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Okay, people, you are making me laugh. I checked my blog stats again today and now my “More Sex” post has gotten even more hits than my “Let’s Talk About Sex . . . Or Not” post. I think I know exactly where your minds are and they are not residing in your heads. That’s fine with me, though. Sex is a good thing. Enjoy it, but be safe.
(Do you think my readership would rise if I tagged ALL of my posts “sex”?) 
Through looking at my blog stats this evening, it has become blatantly obvious to me that I must write more about sex. The highest views I’ve ever posted for a story in one day come from my Let’s Talk About Sex . . . Or Not post. Does that say more about me, or you, dear reader?
So, let’s get on with it. I’ve got a little item I wanted to share with you that I found through the blog Dangerous Intersection. It is an article from the Telegraph discussing the book Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Damages Girls by Carol Platt Liebau. According to the article, “[Lieubau] claims that teenage girls are growing up in a culture in which being called “a slut” is preferable to being labelled “a prude”.
Remember that word “prude.” I’ll be coming back to it in a later post.
Today, as part of Young Son’s sex-ed curriculum, he started carrying a flour baby. This exercise is meant to show teens that they don’t want to be saddled with the responsibility of caring for a baby by making them lug around a 5 lb. bag of flour for four days. Young Son got the point tonight (he’s a quick learner) when he realized that school has been called off tomorrow due to expected extreme cold. With the flour baby, he said he’s not free to do whatever he wants.
I’ve always thought the flour sack exercise was a little inane. It doesn’t cry; it doesn’t poop; it doesn’t eat; it doesn’t wiggle around when you have to change its clothes; it doesn’t scream when you take it out into the cold without a hat; it doesn’t spit up on you in volumes that make you have to change your clothes. It also doesn’t smile and coo and gurgle and warm your heart so much that you’ll do anything for it. I think teens would be better served by helping out in a daycare for a few hours. Of course the legal ramifications of such a scenario would be unmanageable. Flour sack babies are ideal in this regard. They don’t have parents who’ll sue the school district if they are dropped.
Young Son is involved with a sex-ed unit in his science class at school. Our other two children went through the same curriculum, which teaches abstinence-only. Several times throughout the curriculum, we have been required to complete a worksheet or assignment. One evening, we had to write 5 sentences within an essay he was writing about why abstinence was best. After hearing a recent report showing that abstinence-only sex-ed was not any more effective at postponing sexual intercourse than a comprehensive sex-ed curriculum, we had more than 5 sentences to say.
Here is our portion of Young Son’s essay:
The first question we have concerning abstinence in relation to this course is . . . What is the definition of abstinence? [Young Son's] dad is studying sexuality in his sociology courses in college. The definition of abstinence in one of his textbooks is the voluntary avoidance of intercourse. This does not necessarily include abstaining from other sexual practices, such as hugging, kissing, massage, or masturbation. CDC studies between 1991 and 2001 showed a ten percent decrease in sexual intercourse among high school students. This doesn’t mean that these students abstained from other sexual activities, which could potentially spread STDs if students aren’t taught how to protect themselves.
Definitions aside, abstaining from intercourse allows teenagers to concentrate on other things, such as exploring hobbies and academic interests. Abstinence prevents emotional relationships that teens may not be ready for. Of course, it also prevents pregnancy and the many responsibilities that accompany bring a child into the world. While we value abstinence and understand its importance, we fell that an abstinence-only education is not balanced enough for the realities of sexual activity. Students need to be taught the proper use of contraception, along with the responsibilities of early sexual activity. We concur with musical satirist Roy Zimmerman when he says, “Abstinence-only education is like just hold it potty training.”
When I asked Young Son if the teacher had mentioned contraception, he said, “Contra-what?” When I asked Daughter if the course had covered contraception, she said that she didn’t remember.
I know, I know, people who are anti-teen sex think that if they wave the “abstinence-only” fairy dust over teens, they’ll magically stop having sex, while believing that if we give teens info on contraception, we are giving them license to have sex all they want. The unintended consequence of this abstinence-only curriculum is that it is not giving teens enough information to make informed decisions. The sexual urge is powerful, which is as it should be. Our survival mechanism as a species depends upon our procreation. Now, with serious STDs to contend with, some of which are deadly, our survival depends upon understanding how to protect ourselves during intercourse. I think it’s time we return to a comprehensive sex-ed curriculum.
This Saturday last I spent the better part of the day listening to my iPod using earbuds. Bad idea. Even though I didn’t think I was playing it that loud, I woke with a hissing in my ears. As the day wore on, the hissing got worse and was accompanied by the feeling of pulsation on my eardrums. My right ear is worse than my left.
I’ve been thinking about my hearing a lot lately because I’ve noticed that mine has diminished. My brother told me that the damage was probably done long ago and I’m feeling the effects now. (A couple of concerts where I didn’t have earplugs are the likely culprits.) Even more dreadful, apparently damage to the ears is incurable. Excessive loud sounds permanently damage the little vibrating hairs inside the ears.
Hmm. Really? Completely incurable? Aside from being a depressing thought, I’m curious about whether this is true. Our knowledge of the human body is incomplete. Just when scientists decide something with finality, new research causes them to rethink their findings. For example, ulcers were caused by stress and that was that – until someone discovered that ulcers could be caused by a bacteria. Brains grow only so many neurons, after which it’s all downhill in the brain development department – except that it isn’t because regardless of how many neurons we start out with, they can branch and branch into new connections, so our brains continue to develop.
Our bodies can often recover from wicked traumas if given half a chance. Smoking paralyzes and kills the cilia in a smoker’s airways and severely injures the lungs and esophagus. However, once a smoker quits, a great deal of the damage reverses within about a year. Why, if the cilia can regrow within 9 months in the lungs, can’t the hairs regenerate in our ears? Could it be that we don’t give them a chance to?
Last night, the pulsing in my ears got so bad that I searched the house for earplugs. Sound seemed to be making it worse and I wanted to block what I could to see if it would help. I couldn’t find earplugs, but made do with a cotton ball ripped in half. While the cotton didn’t block all sound, I was relieved of the pulsating. I slept with the cotton balls in and am wearing them today.
The fact that I can still hear most of what’s going on with cotton in my ears made me realize that our ears never get a rest. They are always being assailed with sound. Could this be why the hairs in our ears don’t regenerate? Curiouser and curiouser . . . .
I’ve just returned from taking Mom to the nursing home to visit Grandma. As soon as I stepped out of my front door, I said to myself, “It’s really nice out.” That’s a stock Minnesota phrase, usually uttered when we’ve had a cold spell that snaps into a warm spell – warm being a relative term. Today it’s got to be about 40 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Definitely warm when you consider we’ve gone through about a week’s worth of below-zero days. If this keeps up, there will be Minnesotans running around in shirt-sleeves.
The weather forecast told us to expect freezing rain and slippery roads, but so far its partly sunny and nothing is falling from the sky. I’m not sure why Minnesotans actually listen to the weather forecast because it’s usually wrong. Our weather is downright bi-polar, swinging between 20-below and 100-above within the course of a year. Maybe we like to root for the underdog, and with our weather, the weather forecasters are so far under that we’d be better served to call them weather moles.
Hubby and I stopped at the video store this evening. Whilst we were perusing the cinematic selections, a lesson on capital punishment wafted across the store. It issued forth from the mouth of a boor. He was delivering his theory on why capital punishment isn’t effective to the woman behind the counter, who was trying hard to be polite while disagreeing with him. He said that the reason capital punishment, which he’s all for, by the way, doesn’t work is because nobody witnesses the executions. Why, people used to make executions a family event! They used to get out the picnic basket and head to the courthouse lawn, where they could watch a hanging in all its glory. Anyone in the audience who had subversive thoughts of murder, rape or kidnapping on his mind would see the hanging and have second thoughts. By golly, what an idea!
‘Course, this loud, blustery guy didn’t stop to think that perhaps the person being hung had witnessed a public execution sometime in his life and look where he ended up. Sheesh!
When Hubby and I left the store, we chatted about the scene we had witnessed. Hubby thought that if the guy was there to pick up the gal behind the counter, perhaps a different approach would have been in order. Nice thinking there, Bucky, bring up a heated topic like capital punishment while trying to woo a girl. Who comes to the video store for this kind of conversation?
Hubby also thought about the social psychology class he’s taking, specifically in relation to Jean Piaget’s four stages of development. The stages are as follows:
1. Sensorimotor (first 2 years)
2. Preoperational (ages 2 – 7)
3. Concrete operational (ages 7 – 11)
4. Formal operational (ages 12 and up)
The stages I’ll concern myself most with here are 3 and 4. In stage 3, problem solving is related to concrete objects and events. In stage 4, problem solving moves to hypothetical or abstract situations. Studies show that more than half of Americans don’t ever reach the fourth stage of development. We’d guess by his behavior, this guy is stuck in stage 3, without any hope of moving on.
While Hubby was busy with the psychological analysis, I was thinking the guy would make a great character in a novel.
Have you noticed that your computer is continually downloading stuff? Usually it comes in the form of “updates” when you’re shutting down your computer. I always wonder what, exactly, the computer is downloading when this happens. The computer gives me no clues. For all I know, it could be something subversive and yucky that doesn’t enhance the functioning of my computer one whit. Why, there oughta be a law! I suggest a download disclosure law that requires companies to tell us what they are downloading to our computers in the form of updates and how these updates are supposed to function. Of course, most of us might find this to be a needless complication, but we’ve got to get over our habit of letting privacy matters slide.
I purchased my first songs off iTunes today. Everything was going fine – I found the songs I wanted: Moby’s “Very,” Dave Matthews Band’s “The Song That Jane Likes,” the Nine Inch Nails album “With Teeth,” plus two of the band’s songs from Year Zero, and the INXS song “Johnson’s Aeroplane.” Got them all downloaded to the computer. Zip, zip.
And then the whole process suddenly fell apart. I went to sync the songs, to put them on my iPod, and got this message that they wouldn’t sync because the computer I was using wasn’t authorized to play the songs I just purchased. What, what,WHAT!!!! I spent $15 to have you tell me my computer won’t let me play these songs?!?! I went from zero to sixty in terms of calm to anger in the space of seconds. Looking for a solution, especially on the unhelpful iTunes/iPod help page, was not happening.
My daughter looked on serenely as I started cussing. It was time to go pick up Young Son from a class, so she said, “Mom, why don’t you let me figure this out while you go pick him up?” In the minutes it took for me to get on my coat and boots, she had it all fixed and I felt utterly retarded.
Next time I have an issue with my iPod, I’ll just hand it over to Daughter and bypass the zero-to-sixty anger. (Like right now. My Moby song won’t play. Crimeny! Give me a CD and CD player!)
