Paying teenage girls not to get pregnant?

I think this qualifies as the biggest WTF of my life.

I happened to stumble upon this news while watching the trustiest news station ever, CP24. Now here's what's going on:

GREENSBORO -- A buck-a-day -- that's the incentive being offered to young girls to keep them from getting pregnant... Brown said she hopes the program, which pays $1 each day to 12-to-18-year-old girls, will keep them from getting pregnant. In addition to remaining pregnancy-free, the girls must also attend weekly meetings. The program is funded by a four-year grant from the state... Under the program, $7 is deposited into an interest-bearing college fund that the girls can collect once they graduate high school. Some recent graduates earned more than $2,000 and are an inspiration to those still in the program... If a girl drops out or gets pregnant, her money is divided among the other girls still in the program.

This is ridiculous. You're giving someone an incentive for not doing something? What ever happened to hard-earned money? Hell, if I wasn't so pissed off by that I'd be glad to get money for something that wouldn't happen to me. You know why? Because I don't want it to. It's all about choice.

What gets me even more is the fact that a girl's money is divided among the others if she drops out or gets pregnant. There are no words that can be put to what's going on in my mind at the moment.

Let's try to compare it to this: It's like rewarding overweight kids for not having cake for the day. You can't really say that all overweight children will have cake. Some may choose to have cake. Others may hate cake and will avoid it at all costs. But why give money to overweight children for not eating cake? That's not solving the problem, it's just needless rewarding.

All I'm saying is this: That's definitely not the way to solve the problem.

This is annoying. Very annoying.

I started out having a wonderful day today. It was cold, but I was in a good mood at the thought that I was going to have my very first "real" gym class of the semester. And someone else I know was extremely happy so I got even happier. And then everything was great until I went to Wendy's after school with Carrie and Jorge.*

Jorge: So...is Andrew* still avoiding you?
Me: I don't think he's really avoiding me really.
Jorge: That comment. At lunch. "You're lucky you don't have classes with her"?
Me: Uhh...
Carrie: (while listening to music) He told me that he doesn't like you as a friend anymore.
Me: I knew that.
Carrie: As a friend.
Me: Oh god.

So there it is. The thing that ruined my day: the reality that not only is my ex a whiner, he also has no respect for me. Carrie told me that I should not care and delete/block him, but I have no idea what I'm gonna do. Firstly, he doesn't talk to me online. What's the point? Should I still make the effort to pull this together or just give up and pretend like he doesn't exist for 4/5 periods? Nah. I'm a talker, it'll never work. This'll just have to work itself out, I guess.

Anyway, re-reporting the irony of yesterday's post Carrie informed me that basically everyone got their periods either monday or yesterday. I'm not alone, lol.


Sorry for the pissy post, guys. I needed to vent.


*Names were changed for protection. Not the sexual kind, the emotional kind. And the fact that I change people's names sometimes. Deal.

Bawlin' Over Balls [warning, sarcasm within.]

I recently saw a bit of a blurb on TLC (otherwise known to me as PEC or the People's Exploitation Channel because of their documentaries) about a lil' something-something called purity balls.

My first thought was "Weird."
Once I heard what it was about, my second thought was "Disgusting."

So basically a young girl signs her virginity off to her daddy so that he can protect it. Protection...cool, right?! Actually, I find it pretty disgusting. After hearing things like "How great it would be for her to say 'I've kissed but one man in my life'?" Sure, it'd be nice, but that's quite farfetched. It isn't unnatural to pick a random person off the street (wait, it is...) and interview them about their love life only to find that they've had more than one partner over a lifetime depending on their age.

There are quite a few--and I use this word lightly--problems that I have with this particular practice.

• The ages involved are not, at all, regulated in any way. Not in any rational way at least. Upon reading numerous articles about purity balls (and even on the website of the founders, Randy and Lisa Wilson, in an article posted on the site) there are girls ranging in age from four to twenty-something. Nothing disgusts me more than taking personal choice from a girl who hasn't even lived a decade, not to mention probably has absolutely no idea what virginity is since her parents wish to keep her pure.
• What the f**k is this s***t?!? Regarding the age issue and how little these children actually know about their reproductive systems, how they work and will work, what they can do with them, and what may happen to them if they don't take good care, here's a little quote from one of the 10-year-olds gettin' purified...

Three of his daughters are with him tonight, including 10-year-old Taylor. I
asked what purity means to her. "I don't really know," she says, and she's shy
about talking about all this. "But it means you make a promise to your dad to be
a virgin until you are married and not have a lot of boyfriends."

• But what about the boys?! The boys have their own ceremony. Except it doesn't put them down and tell them that they're vulnerable--apparently he's blessing people with his shade and influence.

"Boys become men by watching men, by standing close to men. Manhood is a ritual passed from generation to generation with precious few spoken instructions. Passing the torch of manhood is a fragile, tedious task. If the rite
of passage is successfully completed, the boy-become-man is like an oak
of hard-wood character. His shade and influence will bless those who are
fortunate enough to lean on him and rest under his canopy." -Preston Gillham

• Where are your mothers? Nowhere actively in this kind of ceremony. Not even in the manhood ceremony since manhood can only be passed from man to man. I'll give them that. You certainly can't have a dainty female who needs to be protected passing years of her non-wisdom to her son since carrying his whole body within her disgusting reproductive bits.
• There's that stigma again...and it's that stigma about sex and women. Not just how they should be the ones protecting their virginity (which I hate to talk about in noun form, just take a look at some of the questions on Scarleteen about how to know if a virginity is still there) but also how they're not strong enough to protect themselves and there needs to be a manly-man around to help such a poor, poor soul.

I admit, this was a bit of a rant, and it will lead to a post about abstinence-only education fo' sho'. For now, just think about what you want to do for yourself, and if you really want to bond with your dad...just take some cooking classes, please.

I'ma SHOOT you people.

Today's post, boys and girls, is about pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia videos, also known as pro-ana and pro-mia.

This is absolutely disgusting. Anorexia is a serious problem (well, duh, you people know that) and there are people out there who actually want to look like they'd break with the slightest touch. I found out about these horrible pro-starvation videos on Yahoo! Answers. After watching about 10 of the videos i saw a few that actually had girls that looked about 12 years old in them.

12 year olds!

What the hell? I mean I understand that people that actually have anorexia, not by choice, are suffering and have a completely different view than the general public about everything HOWEVER, there's a whole new generation of people who are insulting people who are trying to get better by showing this off as a trend.

Opinions?

That All [Canadian] Girl

The link in the title is scary.

Very, very, VERY, scary. If you have ever read Miss Nomered's "And a big hearty 'fuck you' goes to..." then you'll know why.

The very first page is comprised of not one, but two hauntingly serene pictures of Holly Jones, a Torontonian youngster that was abducted in 2003. Nothing really makes Miss N's opinion more validated than that. According to everyone that knew Holly, she was the best, the greatest, and everyone's angel. And she has a parkette named after her. But if she so deserves a parkette, why doesn't everyone else who has been killed or abducted?

Because then the world would be made of parkettes.

Imagine that. Unfair? Yes. Descriminatory? Yes. Shameful? Yes. What did Holly do that was so important? Making people happy. I understand that if this was, oh say, my friend Raquel, I would be on the other side of the fence. But I still wouldn't want a parkette named after her. Cassandra Do, the sex worker mentioned in the same entry linked above, never got a parkette. Because that would mean that people would have to talk about something they find very uncomfortable. Not only was Cassandra a sex worker, but she was also transsexual. Those are two characteristics of Cassandra that wouldn't have "appealed to the demographic" so to speak.

But put a young, pretty, middle class, white girl in the news and everyone's rushing to name stuff after her.

These people disgust me.

So today, while I was looking back on some posts in the Body Politics category of the Shameless Blog, I stumbled upon one post that I had read but not commented on. It was about Thomas Beatie, a trans man from Oregon who was carrying his child for his wife. However there was a quote from the couple about how badly they had been treated. People like doctors, receptionists and the likes. These people disgust me. These are the people who we are supposed to trust our lives with. The same people who smile at a child for comfort when the child is going through hell. And just because they don't agree with what Mr. Beatie and his wife are doing they basically make a mockery of the both of them.

Ah, this reminds me of a previous post. In the same class yesterday, this issue came up and being the right-winger that she is, she said:

"That is absolutely disgusting."

After which I wanted to punch her in the face. Or slap her. Something to get it inside her head that she is a hypocrite. Catholicism in itself is contradictory. Hell, all denominations are contradictory. This whole love everyone as you would love yourself thing is getting to me because of a lot of things. If we are to practice the golden rule then we mustn't call people who are in unfamiliar situations "disgusting" because that is disrespect for human life. Saying that people who under the umbrella term of queer (thanks, Miss Nomered) are disgusting is disgusting in itself.

The strange thing was, in all the topics that we argued on, no one wanted to argue that Mr. Beatie and his wife's situation was not disgusting at all.

But I feel like a bit of a hypocrite for not speaking up, myself. Okay, so I'm one person, but maybe I would have been able to change someone's mind?