Okay, I totally agree with the mom that parents, not kids, set ground rules. How many of us in our thirties had the experience, or had friends with the experience, growing up and hearing the anti-smoking (as in tobacco) campaigns and then really, really wanting our parents to quit? The heart was in the right place, but the child is not the head of the family. Kids, and that means teens, too, must accept that their parents get make choices the kids don't like but have to live with, while the kids cannot make choices their parents don't like and simply insist the parents just live with it (there are exceptions to this rule, I admit).

On the other hand, I'm bothered that people won't accept the responsibility that comes with choosing to do illegal substances. Even before the issue of prosecution for committing a crime, even before the issue of breaking the law and what it says to kids when a parent is comfortable doing so just for the sake of satisfying their own pleasure, there is first and formost the fact that drugs are controlled by nefarious people, and that in buying a dime bag you are ultimately supporting a very insidious organization that is in no way about excercising freedom or acting in any kind of noble manner.

Why do I keep hearing about medicinal marijuana when there are all sorts of drugs available as pain killers? Yes, cancer is one issue. But more often than not, medicinal marijuana seems to becoming the new St. John's Wort. Is the pain this mother feels really best relieved by smoking pot?

I don't know what the right decison is. I think this is one of the more complex letters Cary has answered.

This is a tune Roiphe has been warbling for 14 years now, and it surely soothes those men who are sick of being told that sex is no longer theirs to take whenever they want it, that they have to share domestic duties, that they have to wear condoms to keep themselves and their partners safe. Don't worry, her books say. Not all of us want so much from you.

That is not what her books say, not even remotely. It is not a pass to let men treat women however they want. It’s an imperative that women must ask for the treatment they want, as men must, and that people being human, and bounderies being questionable in any romantic scenario, black and white descrpitions don’t work.

Traister says that she

was furious at Roiphe, for sending a message to young women that all sex was OK sex, and that they were probably complicit in any violent sexual experiences they might have had.

That is not the message she was sending, it is a complete misreading of her first book, which was not pro-rape, or pro-all sex, but looking at the complexity which surrounds the term "date rape."

And note that this article has to mention repeatedly that Pollit responded to her in the New Yorker. As if to say "it must be thoroughly driven home that she received her much-deserved come-uppance.” How curious to read a female writing feeling the intense need to put another female writer “in her place.”

It’s really kind of pathetic really, that Baumgardner can say (and Salon can clearly see it as a positive statement) “I came not to be threatened by what she had said.” How empowered is a feminist, if an alternative view “threatens” her in the first place.

And how very curious that Traister won't take issue with Joan Didion, won't actually acknowledge one of the sources for Roiphe's outlook, and instead blames Roiphe for the sentiments that can clearly be found in a major female author of that feminist era.

Finally, what “painful price,” to quote Traister, are women still paying? It’s an embarrasssing victim mentality: you shouldn’t pick up the leggos because you are only doing it because you can’t financially stand on your own as well as a man. Who can say that with a straight face: without first knowing which of the married partners has what degree from what college and works in what industry? It’s a foolish, false paradigm that only works for people reluctant to give up their victimhood, who clutch it tight as a security blanket. The kind of person that Traister in this article seems to be.