I find it hard to divorce the idea that abortion is an acceptable form of birth control from the reality that a lot of people have to use it as birth control because of social and political factors that make contraceptives difficult to obtain or sex education woefully inadequate. I don’t know many women who are super…

I sincerely hope that her daughter keeps striving, and doesn’t let the attention convince her she doesn’t deserve to follow her goals.

This is at the heart of it. I’m not in favour of banning vapes, but I definitely am in favour of talking loudly about the fact that we don’t fully understand how safe they are, that they still include nicotine, regulating their marketing and use in public, taxing the hell out of them, and making them seem lame,…

Yeah, they’re really unfair for a lot of people. I always think of a clip they showed in the Last Week Tonight dedicated to standardised tests where a student is crying while testifying to (I think) her school board because she always gets good grades but isn’t allowed to take the AP classes she needs because she gets…

I find I’m a lot happier if I try to understand people even if they’ve done shitty things. Schadenfreude feels good at first but eventually I just feel gloomy.

Right. Music too smooth? What? Blondie? I feel like half of their appeal is their wide variety and occasional wonkiness, I never would have described their music as ‘smooth’. Maybe if I’d only ever heard The Tide is High.

Oh, completely, I don’t really think they should be used anywhere near as widely as they are, and I definitely don’t think they should be used as part of any admission or funding process. I do think they have limited value for diagnostic purposes for teachers, eg, short, frequent, well-designed, well-run,…

Felicity Huffman claims that her daughter has a diagnosed learning disability, and if that’s true I do have some sympathy for the impulse to intervene, though obviously I disapprove that she actually went through with it.

The black market thing is starting to seem like corporate propaganda because cases have been identified related to legal THC and other products. 

We aren’t anywhere near far enough into the popularisation of vaping to know whether it kills or not. People don’t start smoking and keel over dead the next day. It takes years. 

ding ding ding. We’d managed to make smoking seem relatively uncool, so the tobacco companies turned to vaping. Now it’s an epidemic again.

I agree, I don’t have any particular knowledge about the health effects of vaping and wouldn’t call for a ban, but the number of people over the last few years who have been willing to insist that it’s completely benign baffle me. It’s only just started to be a widely practiced activity, we haven’t had anywhere near…

Full disclosure, I’ve been the girl who won’t express my true needs and feelings but get mad when they aren’t perfectly understood, and with therapy I’ve come to view it as an emotionally abusive behaviour. It puts full responsibility for your emotional well-being on your partner while simultaneously dooming them to…

Breaking up isn’t always punitive, and we need to stop pretending it is. “Do what I want or I’ll leave you” is coercive, but “this is what I need from the relationship or it isn’t going to work for me” isn’t. 

I think the point that there’s not enough information here is really important to stress. People are basically deciding if there was coercion or not based on vague ideas about the people involved, even though this article doesn’t have anywhere near enough info to come to any conclusions. Ashton Kutcher could be a…

I just tried to say this but you used way fewer words and made way more sense. 

I feel like I’ve encountered a few cases lately where people vocally pretend to be into their partner’s kinks because they fear the end of the relationship, then after the relationship ends anyway they process their negative emotions about the experience as a feeling of being coerced. I understand that they feel…

I feel like people are assuming that wants and needs always remain the same, and than Kutcher always knew monogamy wasn’t going to work for him. People’s emotional and sexual needs aren’t static, sometimes what you need 5 years into a marriage isn’t the same as what you needed before you got married. 

She looks great! 

I read her book My Life is a Toilet like 20 times when I was a tween, but I haven’t thought about her in years.