Letters to the Editor
Allie_
Published Letters: 1234 Editor's Choice: 108
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re: my Anonymous friend who doesn't think I should call people names (although he has no problem calling me names)
[Read the article: District attorney won't take gang rape case]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Classic, truly.
Sorry, you need to cast your line elsewhere.
And again, no one wants the women to bear these children. People want to put an end to rape.
But. A drunk 15 year old will lose her license, and may go to jail if she hurts someone. A 15 year old is considered responsible enough to drive and understand the penalties. A 16-18 year old can enter the army.
Why do feminists believe that 15 year old women should not bear responsibility for their actions?
First of all, there are no 15 year old women. 15 year olds are girls. What you have said is incorrect; a 15 year old cannot legally drive (although she can get a learner's permit to practice with a legal driver in the car). If she steals a car and hurts someone with it, she will be tried as a JUVENILE. And since when has it been possible to enter the Army at the age of 16?
Second. Your argument is transparently absurd. You say you want to put an end to rape - in the instance of the Planned Parenthood discussions, statutory rape - a form of rape in which the only crime consists of an older person having consensual sex with someone who is too young to be legally responsible for her actions. Yet your argument is that people of this age should be legally responsible for their actions. So you think 15 year old girls should be legally responsible adults about not being legally responsible adults.
You claim that you don't want to punish these girls by forcing them to carry unwanted children, but then you state that they should bear responsibility for their actions (in this case, having sex). In what way, then, do you want 15 year olds to bear responsibility for their actions? By being denied abortions unless they give up their boyfriends to the law?
I'd like to point out that there are no REAL 15 year olds involved in this case. Despite your implications, there were no actual little 15 year old irresponsible slut-puppies involved. Those were fakes, lies created for the purpose of entrapping social workers who tried to aid girls - fake girls, who pretended to want abortions, and not to be willing to turn in their boyfriends to get them - in obtaining needed medical services. There were no actual, real live 15 year old girls who refused to turn in their boyfriends. The social workers did not encourage any girls not to turn in statutory rapists. The girls (fakes) came up with that on their own. Confronted with a terrible situation - a girl who is pregnant and wants an abortion, but also wants to protect the man who impregnated her - the social workers reacted with compassion, trying to get the girl the help she asked for.
By the way, your post was removed because you don't seem to understand that "troll" (unlike 'arrogant fuck') is not a name. It's a description of an activity someone engages in, trolling. Making inflammatory misogynistic statements on a board devoted to women's issues is an example of trolling, which makes you a troll.
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ha
[Read the article: I'm younger than that now]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So you're 53, are you? I think maybe women hit this earlier than men do; one of my favorite local columnists wrote basically the same article a few months ago when she turned 35.
I busted a tendon in my knee at the ripe old age of 25. I used to dance, as a form of exercise and more importantly as a way of jump-starting the flow of images when I write. After the knee went, I had to learn to write without dancing. I'm 38 now, and for the past several years I've been battling lupus, which never loses its ability to shock with strange new symptoms. Just when I think I've got the hang of living with it, something new happens. Right now it's off-and-on problems with proprioception - the intimate knowledge of where the various parts of the body are. Look down and sometimes I see my right hand and jump out of my skin. It's a little much to get used to. But I'm not dead yet. That may not sound like a cheerful motto, but it's gotten me through a lot. "Right, fucker. I see how this is gonna be. But I'm not dead yet."
It's like riding a wave; you can't fight it, you just have to try to keep some sort of grasp on which direction is up. If you get swamped, get back up and try again. Sometimes it seems like I spend an awful lot of time being spun around under the water. On those occasions when I manage to stand upright, I try to remember to look around: "Hey, I'm doing it!"
When I was cleaning out my grandmother's house after she died, I couldn't find any of her real jewelry. Not the costume stuff, but the stuff that was listed on the insurance rider, things I never knew she had, things I had never seen her wear. I was worried that some one of the dozen helpful people who came and went before her death - nurses, housekeepers - had found it first. But no. It was in a child's plastic purse, tucked in a corner of a drawer, with a newspaper clipping of Dylan Thomas's famous lines. My fierce, hot-blooded, actress grandmother, raging against the dying of the light to the end. "I don't want my house to look like an old lady's house."
When I was 16 years old, an old lady with Alzheimer's taught me a lesson about the body and the soul which has never left me. She had lost the ability to distinguish people, so she acted on the assumption that everyone she encountered was a friend she could no longer recognize. Despite her brain's failings, she died gracious and greatly beloved.