I hope I'm not the only one who appreciates the irony of someone urging Joan to "grow up" while going on and on about her big-girl panties.

Okay, let's say you menstruate 12 times a year for 35 years. That's 420 menstrual periods (more if you hit menopause late or menarche early, fewer if you have a couple of pregnancies). 11,400 tampons would be about 27 tampons per period, which seems excessive.

"Few things send me into a tizzy quite as quickly as hearing someone say they are so colorblind, they wouldn’t care if someone were brown or green or purple. Besides the obvious issues – equating brown skin with those not found in nature..."

Amy, have you ever heard of hyperbole? It's a useful concept for a writer to know about; you should probably look it up.

The poll numbers cited aren't overwhelming. Certainly not enough to accuse an entire generation of being selfish on this issue. The Annenberg numbers, for example, show that older people are less likely to favor increased health insurance spending for children, but still, 75% of them favor an increase in spending (or did in 2000). Sure, the curve for favoring increased spending on Medicare is flatter, but only because young people are less sanguine about it; in fact, if you look at the percentages instead of just the shape of the curve, fewer elderly people in that survey favor increased Medicare spending than increased spending on health insurance for children.

It seems to me that HBO and the other cable networks specialize in shows about "edgy" topics that the writers know nothing about. Who do they think they're fooling?

In 16 Candles, Jake's girlfriend gets raped, but it's okay because she's a slut and she deserved it for being drunk, and besides, she doesn't really mind.

I can't forgive Hughes for that.

This whole topic makes me feel like a hopelessly Luddite curmudgeon. Feh. I'm going to log off and ... you know what, I'm not going to tell you what I'm going to do!

Cry me a river...

One expectation, in the days of larger families, was that the older siblings would take care of younger ones. (Children's books from the 19th and early 20th centuries often feature families of sisters and/or brothers who play together, with older siblings taking a semi-parental role. This is something you rarely see in more recent kids' books.)

Trends in baby-sitting probably have some interesting correlations with changes in family size.

Actually, no. The body is not designed for anything: it evolved. More specifically, the human birth process evolved under selective pressure on several competing trends. It is a compromise among bipedalism, brain size, and point of viability of the infant. Like most evolutionary compromises, it is not perfect.

For some people, the birth process works pretty smoothly, and there's no need for intervention. For others, it doesn't work as well, and intervention is desirable to lessen pain and complications. For some, mother and/or baby will die without intervention. Why is this obvious fact such a stumbling block?

It is, in fact, pretty difficult to portray a vagina on film. After all, an OB/GYN needs to put you in stirrups and use a speculum to get a good look. Or did you mean vulva?

Yes, I have a friend who threw a "good-bye" party for her ovaries. It was a lot of fun, despite the fact that during the surgery her doctors had discovered a metastasization of the cancer that killed her a couple of years later.

The idea of having a party to raise money for rent is pretty old:

http://www.routledge-ny.com/ref/harlem/parties.html

wysiwyg has it right. I mean, if you buy the results of the study, that means that marriage is good for people. Isn't that what the wingers want to hear?

As for the pseudo-Darwinian bullshit, I really don't know what to say.

Years ago I had a friend who had what seemed to be very high expectations of the men she dated, but very low standards. She had a very clear idea of what she wanted (basically, the moon), but she was willing to put up with what seemed to me to be an incredible amount of bullshit and bad, bordering on abusive, behavior once she was in a relationship with someone.

What I took from this is that "choosiness" depends a lot on what point in the relationship you're talking about. And a lot of the research on "choosing" revolves around the first encounter, rather than the longterm.

Some of us eat pulled pork and salad and yogurt parfait (though probably not all in the same meal).

Another nice thing about growing herbs is that you can harvest exactly as much as you need when you need it -- instead of buying a big bunch of basil or parsley at the supermarket when you only need a few springs, and having the remainder turn into mush in your vegetable drawer.

...it's hard for me to understand why people get so obsessed with people "sharing" things that they can, after all, pretty easily ignore. Just like I'm ignoring this Broadsheet post! Um....

Really. We know all we need to know.

Clearly the parents have read "X: A Fabulous Child's Story," by Lois Gould, first published in Ms. in 1972:

http://www.gendercentre.org.au/22article4.htm

Why is it so impossible to imagine that a couple could reconcile -- really work things out and reconcile -- and be happy together after a sexual infidelity? I know people who have done it.

My husband and I are monogamous, but one thing that I've learned from my polyamorous friends is that sex is only one part of a marriage, and that a couple's life together depends on fidelity in a much broader sense. Frankly, I can think of a lot of more unforgivable things that one spouse could do to another.