Jae-Ha Kim

Sharon Skonie and Tom Martin dated for three years and were engaged for 18 months prior to their wedding almost a decade ago. By all accounts, they knew each other very well. But as devout Catholics, they also knew they would have to take part in pre-Cana, where they would meet with an already married couple and then later their priest to discuss marriage issues. “Pre-Cana was a requirement for us to get married in the Catholic church, so the idea of getting [pre-marital counseling] didn’t come as a surprise to us,” says Sharon Skonie Martin of Bolingbrook. “I was actually really looking forward to it because I wanted to get to know Tom better.

Mention women’s studies and you’re likely to get a mixed reaction. One group may talk about why it’s so important for students of both sexes to learn about women’s historical impact on society. Another may roll their eyes and argue that a men’s studies program would be considered sexist — so why the need for women’s studies in the 21st century?

At age 4, Mary Bryk began to suspect there was something seriously wrong with her mother. As Bryk recalls, her mother would meticulously tie Bryk’s hands together and bind her leg to a high chair. Then, she would strike the child’s foot with a hammer. “My mom was a nurse and would constantly tell me she was doing treatments and that the doctor knew what she was doing,” says Bryk, now 44. “But even at that age I knew something wasn’t right. When she fractured my hip while I was hospitalized, that’s when it hit me that what she was doing wasn’t normal.”

Preaching about how difficult it is to earn money is one thing. Actually putting yourself in the situation to experience it is another.

The average hetero man would say, “Hell, no!” if his wife asked him to go to Chippendales with her. But everyone from Naomi Campbell to Courtney Love to pensive Robin Wright Penn has been to strip clubs like Scores. Oh, wait, I believe they’re referred to as gentlemen’s clubs these days. I keep forgetting how classy these joints are now.

Mark Ruffalo appears nude in “In the Cut.” Sean Penn bares all in “21 Grams.” And Ewan McGregor — Obi-Wan Kenobi himself — shows off his lightsaber in “Young Adam.” “It’s about time that men are stripping down,” Neve Campbell says in the current issue of In Style. “If we have to take it off, they should too.” Hallejuah, sister.

You got reamed at the office. The baby spit up on you. And you just spent the last two hours doing the kids’ chores. All you want to do is go to bed, but your husband wants to do more than sleep. If this situation could be rectified by an herbal supplement, would you snap it up? That’s what the makers of Avlimil are hoping with a flashy ad campaign that has some experts wondering whether there’s any substance to back up the glitz.

If you want to know why it takes a woman so long to get dressed, try going shopping with her. Aesthetics aside, women have to deal with sizes that make no sense. Welcome to the wacky world of women’s clothes, where more has become less when it comes to sizes.

I recently saw a display of vintage mannequins from the turn of the century that shocked me. They were life-size and wearing dresses equivalent to a Size 10 or 12. Fast-forward to a shopping trip to a downtown Chicago department store where the mannequins were roughly the shape of your 12-year-old nephew.

Two decades before Jet Li and DMX joined forces for “Cradle 2 the Grave”–which opens Friday–Bruce Lee was kicking it with Jim Kelly in “Enter the Dragon.” Back then, pairing an Asian-American martial arts star (Lee was born in the United States and raised in Hong Kong) with a black karate champ-turned-actor was a novelty. These days, it’s good business to keep faith with the audience that first embraced martial arts films in the United States–African Americans.