You make my heart go giddy-up

I love the things Amanda at Pandagon turns up. Her latest find is the sale of lollipops to girls by the abstinence-only crowd. These cherry-flavored treats tell girls "Don't Be a Sucker! Save Sex for Marriage!"

First, why are they being sold to girls only? Oh, wait...boys are going to be abstinent, so we don't have to worry about them.

Did I get that wrong? Let's try again...boys are sexually active only because they can't help themselves, but girls should know better. It is their responsibility to make the world abstinent.

Of course, the image of these girls sucking lollipops as a means of not thinking about sex is a riot.

Amanda explains that once the girls begin sucking and chewing on their cherry treats, they are reminded by abstinence educators that, of course, they certainly wouldn't want someone else's lollipop after it has been opened and sucked and chewed. Why, I wonder, are the educators not explaining that no one wants a guy's "lollipop" after it has been sucked and...well, you know. Only a girl's lollipop is a use-one-time-only product.

Teenage pregnacy is not a good thing. I would rather someone sold girls birth control devices instead of peddling them this kind of overt, obscene sexism.

We can try to comfort ourselves by saying "But this is just the religious right nutcake crowd." There are two things wrong with that argument. One is that this crowd is sanctioned and funded by the United States government. The other is that the double standard is as alive and well as it was in the 50s, religious right or no religious right.