Letters to the Editor
Anna68
Published Letters: 158 Editor's Choice: 2
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Anna's list of brutal truths ...
[Read the article: Are working moms the enemy?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]1) There will never be a matriarchy. The men won't allow it, and the women don't really want it. A small minority, like you, fantasize about it, but most don't really want to run the show.
Men who flap on about "matriarchy" are terrified that if there were real justice and a real meritocracy they would end up on the bottom of the barrel. They tend to be more insecure than average about their own abilities in the workplace and elsewhere.
2) Corporations and businesses don't care, at all, about what happens to working mothers. Businesses exist to make money. Period.
Smart corporations and businesses do care about what happens to working mothers because they comprise a significant portion of the talent pool. When they push a smart mom out of their company through inflexibility or prejudice, they incur all the costs of turnover and retraining ... AND risk that she will come back into the workplace in five years working for their competitor!
3) The economic changes we're all allegedy seeing are not the result of feminism. They're the result of economics.
Well I said social changes in the first place. But even Ronald Reagan acknowledged that there was a huge economic impact to having a large influx of women workers in the 1970s. We're still absorbing the impact of that ... be it the great jumps in women's earning power, homeownership, entrepreneurship, the growing demand in the service economy, the changes in education ...
4) Unless you work at a magazine, or don't work at all, I doubt very much you would say any of what you just wrote to your boss.
What I would or would not say to my boss is irrelevant. Truth is truth. Justice is justice. Fairness is fairness. Whining is whining.
5) There are plenty of female bedmates out there. I just have to pick one.If I don't like the one I've got, I can replace her.
And now she can replace you too. Because she does not need you to survive economically. 100 years ago that was rarely true.
6) Most women are mediocre mothers.
Okay, so welcome to the land of cognitive dissonance ... women are mediocre mothers and somehow it is better for the human race if they do nothing but procreate and nurture ... these two ideas do not go together. They cannot both be true.
UNLESS it is true that men are even more mediocre fathers! And I haven't seen that in the real world.
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Oh, I dated one of these guys ...
[Read the article: I resent my fiancé because he is rich]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and nearly married him too, and it was Culture Shock, although we broke up for reasons that had nothing particular to do with his money.
So let me just say one thing for all those people who insist that your fiance is just a hippy poser or a liar:
Some rich kids are genuinely hide their wealth because they just want to be treated like a normal person instead of being resented or constantly hit up for cash or treated like they have three heads.
Some don't really like taking money from their family, either because there are strings attached, or because they have an internal need to earn their own way.
In the case of my former guy, he was a public interest lawyer who had very little money of his own and tried to live in a way that did not freak out his clients. His commitment to social justice was deeply sincere and he was supremely embarrassed to have as much privilege as he did. He worked enormously hard just to prove to himself that he got what he had by merit.
Your fiance did not pick his parents any more than you picked yours. You should judge him based on his soul.
But the Culture Shock associated with wealth is a doozy and really worth talking about if you plan to marry him. It might feel less volatile if you present it about that culture shock instead of being about money per se.
My limited experience with the very rich is that it comes with a really freakish amount of baggage and expectation. He may not have an easy time articulating this, but I wonder if me he was attracted to *you* because he picked up on something missing in the people in his life.
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I really like The War so far ...
[Read the article: You must remember this]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]because it sounds to me like the version of World War II as I've heard it told from actual veterans in my life ... including bits where they acknowledge that the American troops were no angels and killed POWs and civilians all over the French coast.
It does not particularly sound like World War II as Re-imagined by Chickenhawks who Want to Glorify Themselves by Association.
Which is what a lot of the WWII stuff in Hollywood and on the History Channel is like.
I think that's why it *had* to focus on the US experience of The War. An attempt to be comprehensive would have allowed us to ignore a lot of the details - the troops abandoned at Bataan (I had a friend who was in the Death March) the secrecy, the killing of 40,000 civilians in Hamburg simply because the bombadiers didn't have very good aim and just bombed everything.