What do we know about teen parents? Take a moment to make a mental list (or, if you’re motivated to get out a pen and paper, I won’t stop you) of all the facts and statistics you’ve heard.

In case you’re coming up short, I’ll give you a few:

• Most teen parents drop out of high school.
• Only 2% of teen parents will graduate from college by age 30.
• Many teen parents will end up on welfare, costing tax payers billions of dollars nationwide.
• The children of teen parents are more likely to fail a grade in school. Their sons are more likely to go to jail. Their daughters are more likely to become teen mothers themselves.
• The relationships of teen parents almost always fail, leaving teen mothers to be single parents.

You can read more here or here or here or watch any episode of 16 and Pregnant that features Dr. Drew. He’ll usually cover most of these points before the hour is up – while interviewing young people who are actually parenting.

Beyond these “facts”, we hear plenty of othe...

I cannot stand this show. No sense in being shy about it, because this is a bias I cannot hide, as will be apparent in nanoseconds.

If I had anything even remotely decent or interesting to say about it, I would have blogged it before now. But every single blog post I have even started to think about writing in the past about it had the same title every single time, one composed entirely of profanity except for the articles of speech linking all my four-letter words together.

Summaries and commentaries that read like these do not balanced critical commentary make:

• "Parade of nonstop clichéd stereotypes! Night of one thousand -isms! All stereotypes encouraged and welcomed to march proudly on Monday! Heart-of-gold hookers! Sexually compulsive foster children and abuse survivors! Slutty latinas! Dry, unemotional Asians! Lady who doesn't know who the baby daddy is! Hypocritical evangelical girl! Hair-pluggin', affair-havin' mid-life crisis guy! Badly-behaved developmentally disabled pe...

Are you in an interracial relationship? Do you have the hots for someone of another race? Attraction is all well and good until someone gets targeted for their race. Here’s the scoop: attraction is different than fetishism. People can have fetishes about all kinds of objects and acts, which can be part of a normal, healthy sexuality. Fetishes about people—particularly about specific races—are more complex than having a fetish about feet or breastfeeding, for example. Let me give my distinction between attraction to those of a certain race and fetish. Attraction is finding a person beautiful or sexy, part of which may be their race. A fetish is finding an object (or a huge, diverse category that someone perceives as an object, like say, race for example) sexy. The key here is looking at the whole person, not how their racialized characteristics fit into your preconceived expectations of them, and seeing that person as a person, not as an object.

Another distinction is that fetishes are...

In Bodaciously Bad Advice, a new regularly updated feature at Scarleteen, I look at some of the dating advice articles from glamour magazines and around the web. I find that most of these advice articles are heterocentric and endorse many gender stereotypes, in addition to just being really crappy dating advice. In deconstructing the articles, I hope to help you, the reader, see them for what they really are and learn to apply these skills of critical observation and thinking to other areas.