All the kids are coming out!

We know that getting teens to use birth control is about more than providing guidance counselors, or hockey moms, with fishbowls full of condoms. We know that there are a great deal of complicating factors, such as the fact that some teen girls feel they want to get pregnant. But what few people may realize is this: some teen boys not only want their girlfriends to get pregnant but, in some cases, are doing what they can to force them to.

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Okay, not what I would wear to fight crime. Or, really to leave the house.

Though I am “of a certain age” (read: not in my 20s, but if Hollywood comes calling I am totally telling them BG wrote this post), nothing reduces me to feeling like a teenager than introducing my boyfriend to my parents.

I bring this up because (a) my boyfriend of several years just met my parents last week and (b) ’tis getting to be the season (or at least the TV season) for such meetings. In fact, the Chicago Tribune’s Red Eye just ran an article listing meet-the-parents DOs and DON’TS — for the KIDS! What were they THINKING? Wouldn’t you say it’s the grownups who need a few pointers?

Like:

DO: Say nice things about your child in front of her boyfriend, excluding admiring comments about her “birthing hips.”

DON’T: Wear that.

C’mon, what else? Add your own in the comments!

Here, from FOBG Mary Beth Williams at Salon.com, a dismaying/touching account of the penny-pinch of heartbreak:

Sep. 22, 2008 | My marital separation would be so much easier if I were in a better income bracket. Then again, if I were in a better income bracket, maybe my husband and I wouldn’t be separating at all. I could rattle off all the reasons why the man that I promised to love forever is not sleeping next to me tonight. I can list all the heartaches we’ve endured over the last two years. Or I could cut to the chase and tell you that this is a story about money.

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This one, at least, was not penned by a supervillain.

Check out Dr. Joyce Brothers’s breakup quiz in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which “lay(s) out some of the better strategies for a dignified, gentle withdrawal that leaves open the possibility of friendship at the end of the road”) and see if you’ve learned anything from BG — or experience — like, ever.

Here, your newest installment of Ask Lynn, the advice column penned by BG’s alter ego, now appearing on the spanking-new Lifestyle channel at MSN.com (and powered by Match.com). This week, we meet Maybe Not So Mature?, who’s doing a little morning-after quarterbacking after a hot and — well, not that heavy one-night stand.

“I knew this was nothing but a fling,” she laments, noting that he’s four years younger (maybe not a huge mathematical difference, but it gives him a whole different digit in the tens place) and that they have nothing in common except that neither lives in the other’s state. “[But] I cannot stop thinking about him. It’s driving me nuts! This is not what I need because I am finally ready to date after being divorced over a year and dating losers for six months. I feel weak for sitting and hoping that he calls. What should I do?”

Other than be stoked that girlfriend’s still got it? Not a whole lot! See what else Lynn has to say, and then come back here to comment!

>heart!<

Brad Pitt announced Wednesday that he’s donating $100,000 to fight California’s Proposition 8, a November ballot initiative that would eliminate same-sex couples’ right to marry.

“Because no one has the right to deny another their life, even though they disagree with it, because everyone has the right to live the life they so desire if it doesn’t harm another and because discrimination has no place in America, my vote will be for equality and against Proposition 8,” the actor said in a statement.

Pitt’s donation marks the largest thus far to the anti-Prop. 8 campaign by an A-list celebrity.

Via LA Times.

Girls and horses: match made in hog heaven. All my early fantasies of happiness and adventure featured my strong and loyal steed. We’d gallop across fields, along beaches, or my horse-friend would appear in the schoolyard at recess (you know, because horses always remember the way back), his coat shining like armor, his communications quiet, subtle — intriguing but ultimately knowable. A wild thing whose trust could be won through love and patience.

Hmm, it’s aaaall making sense now.

Which is why Wired columnist Regina Lynn’s latest inspiration — a horse camp for broken-hearted women — is pure, thoroughbred genius.

“We’d provide horses and Parelli Natural Horsemanship foundational instruction for the women to build relationships with those horses. (PNH is perfect because you learn so much about love, communication, relationship give and take, responsibility — and not just as it pertains to horses. Wimmens dig it),” she writes. All that in a supportive environment where women can “discover, or rediscover, their sexuality, their pleasure, their power.”

Somebody give her some seed money! Because sometimes it takes a heckofa lot more than sad country songs to get over a breakup.

 I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be going through a breakup than sitting in these poor kids’ seats:

Second, sitting three-quarters of the way up the bleacher was Bristol Palin and her eighteen-year-old impregnator, Levi Johnston. Once I noticed them, I kept my eye on Bristol and Levi. What I learned provoked an odd empathy for the awful pickle Wasilla High School’s hockey stick wielding homeboy now finds himself in.

Bristol and Levi sat shoulder-to-shoulder. But not once did they look at each other, speak to each other, or in any way acknowledge each other’s physical presence. Not once. For an entire hour. Instead, Bristol stared straight ahead and Levi had the glazed look of a trapped feral animal.

Then when Sarah wound up her autograph signing and the people sitting in front of him on the bleacher began climbing down, Levi stood up and, without looking at or speaking to his betrothed, turned in the opposite direction and walked away.

What I took away from that is that the People Magazine spin about how excited the happy couple is about their upcoming nuptials and Levi’s “Bristol” finger tattoo is the Karl Rovian nonsense that anyone who thinks about it for a scintilla of a second intuitively knows that it is. If McCain-Palin lose, my easy bet is that there will be no nuptials. But if they win, the hand Levi dealt himself by having had the poor luck to knock up the daughter of the Vice President of the United States (at the time who could have known?) will have to be played out.