Olive I agree. It is a shame the wold has come down to turning such minor things into sexually related things. My H and I went out for ice cream and the way I ate the ice cream must have been an issue, because asked me if I would please stop doing that. I promise it wasn't to be mean. I was just licking my ice cream. GOSH.

Though I may have been known to tantilize males in the past w/ eating banana's and foot long hot dogs. My Bad. oops

Olive, I just want to inform you that the root cause of your suffering is the legislative intent, on the part of the government of Australia back in 1991, to put boys and girls on an equal footing and do away with gender discrimination. Before 1991, girls could marry at 16 and boys at 18 - which made sense because girls do, objectively, mature earlier in physical and non-physical ways, on average. In an effort to do away with gender discrimination, the government raised the age of marriageability for girls to that which had been in place for boys.

I hope that as you go through your life, you will not just suffer from the well-intentioned efforts to equalize genders, but also benefit from them, in that you would:

- be paid same wages as men get for same type of labor, and not earlier
- have equal opportunity with men in anything you want to pursue
- have domestic partners, husbands or not, who share in the responsibility for the upkeep of the household
- the father(s) of you future child(ten) would spend a substantial amount of time with the children after the children become big enough to be weaned

etc. etc.