...who's secure enough about his masculinity not to need a book like Manliness to pump him up.

In my opinion, the Sensitive New-Age Guy is an utterly self-absorbed, nasty piece of work, and for this writer to suggest that it's him or Republican Jesus(tm) for us would be enough, were it true, to make one run screaming for the convent.

Nerdy autobiographical note in Sesame/TV's defense: My parents (who banned all television save Mister Rogers and the Electric Company, and possibly Masterpiece Theatre) insist that it was specifically "Sesame Street" that taught me to read, pre-age 3.

Lynn, me too, although it's possible that having a grandmother who lived with us and read to me constantly may also have had something to do with this.

When I visit my nieces (now ages 4 and nearly 6) I notice that they spend maybe two hours a day in front of the TV, mostly watching Baby Einstein, Dora, Caillou, or some other "educational" cartoon--and I've bought them some of these tapes. What's interesting is that we assume that kids just sit slack-jawed and immobile in front of the TV, slowly getting fat and stupid, but these two work on puzzles, color, play with dolls and Tinkertoys, and all kinds of other things at the same time. And they love to read, or be read to, and go for nature walks and play outside, and they have what I think are probably normal attention spans for their age.

I'm a writer now, with a house full of books. We have a small portable television set that's around 12 years old, but it gathers dust in the guest room. We don't have cable. (We watch our movies with a laser projector and a portable roll-up screen.) If anything, it's probably a reaction to having grown up with five televisions in different parts of the house, blaring constantly (including at the dinner table, where my parents watched the nightly news). Except for the political discussions that sprang from watching the news (usually involving my father saying unprintable things about Ronald Reagan), the adults were the ones who tended to sit slackjawed in front of the idiot box.

If I had kids of my own, I don't think I'd be worried about the psychological effects of television. I'd be more worried about TV as a thief of the time that they might spend doing more interesting things. TV hasn't hurt my nieces yet--they are bright, happy little girls who are utterly absorbed in the world around them. I don't want to see that world dwindle to the four walls and Lazyboy recliners of the slackjawed adult.

I wonder what she was like before her husband replaced her with that robot.

Caitlin Flanagan's message is bullshit. That's the real thing.

Right, but how can she even make those claims if she can't live up to them herself? Why should anyone listen to that?

Granted, some women are truly happy at home, taking care of the kids. And some women make great nursery school teachers. But I am not one of them, and I suspect that many Salon readers aren't, either.

I think my real response to her is simply pity, that she has set standards so high that she can't live up to them. It's fine to have a cook and a housekeeper and someone to take care of the kids so you can write. That's the equivalent, I think, of Virginia Woolf's room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year. It's not fine to claim that other women should put their husbands and children before their own concerns, when one has not done so oneself and has no need to do so. Take away her writing career, her personal organizer (!!!--didn't she deride Oprah and Julia Morganstern in one of those essays?), leave her with the drudgery and the childcare, and she may not be quite so sanguine.

The point is that even stay-at-home mothers--even the supposedly perfect Caitlin Flanagan--can't manage to do it all perfectly without at least a little assistance. I keep seeing this in families we know where the husband's career is put first and the wife has decided to stay home and keep house. The marriage is strained, and the wife is unhappy. Betty Friedan's feminism didn't originate in a vacuum after all.

And that business about comparing love to a bank account--that was chilling. If she thinks she earned her husband's love through her traditional selflessness, what's going to happen when the day of reckoning comes for her sons and she expects to be able to buy their devotion with all her stored sacrifices? Oh, I feel sorry for them--and for the girls they marry. I hear a train a-comin', it's comin' round the bend...

Yes, there are more male than female construction workers. There are also more female than male secretaries and nurses.

I kinda take umbrage at this, as my mother and sister, both nurses, are both college graduates. This is not World War I. You can't just come out of high school and become a nurse. Even if you don't get the BS, you still have to go through a 2-3 year period of training, and a nurse with the BS is much more desirable.

Also: there are plenty of male "administrative assistants." (They balk at being called secretaries, but, well, that's what they are. That's what I was, while working on my graduate degree.) Most of them are also college graduates.