VIEWPOINTS

March 9th 2010

Prego Scare By Text Message

- Laura Sessions Stepp

The first text message my young traveling companion got stopped her in the middle of our conversation.

It read: Hey. I have a big secret I cant tell u til monday tho. But its huge girl nd im scared.

My companion typed:

Ur prego??? Ahhhhhhh

My companion’s friend, whom I’ll call "Worried", came back: They tested me today nd they r gunna call to tell me if it was positive or negative on monday. Im sooo scared!

And so began a saga for my companion, a college freshman, that started last Thursday in my car and continued until late last night.

The first text from Worried arrived as we were driving south on I-95, headed to a conference to talk about, of all things, young people and sex.

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March 5th 2010

Please Mind the Birth Control Gap

- Stefanie

The other day I got a call from Blue-eyed Girl.

Blue-eyed Girl: “My doctor just shamed me.”

Me: “Did you deserve it?”

Blue-eyed Girl: “Oh, I forgot I was talking to the Patron Saint of Tough Love.”

Me: “So that’s a yes.”

Story goes like this: Blue-eyed Girl had recently switched her birth control and had never gotten around to filling her new prescription. So she and G.I. Joe had condoms with them at all times. One night they went out drinking with friends and when they came home, discovered they didn’t have any left. However, being that they were both drunky pants, they decided it would be fine.

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March 3rd 2010

Oxytocin: The Pseudoscience of the Hook-Up Hormone

- Lena Chen

As a now-monogamous former sex blogger, I'm living proof that hooking up doesn't make you crazy or unable to commit. But if mainstream media reports of the past few years are to be believed, I'm the exception, not the rule.

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March 2nd 2010

What We Can Learn from this Year’s Olympians

- Laura Sessions Stepp

Ashleigh McIvor, Canada's Olympic ski queen, told a reporter last week that the ski cross techniques that won her a gold medal were learned by "chasing the boys down the hills" of her native Whistler and Cypress Mountains.

Last week, the Canadian boys were chasing her and other amazing female Canadians who competed in the 21st Olympic winter games. Canada fielded 43 women and 206 men this year. For the second winter Olympics in a row, the women out-medaled the men.

Canadians are crowing this week about their men’s gold-medal hockey victory over the Americans on Sunday. But for the preceding two weeks, their female athletes were the ones dominating the Canadian media.

(What does this have to do with intimacy? Plenty. Keep reading.)

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February 26th 2010

Womb Service — Is It Really Okay to Skip Periods?

- Provider Perspective

A number of birth control methods hold the promise of lighter periods, fewer periods, or none at all, namely the Mirena intrauterine device, the Depo Provera shot, the single-rod implant Implanon, or continuous use of the pill or NuvaRing. To some of us, the idea of effective contraception and no periods sounds like menstrual nirvana. But for others there is a niggling worry: is it really okay to skip periods?

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February 26th 2010

Stefanie Sees Everything – Or At Least Everyone

- Stefanie

It’s time for another story from Lydia. She had taught me to both use the force and resist the dark side. She is my blogging Yoda.

Before you read this story you should know a couple things.

1) My life is very awkward- but I’m pretty sure you already knew that.
2) I run into people I know everywhere. Want me to prove it? I ran into a friend from camp in Ireland, a guy from college in Prague, and a friend from California at an airport in Washington, DC.
3) There is a pretty good chance we know someone in common.

So without further ado.

I Spy

"Oh my god," began Stefanie, "I think I went on a date with that guy."

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February 24th 2010

Circle Circle, Dot Dot – Cooties, Gender, and Building Better Relationships

- Brad Perry

Think back to kindergarten. How did girls and boys relate? My own experience is that, overall, us boys got along pretty well with the girls in our classes. The only memorable rift between girls and boys at that age was the dreaded, omnipresent threat of “cooties” - a mythical condition transmitted across genders via touch, but easily cured by tracing two circles and two dots on the forearm of the infected individual (a “cootie-shot” for those of you not familiar with this epidemic). Cooties were basically a way to upgrade games of tag with a richer, zanier context of infectious disease. Cooties were also understood by both boys and girls to be a fantasy – something we created to make recess a bit more interesting.

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February 22nd 2010

Dating Violence: Not Just “Their” Problem

- Laura Sessions Stepp

Last week, the University of Oregon’s highly-touted running back, LaMichael James, was charged with strangling, assaulting and harassing his girlfriend.

Misdemeanor charges.

That’s all?

Pushed her down in a public parking lot.

Didn’t anyone see it?

We don’t know. Because from what I can tell from news clips and blogs, no reporter asked.

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February 19th 2010

I Should’ve Known When He Said Latitudinarians…

- Stefanie

The other night I received a call from Sunshine Girl.

Me: “How was your date?”

Sunshine Girl: “Uhhh. . .it. . .was. . .good.”

Me: “Are you okay? When I sent you the ‘first date check-in text’ you said everything was fine.”

Note: As I have mentioned before, sometimes when a girl is going out on a first date one of her friends will text or call an hour in to see on how it is going. If it’s going well, she will ignore it. If it’s not going well she will answer the call or text and learn there is some kind of emergency and that she needs to leave right away.

Sunshine Girl: “I’m just confused.”

Me: “Why?”

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February 16th 2010

Fantasy Match-Up: Delilah Rene and Hannah Seligson

- Laura Sessions Stepp

I’d pay good money to see Delilah Rene, 50, and Hannah Seligson, 25, sit down over a bottle of Bordeaux and talk about love. Here’s why:

Delilah, whose nightly radio show by the same name is heard by 8 million listeners a week, calls herself the “Queen of Sappy Love Songs.” Her world, said Ellen McCarthy in last week’s Washington Post, is “a schmaltzy, airbrushed place where love is all that matters….”

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