Of course, it makes political sense to pick your battles. Why not win the fight for marriage equality and then give the creaky old tradition a modern makeover? After all, conservatives' worst nightmare is that same-sex marriage will destroy the institution as they know it, and we don't want to stoke their fears. That's why same-sex marriage advocates so often publicly insist that our aim is one of assimilation: They're simply being subsumed into hetero tradition -- not to worry, they'll totally fit in and (mostly) follow your rules! But Harris-Lacewell says we've got it all wrong.

Interestingly enough, her essay was inspired by "Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America," a book that details how many black families managed to maintain robust, lifelong marriages throughout American slavery, despite the fact that the unions weren't legally recognized. Love can survive even without the privileges and protection of official state recognition -- of course. But, she says, the right to legal recognition doesn't guarantee a union or its endurance -- again, of course. Today, despite "formal, legal equality, marriage has never been more rare or more insecure among African Americans," Harris-Lacewell says. She goes on to argue:

Fewer people who can marry are choosing to do so. More people who do marry are choosing to exit. This is not solely about selfish individuals unwilling to sacrifice for joint commitment. Marriage itself is still bolstered by a troubling cultural mythology, a history of domination, and a contemporary set of gendered expectations that render it both unsatisfying and unstable for many people. 

This is a long and circuitous route to her ultimate point, which is that marriage needs a major overhaul. Her credo: "Let's use this moment to re-imagine marriage and marriage-free options for building families, rearing children, crafting communities, and distributing public goods." In other words: Let's campaign for true civil rights -- for everyone. Not just for couples who want to marry and adhere to the traditional rules of marriage, but families and individuals of all stripes. If marriage were to resemble anything even close to a fair and just social institution, it would support the well-being of people, not a particular ideology or institution. Not to mention, as Harris-Lacewell puts it, "contemporary heterosexual marriage is a bit of a mess."

The critical question is whether we can remake the institution from the inside out, or whether marriage is too constrained by tradition to fully evolve and needs to be demolished (at least in the government's eyes) and rebuilt from the ground up. The latter scenario represents the danger in limiting the marriage equality movement to same-sex access. So, thanks to Harris-Lacewell's essay, I now find myself considering a truly vexing question: Are we progressives fighting the wrong fight?

Or not. I can certainly understand the concern about letting a 13-year-old spend a year alone on a boat, and I think it's probably a good thing that Dekker's been forced to cool her young heels. And just in general, the idea of a world record for "youngest person ever to pull off a life-threatening stunt" is a bit unsavory, given where it must inevitably lead. But still, it's hard to say what the minimum age for such a trip should be, since A) so much depends on the individual, and B) attempting to sail around the world alone is extremely dangerous and slightly bonkers at any age. My grad school classmate Tania Aebi did it at 18, pre-GPS, with very little sailing experience and a boat plagued with problems. That she lived to tell the tale in two books and make a career out of sailing doesn't make her original decision to go one iota less batshit, in my opinion, but I am neither a sailor nor a particularly adventurous soul. What I've learned from Tania, and from reading about all these teenage voyagers, is that those of us whose personalities are fundamentally incompatible with the thought "Solo circumnavigating the globe sounds like a hoot!" really just don't understand enough to offer a useful opinion.

Meanwhile, I can't help noticing that there's been a lot more hand-wringing about Watson doing it than there was about Sunderland and Perham -- both of whom I only heard of after their trips were complete. "I do not want to shatter your dreams but to undertake such a voyage requires more experience than you currently have," wrote sailor Andrew Cape in a painfully condescending letter to Watson. Recently, the L.A. Times asked "Is the girl strong enough, mentally and physically, to deal with considerable hazards at sea, or the long, lonely calm stretches she's sure to face?" and fretted that the color of Watson's boat, "Ella's Pink Lady," would "announce to other mariners the presence of the fairer sex." Hmm, I wonder why folks are so much more worried about Watson than they were about those other two teenagers. There must be some difference there, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Watson's been sailing for half her life, has logged over 5,000 nautical offshore miles, and knows damned well what she's up against, as do her parents. Her father, Roger, has explained the calculation they've all made quite bluntly: "It would be devastating if we lost her ... but I still think it would be worse to say 'no you can't go' because of that risk, because of what she's put into it." Again, I have trouble imagining myself coming to a similar conclusion, but setting world records for perilous tests of human endurance is really not my thing. So I will defer to the opinion of someone whose thing it was, and who paid the ultimate price for her adventurous spirit: Amelia Earhart, whose new biopic comes out this Friday, 72 years after her disappearance. In a letter she left for her husband before her final flight, Earhart wrote, "Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."

As far as I can tell, that's what it comes down to for Jessica Watson: She is quite aware of the hazards, but she wants to do it because she wants to do it. And in light of that, I'm with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard: "I'm nervous for her. But my words at this stage, given that she's determined to go, would be to wish her the best of luck and to urge her to keep safe." 

That's why it's so disheartening to hear that Morehouse College, an all-male, historically African-American school in Atlanta, has instituted a dress code banning this kind of experimentation. The "Appropriate Attire Policy" dictates that students refrain from wearing caps, do-rags, sagging pants, "clothing with derogatory or lewd messages either in words or pictures" and sunglasses ("in class or at formal programs"). Most controversial is the college's decision to outlaw "clothing usually worn by women (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at college-sponsored events."

Now, a few of these guidelines make sense: It's disrespectful to wear sunglasses in the classroom, where you're expected to be paying attention to the professor and participating in a discussion with classmates. And depending on how "clothing with derogatory or lewd messages" is defined (and who defines it), that may also be a wise call. But what about the do-rags, sagging pants and ladies' clothing? Who is that hurting?

Well, for one thing, the drag ban isn't aimed at what you might assume: preventing frat bros from their typical, occasionally minorly offensive, homecoming-season cross-dressing high jinks. CNN quotes Dr. William Bynum, Morehouse's vice-president for student services, as saying, "We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men." Bynum also claims that, when he discussed the new policy with Safe Space, the college's gay group, "Of the 27 people in the room, only three were against it." It's interesting, then, that Safe Space's co-president, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, calls the drag ban discriminatory. In fact, he says, "Some believe that this restriction is what the entire policy is correlated around." It's notable that while most items on the list are banned solely in academic or public buildings, it is now impermissible for Morehouse students to dress in women's clothing anywhere on campus -- even in the privacy of their own dorm rooms.

Bynum claims that the "Appropriate Attire Policy" is designed to help Morehouse "get back to the legacy" of educating "Renaissance men." And Cameron Thomas-Shaw, the student government's co-chief of staff, tells the Journal-Constitution, "The image of a strong black man needs to be upheld ... And if anyone sees this policy as something that is restrictive then maybe Morehouse is not the place for you." While Thomas-Shaw is the most explicit about the connection between the dress code and race, the subtext about Morehouse educating "strong black men" is ubiquitous in stories about the ban. So we're not just talking about masculinity here -- we're talking about black masculinity, a topic that has fueled controversy over everything from Tyler Perry films to Barack Obama. It is, to say the least, a sensitive subject.

And, as the other stipulations of the Morehouse dress code illustrate, ideas about what black masculinity should entail don't just cut one way. The school won't allow black men to feminize themselves by wearing makeup, but it also views sagging pants and do-rags -- that is, articles that connote violent, hyper-masculine gang or thug culture -- as inappropriate. A respectable black man, Morehouse seems to be saying, can't be too feminine or too tough. The college isn't just banning items of clothing; it is, in effect, proscribing entire identities.

As Queerty points out, a school that brags about having graduated Martin Luther King Jr. may want to reconsider its stance on censorship: "Is wearing pumps in class really going to distract from academia? Only if Morehouse contributes to a campus that ostracizes those individuals. Or they could teach tolerance and acceptance. You know, like that Martin Luther King Jr. fella." As America continues to make progress on racial issues, we need to broaden our understanding of what a black man is and should be. Morehouse's mission, to educate the next generation of African-American leaders, is laudable. But until the school acknowledges that those leaders may be rocking a do-rag or carrying a purse, it won't be fully embracing the diversity it champions.

For that, there’s regretsy.com. Since its launch last month, regretsy, with its motto, "Handmade? It looks like you made it with your feet," has become a hall of fame for artistic impulses gone oddly awry. And if there’s one theme that’s emerged from day one, it’s that "handcrafted" and "adult content" go together like vulva portraits and pendant charms.

The site has a minimum of commentary, letting the fetus catnip toys do most of the speaking for themselves. And if a recent search of "mature" on etsy itself is an indication, regretsy will be with us for a long, long time.

There’s something almost inspiring knowing that somewhere right now, someone is toiling patiently to sew an "OVERSIZED" vagina on a teddy bear or spray paint a masturbating dinosaur or crochet a "plug rug" tampon cozy. If you can believe in a ribboned, flower-festooned porcelain dildo, you can achieve it.

It's true that fashion is about fantasy, and that includes the beauty of the models. They're hired to look better in clothing than most of us ever will. It's also true that beauty changes in response to cultural norms, and that it's always been somewhat unattainable. Victorian women who wore corsets or Medieval women who bled themselves white weren't doing so because they thought all the other women had wasp waists or naturally ghostly skin, but because corsets and paleness both signified a delicate, upper-class femininity. Whatever beauty is, it's never the norm.

Givhan may also be right that “as a culture, we hate what we are becoming: fat.” There's a lot of self-loathing out there. But when she writes that skinniness is a “test of willpower and determination,” or seems to approve of women on "The Biggest Loser" “passing out and throwing up in the gym to become size 8 or 4 or 0,” she ignores the fact that, due to many factors, including the work of people like Broadsheet's Kate Harding and the fact that we know how Photoshop works, people increasingly don't believe that they can look like models if they work hard enough. The backlash isn't always about health or body image, but about wanting a standard of beauty that actually seems semi-attainable. At least you could buy a corset (good luck carrying that Photoshop eraser tool around with you at dinner).

“The culture” isn't insisting on emaciated models and greeting larger ones with hostility; the fashion industry is, and as such, it seems increasingly out of touch with consumer demands. “The culture” is developing new aspirational models, like much-beloved, noticeably not-emaciated Christina Hendricks of "Mad Men." Most of us will never look like her, either. But at least she looks like herself without any computerized assistance. And, for the moment, that's enough.