All posts tagged "Teenagers"

Reactions mounted Thursday after a woman sharing her story for the first time said that then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) sexually abused her when she was just 17, while she was living in a homeless shelter and trying to save money to buy braces to fix her teeth.

Laura B. Wolf, an attorney for the then-teenager and now-woman, spoke to The New York Times about the ordeal. Times journalists reached out to Wolf after a federal judge in Florida unsealed court documents that described the victim as "a then-homeless 17-year-old high schooler."

Wolf said her client was living with a parent in a homeless shelter and needed money when she falsely advertised herself as an 18-year-old on a "sugar daddy" dating website in 2017. ...

I have a post up at XX Factor laying out why this is just the stupidest decision possible from Sebelius, both in terms of the adolescents who are being kept from preventing pregnancy and in terms of adults who will continue to be forced to beg for emergency contraception from pharmacists. From every medical, humanitarian, and scientific viewpoint, Sebelius's unprecedented decision to overrule the FDA on this is the wrong decision. I think she knows that. I think Obama knows that, if he had a hand in this. They are not stupid people, and so they can't not know that. 

I'm sure you've seen this story that's been passed around about the supposed "health" editor at xoJane who uses Plan B as her primary form of contraception. (Seriously, how rarely are you getting laid that this even seems like a remotely feasible plan of action?) There was much fail in that piece, including her casual assumption that condoms are only there if you sleep with a subjectively-defined "many people", as if STDs are the result of cumulative stranger-seed instead of exposure to contagious germs. This sort of thing might make you wonder---I know it made  me wonder---if younger people these days have been so poisoned by creeping prudery plus abstinence-only education that behavior like Cat's, which indicates a deep ambivalence about the morality of sexual pleasure, is common. I know it made me long for the days when Salt 'n' Pepa were talking about sex and TLC was flinging condoms around, and the pursuit of female sexual pleasure was taken as a right, instead of treated like some foul thing that requires self-punishment through repeated abortions. Or worse.