Sex and Romance Education

Last post suggested a crazy idea.

Put women in charge of all sex and health education.

The biggest advantage to this would be that male teachers would no longer be able to pass on their own misconceptions about what women really want.

This also presents us with another great opportunity.

A lot of women appreciate romance.  They appreciate respect.  They deserve tenderness, physically, emotionally.

Those things aren’t being taught in class.

Why not?

It’s the perfect time.  Want to spend time with a new friend of the OPPOSITE sex?  Class giggles.

Here’s how you do it.  Be polite.  Act with courtesy both ways.  Don’t touch unless you’re invited.  No means no, always.  Even when you’re married for 40 years.

No money?  This is what you do.  Lots of money?  Then do these other things.

Is the class advanced enough?  Then go ahead and teach them “advanced” techniques.  After all, that’s what school is for.  And if they don’t learn it in a safe classroom where they can get it right, what’s left?

There’s always that street corner, or that back seat late at night.  And the internet, all by themselves.

 

Sex and Health Education

Inventing can be a messy process.  Once crazy idea can lead to another, and that eventually leads to something that makes sense.  Here’s a recent example.

For instance, there was a story about a young woman who jettisoned her fiance.  Why?

She secretly inspected his phone and found lots of pornography.

I’m going to skip a lot of the more obvious questions this raises, but go to a deeper issue.  Pornography does hurt so many people indirectly.  However, it hurts many women very directly, consuming young women and changing them for their lifetimes.  What can we do?

Perhaps society can legalize and regulate pornography?  Why not?  Many countries have successfully done the same thing with dangerous substances, like cigarettes.

Once it’s been legalized, is there anything else we can do?

Yes.  We can restrict all ownership, all management, and all employment opportunities to nothing but WOMEN.

Imagine that.  An entire industry that is nothing but women.  Well, there would be some men.  But those would only be part-time positions paid on an hourly basis.

That was the first crazy idea.  And that led me to think about how sex and health education are taught in our country.  Poorly, overall.

What if it was also taught entirely by women?

The material itself might not change, but the misleading stereotypes about women would probably stop.  After all, it’s men talking to boys that keeps a lot of those stereotypes going.

Would classes be segregated?  Probably yes, it’s still for the best.  Young people don’t know how to handle the other gender so well at that age.

As I said at the start, one crazy idea often leads to another, and another, and sometimes, perhaps a good idea.

What do you think?

 

 

Report your assumptions

Reporters have a tough job.  They are generally idealistic youngsters who place the public good ahead of their own accumulation of wealth and safety.  They are part of a new profession that changes rapidly, especially in our hyperfast information age.

Yet they make the job even tougher on themselves when they take a large amount of baggage with them in their travels.  It’s best to travel light so that you can move quickly, get all the angles, and then get out to report the story.

I’m not talking about baggage as in a change of clothes.  Goodness knows they probably can’t afford them.  I’m talking about assumptions.  Reporters, and their editorial teams, carry a lot of those around with them without even realizing it.  It may be the single greatest reason why some reporting networks attract highly specialized audiences – because of the unvoiced assumptions.

Here’s a case in point.  A story today on NPR talked about how great Finnish children did in school based on standardized tests, compared to other nations around the world.  As soon as the reporter opened her mouth, I knew that the story was already heavily biased because the statement was “Every child gets free preschool.”

Now, in all fairness to the report, this may be the magic answer to the unasked question, what can the USA do better?  However, it already biases the story.  There are so many other factors that go into school success that focusing on any one says all the other factors aren’t as important?

Not important?  What about parental expectations and assistance?  You know what I’m talking about, Tiger moms.  What about limiting other forms of child based advertising and entertainment?  What about the fact that the Finns have a very homogenous society.

I haven’t even gotten started on the statistics part of this, yet.  It’s one thing to say they score the best, ON AVERAGE.  What about the range of variation?  Is it possible that the best in the US easily reach or outdistance the Finns?  And what about components of education that can’t be measured by today’s standardized tests?  Creativity.  Ingenuity.  Resourcefulness.  Curiosity.

Reports are in our face, telling us stories.  To tell the whole story takes a bit more work, but we’re also going to get a more accurate picture of reality.  And in the end, isn’t that what we really want?

At least, that’s what I’m going to assume.

 

 

Dumbing of America – Drink me

Is it only me?  Or is our great nation, the greatest nation on Earth, getting dumber?

What do I mean, this time?

We like to drink our water in a variety of ways.  For thousands of years we were happy with exactly that, plain water.  Then we learned about flavoring the water with leaves, berries, and fruit.  Eventually we added sugar, gas, and started the fizzy-pop-soda industry.

In the few decades that I’ve been alive, I’ve seen the rise of a whole new industry, water.

I never thought it possible, After all, it took mankind thousands of years to figure out how to get a fresh water supply to all of us through a marvelous system of pipes, filters, and pumps.  Now, here we are at the pinnacle of progress, and what do we do?  We turn our noses up at “free” water coming from our taps, and prefer to spend billions on the same water that comes in individual containers.

So, here I am watching a great Korean drama, and what do I see?  An advertisement for drinking water.  Not just any water.  This is water that you flavor, YOURSELF!  Yes, not only are we buying individual bottles of water, but we are also now buying the flavors separately so that you can add them yourself!  It’s almost as if we have stepped back in time.  We are going out to gather our own water.  And then we go out to gather our berries to add for flavor.

What else is wrong with this picture?  You are not only paying for water that you can get from the tap, but you also have to buy the flavoring.  You could have bought some flavored drink earlier, but now you do it yourself.  There’s a good chance that what you are paying for the combined water and flavor is MORE THAN what you would have paid for the flavored drink in the first place.

So, if you know someone who’s paying twice for something they could have only bought once, help them out.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste, no matter what the taste.

Dumbing of America – Energize me

Is it only me?  Or is our great nation, the greatest nation on Earth, getting dumber?

Now what’s bugging me?, you ask.

Energy drinks.  Power assists.  Getting a legal buzz on.

Years ago, when I was but a lad, people drank coffee.  It had a little caffeine.

Since then, we’ve discovered vitamins, enzymes, free-radicals, and all sorts of small things that sound interesting and wonderful.  Humanity is only just beginning to understand all the implications of these compounds, and how they interact to help our bodies function.  Some we think we know better than others, but the science is only beginning.

That doesn’t stop the old snake-oil salesman from putting it into his concoction and telling you that it’s good for you.  And that’s what’s happening.  It doesn’t matter whose drink your putting into your system.  They will tell you it makes you peppy, happy, and better than you were before.  In reality, all it has done is give you a small dose of dirty water, and taken a few dollars out of your pocket.

A few dollars.  Does it seem like a lot to you?  Or nothing at all?  Put it into perspective.  These companies are billion dollar affairs, that spend hundreds of millions on advertising alone.  The actual cost of the product they sell is pennies.  And you pay dollars.

Per unit, you pay more for the drink of “energy” than you do your alcohol, your water, your gasoline!  You spend more for that drug, per unit of time, than anything else in your life.

We have good people working at our company, and many of them in production don’t make a lot of money.  It doesn’t stop them from buying “energy” drinks.  We always get a kick when they ask for a raise, and we gently suggest that a change in lifestyle could amount in a bigger effective raise than anything we could give them.

It wasn’t always like this.  Workers actually saved their money.  They drank water, and brought their own food to work.  Americans in general didn’t believe the snake oil salesman.  We even passed laws to make it harder for them to do business, and set up agencies that were supposed to help guard against them?

What happened?  I have some ideas, but that’s for another post.

Thanks for reading.  Now, where can I get some more energy?