red dots

My daily perusal of the nytimes.com allowed me to come across this great little article.  It highlights Rachel Kudder Nealbuff’s new book My Little Red Book, a compilation of nearly 100 stories told by women about their first periods.  I was particularly intrigued by this article and the whole topic of menstruation after reading Inga Muscio’s cunt: a declaration of independence where she discusses the topic in depth.  It’s great that this subject, which is almost taboo to talk about publicly and is rarely even discussed among women, is brought to light to be read by women young and old.  In fact, Nealbuff even has a website where women are encouraged to post their own personal reflections.

Parents just don’t understand

In response to Charles M. Blow’s The Demise of Dating article in The New York Times, Michael Smerconish wrote a response opinion article in the Philadelphia Daily News. 

Smerconish gives us another “adult” perspective on the hooking-up phenomenon.  Unlike (I’m assuming here) the writer of the Salon.com article and myself, Blow and Smerconish are married adults and have very little understanding of hooking up.  To them it truly is a phenomenon, whereas to everyone I know, it’s a given.  Should we just file it under Will Smith’s line that “Parents just don’t understand”?

But one thing that was interesting to me in this article was when he writes:

“Who can forget the nervousness of initiating a date? Planning what to do. Rehearsing your rap. Then anxiously dialing the telephone to make the bid.  The concern for making small talk if one of her parents answers. (I actually made notes diagramming the possible outcomes and my plan of attack.)

Although I am in college and my prospective suitors don’t need to worry about making small talk with my parents, the nervousness of asking someone on a date is still present and perhaps the biggest obstacle thrown in good ol’fashioned dating’s face.  Because what it boils down to, is what a boy once told me.  ”It’s not like you can just ask the pretty girl in Astromony out on a date with you.”  When told this story, my friend Jenny looked straight at me and said, “Uh, but yes… yes, you can.”

is hooking up really that new?

My sister-in-law and friend both sent me a link to this article in the nytimes under some variation of, “isn’t this what your blog is all about?” and “blog fodder!”  In it, Opt-Ed columnist Charles Blow tells us something that we already know: hooking up is here to stay.

He after explaining to unknowing readers what hooking up entails, he writes, “when I first heard about hooking up years ago, I figured that it was a fad that would soon fizzle. I was wrong. It seems to be becoming the norm.”

None of this info is new for us, right?

But while perusing the wedding announcements in the nytimes, I found a really interesting quote from Jane Kallir, a woman who was remarrying her first husband.  Thinking back on how unprepared she was for marriage the first time around, she tells the reporter that “People didn’t date,” remembered Ms. Kallir, 54. “You hung out and then you slept together.”

Doesn’t that sound familiar to you?

Michelle Obama: Mom-in-Chief

I found this really interesting article while perusing The New York Times about Cherie Blair’s advice to First Lady elect Michelle Obama.  Mrs. Blair advises Mrs. Obama to prepare herself for letdowns in her new role, one of which is that she will have to take the back seat to her husband, in both public and private.  One of the things that I love about Michelle Obama, aside from her sense of style and the fact that she seems like she’d make a great friend, is that everything about her exudes intelligence and success.  She seems motivated and goal oriented and seems to have been able to achieve it all – a great family life and an incredibly successful career.  But what this article points out, is she putting this all aside for her husband?  She left a job as a hospital executive to become a self proclaimed “mom-in-chief.”  Should we consider Michelle Obama as another woman joining the opt-out revolution? 

As contributers to the article note, this isn’t the end of the road for Mrs. Obama.  She will certainly bring her drive and intelligence to the White House and being First Lady gives her many different opportunities.  In addition, her time in the White House is also an investment into her own name and will only benefit her career in the future.  

I think this is a really interesting new foray into the political realm as we begin to see first ladies who are more than just hostesses at their husband’s events.  Hilary Rodham Clinton was the first first lady to hold an active career before entering the White House, and Mrs. Clinton and Laura Bush are the only two previous first ladies to hold graduate degrees.  Some also noteworthy is that Cherie Blair, a lawyer and mother of four children, continued to work as a lawyer while her husband Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

“Just as some young women in recent years have argued that appearing topless on “Girls Gone Wild” is an act of sexual liberation, putting an untested Alaskan governor on the road to the White House was spun as a sign of the arrival of real, hot-blooded women into the mainstream of power.”

From “No Extraordinary Woman” By Judith Warner, Op-extra columnist for The New York Times

into the mind of a teenage boy

A search of The New York Times archives allowed me to stumble upon this article called Inside the Mind of the Boy Dating Your Daughter provided a really interesting insight into the thoughts running through the hormone driven mind of a teenage boy. Researchers at the State University of New York at Oswego surveyed 105 tenth grade boys to determine the various “reasons why they asked girls out, dated and pursued physical relationships.” The most interesting outcomes were that 80% of the boys said that the primary reason for dating was not that they were physically attracted to someone but rather because “they really liked the person.”

The article also went on to ask the boys who had been sexually active what their reasons were and the answers ranged from”physical desire and wanting to know what sex feels like were among the top three reasons they pursued sex.” But what was particularly interesting was that the boys were “equally likely to say that they pursued sex because they loved their partner.”

I think that looking at this survey and article is great in the context of this blog. We spend a lot of time thinking about the thoughts of women and the effect of hook ups on them, but this survey is an indication that boys are not on a one track mind to sex and that there are certainly layers of emotions that we’re overlooking on the side of boys.

Bratz books

Being a lifelong nerd, I used to LOVE when my teachers would pass out the Scholastic fliers or when the book fair came to school.  That’s why I was particularly interested when I came across this article in The New York Times.  Apparently a parent interest group called The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood has petitioned and finally convinced Scholastic to take the Bratz books out of its fliers and book fairs.

If you’re not familiar with the Bratz Dolls and the rest of its empire, it is a new age Barbie Doll that has a dispropriately large head and very prominent features.  The dolls seem to be wearing lots of eye make-up and lipstick and “trendy”/promiscuous clothes.

I personally would never buy one of these dolls for my little niece because I don’t want to promote this hyper-sexualized image at such a young age.

Don’t you wish you lived in an age when your biggest concern was that Barbie was a little too sexy?

So tell me everything I already know about you

One of my favorite Sunday activities is to read the weekly essay for the Modern Love article in the Fashion & Style section of The New York Times. One of the reasons that I started reading about it was after hearing about the college Modern Love essay competition.

This week’s essay is “So tell me everything I know about you” by Joanna Pearson. She recounts what happens when after meeting a guy in a bar, she goes home and googles him. She finds out all sorts of regular details about his life: that he can run a 3:59 mile, his college GPA, a few of his published articles, etc.

This was particularly interesting to me because as computer savvy people who wouldn’t know what to do without Google, college students are prone to this problem. We live in a world where facebook is an addiction and we can learn someone’s favorite movie/book/music and stalk their life through photos way before we get to meet the person.

I think that Pearson makes a great point in urging people to let relationships develop naturally. We should be able to learn details about a person by talking to them, not by reading about them on a computer screen.

sit down, have a talk

Op-Ed columnist Charles Blow recently wrote this article for the New York Times. He tells us that “a 2001 Unicef report said that the United States teenage birthrate was higher than any other member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development” and that “the U.S. tied Hungary for the most abortions. This was in spite of the fact that girls in the U.S. were not the most sexually active.”

How can this be? I enjoyed Juno as much as the next person, but didn’t we learn anything from this? Teen pregnancy isn’t as funny as Diablo Cody and Ellen Page make it out to be. We can’t expect our nation’s youth to just know about safe sex practices if we don’t teach them.

I remember that my health class in high school was nowhere near comprehensive. Yes, our teacher did show us a very graphic video of child birth but I definitely don’t remember any talks about safe sex practices.

I think Blow gives great, yet simple advice to parents at the end of his article. He suggests that parents sit their kids down, talk seriously about sex, and give them straight answers on safe sex practices.

Economics of Love

Win Ben Stein's Money

A couple of days ago I came upon this article by Ben Stein in the NYT. Ben Stein, lovingly known to my generation for “Win Ben Stein’s Money” and his various movie roles, is known to my parents as a prominent American lawyer and former speech writer for President Nixon. What really caught my eye about this article was that it involves two of my favorite things: love and economics. Strange, you may say, but it makes sense once you consider that I am an economics major who is obsessed with supply and demand curves and a product of Disney movies where young children were taught that true love was just a glass slipper away.

Stein poses a great opening sentence: “What could be scarcer or more precious than love? It is rare, hard to come by and often fragile.” I thnk anyone you ask – from the Sunday morning girl on her walk of shame/no shame/glory home to the woman on eharmony.com to the newlywed bride – will agree to the scarcity of love.

So to sum up Stein’s points, he tells us: