Why aren't feminists mad at Letterman?

Because there are so many more important things that infuriate us, like using a sexual encounter about which we know only part of the details as a metaphor for completely unrelated issues.

Feminists didn't take up Bill Clinton's pecadillos as a cause because the larger and more dangerous issue was - and remains - that a few powerful right wing men used it as a way to block the social programs that then President Clinton was trying to pass through Congress. The fabricated outrage over an poorly judged and poorly responded to sexual encounter was an intentional political act, a planned distraction intended to destroy a policy progression, a larger target than one marriage.

Blackmail, a threat to not one man, but to his family and friends and the production company and the network is a really frightening situation. Consenting adults who work together having sex, not so much. There is no comparison to Polanski, to child abuse and rape, linking the issues is crap.

If there is a sexual harassment claim, as there might be, then people within the organization should be doing something about it. But in any closed network of many professions, especially entertainment sexual liaisons are frequent and not always power plays.

FDR gave families money to live on, job training and basic education as part of the WPA, the CCC and many other public works projects. Why not use TARP money to train people for those jobs that are going empty, jobs in engineering, in nursing, medical biology research.

How about the unemployed being allowed to sign up for trail maintenance in the state, local and national parks? They could sign up to do jobs cut by cities for lack of funds like street cleaning, public and school building maintenance. For every job they get paid and they get to go to school at night to learn something else.

I cleaned houses and filed for a shipping company until I got on my feet. I could do these boring and, on occasion, disgusting jobs because I knew I had a place I was trying to get to, one where education and emotional maturity mattered.

The bankers could benefit from cleaning a few toilets.

The best fashion designers seem to be able to design are clothes for very young, stick thin women, the strolling coat hangers. To applaud using Lily Allen, who is merely "non-emaciated" rather than plump, ripe or any of the other symbols of fecundity and desire, buys into the idea that little women are valuable, but larger, average women are not. Small women are malleable and easily overwhelmed and overpowered by public opinion, clothes, straight and gay men, and marketers.

There's the size issue and the age issue. Lily Allen is 24; Audrey Hepburn was 32 when she made Breakfast At Tiffany's. 34 is old for a model now, 16 year olds are in commercials for skin cream for "aging faces." When designers start designing age conscious clothing that expresses some wisdom about how fabric and people mesh, then I'll start paying attention adn paying for their work.

Ms. Ehrenreich spoke recently about how optimism is forced upon us. The very idea that happiness is a thing to be measured is bogus to begin with. Even the US Constitution recognizes that it's the pursuit of happiness, not happiness, that defines our lives.

Everything is marketed, sold to us as a commodity, so we end up being unable to accept happiness as an ephemeral feeling that comes from leading lives that have meaning for us. Not being happy, not being optimistic is misinterpreted as being unhealthy. If we are unwell, there are remedies, yes?

Pills. Self help books with "secrets" about how to happy. Religion. We can take a pill, fill out a workbook, pray - anything to kick up out of what isn't easy, or easily packaged. Feminism is work. It's work because it's about changing deep rooted habits of seeing, of doing, of believing.

Feminism changed divorce laws so women weren't left impoverished; forced a change in banking laws so women could build financial security; recognized and made government see domestic violence as a crime that requires prosecution by the state; made contraception and abortion legal; demanded that women take places at universities, that women vote, that women get equal pay for equal work...OK, so we're still far from that last one. But really, how does feminism ruin happiness?

The Phyllis Shaffleys and Michele Malkins and Ann Coulters of the world not be able to mouth-off for money were it not for feminism. Feminism failed in two big ways: it didn't change the workplace to make it more humane for both men and women & it/we didn't educate our sons and daughters about the history of women's rights as civil and human rights. All those women and men who didn't teach our kids to take care of their homes as well as they took care of their jobs failed to embody the change that has kept many of us alive.

It's in changing that we are most alive, in the pursuit of something that isn't a state of being as much as it is a state within existence. Some days I'm happy. La. La. La. But not when I read tripe about me being made miserable by the thing that gives me great hope.