Right before I left New York, I noticed that the annual “street fair of death” had come to my neighborhood again, with it its questionable, rickety rides designed to thin out the population, one carnival ticket at a time.
Oh, they don’t CALL it the “street fair of death,” because they don’t care about the truth. They call it a fun fair. That’s exactly what they called that festival of bad ideas I went to in the Midwest, where the biggest attraction was a crane manned by two fourteen year old guys—the one that had a cardboard sign that said, “crane rides $5” and when you gave them the $5 they would hoist you up and swing you.
And people thought I was crazy for refusing to do it.
But any of you who have read this blog for longer than a minute know that I have a healthy appreciation of fear. I am good with fear, in the same way that some people are good with wine.
But all of that is hastily put aside for Roller Derby.
I was first introduced to the glories of the Roller Derby by my friend Winchester Grey, who runs the internet.* Winchester said he felt strongly that I would enjoy the derby. And he was right. Then we started bringing Scott and Justine, and they loved it. And recently, we started bringing Robin Wasserman, who also seemed to like it, but with the healthy Harvard skepticism for which she is justifiably famous.
Here’s how Roller Derby basically works . . .
There are all these SUPER COOL GIRLS (in this case, of the Gotham Girls Roller Derby, which is the New York league) with excellent names like Suzy Hotrod and Besonslay and Stevie Kicks and Surly Temple. Each team has one person going around the track called a Jammer. Her job is to whip around the track, scoring points. Meanwhile, basically EVERYONE ELSE ON THE OTHER TEAM is trying to STOP HER by BLOCKING HER through AWESOME FULL-BODY CONTACT. And, of course, they are doing this all on roller skates while going super-fast and wearing excellent outfits, and everyone in the stands is SCREAMING for MORE BLOOD.
Can you find one thing in that not to like? Even one?
So, Scott also blogged about how completely excellent Roller Derby is, and a Roller Derby princess named Em-Dash (she is also an editor—HOW EXCELLENT IS THAT?) wrote and said, “Would you like to come as our guest? And sit in VIP seats?”
To which we said, YES, PLEASE.
So we got to the Roller Derby and were pointed toward where we would be sitting, which was quite near the Bad Girl seats. (When they players are bad, they sit in these. They usually SKID up to the them on their KNEES and crash into the chairs for fun.)
We were just getting ourselves situated, Justine, Scott, Robin, and I, when someone came over to us and said, “Do you know what they call this section you are in? The CORNER OF DEATH. This is where a lot of the players lose control coming around the bend and CRASH INTO THE STANDS at about a hundred miles an hour.”
Robin and Justine looked a little wide-eyed at this, and Scott and I smiled and said, “Coooooooooool.”
For a while, Justine and Robin wanted to convince us that death by flying roller derby girl would be bad, but Scott and I just didn’t get it. I have always assumed that I will die in some absurd way, anyway, like that playwright who bought it when a low-flying eagle dropped a tortoise on his head.** Death by roller derby girl is several steps up from what I have been imagining for myself, so I am okay with it.
To give you some sense of how completely wonderful it was, here are some pictures Scott took:
Awesome
More awesome
Awesome cheerleaders
I see from the website that there are tryouts in December. Which brings me back to the point that I want to be a Gotham Girl very, very badly. However, when I said that thing about how I would not be afraid of being in the roller derby? I meant the other thing, the thing in which I am ACUTELY TERRIFIED of being in the roller derby. I hate injury and death, I really do. I would be very good with the making up of the name-wearing the uniform-skating in circles around the track thing . . . but the part where you get chased and slammed into walls and body-checked . . . that is where I might fail. The only thing I can think of that might work in my favor is that I have a POWERFUL WILL TO LIVE and I might be good at running (or skating) away from people who want to kill me.
I mean, this is what the crowd looks like. They make it clear what they want.
Rabid fans
Maybe I should keep with the writing instead. I have enough of it to do.
But! I promised today that I would be announcing the winners of the SUITE SCARLETT SWEEPSTAKES! I love the truth, so I will fulfill this promise.
Back at the start of the summer, I told you about a sweepstakes Scholastic was having for Suite Scarlett, in which the grand prize winner got a trip for two to New York City, a stay in a fancy hotel, and the somewhat dubious award of having BRUNCH WITH ME!
THE WINNERS!
The winner is . . .
Genevieve Huard of Washington! Congrautlations, Genevieve! I will see you soon!
The five first prize-winners are: Amber Gibson, Caroline Sydney, Sarah Silberman, Amanda Braun, and Kayla Layman. They will all receive signed copies of Suite Scarlett.
NEXT TIME . . . SEKRITS ABOUT ENGLAND REVEALED!
*Okay. Winchester works for Google, but this is kind of the same thing. He took me on a tour of Google one day and let me ride one of the Google scooters down the hall, which I liked a lot. Then we went down this really serious-looking hall with the fattest cables I have ever seen running all along the ceiling for miles and miles, and I said, “What is that?” And he said, “The Internet.” And I said, “oooOOOOooOOoooooOoooh.” Also, it was Winchester who faked me out on my birthday by telling me that I was going to a special “Google party” and instead took me to dinner with Scott and Justine. He, also, does not care about the truth.
** I think this was Aeschylus, but it might have been that guy who wrote Cats.***
*** Oh wait. He’s still alive.****
**** Anyway, my major point in even mentioning this is that there are always new things we can be worrying about, like birds with an artistic agenda. Also, this seems to speak to my theory that everyone should wear a helmet at all times.*****
I just got to England. I’m sitting here now with my tea. I Twittered about my plane, which was called the Dancing Queen, and the fact that they played Abba on the Dancing Queen, and then the Dancing Queen got stuck on the runway for about three hours because Air Force One had just been at JFK and all the planes were backed up.
Just in case you think I make these things up, I took a picture:
Click the photo to make it bigger. SEE? I DID NOT MAKE THIS UP!
In the last few weeks, MANY things have happened that I need to tell you about. So many things, in fact, that I need to spread them out over a few posts.
Let’s do the most serious news first. I think you know what I am talking about.
No. Not the fact that all the money is broken and Wall Street fell over sideways. I barely noticed that in the face of the REAL NEWS.
The morning I read the REAL NEWS, I had just made myself a smoothie . . . one of my favorite smoothies, in fact. I had all of this great fruit and I had just GONE for it, smoothie-wise. You know when you just GO for it, smoothie-wise? You put it ALL in and you pretty much guarantee yourself a great day? Well, I had done that. And then I sat down and read this.
Dear ABBA lovers! We hereby announce the sad news that it won’t be possible to open the ABBA museum in Stockholm in 2009. The reasons are that the premises where the museum was to be built will not be ready in time and that the project in several respects has become more complex than we had counted on. This is very sad for everyone involved and especially for all the fans the world over who are longing for the day when the museum opens. But please keep a bright outlook on the future – there will be an ABBA museum . . .
About an hour later, when I could lift my head from the desk, I took a sip of my now warm and separated smoothie. It tasted like metal. I mean, a lot like metal. So much like metal that I went and checked the blades on the blender to see if they were still there. They were, but I suspected that I had gotten just a hint-o-blade in my drink. So I poured it down the sink, then I took down my disco ball and peeled off the glass tiles one by one and flicked them against the wall. I was in a funk, and not a good funk, like one that Boostie Collins might drop in on.
I tried listening to “Tiger” and “Does Your Mother Know?” and “Take a Chance on Me”, but nothing worked. Finally, I decided that I had to stop moping and fix my blender and disco ball. And for that, I needed a little hammer. (I have a caveman’s instinct for tools and believe most issues can be resolved with a little hammer, or, if things are VERY serious, my little drill.)
So I went to the subway to go to the store to buy myself a little hammer. On my way there, I saw this newspaper:
WHAT DOES THIS HEADLINE MEAN?
“The world has gone insane,” I mumbled.
So I got my hammer from the Little Hammer Shop and got another subway back home. As I slumped dejectedly in the seat, watching the stations snap past, I saw that the guy next to me was reading “My First Five Husbands” by former Golden Girl Rue McClanahan. I moved closer to him, seat by seat, on the sly.
“You seem sensible,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”
He jumped, startled by my sudden appearance.
“About what?” he asked.
“The Abba Museum,” I explained. “It’s been delayed. They say they have all the costumes and everything to go in it, but the building is taking longer than they thought. I don’t know why it’s so complicated to put up a building. People put up buildings all the time. And I realize this is a VERY IMPORTANT building, but you would think they would use every resource available and . . .”
I guess I took my little hammer out of the bag at some point in all of this and started waving it around in agitation. He moved away a little, very slowly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, what would Rue McClanahan do?”
“I don’t know. Marry someone?”
“That’s not going to help,” I said, in disgust.
“Why don’t you go there,” he added quickly. “You could help them. With that, um, hammer.”
Friends, it was like the sun came out from between the clouds.
“You’re right,” I said. “The Swedes are a very proud people. They didn’t want to ask for my help, even though they needed it! You, sir, are a genius.”
“Listen,” I said. “Abba needs my help. It’s urgent. I have to get to Stockholm with my little hammer immediately.”
“Of course they do,” she said. “You and your hammer. Got it.”
“I’ve got to get on a fast plane,” I said, throwing some clothes in a suitcase and gathering up the mirror tiles from my disco ball. “There’s no time to waste.”
“One question,” Daphne said. “Scarlett Fever . . . you know, the book you’re working on?”
“I CAN DO BOTH.”
“Of course you can. But I just need you to know . . .”
“Look,” I said, “I am a professional writer. I can balance my life. I can help build the Abba Museum with a little hammer and write a book at the same time. I can do lots of things at the same time! Remember that time I made you an origami butterfly while summarizing . . . well, not so much summarizing as explaining in detail . . . the entire plot of the movie Xanadu?”
“All too well. The thing is . . .”
“Why can’t you just have FAITH in me?” I demanded.
“I was just talking to your editor, Emma Lollipop, and she was thinking that maybe instead of releasing Scarlett Fever next May, we should wait until just after Christmas. That way we can have a huge summer celebration for the paperback.”
I almost dropped my little hammer in surprise.
“That sounds like a good plan,” I said. “That way lots of people will be able to read the first book before the second comes out!”
“Well, exactly. Now, about this going to Sweden thing . . .”
But I had already dropped the phone. I had packing to do.
So that’s the Scarlett Fever news. I know next Christmas seems CRAZY FAR AWAY, but there will be LOADS going on between now and then. You won’t even NOTICE. Also! Let It Snow, a book I wrote with John Green and Lauren Myracle, is coming out in just over a week! It will be available on October 2nd!
Like I said, I am now in London. I’m here working on Scarlett Fever and YA for Obama . . . because both of those have to get finished before I can bust my way on to the building site in Stockholm.
Actually, I have other reasons for being here as well. And I have THE NAMES OF THE WINNERS OF THE SUITE SCARLETT SWEEPSTAKES!
When will I tell more sekrits? When will I reveal the winners?
TOMORROW.
REALLY, THIS TIME.
COME BACK AND SEE FOR YOURSELF.
(Just a note about YA for Obama . . . I want to thank the readers who aren’t Obama supporters, but still left very nice comments. You guys are awesome! I happen to be very pro-Obama, but I got lots of love in my heart for McCain supporters too. Like my dad, for instance, who is mega-Republican and sent me a nice note just this morning saying he NEEDS John McCain to win, but is still very proud in a dadlike way that I made the Obama site. We may support different people in the election, but we can all be friends! And to all of you who signed up . . . HOORAY! WELCOME!)
ALSO!
I couldn't finish off today's post without an Abba video. This one may be my new favorite. It's for Tiger, and it features Abba! Driving around in a car! Nothing else really happens, but they look fabulous, and I can't stop looking at Anni-Frid's headband! Proof, once again, that Abba can be the most amazing thing in the room without doing ANYTHING AT ALL. (If nothing else, watch at least the first twenty seconds to see "the dance move." Magnificent.)
A real blog post is coming in a few hours, sometime after I wake up and before I catch a plane to London . . . but in case you wonder what I've been DOING with my TIME . . .
Well, among other things, I've been making YA FOR OBAMA, an online community over 50 AMAZING AUTHORS. If you like Obama and you like YA, get on over there NOW and sign up! Make your own page! Make friends! Upload your own photos and videos! Join on a project!
As promised, this blog will be returning to SHINY THINGS. I have SEKRITS to tell and a lot fo generally report on, but AFTER I get some sleep.
In the meantime, please GET ON OVER to YA for Obama! Everyone is welcome! EVERYONE!
I was having one of those days today when I forget how to take my watch off. Does this happen to you ever? You’ve taken your watch off hundreds of times, and then you just . . . forget? You pull the latch and pull it and nothing happens and you start flailing and yelling, “It’s a trap! It’s a trap! GET IT OFF ME!”
And when this happens when you are sitting at a table full of other writers who are ALREADY a little scared of you because you are on deadline . . . and there you are clawing at your watch and screaming about traps . . . well, it can be embarrassing. So when one of them calmly suggested that maybe I should take a break for a minute and update my blog, I listened.
What I found was that the post I fired off last week was quietly collecting 204 comments. 204 REALLY INTERESTING comments. So while I had many shiny things to get to, I feel compelled to respond to a few of them.
On the whole, the comments were really positive! It was great to see what you all had to say. There are many ways of looking at this situation, and I really appreciated the fact that people from all different viewpoints came to offer their views.
In fact, there was only one comment that I took any issue with, and that was this one:
sharpie said... Gosh, this really made me sick to read. Starts off with why are we discussing Bristol and then goes on at length to blast Bristol. Looking at the smutty pics on your side bar, I find it pretty ironic to hear one of your ilk berating a 17 year old girl for having sex! So, you think teen moms should all have abortions if they become pregnant. Fine. Barack's mom became an unwed pregnant teen at age 17. What do you think of that? Of course that's different. I do know one place where your judgmental lecture might do some good. Why don't you go stand on a street corner in an inner city neighborhood and tell every single unwed teenager that if she doesn't have an abortion, she doesn't get any foodstamps. That might actually do some good.
Normally, I would skip a comment like this. It’s not that I have a problem with someone disagreeing with or criticizing me—but Sharpie appears to be responding to some post that he/she has constructed in his/her own head. No one is berating Bristol—in fact, the opposite. (See the title of the post, FREE BRISTOL PALIN, for clarification.) And the part that says, “So, you think teen moms should all have abortions if they become pregnant” is kind of easily dismissed by the fact that I said I wasn’t talking about abortion at all. But something in the comment struck me as worth mentioning, as someone of my ilk.
MY ILK
“Barack's mom became an unwed pregnant teen at age 17. What do you think of that? Of course that's different.”
Sharpie said this while operating under the idea that I was yelling at Bristol, which again, fails the Reading Comprehension part of the exercise. But as it turns out, I have very definite feelings on this! This is the real reason I am quoting Sharpie at all. He/she has provided me with a convenient way of slipping in a piece of information that is quite relevant to this discussion.
I am the byproduct of not one, but TWO unplanned teen pregnancies. TWO.
Both of my biological grandmothers were unwed teens. I knew one of them; the other is an unknown woman from a southern state. My parents' existence, and by default my existence, is based on whole string of errors and lack of resources from way-back-when. I am FRANKEN-UNWEDTEEN-STEIN.
Both of my parents were processed through “the system,” one through adoption and one through foster care. One of my parents got very lucky and was adopted by a wonderful family. One grew up in poverty, under miserable and practically Dickensian conditions. That particular parent of mine happens to be gifted with loads of natural smarts and clawed out of a pretty deep hole. Make no mistake—all of it made an impression and definitely affected their life.
So trust me, Sharpie, I’m not judging Bristol Palin or her ilk. I AM MADE OF that ilk.
THAT ILK
We’re all the product of strange chances. Almost everyone’s parents have the story of the random encounter or blind date or whatever happenstance threw them together. Some people happened to be older and married when they got pregnant. Some did not. No one checks for documentation before you’re allowed out of the womb. Biology simply requires that some little sperm swim fast enough to a little egg—and boom! Out you come. Like an Eggo waffle from a toaster, except less crispy and hopefully not covered in delicious syrup.
My point is . . . now that you’re here, you have some control over your life. Because of their backgrounds, both of my parents went to extreme lengths to make sure I got a good education. Education arms you. It gives you the information you need to make some choices in your life, rather than just getting smacked around by fate.
This is why I think “abstinence only” education is a joke surrounded by a thick coating of fraud. Abstinence only denies your biology reality. Abstinence only deprives you of important information that could profoundly alter your life. Comprehensive sex education is sort of the “owner’s manual” that you need. It’s necessary because many parents don’t know how to or refuse to teach about the reproductive system. It is NOT a class on “how to get some.” It’s a class on what to do when you’ve got some, whenever that is. And that sometime, for you, may be the day you get married! All sex education means is that, WHENEVER in your life you start having sex, you will have some basic working knowledge of WHAT ALL THE PARTS DO and how to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease, because, like I was saying last time, IT’S NOT REALLY THAT COMPLICATED.
In fact, as esteemed sex educator Sue Johanson just pointed out in an interview, ALL sex education emphasizes abstinence. And anything with the word “only” in the title doesn’t really sound all that educational. Anything that actually comes out and says “WE ARE LEAVING INFORMATION OUT” has no place on a curriculum. It means that someone has decided that something is “inappropriate,” the something in this case being how your body works.
Which, in my opinion, is sick. It’s not useful to have someone slapping you on the wrist and saying, “Sex is dirty and bad and SO ARE YOU.” None of that is true.
Taking the discussion in another way . . .
gracewanderer said... "Bristol Palin has no choices." What about the choice she made to have sex in the first place? Is it really so hard to exercise a bit of self control? Of course by saying that I've cast myself in the role of "religious conservative nutjob" which is not the case at all. I just think that our side (because I agree with you! really!) tends to throw the baby out with the bath water, and that people really, really should be taught to exercise self control. Not just by yelling that if you do X we'll cast you out, but by actually teaching methods and practices for developing better self control. That is, to some extent, what makes us human after all.
You don’t sound like a nutjob to me, Grace. It’s a very good question. When I said Bristol Palin had no choices, I meant that she has no choices now . . . now that’s she’s pregnant and her mother is running for Vice President on a ticket that has a strong social agenda for things like abstinence-only education and is powerfully anti-abortion. Now that she’s in the public eye in the middle of a political storm, there is very little Bristol Palin can actually do about her situation except WHATEVER SHE IS TOLD because she symbolizes a much larger movement. Which is pretty unfair to her.
As to whether or not she should have been having sex at all . . . that’s a harder question. Allow me to stumble through it. I mean, you’ve already come this far.
I don’t think the self-control is what makes us human. The urges are human—the self-control comes from something a bit bigger, like society. The human body is ready for sex long before society as a whole feels that sex is appropriate or advisable, which is a large part of the reason high school is such a good time! There you are, trying to memorize the top three exports of India or master Trigonometry . . . meanwhile, your body is just pumping out loads of chemicals designed to make you want to seek out mates. It’s DRUGGING YOU UP. No one has told your body that having a baby at thirteen is a bad idea. It has a really old instruction manual and is slow to adopt updates and just follows the program.
We all learn to control and master these feelings the chemicals produce because, for the most part, we want to learn enough about the exports of India and Trigonometry so that they will LET US OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL. At some point, though, the intellect decides to sit down and have a little talk with the Department of Biological Urges to see if some agreement can be reached. Because it WILL NOT DO to be running around the halls, drooling and chasing after each other. We impose order. It doesn’t mean the urges are bad. It just means they have to be managed so we can do other things with our lives.
I don’t think there’s any way of determining when EXACTLY is the right time for someone to have sex. I think this happens at different times for different people. I think you have to have a powerful voice coming from INSIDE telling you that you are ready to have sex. And I think one of the signs that you are ready is that you are thinking about the consequences beforehand—physical, social, mental, the works. You have to have the confidence not to give in and have sex just because someone is pressuring you to. (Because it’s perfectly normal and acceptable NOT to want to.) And you have to be armed with sufficient knowledge about how to deal with sex.
And if no one is going to teach you, Libba Bray and I are going to drive around the country and explain it ourselves. This is probably not the best solution, as I know for certain that one of us—probably BOTH of us—will try to blow up the condoms and twist them into balloon animal shapes. And I’ll have to keep calling my mom and asking her all kinds of anatomy questions, and once I’m on the phone with my mom, it’s often hard to get off, so you’ll all just be standing around and waiting while she tells me about the cat and the backyard.
But all right. There is only so much of this I can do when there are so many pressing Abba/book/shiny related issues on the horizon. I have SO MANY THINGS to tell you. I have NEWS! SEKRITS!
I also don’t mean to say that this will be my last political blog of the season, either. They’ll just have a new, exciting venue. That will all be part of the news in the next post.
So let me give out the final Suite Scarlett of the summer. Please do not think this will be the last book I give away this year. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I go holiday crazy, so by late November I’ll be gearing up to give away LOADS of stuff. And I have this pile of Let It Snows to distribute as well.
So . . . today’s Suite Scarlett goes to Maple-America.
The comments remain as open as ever. What’s your take on all this? What’s your ilk?
Friends, I have a serious, topical question today. We will be returning to disco balls immediately . . . trust me. I have one on my desk right now, locked and loaded and ready to go.
But let’s just talk for one second, okay? Because I am worried about you guys. And I want to try to answer the question . . . why are people talking about Bristol Palin?
Brisol Palin, for those of you who have managed to avoid all forms of media for the last 48 hours, is the daughter of Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Bristol is seventeen years old and five months pregnant, and she has the extreme misfortune to be in the middle of a contentious presidential race.
This makes me so queasy, I find it hard to type.
A lot of people are saying, “Isn’t that wonderful! What a nice family to support her!” I’d bet my Abba collection that most of you saying that are probably pretty nice people, who do a lot to support others. But I respectfully disagree. I think this situation is nuts. I don't think she's getting support at all, and this is one of the most messed up messages I have ever seen put across.
Let’s leave the issue of abortion well, well aside. I happen to be pro-choice, but if you are not, I respect you for that. That’s not an issue I want to approach, because that’s something that everyone holds personally dear, one way or another. Let’s just talk about teen pregnancy in general.
The simple, plain old fact is . . . you really don’t have to get pregnant. No, REALLY. We have had the technology for MANY, MANY DECADES now to prevent pregnancy. It is not expensive. It is not hard to get. It is not hard to use. It comes in many forms. And some of it protects you from disease. Hooray! In the U.S., you can go into any drugstore and buy birth control. It’ll set you back maybe $5. That’s, like, a cheeseburger.
But okay . . . you’re embarrassed. You didn’t plan this. It just kind of came up and . . .
No, my friends. No, no. I do not want to hear it. If sex is in the picture, you need to get over this misplaced embarrassment. If you get pregnant . . . you are in for a world of exposure beyond your wildest dreams. Your body is also going to expand in nineteen different directions. Your internal organs will rearrange. You may develop conditions that restrict what you eat or do. In time, you will not be able to sit with your legs closed, and eventually you will end up on a table with your feet in stirrups and about fifteen strangers coming in and out of the room and looking at your you-know-what like they are looking at the town clock . . .
So you really should get over that “I don’t want to face the checkout person” embarrassment now.
The majority of teen pregnancies are unintended, largely because this is not 1317, and we are no longer dying of old age at forty. We have long lives now, and seventeen is not really an ideal time to settle down. For some people, there’s money and support for the new baby. But that’s actually uncommon. What about all the people whose parents would kick them to the curb if they got pregnant? (And believe me, these people exist. Lots of them. I’ve met quite a few.)
But okay. Say your parents don’t kick you to the curb. Say you are greeted by loving arms. But what if your family doesn’t have complete medical insurance? What about school? What about the fact that your time to grow up is kind of getting a line drawn under it, because now you have a mouth to feed and a human life to nurture . . . and you’ve only recently figured out how to make French toast without burning it, or how to stay awake through all of sixth period Spanish?
If you have a baby as a teenager, you’re a lot less likely to finish high school. You’re a LOT less likely to go to college. Which means you’ve just drastically increased your chances of living in poverty. Even under the very best of circumstances, you’ve just lost a lot of opportunity. And it didn’t need to happen.
And really? Don’t look to your boyfriend. It is a simple fact of biology that guys more or less get off scott-free on this count. There may be social repercussions for them, or there may not be. They may experience guilt, or they may not. But the bottom line is . . . they won’t experience a belly full of baby. This is all you.
As if that wasn’t bad enough . . . let’s look at it from a cold, clinical, beancountery way.
In Alaska alone (you know why we are talking about you, Alaska) . . . teen pregnancies cost the state at least $30 million in the year 2004. AND THERE ARE NOT VERY MANY PEOPLE IN ALASKA. (And no, it is really not that helpful that Governor Palin slashed the budget for the program there for teen mothers.)
Overall, the costs to the nation ran to about $9.1 billion. Yes. $9.1 billion. Oooof. And that’s just government money. The burden of a lot of this is on families, and who even knows what that runs to. This is all for something that could have probably have been prevented by a small piece of rubber or a pill that costs pennies to make.
A lot of people say, “ABSTINENCE! IT IS THE ONLY WAY! THE ONLY THING TO TEACH! All of this fornication is a horrible modern thing brought on by television and video games and BOOKS!”
Har har har! GOOD ONE! I don’t know how these people missed hearing about all of human history . . . but this sex thing has been going on for a while now, and frankly, it’s probably going to continue. It’s the world’s oldest form of entertainment. We come pre-installed with all kinds of hormones and squishy bits. Maybe this will be improved upon when Human 2.0 is released, but this is what we have so far. And in general, it works pretty well. There is lots of fun and comedy value, and we get to continue as a species!
My bottom line is . . . sex is something we really need to deal with. Not shamefully. Not through hiding information. It’s up to every individual to decide when he or she is ready for it. And at WHATEVER age you make that decision, you should really be informed about how to manage it.
There’s this argument that comprehensive sex education is going to make kids want to have a lot of sex. Clearly these people have never sat through a comprehensive sex ed class. There is pretty much nothing in the world that is less sexy than your teacher talking about condoms, which are completely stupid looking to begin with. You have to be a very special person to sit there under the antiseptic, florescent glow of third period, your mid-morning crash setting in, staring at a plastic cross section of a uterus and think, “I have GOT to get me some of this.”
I speak as someone who was actually never in that class. I only saw them later, after I graduated. I went to a high school that taught abstinence only—in a kind of “have sex and will lock you in the basement and unchain the wolf” way. They were REALLY serious about this.
The only exception was that for ONE DAY in senior year, the health teacher was allowed one period to come in with a big black box. She had to lock the door, and then we got about a half hour crash course on everything in the entire world related to birth control. Which is pointless, because it takes you at least an hour to stop snickering. It was intentionally designed to be ineffective, because the official doctrine was that birth control was bad.
Did any of this help? Errrr . . . no. We had loads of people who got pregnant. It would have helped a lot if someone had really hammered home the statistics and said, “Girls who have sex without birth control have a 90% chance of getting pregnant within a year.”
So what was the solution in my school? I’ll tell you about something that really happened.
In my senior year, there was a very sweet, kind of innocent sophomore. After a dance one night, a guy started paying her a lot of attention. They started making out, and she ended up getting pressured into having sex. And got pregnant. In one shot.
Devastated and unable to talk to her parents out of fear, she turned to a teacher. This teacher, though incredibly kind, was obligated to tell the administration. A day later, the girl heard her name being called over the speaker to come to the office, which was always a bad, bad sign. When she walked in, the principal was on the phone, and what she heard was, “I think your daughter has something to tell you.” And she was handed the phone to talk to her parents. Then she was expelled, just like every single other student who ever got pregnant in my school and was found out. Every single one. That was the policy. For the most part, people kept it quiet. They got abortions on the downlow, and they got zero support, because they couldn’t tell anyone. That’s how it was managed. LOOK! WE HAVE NO TEEN PREGNANCIES! SEE HOW EFFECTIVE THIS IS?
I was three months away from graduation at the time. When I heard this, I turned to my mom and said, “I am leaving this school. I don’t even care anymore.”
And I think for maybe an hour, I was serious. I wanted to walk away from the place and go to some other high school for another senior year. My mom is pretty conservative, but she is also a nurse, and she is very practical about the matter of pregnancy, as nurses tend to be. She was, to my amazement, almost as outraged.
“That is NOT how you handle a pregnancy,” she said. “What goes on in this school? Don’t they teach birth control?” Because she hadn’t realized up to this point that they didn’t.
When I explained that we had no such class, her jaw dropped. “Sometimes,” she said, “I think we made a real mistake in sending you there.” This is from the woman who still claims that the stork brought me and loves to tell me how she has never smoked a cigarette or had a drink IN HER ENTIRE LIFE (and she is not joking whatsoever) and is thoroughly scandalized by anyone over forty who wears footless leggings. I mean, she has an entire drawer of SLIPS!
So I am not coming from some elite, super-progressive upbringing. I am coming from the abstinence/denial program, and it is ONE BIG HOT MESS.
Your school is probably not like that—or, at least, I really, really hope it’s not. I just want you to understand why I am so baffled and enraged by people who take tools away from girls, take away knowledge and protection. It’s Medieval and illogical and makes the world look at us like we are its insane hillbilly cousin who washes himself with a rag on a stick.
So we return to Bristol Palin, who is standing there with a spotlight the size of the moon shining on her, all of seventeen years old, with the entire Republican National Convention hanging on the fact that she has to have this baby she probably didn’t intend to ever be pregnant with and marry her boyfriend. She will now be saddled to this dude whether she wants to be or not. And she can’t have an abortion even if she wants one because the PRESIDENT WILL PROBABLY CALL AND YELL AT HER and three thousand news cameras would follow her.
Bristol Palin has no choices.
This is the very definition of suck. I feel for her. When I was seventeen and newly released from the aforementioned high school gulag, I basically acted like someone who was in full-time training for the Stupid Olympics. I woke up each new and glorious morning and asked myself, “What mischief today?” Seventeen is when you get to date ALL THE WRONG PEOPLE so you can learn important lessons. Not when you marry them because there’s an election. Not when you have babies you aren’t ready for so a political machine can roll on, right over top of you.
So why are people talking about Bristol Palin? Because it’s an election, and this is what happens. But most people are talking about the messed up system that backed her into a corner. This isn't to say that this is everyone else's fault. Mistakes were made here. I think these kinds of mistakes tend to happen a lot when girls have to fumble around in the dark, when they aren't armed with facts and realities and treated like full human beings, reproductive system and all. To hold her up as a shining example of things being done right is beyond my comprehension.
On a day to day basis, Bristol will be taken care of. The girls like her who aren’t the focus of media scrutiny . . . not so much.
And I’m saying this to you, because a lot of you are girls, and a lot of you are seventeen or younger . . . and these things will sooner or later come up in your life, if they haven’t already. There is no reason why your options should be taken away. There is no reason why you should be denied knowledge or care. And there’s no reason for you to be moms yet, not if you don’t want to be, which I imagine many of you don’t. Whether it is abstinence or contraception . . . either way, this does not have to be your fate. And you’re not dirty. And you’re not bad. You’re human, squishy bits and all.
If anyone tells you otherwise, I really, really hope you have the natural presence of mind to turn and walk away from them.
Wow. I need to shake it off. And I have just the thing. Whenever I get stressed now, I think about the subject that stresses me out, and I superimpose it over this video. Try it! Imagine that test, or dreaded conversation, or horrible deadline . . . imagine it in detail . . . and that this is the movie someone has made of you going through this problem!
It WORKS, doesn’t it?
Now, today’s winner of Suite Scarlett is . . . Summer Marie.
And I’ve decided that I have to give away one more, because there were very few shiny things in this post. I didn’t know this rant was coming on. I will post again soon, and there will be LOADS OF SHINY THINGS AND SEKRITS in it!
So, if you want to win, leave a comment! Fire away! What do YOU think about all of this? ALL OPINIONS WELCOME, as always!
