I always thought that I was pretty old when I had sex for the first time (19), but Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that I was completely average. It turns out that 70% of unmarried teens in American have sex by the time they are 19. (OK, fine I was on the older end of the spectrum, but whatever.) I waited, despite intense pressure from a boyfriend in high school, because I wasn't ready and I knew it. It was a good decision for me. Other girls may be ready earlier, and those are their decisions, too.

I know that some people believe that "feminist" and "lovers" do not belong in the same sentence, either because feminists are horrible people incapable of love (especially heterosexual love, which is why we never shave our pits or legs or bikini lines) or because feminists are horrible people that no one else is capable of loving (because we never shave our pits or legs or bikini lines).Pat Robertson famously opined that, "Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." Obviously anyone who engages in feminism must be terrible.

I swear that I will one day get over the miserableness that was the previous ensuing decade, but for now I will continue to harp on yet another failure of the previous decade. In January 2009, President Obama started the year off right by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law. The Act righted a serious offense committed by the Supreme Court, which had ruled that discriminating against women by paying them less than men for doing the same (or even better work) was perfectly fine as long as companies kept it secret for a really long time.

At the end of 2009, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was too young in the 1980s to experience the wrath of the backlash against feminist achievements, but the revival (and worse, implementation) of Reagan-era policies and ideas in the first decade of the 21st century shattered my faith in humanity. I know that the arrival of a new decade and political cycle doesn't mean that progress is back in terms of feminism and gender (history is a pretty good indication that another anti-woman, anti-gender equality shit storm will hit again), but at least the attack on women's rights and gender issues is not relentless right now.

Last Friday, Jan. 22, 2010, marked the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion across the United States. This is not to say that abortion was not legal at all before Roe - it was legal in 1/3 of states before Roe, and it was legal in the US before the Victorians more or less ruined everything with their horrid morality issues. But don't get me started on the Victorians...