1 Ok, cool. 1. Not a problem for most Asian men then. Seeing our average schlong size is actually rather schlort (4", pretty much). See? Size does matter, and Small Is Beautiful! 2. Not all virgins use pr0n. I'm fairly certain my sister was against it, and her husband's not complaining... (by heaven, he's in his 40s!) 3. I dunno about you, Attila, but the rubbing the dickhead thing? Pure gold. I get all tingly shivers just thinking about it. 4. Em. OK. What I'm actually trying to say, Attila, is that these are issues that could potentially come up in any marriage regardless of *ahem* "experience". I mean, you wouldn't know (from the man's perspective) your wife's vagina was too damned tight until you went at it for the first time, for instance. Isn't it better to experiment *together*? Knowing that you will never be compared to anybody else because there *wasn't* anybody else. Knowing that your commitment to each other doesn't have an escape clause or a 'Plan B' built-in right from the start. Knowing that your spouse learnt how to please you from learning how to please *you* and no one else. Being secure in your sexual knowledge and experience within the holy bonds of matrimony. I think that outweighs anything you've thrown out at us so far. But of course, if you simply mean boinking your fiancee, or to-be bride in the changing room or the night before, well, that's a whole 'nother story and something I can fall in line with. That, or practicing on a relative. The closer the better. /never said I wasn't a perverted deviant. //Joking. Mostly. ///Ever seen my cousins? Some of them VERY hot hot hot! ////Especially the Eurasian ones. Holy crap!

2 Gregory: I love you. Forever.

3 Sexual incompatibility? In something as basic as "Insert Schlong A into Tw-er-Slot B"? Yes. It is a little more complex than it appears. Of course, not having experience in the matter, you're forgiven. In addition to LMA's nuggets of incompatibility, there's always the he's a 3 times a day guy, she's a once a month girl. And that equation can be quite reversable, and I think to most men that is a troubling prospect. A real nymphomanic isn't nearly as much fun as she might seem. And personally, I wouldn't bed virgin. Too much drama.

4 The obvious problem with "wait till you're married" is lots of people getting into inappropriate marriages just so they can get some sex. Surely this used to happen a lot. Sexual compatability is largely about frequency--how often does he/she want it? Problem is, you can't judge this from before-marriage sex experience, because people change too much. Especially women--a woman at 25 and the same woman at 45 are almost two different species. However much she likes sex (and other fun stuff) at 25, there's a pretty good chance that by 45 she's going to be more into recreational shopping. It would be great if there was a good way to tell in advance.

5 Past performance is not an indicator of future expectations. The complaints I've heard from my married friends--at least the one's that I've been close enough with to talk about such things-always have to do with misrepresentation in the years leading up to the marriage. "She confessed to me, after living together for two years, that she secretly thinks a lot about sex, more than any other woman she knows. So much more that she never told anyone, except me. She said that if she doesn't have sex three times a week, she doesn't feel right. Right after the honeymoon, I see things are different. She's always coming up with reasons not to have sex. I keep trying to get her to talk about it. After a few months, she tells me that she was just telling me what I wanted to hear. Plus, that makes her the better person--thinking of me and trying to make me happy. She launches in to her monthly cycle and how it leaves only a couple of days per month that she would even be interested in having sex. And how she was pissed at me in the last few months on those days. Now after five years we sometimes joke about getting lucky on New Year's Eve. On her or my birthday too, to keep from exaggerating. No joke." I've gotten similar stories from other men-- and one woman who I was close to at work for a few years before she got married. (She was newly engaged when I first met her). The day she got back from her honeymoon, I asked her how it went and she closed my door and told me it was a nightmare. When they got to the hotel, he announced that his mother and sisters had been giving him advice how to act during their engagement and that "It wasn't him. And that BS is going to stop NOW!"

6 Well, at 46 I've calmed down to the "nympho" level . . .

7 I think part of the point of these ceremonial pledges or pseudo-marriages between fathers and virginal daughters is that it defines sex as bad if done for pleasure. When done within marriage, to make babies, or solely to enhance emotional intimacy, it's then (barely) tolerable. I'm not knocking the intimacy -- in fact, I think that's the main thing -- but it shouldn't be ok for it not to be fun for the girl. It shouldn't be "normal" or virtuous for it not to be fun for the girl. And the girl shouldn't belong to her daddy quite so much. Ain't healthy! This patriarchal nonsense has to go! Such attitudes are also crippling for the men who buy into them. My husband was a virgin until we met; he was 23. And he never really did catch on. Too late, too shy, too uptight about the whole thing. So I had to kill him. I also see the far-religious-right talking about the terrible sin of "deliberate childlessness," which they regard as an offense against God (using birth control and also failing to produce new members of the faith) and as an offense against country (failing to produce new, hopefully white, citizens). Very disturbing! Very Handmaid's Tale. We are in creepy creepy times. And anyone who wants to reduce sex ed or limit access to birth control or even abortion (which I regard as a last resort, not a good option) is very very dangerous.

8 I think a lot of Christians--a lot of Catholics, even--would say that sex is there partly to strengthen the marital bond, and that it was meant to involve pleasure. My understanding about the argument that childlessness can be an expression of selfishness is that it is harder for the values of Classical Liberalism to endure while the populations of those countries that know them best go down--and while the populations of areas/nations that do not believe in, e.g., separation of church and State--continue to go up. And I don't even know whether I think Western Europe has the same take on civil liberties that Americans do: without the Bill of Rights, and a belief that self-defense is a human right, it appears easy for some democracies to lose their way. I think we're really lucky to have the Bill of Rights to remind us that certain freedoms are foundational. And while I am nominally pro-choice, I cannot see equating birth control and abortion. Birth control empowers women and families to concentrate on fewer children and give them more advantages; lack of access to same can impoverish families, giving them too many mouths to feed with too little money. To suggest that abortion is somehow equivalent to birth control is . . . icky. That's ending a life, and nothing to fool around with: there are women who are scarred for life from being pressured into abortions. It's one thing to say "the procedure should be legal, as a fail-safe." It is another thing to elevate this into The Most Important Issue of the Day, and be unable to cooperate politically with those who see the issue differently.

9 "...how much control women have over their own bodies,..." Rin, I absolutely agree! In fact, I think this is (or should be) true for everyone! Every moment you live, until the moment you die, you should be able to dictate what you do (or others do) with your body and nobody else, unless you sign over power of attorney; man, woman, boy, girl, fetus, embryo, zygote... But never mind. Do you know that there are governmental forces at work now that are forcing us to eat healthful food? Stopping construction of fast food joints, banning transfats, all that sort of thing. What are your thoughts - after all, it's my body and I should be able to control what goes in as much as what comes out. Perhaps we can adapt the infamous 'Castle Doctrine' for the individual, rather than the property. It does seem to me weird that pro-abortion advocates are often anti-self-defence in other ways... I'm Chinese, and a minority in my own country. Can I be religionist and say I sure as heck don't need the Muslims outbreeding my kind? And anyway, if you had a bunch of people who spoke German, were Lutheran, wore German clothing, had completely German names and otherwise fitted into German society, for instance, I doubt most Germans would care if they had four heads and orange scales. It's not racist at all to discriminate against cultures and religions; only against race.