I think I found my new best friend. Okay, it wouldn’t actually be like a real, live, human or animal best friend, but since I love, love, love the pjur wand, I’m thinking Wowsers, I’ve got to try this toy too.

My favorite thing about it is the way they’re marketing the Mark One, with it’s “aircraft-quality spun aluminum.” Because you and I both know that when we’re actually thinking about what’s important in a sex toy, we’re not thinking “airplane.” Still, I’ve seen the aircraft bit thrown around before at Elemental Pleasures.

They take it a step further:

We believe that aircraft-grade spun aluminum is the new hot fudge chocolate sundae.

One thing for sure, you can’t eat aircraft-grade spun aluminum, but I do love my hot fudge sundaes with chocolate ice cream, so that comment did make me hungry. Not horny, just hungry. And the only thing that makes me think I may not call it my new best friend once I try it is that it’s not curved. I know that I love the curve for inside my coochie. But it had me at six, deeply satisfying levels of pleasure orbs. So, who am I to judge?

Anyway, this wasn’t what I meant to blog about today. No, I wanted to talk about the fact that 8 year old girls are going through puberty regularly in America. Yes, that’s right 8 year old girls are growing breasts and pubic hair earlier, and the average age for menstruation is 12.5. Although this to me is not alarming, since 12.5 seems about right. It is, after all, around the same time as when I first got my period. I got “Harry with the red hair’ right before my bat-mitzvah, as in one day before I was about to become the traditional Jewish version of a woman. Yes, that’s when I became the biological version of one. And in my purple, custom made bat-mitzvah dress, while dancing to Huey Lewis and playing Coke and Pepsi, I was secretly, or not so secretly, dripping blood between my legs.

Back to the article in today’s LA Times:

Earlier breast development is now so typical that the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society urged changing the definition of “normal” development. Until 10 years ago, breast development at age 8 was considered an abnormal event that should be investigated by an endocrinologist. Then a landmark study in the April 1997 journal Pediatrics written by Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that among 17,000 girls in North Carolina, almost half of African Americans and 15% of whites had begun breast development by age 8. Two years later, the society suggested changing what it considered medically normal.

The new “8″ — the medically suggested definition for abnormally early breast development — is, the society says, 7 for white girls and 6 for African American girls.

When it comes to the negatives, people blame the environment and obesity (and as a fat ally I have to say for a lot of women I know, obesity is not a negative issue), but others say it’s because of better public health and nutrition, which are of course one would see as good things.

Perhaps it’s really nothing to be alarmed about. I mean, the Times reports on this case from 1834:

There have always been rare cases of extremely early puberty, called precocious puberty. One report, going back to 1834 in Butler County, Ky., was of a baby girl whose hips and breasts began to grow soon after she was born. By the age of 1, she was menstruating and at age 10, she gave birth to a 7-pound baby. Such extreme cases today would be examined and treated.

The bigger thing to address, in my opinion, and it is addressed at the end of this article, it what to do about sex education for these newly budding beauties. I mean once you get the breasts, the curves and the pubic hair, you want to show it off, right? (Answer: Wrong). But the truth is, people of both sexes will start to notice a post-pubescent woman, and then she’ll notice getting noticed, and one thing can lead to another and another, and then, well, let’s not overlook what’s happened to Jamie Lynn Spears here. So perhaps we need to start to re-evaluate when we start to teach sex education. Perhaps in third grade we should do the first extremely subtle form of it. Like just acknowledging that sexual urges happen and that when they do you should know you’re not alone. And that the safest thing to do is explore your body on your own.

On my own is how I plan to explore my body too. Once I lay my hands on the Vergenza’s Mark One. And then I’ll let you know if its as good as a chocolate hot fudge sundae.