This item is arrant bullshit.

I know little about the accuracy of the claims of the H.S. student involved, but it's fair to assume that neither does the author of this Broadsheet item, since she presents no additional information on this subject.

Instead she unequivocally broadcasts the philosophy that a male's complaining about gender discrimination is necessarily without merit.

Such people as this author should not be paid, or published, by Salon.

(OR -- maybe Salon could just publicize a list of acceptable bigotries.)

For a long time I've believed that the division of labor between the sexes in prehistoric times -- whose general effect on physiology is rarely disputed -- had to have specialized the brains of each sex to enhance their biological roles (at the time).

But if ever a high-profile individual had the temerity to suggest that differences between male and female brains might have an effect on their different abilities,

there has been a kind of knee-jerk wave of protest; witness the royal brouhaha that followed Lawrence Summers's suggestion that perhaps women's rarer presence than men's in the "highest echelons" of math academia *might* be related to biological differences. (This was not the only bit of Summers's Jan. 14, 2005 talk that was controversial, but it probably annoyed more people than anything else.)

Of course we know very little about just how these biological differences, confirmed in recent studies of physiological brain differences in both structure and usage, truly affect our behaviors.

But it is gratifying to see a Broadsheet story unflichingly take this highly likely biology-behavior connection as virtual fact. It is a bit ironic that amidst such controversy the writer feels this is all so obvious that she pigeonholes this story in what she calls the "No shit, Sherlock" category -- but I'm glad she did.

If I were getting what I felt was rare and valuable therapy from this therapist, I'd probably continue and not worry about the past.

The stripping would in any case be of absolutely no consequence to me, but the lying about the Ph.D. is more troubling. If this were about a doctor or dentist or lawyer with false credentials, I'd quit immediately. But I don't really believe that a Ph.D. is an important credential for a therapist to have, or at least my therapist.

Some people just have a knack for counseling others, and I think it's unfortunate that whoever wants to offer therapy as a lay counselor can't just do so, much as one might enlist a friend to discuss one's problems with. (Actually, I think lay counselors may be legal in some states, or tacitly tolerated in others where they're technically illegal.)

On the other hand, perhaps the most important part of a counselor's credential is the many hours (e.g., 3000) -- of doing counseling under supervision -- that even a Ph.D. psychologist must have under under their belt before she can get a license to counsel.

In some ways I wouldn't care so much where or for how long an airplane pilot went to flying school as much as the number of hours they have of (properly) supervised flying experience. And mutatis mutandis for a therapist.

On the third hand (I said this was a tough call!), to some extent the license requirement of so many hours of supervised counseling is a way for counseling businesses to obtain virtual slave labor; the trainee is often paid little or nothing for the privilege of getting this experience. So quite possibly the 3000-hour requirement is overkill: at 20 hours a week of counseling as a trainee, this would take three years of 50 weeks a year.

I can't fully understand the letter-writer's situation without grasping the consequences of not belonging to Actor's Equity. Does this mean that no mainstream show would consider hiring her as an actress, lest they be picketed by Actor's Equity? (This would be a damn shame. I wonder why A.E. is so finicky about who is "eligible" to join.)

In any case, wouldn't there be fringe-ish productions that don't care about the union status of their actors? And in any case, wouldn't there always be the option of joining a purely amateur production (many of which are not the least bit amateurish) which might pay nothing, but which would satisfy her craving to be involved in acting?

This acting solution wouldn't solve the LW's problem of finding a satisfying career. This is a hard problem, but there seem to be many excellent books, as well as counseling options, to help people find a satisfying career.

Neither LW nor Mr. Tennis mentions these. Maybe they're worth a try.