Letters to the Editor
CindyLu
Published Letters: 7 Editor's Choice: 2
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Tom Hanks doesn't have to give up anything
[Read the article: "No Reservations"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In his movie with Meg Ryan, he's allowed to ruin her business, close her store, ruthlessly, and still gets the gal.
I don't know why the Summer of 2007 is so about "knocked up" as the only story arc for lead women characters. I saw the Prada movie with M. Streep for the first time this weekend, and I thought it would have been ten times the better movie if it were about her character. This Prada movie was yet another movie warning young women about making your career important, and you can't have both; a great career and a man.
While the guy can have the great career and even be wacky. In fact, in Knocked Up, the guy can just be wacky and irresponsible and chubby and still be the hero. The gal has to be the uptight, no fun zone, character who just needs a good gittin' laid and knocked up. Ya can't have both though, a career where you are excited and juiced to get up every morning to go to, and a romantic interest. Ya also can't be the other way: wacky, irresponsible, and chubby. Women main characters have one way to be: the extra good skinny girl who learns that their career shouldn't matter to them and slowly realize they exist to be mothers.
Another rule: If a woman is chubby, she is not allowed to have a sex drive. She is effectively, a eunich, and does not suffer, but is there for emotional support of people who do have sex drives. You can have movies with chubby guys and guys with skin problems that can date models, though.
Another rule: ya can't have a main woman character in a movie in her thirties or forties (or even late twenties) without her having a child or her not wanting one. If she exists, she will be punished in the story line by never having a successful relationship, be killed, or otherwise git her comeuptance. The only exception is James Bond's boss.
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Ah, so dispassionate, the voice of reason
[Read the article: The politics of postpartum depression]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Women should not be shamed into avoiding abortion, as you describe them being. Good research and conscientious reading of it can help this happen."
Where have you been? Legally, abortion clinics have been made to even say that abortion causes breast cancer, etc, etc. Not that this is based on facts, but due to some odd lawmaker's dream to get more campaign money from anti-choice groups. And it is made law. Good research and conscientious reading have nothing to do with the laws being put into place to obstruct a woman't right to choose.
You know, this is a sucker's choice. It is not the case to get it passed that this has to be tacked on. That is never the case, as if congress has this one chance to vote on it. I'd never deny their tendency to kick women who want to exercise choice in parenthood. God forbid a woman doen't want to be pregnant, burn her at the stake for being unnatural.
Rather, another choice they could make is to take this post-partum study money and tack it onto the funding of Halliburton and see if gets rejected.
Contrary to what most of you know, there have been comprehensive studies on both abortion and post partum depression. We aren't entirely ignorant, nor without common sense.
By the way, there are so many other issues that need funding that it is not a tragedy if this doesn't get passed. There are also current studies being funded publically and privately on this issue, but voting for an increase to these studies is not as grandstanding as creating a new bill in isolation. This is not the government's first venture at funding such a study.