Letters to the Editor
justlikeawoman
Published Letters: 54 Editor's Choice: 1
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Refreshing
[Read the article: How can great love just stop, just like that?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Never mind that first post, if it doesn't speak for you. Certainly it's a prime example of the response one expects, almost universally, in a culture where Dr. Laura and books like "He's Just Not Into You" dominate the dialogue about relationships. Here it's considered healthy to make the most damning judgment possible of the other, and use the ensuing rage and blame to stomp all of the wonderful past moments into a small, ugly pile that can easily be flushed down the toilet.
Cary's thoughtful, poetic, and beautiful response seems so much subtler and closer to the truth, if one can bear the truth. We are all such marvelously complicated beings, and even our closest friends of twenty years have deep untapped currents of thought and feeling that might astonish us, if we knew. That we can share an hour, walking alongside one another on the same street, is, to my mind, nothing short of a miracle. Cherish every minute of joy you have together; not even the other person can take those away from you.
I speak as someone who, out of her own complicated ambivalence and fear and feelings of unworthiness, went running in another direction when I found exactly what I wanted. On the surface of things, it looks damningly like the other person's "fault," but in all honesty, I moved away first.
If it's any consolation to the writer of the original letter, you can be fairly certain that the gentleman in question will regret this: if not now, before long, and probably for the rest of his life.
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Van Halen
[Read the article: W. rocks the vote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]At this point in Bush's disastrous debacle of a presidency (and with Republican candidates trailing in the polls), the more appropriate choice might have been "Jump."
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Hope I die before I get old...
[Read the article: Sex and the single septuagenarian]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So this is what I have to look forward to? Man-sharing and the continued risk of infection? Good Lord, this isn't appealing to someone in her thirties, either.
I was raised on the abstinence-only model, which I found maddeningly oppressive and unrealistic, but reading this just makes me want to shave my head and join a Buddhist monastery. Forget the whole business.
Maybe I'll be lucky and get hit by a bus.
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Blood in the water
[Read the article: Anne Lamott's amazing grace]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've got to stop reading these Salon reader responses, they leave me depressed for the rest of the day.
There are too many sharks - those that smell blood in the water and attack. Some days it's a regular feeding frenzy around here! The blood in the water, of course, is a writer's vulnerability, which is a thing never to be tolerated in the "shark" himself, and which must at all costs be punished for appearing so flagrantly and appallingly on the page. Disown and annihilate!!!
No doubt Lamott's musings on aging can make younger people uncomfortable; the truly logical person will have to admit (barring an untimely death) that "One day, that will be me." Those gentlemen who call her a hag and conjure up less than complimentary images of pink lipstick will one day register in the minds of strangers on the street as "old man," a less than virile concept in our culture. (In the words of Yeats, "An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick...")
But empathy is an act of imagination beyond the powers of some. Especially when to identify with the other would involve owning unacceptable aspects of oneself. Like fear, like vulnerability, like so many things that make us human and susceptible to forces beyond our tight-fisted control.
We are not invincible. We don't need to be sharks.
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Original
[Read the article: Porn in theory, porn in practice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I thought I'd read all the pros and cons on porn, the libertarians and the fundamentalists, the Andrea Dworkins and the Susie Brights, but Cary's take is refreshingly unique and honest and unlike anything else I've read. Viewing porn is, after all, an essentially passive experience - passive and anonymous - gawking at what countless others have already gawked at before, aroused by an impersonal scenario.
As a straight female I've enjoyed gay porn, but not straight. Why? Perhaps because there's no opportunity to suffer by comparison with impossibly enhanced female sex-bots. This, I think, is what makes many women anxious: that eminently human fear that we will be quartered, weighed, and measured against the glossy celluloid (often inaccurate) representation of female sexuality and be found lacking.
Then again, at least the LW is dealing with these "unreal" women, not actual other women. That's still less threatening.