Letters to the Editor
Anna68
Published Letters: 158 Editor's Choice: 2
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Yeah, but is glorifying thinness preventing obesity?
[Read the article: Live large and prosper]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have not noticed that glorifying thinness has lead to a *decrease* in obesity. Has anybody else? I mean the models get thinner, the percentage of overweight and obese people get larger, so clearly thin images are *not* motivating a lot of people.
If anything, I'm going to hypothesize that the more unattainable the ideal body is, the *less* overweight people are motivated to lose weight. After all, if it can't be done, you may as well eat another Twinkie.
Perfectionism, in any endeavor, is the enemy of the good.
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I had a working mom and I *was* happy (and I am from the US!)
[Read the article: The whole "working mother" thing actually works]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My mother was at home when my little sister and I were very little, but as soon as we were both in school, she was working. What I remember of her as a SAHM was someone grumpy and depressed, which honestly made me feel anxious. It was SOOOO much better when she went back to work! She may have been gone for the two hours (oh horrors!) between when school got out and work got out, but she was so much happier and less stressed when we saw her at 5, I think it was well worth it.
Besides, those two (oh horrors!) hours were usually filled with homework, after school activities and playing with kids in the neighborhood so we wouldn't have seen her much anyway.
I know that nowadays kids don't play in the neighborhood ... they also don't walk home from school, or take the bus to piano lessons or whatever.
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Okay, who is being the western cultural whaducallit in this arguement ...
[Read the article: Feminist hypocrisy on the hijab?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This entire arguement is based on an incredible false premise:
There are no Muslim feminists
WRONG!
Women's rights are human rights, and, astonishingly, some humans who are NOT in the western world have managed to figure out for themselves with their perfectly good non-western brains that oppressive tribal customs are oppressive tribal customs.
You'd be shocked, yes SHOCKED to know, that there are Eastern European feminists and Asian feminists and even (no!) AFRICAN feminists!!!!!
(OMG! You mean there are feminists who aren't WHITE MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS??? Say it aint so!!!!)
The Muslim world has been an economic and cultural backwater for oh, maybe 400 years give or take, but before that they were well ahead of the west in terms of everything from science to human rights to bathing. Give them time and they'll pull out of their anti-modernity soup.
But in the meanwhile, anyone who cares about human rights at all should stop finger pointing, and stop handwringing about political correctness and ask the Muslim feminists what they need, how we can help *THEM* affect change.
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uck! The Morality Police!
[Read the article: Shaming Jamie Lynn Spears]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is so much fun to run around being superior to some girl you've never met and never are going to meet, isn't it? Makes you feel all good about those taxes (exams? husband?) you've cheated on doesn't it.
It's like a drug. You know, the ones you all didn't inhale back when you were 16, when you didn't have sex, make stupid mistakes, or at least get caught doing it.
Ms. Spears is about to have to do something consequential and difficult: birth and raise a child at 16 with the entire world wagging its hypocritical Mrs Grundy finger at it. I wish her luck and a few real friends in life. She will need it.
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Children, children ... HUMORLESS children ...
[Read the article: Quote of the Day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You did get that Margaret Cho was talking about hypocrisy, right?
No, obviously you didn't because there were TAMPONS in the sentence. I didn't know that so many 4th graders read Broadsheet! My goodness! What vapors we must have! I think I'll faint dead away!
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Nobody expects the Inquisition
[Read the article: A new face for American diplomacy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Inquistion did not involve Catholics killing Protestants... because the Protestant Reformation hadn't occured yet, thus, there were no "Protestants.
Oh, honey, it totally did involve Catholics killing Protestants! They just called them Heretics until there were enough of them to command large armies. The Inquisition was in fact invented to wipe out the Albigensian and Waldensian Christian heretics in the early 13th century, because they stood for, amongst other wacky things, being able to read the Bible for themselves.
Then later on it became effectively the Christianizing arm of the Spanish Crown and went after Jews and Witches and Muslims and Christian converts who weren't maybe converted *enough* for the their taste.
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well of course the most important thing ...
[Read the article: The myth of "rape hype"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... is that we protect the boys from having their lives ruined by being falsely accused.
And if a few hundred or thousand or young women are sexually abused during their quest for an education, well, yawn, that's so feminist echo-chamber and we all know the ladies make tempests in out of nothing! It's just a few hundred or thousand ... and obviously it doesn't count if it was on summer break!
Who was it who said, all geniuses born women are lost to the public good?
Here is this tragic waste of life and energy and talent, on a massive scale, and all we want to do is twitch and moan. Rape on campus is a public health emergency. But if we're all agreed it's not really, because its just a "feminist" thing, well it will all go away. And that worked SO well with drug addiction, AIDS, the correlation between smoking and lung cancer, la la la la ...