| Dear Josey,
I’ve made a big mess. I’ve been living with my girlfriend for a couple of years and we’re engaged. I get totally turned on watching her prance around in her undies after showering. Early in our relationship she let me take pictures of her in lingerie.
Last week, she was getting dressed and when she turned around and bent over I snapped a shot. I was putting the photo in my picture box when I came across an old shot of her and, let's just say, the bootie is much bigger!
Mistake #1: I mentioned it to her and she got pissed and blamed my amazing cooking. Mistake #2: I bought a couple of low-fat items and a membership to a gym. She got pissed again but started going to the gym. Mistake #3: I bought doubles of a bunch of food items – one regular and the other low-fat – emptied the regular containers and refilled them with diet stuff so she wouldn’t know she was eating low-fat food. Wouldn’t you know it? She came home early recycling day and saw the empty containers in the blue box.
I did this out of love, and OK, fear, but how can I possibly fix it?
Dear Made,
Not only did you make a mess dude, you tried to clean it up with a rag-full of low-fat cottage cheese and made it bigger. Which is too bad because it sounds like your girlfriend felt good enough about her body to prance around in her undies. But now, not only have you pissed her off and made her feel self-conscious – you’ve also probably closed the show.
Cardinal rule: Never, ever, ever tell a woman she’s fat, getting fat, packed on a few pounds, looking "healthy," etc. And if she asks if you think she’s packin’ on the pounds, just say no! Because we know when we’re chunkin’ out. We ask because we’re looking for some assurance that you’re still hot for us despite. It’s a little goofy, I know, and I could give you a long speech about women, body image and oppression and why we can complain about our jelly belly and you can’t in order to explain, but it’s easier if you just trust me on this one.
It might help if you think about what it would feel like if she said, "Wow honey, you’re really balding, eh?" And then, in your case, I dunno, started bringing home hats for you to wear… and trying to pretend they were really, um, full fat? Anyway, I’m sure your elaborate plan to trick her into eating low-fat food seemed like a stroke of brilliance at the time (I can only assume you were under the influence of something when you hatched it), but all the "lite dressing" in the world isn’t going to motivate your girlfriend to lose weight if she doesn’t want to.
At least you’ve recognized the error of your ways. All you can do is take every opportunity to make her feel like an absolute, fucking knockout, maybe lighten up on the fancy cooking and prepare some healthy, tasty meals once in awhile and she may find the motivation to lose weight on her own – or not, in which case you better be able to deal with it without running out and buying cases of Snackwells.
Anti-Sex Education Scary
More on the "let’s treat teenagers like idiots and resort to filling them with misinformation to try and scare them out of having sex" file.
In response to a recent letter in which I expressed my annoyance over comments by an "expert" on a TV panel about teen sex claiming that girls can get pregnant through anal sex, one reader wrote in with another example of how we’re "anti-educating" young people about sex.
A 17-year-old girl described to this reader how, in sex ed class, the teacher refers to sex as "Russian roulette" because you will either "get pregnant or sick from it." She also asked him about "flash pregnancies," something the young woman had been told can happen when "two teens are touching each other and grinding bodies (with no penetration) and the girl gets some semen near her vagina and ‘flash!’ she's pregnant."
As I said, with the anal sex issue, OK, I suppose there is a highly remote possibility of this happening, but as this reader put it, "this kind of scare tactic approach to sex ed is sad."
What’s even sadder is what is going on south of the border. Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque documents the results of a U.S. federally funded program that gave $170.5 million to private organizations to promote abstinence in 2005. Half a million went to Albuquerque and the half-hour film documents the results. Watch it just to see the woman from the Abstinence Clearing House (yup, they got one down there) talk about their "covert" operations on native reserves in Mexico and how they want to make "being a virgin cool" by turning virgin beauty queens into role models. You gotta see it to believe it. Download it for free at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6125514476868719421&q=abstinence+albuquerque.
And if that’s not scary enough, read Cristina Page’s article "The War on Sex" (http://www.alternet.org/rights/36371/) about how the ultra-conservative anti-abortion movement in the U.S. is also leading campaigns against "the only proven ways to prevent abortion: contraception."
Wacky, scary stuff. |
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