Is "getting speared" a euphemism for something?

From The New York Times ("TV’s Perfect Girl Is Pregnant; Real Families Talk"):

High school girls here wondered aloud on Thursday why no one was talking about contraception. Parents across the country, on the other hand, commiserated over the Internet about how, thanks to Ms. Spears, they were facing a conversation with their 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds about sex.

How terrible! It's absolutely awful for children to understand how to avoid pregnancy before they're faced with it!

Seriously, maybe Jamie Lynn's mom, who recently canceled a book on parenting, ought to have had the talk at that age.

And yeah, why isn't contraception being discussed? Good job, New York Times, you get a cookie.

Of course, none of this means an end to the usual doom and gloom as neo-Puritanical parents and right-wing politicians lament that children are getting pregnant at younger ages (quick: how old was your average girl when she had her first child in 1600s New England?). Why, it's almost like it's the television's fault that these poor little children hear all this disgusting filth about penises going into vaginas, squirting, and coming back out and smoking a cigarette:

“Nowadays, nothing’s safe, not even cartoons,” Diana Madruga, who has an 11-year-old daughter, said as she wrapped up her shift as the manager of a Dunkin’ Donuts here in the Boston suburbs.

Here's a hint for you, Mme Madruga: turn off the goddamn television! And don't have your kids read the Bible, whatever you do. There's filth in there too.

Of course, I'm jumping the gun a little. Only some of this is part of that age-old (that is, going back to circa 1980) shouting match between frightened, goonish right-wingers and the few people simultaneously both courageous and influential enough to stand up for free speech. There is also a hint of an actual social problem here, expressed so eloquently by a 17-year-old:

High school girls who had already had their hearts broken by the all-too-public life of Ms. Spears’s older sister, Britney, known as a hard-partying mother of two, worried that their younger sisters would be devastated by the news — or, worse, that their sisters might think it was “cool” to be 16 and pregnant.

What? Maybe some of the problem here is teenage girls don't have good role models anymore. Wonder Girl never got pregnant (correct me if I'm wrong).

“She’s the idealistic little girl,” Alicia Akusis, 17, said of the television character Zoey between classes at Concord-Carlisle High School here. “She does perfect in school. Boys like her because she’s pretty, but she doesn’t deal with boys. She’s really smart, she’s really cool, she’s an empowering girl character.”

She's the "idealistic little girl" who "does perfect in school"? Maybe Concord-Carlisle should work on its grammar curriculum, but I digress.

Anyway, empowering female figures have sex drives too. From the sounds of it, nobody can fairly accuse Jamie Lynn Spears of a moral failing. She was 16 and practically living with her older boyfriend. Uh, yeah, they're going to have sex, and probably not safely. Mama Spears should have looked up from the typewriter that she was using to write a book on parenting occasionally to spend time constructive time with her daughter. And, oh yeah, maybe not let her live with her boyfriend. Seriously, Mama Spears was so shocked that all she could do was muse that her daughter had never missed curfew, as if sex couldn't be had before curfew.

Maybe some good could come from this. Nickelodeon could do a docudrama show about teenage pregnancy and postpartum life. Some of the dialog could be awesome, showing what it's really like when you have an infant. Like, not being able to hang out with your friends, or get boozed up, or whatever 16-year-olds do nowadays. Actually, Nick kind of did have that idea:

Dan Martinsen, a spokesman for Nickelodeon, said Thursday that “Zoey 101” was one of its most popular shows among viewers 9 to 14.

“Nothing about the content, characters or the storytelling on our air has changed at all,” Mr. Martinsen said. He said that Nickelodeon was discussing a special on the issue with Linda Ellerbee, the television journalist who is the host of “Nick News.” “Whenever an issue becomes so prevalent that it’s inescapable,” Mr. Martinsen said, “her show is where we turn to help kids navigate and interpret and understand it.”

And, of course, this Times spiel ends on a note of attempted irony:

Greg Moseley, 18, said he was sick of hearing the name Jamie Lynn Spears. “Why do we care about Britney Spears’s little sister?” Mr. Moseley said. “Why does it make a difference? What does it mean? Nothing.”

“All this stuff is impossible to get away from,” he continued, “unless you go to Alaska and live in the woods.”

Or, turn of your television and skip the headlines about it on the Internet and in the paper. Mostly worked for me, except I guess I sort of just ranted about it.

Sex ed. delays intercourse?

"Study: Sex Education Works to Delay Intercourse." The only thing that makes me doubt it is that Fox reported it.

Also:

[Jamie Lynn] Spears, who turned 16 on April 4 and says she is 12 weeks into her pregnancy, told the magazine she plans to raise her child in Louisiana, "so it can have a normal family life."

...of eating possum and shagging sheep?

Doll lovin'

A documentary about Real Dolls and the men who love them. Definitely one of the stranger modern, uh, relationships.

Moms pissed off

I love hearing stories about pretentious suburban mothers getting hosed over nothing. And it happens all the time in allegedly "liberal,""progressive" Los Angeles. Like, this non-issue about some Disney Channel star on some movie that I've seen billboards for somewhere getting pissed off because an actress in it was seen nude:

(Sept. 7) - The wholesome image of Vanessa Hudgens, star of the made-for-kids TV movie hit "High School Musical," was under fire on Friday because of a nude photo circulating on the Internet, creating a new publicity challenge for the Walt Disney Co.

...

"She's damaged," Renee Rollins-Greenberg, a Los Angeles mother of two, told Reuters. "She's got this teeny-bop audience, young pre-teens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she's this wonderful, pure innocent person. Eighteen is awfully young for this kind of display."

"I'm devastated because I have an 8-year-old for which I now have to have an explanation," said another Los Angeles-area mother, Rosie Konkel. "She's always looked at this character as a very smart and proper young lady."

No, she's not damaged. She's damaged when she does a nude pictorial in Penthouse. That's when you know your body is buying you a star on the Walk of Fame anymore.

.xxx

Numerous media outlets reported on May 11, 2006, that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Names ("ICANN," as in "ICANN screw you however I want"), decided against the creation of a top-level domain ("TLD") of .xxx. The obvious rationale behind a .xxx TLD is that it would make it extraordinarily easy to filter so-called "adult sites." Many porn sites presently use the .com TLD. Some civil libertarian types fear governments might try to force porn sites into this domain hierarchy (this would certainly be a case of the state overreaching its power, but is still preferable to outright censorship). Moreover, the .xxx domain offers the adult industry, schools, libraries, and parents a chance to actually prevent the viewing of so-called objectionable material by minors.

Although no specific reason for the rejection was given, it's unlikely that reactionary politics in the U.S. didn't play something of a role. The rejection of .xxx is just another of a slew of examples of U.S. reactionaries ("conservatives") choosing to keep the status quo over actually protecting the interests of their constituents, many of whom probably don't want their children viewing pornography even as they view it themselves. Another rather hilarious example is when they try to prevent education about birth control, which only encourages more unsafe sex and more abortions.

There is a fear that .xxx would legitimize an industry that arguably has already been legitimized anyway by virtue of the billions of dollars spent on consumption of pornography. To go off on something of a tangent, it might be interesting to consider what type of person is actually entertained by pornography: it's likely the type of person who probably doesn't have a steady supply of healthy sex. It's a safe bet that the type of person likely to view it, even if unhappily married, is the type of bored guy sitting in a hotel room on a business trip with nothing to do, or the person who lives in a lonely suburban subdivision with nothing to do in the evening. Naturally, such people are very likely to vote for reactionaries, even if they don't want anyone interfering with their private viewing conduct.

In the end, one can only marvel at the fact that the self-appointed defenders of private conduct actually went out of their way to exacerbate a problem. The prospect of the .xxx TLD provides one of the few incentives imaginable to the adult entertainment industry to actually keep their unsavory content out of the hands of minors without even imposing a burden on their resources. The problem for moralists, of course, is that it doesn't do anything to limit the consumption of the material by adults who are already viewing it anyway. The .xxx TLD could be easily filtered. All that a firewall or filtering product need do is block the entire .xxx TLD from being accessible to a computer. It should be a no-brainer.