The XX Factor: What women really think.

Zero Tolerance Means Zero Critical Thinking

School is where we send our children not only to learn—reading, writing, arithemetic—but also, one would hope, to think. It’s hard to see how kids are supposed to do that, though, when they go to schools where the grown-ups appear incapable of engaging in any form of critical thought or useful decision-making ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Teens, schools, sex, lies, and sex

Well, Jess, my tongue was firmly in my cheek when I wondered whether it was healthy for anyone if adolescents lived with their parents. I guess I need to either improve my written tonal control (is there a personal trainer for that?) or learn to use emoticons.

But I was thinking of precisely such parental traumas as The Sex Talk. Meghan, I love how your mother spoke to you! Very early on, my mother told me (this would have been, oh, 1973?) that If People Needed Planned Parenthood, It Was A Good Thing To Go There. I had no idea what she was talking about yet. She was clearly uncomfortable. Then she took me to her gynecologist, a very stern woman who gave me The Contraception Talk. By the time I was in college—and I got out of high school like a bat out of hell, at age 16—my dad implied jokingly that I must be getting plenty of exercise in bed, and told me flat out that he assumed I was using contraception.

It was the anti-virginity era, and what I wish is that someone had said to me: if you never have sex with a boy, that would be just fine. Later I learned that they all suspected that I was heading toward the land of Sappho: my parents, my little brothers, and probably passersby as well. So parents, here's a tip: It sure would have saved me years of misery (and a lifetime of pap smears) had someone said: You don't have to have sex with boys. Ever. Liking girls is just fine. You could even grow up to marry one.