Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 441 Editor's Choice: 86
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I have to agree, Valentine's Day is crap.
[Read the article: Happy Valentine's Day ... boss!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mind you, giri choco is even more crap. The idea that you have to buy gifts for people who have power over you and make more money than you is outright insane. If I were Japanese I would bake really really terrible chocolate cupcakes and give them to all my bosses with a big smile and a "I'm sorry I'm such a terrible cook, please accept this humble token of my appreciation, I really can't afford to buy box chocolates and I think it's the thought that counts anyway, don't you agree?" song and dance, and the next year, I'm sure they'd politely suggest that maybe I'm too busy to spend all that time baking cupcakes and I should just send them a card. Or else I'd get to secretly gloat behind my smile about how they feel obligated to eat my terrible cupcakes and even pretend they're delicious (or, I'd ostentatiously burst into tears if they dared criticise my cupcakes.)
Man, I watch too much anime.
Anyway, Valentine's Day. Chocolate is tasty, but diamonds have blood on them and flowers, unless they're in a pot with dirt and roots, are dead. Candlelight ruins your eyes, sexy lingerie is actually a gift for the man who buys it (my husband has been alternating between pestering me to buy more sexy lingerie and/or buying it for me for years), and movies and dinner are nice and all but if you only do them once a year, that kind of sucks in and of itself. I find the things that women are supposed to find "romantic", which are pushed so hard on men to provide and on women to demand, mostly repulsive and/or useless. If he can afford to buy you a diamond necklace, think of how many DVDs he could buy for the two of you to share instead! Or how many great books he could buy and you could read them over and over! Or, if it's the resale value of the diamond you're really interested in, he could buy you some very attractive stock in growth industries. I mean, almost *anything* is worth more, in practical terms, than a diamond. Why doesn't he hire you a maid for a day so you don't have to clean your house? In Maryland you can hire one for $88 a day. I don't think you can buy any diamond that cheaply.
And as several posters pointed out, why the hell doesn't the woman reciprocate? Unless sugar daddy is making 10 times your salary or more, or unless he sucks so badly in bed that he basically has to buy you like a prostitute to make it worth your while to give him any (and if so, either ditch the guy or please admit to yourself that you are a whore), you owe him something equivalent in return to what he's giving you, and no, that's not sex. You're supposed to like the sex, too. Now if he makes 70K and you make 30K, it is obviously absurd to imagine that you can afford to spend as much on him as he can on you, but you can buy him a CD by his favorite band or a DVD or a nice case for his cell phone or *something*. If he spends $500 on a diamond necklace for you the least you could do is buy him a $120 Nintendo DS or something.
So Valentine's Day is dumb. I'll take it seriously when other women take their obligation to get stuff for their lovers as seriously as they take their lovers' obligations to buy them stuff.
BTW, this year I am dead broke, but every other year I've bought my husband exotic cheese for Valentine's Day, since his equivalent to chocolate is cheese. If he ever bought me anything more expensive than a box of chocolate, though, I'd chew him a new one. We need that money to buy things that are actually valuable to us. Like, uh, video games and DVDs. (So we're still shallow. We're just shallow about totally different things. :-))
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Hear, hear.
[Read the article: The "middle ground" on abortion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have long been a proponent of the idea that reducing abortion by decreasing women's motivations to get an abortion is the only safe or humane way to reduce abortion and the only way consistent with the principles of liberty that this country was founded on.
The right to have an abortion if she needs or wants one prevents women from being slaves. But as long as women are in positions where they cannot choose to preserve an unplanned pregnancy if they wish, they cannot truly be free either. And as soon as your choices are unplanned childbirth and childrearing, unplanned childbirth and giving the baby up, or a possibly painful surgical operation/drug regimen, you have a bowl full of suck -- it's infinitely better never to have to make those choices in the first place.
Feminists have argued for birth control, better family-friendly policies, and more support for mothers and children since pretty much the dawn of feminism, but we have never seriously tried to make the case that these policies would reduce abortion. This would make a great wedge issue to get pro-lifers to vote for women's rights, or, alternately, totally discredit them ("You can't possibly really care about babies if you're against legal abortion but also against universal health insurance for all babies. What about mothers who don't have insurance? Why do you hate babies so much you want them to be born to people who can't get health care for them?")