you don't have to worry, he will be taught his male place in school (and everywhere else). It's interesting, the world you describe, and certainly not good, but it seems like it must be on a completley different planet from the one I am living on. So I guess it depends on what neighborhood you are raising him in.

Is there no one who can actually write in need of a weekly column?

DJD can do nothing but blog at a stream-of-consciousness level, and that's on a good day. What few decent points she struggles to find answers to are all but drowned in her issues with her past and her pigmentation.

I urge you to insist on better writing from better writers. If you need a token, surely there are talented black women writers out there willing to write for Salon.

She professes an outright hatred for typical black men and then can't resist a dig at Wayne Brady, because he's not black enough. WTF?

Why do people who have kids insist on telling everyone they can reach in whatever media form how hard it is to raise their offspring? You chose to have them. You deal with them. Don't tell me about it. Keep it to yourself.

There are some things a woman just can't teach a boy. If that conflicts with your feminist principles, ditch the principles.

"Miracle Of Birth Occurs For 83 Billionth Time" ("Onion" headline)

You had a son. Okay. Good for you. So have billions of other people.

This has got to be the most self-indulgent, narcissistic, navel-gazing essay I have ever read on this site.

Wouldn't it be ok if he was womanly, or gay, or transgendered? Please just encourage your son to be who he will be.

Perhaps you should give him up for adoption if you feel his being male is somehow a defect, or an overall fault.

Your sexism is both disgusting in its own right, and troubling from your son's perspective, certainly. It is not easy to grow up, I imagine, with your mother hating who you are.

No worries, though. He'll have all the maleness beaten out of him as he wends his way through the educational system. I read in the news recently that a 4-year-old boy was charged with sexual harassment against his teacher. As he learns how bad and wrong it is to be male, he will eventually resign himself to mediocrity, after all, just because girls are superseding boys in school as measured by just about every metric you can think of, doesn't mean schools are biased against boys.

Maybe his female teacher will have sex with him in school as well - since boys can't be victims of sexual assault by women, that won't be too bad.

As he heads towards the workplace later in life, he better watch his patriarchal tongue - case law now defines sexual harassment as anything interpreted as hostile by a female employee, regardless of intent.

As he marries, fathers children, and then is divorced by his wife, you can take feminist comfort in the fact that your ex-daughter-in-law is empowered, and a fresh future awaits her as a truly independent single mother, albeit subsidized by your son's monthly checks.

Hopefully she won't empower herself further by fleeing with your grandchildren to an unknown location to avoid "abuse".

Nice, really nice.

Why not just call your son a n*gger boy and be honest with yourself?

You really seem like you would be fun to hang out with. Oh yeah.

you have spent your life setting yourself up as the enemy of men.

If a father raises a daughter, he will raise her the way he imagines she will be most valued and cherished by the men who inhabit her life.

You are raising a son, but feminism demands that reality be scrapped in favor of theoretical experiments in reassigning boys to become something like "girls without benefits".

THIS IS NOT VERY GOOD.

Your boy will likely rebel and probably hate you for a time. maybe in a few years, maybe in decades.

Find a man to help with this thing you are trying to do. Why is it again that you despise men so much all your life?

so it really makes no sense to object to an honest discussion of the matter. (If you think that women in traditionalist socieities are happy with men or that it doesn't matter if they aren't I suspect you are quite mistaken)

Wayne Brady gets insulted for not being black enough.

Congratulations, Salon! You've found the black Ayalet Waldman. Vapid, racist, hates her children and who she is. What a loser.

Wow. Just wow. Where to start?

Sweetie, somewhere you missed the memo, but feminism is not about hating men. Men who live today are also victims of the past, products of socialization that they did not choose, but nothing will change if you choose to only see them as the enemy.

Your son is your son. He is not "the man" or "men." Teach him to respect women, respect and love himself, support and love him as you do your daughter, without reservations. Do not project all of this bullshit on your poor son. If you help him, he can will be part of the future, of things changing for the better, not a perpetuation of the wrongs of the past.

Sweetheart, seriously, get some therapy, get this crap out of your system, it is blinding you and no doubt hurting your job and responsibility as a parent.

Just an aside, speaking as a proud lesbian feminist, the people whom I have met who do this kind of ranting, who openly talk about *hating* men, are straight women, not lesbians. I hold this essay up as exibit 25437b. To all the straight women out there, if you're mad at a man it's not the fault of *all men.* As unattractive as we find misogyny misandry is equally ugly.

... who seem hard-wired all on their own to perpetuate stereotypes. I have the princess and the NASCAR driver, the soccer player and the artist, following specified gender lines. Why? I don't know. I know plenty of moms of tomboys, moms of delicate sons... I didn't get them.

What I did learn, am still learning, will likely continue to learn as long as I live, is that my children are individuals, their own little people whom I cannot control. I can guide, I can provide, I can nurture, encourage, and in some cases shove. But they will do what they will do. The best I can do is try to be pleasant, be true to myself as a person while still caring for them to the best of my abilities, and hope for the best. I can't "raise a feminist" any more than my own parents could "raise a good Catholic." It doesn't work that way. I can be a feminist myself, and raise my children as well as I can, and let them go and do what they will in the world.