I can't say I think much of the whiny old men (Keillor's not one, although he's posing as one - he has his dream job). It's the whiny old men who got us stuck where we are today, in a world where twenty-year workers can be pushed out the door without notice, sixty hour weeks without overtime are taken for granted, and most people have jobs that are so far from being creative or making a difference that their own children have no clue whatsoever what Mommy and Daddy do for a living because it's impossible to quantify. Whiny old men who are desperate for security made this world.

I'm not so sure the younguns aren't whiny old men too, though. They may claim they want jobs that require creativity, but what they do instead is take crappy boring jobs and sublimate their dreams into watching youtube. As Keillor should know, being a writer is hard work.

By the way - add me to the list of people who found Keillor's poor mouthing offensive. There are plenty of real poor people in the world and he isn't one.

I know I have bumped into several older women recently that had deluded themselves into believing they were sane, but when you observed them for some time, you realize these women are batty. How sad. I guess they need an insane man if they want someone.

Oh dear. This is so true, and so unfortunate, that I had to laugh out loud despite myself. It goes both ways, though - a lot of older single men are nutty as fruitcakes and have no clue about it. People who live alone lack observers who might help prevent their quirks from evolving into full-blown personality disorders. (Or maybe there's a reason some of these folks haven't found someone!)

Re: Quentin Compson

While your letter back was amusing, you totally skipped the main question presented: basically is it acceptable to make childbearing a criteria for continuing a relationship? And if so, what are the implications for women 35 and older who cannot be mothers? Are they supposed to give up on relationships altogether? That seems to be the implication of your flip reply. Or to put a fine point on the issue, I just found out my husband is infertile, should I divorce him? I think not.

Interesting attitude, which puts you at odds with thousands of years of human history, in which it was taken for granted that the primary purpose of marriage was children and infertility was obvious grounds for divorce.

Of course childbearing is a criterion for continuing a relationship. It's no longer the only criterion, which is a good thing, but as long as people continue to reproduce primarily within relationships, it's going to continue to be one criterion for many people.

re: brightstar, again

I only want sex, lots of it, with someone I love. But most women seem batty and deluded and push their crap on me. Or they reject me because I am not their stupid Brad Pitt or George Clooney lookalike they all want. Or they weigh 250 and seriously entertain the notion that some guy wants them anyway. Or they have had 200-500 one night stands and refuse to fess up to it. And they all think they can do anything they want, but the guy has to be limited in his choices and rights in the relationship. Oh, and he needs to be FIXED too.

Brightstar - you seem to be aware that you're not perfect. Yet you haven't made the jump from that to realizing that you might have to settle for something less than perfection in a woman. Let's go over your talking points: 1) "Those fat ugly women sure are evil for rejecting me based on my looks." 2) "Those crazy bitches with baggage better not think I have anything wrong with me that might need fixing." 3) "I want lots of sex without a lot of this other stuff attached to it, but anyone who's into casual sex better not apply."

See why this isn't working for you?

I've seen the "doll eyes" site before (weirdly enough it comes up on a search for age progression software - what a scary thought). What makes me laugh is the artist's bad eye; some people just can't seem to tell when their work enters the Uncanny Valley, and she's one of them.

They're all disturbing, but so far no one has commented on this one:

http://www.naturalbeautiescontest.homestead.com/retouch1aaaa.html

Because if you are a black person who can't pass the paper bag test, the pageant people don't want to look at you.

I can't help comparing this to the situation of the female letter writer who wrote Cary complaining that men of her own age are dumping her because she's too old to have children. Biology's a bitch. Women have to decide whether or not to have children sooner than men do. We can argue all day about whether or not a 50-year-old man should want to have his own kids - the fact remains that he can, whereas a 50-year-old woman probably can't.

When it comes to pregnancy, the opposite is true: men have to decide whether or not they want to be fathers at the time of conception. Women get an extra chance to opt out later by undergoing a medical procedure. Men don't. Biology is a bitch.

When biology changes such that men can terminate a pregnancy by undergoing an abortion themselves, then it will make sense to give men a choice whether or not to have an abortion. Until that time, men who really really don't want a kid right now should probably not have sex. That's what women who didn't want children did before abortions were legal.