Seems to me that this would all be solved very simply if we could all band together and demand safe, reliable, foolproof birth control, for men and women. Then everybody gets to decide for themselves whether or not they get pregnant. If you're a man using hormonal male birth control, guess what? You can't accidentally get a woman pregnant, even if she wants it. Same for women.

Since male birth control seems likely to be on the market within the next five years, hopefully this will seem like a ridiculous argument someday soon.

"He said he had pictured me as "pure" and that the standards are different for men"

Honey, stop for a minute and think about what this says about him. And what other gendered double standards is he waiting to spring on you?

Cary, you've been on a roll lately. Keep it coming!

And I would also like to say how very grateful I am to live in a world that permits genteel online debates about gender relations.

Awesome - every single female in my office had a few minutes of good ol'-fashioned cackling over this :)

Some of the earlier writers touched on this already, but to expand - this girl is WAY too young to be pigeonholing herself as asexual. Many women don't get in touch with their sex drives until relatively late in the game. I started having sex at 17 and thought "Hmmm, this is interesting". It took a handful of partners and four or five years before I got to a point where I actually craved sex and was 99% orgasmic. And the thing is, it keeps getting better.

The LW should definitely do as the other commenters have suggested and see a doctor and/or a therapist, just to get a sense of all the millions of things that can cause her condition. Wait five years, or ten, and then decide what you think about sex.

This isn't meant to be a flame, but I am really shocked by the vitriol in some of these posts. Since when is being quiet the same as being passive-aggressive, manipulative, controlling, or childish?

There are a LOT of reasons someone might not be chatty - just for starters, he might just find the LW annoying and not want to talk in her presence. He might have an anxiety disorder, mild depression, social phobia, personal stress that he needs to process internally.

He might just not be a talkative person! He might be an introvert - a lot of extroverts seem to interpret silence as hostility, when it really means that someone is processing a situation or a conversation *internally*.

Sheesh. Talk about projection.

The problem with talionic justice is that it negates the idea of individual responsiblity. If the brother (or any relation) of an alleged criminal can be "substituted" as a sacrifice to "justice", the original criminal goes scot-free. This guy has confused justice with tribalism.

Consider the Pakistani rape case, where a teenage boy belonging to Tribe 1 was accused of having an affair with an older, married woman of Tribe 2 (there's some evidence that the accusation was leveled to cover up the fact that the boy was actually sexually abused by a male member of Tribe 2). In revenge for this crime, the older sister of the boy from Tribe 1 was sentenced to be raped.

That's talionic justice.

As a current college student, I would like to explain why so many people are taking 5 or 6 years to get out of college today. It's not laziness, it's simple math. Without merit scholarships, an undergrad is eligible for an absolute maximum of $11,500 a year in loans. I don't know anybody who can get grants anymore.

That $11,500 covers tuition and books at my enormous, anonymous state school. That does not leave much to live on, especially in my area, where you're lucky to rent a room in somebody's house in the suburbs for less than $500 a month, let alone get an apartment with friends (living alone is not even a possiblity).

Housing prices means I have to live in the suburbs, which means I have to have a car, with all the attendant expenses. I have to work a minimum of 25 hours a week just to support myself. This means that it is economically and temporally impossible to take classes full-time without putting everything on a credit card.

I have supported myself since I turned eighteen and am extremely proud to be graduating from college in slightly less than 6 years.

As a Washington area college-age male (posting under my fiancee's account, no less), I think there are environmental factors that the article touches on and then blows past. Finals, job prospects, exhaustion are all there, but the most telling reason I could name for any sexual decline from one generation to the next would be the massive dosing of prescription and recreational drugs. I don't know in detail the erectile success of my male friends, but I do know they're all either medicated for ADD, enjoy the occasional bit o' weed, or both. This is not the most potent cocktail for those glorious four-hour erections of yesteryear.

Before the inevitable ranting starts, I'll jump in and suggest that anybody who is interested in how Muslim women experience their own religion should read "Politics of Piety" by Saba Mahmood. I'm halfway through it and it is absolutely fascinating. It's written by a Pakistani-American (I think) feminist academic on the rather recent "mosque movement" of women holding religious classes and debates in local Egyptian mosques. There's some very nuanced reasoning about what women seek in these classes and what they get out of them.