The Washington Post reports on a "controversial" meaure that would: increase funding for family planning clinics, expand Medicaid and private health insurance coverage of contraceptives, require hospitals to make emergency contraception available to rape victims, and allocate money for comprehensive sex education programs that teach youths about birth control as…
My wife and I attended the wedding of a good friend today. A thoughtful and sometimes light-hearted rabbi presided over the ceremony.
This ceremony was quite a change of pace from most of the religious weddings I’ve attended. There was no somber talk about the heavy guilt we bear for being human or how small and pathetically helpless we are, or how we are at the mercy of a God who could crush us for no reason if He wanted. Instead, the ceremony focused on the interrelationships of the people attending the ceremony. We were all there to celebrate and support the new marriage as a newly bonded community. I was really getting into the ceremony, which is unusual for me (I generally prefer empty churches).
Toward the end of the ceremony, the rabbi invited each of us to take a moment to appreciate the sacrifices of our ancestors, to consider all those things our ancestors had done to enable each of us to be standing there today. Like most people, I started considering the sacrifices made by my parents and grandparents, but that got me thinking about the overwhelming odds that I shouldn’t actually exist at all.
I shouldn’t exist? Why would I think that? Because if my mother had not met my father at the right point in time, and if they had not been amorous at the right time of the right day, the sperm and the egg that became “me” would never have met …
Today’s topic is high heeled shoes. Why do women wear the damned things, I sometimes wonder. Those women wobble around, they take longer to get from here to there, they often trip on small sidewalk imperfections, and they regularly fall and get hurt.
I will confess: my gut reaction is that a woman’s IQ relates inversely to whether that woman tends to wear accident-inducing high heeled shoes. I think of women who flock to such shoes as women who aspire to become Barbies or Princesses. Before you write a comment to protest, I realize that my gut feeling is a gross over-simplification. I also have an analogous gut feeling with regard to men who aspire to higher forms of masculinity by rushing to engage in dangerous activities such as motocross or hang-gliding . . .
I never understood high heels. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don’t think that women who wear high heels are “hotter” than those who don’t. To the contrary, I’m annoyed by high heels. Most woman who wear them look uncomfortable, so uncomfortable that they become objects of my pity, not lust. But many other men (and women) disagree with me. For proof, take a look at almost any advertising (and see here and here and here (for 8” heels!)).
Because I appear to be obtuse regarding this particular slice of human sexual responsiveness (and a tad bit concerned about my lack of responsiveness!), I have chosen this subject of high heels as yet another port of …
This long awaited report had been authorized by Congress in 1997, according to the Washington Post. Here are the results: A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration's social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or…
This is mind-blowing. To think that I used to have some respect for John McCain. The question recently put to McCain, on his Straight-Talk Express campaign tour, was straight-forward. Here's the transcript of what unfolded: Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions…