, and fill in for all the people now). It is not a choice to have children, if you think of us in this all together, you know, as a society. If you think we're all just a big mass of individuals, good luck trying to get any social progress done.

I think Martha Albertson Fineman, legal scholar extraordinaire, said it best in The Autonomy Myth:

"Whenever we use individual choice as a justification for ignoring the inequities in existing social conditions concerning dependency, we also fail to recognize that, quite often, choice of one status or position carries with it consequence not anticipated or imagined at the time of the initial decision...Even if someone does 'consent' in the sense of taking risks or fogoing opportunities to undertake dependency work, should that let society off the hook? Should society tolerate the situation of dependency within the family [and work] and the mandate personal sacrifices a caretaker typically encounters under current societal arrangements? In other words, are some conditions just too oppressive or unfair to be imposed by society even if and when an individual openly agrees to or chooses them?" (2004:42).