I received a highly offensive reminder from Kaiser Permanente recently: "People with a cervix should receive a screening for cervical cancer every three years."

Setting aside the fact that I am not comfortable receiving care from a medical team that thinks "woman" is a dirty word and would prefer to refer to me as body parts and vaginal discharges, this reminder made me angry because exclusive, woman-erasing language like this literally kills women, harming the most marginalized women the most. 

It is a happy talent to know how to play...

But in order to play safely (and without having your time usurped by people you don't like) in this world, especially as a woman, you need to be good at assertiveness and boundary-setting. That is something I'm good at — and it's the reason I've able to been spend literally years abroad as a solo, female traveler.

Lately, it's also the reason I've been able to spend the last 13 months on the road as a solo, female RVer. 

In a perfect world, a girl could pass out completely naked on a fraternity floor and no one would touch her. 

However, we do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world where girls and women have always been told not to go anywhere alone; not to go outside at night; and to keep an eye on each other at parties.

But considering how rape accusations have the power to royally fuck up a boy's or man's life, why aren't we also telling them that they should look out for each other?

This stupid comic! Three different people posted this on my social media this morning in  unrelated discussions about "unfair double standards."

Which is why I feel morally obligated to inform you: if you actually look at it, this comic means the opposite of what you think it does. 

Guys — I am absolutely loving my summer reading list! It started with Hillary's What Happened, which, as I wrote in ​Right Now is the Best, Weirdest Time to Read Hillary Clinton's 'What Happened', felt weirdly timely and relevant. I also enjoyed and recommend ​A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation (which also feels really relevant right now), ​Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (which is alarming, to say the least), A Sand County Almanac (which is more soothing than poetry), and ​The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West (which was educational, but definitely not my favorite).

Now, I'm finishing Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, from which I learned a really weird and unexpected fact:

​Marriage counseling was pioneered as a form of eugenics. 

When people ask me what my blog is about, I want to tell them, "Playfulness." Playfulness is why I started this blog. It's on my About page; it's discussed on some of my most popular posts...

Yet one recurring theme has been assertiveness. Assertiveness seems at odds with playfulness... but, in fact, I've found assertiveness to be a crucial skill that enables my playfulness. 

​And it's probably one of the most important possible social skills you can learn and use during the current lockdown/quarantine/social distancing protocols.

I'm not outraged. I'm not offended. I'm just sad.

I recently had the good fortune of meeting ​Rich Gosse, chairman of The Society of Single Professionals and author of The Donald Trump Syndrome: Why Women Choose the Wrong Men to Love​.

He told me something none of you millennials are going to believe:

"Even though I founded the second ever online dating site back in the 1990s, I still think meeting face-to-face is best.”

And I agree.

I was a Game of Thrones hipster. I almost certainly read the books before you did, because I read them in 2003. You read them in June 2011. 

The same is not true for me and Harry Potter. I didn't start reading them until 2004, so I only had to wait for two of the books to come out.

A recent article in The Harvard Crimson complained that scholarship recipients felt "uncomfortable" and "out of place" at an annual Scholarship Dinner, where students had the opportunity to network with billionaires and millionaires (many of whom were, themselves, scholarship recipients in their days at Harvard) while eating delicious food.