Letters to the Editor
Argiri
Published Letters: 30 Editor's Choice: 5
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Post-Feminist Quandary
[Read the article: Raising Cain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]("Poor kids have to fend more for themselves emotionally; it makes us strong but it also makes us sad."
You have put your finger on a home truth there. That is simply, brilliantly, and perfectly stated.)
The subject you have raised in this article bears a great deal of thought from us all. I work in the assessment field. The feedback from our educational system is more available to me than to most of us. I believe that our schools, well-meaning as they may be, are responsible for many of our social evils. For one, I firmly believe that our schools penalize male children heavily for acting male. Girls may find school numbingly boring, but they generally adapt better than boys, whose testosterone-driven need for activity and aggression too often gets them a diagnosis and a prescription for pharmaceutical speed. As a society, we need to come to some positive and workable reckoning of chemically-mediated male and female behavioral drives so that they can work synergistically, not in opposition; we need to be able to see the biologic as biologic and separate it as far as we can from the political. Something is indeed badly wrong in our regard for manhood: we actually value male aggression highly...but not until a boy is a man. When the boy becomes a man and channels his vigorous male drives into entrepreneurial activities, his aggression and need for challenge are considered appropriate and promising. However, the same qualities are vigorously pathologized throughout the boy's childhood. He's somehow expected to suppress these drives until he finishes school, then pull those biologic drives out of the disciplinary lockbox where he's been keeping them throughout his academic career and put them into high gear. Yet, after twelve years of denying this part of his male nature, how can the boy make confident, non-neurotic use of it?
As problematic as they can be, I believe that the boys who refuse to submit completely to the disciplinary constraints of school are responding in a healthy way to an adversarial situation. In this scenario, generally perceiving their female teachers as petty oppressors, many boys develop a mindset toward women that is not conducive to their success and happiness in marriage or in a unisex workplace. Many of them learn to hate us this way. If they turn out heterosexual, this doesn't mean that they stop hating us; it means that they either sleep with us or marry us and, either way, lash out violently against us.
Ironically, Ms. Dickerson, as the mother of a school-age boy, you will most likely find yourself in the role of his defender against teachers and school administrators...who will usually be women. If his exuberance ever creates a nuisance for one of them, they'll be quick with psychobabble about conduct disorders and suggestions for Ritalin. And it is the criminal truth, as we all know, that this scenario will be exacerbated because of your son's race.
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That's not the ultimate...
[Read the article: Child rape in the movies]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You overlook the very graphic, credible, and violent rape scene in the movie version of "Bastard Out of Carolina," where Jenna Malone plays the young victim. If you count out the age issue in "Pretty Baby" - and the story took place at a time when age limits were neither as rigid nor as sacrosanct as now - no rape occurs in that film.
I don't have any conclusive answer on this. I am beginning to feel that footage of events such as the execution of Saddam Hussein, or any other deliberate violence on a similar level, should not be available for all to view. I think at least three children have hanged themselves, imitating what they never should have seen. Violence on the level of snuff-film violence should not be available to the impressionable and possibly unstable of any age.
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Oh, come on...
[Read the article: What Oprah can't forget]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why shouldn't she crow in whatever fashion she sees fit? She has done a good and generous thing.
Most of the people who've made the news lately have made it by getting hung, insisting on the continuation of a hopeless war, being photographed in public with their skirts up and their underpants missing in action, and through similarly depressing/nonproductive/laughable/undignified actions. I
say let her revel in the terms of her choice. People come with their own narcissism, materialism, et cetera, and their pasts of whatever kind, just as food comes with salt and fat and carbs as well as protein. Why shouldn't she be as welded to the totality of her experience as any of us, and free to savor an achievement she regards as a crowning glory?