Letters to the Editor
evilbunnytoo
Published Letters: 3
-
this is a soccer mom blog post
[Read the article: Stalking Dr. House]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This article reads like a bad soccer mom blog post, so you're crushed out on Dr. House and fantasize about who he should sleep with (you of course!) - How does fantasizng about a relationship with a pill-popping, emotionally unavailable, egotistical, and manipulative doctor with a god-complex go with being a thinking woman?
I like to watch House as much as the next person, but I'm tired of seeing the social meme of "loving an unemotionally available guy" with the subtext of 'my love will change him' being promoted. Its a horrible cultural myth that leads women into relationships with men that are emotionally damaging.
While real thinking women may be sexually attracted to bad boys, they know that relationships bad boys are bad for you (a tumble in the hay - yes/relationship - no) because at minimum they chip your self-esteem and lead you into situations where you make exucuses for him and put up with behavior from men that should get them kicked to the curb.
-a woman who thinks
P.S. Have you ever watched PBS? If so how can you not have known about Hugh Laurie's prior comedic career?
-
What's with the mypoic foucus on PvP and Achewood
[Read the article: Cats behaving badly]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Whenever I read articles on webcomics, I wonder why the article myopically focuses on PvP and Achewood (I never heard of achewood until today) - Penny Arcade, Something Positive, Questionable Content, and XKCD have all managed to produce high quality content and to become some of the most popular webcomics around.
-
misgivings about the program and questions about parental responsibility
[Read the article: R.I. teens learn about dating violence]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I want to say upfront, I'm a feminist and I do think that teens should receive education on this front but I have several misgivings:
misgiving one: As an earlier letter brought up, often this education tends to focus on physical violence, and tend to send the simple message that only men are perpetrators while women are often passive victims. It fails to examine female on male violence, cases where both partners batter each other during fights, the contributions of gender role expectations and socialization to our responses in interpersonal relationships, learned helplessness, or same sex domestic violence.
misgiving two: we are expecting more and more socialization out of schools while at the same time underfunding them. We are increasingly measuring school academic performance and basing funding on this criteria, yet also expecting schools to find the time to improve kids academic skills - there's only so much time in a day and we have to decide what the priority for school is. When will the program be taught, by whom? Which classes will it interrupt or replace? Will this replace DARE or other programs aimed and teens and young adults or get added to the total package.
I also wonder what the parents role in all of this is - Why did Ann Burke not cover the dangers of relationships and educate herself and then her child about health interpersonal relationships? I'm worried that more and more parents are defaulting on their responsibilities for socializing their children regarding sex and related areas (such as domestic violence and health interpersonal relationships) over to the educational system, which is not designed for such subjects.
I grew up with parents who actively educated themselves on issues, sat down with us and discussed the uncomfortable subjects such as sex, who shared with us (at age appropriate times) their own experiences with sex, drugs, and other issues (such as interpersonal violence), and routinely critiqued the messages they saw us receiving from peers and the media. Because my parents knew the world wasn't safe they felt they needed to (age appropriately) help us to learn how to judge situations and other people.
This was, at times, uncomfortable for us and for them, but it helped my sisters and I to learn and decide what we wanted out of relationships. It gave us the ability to walk away from unhealthy relationships and to be able to resist losing ourselves in another person. My parents discussions about what to expect from society and others gave us the ability to do a "gut check" and recognize when we thought something or someone was unsafe.
No school program and replace this kind of careful nurturing of children from an early age, the kind of nurturing which allows children to take risks, but also teaches them to listen to their instincts and to keep themselves safe.