Letters to the Editor
Betsy1
Published Letters: 28 Editor's Choice: 5
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I'm really tired of the Texas bashing
[Read the article: Really bad trip ... to a museum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hi. I'm from Texas. Grew up in Galveston, a place that had a Democrat in Congress until Tom DeLay's little redistricting stunt. Texas has a population of almost 21 million people, which is more than the population of Asian Americans in the entire country, according to the 2000 census. Yet I very much doubt that anyone would say to Asian-Americans, on the basis of Michelle Malkin, "What the hell is wrong with you people?" (As they shouldn't, of course.) WE'RE NOT ALL THE SAME.
Texas isn't even as uniformly conservative as many other states (see: Kansas, Oklahoma, I could go on). I'm sorry one of us is currently the figurehead for all that is wrong with this country. Believe me, I am truly sorry. I know you're frustrated with the state of the country, and I am too. But that doesn't make all Texas the same, or responsible for the batshit crazy stuff by a couple of people that happens to get a lot of press. The fact that one (count 'em, ONE) child's parents complained, and that the idiotic principle and school board kowtowed to them, does not mean that everyone in Texas is so stupid as to be afraid of statuary pectoral muscles.
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working on it
[Read the article: Really bad trip ... to a museum]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]xylu writes:
"coming to the defense of Texas seems to be far more important in the minds of those Texas loyalists who have posted here -- than trying to fix what is seriously wrong with that place."
xylu, what makes you think we aren't doing that?
I think none of the people who objected to Traister's "What is wrong with you people" were attempting to defend so many of the state's reprehensible policies. Believe me, no one feels more strongly about them than we do, and many of us (myself included) are involved in all kinds of work, paid and voluntary, political and NGO, to try to improve things. But the holier-than-thou attitude you bring will win you no converts, I can tell you that much straight out. And as someone pointed out earlier, neither will the condescending "What is wrong with you people" approach.
What we're objecting to is not that someone is criticizing something Texan (we do that all the time) but that she was stereotyping ALL TEXANS as being the same. We're not the same. And it can be very frustrating, when you've been working hard for the last 8 years to fight reactionary policies, to have someone that you think is on your side talk to you that way. Any idiot knows that the state has a conservative majority, and on top of that the conservatives have a disproportionate amount of power in the state. No one is disputing that. But there are lots of good people (statistically significant numbers, even!) who are not conservative and who are working as hard as they can to make things better.
p.s. And really, all that needs to be said here is 1. Twisty (I Blame the Patriarchy) and 2. Amanda (Pandagon). Ms Traister, were you really talking to them too?
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bleeding-as-sacred
[Read the article: To bleed, or not to bleed?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I get very fed up with the sentamentalism that some (obviously, not all or even most) feminists attach to menstruation. I think her article would have been infinitely more useful had it dealt primarily with the actual medical and contraceptive implications of it. For instance, though I would have absolutely no negative emotions about getting rid of my period entirely (and I certainly wouldn't feel "less womanly," for heaven's sake), I wish she had made more of the fact that without a period YOU CAN'T TELL IF YOU'RE PREGNANT. This is not a trivial matter! No birth control method is perfect, and I could see that leading to a number of women having to either get late-term abortions (which no one wants to do) or carry to term an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy, several months of which were spent taking the hormonal birth control pill because she'd had no way of knowing to stop. That can't be good for the fetus or the mother. Forgive me, but such consequences seem way more important than "no more girl-sharing of tampons!"
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RE: DM's post
[Read the article: To bleed, or not to bleed?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think the FDA would have approved of this without indication of long term safety
Um...you're kidding, right? Tell me you're kidding. Ever heard of Vioxx, to name only one of the many drugs the FDA has approved with far, far less oversight than should have been applied? Sadly, the FDA is one organization I trust very little these days. Between the unsafe drugs they do approve and the safe ones they don't (for long periods of time, due to politics-hello, EC), they don't have a whole lotta cred in my book.
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Joan Williams rocks my world
[Read the article: Is the backlash here yet?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is just a little fan letter for Joan Williams. Her book Unbending Gender and her article "Selfless Women in the Republic of Choice" get gender, politics, and economics in the United States exactly right. I'm constantly recommending her book to people, though I doubt they ever read it (it is a work of legal/political theory, after all). As a graduate student, I can only aspire to her level of insight. And believe me, I don't usually get this fawning about random academics I've never met. She's just that smart.