green

I've spent some considerable time reading through this thread and now I am gonna add my own two cents into the coin collection. Colton, I think that the approach which you have taken with your younger sister is excellent. There has been this pattern of early pregnancies in your family and your kid sister, who is now sexually active, has come to you for help in managing her sex life. You are being proactive. She is on the pill and she is being innoculated against HPV. This is all to the good. I also believe that although we all want to believe that our husbands, boyfriends, and children are behaving themselves sexually this really ends up being a matter of trust. People do screw up and sometimes around and people do lie. This is why we must all concern ourselves in this business of conducting personal risk value assessments. As for you, Gadget, it strikes me that your risk management skills are excellent and that you are doing a fine job of protecting your children but it is always possible that one of your decent, clean-living, and carefully raised children might be conned by someone who only says that he is cut from the same bolt of cloth. People will lie, sometimes out of a deep sense of shame, but when it comes to sex and STDs these lies can have unexpected consequences. I think that the only possible argument against this vaccination is that we have no idea what the really long term affects might be. Other than that, a chance to protect women against possibly contracting cervical cancer...well, that looks pretty good to me.

I don't think that the individual who started the thread should have the right to delete the entire thread once other people have committed their time and attention to it by posting on it and/or simply voting in a poll. I do think that we should all retain the right to delete our own posts, however.

Yah, tell me about it!! There I was, eleven years old, I had breasts and horrible menstrual cramps and even then I knew I didn't want to have kids. I never, ever did find a doctor who was willing to spay me. Oh, ugh. I guess I was kinda lucky. I went through menopause shortly after I hit my 40s.:clap2:

This business of abused women is a tough issue for all of us. Tough minded modern women often find it hard to relate to these women unless they acidentally find themselves in the same place, that is to say, in thrall to a man who is controlling to the point of being abusive. Though it is certain that there are men who are anxious to be dominant and who are also strongly anchored to a religious code of behaviour, it is also certain that it is men, and certainly these men, who will easily find reinforcement for their misbehaviour in their religious teachings, and it is this which serves to alienate the modernists from the fundamentalists, regardless of belief, be it Christian, Islam, Jewish, or founded in any of the more esoteric beliefs. At the same time this issue of abused women is certainly a divisive one. There are many of us who think that the logical, indeed the normal, move for any hard up against it woman is to take charge of your own life by walking out, cutting your losses, and remaking your life. Green tends to fall into this proactive group. Her own temperament leaves her unsympathetic to any behaviour that carries the pathology of victomology and of passivity. Nevertheless, there are a lot of women and their kids out there who are living in victims' ville and we must wonder where these people came from and what we can do for their kids. Just to let you know where Green is coming from vis-a-vis this particular issue, you should know that she kinda dresses to the right. She saw her husband and a colleague and friend of theirs, a man of colour, be hung up to dry on sexual harrassment charges by a former friend. This was a long term friendship which had gone sour. The deal was that the complainant was a woman and she complained that this was all about sexual harrassment. Green herself explained to human resources that the individuals involved had been friends with each other for the past 15 years and that the children of one of the two injured parties had been calling the woman who was crying wolf auntie for well over a decade. It is important that we never unthinkingly hand out power, be it to the left or to the right. Our responses should never, ever be thoughtless, eh.:phanvan All the same, whether you or Green can find it in your hearts to deal with one of these women, they do exist and they do need help.

Big thanx from Green to Ousooner for clearing this up!:biggrin1: It occurs to the sneaky Green that you Americans could both protect and assist each other against judgemental and obstructive PCPs by taking the following approach: The individual who wishes to be approved for surgery posts his/her home area on the home state site and requests fellow members for assistance in locating a, well, fat issues sensitive PCP in the local neighbourhood. This information can be communicated to the individual in need either in the form of a PM or a public post. (The home state site, by the way, can be found by looking under USA on this site.) As we all know, medicine is still an amalgam of art and science and thus we are subjected to the personal biases of the individuals who treat us. We are often helped by our medical practioners but sometimes we find that we are both humiliated and blocked from treatment. This site permits us to help each other and it is a really fabulous resource on oh so many levels. Nevertheless, I would urge anyone who is receiving grief from their local PCP to post on their state site about this and as a corrollary I would urge all American posters to periodically take the time to visit their local state sites. Who knows? There maybe someone in your neighbourhood who is looking for your PCP. By the way, up here in Canada we still call 'em family docs or General Practioners. This does not narrow our chances of having bad ones, however.:phanvan Neither kindness nor humiliation carry passports, eh.:think

Thank you, BJean, for your post on breast cancer. Knowledgeable posts are fun! We all get to learn from each other. Some of you may not know that Jewish women who have their roots in Eastern Europe have a significantly higher chance of developing breast cancer. It's a genetically linked issue. And here is another depressing bit of information: if all the women in your family have developed breast cancer the odds are dreadfully high that you will, too. I knew a woman who fell into that category. She was receiving mamograms quarterly for this reason. Less than a month and a half after she had been declared clear she could feel a lump. And don't forget that men can develop breast cancer, too, even though this is less common.

Uh, you are undoubtedly right.... I think I remember that it was women who breastfeed.

I never felt guilty about it. I felt fortunate that I was able to take advantage of modern technology for a situation which I was unable to control on my own. I viewed, you see, my weight gain as being akin to having diabetes or from suffering, as I do, depression. Now, depression runs in my family and is a genetic thing. We all know that obesity is a result of overeating plus genetics plus the modern lifestyle. In the case of some of us there are further complicating factors. I am really happy with this technology. I have lost weight and I feel much better about myself even though I am still not a Hollywood grrl. And I paid for myself; it was money well spent.

Yeah, I remember reading this article. It noted that nuns tended to have the lowest incidence of cervical cancer and women who were sexually very active had the highest incidence. Another article which came out around the same time, this one on breast cancer, noted that women who had children tended to have a lower rate of breast cancer. After reading these two articles I thought to myself, Oops! Also noted in another article around this time was that Jewish women tended to have a lower rate of cervical cancer. It was surmised that this was because their men are circumsized and therefore cleaner. Less foreign material is being dropped off at the cervix. If my memory serves me, all three studies were made at least 2-3 decades ago.

I enjoyed it, too. Bush was much funnier than the paid comedian. Thanks for posting this.

You Lotus Land folk were paying your dues behind the bad weather awhile back when we easterners were wondering whether we would even experience winter. It was lovely autumn weather in southern Ontario until mid-January. Now the weather here is pretty damn cold!!! Brrrrrr!

This is going to sound dumb but what is a PCP? I see this on a lot of the American posts and I have been curious for quite sometime now as to what a PCP actually is.

I think what concerned some of us was that this woman was telling the child that he must not look whenever some underdressed babe wanders by. This kinda puts the female body under the category of a taboo object and thus freights it with more emotional weight than it might otherwise have had. Certainly the child is not going to feel comfortable around young women nor take them for granted as, well, part of the landscape. Indeed, it is my opinion that once they are designated as taboo they will become more erotically charged.

Oh, as for that, my parents were both Europeans but I was a stolid little Canadian girl, a product of my own culture in many ways, and this was the early 1960s.

Lisah, I don't have kids, either, and my husband and I are lucky enough that we have to pay a healthy whack of taxes, and I'm talking Canada so our tax burden is higher than yours! The reason I don't resent paying education taxes is that I believe that a country which has a well educated population is more likely to be free of violent street crime, poverty, one parent families, carelesness, and dysfunctional neighbourhoods. People who are educated do not behave like people who live in the ghettos of poverty. They are, generally speaking, quieter, cleaner, more law abiding, less likely to have large and fatherless families, live on welfare, kill each other and maybe even the occasional middle class person who gets in the way, and sleep on piss-soaked mattresses. They are more fun to be around, easier to be friends with, and they save us lots of money with respect to the police and legal systems. Educating other people's kids is an altogether great investment. It keeps them off the streets when one might be in the mood to walk the family dog. And you have got to remember that it was the tax money of other childless folk that contributed to educating our own charming selves, eh.:heh:

I suspect that this method can lead to an unhealthy Puritanism and a neurotic relationship to the body, including one's own. How can it not? How can receiving these admonishments not to look not lumber the 10 year old kid with a sense of ambivalence and shame about all bodies, including his own? How is this kid going to deal with a female body when it is finally okay to look after being trained for years that it is not okay? I remember when I was a young adolescent girl visiting the Art Gallery of Ontario with my parents and feeling horribly embarrassed by the sight of all those 17th and 18th century nudes. Because my parents liked art I spent any number of times fidgetting, blushing, and staring at my feet. I really thought that it was improper to look at the naked people. The European attitude towards the body is quite different from ours. Their beaches are topless and some of them permit total nudity. This was a big shock to me initially when I first started living there but it certainly does demystify the human body. And any child who is raised in that environment is aware that the naked body does not come in one format - that of forbidden sex fantasy.

This is a very interesting point. I have both read about this and I have been told by friends who belong to more sexually repressive cultures that their youthful sexual activities would involve everything and anything, including anal sex, that would avoid piercing the hymen. And there are plastic surgeons who make a good living rebuilding hymens for those young women who need them.

People who abandon their animals enrage me. I have always made a point of taking in adult cats, the ones that people no longer want or can care for. During the last couple of decades my mate and I have taken in two pregnant strays, one abandoned male, a couple of cats who needed rehousing because they were living in houses who took in needy animals, a cat whose owner died, and a couple of frisky teenage brothers who were causing discord between their owner and his new live-in girlfriend. For a long time we lived with a foul tempered cockatiel who had needed a new home. Though we live in a three story house we do have one rule: though we much prefer to live with two cats the absolutely maximum number of cats that we will live with at any one time is three. I am afraid that if we relax this rule we will end up sliding down hill into the zone of total dysfunction and onto the front page of the tabloids. The issue of animal abandonment is a big one where I live. Country folk complain that when the city people return to the city at the end of each summer they leave behind them a raft of family pets. I worked with a woman who eventually confessed to me that when she moved from her appartment into her new house she left her cat, Muffin, behind. I was plenty horrified; I would have taken the cat in. In my opinion a animal is much like a child: don't take on the responsibility for another living creature unless you are prepared to carry it through. Get yourself a furby instead.

Cool. Very cool.

I am where you are at, TommyO. After my mother died I came into possession of my father's ashes and my mother's ashes as well. To tell you the truth, I was the sole executor, I was very distraught, and I didn't really know how to deal with their ashes. And so they sat on the floor of my hall closet on the main floor of my house for approximately 9 months. It was only when I was preparing to relinquish them to my surviving brother that I realised that I had derived some degree of comfort from having them with me and that I would miss them. Grief places one in a very strange state. I still have a half-finished bottle of my mother's foundation make-up. The smell and the colour will always be able to conjure her up for me. We had no service when my father died. He was cremated. The family gathered around and ate a meal in a steak house on his dime. My father loved a good meal and he loved steak. After a few days my mother went to reclaim his ashes but he wasn't sufficiently cool for her to bring home. She found this wildly funny. She kept his ashes on her bedroom dresser and as she was dying we placed them in her hospital bed. This was probably a sentimental gesture on our part, she was in a coma, but it gave us comfort. Our family marked both my brother's death and that of my mother in exactly the same fashion as we had marked my father's. We gathered together and we ate together. As we did so we talked about the missing ones. We are still atheists. Maybe we were born without the belief gene. Who knows? Certainly we miss them and we are anxious to hold on to such totems of them as are available of them. It is nice to have material around that will evoke a vivid memory of someone whom you love, be it through hearing a voice, seeing a photograph or smelling a characteristic fragrance. But this, the dreadful sense of loss, belongs exclusively to those of us who are still alive. And when we die we will, of course, be beyond it. This is, for better or for worse, how this atheist sees it.

I was, I believe, fairly fortunate in that both my parents had a relatively relaxed take on sex. Neither of them were virgins when they first met each other. My British mother hadn't met anyone with whom she could fall in love, it was wartime, she was tired of waiting, and she was curious. My father had had his own experiences. When they did get together they lived together for a year before they married. My mother was a British subject and my father was a stateless refugee; she was afraid of compromising her own status. I became sexually active during a fine era; the pill solved the problem of pregnancy and the STDs of the era were amenable to antibiotics. My father's sexual advice to me was that I should remain abstinent until I finished my university work. He said that my grades would drop if I did not. My mother was entirely comfortable with my activities. Her concern was merely that I did not become 'a public convenience.' I personally believe that we share much of our hardwiring with our fellow mammals and this includes our sexual hardwiring. Though the fashion in which our particular brains are structured permit us to do some overwriting of this basic material there is, nevertheless, much that we can understand about our own brute sexuality by comparing this with the general sexual behaviour of all members of the mammalian class. (This is why, for instance, infidelity patterns between men and women tend to be different.) Laurend can explain much more cogently what I am trying to say and, indeed, amplify upon it. As for this business of monogamy and virginity and its connection with Judeo-Christian-Islamic teachings, you will note that the purity, the virginity of the bride is always emphasized, the man...not so much. In the case of the Orthodox Jews, the married woman is required to hide her hair when in public. Muslim women are expected to wear, depending on the severity of their home environment, a variety of cover-ups which might vary from a simple head scarf to a burqa. Of course Christians and those of other religions, too, want to ensure that their brides are untouched. Though there may well be a psychological pay-off when a pair of individuals walk into a marriage as virgins I am inclined to say that the chief pay-off is social. Men are certain that their children are really theirs and that the flow of property and power will continue to be transmitted in an orderly fashion. The societal pay-off is tremendous. And so it is natural that virginity would be enshrined as a very good thing in religion. You may be interested to note that this has its parrallel in the animal world. Males will often slaughter the new born young whom they believe were fathered by other males. As for the act of sex, it is as morally and as emotionally loaded as the individual perceives it to be. This varies greatly from individual to individual. And it is true women, for reasons of mammalian hardwiring, tend to be less able to separate sentiment from sex. Religion, can, for the reason that I have gone into above, confuse the issue for many of us. The moral caveat against sex which is enshrined in most religions is based upon a need for an orderly society. Indeed, most religious constructs are built around this desire to calm down the primitives and force them to behave better.

Try to look at this as being a little holiday. You will be filled and restricted again. You have lost weight :clap2: and you will continue to do so. This is just a petite break, and kinda like a walk down memory lane...or eat street.:phanvan This period will not forever and it will remind you of why you became a bandster. Maybe, although eat street is a very scary place to find yourself, you can learn something interesting about yourself and the drive to eat. Maybe something positive will come of this unexpected situation in which you find yourself. And, you know, it could be a lot worse; there are those of us who suffer slippage or leaks.:omg: Ugh! Every bandster's nightmare, eh. I hope I don't sound too much like the Pollyanna who nobody wants to hear. I'll shut up now and go away.

Barbara's assessment of the situation is a fine one, I think. But Green has herself been known - famed - for behaving badly at times. The following story is one of those times. My husband has a cousin who is German, monied, and an outspoken anti-Semite. Now, as you may or may not know, my father's side of the family is Jewish and few of his family actually survived the Holocaust. Although I had met this cousin and his family the arrangement which my dh and I had come to was that he maintain his usual relationship with this family but leave me out of it. When I came home from the dentist one day and found this man and his equally arrogant daughter sitting in my house, and my apologetic husband rolling his eyes and cringeing at the door, I freaked. Initially it wasn't so bad. I grunted at 'em and set about to make my lunch for work (we both worked permanent off-shift, not being morning people) while bitching to a friend on the phone about the situation. I was holed up in another room of course. Things began to get bad when I called repeatedly to my dh that we were going to have to leave for work soon. The three of them kept yapping and then this is when I did my big bad. I screamed at my husband, "Mark we've got to go to work. Arbeit macht frei!" For those of you who have no idea what this is all about, these words, which translate in to English as work will make you free, were inscribed above the entry to one of the Nazi death camps. I was out of control, of course, but the visitors did split ASAP and we did get to work on time. My dh was absolutely furious with me but my mother, normally a very proper Brit, found my stunt hilarious. And my dh quickly forgave me. He is a very sweet man.

I dunno. He started it by sending you those photos....:nervous

In February of 2005 my kid brother suddenly died after a very short and unexpected illness; two months later my mother died in very much the same way. Her illness was also brief and unexpected. Both of them spent their last few days on earth alive but incommunicado and they died exactly two months apart. My brother and my mother had very vivid personalities and it was both difficult and painful for me, an atheist, to imagine that these were entirely erased, entirely scrubbed out. My family is a small one and I was close to both of these individuals. I spent that first year missing them and grieving my loss. I even went through a period when I had the most irrational sense that they were only hiding and that now the game had gone on for far too long; it was time for them to come back! But though I was a mess that year I knew that they were, quite simply, dead and I knew that the pain of death is something which only resides with the living. The dead feel nothing. This provided me with some strange comfort. They were beyond hurting or anything else. I was the one who was in trouble and I could shoulder that.