Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
BennyBrooklyn
Published Letters: 26 Editor's Choice: 4
This piece was horrible on every level. It was a dumb idea (I used to like a sex columnist but now I like him less but I'll still read him. That's the sort of thing you yak about with your friends, not share with the world as a professional article.) It was poorly argued and written. It isn't even controversial because it doesn't have a logical point. It's just a personal reaction to another writer. It's an email masquerading as a column.
And to those who say that we shouldn't complain when bad writing appears on Salon, well we premium members are paying to support this site, and this is the best way we have to react to the editorial content. I bought a subscription in order to support Salon's reporting on the war in Iraq and other important issues, because I think it's important to support such journalism at a time when the 'mainstream' media has so clearly dropped the ball. I realized that some of my money would be spent on fluffy junk, because Salon has always had a certain level of fluffy junk. But I expect the fluffy junk to at least be mildly entertaining. I clicked on this article because I thought it might tell me something I didn't know about Dan Savage, or at least provide an interesting perspective from someone who grew to have questions about the validity of his work. It did neither. It isn't even funny.
Dear Debra Dickerson,
I've never found any of your work to be well-written, cogent, or informative. With this last article I now realize that I shouldn't expect those things from you, because you are content to phone in your assignments. I hope you are fired and replaced with a better writer soon so no more of my money is wasted paying you to hammer something out 2 hours before your deadline. This is not a personal attack, I do not wish you ill, but I hope you are pursuing some other career interests, because what you write is simply not worth reading.
I'm not usually a fan of Havrilesky's, though I read her because she's often the only Sunday update from Salon, but in this column she once again proves that she can be a fine TV critic when she focuses on talking about the shows rather than blathering on about chickens or one of the other affectations she uses when she gets bored of writing her column and wants to talk about something else. A series of well-done reviews of TV series, complete with discussions of general quality, specific audiences each might appeal to, and some nice verve in the writing.
When she stays on topic and focused Havrilesky is one of the best TV reviewers out there, and I post this letter in the hopes that it might help convince her to do so more frequently in the future.
Why am I not surprised that Debra Dickerson used to "harangue" her co-workers about their lunches? What a perfectly unpleasant thing to do. It matches Dickerson's writing style perfectly.
"Mainstream" fashion magazines are responsible for both large numbers of eating disorders and yo-yo dieting that leads to increased obesity, so singling out the "Urban" magazines for promoting big butts is idiotic. Magazine images damage women's self-esteem and health. This news brought to you by the coalition to repeat things everyone's known since 1970. Furthermore the reasons for increased obesity in minority groups can be more closely correlated with A) Poverty B) Education and C) Other cultural norms than with booty mags. Minority women tend to be poorer (meaning they can't afford as much fresh fruit and vegetables) and less educated (People with less education tend to be fatter, presumably due to a poorer understanding of nutrition science) than their white counterparts.
There's also the fact that 'soul food' is a nutritional nightmare, full of fried foods and fatty meats.
As for why fat minority women are more likely to see themselves as normal than their white counterparts, well you just said that more minority women are fat, so in the context of their friends and family THEY ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE NORMAL. There also may be a distrust of traditional authority at play here.
This article is a ridiculous attempt to offer scaremonger attacks against magazines that Dickerson doesn't like, precisely because she's the sort of person who would 'harangue' a coworker who brought in a cupcake instead of carrot sticks. She doesn't like fat people, she doesn't like people enjoying images of people she considers fat, and she likes playing holier than thou.
Address the serious social issues at the root of the epidemic of obesity among minority women and then we can talk about the booty mags. Until then you're missing the forest for a single leaf on one of the smaller trees at its edge.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
