I agree - it's more than class resentment and it's more than hating people for making a choice you didn't make. Mothers are everybody's favorite target.

I'm used to it by now, but it was a shock the first few years of parenthood. There weren't any blogs then (or they were outside my radar) so I didn't realize how much vitriol was going to come my way after I saw that line on a stick. Now it just seems kind of funny, although awfully pathetic. (People may still despise me as a working mom of school-aged kids, but I don't hear as much commentary from strangers as I did when my kids were more visible as babies/toddlers.)

Maybe new mothers are easy targets because (generalization ahead) more than any other time in our lives, in baby-rearing we're uncertain about what we're doing and we want desperately to get it right. But if you look back in history, this generation has it fairly easy - moms have always been out there ruining their kids, turning them autistic, making them gay, sending them to therapy . . . there's just no limit to the malevolent power of our fertile wombs!

I don't mean to be sarcastic, but I truly never considered that those guys are supposed to be playing the role of a thinker. It makes sense now that you point it out. Our opinion-givers should be people who have a broad base of knowledge and the ability to analyze information logically and explain their processes.

But I don't think it's ever been that way in the mainstream media in my lifetime. If you asked me "what are they paid for," I would have said, "I don't know - to get attention?"

Sigh. Thanks for pointing it out, anyway. You make some very good points.

My sample set is not huge, but the young girls I know are reading more substantial fiction with heroines and heroes who are doers rather than "done tos." The Twilight fans I have talked to are all married women in their 30s or 40s. I definitely think it speaks to something deep in them, probably whatever made me recoil from the first book (I'm also a married woman in my early 40s. The married woman who lent it to me told me it would leave me dissatisfied with my husband. Huh.)

I think Twilight would have appealed to me when I was a tween. My father abandoned our family when I was a kid, and my fantasies of romance were full of older, distant men. I'm not sure why it repels instead of appeals now - maybe because I identify with the adult characters in fiction at this point. The idea of a 100-year-old "hero" becoming obsessed with a teenaged girl is sick-making to me as a parent of young kids - boys, but still.

Not to say people shouldn't have and enjoy their fantasies. Finding a writer who can speak to that need is a powerful thing, I imagine. One thing that does surprise me is that some modern young women share that taste with their moms when there is so much really great Y/A fiction to choose from.

I think that people we could have brought over to our side, possible populist voters, have already given up hope that the Dems have a real interest in their fate. There has never been a better time for an anti-corporate candidate, and Obama wasn't that guy. (he's a great guy, but he's not that guy.) Palin isn't either, but her idiot followers don't realize that. Who knows what she'll stir up. The curse of interesting times.

Anyway, I think your analysis is excellent.

I also enjoy the Ethicist. It's interesting to see him lay out his reasoning.

It's not surprising he had to reach back to the pages of 19th Century literature to find ideas for how to deal with this dilemma, though. What would a morality tale aimed at a modern audience tell us? I don't think we even have a modern narrative that recognizes it as a problem.

I don't think your social circle is at all like mine. I have two boys, no girls, so I can't really compare, but in general girls are considered smarter and "easier." Nearly every mother in my peer group (including myself), and more than half of the fathers, said they wanted to have a girl - I mean, before knowing the sex and of course everyone loves what they end up with. (I can't imagine life without my guys and would not trade them for anything! But I remember that I dreamed of a bookish and clever little "Matilda," like the movie.)

I have a friend who has one of each, and she says that she thinks the culture - school in particular - is harder on boys and the parents of boys. But I'm sure it varies by neighborhood and social group.

(One kind of cool thing about letters columns is that we can give unsolicited advice.)

Why did you get so carried away? Because you loved the attention. Because you are clever and verbal and you could play with ideas without getting under the surface, and it got you all kinds of positive strokes.

I don't despise you for changing your mind, or for having been a Republican (or whatever your philosophy was), but it's really hard to have any respect for you when your ideas seem entirely built on shifting sand. Take a few more years to root your restless intellect. And get out of the spotlight. You clearly aren't stupid - but you owe it to yourself to go beyond facile and clever.