This snappy two-minute video recap of NOM's bus tour stop in Maryland reveals a clever new twist on the hetero marriage defense: "We're asked to believe that a mother, a biological mother, will have no problem sharing the care of her child with another woman!" one speaker announces at the rally. "Moms, do you believe that?" (They do not!) Sure, NOM can understand two women loving each other and wanting to spend their lives together. But once it's time for the couple to share in the child-rearing, the biological mother's jealousy will ultimately destroy them both—along with every American family? That's just science.

In Jennifer Senior's New York Magazine piece on recent research into the joylessness of parenting, Senior recalls a time when her beloved 2-year-old son dismantled a wooden garage then proceeded to chuck the wooden planks at her head, leading Senior to turn to booze. But does it make her happy?

Signs point to no! According to Senior, "a wide variety of academic research shows that parents are not happier than their childless peers, and in many cases are less so." Duh, right? While joyless parenting may constitute a newfangled field of research, that whole joyless motherhood thing has been racking up its share of anecdotal evidence for quite some time. In the Atlantic, Sady Doyle recounts 60 years of its horrors: Simone de Beauvoir's observation that "the child is merely harassing and bothersome"; Adrienne Rich's assertion that children cause "the most exquisite suffering"; Mary McCarthy's fictional mother feeling that, "to her shame, [the baby] was a piece of hospital property that had been dumped on her and abandoned—they would never come to take him away."

Feeling soulless yet? What this edition of Sexist Beatdown needs is a couple of fancy-free non-parents who have not yet been trampled by the misery of child-rearing! So join Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I as we discuss the Stockholm syndrome of baby-making, the luxuries of upper-class depression, and the quiet despair we are told we will forever regret not having!

SADY: Hello, fellow non-parent! Enjoying your non-parental non-miserable lifestyle yet? Because I sure am!

AMANDA: God, I am too. I plan on enjoying it until I have children too late in life, at which point memories of my blissful childless years will only contribute to my ultimate unhappiness.

SADY: If only we were all having children immediately after leaving our parents' homes! Surely this would alleviate our misery. Also, it would help if we were not so rich and successful. This makes it harder for us, unlike the lower classes and immigrants, who simply take these bodily matters of procreation in stride. POOR PEOPLE: Not at all subject to undue stress in the matter of having kids!

AMANDA: Indeed. It is so very taxing to have the time to dote over our own happiness.

SADY: The thing is, I don't think that the news that raising children can be stressful IS NEWS. Like 74% of second-wave feminists were talking about how grueling it is to raise children, and/or to have that as your primary responsibility.

AMANDA: Haha. And now that it's shared, people are suddenly all like, "Should we even be doing this?"

SADY: Right? Like, "wow. It turns out this is HARD. Who knew?

AMANDA: "Who" indeed! I do find these studies of happiness interesting, but I find it strange that people are looking for some sort of definitive answer from them: Like, Everyone procreate! Or, Condoms!

SADY: Right. I mean: "Happiness Studies," in and of itself, which I hear is actually a growing field, is strange. We can measure what makes people happy or unhappy, but ultimately I guess I'm with Senior on this point: Are we questioning what role "happiness" plays in our life choices? I mean, I have recently come to feel that I might not want kids, but this has to do with the fact that I am (a) poor, and (b) high-strung. I can't get a dog without Googling care instructions obsessively and researching what sort of terrible ailments might wind up killing it. But was "happiness" what people had children for, ever, anyway? Maybe the issue isn't that "parenting has changed"—because it seems to have changed most fundamentally in terms of who has to do it—but that we EXPECT "happiness" from popping one out in a way we didn't use to.

AMANDA: Right. I think the happiness part is some new-agey conception of raising children. It's important to remember that joy aside, the fact is that now a lot of people get to choose whether they have children or not, and if so, when. And so it becomes much more of a quality-of-life question than a biological-necessity one. And so I think it's fair to expect that you do the thing that you think will make you the happiest. But there's also a lot of fear-mongering about that, because of that whole ovary-loss thing. So people are like, "If you don't have kids now, you will never be happy and you'll regret it for the rest of your life!" And people on the other end are like, "Once you pop it out, there's no turning back! Life-ruiner!" When, actually, I bet that a lot of people could find meaningful, happy lives doing either of those things.

SADY: Yeah. I mean, women are so, so frequently scared out of, like, LIVING, or doing anything other than having children ASAP, because they're told that their fertility is evaporating and they'll be unhappy forever if they don't have babies. And I think it's worth noting that a ton of the parents interviewed, who were speaking most directly about being unhappy and frustrated, were women. Men in that article were mostly "experts," even if they were also fathers.

AMANDA: Right, I think there is some stat in there that women are on the whole less happy. Which, you know, probably has something to do with that whole "shared parenting" thing not being completely shared, and the general added expectations placed on mothers. One of my favorite parts of the story was the suggestion that you "always regret the things you didn't do, not the things you did do." Like, why does the "thing I do" have to be having babies? There are plenty of things I won't be doing if I end up having kids.

SADY: Haha, yeah. "I will never regret not having children, when I die because my child threw boards at me and one of them had a nail in it and it punctured my skull and killed me." But I'm also wondering if being told that children are the KEY TO HAPPINESS (if you are a woman) has to do with the disappointment (among women) that children don't auto-fulfill you? I mean, Simone de Beauvoir talked about this. Her whole deal was that women are told having children will fulfill them, and then it doesn't, and then they hate their children. Her solution: Make something else in your life more important than getting pregnant?

AMANDA: But there's nothing more important than hating your kids! If you never do that, you will regret it for the rest of your life!

SADY: It's true. You'll never regret hating your kids as much as you'll regret not hating them. It is fun to think about fathers in all this, though. I mean, I like to imagine they're at least MARGINALLY more involved in dealing with the poop and the breaking things and the eighteen years of college prep these kids are all being put through now.

AMANDA: Right. The story did mention that the most unhappy parents of all were those who were the non-custodial parent (mostly fathers). So having a kid and not raising it? Depressed for life. Having a kid and raising it too much? Also depressed—single parents and moms in general were less happy. Solution: Move to Norway?

SADY: Right. I, predictably, DID enjoy the part where they were all like, "maybe if we had state-sponsored child care?" "Also, longer maternity leave helps?" Like: All of these things that feminists are advocating FOR WOMEN would actually make parents' lives easier, in the long run. OR, you could just live a life of heedless wanton non-impregnated self-satisfaction. Until you die, and there is no-one who will visit you at the nursing home. Except for that one robot seal thing.

AMANDA: Right. I mean, is that the whole point of it? That someone will be there to care when I die? That seems to be the last-ditch explanation when I press people on why this is necessary. I'm guessing it's more like a Stockholm syndrome thing.

SADY: Yeah. Probably. We love our tiny oppressors!

AMANDA: The baby captors stole our happiness! Join us!

Photo via Smithsonian Institution

ABC's LOST—spoiler alert!—is a television program set upon a mysterious tropical island marked by strange electromagnetic properties, hot-weather polar bears, smoke monsters, time travel, reincarnation, hippies, and nuclear experimentation. Somehow, though, gender relations on the island remain largely unaffected!

Several of LOST's female characters have been on a slow march toward wifey since the series' inception. My colleague Sady Doyle encapsulated the lady-half of the series thusly:

Claire’s most interesting story line was having a baby and a boyfriend. Sun’s most interesting storyline is having a husband and a baby. Kate’s most interesting story line is having two potential boyfriends, between whom she cannot choose, and also a baby eventually. Juliet’s most important storyline was that her boyfriend might have thought for 1.5 seconds about liking another girl so she had to fall down a mine shaft and explode three times on screen.

The trend continued in the series' penultimate episode. Guess what? It's job interview time on LOST! And when sleepy-eyed island guardian Jacob convenes the surviving members of his "candidate" pool he had chosen to replace him, he finally explains one of the enduring mystery of the series—why are all the surviving "candidates" totally guys?

Let's find out!

Jacob explains why he scribbled a bunch of names in a cave and then systematically crossed them out until he found the right person to take over his position—if he didn't, everybody ever would die! So anyway, at last count, the five remaining un-crossed-out candidates for the job of protecting the entire world from evil were James "Sawyer" Ford, Jack Shepard, Hugo "Hurley" Reyes, Sayid Jarrah, and either Sun or Jin Kwon (now we know that the candidate was almost certainly Jin—more on that in a second). Then, Sayid and the Kwons died, leaving an all-dude cast of Sawyer, Hurley, and Jack to duke it out.

So then Kate is like, "Why did you cross my name off the wall?"

And Jacob, to his credit, is franker than most biased interviewers! "Because you became a mother," he admitted. "It's just a line of chalk in the cave, the job is yours if you want it." That's right: Kate just got mommy-tracked! For the job of saving the world from evil by preventing a half-human-half-smoke entity from leaving this tropical island divorced from time. Funny how the laws of physics don't apply here, but gender roles are still holding steady.

And then Kate—who traveled back to polar bear island for the express purpose of not being a mommy anymore, and returning her accidental foster baby to biological mother Claire (long story)—is like, "oh, fuck."

Hey! Guess which of the remaining candidates was also a parent?

* Jin Kwon: Dad. Since Jin's wife Sun was a mother, we can assume that Jacob nixed her from the candidate pool as well, meaning that Jin was the Kwon still in the running. Sun had raised her daughter alone while Jin was lost in time for a while, so he had never even seen his only daughter; he had spent the last several years trying to find a way back to his family. Of course he would be interested in taking this thankless desert island job that would have alienate him from them forever!

* James "Sawyer" Ford: Dad. Back in the real world, Sawyer inseminated a woman he was attempting to swindle out of some money. Sawyer has also never met his progeny, daughter Clementine, but he did throw her some anonymous cash at some point. Awww.

* Jack Shepard: Daddy! When Kate and Jack left the island with Claire's baby, he took on fathering duties for the displaced kid. Then Jack grew a beard, got addicted to pills, and abandoned his foster child to go back on another zany island adventure. Sounds like a capable protector of all human life to me!

But none of them are mommies, so—hey—would they like a job?

DEAR ABBY: My 12-year-old daughter, "Jenna," is in the closet—literally. About a week ago, she moved into her closet. She put her dresser in there, threw some blankets on the floor and that's where she hangs out now. When asked why she doesn't hang out in her room, she says, "I just like it in the closet."Some of her girlfriends claim to be bisexual or gay. Is she telling me that she's "in the closet" or is she messing with my mind? Some of her friends are into cutting, and Jenna seems to be curious about it. I don't know what to make of any of this. Any advice?

I, too, am concerned.

I am concerned at the apparent expansiveness of this 12-year-old's closet. Perhaps she is attempting to tell her mother, "If I can lug my dresser in here and I've still got plenty of floor space, my closet is too large."

I am also concerned that Concerned thinks her kid's new hang-out spot could only possibly signify: (a) an overly literal gesture of lesbianism; or (b) a mind game meant to mess with mom. (Although from where I'm standing, both of these possibilities sound kind of awesome. Kudos for creativity, Jenna!). But perhaps she just likes it in the closet.

Abigail Van Buren, for one, is concerned that Jenna does like it in the closet—and her new hang-out spot could signify a predilection toward darkness:

DEAR CONCERNED: How close are you and your daughter? Are you the kind of mother she feels safe talking to about anything that might be troubling her?

Happy, outgoing girls don't usually take refuge in dark, confined spaces. She may be overwhelmed or depressed, or something may be going on in Jenna's life she needs help with but is afraid to tell you. Stay closer to your daughter for a while. If her change in behavior persists, keep probing until you find out what's going on.

Cutting can be an attempt to mask emotional pain, and if she starts, a licensed psychotherapist should be consulted.

While I am amused at the fact that Van Buren has discarded the "secret lesbianism" possibility without discussion, I have to disagree with her assessment here. I'm not a parenting expert, but I did spend a great deal of time hanging out in my closet when I was a kid. My literal closet. I'd also build forts in my room. And in the back yard. And in the dark, confined space under the stairs. It sounds like Jenna is a kid who wants a place to herself, and "probing" her about that perfectly normal behavior will only reinforce  the idea that ohmygodyouthinkeverythingIdoiswrongmomIjustLIKEITINTHECLOSETTTT! Is Jenna hanging out in closets and feeling out her sexual identity? Relax. Is she cutting? Time to get "concerned."

Among them: Punching, hitting, kicking, slamming kids into walls, holding kids down, death threats, graphic plans to carry out gun violence, threats to stab another kid in the eye with a pencil, and forming a "kill a classmate club." At school. In the second grade. According to the MCPS parent, the abuse was also sexual: "there was genital groping and there were unwanted sexual nicknames," she told WTOP.

The mother told WTOP that she reported the abuse to College Gardens staff, but says her concerns were shrugged off:

She went to officials at College Gardens Elementary School with her concerns.

"We were brushed off. They met with the boy that was accused. He denied it, and it went away. They said it didn't happen."

But she contacted other parents.

"And I simply said to them, 'Did your child report anything unusual on this date?' And I got back a fistful of responses."

Sound familiar? This is what many adult women—women who graduated the second grade decades ago—experience on a regular basis. They are sexually assaulted; they say something; the accusation is denied; it goes away.

Of course, this second-grade alleged offender—likely a 7- or 8-year-old boy—can't be held solely responsible for groping another child's genitals. No: That boy has been raised in a system where this is okay. When the groper is a second-grader, he is, indeed, "too young to know better." But that impulse to excuse away the groper's actions doesn't stop with second-grade offenders.

No one could argue that a second-grade girl was "asking" to getting groped. But as groping victims get older, commentators get more and more comfortable shifting the responsibility for preventing sexual assault to the victim—telling her that she shouldn't have gotten drunk, shouldn't have stood in the pit at a concert, shouldn't have worn a skirt, or shouldn't have gone to a bar and sat facing the bar like any normal patron. When groping incidents occur in bars and rock shows and workplaces, the implicit message is that women don't belong in these traditionally male spaces, and they deserve what's coming to them if they enter them.

In this latest case, it looks like these messages are being sent to girls as young as 7 for having the gall to show up to elementary school. The good news is that some media outlets and law enforcement agencies are taking this seriously, even if the school  allegedly failed to act on the complaint—the concerned mother ultimately secured a restraining order against the offending second-grader.

I would love nothing more than to write an insightful article about healthcare reform, but I'm dumb now. Anything I write relating to healthcare would end up as a screed about why my children have to take a back seat on getting their flu shots to a bunch of kids with “respiratory disorders.” Why are kids who can't breathe right so much more important than my own kids? My kids love to breathe, and they're good at it, and they should be rewarded for their aptitude in breathing. But I digress.

Traister should be commended for managing to pen a quite intelligent essay about how stupid he has become. But after generations of women have sacrificed their private intellectual lives for the purpose of child-rearing, why has it taken a stay-at-home-dad to articulate this?

Traister touches on that point in the opening of his essay:

I don't know if parenting makes you chronically stupid or just temporarily slow, but after nearly four years of child rearing, most of them spent as a stay-at-home dad, my intellect has been dulled to a nub. Women have known this for generations. Maybe that's why the "stay at home vs. get out and work" debate is so contentious. Of course, I've never heard anyone talk about it. But maybe I just wasn't paying attention until now. All I know is, while my wit may never have cut with the precision of a Ginsu blade, my mind was a bit sharper than the rusty pair of kindergarten safety scissors I'm working with these days.

I wonder why Traister has never heard and/or paid attention to anyone talk about this before? I imagine that when women have written and spoken about this, it's been considered a "women's issue," and therefore not something that would necessarily emerge on Traister's radar. There's a reason that Traister's story is considered a more general-interest piece: A woman's intellectual talents just aren't publicly valued in the same way a man's are. Who cares if you're losing your mind if there wasn't much value there to begin with?

Nowadays, most people don't have a problem accepting women as intelligent. Career women are certainly celebrated for their braininess in their chosen fields. But when it comes to baby-making, a woman's intellectual contributions have got competition—they must be weighed against her perceived innate talent for child-rearing. When a woman chooses to abandon her career in order to raise kids, the loss to the world of ideas is balanced against the valuable nurturing she'll provide to future generations. (Women who have always been on the mommy track, of course, are never assumed to have any brains to lose).

Not so for men, whose intellectual lives are assumed to outweigh their worth as readers of monosyllabic storybooks and preventer of babies swallowing small toys. Stay-at-home-dads are still seen as the exception rather than the rule. (Of course, our refusal to see men as nurturers isn't fair, either).

Were Traister's piece written by a woman, I imagine the following would be different:

a) She would have to work harder to prove that she had a valuable intellectual life in the first place;

b) She would be required to insert the appropriate number of caveats about how much she really, truly loves her children, even though they are making her dumb, and wouldn't trade her full-time mom job for anything;

c) A portion of the backlash would be centered on her failure as a woman.

As it stands, Traister's article has gotten its share of negative responses—but none that I can see which single out Traister's failure as a man (just as a parent and writer). But it's also received dozens of grateful letters from SAHMs (that's Stay-At-Home-Moms) who are happy to see another parent write frankly about his newfound inability to think normal adult-person thoughts. Obviously, Traister is exaggerating a bit—his life as a stay-at-home-dad hasn't made him too dumb to write a coherent essay about his discomfort with parenting's brain rot. But the question remains—why are more women expected to fight the slow atrophy of their intellect than men are?

Bad news, parents: YOUR BABY IS PROBABLY A RACIST, and that means that you've got a whoooole lot of explaining to do. According to a Newsweek cover story, studies show that children as young as six months old "judge people based on skin color." And children as old as six years old will refuse to accept the possibility of a black Santa—but will eventually concede that "black Santa could fill in for White Santa if he was hurt." White people: Why are your widdle babies so racist?

a)  My kid isn't racist: We watch Sesame Street, and there are some very, very diverse Muppets on that program.

b) SHHHH! Don't say the R-A-C-E word around Jimmy! Everybody's equal, Jimmy. I'll explain that vague sentiment when you're older.

c)  Mall Santas.

d) As Sady of Tiger Beatdown and Amanda of the Sexist discussed in this week's edition of Sexist Beatdown: Uhh, maybe Newsweek is kind of exaggerating about the whole racist baby thing, since the real problem appears to be progressive hippie parents scared shitless about even raising the issue of race with their children. Okay, also mall Santas.

AMANDA: hey, racist baby.

SADY: hey there!

AMANDA: are you ready to discuss how modern equality-minded parents have all taken to blaming their latent racism on their impressionable young children?

SADY: ha, yes. the babies, they are all RACISTS! sort of. first of all, i think the very RACIST BABY tagline is kind of hilariously off, in that the actual "children as young as 6 months old discriminate on the basis of skin color" thing is, apparently, literally wrong. what children as young as 6 months old do is look longer at photos of people who are not the same race as their parents, according to the article. but, you know, that is not SENSATIONAL. so let's just imply with our headline that six-month-old white babies are already full of societally determined anger and hate.

AMANDA: but, importantly, it is also The Longer Gaze at People Who Are Not the Race of Their Parents That Shall Not Be Named. since the main parenting tactic unearthed in this story is: as long as I never mention race or racism, my child will come out unracist. to the point that some ostensibly nonracist parents DROPPED OUT OF THE STUDY when they found out they would be forced to discuss race with their children. "not under my roof."

SADY: yeah, exactly. and the result, apparently, IS that the four and five-year-olds end up with pretty fucked-up ideas about race.

AMANDA: and also, hilariously, report that they think their parents are racists, too

SADY: right. "do your parents like black people?" and 14% are like, "nope!" which makes sense, if the kids are getting shushed every time they ask about the existence of race. (1) They get the sense that race is a forbidden topic, and maybe therefore a Bad one, and may project their parents' fears of race discussion onto people of different races, concluding that THEY'RE what the parents are scared of. (Behold my extrapolation of in-no-way-expert conclusions!) (2) If you don't have someone TALKING about race, and pointing out the existence of racism and why it's bad, you're just left to soak up all the messed-up cultural stereotypes and racism like a little kindergarten-enrolled sponge.

AMANDA: yeah, and I think this points to a lot of the assumptions that these parents have about their children for no apparent reason. like Chris Brown's mom expressing shock that her child attacked his girlfriend, when that kind of thing was in the home and probably not addressed in any significant way. or parents insisting that their child would never rape someone, even though they failed to bring up in sex in any conversation. and I think this also goes back to the fear that, like, if you talk to boys about preventing rape, you somehow magically turn them rapists through the expectations you've laid out.

SADY: right. well, i think a lot of it is also the nature-vs.-culture thing, and this messed-up expectation we have that kids are inherently pure of all culture. like: if you never MENTION injustices, your kids won't be aware of them, and then they will somehow progress into childhood without ever noticing that people are treated differently and drawing their own conclusions about that! whereas the fact is that a large part of childhood is not only learning what your parents and teachers explicitly, verbally teach you, but getting socialized and learning to reflect the norms around you.

AMANDA: and it's such an obvious cop-out when you just state it like that. "I thought if I never MENTIONED why Santa was always white, my children would never shun the black Santa that entered their classroom." It doesn't make any sense! and so the burden of talking about this shit lies on the groups who are going to be most affected by it, which is why minority families talked about discrimination with their kids, and why girls get a shitload of advice on how not to get themselves raped.

SADY: right. exactly. it's about the comfort of privilege. like: kids who experience discrimination, on any level, are going to naturally bring it up with their parents, and parents are going to be more responsive to that. like, i think i was four years old when i first asked my parents why some people said certain things were not for girls, and why boys wouldn't let me do those things. (the things in question were pretending to be the Ninja Turtles* and/or soccer, but still, I THINK MY POINT HOLDS.) but if you ARE privileged, and you never directly experience discrimination, and all you have are these vague messages that certain aspects of your life (like, say, your race) are Not To Be Talked About, you're of course going to grow up completely blind to your own privilege and also unreflectively participating in it.

AMANDA: yeah, and another interesting thing that separates race from gender is that, if you're a girl, and you play the best fucking Raphael on the block, boys on your street may have the opportunity to recognize that and understand that girls can play Ninja Turtles. but if you think that Hispanic kids can't play Ninja Turtles – stay with me here – and you don't have any Hispanic kids on your block, you may grow up always assuming that Hispanic kids are shitty at impersonating superhero mutant sewer denizens. and that injustice cannot stand. so while gender becomes problematic through constantly reinforced roles, the problem with race is that there's sometimes just a vacuum.

SADY: right. the article does, to some level, address what happens in diverse schools. because the thought was, if kids are not raised in these mono-racial environments, they'll associate across races more and be less likely to make judgments based on race. but, nope! what happens, more often than not, is that even within a diverse environment like a school, kids only hang out with or form relationships with people of their own races. and that's complicated; i mean, i imagine that there are white kids having all-white friend groups because their parents are uncomfortable with dealing with non-white people and they're consequently uncomfortable with it as well. but i imagine there are also kids of color who are like, "oh, God, i do not want to deal with the white kids that are clueless and/or hurtful about race, i cannot educate anyone in the lunch room today, i just want to have my peanut butter sandwich and chocolate milk in peace."

AMANDA: and the interesting thing is that kids are pretty ready to accept it—to the point that when they watch a multicultural Sesame Street episode, they do not notice the message enough for it to change their habits. Santa, apparently, is untouchable, though.**

SADY: ha, yes. "even the little girl the most adamant that the Real Santa must be white came around to accept the possibility that a black Santa could fill in for White Santa if he was hurt."

AMANDA: Christmas is even more racist than babies are

SADY: I'm dreaming of a non-exclusively-white Christmas, myself.

* Incorrect! There were no Ninja Turtles when Sady was four. There were, however, Ghostbusters. And Sady was not allowed to play. NOT EVEN AS JEANINE.

** Upon further reflection, I can totally understand why some white kids would not accept a black Santa. To adults, Santa is just whoever puts on the suit, and there's no reason a black dude can't put on the suit. To children, Santa is one real dude who becomes very important to their well-being each December. And for their whole lives, they'd seen that dude reproduced in malls, on television, and in storybooks as the same rosy-cheeked white dude. At that point, it's against that kid's best interest to accept that Santa could be black. Because if Santa could be black, that means there is more than one dude being Santa. And if there's more than one dude being Santa, that means that Santa isn't really real. And once you acknowledge to yourself and your immediate family that Santa isn't really real, there's always the fear that the presents will stop mysteriously dropping through the chimney. The only way to circumvent the racism of Christmas, in my opinion, is to introduce black Santa to children at a very early age,

Photo by soulchristmas

(a) A father who films his hilariously drugged-up child after a doctor's visit:

[youtube:v=txqiwrbYGrs]
"David After Dentist"

(b) Or a hipster music video depicting a screaming child dodging scary monsters without the help of his unresponsive mother:

[youtube:v=J7oNouvi0xI]
MGMT's music video for "Kids"

Personally, I'd say that forcing your own child to go to the dentist—ughhhhhh—and then filming him totally cracked out on dentist drugs—Daaaaaad!!!—and posting the results to Youtube—YOU ARE SO EMBARRASSING DAD I HATE YOU—is slightly more cruel than subjecting a child actor to a hipster-video-of-horrors. Because, as David's Dad failes to assure his child in the video, "David After Dentist" is, in fact, real life. Meanwhile, MGMT insists that no children were harmed in the video's making.

But at least "David After Dentist" was funny! Less funny is when you actually start marketing t-shirts with your child's image on them referencing the time you forced him to go to the dentist, filmed him totally cracked out on dentist drugs, then posted the results to Youtube. That's not just child cruelty, Dad. That's tacky child cruelty! Perhaps it is Capitalism which is the true monster.

Drumming up a good teen sex scandal for the nightly news ain’t what it used to be. A couple decades ago, a news anchor could scare the shit out of some parents by just turning to the camera and posing a question: “It’s 10 o’clock. Parents, do you know where your children are?”

Nowadays, the advent of e-mail, cell phones, and GPS has ensured that parents always know where their children are. And so, local news reporters have been forced to dig a little deeper than that old rhetorical question for their parental scare tactics. Below, how to engineer a teen sex scandal using only a cell phone, a pair of blue jeans, and a few good "experts."

NBC Washington: “Gossip Site Causing Concern, Controversy in Montgomery County”

Rumors: Is your child spreading them? NBC Washington reports on this concerning new trend, noting that Montgomery County high school students “call each other names, spread rumors, and recently, a former Whitman high school student posted death threats.”

What’s to blame? A dangerous element that lurks, unseen, around us all: the Internet.

Andrew Ship, a high school counselor and “Internet safety expert,” walks solemnly down a high school hallway as he explains to parents the grave dangers of kids spreading rumors. “There’s nobody monitoring this stuff.…There’s no Internet police,” Ship says.

There is no “Internet police,” but there are real police—and like NBC Washington, they’re surfing teen boards, too. NBC reported that cops have “temporarily shut down the Web site twice in the last five months after a photo of a topless underage teen popped up.” Police have since monitored the site for illegal behavior. What the report fails to mention is that the new teenage forum for circulating gossip is actually far more regulated than schoolyard note-passing ever was—now, parents are let in on the notes, too.

In that way, the move from mail to message boards has actually encouraged teen sex scandals: It puts underage improprieties only a Google search away from a local news reporter hard-pressed for a sex story. Now, kids aren’t the only ones who can spread rumors about kids on the Internet!

—

Fox 5: “What Texting Acronyms Are Kids Using?”

Leather: Is your child lusting after it? Last month, Fox 5 D.C. published two stories on its Web site covering a list of online chatroom “codes,” titled “50 Acronyms Parents Should Know.” The acronyms included such standard kiddy fare as “A/S/L” (Age/Sex/Location), “POS” (Parents Over Shoulder), and “FOL” (Fond of Leather). This teen sex scare is constructed of a delicate local news logic: Teens use acronyms on the Internet. Sadomasochistic leather fetishists use acronyms on the Internet. Could your teen be couching his sadomasochistic leather fetishism in intricate abbreviated text-speak?

Even Fox 5 can’t be sure. The first story on the acronym blow-up, published May 23, took a novel approach to the teen sex scandal: reporting the trend while simultaneously debunking it. “Many people who see the list wind up howling with laughter, since many of the terms are completely unknown to most people, teenaged or otherwise,” Fox reports, before blaming “some local TV news reporters” for furthering the scandal.

In the second story, published May 25, “some local TV news reporters”—also from Fox—take a more traditional approach to the trend. “It may be an old list, but it doesn’t change the fact that parents want to decipher what it is their kids are reading and how they’re communicating online,” Fox reported. “Erin Jansen, founder of NetLingo, acknowledges that not all of the terms on the list are used by everyone.”

So, are your kids secret Internet sadomasochistic leather fetishists, or aren’t they? There’s only one way to be sure: Don’t ask them.

Combined, the two stories quoted the following sources: PC Magazine editor Sascha Segan; NetLingo’s Jansen; several Digg commenters; 21-year-old Arizona State University junior Jason Parks.
None of these people are teens. But many did think the list was ridiculous. “It looks like a lot of them come from online sex chat rooms, and not just any chat rooms, but sadomasochistic ones,” Segan said, in the second story.

What does a local news station do when even its adult “experts” won’t help further its teen sex scandal? Remember that a picture can say 1,000 sadomasochistic online acronyms—even if your kids don’t know any of them. Fox paired its overblown warning of youth Internet use with a shot, plucked from Flickr, of three blond-haired children gathered conspiratorially around a laptop. All are several years shy of tweendom—and decades away from serious leather play.

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Fox 5: “Jeans May Cause Tingling Thigh Syndrome.”

Jeans: Are your teens suffering from them? This recent Fox 5 story is a typical “hidden danger of teen trend” piece: This time, wearing fashionably skinny jeans may make your thighs tingle.
If you’ve noticed your teen suffers from a compression of the “lateral femoral cutaneous nerve,” he may have been donning these super-tight, sexy leg coverings—under your own roof. The condition, known as meralgia paresthetica, or “tingling-thigh syndrome,” “usually affects obese people or manual laborers.” Now, numb thighs are beginning to afflict a demographic you actually care about. Tingling-thigh syndrome “is cropping up in younger people,” Fox reports.
How long has this condition been “cropping up” in younger people? Since you, too, were a younger person. “Skinny jeans are not the first pants to cause the condition,” Fox reports. “Super-low-rise jeans, popular in the late ’90s and early 2000s, were linked to meralgia paresthetica; and in the 1970s, there were rumors that snug jeans caused infertility in men and yeast infections in women.”
Older people lucky enough to have escaped sterilization by skinny jeans now have a new set of young denim enthusiasts to worry about. That is, until they reach the end of the story, which completely invalidates its premise. “Salon.com does counter that the condition may not be affecting very many people.”

WJLA-TV: “Sexting: New, Dangerous Teen Trend”

Teens: Do you hate raising them? Published May 15, this teen sex scandal story broke on WJLA-TV a full year after teen “sexting” hit the scare cycle. Sexting, or sending explicit photographs via cell phone, evolved from a centuries-old teenage pastime: creating and sharing nude depictions of sex partners. This tactic preys on society’s weakest—those who think their children are far more difficult to raise than any generation before them.

WJLA-TV works hard to make millennial parents feel sorry for themselves, calling the trend a “new” and “dangerous” “risqué game” that has “invaded middle schools.” According to WJLA-TV, “the phenomenon is raging as wildly as their hormones,” and boy, are modern hormones wilder than ever. This ostensibly local adaptation of the national teen sex trend story is devoid of place, names, or evidence of sexting. Of the 10 12-year-olds surveyed by WJLA-TV’s Julie Parker, half had “heard” of sexting. None had actually sexted.

Thankfully, a couple of anonymous parentals—who declined to stand by their boilerplate shock on the record—provide the necessary outrage. “It’s alarming. They’re not protected,” says one. “It’s really disappointing! It’s hard to be a parent today,” whines another. But not as hard as it is to be a local news reporter in search of underage smut.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

No. NO Not again. Not another "Mr Mom" reference!

Maybe this shit could fly in 1983. I wouldn't know, because at that point, my own Mr. Mom and my regular female Mom hadn't gotten together to shared-parent me yet. But at this point, New York Times—-stop. JUST STOP.

You've informed us that despite the "Mr. Mom" idea you have helped to propagate, "Dads" still outnumber Mr. Moms ("Mr. Mom Aside, Dads at Work Are Still the Norm").

You've asked the eternal question: "But Can Mr. Mom Tie a Ponytail?"

You've even called the guy who wrote in to debunk the idea that only women can be proper parents a "Mr. Mom" ("Mr. Mom Fights Back")! I can't believe you did that, you fucking jerks!

Thankfully, we already have a suitable replacement word for "Mr. Mom." It's called "Dad."

I fear children. Will this ever go away?

You might learn to grudgingly adapt to nieces and nephews through a process of desensitization (if they’re exceptionally cute). But no, the fear is primal, permanent and justified—and it will never go away. That said, it’s astonishing how many child-fearing adults eventually end up as parents. Makes for some crazy kids, who come of age accustomed to lording over their deeply frightened minders.

When a child enters my sphere, how might I attempt to relate to it?

As with a strange dog, it's best to ignore it and avoid eye contact until it submits. Seriously.

Do children find it condescending when adults give them special attention and talk down to them?

No more than alt-weekly journalists feel condescended to when their subjects try to come up with "edgy" answers. But really, in my experience kids are wily beyond belief. And they’ll rise to the occasion, given the opportunity. But like most adults I know, they’re also egomaniacs and can be swayed of any crumb of adoration you toss their way.

As a parent, what is the worst thing that a childless—or child-fearing—person can do when relating to you or your kids?

Smoke. It's impossible to explain to a child why adults would choose to do something bad for them, so we offer implausible explanations that "they don't know it's bad for them." Or-–-and this one is baffling to our four-year-old-–-“they know it’s bad for them but they just don’t care.”

I come across a parent-less small child in the wild—on my sidewalk or in the grocery store. Do I ignore them in order to avoid appearing creepy, or attempt to hang out with them until a guardian returns?

If you’re a woman, you hang out or at least keep an eye on them until a guardian returns. We instruct our children that if they ever get lost to "ask a mommy for help." Men, too, should ask a mommy for help. [Insert lame double entendre here.]

How do I react to an older person who assures me that I will someday "change my mind" about having children? I find this scenario haunting.

The best response I've heard is, "I'm sure I will change my mind, because 'other people wanting me to have children' is the best reason to have them." You have to realize that deep down, breeders are a bit desperate to have you join their club. We don’t want to be alone in this. We don’t want to be taunted by your brazen freedom, the luxuries and ambitions we’ve forsaken to become soccer moms. We need someone to share war stories with. We need carpool buddies. We need empathy. We need you to suffer the indignity of the postpartum muffin top along with us. No matter how much we adore our own children-–-and we do – we've suffered for them. We’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to convince ourselves once and for all that procreating was the right thing to do.

What is the biggest misconception you've found that childless people have about parents?

That we stopped caring about you, your social life, the latest trends, world events, etc. We do care; it's just that we have no time to discuss it because little Wingspan is late for pilates.

Photo of Sarah and Ava by Elizabeth Dranitzke of PHOTOPIA