Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Published Letters: 329 Editor's Choice: 37
Wives, too, are recycled. Early January was when my father, eight years ago, left plane tickets with his name and another woman's out on the kitchen table for my mother to discover. They were both fifty-five years old.
I don't know if divorce is always an act of liberation when a woman initiates it, but when a man uses up a woman, decides she's too tired and worn out to hang onto, and skips off hand and hand with a newer model to start off the new year with a new life, it's great for him, but devastating for all those he betrayed.
Perhaps this is a good time to think of all those older women in their fifties and sixties who never thought they'd be figuring out how to survive alone into their old age financially and emotionally after having given up so much for their marriages. Remarriage is very often not an option, for a variety of reasons. Sadly, many of these were women who, like my mother, prefaced statements about marriage and gender relations with the words, "I'm not one of those feminists..." Feminism had better not fail them now.
I wish people wouldn't generalize about the supposed "feminization" of higher education. I don't care if there are more female English majors or art historians or whatever, although I've always noticed, anecdotally, that the smaller number of men in those disciplines seem to get more attention than the women, at least on the graduate level, and prepared for Greater Things. Education and the humanities are still, by and large, a female ghetto.
But have you looked at the fields that really matter to being on top economically and in terms of infrastructure? Engineering? The sciences--both physical and biological? Medicine? What about information technology? Numbers of women are still small in many of those fields. In computer science the number of female students has actually *decreased* in past years. And that's where the big bucks are, too, in terms of funding and salaries.
I don't want to see anybody kept out of those fields. I've heard way too many stories about harrassment, hostility, admissions committees simply rejecting otherwise qualified female students on the basis of their gender, and all kinds of other tales of horror, and I have to shake my head at such self-defeating behavior. If you keep the women out, or don't encourage them to come in, you will lose crucial talent. This would be true for men, as well...if it could be shown to be true--and I am highly skeptical. *All* the best minds, male or female, matter when the country's viability as an economic, scientific, and technological superpower is at stake. Do you people really want to be bested by China? Then stop whining about reverse discrimination.
You may be right...I'm having a really hard time visualizing Garrison Keillor squished into that middle seat.
Enjoy your noontime darkness.
but the Red Green Show rocks.
as to how slitting your children's throats, whatever they've done, does not bring dishonor to your family, Muslim or not.
It's scary to see a huge state held hostage by a small group of people with the emotional maturity of 6-year-olds who go around clutching their ears and saying, "Na na na na na! I don't want to hear anything about sex!"
Thanks to the reality distortion chamber of the Right Wing Noise Machine, these former Democrats ended up electing a man who rarely goes to church, has a long history of disobeying the teachings of Jesus, and has now, apparently, reserved for himself the right to waive restrictions on torture. Meanwhile, the "liberal elitist" they rejected is a practicing Catholic with a long history of philanthropy and public service, as well as a stellar military record.
My head hurts.
When I was 27 and married for six years my father left my mother after a 33-year marriage. Up until then he'd been a model husband and father, which made it even worse, because that apparently meant that my own husband, who had never been anything but absolutely faithful and committed and who had always loved and supported me, would do the same thing.
We're still happily married and expect to be that way when we're eighty. Men are not all the same. Neither are women. It took me a while, but I finally got through my thick skull what he kept pointing out to me: that he was not my father, that I was not my mother, and that our marriage was not my parents'. At all. Not even a little bit. I felt bad for ever having thought that he could be anything like my father, other than possessing a very superficial professional resemblance to him.
I absolutely know how the LW is feeling. You think you and any relationship you ever enter into is doomed because the first man you ever loved, the one who was never, never supposed to leave you, abandoned. (So did mine. He prefers the third party's children.) And sometimes at three months you do know it's forever. I did. But because you're at the very beginning, you have the chance to make sure that what happened to your mother doesn't happen to you.
So remind yourself: he's not your father. You're not your mother. And you'll avoid re-enacting that horrible play.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
