To help Lynx out, here are the favorite stereotype topics of BS based on a sampling of the past few weeks:

1. Women in foreign country X not allowed to be truck drivers/voodoo priest/sperm donors/urinal testers/fill in the blanks;

2. Study says boys smarter than girls. No they aren't! Yes they are! No wayyyy!

3. Men are creepy degenerate sexpigs, women are pure righteous souls (but if they want to have dirty weasel sex with anybody they have the God-given right to it, dammit);

4. There aren't enough TV shows/summer movies with women in them, so that's ignoring us;

5. But when we are in them and there's violence/sex/dumb bimbos, that's exploitation;

6. Men don't take feminism seriously anymore.

Did I miss any? Readers, your thoughts please!

I thought one of the main Betty Friedan ideals of feminism was learning and development through criticism. I guess not. But if pointing out the obvious as criticism is a sore point, maybe the BS editors should look at what they put out. Maybe they care, maybe not.

In any case, my point seems to have gone over your head. Maybe you don't read here regularly, but if you did you'd know that the presentation of subjects in the manner I described is pretty common. Combine all that with the occasional "we're not taken seriously anymore" routine and you have to wonder about the editors. Why should feminism be taken seriously anymore if this is the best opinion/new content it can produce? You don't have to be brightstar to realize that the apple has fallen very far from the tree.

And to answer your question: I still come here because the responses of the posters, such as greeneyedkzin and dick dworkin, are thoughtful, intelligent and worth it.

And honestly, for the trolls who think men lurking outside of school yards to ogle girls is A-OK: I'm thankful you're not representative of real people. The men I know would not only object to that sort of behaviour, but they would also help to remove you from outside the school gate.

No one suggested anything of the sort. Stop throwing up straw man arguments.

@IAB: You are right about Carter vs. Clinton. If you really need to know her guiding political philosophy IMO, you need look no farther than Joe Klein's "Primary Colors" for their MO: as the Clintons saw it, you can do good as President, but you need to be able to be bad to get there. Or, as Travolta puts it: Abe Lincoln had to tell all those chickenshit lies before he could change the world with the Emancipation Proclamation.

@AlecsMom: I never thought of that, but I think you're right. In the mortgage market the lenders are NOT lowering rates when the Fed's cutting the discount, they're just pocketing the difference to cover their margins. Why wouldn't the oil companies do the same with a gas tax holiday?? There's no law saying they have to lower prices at the pump, you know.

I think that about sums up the strength of your argument. Does your mommy know you're reading this instead of doing your homework? This page is for grownups.

Ah, a discussion, and you did not call me a moron. Thank you for the courtesy.

1) Yes, a blog about women's issues posts about when women are forbidden from holding various professions or performing various activities in different parts of the world. How is this a problem?

The only problem is that BS seems to treat this issue--and obviously, different issues cover it differently--in a shallow manner.

For example, the article explaining that Saudi women might be given the limited right to drive in the Kingdom. This is good news! But the opinion attached to the article, by the author, suggested that these limits were oppressive and patronizing. Maybe, to Western eyes, they were. But did the author or her sources ever ask the opinion of any women in SA? Or wonder why women are as repressed as they are there? Last time I checked, women still accounted for at least 50% of the population there. Women in history have not been exactly helpless against authority; the French Revolution was started by women rioting in Paris over bread prices, and do you think the wives and mothers of the Concord minutemen had no role when their husbands and sons told them they were going to fight the British, risking life and limb, instead of sowing their crops?? If the Saudi women feel so oppressed, why don't they do something about it? Well, maybe they don't feel that oppressed. But the BS writers think they are, though nobody's bothered to check. They'll just put out Western feminist opinions as goodthink.

Yeah, there are trolls in this place, but that doesn't diminish the fact that BS could do better. Judging by some of the other thoughtful responses, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks that.

I think AL's on to something: as gambling has gone more mainstream, it's started to mirror economic trends in the general population. But there's something else, too, as a corollary: Vegas, we all know, over the past two decades has become less focused on gambling and more on becoming Disneyland-in-the-Desert. The focus on attracting Ma and Pa Kettle from Ohio, while providing things for Jimmy, Johnny and Sue to do, has made Vegas reliant on people like that; so when Pa Kettle has to take that salary cut or Ma sees $4 gas, they change their vacation plans and the big Vegas operators suffer accordingly.

Time was when Vegas catered to and depended on superwhales like Johnny Chang or professional greaseballs to keep the cash rolling in. No longer. Live by the demographic, die by the demographic, I say.