as far as domestic duties go the problem is that women want men to do half the work but they still want to make all the decisions and that will never work without stress. A lot of men would be willing to do half the cleaning IF they could get rid of all the useless knick nacks that require extra work, select furnishings that are easy to clean/don't need cleaning, etc. if they were given and equal say on how much cleaning is needed, how clean things need to be, what is the proper tradeoff between time/energy expended and results, etc. etc. It ain't ever gonna happen and so the person who wants to run the show will get to do the work.

From what I've read of Caitlin Flanagan, it's very possible that I'd agree with the author.

But in her criticism of Flanagan, she feels her case is made by merely quoting this passage from Flanagan's piece in the NY Times Style section:

"A man can sit in, watching television with newspapers scattered everywhere and food all over, and they just don't care...We women have the sense that someone's watching us. We need those newspapers picked up because what would people think?"

Earth to Rebecca: The different male and female attitudes toward neatness that Flanagan describes are overwhelmingly typical. Please note that Flanagan is describing life as it is, not as it should be. There's a big difference.

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Am I finally grasping what everyone else knew all along -- that in Broadsheet, describing reality that differs from how it "ought to be" automatically means the describer is advocating that reality?

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Hey, Broadsheet, you want to really make a difference?

Then criticize Cosmopolitan magazine. 'Cause this is the top-selling magazine for single women, with a circulation of about 3 million. And almost every word in it encourages women to think constantly about their appearance, and to be subservient and manipulative -- whatever it takes to get their man.

Cosmopolitan is not merely *describing*, but strongly advocating, a lifestyle that is the diametrical opposite of liberated. (True, when Helen Gurley Brown became editor-in-chief in 1965, her influence led the magazine to advocate what was then very liberated behavior.) If you haven't picked it up for a while, you might want to take a look at it and tear it to shreds in your writing, instead of complaining about those who merely *describe* an unliberated reality.

Nice literary piece, but the Duke Lacrosse team may in fact be innocent of these spectacular charges, and not just presumptively. There are apparently strong witnesses that have a very different story to tell than the one that sparked all the outrage.

Your observations about young male warriors are pretty accurate, but perhaps when targeting specific persons for your righteous journalistic indignation, it's safer to wait for the convictiona first!

What I find most distressing are the women involved in El Salvador's abortion ban - those who helped push through the legislation and actively support it. I have a similar level of frustration with the female members of the anti-choice movement here in America. What do these women hope to accomplish by condemning their sisters? How do they not recognize the importance of all women being allowed to control their medical decisions? Having never ascribed so strenuously to any ideology that limits and harms others, I simply cannot understand...

You have to understand that the Salvadoran and American women who support an abortion ban don't see it as a matter of restricting women's personal medical choices. Rather, they see it is a life-or-death struggle, akin to interceding in Darfur or Belfast. Is it fit that a woman go to jail for abortion? It is if you believe that she has intentionally ended a life. Similarly, many if not most of PETA's members accept the premise that animal life is worth at least as much as human life; thus they see themselves as standing up to murderers. The abortion debate will not be resolved as long as there are those who see a fetus as intrinsically souled; the debate lies in the premises of each side, those who see tissue and those who see humanity.

In my house, my husband is the one who can't stand clutter. I perfer to do laudry, and I can't cook to save my life. As long as we continue to perpetuate these stereotyps we won't get anywhere.

As for El Salvador, I appreciate that people may feel a fetus is a human life, but I am sorry, as long as the fetus cannot live outside the womb, it MUST be the mothers' decision. Hopefully in consultation with her partner (if he is not abusive, or her and the fetus' father), her doctor (if she has access to one and can afford it) and her conscience (which in the end is all she is really left with.) I have said it before and I will say it again, I cannot and will not judge another woman's choice. I leave that right her God.

I envy Rebecca Traister and wish more women (including me) were like her. I can't stand the clutter, and probably for the same reason that Flanagan articulates: I feel as though someone is watching and disapproving. But that's because someone has been watching me and disapproving of me all my life: my mother, my mother-in-law, my sister, other girls, the ladies at my parents' church, Them, whoever They are.

So maybe it really is true that the vast majority of women hate clutter and disorder. That's irrelevant. The point is that Flanagan thinks that it should go on being true. She's the modern day Angel in the House, the one Virginia Woolf proudly announced she'd strangled (but which probably helped kill her in the end), the being who whispers in all our ears that we should forget writing and silly things like careers, because our true role is to be little helpmeets at home, and oh, by the way, we're not doing it right.

And the kicker is that Flanagan herself is an utter fraud. We should point this out over and over, the way we keep repeating until we're blue in the face that there never were any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Flanagan does not cook her husband's dinners and apparently never did. Flanagan does not do any housework herself. Flanagan didn't even take care of her small children without the help of a nanny. And, interestingly enough, according to the Columbia Journalism Review Flanagan may even have "borrowed" someone else's research for an article she wrote about Mary Poppins a couple years back for the New Yorker (http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/1/lettertoeditor.asp), which would have made her a fraud as a researcher and writer as well as a housekeeper. She is not the shining paragon of self-sacrifice she'd like us all to believe she is, and if those allegations are true, she's not even the exemplar of Virtue Rewarded. She's just a little girl in a forty-something body who's still rebelling, as I suppose we all are, against her mommy.