Here we go again, yet another article on upper class women with careers. Seems like Salon only cares about "mommy wars" when the mommies in question make six figures or mor.

Is anyone else besides me sick of hearing from narcissistic, wealthy people who think the universe revolves around their careers?

News flash: not everyone has a choice whether to work or not. Not everyone thinks the key to happiness in life is advancing in a big corporation. Most of us work to pay the rent and provide for our kids, if we have them. Some of us find a career to be a means, not an end.

Disclosure: my wife and I could not afford child care even on two salaries, and so we decided that for her to stay home with our son would be the most cost-effective, even though we lost nearly half our income. I have a feeling that working single mothers and lower middle-class couples like us are the vast majority of people affected by this issue. But nobody writes novels about us.

I get the feeling from articles like this that people of Wolitzer's circle barely know we exist. Then we are subjected to highminded rhetoric about "ambition" and "using your mind" from people who have never had to worry about how they will pay for groceries until the next paycheck. Screw you.

Authors like Naomi Klein and Barbara Ehrenreich have done a much better job of describing the real issues involving people who are trying to juggle families and careers. But then again, Ms. Wolitzer's book is just a novel and maybe it's too much to expect a work of fiction to have so much relevance to the real world.

If that's the case though, then why did Salon decide to use it as a platform for a discussion of the "mommy wars"?

While I can agree that the tone of Yoffe's article was a little too moralizing for my taste (and clearly that of most of the people posting comments here), I don't think the huffy reaction people seem to be having to it is really justified.

For a single parent to raise a child alone IS very difficult. Children ARE in most cases better off having two parents. Married parents DO provide a level of stability for children that simply doesn't exist for single mothers not making a six-figure income. As a parent myself, I can't imagine how I would cope raising my son without my wife.

None of this is to say that children of single parents can't have decent lives, or that they can't be happy families, or that marriage is a necessity, all things that were clearly stated in the article. I don't recall Yoffe stating that society is being "ruined" by single mothers, either.

In fact, my hat is off to anyone who can do it. Talk about a hard job. It's just that it's a lot more difficult and there are many more hurdles to clear. Single mothers start out with the deck stacked against them. This is a shame, but it's simply reality -- whatever your political or social agenda.

I guess I don't understand why it's apparently forbidden to even mention marriage as being overwhelmingly the better option for parents. If two people really can't make it work then there is no shame in single parenthood, or an abortion (which I think would usually be the better option in cases like this -- I am no conservative!). But why can't we have more support for single mothers AND acknowledge that marriage is often (not always) a better option for the child? Yet another reason to support gay marriage!

I think a false dichotomy is being perpetuated here based on some imagined "conservative" vs. "liberal" cultural divide. Children have no concept of political agendas. They need a stable environment and parents who love and support them.

Thanks for putting the link to the NYT article in there. These fashion designers and modeling agencies are ridiculous. I thought it was interesting that, even among the agents who are looking for these emaciated bodies, not one of them said anything about finding them personally attractive.

So what is driving this trend? I can only conclude they are all a herd of sheep, mindlessly following the herd. I don't follow fashion very much, but whenever I catch a glimpse of a catwalk with models on it I am amazed. I'm a white heterosexual male and I don't find those women very attractive at all.

More disturbing than the physical aspect of it is this fetishization of youth and denial of aging. When top-name "men's clothing" won't fit any real male over the age of 17 without a hormone disorder, fashion has become sickly and divorced from reality, not to mention a little perverted. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, because fashion is all about denial of reality.

But these designers don't make clothes for normal people anyway. They make them for rich people, and therefore won't care about any of this.