Letters to the Editor
firefly82
Published Letters: 328 Editor's Choice: 30
-
How do we know...
[Read the article: Keeping men out of the kitchen?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm highly skeptical of presuming what any social phenomenon means to any individual family. Family and personal history bring so much more, in my limited experience, to family dynamics and habits than political gender role anxiety does.
My grandmother cooks Thanksgiving dinner because she always has. The last few years, my father's taken over doing Christmas dinner. I was in my 20's before I realized that anyone other than my uncle was capable of making mashed potatoes.
I just think it's somewhere between really hard and really dangerous to look at any one family's culture and determine what it must mean in terms of some external ideology. Or to presume that any ideology can frame a single family's emotionally complex experiences very well.
-
In answer to the original question
[Read the article: Keeping men out of the kitchen?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Are there times when some good old-fashioned stereotyping makes for better pumpkin pie or bigger laughs, or does it always spring from that dark, stupid corner of our souls?"
Sometimes, believe it or not, neither. Sometimes what looks like gender stereotyping to you is just what works for someone else for reasons entirely obscure to you.
-
Thanks, Broadsheet.
[Read the article: Boys in the girls room, oh my!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Carol, you nailed this one.
What they're upset about is the challenge to their supposedly divine mandate to abuse others. They have no thought for the equal humanity and value of people different from themselves. The only understanding they have of control over their own lives and comfort in their own values is their ability to kick others around.
I mean look, they're suing over their schools' now-clarified inability to legally maltreat, abuse or neglect other people's CHILDREN because of their sexuality.
-
What does it mean in this country
[Read the article: To spank or not to spank?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that children are the only class of citizens it's still legal to hit?
I don't want big brother micromanagement of parenting anymore than the next person. But really. What does it say about us that we say it's illegal to hit an adult, but not illegal to hit a child?
I was spanked, not excessively, not past the age of 5, not even painfully as far as I remember. I do remember what it taught me: not "right from wrong," but constant paralyzing paranoia of arbitrary punishment, which followed me until adulthood.
@Salon editors: Juliebird deserves a red star.
-
@ max mendalbaum
[Read the article: To spank or not to spank?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"It actually dissuaded me from violent behavior because I knew beating up my little brother would result in a spanking."
But not because you conceived that beating up your little brother was wrong and hurtful to HIM.
-
@ max mendalbaum
[Read the article: To spank or not to spank?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Of course I conceived that, that was the whole point of beating him up. He was my little brother. I loved him, but he often made me want to beat the crap out of him."
So did the spanking impress upon you that it's wrong to hurt people you claim to love?
-
@ Karey43
[Read the article: A friend is involved in Scientology. Should I interfere?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Actually, Karey, Christianity does not and cannot require you to believe anything.
Christianity, at its best, takes Jesus as a model for how to treat other people and have a relationship with the divine. Most Christianity holds several similar articles of faith. Some Christians indeed believe that these are things you have to believe to go to heaven. Some, however, believe that they are metaphors or stories which attempt to express divine truth, but can only do so in the approximations that our physical world allows. Many Christians don't in fact believe that you must be a Christian to be "saved" or go to heaven. Many Christians don't believe literally in things like the resurrection at all, but use common statements of faith as a framework for their personal struggle to figure out what they believe.
And a few Christian churches and sects actually enshrine the principle that no person or institution other than God himself may have any command over a person's conscience and beliefs.
Put 40 Presbyterians in a room, ask them what the virgin birth or the resurrection means, and you'll get 43 answers.
-
"Think of it as a short-cut to your own emotional maturity."
[Read the article: A friend is involved in Scientology. Should I interfere?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No such thing.
-
Cultural disease?
[Read the article: Is a need for skinny jeans in the genes?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"But it completely muddles my understanding of anorexia nervosa as a cultural disease. In countries where zaftig women get the most mojo, are there still (owing to these biological factors) a certain number of people who want to starve themselves?"
Possibly but not necessarily. The "interaction of genes and environment" paradigm has largely unseated the "nature vs. nurture" one in the life sciences. Few genes are known to be completely deterministic for complex traits or disorders. So even were someone to have all the "anorexia genes," it's still highly possible that s/he would never develop it if certain environmental factors never came into play.
But might you have to re-examine certain feminist assumptions about cultural pathology if more complete evidence contradicts them?
Yes.
-
Hitchens and Dawkins
[Read the article: Romney: "Freedom requires religion" ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I sometimes find the anti-God stridency of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens grating. Listening to Romney's speech I realized what a necessary corrective it is to corrosive political pandering."
Hitchens and Dawkins and others have every right to their smug, smarmy, shallow contempt for religion, and to broadcast it as they see fit. That's a core principle of both my own religous ethics and what I understand of Constitutional law. But I really can't see them as "corrective" to theocratic pandering like Romney's. Rather, they just blindly hand him ammunition. They handily confirm the Christian right's boogeyman of combative, anti-faith non-believers, even as they stand alongside it and help uphold its lazy bigotry that there can be no tolerant, peaceful, liberal, or intellectually honest faith. Or any that joyfully respects a free, secular state with equal protection for all its citizens without regard to belief.
But yes, Romney's statement should be chilling to religious believers. Not only with regards to the rights of our non-religous fellow citizens...but what if Romney gets it into his head to define just what religion freedom requires? I doubt mine would make the cut....
-
@ saintzak
[Read the article: Romney: "Freedom requires religion" ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Rome threw them to the lions for a very good reason."
That's just hateful.