"When people use contraception, they're not asking themselves, do I want a lifetime relationship with this person or would this person be a good parent," Smith explains. "They're simply hooking up, typically because of sex, and sliding into marriage."

By this gal's logic, then, sex with contraception actually promotes marriage.

And if they can't make you, well, they can at least beat you down so hard that you don't have time to worry about your beliefs, because they've manipulated the system and forced you into a de facto adoption of their behaviors.

Have you read Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi? In the second volume, she writes about the restrictions on women in post-revolutionary Iran, something to the effect of, if you're scared that your headscarf isn't long enough, that your ankles might show, etc., then you don't have time to think about what's happened to your freedoms. There's a lot in there that reminds me of what's happening here today.

Ni, I haven't read that. I was thinking about it as a deliberate perversion of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, in which subjugated populations are forced down from self-actualization to preoccupation with basic survival. Some studies suggest that it is,quite literally, crazy-making.

Okay, kind of off topic, but for whatever it's worth I think Persepolis (the first one) is great, and I have assigned it in Politics of the Middle East.

But I've only done that once or twice and I don't know if I'll do that again. While those who read it seemed to like it and get a lot out of it, clearly a bunch of students had a tough time with the idea that we should give serious consideration to a text when the text is a graphic novel. Not that that's enough to make me drop a text, but it's hard to work around.

Well then, can I borrow yours? And I'm surprised about their view of the the graphic novel. I am going through the opposite right now, in that they all love reading Thomas Friedman, which is a book that I chose to show them how not to think about the subject, but also to give them a "mainstream" perspective. They claim not to be able to "get" anything out of Keohane and Nye.

So who should we blame for this - the people who assign and write textbooks for grade school? Those responsible for the low-content articles you read in glossy magazine or Gannett newspapers? The average student does seem to want to cling to familiar reading norms - and be threatend or scared by going outside them. And sure, you can borrow my copy.