I only have had time to read the sex portion of your rant.. but i think that you may be underestimating sex.
In fact i think most people underestimate the impotance of sex to ones emotional stability.

I think people get attached to individuals through sex – much more so than through other activities – obviously its incredibly intimate, and so that would be expected. But its more than that. – its giving ourselves to another person at the most vulnerable level. with no clothes or words to hide behind.
And im only speaking as a male, i can only imagine that being the physically diminutive gender, it must be even more impactful on females.
I think this is the cause of a lot of pain in our society. People are not giving sex the credit it deserves, and as a result are left feeling empty with nothing to pin it on.
And the real killer is that a quick fix for feeling that way is to have sex (and it all just builds on itself)
I think that the nypho tendancies that Pheobe shoes are probably pretty typical of a person who feels very lonely (pretty good for her character).

id like to pretend that sex was just something we had to do – like eat and sleep. and i think masturbating is (whether you’re having lots of sex or not – you know just to chang it up a little ).
but sex is something thats connected to ones person – i wish i had a better explenation, but i think its an inherant trait (you know like trying to explain inertia)

anyhow wish i coulda read more – but i have work to do…
please excuse any spelling mistakes, i dont claim to be an academic – i just draw pictures

–Matt–

On the other hand, I think Malcolm in the Middle portrays an overextended middle-class family appropriately….their house is a cluttered three-bedroom ranch house that’s built for comfort (anything else would have been destroyed by the boys by now). Bedrooms are shared, money is tight, and Malcolm is smart, but plenty distracted.

Chandler’s penance is his uncontrolled effeminacy, his failure to be a “real man” to compensate for his flaming drag queen dad.

Is it obvious that I don’t like those characters. I’d rather hang out with Ross: at least he’ll talk about dinosaurs.

That her starvation diet is some sort of po-mo reinvention of the hair shirt? That could work.

(I wonder if the writers are that meta in their thinking.)

Ask my wife. (Badump-bump) Seriously, thoughÑthe standard shtick of stand up comedians is that men always want it and women have to be coaxed. In most of my relationships, I found that it’s the other way around. Yet this stereotype had a way of making me view my sexual appetite as inadequate: inadequately male, inadequately adult, inadequately sexual, and who knows what else.

About Monica’s hunger: Do you think it’s some divine punishment devised by the writers of the show that, having been a fat & food-obsessed teen, she’s now a chef? Surrounded by food that she must restrain herself from consuming lest she returns to fat Monica and turns off (fat) Chandler?

Will it turn out to be the case, once we know the genome well enough to understand its interactions with our environment, that most of our “mental” problems are food/hunger related?

I find that my mood is extremely food dependent – except when I’m tired. When I’m on a business trip, for example, I simply don’t need to eat as much or as regularly and I can still maintain a cheerful demeanor.

I find *Friends* unbearable on so many levels, not so *Buffy*, which is watchable but just not terribly compelling to me. Anyway, you should all be grateful that I pay so little attention to your favorite shows. I fell in love with *The Tick* and *Greg The Bunny* and *Furturama* and they all got cancelled long before their time. I’m cursed.