Dress Codes At Work - A Political Land Mine

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Boy, oh boy, talk about a feminista double standard!  There are big problems for men who try to impose a dress code for women.  The subhead of a Wall Street Journal article from June 19 read “When a Man Regulates Attire At Work, Women Often See an Oppressor, Not a Mentor.”  The ultimate suggestion is to have a woman boss lay down the wardrobe law.

Oh, please.

Tom Mills, Managing Partner of a Washington DC law office, was asked to make a firm-wide apology for complaining to the Wall Street Journal’s “On Style” column that the work attire of some young female law associates was based on the “TV-woman lawyer look with skirts 12 inches above the knee and very tight blouses.”  Evidently, the attire seen in many law offices and courtrooms reaffirms the accuracy of his statement.

Mr. Jim Holt, president of the Mid-American Credit Union in Wichita, Kansas, has become a target since he expressed his view publicly that panty hose are more professional than bare legs for working women.  That relatively benign statement got him lots of actual hate mail - hate mail!!  Gee, it doesn’t take much for feministas to start spewing hate, does it?

The rage seems to be centered on the concept that men should not be able to comment, criticize, suggest, offer an opinion, have a preference - nada - towards a woman without being accused of oppression.  What would female bosses do with male associates who came in with muscle shirts and low, baggy pants revealing skin really low on the abdomen?

If women wish to be taken seriously (for their minds, and not their bodies), then they shouldn’t be using professional circumstances to dress as they might if they were looking for casual sex.

The Amorality of Advertising

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J.C. Penney officials are upset about a racy, fake advertisement on YouTube, in which the retailer appears to be endorsing teen sex.  The “fake” ad was not done with their knowledge or permission.

The video, called “Speed Dressing,” ends with teens telling the girls’ mother that they’re heading down to the basement to watch TV.  As they head toward the basement door, the words “Today’s the day to get away with it” flash on the screen, echoing Penney’s use of the phrase “Today’s the day to…” in a series of ads it launched last year.  Penney’s logo and slogan then appear on the screen.

The title refers to the beginning of the video which shows two teenagers in their own respective bedrooms stripping down to their underwear and then timing themselves as they race to put their clothes back on. 

The amoral part of this story is the response of Alan Siegel, chief executive of New York strategic-branding company Siegel + Gale.  “It’s not going to reflect well on the brand in Middle America, but the ad is nicely done and the people in it are attractive; young people in New York and LA will get a kick out of it,” he said.

The potential impact on young people is irrelevant, however, as long as it’s clever and attractive?  Amoral thinking at best.

Unprotected Teen Sex on the Rise

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The Center for Disease Control calculates that high-school kids are having more sex, and more unprotected intercourse, when compared to the behavior of their older siblings.  Condom use is down, as kids have become more complacent about herpes and AIDS.  Maybe it’s also that the total swing of society in support of teenage sex and babies born out of wedlock is working - a photograph of Britney Spears’ 17 year old sister Jamie’s new baby is worth $1 million.  Hmmmmm.

Octopus Mating Games

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California’s Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has found out some fascinating things about the mating behaviors of octopuses.

First, some general information:  these particular octopuses are about as big as a human hand, and most of that size is in their sucker-covered tentacles.  Their bodies are just walnut-sized.  To procreate, the males deposit “sperm packets” in the female’s body through a specialized tentacle.

Second:  this particular species (aculeatus octopu) is normally yellow with dapples of brown, tan, and grey.  But when a male sees another octopus, he puts on his fighting and flirting colors (both of which look the same), turning nearly white with dark stripes.  That signals that he’s a male, and is ready to fight OR mate. 

Third:  the females will mate with any male octopus that wanders by.  The males are more selective and are more enthralled with the more voluptuous females - skinny girls need not apply.

Fourth:  the little itty-bitty guys don’t want to fight the regulation-size guys, so they crawl along the ocean floor to one of the voluptuous females in a den guarded by the larger male.  These clever smaller dudes remain brown and yellow (typical female behavior).  By hiding and “cross-dressing,” these little guys often manage to get close enough to the female to mate….and, as I reported, she’ll mate with anybody, anytime, anywhere.

Moral to this story??

4,914 Sex Sessions

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With all the controversy about inappropriate sex (single women having babies out-of-wedlock on purpose, child sexual abuse in various religious orders, kids performing oral sex in middle school classrooms, etc.), it’s nice to know that I can share with you a positive, healthy, and utterly lovely sexual story.

Nancy K (I’m protecting her privacy!) wrote:
I’d like to respond to your radio program caller who, sadly, had sex with his wife about once every three to six months due to an over-packed lifestyle.  I’ve been married for 27 years to a great guy.  We’ve had our ups and downs-family troubles, kid troubles, you name it - some of them pretty devastating,  but our marriage has survived due to commitment, faith in God, and the intimacy that holds us together when the storms hit.

Since I can remember, we have sex every other day…yes, you read correctly.  Barring serious illness or surgery, even during the early years when our kids were young, through the teen years when we had kids all over the house, and now through the college years when my kids come home to visit, we have kept this pattern.  It has not always been easy!  Sometimes, we need to be creative.
We have a lock on our door, and a television in the bedroom as a sound buffer.  We have even “snuck” away from our home for a quick evening in a local, cheap hotel, and returned before bedtime, all for the price of a dinner and a movie out.  Sometimes, he drops by at lunch, if he’s out on a customer call, or I meet him.

I estimate that to be approximately 4,914 sessions!  Mind you, not all of these times are steamy hours of sex.  Some last only minutes, but the connection is there, and I can say with confidence that I challenge anything or anyone to come between us, because we are truly one.

When marriages allow all the intimacy to be sucked out of their lives, they will not have anything to cling to when trouble comes, and it will come in some form during your marriage.  I don’t always feel like having sex, but I always feel like being close to him, and by seeing the best in my man, respecting him and his needs, and honoring him.  I find that I can almost always get “in the mood” because he values me.

My hubby bought me “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands” as a little gift one day - and I read it and loved it.  I picked up some new pointers, and used it as a refresher course to jump-start an already-good marriage.

I quoted this letter in full because I believe that the most devastating aspect of a marriage is one in which the spouses take each other for granted, serve their own moods or desires, and don’t wake up every day wondering what they can do to make the other’s life worth living.

The World’s Best Lovers

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The GfK Group (www.gfk.com) is one of the largest market research companies in the world.  They recently released the results of a study commissioned by the Wall Street Journal Europe, in which they surveyed the sexual attitudes of 19,100 people in 20 countries:   www.gfk.com/group/press_information/press_releases/00715/index.en.html

One third of Americans and one third of Europeans believe that their countries have the best lovers.  The Greeks are the most confident - 77% rated their own country “tops” in matters of sex.  The exceptions are Belgians, Germans and the Dutch who assume that the best lovers aren’t in their own countries, but in….Italy.  And 69% of Italians agree with them!

The Greeks are also at the front of the class when it comes to frequency of lovemaking.  One quarter of Greeks say that “at least five times a week” is appropriate, while only 10% of Europeans and 16% of Americans feel the same way. 

Adultery in marriage is also regarded very differently in various countries:  90% of Turks thought adultery was intolerable; 40% of Americans agree with the Turkish viewpoint, and in all countries, women are more unforgiving of extra-marital sex than men.

One in Four Teenage Girls Has an STD

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The results of the first national study to measure the most common sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) found in young women were released recently by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to the report, 3.2 million teenage girls between the ages of 14 and 19 were found to have the human papillovirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes or trichomoniasis.  The study did not determine the number of girls who had HIV/AIDS, syphilis or gonorrhea.

I don’t know what qualifies as an epidemic here, but clearly, these numbers represent a crisis of monstrous proportions.  Responsible adults forming public should be figuring out how we can reverse the direction of these horrifying statistics.  The wholesale distribution of condoms and consensual counseling at the high school level has not dampened the levels of risky behavior among the nation’s teens.  Sex education has apparently been successful at teaching our children how to do it…often, and clearly, not safely.

Do Teens Yearn for Internet Seduction?

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Reuters’ Julie Steenhuysen wrote a news essay recently which was a real shocker.  She quoted Janis Wolak of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham:

A lot of the characterizations that you see in Internet safety information suggest that sex offenders are targeting very young children and using violence and deception against their victims….

Especially since social networking sites became popular, people are suggesting that these offenders are using information to stalk and abduct their victims.  We are not seeing those types of cases.  The great majority of cases we have seen involved young teenagers, mostly 13, 14, 15 year old girls who are targeted by adults on the Internet who are straightforward about being interested in sex. 

From the perspective of the victim, these are romances.

Among the study’s other findings:

* Internet offenders pretended to be teenagers in only 5% of the crimes studied.
* Nearly 75% of victims who met offenders did so more than once.
* Youths at risk have “buddy lists” including strangers, and they discuss sex online with strangers.
* Boys who are gay or questioning their sexuality are more susceptible to Internet-initiated sex crimes than other populations, resulting in 15% of criminal cases.

Other than religious institutions, there is virtually nothing in our society that elevates sexuality to a spiritual status.  This is the result of a society which takes kids out of school (without parental notification) for abortions; which has peer sex classes showing how to put condoms on bananas; which has “sex fairs” at major colleges and universities; which has porn as mainstream, primetime television and advertising; which has practically naked models in store windows for Abercrombie & Fitch and Victoria’s Secret; which has families repeatedly torn apart by busy, “two parent career” homes, divorce, re-marriage, shack-ups, and other adult misbehaviors that emotionally devastate children who look elsewhere for love and comfort. 

What is normalized is yearned for by children who want to be “adults.”