The author writes:

Are murder victims "asking for it" now too? Note that this story mentions an 18-year-old was wearing, a black halter top and white miniskirt at the time of her abduction.

I would much prefer a world in which we could each wear whatever we wish, without having to risk negative consequences.

Likewise, it would be a distinctly better world if only we could walk through a tough neighborhood at any time of the day or night without having to risk negative consequences.

Alas, these preferences are not aligned with the real world.

A woman wearing revealing clothing will attract more attention from men than one who is not -- and some of that attention will sometimes be from dangerous people.

The above observation does not -- in any way -- excuse the perpetrator, mitigate the crime, or blame the victim.

Yet it is true nonetheless, and all the protestations in the world won't change that.

The statistics in the following passage from this Broadsheet item . . .

Researchers on the American Time Use Survey talked to 1,300 Americans last year. They found that "married persons spent more time doing household activities than unmarried persons -- 2.1 versus 1.4 hours per day -- and women, regardless of marital status, spent more time doing these activities than men." More specifically, women reported spending one hour a day on housework, and three-quarters of an hour on food preparation, while men clocked 15 minutes spent on each task. More than half of the women surveyed said they had done housework in the past 24 hours, while only one in five men had; 66 percent of women had prepared meals versus 37 percent of men. Additionally, women with children spent twice as much time caring for them as men with children. Men spent more time at work, more time doing yardwork and more time watching television.

. . . are complex and summary statistics. It is especially notable that no mention is made of the time that a man and woman sharing a household spend working in a traitional job.

But the absence of facts never stopped R. Traister from bellyaching before, so why would one expect anything different now?

Lynn Harris includes among "what we're reading":

Too lazy to analyze data, Times appears to blame working women for lazy men

(referring to a Huffington Post on the subject).

This is an idiotica charge to make about the NY Times article, which can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/business/31men.html (and is freely accessible until Aug. 7).

If you read it, I challenge anyone to show where the article *blames* women for the phenomenon of men dropping out of work they feel is not good enough for them.

The article *does* imply, if not explicitly, that more women in high-paying professional jobs tends to mean it's harder than it used to be for me to get a similar job.

The Huffington Post gets all huffy about this

implied causation, and states that anyone buying such logic would fail the LSAT (often taken by college seniors).

I claim that anyone NOT buying such obvious logic would fail the PSAT (often taken by H.S. juniors, at least five years younger than college seniors taking the LSAT).

Here's the basic argument: When a group of people seeking work has significantly more competition from another group than was the case in the past, THEN THEY WILL HAVE MORE TROUBLE GETTING THOSE JOBS, everything else

being the same.

I strongly applaud the changes in our society that now permit and encourage women to obtain work in many fields that were previously almost closed to them, especially due to discrimination. It is shameful that this was not always so.

The fact that this leads to fewer opportunities for men than they used to have -- as long as the hiring is not discriminatory -- is just tough luck for the men. The percentage of men plus the percentage of women in a given field adds up to 100%. Try as ye might, this is not something you can change.

This in no way suggests that women have done anything wrong. Whatsoever.

I really hate reading idiotic paranoid complaints like the one in the Huffington Post, and equally hate seeing such stupidity disseminated further by a citation such as here in Broadsheet.

And I have no sympathy for anyone who did what he's accused of doing.

But consider this passsage from the item by Sarah Goldstein:

The complaint also stated that "during a department discussion about discrimination in the workplace, [Chillemi] said that when choosing between hiring a man or a woman, 'of course I'd pick the man. The woman would most likely get pregnant and leave.'" (Guess Chillemi isn't acquainted with many heartless childless types.)

I am personally totally in favor of equal opportunity in the workplace, and I believe that

pregnancy leave, etc. should be built into labor laws. Such laws should compensate employers for pregnancy leave, so they won't have a financial incentive to be prejudiced against women employees.

But if we are going to talk about reality, it just happens to be TRUE, whether you like it or not, that more women than men will take leave from a job, either temporarily or permanently, usually because of pregnancy.

I would not have use the wording "most likely" (i.e., probably), when "more likely than a man" is what is accurate.

But the fact mentioned by Goldstein that many women do not have children -- and so for them this whole thing is not an issue -- has nothing to do with the employer's problem: that women are more likely to take leave from, or quit, a job than men are.

Can't Broadsheet writers distinguish between what is good and righteous on the one hand, and what is true on the other? Perhaps you need some practice doing this.