Letters to the Editor
alarajrogers
Published Letters: 440 Editor's Choice: 86
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Marrying down and doctor disparities
[Read the article: Bringing up the boys]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have a bachelor's degree and a year of grad school (never completed the masters.) My husband does not have so much as a community college degree. However, he is a self-taught programmer who has Microsoft certs out the wazoo, and while he is five years younger than me, he started acquiring life experience earlier, so in my opinion, he is my intellectual equal. No, I would not consider marrying a man who is dumber than me, any more than the average man considers marrying a woman who he considers butt ugly -- intelligence and self-confidence are *the* requirements I have to be sexually attracted to men -- but I also don't consider what degree a guy has to be the best measurement of that. My ex was a very smart guy, three years younger than me, who blew his hopes at a college education by trusting that, when he scraped together all the money he was going to use to get his education to get his mom a down payment on a house, she would pay him back. She didn't. To the best of my knowledge he never did get his degree, and he worked as a mechanic and a retail clerk before finally getting an office-type job. In a statistical analysis of men who drop out of college he would look just the same as the other guys who drop out of college and I'd have looked like I was dating down.
I think women are smart enough to tell if men are smart without needing to see their paperwork. I'm not worried about where the college women are going to find men to marry, I *am* worried about where those men are going to work, and whether they will be flexible enough to accept that their college-educated wives with high powered jobs are going to continue to work after the baby and *they* will have to do the child care. No intelligent person is ever going to think it's a good idea to work the $60K a year job *and* do the housework *and* take care of the kids while the person with the $20K a year job acts like, as soon as the lawn is mowed and the car is washed, his job is done.
As for doctors, to the best of my understanding female doctors are concentrated in specialties such as pediatrics, ob/gyn, and general practitioner, where (except for the obstreticians, at least) the hours are more flexible and the demands are less high, whereas men tend to go for the high-powered specialties that require lots of extra education, or the extremely demanding ones such as surgeon. The stats should be broken out within *specialty*, and in years of experience ranges, before being broken out by gender, if we want to see a gender difference. It makes sense that the disparity with pharmacists is far less because there aren't nearly so many different kinds of pharmacists with different pay scales, but I would like to see that stat broken out by years of experience, because when I go to the pharmacy, typically all the women pharmacists are young -- I only see older pharmacists when they're men. When did women start entering the profession in large numbers?
I believe there are real gender disparities in some professions, but that they are generally less than we think they are because women and men often have different levels of experience and concentrate in different subdivisions of the profession, and these are not controlled for in most statistical analyses.
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Let's not fetishize "the natural".
[Read the article: Two pills show great promise]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Chimps in the wild live to be between 40-50. In captivity, they can live to be 60. Regardless of how many periods women in pre-technological societies had or didn't have, we *know* we live longer than most of them did, so if the reason you get cancer is that you lived long enough to get it, it doesn't really matter if your more "natural" sister who died younger would or would not have had more periods.
Going without a period is right for some women, who have severe negative consequences from their periods. It is not right for others, who suffer complications from the current Pills on the market. A new Pill that works with totally different chemicals will be better for some women and useless for others. Our reproductive systems never have been one-size-fits-all.
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No, the double standard doesn't make sense...
[Read the article: Boys and girls gone wild!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...because sex is not risk-free for men (getting a woman pregnant opens you to the risk of 18 years of child support, and then there's the risk of disease), and because there are other risks to getting drunk and wild besides having sex, and men disproportionately suffer those.
Girls are more likely to have promiscuous sex while drunk, but boys are more likely to *die*. Drunk young men do all kinds of stupid things and end up in the Darwin Awards for it.
Somehow I think death is a little worse than even being date-raped. At least for most people.
I'm not funding *my* sons to go on Spring Break somewhere with no supervision or guidance whatsoever from more responsible people. At the moment (none of my kids are teens yet so it's hard to say what they'll be when puberty hits), I'd trust my daughter more.
Yeah, sex is more dangerous for women, and if a guy gets drunk, gets filmed having sex with five women, and then it's posted to the Internet, he'll probably be at best a little embarrassed -- the social double standard will prevent his life from being ruined. But it's not as if men suffer *no* consequences from having promiscuous sex with impaired judgment, and there are much worse potential consequences to impaired judgement than having sex. So yes, the lack of concern for what boys do on Spring Break is sexism, though I should note that it's sexism that negatively impacts *both* sexes (we tsk-tsk over girl behavior and give boys a free pass, *and* we're so concerned over the fate of girls that we ignore the risk of boys *dying* -- seems pretty bad for both, there.)