Bad logic from Annie's Mailbox

Annie's mailbox response to a parent whose son's girlfriend doesn't have a curfew:

You might consider raising his weekday curfew by one hour as long as it doesn't affect his school performance, but giving him unlimited freedom is actually likely to create some insecurities. We feel sorry for Holly, whose parents give the impression they don't care about their daughter.

Yeah yeah yeah, I know that's the conventional wisdom. But think back, in first person, to your own adolescence. Think about the first time you, personally, didn't have a curfew, or it wasn't enforceable, or it was otherwise feasible for you to stay out however long you wanted.

Did you feel insecure? Did you feel like your parents didn't care about you?

I don't know about you, but I felt pretty much neutral about the whole thing. I didn't even feel anything strong enough to say I felt liberated. It was just "Finally I can let the evening's activities take their natural course without having to be home at some completely arbitrary time." Since then I have once in a while felt a glimmer of liberation, just like how I sometimes revel in the fact that I can sleep until noon and eat junk food for breakfast and no one will stop me, but overall it was a small sigh of relief that life was now more reasonable.

Actually, if anything made me feel insecure or that my parents didn't care about me, it was arbitrary rules. Arbitrary rules made me feel like my parents didn't care about me, personally, as an individual, with my own personal needs. It made me feel like they were trying to parent an archetype or a stereotype, or trying to pat themselves on the back for being such good parents. "You can't go to that boy's house unless his parents are there. Look at us, we are such good parents, much better than the parents who let their daughters go to boys' houses unsupervised." As it happens, they didn't have to worry about the boy. I couldn't even get him to kiss me. However, I didn't feel comfortable around his father and wasn't about to go to his house if the father was there. How could I feel secure and cared about with rules like that?

Open Letter to "Need Help" in today's Dear Ellie column

From today's Dear Ellie:

I've been married for three years and am increasingly frustrated with my mother-in-law.

She has a gambling problem and often cannot pay her rent, or her basic bills. She has major health problems, yet smokes and is extremely overweight.

My husband and I help her financially when she needs it, but it's more difficult for us lately. I'd like to arrange an insurance policy for her, to help with the cost of her funeral expenses should she pass away. I feel that due to her careless lifestyle and health problems, she may not be around very long.

No other relatives are in a secure financial position to assist with final expenses. Or they'll refuse, since we're always bailing her out.

How do I bring this up to my husband? How do we talk to my mother-in-law about signing a policy for funeral coverage?

I cannot take one out on her without her knowledge. I feel my husband should be the one to talk to her. When I've mentioned this before, he got very angry and didn't want to discuss it. I'm just trying to avoid a disaster, not looking to make any money off her.

Need Help

First of all, broach the subject with your husband by talking about funeral planning/wishes for after death in general. Do your own wills and plan your own funerals if you haven't already. Bring up Baby Kaylee who was recently in the news to steer the conversation towards organ donation. Then once you're on that, ponder whether you know your own parents' wishes (aging parents, you know) and ask your husband if he knows his mother's wishes.

Then your husband can use the same technique to find out his mother's wishes.

Allow some time to pass and price her wishes to find out whether you can afford them. Then, at a calm and neutral moment, have your husband say to her "BTW, Mom, remember a while back you said you wanted to be buried in a solid gold tomb? Today I just happened to stumble upon how much that costs and there's no way I can make that work. Do you have insurance or pre-planning or anything?"

At this point she should either agree to insurance or take responsibility for pre-planning. And if she doesn't, she has been duly informed that her wishes cannot be fulfilled without some action on her part, so you're off the hook for not doing more than you can afford.

Things They Should Study: bullies who tell their victims they should kill themselves

Today's Annie's Mailbox has a girl whose bully is leaving her MySpace messages saying "Why don't you just go and kill yourself already?"

I've heard of this bullying method before, although it was never done to me, and I really think someone should research it. We could use more information about the perps motives and what they're thinking, because this makes even less sense than most other bullying techniques.

My bullies bullied me when we were unwillingly all in the same place - at school or on the bus mostly. But in this technique, the bullies go out of their way contact the victim at home outside of school hours. If they really think the victim is so worthless they should commit suicide, why would they go out of their way to contact her during free time that isn't being marred by her presence?

Also, I don't know if this is broadly applicable, but within my own circle the victims who were being told to suicide were far cooler than me. (To me they looked like they were on par with their bullies in terms of coolness, but they were all several levels above me so it's possible I couldn't see the distinction.) In callously cold and objective terms, I was a far better candidate for suicide than these victims, but no one ever suggested that I should commit suicide. And now that I think about it, those particular bullies were never cruel to me. We certainly weren't friends and some of us didn't quite get along in a sort of cold and distant and avoiding each other way, but they never actually bullied me. Why would they do something so much more drastic to the cooler victim while leaving the uncool victim alone?

I'd love for someone to seek out adults who used to bully this way and find out about their motivations and how they chose their victims. Even moreso than regular bullying, it's a giant mystery to me.

Make sure you read Savage Love this week

Everyone needs to vote on a new coinage. (NSFW, as usual)

Do extroverts really deliberately not talk to people (even when they have something to say) for the sole purpose of spiting them?

I've heard this sentiment many times; the most recent iteration come from today's Dear Prudence:

My husband has three children from his first marriage. Every year the three of them—now ages 16, 21, and 25—come to my mother's Christmas party and line up on the couch sullenly, grimly, and silently. This rudeness is extremely embarrassing to me in front of my other relatives. Worse, my husband is kind of powerless when it comes to his kids and tends to join them, silent, on the couch. I would just like to have them not come, because I don't think I can make them talk, but this thought distresses my mother no end. What do I do?

This lady seems to think that her stepchildren aren't talking for the sole purpose of spiting everyone else. This is odd to me, because it seems so bloody obvious to me that they're feeling shy and awkward and uncomfortable in the home of all these near-strangers (their stepmother's family of origin). They clearly just can't think of anything to say - or perhaps can't think of anything to say that's of sufficient interest and doesn't push any hot buttons. (For example, I know full well that people don't want to hear about the organic hair products I'm recently obsessed with, and the strange mistakes that came up in the text I was quality controlling don't make a good story to people without a solid grounding in comparative stylistics. And we can all think of that one person whom you just shouldn't get started on politics, so a whole wack of topics are right out if that person is there.)

However, this lady thinks they're doing it on purpose and out of spite. Therefore, it stands to reason that not talking even though she has something productive to say is something she might conceivabely do out of spite (because how else would it occur to her that this might be their motivation?)

Do extros actually do that? How egotistical is that train of thought - "I will deprive them of my wit and wisdom because what I have to say is so fucking special that it WILL be missed!" Do they never find themselves at a loss of what to say?

In the meantime, here's a helpful hint: whatever fascinating thing you think the non-talker has to say, they aren't aware that they have it or aren't aware that it might be of interest. So (assuming it isn't too personal) ask them about it!

Dear Margo misfires

This one really surprised me because Margo is usually very good.

Sixteen is a tough age for kids and their parents. It's good that you understand the value of communication, but unfortunately you can't achieve it. There's an old saying that the older you get, the smarter your parents become. I hope this is so in your case. In the meantime, to calm things down, you might try to lose a little weight, clean up your room and bring that D up to a C. As for retreating to your room for hours, granted, that is not screaming, but it is passive aggressive. I am guessing if you make an effort your parents will seem much more reasonable to you.

1. While losing weight is generally a good thing for most people, it is completely inappropriate to advise someone to change their body to smooth over interpersonal relationships with someone else. Do you really want to be setting that precedent and normalizing that concept with a 16 year old girl?

2. Retreating to one's room isn't passive agressive, because passive aggressive implies she's doing it to evoke a certain response from her parents. She isn't. She's doing it for her own benefit, so she doesn't have to deal with them. Think about when you seek privacy in your own life. You aren't seeking privacy as a dis to the other people. You aren't going "I'll show them, I'll deprive them of my company!" It's for your own purposes, because you personally need to either be alone, or be away from certain people, or be alone with a certain someone.

Things They Should Invent: interbloguality

1. People who are on Twitter and also have a blog (or LJ or something similar) should post their Twitter feed on their blog as a sidebar or something. No, I don't know how to do that, but I have seen it done. Readers who don't work 100% from feeds might not want to have to check two things.

2. Inspired by today's Dear Ellie, people who are trying to meet people on online dating sites should blog, and either put their blog link in their dating profile or share it early on in the getting-to-know-you process. Then they can get a window onto each other's inner life and figure out if they're compatible much more easily than by sharing favourite movies and bands.

Slight misfire in Dear Abby

Someone writes into Dear Abby saying that parents should teach their teenage daughters how to politely decline a date. (Which I agree with, by the way. I'm still not sure I can do it - I always send out pre-emptive "not interested" signals so I've had very few civilized invitations to practise on. But that assumes that parents can teach their kids things that will work in the kids' social circle. The vast majority of the scripts my parents have given me when I asked for advice have been way off and just gotten me laughed at.)

In reply, Abby says:

If a girl is so eager to please that she doesn't know how to say, "Don't call me" or, "Thank you, but I'm not interested," then how is she going to learn to say, "Do not touch me in that way"?

I don't think this is quite a fair analogy. If you get asked out on a date in a way that's perfectly civilized and appropriate, you don't want to hurt the guy's feelings and it may be that you don't know him very well. But by the time you get to "Don't touch me that way", your thesis is either "Fuck off!" or "Touch me this way instead." If it's "Fuck off!", you don't have to worry so much about his feelings. If it's "Touch me this way instead," you know him well enough that you can say to him "Touch me this way instead," or you can just grab his you-know-what and position yourself for him to verb your noun (assuming he's already expressed enthusiasm for verbing your noun).

"Don't touch me" is a far easier concept to express. Someone who can't quite manage to politely and with no hurt feelings convey "You're a perfectly decent person, the invitation was perfectly appropriate, I'm just not nearly as enthusiastic at the prospect so I'm going to decline," can still manage "Don't touch me!"

No problem!

Dear Dear Abby's Correspondents:

You might be interested in my analysis on the use of "no problem" as a reply to "thank you".

Things They Should Invent: custom-made porn

This idea was inspired by this Savage Love column (most obvious content warning ever: it's a Savage Love column about porn - proceed accordingly) where the guy is looking for het femdom porn with werewolves and vampire themes targeting a female audience (with a laundry list of sex acts he doesn't want to see in said porn) and Dan Savage is all yeah, good luck buddy.

There's a business opportunity here! Customers send in requests for porn that meets their exacting specifications. The pornographers calculate how much this porn would cost to make and how much of a return on investment they can expect to get. Then they give the customer a price that constitutes part (but not all) of the cost of making the porn. The better the projected ROI, the less they charge the customer.

So if the customer agrees, they make the porn and give it to the customer. But THEN, they also sell the porn through their website, and split the profits with the customer by the same proportions that they initially invested. So while the porn is significantly more expensive to the customer to start with, they can make money back and maybe even turn a profit. So if woman-centric het femdom vampire porn has a larger audience than the marketing department expected, the dude who wrote into Savage Love could get rich. If not, he can still get his niche porn for the right price even if he's the only person in the world who wants it.

Other possibilities that would make it more interesting but I'm not sure if they'd wreck the business model:

1. If the customer can't afford to have their porn made, the pornographers can still keep the idea. If they use it sometime, the customer who submitted the idea gets the porn for free but doesn't get a cut of the profits.

2. If the pornographers think an idea is commercially viable so they don't charge the customer very much, the customer can choose to invest a greater amount and thus get a greater share of the profits.

Open Letter to "Wanting To Talk It Out in Alexandria"

To the writer of the second letter here:

I'll bet you anything "Elaine" is an introvert. She actually does need to stop and think about how to respond. It isn't passive-aggression. Her thoughts don't come to her immediately as words, and she cannot just talk out her thoughts. She does not have the words - her thoughts do not exist in word form - until she stops and thinks about how to formulate them.

Read The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney for information about how this works and how you, probably being an extrovert who thinks by talking, can coexist with this.

Random weird advice column letter

I stumbled upon this old Annie's Mailbox while googling for something else.

Dear Annie: I am a retired naval officer. Two weeks ago, my 16- year-old daughter had a date with a young man I had never met. My wife, a teacher at the school, said he was a good kid.

When the young man showed up to get my daughter, he sat in the car and honked the horn (strike 1). I went out and told him she was not ready and he should come in the house. He did and then proceeded to call my wife by her first name (strike 2). When he tried the same with me, I very sternly said, "You can call me 'Sir.' " Finally, when my daughter came down, he blurted, "It's about time" (strike 3). At this, I blew my stack.

In military fashion, an inch from his face and speaking loudly, I proceeded to tell him that I will not allow anyone to come in my house and treat my family this way. I grabbed his coat and threw it outside and informed him that unless he also wanted to end up on the ground, he would walk out and never see my daughter again.

My daughter cried, as expected, but my wife has not spoken to me in two weeks. She says this is the way kids are now and I should remember that I no longer wear a uniform. She thinks I owe "Junior" an apology. I told her he owes our family an apology for his lack of respect.

Tell me, Annie, was I wrong? My wife and I will do whatever you say.

Obviously, father, you have never been a 16 year old girl. I'll bet you anything she specifically instructed her date to honk instead of coming in so he wouldn't have to deal with her asshat father. Your date is someone you like and choose to spend time with; your father is someone whose presence is forced upon you. Protecting your date from your father's unpleasantness is far more important than having your father like your date.

Dear Abby misfires

This guy is tired of living in the shadow of his more popular and attractive younger brother. He concludes by saying:

I know I shouldn't compare myself to Chaz, but it hasn't been easy living in his shadow and being seen by everyone as "just his brother." It has done a real number on my self-esteem. What can I do to not let this affect me so much? Should I move someplace where nobody knows him?

Abby starts her answer with:

Let's follow that last sentence to its logical conclusion. You move far away from Chaz -- and then what? Pretend you're an only child? What if he comes to visit? What if you meet someone special and want to introduce her to the family? Only as a last resort should you take such drastic action.

That is incorrect. From firsthand experience as the older sibling of a more attractive, talented and popular younger sibling, I can assure you that moving away does help. You don't have to pretend that you don't have a sibling, it just helps to be in a place where people don't know your sibling and aren't going to compare you to them (and you aren't going to get the impression that they're comparing you to them). You also get the bonus of not having your sibling's accomplishments in your face every day. Carving out your identity as your own person instead of as compared with someone else is far easier to do when you don't see your "competitor" on a daily basis. Moving away, even temporarily, will help.

Open Letter to women who are wondering if their boyfriends will ever change their mind and want to have children

Dear R who wrote in to Cary Tennis and lady who wrote into Claudia Dey:

My first thought was to implore you, speaking as a childfree 27-year-old (who was recently a childfree 26-year-old), to take your boyfriends at their word.

However, I quickly realized that if you aren't going to listen to a 27-year-old whom you like well enough to date, you clearly aren't going to listen to a 27-year-old stranger.

So instead, I'll give you a little piste de réflexion. Just think about this, quietly and to yourself, at your leisure, and see what you come up with:

If you were dating a 27/26-year-old man who said he does want children eventually, would you assume that in his youthful folly he doesn't know what he's talking about and may yet change his mind?

Open Letter to the person who wrote in to today's Globe and Mail Group Therapy column

The reader is having sex drive issues, and her partner thinks the Pill might be the problem. Various responses and comments either tell her to go off the Pill, or that the Pill isn't the problem.

Dear reader, please listen to me, I am speaking from firsthand experience: you need to switch pills. Do not go off the Pill, do not disregard the Pill as a possible source of the problem.

Every pill has a different level of hormones, and every person has a different level of hormones. If the hormone levels in the pills are incompatible with your own personal hormone levels, you may experience side effects including reduced sex drive. Finding a more compatible hormone level will alleviate these side effects. Also, switching from monophasic to triphasic or vice versa may also have an effect.

Personally, Alesse killed my sex drive, Cyclen brought it back, and Ortho-Tri-Cyclen actually increases it for one of the three weeks (which is nice - it's fun, but it would be unsustainable if I were like that all four weeks).

So don't stop the Pill, don't disregard the Pill, just tell your doctor your sex drive is waning and ask if switching pills might help. There are at least a dozen different hormone levels available, so give it a try before you write it off.

Linguistic research needed

Dear Abby readers complain about being addressed as "You guys".

Based on the letters, it seems to be a regional dialect thing. I can see how the word "guy" can be masculine when it is intended to be so, but personally when I say "you guys" it is gender-neutral. By that I mean that there's no intention of gender in it. It's even more gender-neutral than the intentions behind "Everyone should bring his book," because I don't see unless you point out to me and make me think about it how "you guys" could even be interpreted as masculine. It would be like interpreting the word "human" as masculine because the word "man" can be found in it. It isn't even like the French ils for a mixed group (which seems to be falling into disuse, incidentally). In my train of thought in using this word, it isn't marked as masculine at all. It's like "you guys" is a completely separate term from "guy".

So what they should study (in addition to mapping "you guys" usage) is whether anyone who says "you guys" ever intends it as masculine, whether explicitly or through an "everyone should bring his book"/ils/mankind type usage. Because in my dialect there's no thought of gender whatsoever. It's just that we don't have "y'all" or "folks" in our active vocabulary, so there's not much else we can put there.

Going to hell

Similar letters from Cary Tennis, Dear Prudence, and Damage Control: religious kids who think their non-religious parents are going to hell.

Here's something I don't get, and I say this as a former religious child myself: why would you care if someone else is going to hell? The only reason I can possibly think of is because you want them to be in heaven with you. But surely any deity worth being worshipped as a deity can arrange things so that you have everyone you need for a heavenly heaven experience, while everything deserving of a hellish hell experience experiences just that. (In fact, just to make things easier, maybe some people's hellish hell experience is being trapped for eternity with their evangelical relatives!)

I think Dear Abby printed a fake letter

I think today's first Dear Abby letter is a hoax. It's alleged from a father warning people that the latest thing among teenage girls is to have a "prom baby" (i.e. get knocked up at the prom) to get out of going to college. But consider:

1. If someone is smart enough to get into an Ivy League school, they would know that taking care of a baby is harder than going to college. These people are 17, not 13.

2. In what world would it be easier to tell your parents you're pregnant than to tell them you're not feeling ready for college?

3. If they really wanted to sabotage their own chances of going to college, wouldn't they just submit a poor application? Don't US colleges require essays and interviews and all kinds of stuff like that rather than just filling out a form? Why not just submit a crappy essay or blow the interview?

4. If they really wanted to have a baby, why would they put all their eggs in one basket by depending on getting pregnant on one specific night? Wouldn't they instead work on arranging their lives so they have multiple opportunities to "try"? Even highly supervised kids, in their final year of high school, could arrange to have some "group projects" that required a lot of work at a conveniently parent-less house, or find some way to be alone in a car. This does take some stealth and lying and good luck, but if it's really that important to get pregnant, it's not that hard to make it work.

5. When I was that age, the thing to do if you weren't feeling ready for college was to work for a year. It was considered a responsible, perfectly respectable thing to do. Surely they've heard of that!

6. All the Google results for "prom baby" (excluding those where the two words appear next to each other but aren't intended as a single term) point to a) this column, or b) references to babies that were born at proms, not conceived at proms. The only Google Blog Search results or Technorati searches (again, excluding those where the words appear next to each other but aren't intended as a term) are referring to this specific Dear Abby column. If this were really a trend, it would have been mentioned on the internet by now.

What I'm surprised about is that Dear Abby didn't clearly see that this was a hoax.

Parenting advice from the childfree

Inspired by a train of thought arising from the first letter in Friday's Vine (i.e. Friday March 9, it hasn't been archived yet):

Think about the sexual values you want your kid(s) to have. Yes, I know, squicky. You don't want them having sex at all ever. But work past that mentally and think into the distant future, when your kid is a full-fledged adult and in whatever kind of situation you think it's appropriate for people to be in before they have sex. What do you want their sexual values to be? Do you want their sex to be loving? Kind? Gentle? Respectful? Fair and equal? Fun? Romantic? Not taken too seriously? Taken very seriously? Heterosexual? Homosexual? Married? Unmarried? For procreation purposes only? Heavy protected by contraception? Just decide, quietly and to yourself, what these values are.

Then, whenever a book you're reading contains sex scenes that reflect these values, buy the book and keep it on a bookshelf in your home. The books don't have to be about sex, they just have to contain one or more sex scene of whatever level of graphicness they happen to be. You can read them or not as your preferences dictate to you, just keep them on a bookshelf in your livingroom or some other public area of your home. Don't point this out to your kid or anything, just keep it there in your home.

Why? Because at some point in early adolescence, your kid is going to learn that some books have sex in them. And they're going to look for the sexy parts of books so they can learn more about sex. While they might prefer a more visual medium, books have the advantage of being innocent- and respectable-looking, silent, and easily portable. Once your kid discovers that there's sex in them thar books, they will read the books, especially the sex scenes, and most likely surreptitiously. But because you have chosen books whose sex scenes reflect what you consider to be positive sexual values, your kid's earliest exposures to sex portrayed in media will reflect the values you want to instill.

I don't think Dear Ellie quite gets what the internet is all about

A self-described "internet geek" writes to Ellie asking for advice on how to attract women. Most of the advice she gives is adequate, but this one statement I disagree with: "...push away from your computer to try something new – rock climbing, snowboarding, whatever. Now you have something to be enthusiastic about in conversation."

There are two problems here:

1. The internet is an excellent source of things to be enthusiastic about in conversation. Rock climbing, not so much. Whatever you're into, the internet can help you find out more about it and hook you up with communities of like-minded people. Rock climbing...is rock climbing. It's only one thing. If you spend an hour rock climbing and you aren't particularly enthusiastic about it, you've just wasted an hour. If you spend an hour on the internet looking for things that are interesting, you will definitely find something to be enthusiastic about.

2. If rock climbing or snowboarding or whatever is the tipping point that causes this guy's next relationship to launch, that relationship isn't going to last. He needs someone with whom he can discuss whatever he's actually into, not someone for whom he will always have to act like a rock climbing enthusiast.

I think the guy's main problem is that he thinks he has to Make a Move - that there's this one-chance, make-or-break Move that he has to make, and if he does it right he'll come out with a girlfriend. Ellie should have focused her advice a little more towards getting to know people and building friendships over time, and she completely neglected to mention how the internet can be helpful in doing that. On the internet, this guy can find other people who are passionate about whatever he's passionate about - for real, not random rock climbing - and find where he can meet likeminded people IRL. Plus he can use online communities to practice making friends so he's more comfortable doing that IRL.