Aamused in Austin, TX

"The fact that anyone was interested in the first place was a surprise," she said. "The fact that there was a lawsuit in the first place was a surprise. That it's still going on is a surprise."

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman was surprised, too.

"I don't know why we're here in federal court to begin with," Friedman told attorneys for both sides in April. "I don't know why this guy thought it was smart to file a lawsuit and lay out all of his private, intimate details."

Q. Doesn't it seem curious that this resurgence of the girlie girl and sex kitten seems to be running parallel to the great religious and political conservative movement engulfing us today? What are we doing wrong in letting the lessons some of us learned in that period go quietly by? Whether by folklore, story-telling, or by virtue of your upcoming book, shouldn't more be done to show the risky effects of insular dependence on the man in your life?
— Barbara P. Hageman, Brewster, Mass.

A. I recommend reading Ariel Levy's new book, "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." It has a lot of interesting material linking the red state surge and the self-actualized sex kitten surge.

In my book, I make the point that we live in a society that is so derangingly sexualized, it's not a sexy society. You can't think about sex clearly if all you're thinking about is sex, whether it's an obsession over celibacy or nymphomania. America has always been conflicted about sex, its puritanical side clashing with its prurient side. But now, with the ascendance of the prudish religious right and the numbing oversexualization of commerce and culture, America seems positively bipolar about sex.

As Amazon.com began selling sex toys, a public radio station in Kentucky briefly canceled the venerable Garrison Keillor's show "The Writer's Almanac" a few months ago because he read a poem with the word "breast" in it. An art dealer in New York captured the schizoid insanity of the moment perfectly, confiding that he gets calls from wealthy private collectors in places like Texas saying that they don't want Rubens or Monet nudes because they have small children at home. They'd rather stick with impressionist landscapes and old Dutch masters. I agree that young women, like the Ivy Leaguers interviewed in a recent front-page story, may correctly assess that it was a grind for baby boomer women trying to have it all. But they seem oblivious to the perils of insular dependence on a man.

It is time we adults grew up

We now know that comprehensive sex education cuts teenage pregnancy rates. It should be compulsory

Angela Phillips
Friday July 1, 2005
The Guardian

Six years ago, when the government revealed a programme aimed at halving the teenage pregnancy rate, even the British Pregnancy Advisory Service was sceptical, describing the plans as "about as useful as the Millennium Dome". But an independent study headed by Professor Kaye Wellings, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has found that the strategy, which combines a national information campaign with coordinated local action to improve services and education, is starting to work.

Progress is slower than the government hoped, but the evidence is clear. In most of the high birth-rate areas, where the teenage pregnancy strategy has focused energy and money, rates of unprotected sex are stable and the teenage birth rate is going down. In more affluent areas, where the strategy has not been widely implemented, the number of young people not using contraception on a regular basis (and the rate of sexually transmitted infection) is actually rising.