Whoa ... JDate! Since 1997, the Jewish singles site has given the world tons of Times wedding announcements, inspired plenty of trend pieces, and spawned a bunch of similar dating sites aimed at members of ethnic groups whose parents will disown them if they find love outside the tribe. Personally, I’ve never used it, being both categorically opposed to the idea of socializing only with other Jews and fanatical about proofreading. (Speaking of which, Ml3302, if you’re reading this, you might want to reconsider using the tagline “Disover me.”)

Like a lot of secular Jews, though, I’m kind of fascinated by the way JDate blends Craigslist’s obsessive focus on the bottom line with Nerve’s desperate posturing. So starting today, every Tuesday I’m going to feature a JDate profile of the week.

This can't be a real person...can it?: The JDater known as Babypackwell It was hard to pick just one when confronted with:

• The gay man in giant sunglasses who said “I have a rabbit, she’s a Jew too”
• A woman named Babypackwell (pictured), who I’m 99% sure co-starred with Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl
• The guy who listed one of his interests, unironically, as “discovering new soy products”
• The profile that ended “PLEASE DO NOT BE INTIMATED ... I AM NOT HIGH MAINTANCE !!!!!!!”

But my favorite was CreativeandFun6417, a surprisingly cute 40-year-old music-business entrepreneur from Chicago who described himself as follows:

I'm a perfect cross between Jerry Seinfeld, Ansel Adams, James Bond and a little George Castanza [sic].

In other words, he’s a nebbishy superspy who takes meditative black-and-white pictures of the American West. Ladies, the line forms on the right.

He's got a heart of stone, but he gives good advice: Consulting a statue of Bob Newheart in ChicagoThe first universal rule about advice columns is that the questions are, without fail, more interesting than the answers. The second universal rule about advice columns is that all advice columnists are wrong, always. The third universal rule about advice columns is that Dan Savage is the exception that proves the rule. Welcome to Bad Advice, a weekly column looking at the misguided guidance of the Internet’s agony aunts.

On Slate, Dear Prudence counsels a guy who’s constantly getting dressed down at his office for non-PC behavior (like using the term “girlfriend” to describe his female significant other). Prudie tells him to leave his job and try to find work at “a rap recording studio, an oil rig, or a race-car pit crew.” Hmm ... mean, yet confusing!

Dear Margo, the offspring of Ann Landers, punts it to therapists twice this week. Your fiancé won’t shower? If confronting him doesn’t work, try talking to a mental health professional. Still haunted by the possibility that your wife had an affair? Try cognitive therapy. Of course people with personal problems should seek psychological help—especially if the alternative is writing to a stranger on the Internet—but still: Booooring.

At Salon, lovably incoherent Cary Tennis tells an Internet troll to buy a bicycle. For once, I am in complete agreement with Cary Tennis.

And finally, Dan Savage lays out a Bill of Rights for lovers: If one party doesn’t get to come, neither does the other. So sensible!

Singapore will forever occupy a distinct and sexually enticing place in the minds of many a Gay American. I was only a 4th grader at the time, but I distinctly remember the caning of Michael Fay, who received the brutal punishment for vandalizing some cars with spray paint. To be sure, I'm not a fan of S&M, but there was still something darkly sexual about the whole affair. Mercifully for Fay, the Singaporean president at the time, Ong Teng Cheong, reduced from 6 to 4 the number of times the bamboo stick would strike Fay's 20-year-old ass.

Whatever one thinks of the erotic undertones of being beaten on the behind with a bamboo cane, surely the Singaporean government just turned off a huge potential tourist market by deciding to retain its ban on gay sex. Thankfully, at least for breeders, anal and oral sex is now legal.

The Singaporeans, if anything, are good businessmen. Surely they know about the billions of dollars that are to be made from the gay tourism industry? Here is a very wealthy Asian island city-state frequented by many a businessman and just a hop, skip and a jump from Bangkok, that other sex capital. For a view into gay life in Singapore (where, at least, the leader does not go around proclaiming the non-existence of homos), it's advisable to defer to Sir Ian McKellan, who recently traveled to Singapore to perform King Lear.

Makes one pine for the Headline News of the 90's, when our attentions were drawn to dramas like the football star who murdered his wife, the white trash figure skater who had her nemesis beaten with a pipe, and the distraught lady who cut off her husband's Johnson.

Woody Allen defined the act as “sex with someone I love.” But sometimes you hurt the one you love, and in my case I proved Norman Mailer’s theory that “anybody who spends his adolescence masturbating enters his young adulthood with no sense of being a man.”

Specifically, I entered adulthood with no sense of how to have sex with an actual human female, thanks to Traumatic Masturbatory Syndrome. TMS affects between five and fifteen percent of the male population, according to the TMS-awareness website HealthyStrokes. The effects of TMS are twofold: inorgasmia, the inability to climax (unless the penis is stimulated in the traumatic fashion), and erectile dysfunction. Two-thirds of prone masturbators suffer from the latter even if they’re 70 years younger than former Senator Bob Dole.

Before we proceed, it’s important to note that TMS isn’t entirely accepted in the medical community as a physical affliction; it is a theory that Dr. Lawrence Sank of the Center for Cognitive Therapy postulated in 1998 after studying just four traumatized masturbators. (Wouldn’t “Four Traumatized Masturbators” make a great name for a band?) More research is necessary. That said, my story would indicate that Dr. Sank is right on when it comes to hard-ons.

The first time I had an orgasm, I had no idea what I was doing. I was lying on the floor of the family living room, doing seventh-grade homework, and suddenly my groin started to feel good. So I pushed harder against the carpeting. And harder. And harder. And then I peed my pants, only the pee was tugged out of my urethra.

At least I thought that it was urine. My boxers were soaked with a warm, sticky liquid. My heart was racing, my face was flushed and I was hyperventilating. Why is my pecker so sore after peeing? I wondered. Why did I piss myself when I didn’t need to go?

What lies beneath: Only time can cure a broken dick I stood and limped through the living room, a stab of pain with every footstep.

“Why are you wincing, honey?” my mother asked. “Do you have a headache?”

Mom had guessed correctly, except that it was my southernmost head that ached. I staggered to the bathroom and removed my briefs, dismayed to find that I had ejected gooey, clear piss. I wondered if I should tell Mom to call 911.

I had taken sex education the previous year, so I must have technically known what semen was—although the teacher never detailed its albino yolk-like consistency—but I didn’t put two and two together. I decided against summoning an ambulance, changed into an unsoiled pair of underwear and forgot about the incident.

A few weeks later, however, I was lying face down in bed, trying to sleep before class the next day, and I felt the same pleasant pressure. By instinct I cupped my testicles with my hands, thrust downward into the mattress, and soon ejaculated for the second time. The third time, I used a towel from the linen closet to capture my sticky Semitic seed. (And thus was I united with my jizz rag; it’s a heartwarming saga.)

I never had an older brother to teach me how to masturbate, and I didn’t understand the jerking motion my friends made whenever they referenced the topic. Humping the bed seemed to work fine. But when I finally scored the occasional opportunity to have sex with girls, the effects of this prone method took their toll.

The majority of traumatic masturbators would rather whack off than have sex, as opposed to 80 percent of non-traumatic masturbators (which is still a startlingly low statistic—seriously, guys?), and I soon discovered why.

Because of TMS my penis was moodier than a Dashboard Confessional record. The first time a girl offered to have sex with me—an act of charity that dwarfs anything that Mother Teresa ever accomplished—I couldn’t get it up. This was partly due to nervousness, but mostly due to my traumatic masturbating. “Um… just give me a minute…” I kept pleading, humping the mattress.

Even cowboys get the blues: Smoking makes everything go a bit soggy “Maybe you should drive me home now?” she asked forty-five minutes later, as I sobbed upon her breasts like a little girl who had lost her teddy bear.

The next time a chick offered to defile me, however, I did manage to get it up—only I couldn’t get it down. After a good hour of fucking, I couldn’t finish. She was getting sore and asked if I’d take much longer; ultimately I drove her home with a raging, unsatisfied erection. (Guys assume that it would be great to last forever, but when you can’t actually enjoy the proceedings, the feat of endurance is useless.) When I arrived back at my house, my mattress finally got me off.

This happened the next time I had sex, a month later. I bragged about my superhuman capacity to anyone who would listen but I privately wondered what the hell was wrong with me. Why could I orgasm so easily when I made love to my bed, but mashed these girls’ innards into the raw, stringy consistency of ground beef?

However, by the time I started college, I had the opposite problem: I lasted only a few minutes, and sometimes seconds, during sex. A girl once laughed after my sub-par performance and asked the most dreaded question a man can hear: “That’s it?”

The most shameful incident came in the summer of 2003, when I had the chance to have sex with a lesbian whom no guy had ever penetrated. (If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: Thank Christ for booze.) We were pounding shots. She said that I was cute—which proves that I’m either such a stud that even lesbians can’t resist me, or I look like a pretty woman—and we made our way to a bedroom downstairs. She gave the best head that I’ve ever gotten in my life (she licked my balls like a clitoris, I think), and then confessed that she had always wondered what it’s like to have a man inside her instead of some chick’s fist.

So I slid into her, totally getting off on the fact that I was converting a lesbian, and then I actually got off. I blamed my premature ejaculation on the alcohol, but I knew it was the same problem that had plagued me for years. I just didn’t know what the problem was.

(Fun Factoid: after I had finished filling the lesbian with Man Juice, she said, “I thought it would spray more—like a geyser or something!” Fun Factoid #2: Did you know that only scientists can impregnate lesbians?)

With my next girlfriend I tried those “extended pleasure” condoms with a numbing agent for guys with control issues, except that they made me so desensitized that I couldn’t summon an erection in the first place. By this point, I was terrified of sex—it always meant embarrassment and emasculation.

No humping: The only cure for TMS But salvation came in the form of a Google search for “young male impotence,” or some such thing. I discovered HealthyStrokes.com and realized that I had been my own worst enemy for all those years; I had conditioned my anatomy to only respond to the stimulus of pressure instead of friction. The good news was that TMS is fully reversible. I could save my privates through a journey of sacrifice.

The sacrifice was this: I had to forever give up humping the mattress. At age 20 I had to teach myself how to masturbate all over again. At first it felt foreign and strange, jerking up and down whilst I lay on my back. There was nothing erotic about it; I couldn’t picture myself on top of a woman, and because of my TMS I hadn’t yet had one on top of me during sex. I started to despair; what if I couldn’t fix the problem and recondition my penis? What if I was doomed to a solitary life of self-satisfaction?

But like Senator John McCain, my motto is No Surrender. After a couple unsuccessful tries at whacking it like a normal human male—and subsequent relapses into prone masturbating—I forced myself to jerk it faster, faster, faster, and finally my body responded. It was the best nut-bust of all time because it meant freedom. Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I was free from TMS at last!

I continued to squeeze ‘em off using the time-honored method, and then something happened when I next had sex: I actually had sex. I lasted for a decent amount of time, I enjoyed it. And I climaxed. It was everything that I had always (wet-) dreamed.

However, because I’m faithful to my current girlfriend and therefore cannot have good sex with all the girls whom I’ve disappointed—especially that horny fucking lesbian—I must always live with the shame of knowing that I underperformed for all those years. Things have straightened out, so to speak, but those females will always remember me as a boy—an invalid—instead of a man.

But for all of you budding traumatic masturbators out there, you can avoid my mistakes. You are the future; TMS is scary enough to make you really piss your pants, but you can spare yourselves from years of humiliation and self-doubt if you simply take the time to learn the proper method. The choice isn’t hard, my friends, but you will be.

Vagina Monologues superstar: Dawson • In Virginia, a state delegate has introduced a bill to ban the plastic testicles truckers like to hang from the backs of their big rigs. Ew.

• You know how everyone in the world seems to have given birth to a baby, like yesterday? Turns out we’re in the middle of a baby boomlet.

• New Orleans is the vagina of America, according to Rosario Dawson. The city will host a very special celebrity Vagina Monologues this April.

• Good Magazine’s Huffington Post blog wonders whether the world would be a better place if yuppies lived in communes.

• A flesh-eating MRSA bacteria is plaguing gay men. The good news? Researchers think it can be killed with a proper soap-scrubbing. Mike Huckabee will probably still suggest quarantining the country’s entire gay population to Gitmo, though – just to be safe.

Ugh. It took me exactly two weeks of searching for JDaters of the Week before I had an ethical crisis. Who am I to rain down judgment upon the good people of JDate just because they call themselves things like "Portnoy4U" and adamantly refuse to proofread? If someone dug up my long-retired Nerve profile and mocked it on the Internet, I’d be pretty devastated. (And it’s SO mockable – I’m pretty sure I actually compared myself to Natalie Portman in Garden State. In public. In order to impress boys.)

The feedback I’ve gotten about the column didn’t help much. Readers like it, but my friends and family all seemed ambivalent at best. This weekend a rabbi I know told me he thought it was un-Jewish. “Like lashon hara?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “A lot worse.”

The truth is that the column doesn’t have to be cruel. As it happens, the whole time I was scouring the site last week, my mock JDate profile (you need one to check out the goods) was getting IM’d by a totally cute, totally interesting, totally un-douchey-seeming Manhattan boy. I kept ignoring him, caught up in my quest to find the most ridiculous profiles on the site, but maybe I should have just featured him. Maybe one of you would have sent him a message, and a lovely shidduch would have been made.

So this week, I’m taking a new approach, mitigating the negativity a bit with a three-pronged format. I’m picking one profile that’s good, one profile that, um, needs work, and one profile that represents the most fascinating tribe on JDate—the non-Jews.

The JDate matrix: Welcome to the desert of the realThe good: He’s a twin! He has five little sisters! He says his family life has giving him “Mideast-peace-summit -level negotiating skills and Barack Obama-esque motivational speaking” abilities! You will seriously never be able to have a fight with this guy—no matter how hard you try.

The bad: “Sometimes I feel that I am Neo” is a totally understandable sentiment. We all get a little Keanu sometimes. But it’s generally a good idea to save that kind of revelation for the second date.

The non-Jewish: He recently shattered his knee in a motorcycle crash and quotes Courtney Love on his profile. He says he majored in keg stands and freely admits that he looks like a serial killer in his photo. And I bet that every time a Jewish organization releases a study about the perils of intermarriage, his profile gets another thousand hits.

Previously:
The Guy Who Volunteered
Jerry Seinfeld Meets James Bond

Come on, you know what this guy's thinking: A meydl of the perfect height I am going to ask Dr. Ruth Westheimer, the legendary 79-year-old sex therapist who stands no taller than Frodo Baggins or Yoda the Muppet (four feet, seven inches), if she is the perfect Blowjob Height.

Before I harass the near-octogenarian about whether she can perform oral sex while standing, however, I listen to her November 7 speech at the Museum of the City of New York on the Jewish Daily Forward's "Bintel Brief" column. Forward Web editor Daniel Treiman explains in his introduction that the Brief was the first newspaper advice column, started in 1906 to address the questions of the immigrant Jewish community. Typical questions included how to get a get (Jewish divorce decree), how religious spouses could share a home with nonreligious spouses, and sometimes whether others in the community would adopt babies that poorer families could not support.

The Brief was the Craig's List of its day, and illiterate Jews would often pay professionals to write letters for them. The Forward revived the column as the "Bintel Brief Blog" this year, with Dr. Ruth as the inaugural poster. Yes, Dr. Ruth is Jewish-her parents were "killed by the Nazis" and then she fought in the Israeli war of independence as a sharpshooter. "I was a sniper," she tells the audience. "Watch out!"

When the Forward announced Dr. Ruth's guest blogging, "There were so many comments of delight and excitement, itching to hear what she has to say," Treiman says. (When I think of GILFy Dr. Ruth, I feel delighted, excited and itchy too.)

Dr. Ruth says that the Brief paved the way for American advice columnists and celebrity therapists. "Bintel Brief replaced uncles and aunts and grandparents who would have given that advice," she says in her thick, luscious German accent. "People like myself couldn't do these comments-on TV, on radio-if not for our ‘grandparents.'" The Brief writers were "not trained psychologists, not trained social workers," but "trusted friends" who doled out wisdom to "poor Jews, not educated, like we see on Fiddler on the Roof, whose primary goal was to survive."

She believes that modern society is lacking the kind of community that the Brief fostered.

"With Bintel Brief, people didn't feel alone," Dr. Ruth says. "I see the danger [today] because we don't live anymore like people on the Lower East Side. People don't know their neighbors or talk to others on the subway. But don't start a sexual relationship on the subway! Please, at home!"

After her speech, the audience asks questions. She acknowledges the "tremendous issue of intermarriage," but dismisses it because when young Jews go to college, "We shouldn't be so surprised that they meet other people." Orthodoxy can be an aphrodisiac because waiting a week after menstruation to have sex "can mean a fantastic sexual experience after." Even some Hasidim come to her for advice because "[i]n the Jewish tradition we should not spill the seed in vain, so there are ways to discuss premature ejaculation," Dr. Ruth says with a laugh. "The sages in the Jewish tradition, sex was not considered a sin-it was considered a mitzvah. That permits someone like me to speak about orgasm and erection." (Oh, you naughty girl.)

I want to ask my question-about Dr. Ruth's physical stature-but I chicken out during the Q&A. She races out of the room like a munchkin on PCP to get to another event, but I follow her outside to her car. I haven't shaved in a week, and I look (and feel) incredibly creepy stalking her like this. But I must know.

"Dr. Ruth," I say, "I've always wanted to ask you something. A short woman and a tall man, when she's--"

"It's OK," Dr. Ruth says without any hesitation, clearly answering the question for the billionth time. She ducks into her sedan and vanishes into the Manhattan night.

In an attempt to pump up its flaccid tourist industry, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism has launched a new campaign to bring gay, lesbian and bisexual tourists to the Holy Land. Advertising aimed at "proud visitors," features two kippa-wearing men locking lips with the Old City of Jerusalem in the background and same-sex couples floating in the Dead Sea clasping hands.

What's next? Cruising on the Via Dolorosa, the Temple Mount? The Palestinians will take any excuse to start the next Intifada, but I imagine it's the rabbinate whose beards are going to curl at the thought of these tanned hardbodies laying their leather tefillin at the Western Wall. "When the Messiah comes," could take on a whole new meaning.

You have to salute the Ministry of Tourism for trying to bring tolerance to the most intolerant city in the entire world, but I wonder if they'd be so liberal if it were Yitzhak and Mohammed shtupping rather than a couple of sons of David.

The end of sponge-worthiness: 

Gallup's survey of 293 college women also found that those who did not use condoms were most likely to initiate sex and to seek out new partners as soon as a relationship ended. "These women are more vulnerable to the rebound effect, which suggests that there is a chemical dependency," says Gallup.

Semen contains hormones including testosterone, estrogen, prolactin, luteinizing hormone and prostaglandins, and some of these are absorbed through the walls of the vagina and are known to elevate mood.

The depressing news: Talking about women’s rights isn’t doing much to stop female genital mutilation.  The good news: Reminding people that it’s not required by the Quran does seem to be effective.

Not that this should be surprising.  As Samhita at Feministing points out, the feminist movement has always suffered from a PR problem: people see it as the province of privileged white Westerners, so they reject it out of hand.  Oddly, this seems to be echoed in the West via the right-wing rejection of feminism as the province of privileged nanny-obsessed navel-gazers—a rejection often accompanied by complaints that the movement doesn’t care enough about the Third World, despite exactly the kind of anti-FGM work that’s currently being rejected by sub-Saharan Africans as too Western—but I digress.  Feminism has always dealt with these kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” issues, and it’ll always get around them.  The point is, when you talk to devout people in the language of their religion, they’re more likely to listen. 

Sexy sabra: One of the Maxim adsMaxim has teamed up with the state of Israel to point out what every American Jew already knows: that IDF soldiers are foxy.  Naturally, the Maxim campaign has already created controversy among those who think Israel's chosen a declassé wingman, a topic the New York Post--also a class act--covered today with the headline "Piece in the Mideast." 

But here's why this is especially interesting, at least to people like me who spend most of our lives staring into a glowing screen: Gawker's having a contest to see if their readers can come up with a better headline, and the comments are not only relatively funny, but nice.  Is it possible that bringing up Judaism makes a bunch of hardened NYC media types get all gentle and kindhearted?

Then again, the comment section also demonstrates something we at Jewcy know all too well: It's hard to come up with a new Jewish pun.  Go enjoy the lack of bitchiness, and then see if you can do them one better.  

From the Daily Mail: The UK has its first lesbian bigamist.

Maybe Jerry Falwell wasn't wrong -- gay marriage opens the door for plural marriage and then we're down a slippery slope to marrying our pets and ergonomic chairs. Or whatever it was he said before finally dying.

From the (apparently bisexual) bigamist's jilted husband, who took her back:

"If she'd been unfaithful with a man, that would have been it, but because it was with a woman, it didn't feel like proper adultery."

The bigamist herself blames post-natal depression. Or else she's simply bad at math.

As this week's guest blogger, I will now take it upon myself to answer the question, "Why am I here?"

Not "here," like "on earth," in which case the answer would, I fear, be sadly free of altruistic purpose and meaning-gathering.

I mean, like, on Jewcy.

I would like to begin answering this question by posting this image of me strangling Jewcy editor Michael Weiss in 1998.

(This was part of a poorly-produced humorous video sketch conceived by the staff of our campus humor magazine. I believe it was a parody of Jerry Bruckheimer films).

So, we've covered the "personal connection" angle. If you're wondering, I totally didn't sleep with your editor (more on my sex life later).

Continue reading...

Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston has invited the Pope to the city in 2008, saying that a visit from Pope Benedict XVI would help to heal the wounds of Boston's clergy abuse scandals.

Because if you were raped by an authority figure in a funny hat, a visit from a bigger authority figure in a bigger, funnier hat will totally make you feel better.

She's NOT biting the apple ... see? Eve got nothin' on me, bitch!I didn't mean to write pages 170-172 of Wendy Shalit's new book, Girls Gone Mild. It was an accident.

I have never been "mild" in my life. I get paid to tell dirty jokes. I have worked as a professional body double. I won't even eat mild cheddar. Or mild salsa. It's "medium" or bust with me.

Wendy and I are unlikely friends. Although we are close in age and both attended liberal Northeastern universities, Wendy is now Orthodox, married, the mother of a toddler, and, well, way more successful than I am. As a profile in the Toronto Star explains:

Shalit is the author of two thoroughly researched books about "young women reclaiming their self-respect" and rejecting promiscuity and the hypersexuality of popular culture and fashion.

Girls Gone Mild has just arrived on bookshelves. Her previous book, A Return to Modesty, was praised by Salon, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, which called her "a prodigy at cracking the codes of culture." Playboy, on the other hand, put it under the heading, A Man's Worst Nightmare.

Wendy Shalit - She's So Modest, This is Virtually the Only Photo of Her on the Entire InternetHere's what happened. About a year and a half ago, I emailed Wendy; we struck up an online friendship, and met once in a West Village diner when she came to New York to visit with her publisher. I started reading the blog Wendy writes in collboration with some twenty other modesty-minded women.

I was sometimes sympathetic (it is hard to find a nice one-piece swimsuit these days), and sometimes turned off by the bloggers' self-righteous attitudes (oh, those grapes are sour!) towards female celebrities including Britney, Paris, and the proudly-hot-at-40 Cindy Margolis.

The bloggers are all, as far as I can tell, Christian or Jewish -- and, of course, obsessed with modesty. I would always laugh -- in my high-school-debater, "gotcha" kind of way -- when they commented on the dress of Muslim women. Comments like "Well, that's just TOO modest." In one discussion of an "interfaith hospital gown" (clearly a paper burqua), one commenter writes "Oh- for heaven's sake--Why not just wrap up in a couple of sheets?"

That, of course, is precisely the remark I would make towards the modesty bloggers' own skirted swimsuits and up-to-the-collarbone wedding gowns.

Oy! Imagine the Tan Lines From THESE Modest Swimsuits!So here's the story. One day, a "modblogger" posted a cry for help: "I've offered to put on a Modest Dressing Fashion Show at my church this spring, and I have no idea (yet) how to run it!"

I imagined a bunch of girls in department-store frills and bows, and clunky, secretarial two-inch pumps, marching through a church basement while awful Christian "praise music" blasted from a boom box and everyone stood around uncomfortably, and then nodded and applauded, saying to one another "See, modesty can be fashionable," all while wondering, each in his or her own head, how that spectacle was just so embarassing, and what is it those secular models have that our girls don't have? I was embarrassed just thinking about it.

So I wrote up a reply. Just a long blog comment, explaining things like "...work out ahead of time who walks, in what order, wearing what, and post the list on a wall right in the place that the models see before they walk down the "runway" ...Arrange things so that the hardest outfits to get into come early in the show, so that a model's switch from first to second outfit can be done very quickly."

Wendy's ModestyZone has featured the Gali Girls, which are like Bratz, minus the makeup, T&A, and implications of casual sexWendy asked if she could excerpt it in her book. I said "sure." She offered me an opportunity to edit the piece, but I was going through a divorce at the time (oh, the irony! score one for Wendy) and never got back to her. Next thing I hear, the book is out, and a signed copy is in the mail to me.

Thus, I have written pages 170-172 of Girls Gone Mild. I have also written fifteen posts for Jewcy over the last five days, and this is me, signing off as your Guest Editor.

You can see more of Wendy here. You can see more of me at Jenisfamous.com, or in Brooklyn at Pete's Candy Store. I've also conducted an interview with Wendy -- an extension of this post -- which you can look forward to on Jewcy in the next few days. And finally, I'll be contributing a post here and there as an erstwhile guest contributor.

As for now -- I never did get around to telling you about that time I spent Passover at my high school boyfriend's family's beach house in Nags Head. It was my first Passover; after three days of sunbathing and chopped liver, I had never been so hungry for bread.

This is the most Jewish I've felt since then.

Thanks, Jewcy.

Sincerely,
Jennifer Dziura
Comedian and Retiring Guest Editor

Infertility is an issue most people know very little about. But that doesn't stop those same individuals from having strong opinions on the subject. Strong opinions based on ignorance are often deeply misinformed and prejudicial. Such is the case with infertility. A subject more fraught with personal anguish, confusion and ignorance you'll be hard put to find.

Jews have a special interest in infertility. There has been much talk about the decline in Jewish fertility. We are having less children and we are having them later in life as we tend to marry later than our parents and grandparents. As a result, fertility issues tend to rear their ugly head when a Jewish couple is ready to have children. That's precisely what happened to my wife and I. We were married in our 40s and had no previous children. When we started trying we found we couldn't conceive naturally. That started us on the maddening, exhausting, intense whirlwind of fertility treatment.

Our final stop before turning to adoption was egg donation, a procedure by which a young woman's donated egg is impregnated with the husband's sperm and the resulting embryo implanted in the wife. Getting to egg donation as a viable option is sometimes difficult for a woman. It means that her genetic material will not be present in the resulting child (though she will carry the fetus to term). For women culturally inculcated with the notion that they carry the responsibility to bring children into the world, the notion that this child will be yours emotionally, but not yours genetically can be hard to surmount.

For Jews, especially Orthodox Jews, it is sometimes important that the female egg donor be Jewish. There is a halachic requirement that a mother must be Jewish for a child to be considered Jewish. And since the birth mother is not genetically related to the child, there is some question as to whether the egg donor should be Jewish. Some rabbis say that the contributions of the gestational mother are so critical to the process that she should halachically be considered the actual mother.

My wife and I didn't care whether our donor was Jewish. It just so happened that the NYU Fertility Clinic we chose (where our doctor was Jamie Grifo) has a large Jewish clientèle and maintains relationships with brokers who specialize in securing Jewish donors. The donors for both our children (we have a 6 year old boy and 2 year old twins) were Israeli. Their ethnic backgrounds were very similar to our own. In fact, our 2 year old daughter looks enough like my wife that people point it out to her.

Though we never had to face the question of whether our children were Jewish if they had a non-Jewish donor, I would have sided with the rabbinical opinion that the sweat and equity exerted by my wife during pregnancy earned her the halachic title of "mother."

Finally, as a member of a formerly infertile couple, I can't say enough how important these treatments are. Many of us want to bring children into the world and but for biological impediments cannot do so. Procedures like egg donation allow us to make our dreams come true. I urge anyone facing the problems that my wife and I faced to consider the path we chose. There are many online resources available, but one of the best is RESOLVE.

Finally, there is the question of how to deal with your children once they are born. Do you tell them? If so, when? And what and how do you tell them? We've chosen the route of absolute openness. We told our first child he was an egg donor baby when he was about 3 years old or so. We talk openly about our childrens' origins with friends, family, neighbors and virtually anyone. Some parents in similar circumstances choose to address these issues differently. There is no single correct way to deal with this. But my approach is that there is too much fear and ignroance swirling around infertility. I want to lower the curtain and make egg donation as normal as natural childbirth in the average person's mind. If my openness on the subject will open a single person's formerly closed mind then it will have been worthwhile.

 For more of my blog posts on infertility and egg donation.

Amazing story from Anna Quindlen in Newsweek about the question anti-abortion activists never actually answer: If abortions were made illegal, how would you punish women who have them anyway? A group called the AtCenter Network made a video surveying protestors at an anti-abortion rally in Libertyville, IL and found that none of them had given any thought to the matter.

Says Quindlen:

Lawmakers in a number of states have already passed or are considering statutes designed to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. But almost none hold the woman, the person who set the so-called crime in motion, accountable. Is the message that women are not to be held responsible for their actions? Or is it merely that those writing the laws understand that if women were going to jail, the vast majority of Americans would violently object? Watch the demonstrators in Libertyville try to worm their way out of the hypocrisy: It's murder, but she'll get her punishment from God. It's murder, but it depends on her state of mind. It's murder, but the penalty should be ... counseling?

For some reason the AtCenter Network people have disabled embedding, so you'll have to go to YouTube to watch the video, but it's SO worth it. When you're done, come back over to Jewcy's loving embrace and let us know your thoughts. Mine: Uh, isn't this why we have a separation between church and state?

This advice column from Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, who is always willing to lecture people about their Jewishness or lack thereof, gives advice to a Christian man who met an Israeli woman online.

Compare that with this story that came over the wire today, about an Australian guy who got scammed into thinking he was falling in love with a woman he met online. When he went to Mali to 'meet' her, he ended up being kidnapped and held for $86,000 ransom.

I mean, how can anyone who has ever used JDate ever doubt that people lie on the internet? I know I said that I was five-foot-six, but I was kind of rounding up...