...but the letter sounds to me exactly like the plot of Breakfast at Tiffany's (she calls herself a free spirit, has the attributes of a cat?) Cary, I think you've been had.

Once upon a time, a rabbit was hopping along and noticed a swallow sitting in a tree.

"What are you doing up there?" called the rabbit.

"Oh nothing," said the swallow. "Just sitting here, enjoying the lovely sun and the cool breeze."

"Oh, how nice. Do you think I can sit here and enjoy the sun and breeze too?"

"I don't see why not," said the swallow. "Go ahead if you would like."

So the rabbit sat down and closed his eyes to enjoy the sun. And after a couple of minutes, a wolf sneaked up on the rabbit and ate him.

The moral of the story? If you are going to sit around and do nothing all day, you better be high up.

Really, it's only tangibly related but it's a similar idea to your problem. It also sounds to me like you might be quite young and new to the work force, so the best thing to do is take this as a life lesson and learn from the experience. For all the Successories plastered over the walls and monthly birthday cakes, companies don't really care about their employees, so just look out for yourself while keeping your true self intact.

Here's something to keep in mind:

1. You are not a student.

2. Your boss is not a teacher.

3. Your boss's boss is not a principal.

4. HR is not your guidance counselor or academic advisor. They work for the company and have the company's interests at heart. They have your best interest at heart ONLY in the frame of how they affect the company.

After school we all have to learn new ways of relating to the power structures we find ourselves in and will be part of for the rest of our lives. Even if you find a new job where people are more forgiving, it will still be a BUSINESS and your principles will not mean much compared to what you can do for the company.

Incidentally...a lot of us commenters are operating on the idea that you must be young, 25 years or younger. If that is not the case, you have some SERIOUS work to do and this issue is really the least of your problems.

Women are still the HELPER class in these commercials.

It used to be that men made messes and women followed them around cleaning up behind them, obstensibly because women cared more about having a clean house (or whatever) than men did--while really it was that men were too important to do such a menial task as cleaning up after himself.

Now, men make messes and women follow them around cleaning up behind them because men are too moronic to care about making the mess or too idiotic to learn how to clean up after himself.

Either way, responsibility for everything, from washing dishes to getting the car serviced on time, eventually falls to women after the men screw it up.

That has to be the most polite way of saying "she's willing to do threesomes" that I have ever seen.

Having worked in a lot of pink collar offices, there's no need to use the ladies' room as a network because everyone just talks about that stuff at the cube or in the office.

This might be necessary in an office where there is a high population of men, especially in a "conservative" field like banking or law where "girly talk" (as in motherhood or health) is frowned upon when out in the open.

...but it's in use in the women's room too. In a bank of stalls:

1. No one takes the first or last stall; usually they take the second stall from the entrance. In fact, at my last job, the use of the second stall was so common despite there being twelve stalls that the cleaning people would come in twice a day just to clean that one stall.

2. No one takes the stall next to someone else if they can help it (the movie-theater rule)

3. Look under the stall before you open it! (more common sense than a rule)

4. Provide toilet paper to a person under the door or partition if this is necessary.

5. All rules apply to the use of sinks.

...did anybody know that this was still an issue anywhere with anyone? Do I see any hands out there?

[blockquote]“When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.”

[/blockquote]

Can someone with better search skills than me find out how many "mommy wars" and "opting out" articles the Times printed in the last few years??

I have no evidence of any kind to support this, but I have a theory that racism is a lot easier to "prove" than sexism, to the extent you can prove such a thing.

Take the bowling vs. basketball criticism. For Barack, it's easy to say, "Would you feel that way if he were a white man? Would you be making a comparison if he were a white man?"

For Hillary, you have the cleavage debate, where there's really no way to say, "would you be criticizing the cleavage if she were a MAN?"

I feel like I'm saying all of this very incoherently, but hopefully you can see my point.