Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Where DON'T Babies Come From?

Obviously, the magazines would cover it (sex sells, after all), but there was such a moralistic outcry in the States over the whole thing ("My God, won't someone think of the children?") and I don't think there was that same reaction in Europe. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Loved the Washington Post TV column 's recent comment on Nipplegate, btw:

On Feb. 4, it'll be Prince on CBS, on the heels of last season's Rolling Stones on ABC and, before that, Sir Paul Bad-Taste-in-Women on Fox.

Not coincidentally, these three flat-chested blasts from the past followed the historic 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, broadcast on CBS, in which congressmen were blinded, FCC commissioners plotzed and little towheaded babes were doomed to lives of crime and debauchery when they caught a glimpse of an actual female breast.

P.S. Obviously I misinterpreted your post, Olympe. Glad you weren't offended--I was seriously puzzled as to what, exactly, you might have found offensive .

I don't recall taking any type of sex ed as a kid. And I graduated within the last decade. I think I may have missed it because we moved around so much.

I’ve heard the bit about trolls stealing babies, but I thought they just kept them.


I’ve worked in obstetrics a couple of different times. There have been two or three folks over the years that were totally shocked to find out how the baby came out, too… And that’s when they were in labor. I had one lady that came in and had never been to the doctor. She had never even had a vaginal exam done by a doctor, and the concept was totally foreign to her. You should have heard the conversation that ensued when I had to convince that I had to do that to see if she was dilated or not… She couldn’t even understand the concept of that being how the baby got out, let alone a nurse doing an exam on her.


You are probably right - at least in the aspect of showing pictures etc, about it. You still won’t find topless billboards or topless ads in the US. And boy, let me tell you how shocked I was when I visited Europe as a naïve 18 year old…


Oh, my god! You mean people do that for pleasure????? I think this is still common thinking about young kids.


I’m not sure they still do this, but I might be wrong. They still airbrush them out on TV shows. I was raised with the idea that you covered those nipples at all cost - even if it meant using band-aids. (Of course, I never much listened to my mom in that regard. I think she still gets aggravated when I wear something low enough to show off my cleavage. (And as I’ve joked with Olympe, it doesn’t take anything extremely low for me to do that…)


I think that most religious folks are using the idea that both ideas should be presented - not that evolution should be presented as a hard fact. (And I think it’s been more about evolution than biology.) I think that’s where the objection lies. And some teachers have been known to tell students that their religious ideas are stupid, and they present evolution as a fact instead of the theory that it is. I think it’s all a matter of the way something is presented. When I was growing up, I was taught evolution as a theory , not as the hard and fast truth. That’s not always true now.


BILD?

I think people in the States got so upset over the Janet Jackson thing because she suggested that it was done on purpose. (Or maybe it was Justin Timberlake that suggested it, but I did hear him say later that it truly was an accident. But then who knows since one of his new songs uses outrageous language.) Of course, now the Superbowl half-time shows are on a few second delay now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild

I must admit that the moralistic outcry over Janet Jackson's 'little accident' wasn't all that loud over here. Instead, it was reported that there was such an outcry in the states.

I guess you got rid of your naïveté quickly. All this nudity, people cursing wihtout restraint (okay, you possibly didn't understand any of this ), and all the alc you could get there - even the really hard stuff.
You did know about the hard liquors, didn't you?

Well, my grandma was taken side by one of her older sisters. This sister told her then that children get out the way they got in in the first place. That did the trick for her.

LOL! Typical American! I mean, what's the big deal? Is breast-feeding in public forbidden? If not, children can get the full view that way, too. :rolleyes:

No, not really--although there ARE people who raise a stink about it over here. I'm not one of them. My philosophy? At least this type of partial nudity has a purpose, as opposed to the televisions shows and movies which just have nudity for nudity's sake.

At the time of the Janet Jackson/half-time show thing, I didn't really care (I'm not much of a sports fan anyway), but it seemed to me like it was an accident, so I thought that the whole outcry over it was just ridiculous.

The thing is, "intelligent design" really has nothing to do with religion. It's purely science -- and not just biology. When you look into it, Darwin's theory of evolution has a large number of *big* problems with it. And a lot less "proof" than most of us have been led to believe (see "Icons of Evolution" by Jonathan Wells). Darwin thought cells were pretty basic, for instance; we're learning now how fantastically complex they are (see "Darwin\'s Black Box" by Michael Behe). ID doesn't attempt to identify the "intelligence" behind the design; it's just about teaching both sides of the issue.

I think it's a fascinating topic. Science ought to be about investigating the world and following whatever evidence you find to wherever it leads you -- without ruling anything out before you even start.

PJ

And usually it's not even partial nudity - it is none at all! The majority of nursing mothers I see in public are very discreet, using blankets, etc. I rarely actually see skin. Yet people still flip out about it. I always want to say, it's biology, people, get over it.

When I worked at JCPenney, I used to sit in the associates' lounge on my breaks and do the day's crossword puzzle in the paper. The "Dear Abby"-type column was on the same page as the puzzle, with the horoscopes and stuff, so I'd read that too.

Someone wrote in about breast feeding mothers in public, basically complaining about how "inappropriate" it is. I wrote a reply, including a couple of things I'd learned from my psychology class about the benefits of mother's milk versus formula or cow's milk.

I also said something like, "Hungry babies cry. Breast feeding saves time washing dirty bottles, which would probably be a blessing considering how many women lose sleep in the first few months of motherhood. And when the mother's out with the baby, at least if she feeds the baby, it's not screaming because it's hungry--less headache for those around the woman with the hungry baby."

I was pretty smart-alecky, come to think of it--not that I was trying to be, that is.

And yes, most of the nursing mothers I've seen have used blankets while breast feeding--to keep their babies (and/or breasts) warm, if not for modesty.

Reminds me of a Far Side cartoon. There's this scientist showing off his latest theory at a blackboard. Complex equations and such on one side, then a giant arrow to the words "And then a miracle happens" and another arrow to much simpler equations. Caption: "I think you need to expand a bit on step two..."

However much you pretend, magic and miracles aren't science. "We're like this because some unknowable superior entity wanted us to be this way" is not a scientific theory. It's not a testable hypothesis.

Evolution, on the other hand, is a testable theory. And one we've seen a lot of evidence for.

And if there are problems with Darwin's original sourcework... Well, it's not like "Origin of Species" is the bible of evolution. If we find that some of it's wrong, we can update our theories.

Freud's theories on psychology were based on instinct, guesswork, and whatever seemed to make sense to the good doctor at the time. Most of it has been discarded by the bulk of modern psychologists. But that doesn't mean we've abandoned everything that was built from his work. He gave us the basic principles of psychoanalysis and modern psychiatric treatment. We've just improved on them and adapted them as new information came in.

Science is about learning, testing, and revising.

And no, scientists aren't perfect. They make mistakes. Some of them do bad things for selfish reasons. Sometimes, because we don't know everything (if we did, there'd be no need for science at all), they make invalid assumptions. But when things like that are discovered, or when new information comes in that contradicts the old... we learn from that, we make the corrections, and we move on.

As for nipples and such... Every culture is different. We all have our taboos. I remember Dad remarking on a Palestinian woman who was breastfeeding her child. When she saw strangers approaching, she made haste to cover up... her face. In her culture, it was considered indecent for anyone but her husband to see her face, but seeing her bare breasts was perfectly natural.

Then again, it wasn't so long ago that seeing a woman's ankles was considered pretty racy, and no small number of young boys thought that women had some mysterious means of locomotion that didn't involve legs.

What's considered indecent changes from time to time and place to place. Here, female nipples are not for public display, but just about everything else can be (face, hair, neck, midriff, legs...). I don't know that you can really say it's good or bad or prudish or not. It's the limit our culture has set. For now.

But anyway... Getting waaaaaay off topic here.

Wonder how many kids were (or will be) told that babies come from eBay...

Thanks, Paul. I was just going to point this out.

My grandmother's first husband wrote her love letter in which he told her she didn't know it but that he had seen her ankles....

Ebay indeed... What a riot.

My pleasure, C_A.

I firmly believe in every person's right to their own beliefs. There are plenty of respectable scientists who are people of faith. But faith, by its very nature, is not science.

BTW, love the avatar.

Back to the subject at hand... Maybe it's not eBay. Maybe it's eBaby...

Actually, that reminds me of something else. A bit from an ep of " Perfect Strangers ."

Balky comes home from shopping, all excited about his new discovery. Went something like this...

"First I found drink powder. You just add water, and you get a fruit drink! Then I found soap powder. You just add water, and you get soap! But, today... Oh, cousin... I found the most amazing thing!"

*Balky holds up a bottle of baby powder*

"I love this country!!"

Is this place to mention virgin births?

c.

Why not?


Good one! Should've though of it before I told my daughter about the real thing. She just happened to notice the 'exit' while bathing. As the curiousity of a three year old goes, she had to ask, "What's it good for?"

"It's where your babies will come out."

"My babies?" I nodded. "Now?"

Seeing that she was obviously shocked, I reassured her, "No, not now. When you're all grown up." Muttering under my breath, I added, "At least I hope so."

"Not now? Sure?"

"No, not now. Sure."

"Good!" she said and heaved a sigh of relief.
Who would have thought of having that sort of conversation that early?

You've got a lot of faith in science, Paul Not blind faith, of course, but then neither is mine.

And it's nice to say everyone can believe whatever they like, but logically speaking, they cannot all be right. When two people disagree, at *least* one of them is wrong (quite possibly they both are).

Science is a search for causes. But scientists are human beings, who have preconceptions and biases just like the rest of us. Someone who starts off saying "well, of course there's no God; that's ridiculous" is going to *artificially* limit his/her search to the natural, not the supernatural. "There is no God" is not a proven (or provable) statement; it's a premise. And it might or might not be true. And if the premises are false, the conclusions are very likely going to be wrong.

ID is actually *more* falsifiable than evolution. ID says, frex, "the blood clotting process involves about twenty different chemical cues all firing in a specific sequence, and if one of them is missing, it's disastrous -- either blood doesn't clot at all and all blood is lost, or it clots up all over the place, causing strokes and shutting down blood flow. Either way, you're dead. This sequence only works when *all* elements are present together, therefore it could not have been built up a piece at a time." To falsify that, just prove that it *could* build up one piece at a time.

Evolution says "the blood clotting process built up one piece at a time. We haven't any clue how it happened, really, but we're certain it did." How do you falsify that? No matter how many failed experiments you conduct, the hard-core neo-Darwinist can just shrug and say "well, sure, *that* way didn't work. But that just means it was a different process, one we haven't found yet. Give us more time; we'll find it."

When you look into it, the odds against evolution are staggering. Takes more faith to believe in *that* than in God, IMHO. And faith, as we all know, is not science.

PJ

Could we please stop talking about ID and evolution? I'm afraid I'll post something that will set off a flame war (this is a really, really sore point with me) and I just don't want to go there. It's a debate that can't be "won" as I've learned in the past, so there's no point in starting it. Besides, it's off topic anyway .

Back on topic...

I remember my parents telling me that I was found under a gooseberry bush. I always found this rather insulting. I hate gooseberries. Why couldn't I have been found under something nicer, like a raspberry bush?

I was the youngest child. As a result, I really didn't have a clue for the longest time where babies came from. I suspect children with younger siblings are more likely to realise that babies come from mummy's tummy. However, if you never get to see the 'watermelon belly', how are you ever supposed to guess something like that?

Yvonne, you obviously went to a more forward thinking school than I did. We didn't get any sex ed classes... at least not unless or until we chose to study biology for 'O' level, and lots of pupils didn't do that. (We'd have been somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, then.)

I remember how that particular biology lesson started. The teacher breezed in and said, "Right. We're going to start on reproduction this week. According to the syllabus, I can either teach you about the sexual reproduction of rabbits or of humans. I thought you'd be more interested in humans, so we'll be studying that. However, just so you know, the only real difference is that rabbits ovulate as a reflex action to sex."

Even those kids who studied biology were desperately ill-informed. The attitude was that the kind of nice girls who attended the school didn't *need* sex ed. Suffice to say, the attitude was naive in the extreme. It took me months to figure out that one of my classmates didn't just have a passion for baggy clothing!

Mind you, after I figured out what was really behind said classmate's fashion choices, I realised that there was a far bigger mystery to unravel, and that was... how did girls got to meet boys in the first, since we were at an all-girls school!

Chris

Oh, the things I'm learning here today! . I want to go to a sex education class taught by you guys .

ML

Well said, Pam. My faith is also not blind.


You got that right… They are probably both wrong.

Many years ago, a brilliant scientist (in Australia, I believe) said that all stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria. He was almost laughed out of the profession because it was thought that there was no way bacteria could live in the hydrochloric acid. Guess what? He was later proven right… and wrong. Many are caused by bacteria… Some are not.

Pam, everything you said was well said.


I agree. It’s a war that can’t be won. It’s akin to democrats and republicans getting together and arguing politics. I’ll say nothing more about it.

Okay, MLT. How about this: A couple of folks mentioned virgin births… Well it can happen (and I’m not talking Mary or artificial insemination). You can get pregnant without having sexual intercourse (vaginal). If a guy does his thing on your leg, on your belly, or on the floor for that matter, if you are close enough to the semen, those little fellas can SWIM!! Sometimes those little fellas can slip out in pre-ejaculate fluid, too, before the guy even does his thing…

Here’s another myth… Breastfeeding one baby prevents you getting pregnant with another. (It helps, but it won’t outright prevent it.)