Extra small condoms for boys as young as 12 are going on sale in Switzerland.
Called the Hotshot, the condom has been produced after government research showed 12 to 14-year-olds did not use sufficient protection when having sex.
The study, conducted on behalf of the Federal Commission for Children and Youth, interviewed 1,480 people aged 10 to 20.
It showed more 12 to 14-year-olds were having sex, in comparison with the 1990s.
Nancy Bodmer, who headed the research, said… “The results of this study suggest that early prevention makes sense.”
[…]Nysse Norballe, a spokesman for the company, said: “At the moment we are only producing the Hotshot in Switzerland. But the UK is certainly a very attractive market since there is a very high rate of underage conception. The UK would definitely be top priority if we marketed abroad.”
[…]The UK has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.
In 1999, the government pledged to halve the teenage conception rate within 10 years.
But data released last week from The Office for National Statistics shows it has clearly failed to make any significant impact.
Maybe the government should commission some research on how premarital sex affects people’s ability to form stable, life-long marriages.
First, take a look at this video of Michele Bachmann discussing her little debate with Democrat Arlen Specter, and keep a count of the things that she does that strike you as admirable.
What do we learn from this video?
My biggest problem in trying to get along with SOME women is the fact that I feel enormous pressure to only say things that women agree with. They only want to hear compliments, never criticisms. But I don’t like that – I want the freedom to be myself and to say whatever I want.
In a recent post that I was talking about William Lane Craig’s advice on how to have a happy marriage. He recommended that couples learn how to argue properly. And I think in that video we learn several tips on how to argue properly.
Here are some questions to ask about this video:
Does Michele feel offended or victimized during the debate?
Does Michele lose her temper during the debate?
Does Michele make gender an issue during the debate?
Does Michele focus more on arguments/evidence or feelings/motives?
Does Michele accept apologies and try to move on?
For me, a fun thing to do with a woman is to get into a good argument without having to censor myself. This happened to me recently where I was getting into some very long debates with a woman I really liked and the more I was able to be myself and have her not censor me, the more I just wanted to grab her and hug her. It became a really powerful feeling that I had a LOT of trouble resisting.
I distinctly remember at one point we were having a real scrap and I was pleading with her every hour to see whether she was feeling OK with the degree of sustained disagreement that we were engaging in, and I’ll never ever forget what she said. She said that she was fine, but that she was willing to stop if I needed a break. We had been debating a bunch of things for about three hours. (a typical date)
The experience of being myself and being accepted is so different than what I hear other men saying about women that it really makes me sad. It turns out that men lie a lot to women in relationships – telling them what they want to hear and hiding their real views in order to get sex. I just think this is demeaning to women and men. A much better idea is to argue it out with her and treat her as an equal.
And that doesn’t mean that there is no place for feelings. I remember one day this woman tried to clobber me on some obscure point of theology and she took a very adversarial tack. And I was surprised that I just felt wounded and attacked, so I asked her to adjust her approach, and she did. So I do think that there is a time for talking about feelings, but not to use them as an argument.
I think that when a person is hurt (male or female), the thing to do is to get the other person a gift, and have them sit down with the gift and then you explain to them that you love them and that something they said or did hurt you and explain how it made you feel. But I don’t think that hurt feelings should be used as a substitute for an argument in a debate. Debates should be about truth, not who “wins”.
So the main point I am trying to make is that the way that a woman approaches debates can actually be a powerful way of getting a man to really like her. The experience of being able to be yourself with a woman and to express your views in a heated discussion without getting attacked or censored by her is exciting and addictive. It makes a man like a woman because he feels that she understands him.
A free society needs people with consciences. The vast majority of people must obey the law voluntarily. If people don’t conform themselves to the law, someone will either have to compel them to do so or protect the public when they do not. It costs a great deal of money to catch, convict, and incarcerate lawbreakers — not to mention that the surveillance and monitoring of potential criminals tax everybody’s freedom if habitual lawbreakers comprise too large a percentage of the population.
The basic self-control and reciprocity that a free society takes for granted do not develop automatically. Conscience development takes place in childhood. Children need to develop empathy so they will care whether they hurt someone or whether they treat others fairly. They need to develop self-control so they can follow through on these impulses and do the right thing even if it might benefit them to do otherwise.
All this development takes place inside the family. Children attach to the rest of the human race through their first relationships with their parents. They learn reciprocity, trust, and empathy from these primal relationships. Disrupting those foundational relations has a major negative impact on children as well as on the people around them. In particular, children of single parents — or completely absent parents — are more likely to commit crimes.
Without two parents, working together as a team, the child has more difficulty learning the combination of empathy, reciprocity, fairness, and self-command that people ordinarily take for granted. If the child does not learn this at home, society will have to manage his behavior in some other way. He may have to be rehabilitated, incarcerated, or otherwise restrained. In this case, prisons will substitute for parents.
I am reading her book Love and Economics right now, and this argument is in the first couple of chapters, which is how I found this article.
WINTERY KNIGHT 