You had very good taste for a 12-year old. I kissed at 13 and also did some ‘serious’ stuff, but no sex 'til 17. I’d have very little to say to those now-grown girls, I think, if I were to meet them somehow today.
Any time you want to talk about the stuff that makes your Barbie bondage mundane, I’m slavering to hear it! And I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.
FTR, there are many times I think fbofw is too mundane to be interesting… I mean, even on a soap, something’s got to be happening that’s exciting. But when she focusses on humor, Johnston does pretty well, and the characters are mostly pretty real seeming.
I’m still new at this… I tho’t the pit was where nastiness was kinda expected…
The idea that Lynn Johnson “murdered” the dog shows a strange misconception of the role of the author in drama… Again, did Homer “murder” Achilles? No, he merely wrote a story in which Achilles died. Lynn Johnson is writing a “soap opera,” comparable to Gasoline Alley, in which time passes. That’s nifty. But, as time passes, people (and, alas, pets) die.
Anyway, my snarkiness was certainly uncalled for… But in the pit, is that a reason not to say something?
Er, no. Just as you’re not supposed to be nasty when dealing with people face-to-face unless it’s called for, you shouldn’t be nasty here simply because it is the Pit unless it’s called for.
Speaking for myself, if I see a poster being nasty or swearing just because they’re in the Pit, my first thought is that they lack decorum and should lurk for a while.
Farley didn’t drown, he died of a heart attack after pulling her out. He was a really old dog.
Guys, I think we have to remember here that Lynn Johnston bases “For Better or For Worse” on her own experiences as a mother. The character of Elly Patterson is basically Lynn Johnston drawing herself - they even look alike. Johnston’s husband is a dentist, as is Elly’s husband, and loves model trains, as Elly’s husband does. They live in a small town in Ontario, just like the Pattersons. Elly’s father is a lot like Johnston’s father. This is totally on purpose, by the way. What you’re seeing in the script is a dramatized account of the life of Lynn Johnston.
Johnston herself is, like Elly, getting really old; she’s 55. Like all old people, she perceives that kids are getting worse, despite the fact that they really aren’t. If Johnston perceives that kids are getting more precocious and world, this will naturally be reflected in the strip.
This perceptive effect may be enhanced by the fact that unlike Elly, Lynn Johnston DIDN’T have a third child. All the 12-year-olds she sees are other people’s 12-year-olds. So her perception of how 12-year-old girls act probably leans more towards “they’re getting wilder” than they would if she actually had an April.
If this sounds like I’m being negative, I honestly think “For Better Or For Worse” is one of the ten greatest comic strips ever created.
Ease up on the newbie, Audrey. For one thing, he’s right, and for another, I’ve seen attacks on other dopers that were a 1000 times worse.
Rick: I agree with your opinions of FBOFW, but 55 ain’t freaking “really old.” Hell’s bells, I’m only 12 years away from that age and I don’t feel middle-aged unless I look at my bills.
Your 5th grade sex-ed class covered blowjobs?! Damn.
Yeah, kids that young need to know where babies come from, but I think they can still wait a few years past that before we teach them about all the alternative variations. Unlike with genital sex, if we don’t teach them that there’s such a thing as oral sex until 8th grade, and they find out about it on their own a year or two earlier, I don’t think our educational system has failed them.
The Starr report went a bit beyond the sex-ed style of approach, and that was my problem with its public release. It was more like teaching kids about sex by leaving the Penthouse letters out for them to read. That might not be so bad at an appropriate age, but I’m glad I didn’t have an eight-year-old at the time to have to explain the phrase “semen-stained dress” to, or what the deal was with the cigar.
My friend’s stepdaughter came home from school last year & told her that she had kissed a boy at school (she was 10, I think). Instead of freaking out, her stepmom-to-be asked her about it. It turned out that the boy had kissed her, kind of a hit-and-run thing, and that she really didn’t think much of him or the kiss. They laughed about it and it was forgotten.
THAT is how I would want to react. Freaking out would only make it bigger in the kid’s mind, and maybe more exciting.
I wanted to kiss boys when I was 10, but none of them wanted to kiss me…
RT, in the interest of giving kids as much information as they need to make informed decisions, I will not just tell my kids about plain old Missionary-position sex. We learned about other forms of intimacy, probably to address questions like, “Can you catch something doing this?”, “Can you get pregnant doing this?”, etc.
Do you really think that 7th graders don’t know what a blow job is? Guess again!
There’s a pic of Lynn with her husband and two children on the back of one of her earliest books of collected strips. And the fictional Patterson family of the time were pretty much dead ringers for the RL Johnston family. But the difference has widened somewhat over the years.
Like **EJsGirl said, easy on the ‘old’ stuff! 55 can’t be old; for me, it isn’t that far away!
If that’s what she perceives, I think it doesn’t show in the strip. But kids these days really do know more about stuff related to sex than kids 10 or 20 or 30 years ago did. (I’m not sure that either ‘precocious’ or ‘worldly’ describes this well, btw.) Johnston knows that, and the strip reflects that.
Again, I don’t think that’s what comes through. That kids are doing stuff a bit sooner comes through (although I don’t think 12 was all that unusual an age for a first quick kiss a generation ago), but there’s no ‘wild’ character among April’s contemporaries that’s remotely the equivalent to the way Candace was portrayed in the strip a few years back.
EJsGirl - not only do I think 7th graders know what a blowjob is, but I just got finished saying that a few posts back.
There’s a difference between what is within the reasonable discretion of each set of parents to decide what to teach their children, and what the school system should teach their children. For one thing, what the school system teaches, necessarily defines one boundary of a parent’s discretion in that matter: if the school’s already taught your kid X, then you no longer have the option to not let him be taught about it until next year.
So where it can be done without ill consequence, it would seem that the school system’s choice of what age to teach what students what facts about sex, should be somewhat on the conservative side. That means a lot of parents may have explained a lot of stuff to their kids about sex before the schools do. There’s nothing wrong with that.
True. I see your point. I certainly plan on being the first one to tell my boys about “that stuff” (or at least making my husband do it!).
I work in education (specifically public K-12 school districts in CA mostly) and I’m not sure I want them having first crack at ANYTHING my kids learn!
I have a nit to pick, not with you personally, CCL, but just with the underlined phrase. Exhibiting certain behaviors (kissing, freak-dancing, smoking), is not “growing up”. Learning how to control your urges and act responsibly is. Think of someone you know, or know of, who is a perennial screw-up. Can you trace their pattern of behavior back to drinking/drugs/sex/delinquency at an early age? Probably. And that behavior is what prevented them from “growing up”.
I just think that this is a very unrealistic portrayal. Not because they kissed, but because of their attitudes. There’s simply no way they would be so blase about this (sorry, can’t do an accent aigu! They act like they’ve done it before (kissing, I mean, not “IT”) and there’s no way you act like you’ve done it before unless you’ve done it before!
uComics should be showing tomorrow’s strip by the time anyone sees this. 2am Eastern at the latest.
So, par avance, I’ll mention what I just now noticed: April is overreacting here, too. One kiss and she’s willing to be Rose to Gerald’s Jack? Either this is another continuity gap, or (as is more likely) this is April doing what she always does: fly off the handle as soon as Elly makes the tiniest objection to something she’s done.
Just wanted to get that in now, in case Elizabeth says something similar in IM.
It’s not up yet. Well, anyway, I also wonder what Elly meant by “alone together”. Of course April and Gerald shouldn’t be, like, down in the basement together, but that would apply to any boy her age or older. I don’t see why they couldn’t have a tame little date like a movie and ice cream, or a school dance, if there are any at that grade level.
And that’s another thing…boy/girl pairings get stepped up when school activities acknowledge that there might be couples. And when kids get to the confirmation/mitzvah phase. I remember that at my school, that was the acid test. If a guy agreed to be your date for your confirmation or mitzvah, it was official. If he didn’t, then he didn’t think enough of you, and phooey on him. Anyway, I think that without these constructs, kids would be getting off the dime at a later age.
When I was 12 I still thought you couyld get pregnant by kissing. That was 1972. I guess things have changed.
Feel free not to do the math , as I wish to be 29 as many decades as I possibly can.
Still more evidence for the theory that somebody is doing a lot more than kissing at the age of twelve or so: My cousin’s sister-in-law is about to become a grandmother at the ripe old age of 27.
The woman in question (who was, incidentally, born when her own mother was 14) got pregnant when we were in seventh grade, and now her 13-year-old is pregnant. To recap the new family statistics, we’ll have a mom, aged 13; a grandmother, aged 27; and a great-grandmother, aged 40.
Does anybody still think we should wait till middle school to start teaching kids about sex and contraception?
