The BBC reports that while a woman is naturally attracted to men who smell like a good genetic match (this, to me, would be a musky mix of garlic, teen spirit, and his excellent dog), the hormone havoc wreaked by the birth control pill may turn her on to the wrong guys. “Wrong” here meaning too genetically similar for species diversity, not (necessarily) “that unbelievable douchebag I can’t believe she likes.”

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You’ve got a friend on January 9, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,
For some reason, whenever I meet someone that I find cute and interesting, we always end up buddies when I would like more! How do I get past this and not feel rejected — and not lose a good friend?
— Everyone’s Buddy

Dear Everyone’s Buddy,
See, Jilted Guy?! This is the girl version of the Nice Guy thing — and yeah, it smarts. Wouldn’t it be nice, once in a while, to be intoxicatingly mysterious, to have men come up to you and say, “Friends, schmends, I must be your lover!” instead of “Hey, buddy, howaboutta game of horse?”

But try thinking of it this way: maybe there’s nothing wrong at all. Maybe, for some cosmic reason, you just happen to be the kind of person for whom serious relationships start out as — and develop most soundly from — friendship. If you trust that this will naturally evolve when it “should,” you’ll be playing a mean game of horse with your devoted hubby while Miss Tedious — I mean, Miss Terious — wishes she had more true friends.
Love,
Breakup Girl

Doubt sets in on January 9, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,
I fell in love with a 3-year-old (not literally) and I thought he was my knight in shining armor. I was seriously disillusioned the other day and now I’m not sure how to feel. Help!
— Sarah

Dear Sarah,
Standards, yes. Larger-than-life expectations, no. Listen, sistren, we have to relate to boyfriends as bonuses in our lives, not as Bob Villas who are going to spackle and caulk and make it look like everything’s all pretty and together. When we think, “Oh, if I can just have this boyfriend, then my life will be complete, world suffering will cease, and Buffalo will win the Super Bowl,” then of course disillusionment strikes — maybe even in the wrong place and for the wrong reason. So chalk this one up to “Whoops!” and start looking for someone whose personality type falls somewhere between the age three and medieval.
Love,
Breakup Girl

You’ve got to give swimmeur Laure Manaudou [for French readers] credit for staying afloat amidst “sex, lies, and videotape.” Still, BG may have to make a poolside appearance.

Here, your weekly installment of Ask Lynn, the advice column penned by BG’s alter ego at MSN.com (powered byMatch.com). This week, we meet Lost, who poses one of the biggies: why is breaking up so hard, even when my relationship is so bad?

The deets: “My boyfriend of five years feels like he has to hide everything and lie to me about who he speaks to. …We have fought constantly about it, and every time we fight we break up….he tries to blame me…. I do not think that he appreciates me. Am I stupid for wanting to stay with him? I think so. Then how do I get out of this?”

You mean, besides fast? Find out what Lynn has to say, and then come back here to comment!

When you give your friend space, no one can hear you scream …

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Need a last-minute wedding gift?

Here.

You’re welcome.

Crap.

More later. BG’s busy with Elizabeth.

It’s sort of a necessity once you hit the age — you know, the age between “boys/girls have cooties” and “I’m pregnant!” — that your school district (one hopes, anyway) starts flooding the lesson-plan infrastructure with talks about SEX and CONDOMS and VAGINAS. OH MY GOD. (My mom used to call them “pookies,” by the way, so from my childhood on, anytime I met a furry friend or stuffed animal with that name I burst into hysterics. Nobody got it.) Anyway. Planned Parenthood, as you may know, also — especially where schools and other grownups drop the ball — tries to help teens muddle through the skeery, scary world of sex. (Free condoms are part of the deal too, so I’ve heard.)

But have you seen their latest sex-ed videos? Wow, are they not the usual “If you respect me the way I respect me you’ll wait.” They include: a goofy sense of irony, a doofy mustachioed man, and — somehow — the line, “Hey, a horse is a majestic creature!” The allure lies in … well, not Mustache Guy, but in the meta-: the (finally!) successful attempt to bring humor to oodginess and taboo. Win/win: Planned Parenthood gets their message across, and teenagers across the nation sigh deeply with relief knowing that, armed with this knowledge about STIs and more, they can totally tune out their parents.

I take it that by now most people with a pulse have seen The Dark Knight at least 1/5 as many times as my 18-year-old brother, not counting IMAX. Still, no spoilers here, except maybe of your jaunty “ain’t love grand?” mood. The Onion’s AV Club recently took up a topic from one of The Dark Knight’s IMDB boards — one that took what we over here take to be a bit of a disturbing turn. The question at hand: “Is The Joker ‘sexy’ — too sexy, in fact, to be an effective villain?”

Um, quick bio: The Joker is a deeply disturbed killer who shows no remorse for his actions. He takes perverse pleasure in chaos; he will go to any length to bring it about. My father, quaintly, compared The Joker to the Phantom of the Opera. Sure, some of us — uncomfortably — do find The Phantom a bit arousing, but he, let’s recall, is motivated by love. We know his sorrowful backstory; we develop sympathy for him, trapped as he is in an unbearable soundtrack. The Joker, by contrast, appears out of nowhere, backstory-, alias-, and fingerprint-free, motivated by nothing other than pure eeeeeeevil, to wreak havoc upon Gotham. No tragic story, just an appetite for destruction and a terrible hair day. So…”sexy!?” Yikes.

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