by Lisa Brady

Thanks to a new wave of reality TV shows like MTV’s Teen Mom and 16 and Pregnant, and ABC Family’s The Secret Life of the American Teenager, the issue of teen pregnancy is out in the open (and apparently a source of endless entertainment). But does anyone else find it incredibly ironic that ABC Family is showing a series about teen pregnancy?

In the past it was considered a grievous mistake to get pregnant before getting married. These days, with the 50% divorce rate and the prevalence of one-night stands (and unprotected copulation), it’s very common to have a single parent situation. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If Gilmore Girls has taught us anything, its that single mom’s (or dad’s) rock – and can be super hot. And with the likes US Weekly and People rewarding teenage moms with magazine covers, it’s almost as if the mainstream media is actively encouraging the phenomenon.

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By Edward Kelly

It starts innocently enough. A woman with red hair and a nervous smile sits in a non-descript room where the lighting is perfunctory at best. Behind her the wall is textured and yellow-ish. The woman rifles through an off-camera plastic bag. She holds up a receipt showing that the product in the bag was purchased recently (if memory serves, the timestamp on the receipt read August 30, 2010, around 2:45 p.m.).

The video is eight minutes long and therefore above average for something on YouTube. I’ve described the first minute or so because, since I saw it, the woman in the video, Karen Alloy (a popular YouTube vlogger with the user name “Spricket24”), has changed the settings and the video is now logged as private. If the description above sounds downright banal, well, that’s because it is. In fact if it weren’t for the title I would’ve bailed on it after the first 15 seconds. But the title of this video is “How To Take A Pregnancy Test” and thus I am in it for the long haul.

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by Brett Warner

My younger brother used to play softball and during the games, I would wander about the nearby train tracks or bum around in the small playground. (My main concern that summer was whether Agent Mulder could really be dead — he wasn’t, though in retrospect it might have been wiser for my then favorite show to go out while it was still ahead.) One day, there was another young kid on the swing set and he had this small, red, egg-shaped video game on a key chain. It had a funny name and my fifth grade eyes glazed over as he explained how the thing worked. “These are gonna be the next Beanie Babies,” he promised. I think I probably told him that was stupid. Shows what I know.

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by Dan Tabor

I once had a fiancé who would only allow Hentai and “approved” porn in the house; that was the pact after finding my cache stashed on our shared PC one day. On the exact opposite end of the spectrum, I also dated a girl who didn’t believe porn should exist, or be viewed in a house where a couple was living together, so essentially our house became a complete porn demilitarized zone.

But, with the proliferation of pornography in our culture and the general acceptance of it, the porn pact is fast becoming something that is better settled sooner than later in most relationships. Much like how you’re going to split the bills, this mutual understanding of porn and the rules concerning it within the relationship has simply become a fact of life.

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by Nahp Suicide

Many beer brands speak to men in a shared tone, showing them that they really understand their needs. Yet up to now, all intentions were expressed by a message without an action plan. Andes, the leading beer in the Andina Region of Argentina presents: Andes Beer: Teletransporter – A revolutionary invention capable of doing something almost impossible.

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by Luisa Mateus

“He did not know how long she has been looking at him, but for perhaps as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let you thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away… to wear an improper expression on your face was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.” – George Orwell, 1984

Google’s Eric Schmidt made a quip last week about young people’s flippant attitude to so much personal information being available online He indicated that it might be appropriate for young people to change their names in the future to escape past online activity.

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by Nathalie Moody

Jealousy. Why was this emotion created in the master-planning of the emotions? There must be some involvement from the devil here. He must get off with twisted satisfaction as the most rational and mature lot of us, struggle to ignore the evilness of this illogical envy! It creeps under our skin and skews are sense of reality. Jealousy can distract us from moving on, moving forward and functioning as a rational human being.

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