Re Patricia Drazin's post -- what always amazes me about this sort of thing
is the huge percent of girls who buy into this stuff.  Very depressing --
why is no one teaching these girls that sex isn't payment for dinner?  I'm
not excusing the boys, no way, just saying it seems like the girls would be
more *liberated* than this, in this day and age.  I remember a talk with
Miranda (now 15) about a year ago, about sex, and I said that I was less
concerned with *when* she started to be sexually active than I was with
having it be *her* decision (i.e. truly consensual) and having it be *safe*
in terms of STDs, and not emotionally devasting.

I show a film in my "Women and Culture" course titled "Who Remembers Mama?"
about that generation of women now my mother's age (75) or a little younger,
who were raised to be wives and mother in an era when women didn't go to
college and didn't work outside the home, and who were then dumped by their
husbands in middle age and were expected to be able to support themselves.
They talk a lot in the film about how the rules were changed on these women
in the middle of the game.  On the exam over this section, I always ask if
the students think that college age women today are better prepared to be
financially/emotionally independent, and am always depressed/appalled at how
many *girls* say "Well, I'm better prepared because I'll have a college
degree and work for a few years before marriage, and maybe after marriage
before kids, so that if my husband leaves me I'll have my degree and some
experience to fall back on."  In other words, for many of them the ideal is
still to be at home with a man supporting them, and the college degree and
job are just "in case".  I realize they are too young and idealistic to be
thinking they will ever be dumped by their husbands, so I tell them about my
college roommate whose husband was killed in a hunting accident when she had
two toddlers and was pregnant with the third.  They can imagine this
happening to them much more easily than divorce, at this age, even though
the odds are clearly on divorce.

Not breastfeeding related:  In the local paper, one of the economics
professors from A&M is going to a conference in Austin on horse-racing and
was talking about how the horse-racing industry in Texas isn't doing very
well, in part because people are unfamiliar with pari-mutuel betting.  His
conclusion is that we need an educational campaign state wide to teach
people how to place pari-mutuel bets at the race track.  Does this strike
anyone else as ludicrous?

 Kathy D., still freezing in Texas